i posted this in somewhat more fragmented form on the official boards, wherein i encountered great resistance from the infalliable rules hivemind*. since the saner players and freelancers seem to hang around here, i thought i'd throw it out and see if this bothers you guys as much as it does me.

disclaimer: this is not to do with anything but security and military implications of overpowered summoners. no actual endorsement of mass genocide is intended.

so, in 3e, your odds of summoning a force 12 spirit successfully and surviving are about 1 in 1000. other people have run the numbers on this board, but i think you can safely say they're between 25 and 50% depending on exact circumstances. while the sr3 force 12 spirit was definitely a worse deal since immunity was way powerful, there's a good argument that a force 12 spirit in 5e is basically the equivalent of a teleporting light armored vehicle you can undetectably smuggle with you almost anywhere you want.

oswald's really not the right assassin for this, as this tactic is most likely suicidal, so let's go with osama bin summinin. our plucky awakened terrorist reads from his own version of the koran where suicide tactics are totally permitted and dealing with the djinn is a valid method of jihad, and for whatever reason he decides he's going to kill a VIP giving a speech regardless of the cost. were he to attempt to suicide bomb the vip with actual bombs, he has to deal with chemsniffers and other excitement. drone and car attacks can be stopped with firepower and smart planning. i submit, however, that osama bin summinin's best bet for wiping the VIP if he doesn't care too much about survival is to summon the biggest spirit he can and tell it to sic balls on said VIP. assuming he can get close enough to get a look at the guy, he can do it, and there's not a single way to spot that he can do this for a mundane. if he's learned masking metamagics, even the awakened might have a problem.

again, i won't run the numbers on summoning this beast, but suffice to say the odds are indisputably better than 1 in 1000. if he successfully gets his murder-djinn, the summoner merely has to have one service to say "kill that guy" and security is in some deep, deep shit. they have about 3 IPs to do something about this: IP1, summon, IP2: command and manifest, IP3: kill. if security isn't right on the ball, they may not even react before their VIP is butchered like a hog.

physical security is a bit fucked anyway. with a 24+ defense dice pool, 24 hardened armor and between 6 and 12 automatic successes for damage resistance, they need to be able to hit this thing with massed grenades, assault cannon fire, or missiles to even annoy i. i submit this is not an optimal tactic under many circumstances. you could suicide bomb the thing with drones carrying explosives, and this is probably your best bet, but again may not always be viable. you can also shoot the summoner, if you know who he is. is that guy gritting his teeth in pain summoning something, or experiencing last night's delicious meal from stuffer shack? you want to guess and shoot him?

magical security ain't much better off. mages are going to have a bitch of a time banishing this nasty if they aren't themselves willing to take a big hit of drain, and they better get it right the first time before the spirit lets loose. he's fairly resistant to direct combat spells and can dodge indirect spells easily with a 24+ dice defense pool. any astral mana barrier that doesn't basically incapacitate the mage casting it is going to get disrupted simply by the spirit flying up to it, though it may provide visual cover. about the only viable tactic i can think of for defense is to have several other spirits there to try to gangbang this thing into submission from the astral, but that's iffy as well. it is going to be twice as powerful as most of them.

the killer spirit? well, it just needs to land one 24P engulf or elemental attack to pretty much put the VIP down in one. with 24 dice to attack, hard for it to miss and not do assloads of damage.

result: VIPs need massive, massive amounts of dedicated magical security to feel safe from these types of attacks. viable for actual presidents of countries and vice presidents in megacorps, probably less viable for other people with good reasons to be paranoid. i wouldn't leave my warded arcology without a magical bodyguard if this sort of thing could happen.

now, a not-normally suicidal summoner might try to pull this shit if, say, emotionally distraught, pushed too far, or in an otherwise no-win situation like the Red Samurai bearing down on his ass with a vengeance. since a force 12 isn't a virtual guarantee of explosive death by drain, he may find the win or die button his best choice, or he may not give a shit anymore.

result: law enforcement always, always has to assume a magical perp might summon a tank on a moment's notice. assault cannons and grenade launchers are standard issue weapons, since you have to assume you must go loaded for worst-case scenarios. beat cops probably regularly straight-up shoot street people dead if they blink at them funny. it's not "i thought he had a gun", it's "i thought he was casting" that gets knight errant off from the huge number of officer-involved murders of harmless homeless orks gone off their meds in the wrong part of town.

oh, hey, what if your terrorist or temporarily crazy summoner lets this thing loose in a mall, or in an airplane... oh shit. roll 1D6 x HTR response time and figure out how many people it can kill before people that can even start to hurt it show up, if they can (ok, astral response is faster, sure, but that's still on the order of minutes). i think that's a lot of people, yes.

result: pretty much everybody is kind of worried about this sort of thing if it happens, oh, ever.

historically, the shadowrun universe actually owes a great deal of its political order to an act of what would politely be called magical asymmetric warfare (less politely, magic 9/11) where a couple dozen shamans broke the back of the biggest military machine on the planet, killing themselves in the process of doing so. i cannot imagine that the threat of awakened fanatics unleashing tanks from the ether is not something that is taken very seriously by security experts, if not least for the ability to stoke the paranoia of the masses.

i leave the results to your imagination; suffice it to say that i'm a little surprised summoners aren't burned out with ware as soon as their abilities manifest in many places, let alone that there haven't been magical holocausts and constant shoot-on-sight pogroms against unregistered mages. it does, however, make a lot more sense why really important people live in mana voids like orbit,

am i missing something here? an easy security strategy that makes this less viable? i don't think "shortage of suicidal mages" works as a way out; hell, if you're a poor teenage conjurer in a magic-repressive culture like the middle east is described as, being raised by kindly strangers to go blow your brains out for god against infidels is probably one of the few viable career paths you have. plus the losing their goddamn mind or having nothing left to lose types of incidents. i think this is one of the reasons the easier high-force summoning rules cause serious setting problems for 5th edition on top of the game balance issues.

*not unique to the shadowrun boards. it seems like any official forum for anything is filled with prolific posters that defend their product to the death even if it's obviously flawed. doesn't seem to matter if it's a small issue or a giant problem, must defend product with forum lives. defense force assemble!

Which is why you put in place controls to manage that sort of thing. Simple and easiest is the expenditure of Edge to resist the summoning, followed by an expenditure of Edge to resist Binding (the sweet spot for that expenditure will vary, depending upon who you talk to, I prefer Spirits of Force 4+ to do so). Simple, effective, and well within the rules, until someone decided that Mages were just not powerful enough. *sigh* I still weep for the future.

If you MUST use the "spirit uses edge" shtick, (no offense to those who do, I personally do not like it, as a GM and as a player) make it if the force of said spirit is greater than summoners magic use it.
ways to deal with spirits in 5.
banishing a force 12 spirit is as follows in SR5 -mage rolls banishing, spritit rolls its force, say 12. 3-4 hits, mages banishing, 6 (yes if I make a mage they will have banishing 6 now as it is actually worth something finally)+magic 6+ lets say a power focus two. 14,4-5 hits, if he spends edge (which in SR5 where it refreshes with a good rest is easy) get about another 2 hits. or, instead of that, have a NPC mage summon a F15 spirit and kick the 12s ass. or just ask your players not to abuse the spirits to much.

yup. but even edge isn't really enough if the summoner spends his edge to keep this from being viable. with edge, i think a summoner with a drain pool of nine dice can expect* to survive (barely) summoning a force 12 using edge as well. hardly a 1 in 1000 chance like in the old days.

*force 12 using edge expects seven successes using rerolls for 14P damage. summoner rolls and rerolls nine dice with a point of edge and can expect five successes, taking 9P damage. he's in bad shape, sure, but in good enough shape to sic that force 12 spirit on his foes. he does need to be a good-ass summoner to get services, but specializaiton+foci+edge can give him enough dice to expect to win. by contrast, you had about 2% odds of a service and 1% chance of survival in 3rd ed with a conjuring of six and charisma of six. gets worse from there of course.

Never said a Spirit uses Edge to resist Banishing...

The truth is anyone can be gotten anytime if one is dedicated enough to the task at hand.

The scenario you described no doubt has security is SR sweating in their sleep and you wouldn't even need to go crazy levels of Force to do it.

And that is just one lone summoner. Get a cabal going sending in a strike team of moderate force spirits and one is bound to get through.

How do you explain it not happening 24/7? It is a bit of hand wavism, sort of like being in a MMORPG where PVP is allowed in some zones but not others. Otherwise you get shot in the head the moment your character first spawns because some sick **** would be camping the spawn points if they could. A certain level of suspension of disbelief has to be taken to make the game work.

It is not a perfect answer or even a good one, but end of the day you have to think of what sort of campaign you want it to be.

no no, I did not mean to imply that either. shoulda spaced those two separate thoughts apart.

Having seen a Force 5 Spirit inflict 20 points of Damage on a Summoner, I think you vastly underestimate the results (besides, having recently confronted a task using a 9dp, with +3 additional for Edge 3 because I really wanted to succeed; the result of 15 successes was freaking amazing; so you can imagine that having 24 Dice (force 12, with Edge 12, remember) rerolling 6's, well, you can kiss that mage goodbye), whether actual damage, or the psychological effect it would have just knowing you can indeed die, and die horribly. Besides, the sheer fact that the Spirit GETS TO RESIST WITH EDGE keeps that stupidity down to a very dull roar.

... So, noone's allowed to honestly disagree with you, shinryu?

Hey, no worries, assuming that was directed at me.

The biggest flaw I see with the scenario is that a shaman summoning a F12 spirit should have a very noticeable shamanic mask (unless that got nixed in 5th?) Identifying the caster would be very easy for security. It seems to me that the scenario would work better with a hermetic mage that had a F12 elemental on call.

Either way, it would be a nightmare scenario for any personal security detail.

well, i am right, so that is a problem for your argument. you have been polite in disagreeing, however, and i appreciate that.

politely, i did not see a counterargument that i have yet found convincing for this scenario. less politely, i got accused of advocating genocide by people who seem to reflexively defend RAW like a holy text without doing the math. if you honestly disagree, that's fine, but it doesn't invalidate my argument. if you can break my argument on the rules or some valid tactical or social consideration i have missed, so be it. if you have to say "the setting doesn't say this happens!" then i retort that the writers of the setting haven't thought through the implications of their own rules very well. you may consider this the magical analog of the 5th ed writers having to clean up the nanotech mess from the fourth edition.

while edge does add some unpredictability to rolls, you have to understand a force 5 spirit doing 20 damage on summon is a freak event. it's not possible to easily calculate odds on that, but you're talking about rolling something like every die rolling a success, or rolling multiple sixes and getting successes off of those. can happen? yeah? does happen? not often.

, 1-2% of the population is awakened so there is one limiting factor, two. if the summoner goes unconscious the spirit goes away. 3. Magic is SUPPOSED to be scary, "geek the game" is a rule for a reason, imbalanceing? sure? but thats what magic does. 4. whats to stop a runner team from flying a copter, or running a hummer into said mall dropping ridiculous amounts of bombs, then blowing it sky high? It is a rare thing for someone to give there life completely to something. (if summoner dies, the spirit just leaves and doesn't do the task). I am sure there are plenty (use this term loosely) higher powered mages out there to protect from spirits. APDS assualt rifles -can- hurt said spirit. ( though the force/2 auto hits to resist damage IS a bit silly) and remember, some spirits have severe allergies to there opposites

May not happen often (you are very right), but it happens often enough at our table (3-4 times per session, we end up with rolls that are beyond exceptional, in one way or another) that the Mages ARE NOT WILLING to throw their lives away on random attempts to summon a Force 7 Spirit, let alone something as horrific as a Force 12 Spirit. Only in the most carefully controlled circumstances, with everything going our way, have we ever had a Mage even attempt to do so (Force 7 Spirit for the Zero Zone we hit), and he STILL had to soak 14 Physical Drain (1/2 the dice pool in successes). That being the case, we never really worry about spirits much above force 4-5 unless we are hitting a Zero Zone, because most mages cannot successfully summon one reliably enough to just spam them (after all, the average magic attribute across the world is probably somewhere between 3 and 4, with maybe a couple of Initiations thrown into the mix).

Erm... You may not have intended it, but it certainly came across like you were suggesting that, in setting, such a thing should/would occur. In particular, you do seem to ignore that things like the Great Ghost Dance are truly exceptional events, things that only come up as serious desperation plays because the consequences for their use go well beyond just killing some of the participants.

In any case, you do seem to have a few serious errors. For example, you equate summoning a Force 12 spirit to be like a suicide bombing - done by a fanatic willing to die for the cause. What you miss, however, is that suicide bombers are (at least so far as I've read) generally recruited for that purpose specifically, rather than being otherwise valuable assets. Someone that has 6 Magic is gonna be too powerful and too useful to waste on such an action - instead, if they're Aspected, they'd be used to summon and bind spirits for a wide variety of tasks, many of which would actually be defensive in tactical significance. If they're not aspected, the list of things that they'd be used for gets a lot longer. It's tactically moronic to have someone kill themselves summoning a Force 12 spirit.

I'm not sure why you think Force 5 spirits should be hitting with 20 Drain with any great frequency, though - that SHOULD be a reasonably accessible Force. Even a Spirit of Air only has about 13 attack dice at that Force and a DV of 10 -5, compared to a potential 18 and 12 -7 for a chargen Street Sam. It's true that spirits are a FOO (First Order Optimal) strategy, but that's not a bad thing; games need to have such strategies for those times that you've got new players mixed with experienced players.

as a brief tangent, i myself have seen enough of these "shouldn't happen but does" rolls that i wonder if the imperfections of game-grade dice really do make that big of a difference. anyway...

so, i fully concede we're talking about a rare event, here, although i would note that even a force 8 spirit is kind of a bitch to deal with for all but the most elite forces. still, one 9/11 is enough in some cases, and the problem with the anti-awakened propaganda is that, unlike many other forms of ethnic stereotyping, a great deal of it is really true. so i don't think i'm understating the social implications.

in fairness, i have a couple of decent defensive solutions that may be employed; it's the explosiveness (of one) and lack of reaction time that are problematic.

1) lots of big explosions is one solution. a kilo of rating 25 explosive gives you a shaped charge that when touching* an object halves its armor and does 25P or more damage. mount these little bastards on long sticks (spar torpedos, thanks sane poster on official forums!) crossbow bolts, on suicide drones, or in shaped-charge grenades (interesting note; modern launched HE grenades are almost universally HEDP grenades, so should have much better armor piercing than they do). our spirit is now reduced to soaking with ~24 dice + 6 automatic hits, which is still a lot but so is 25P damage, not quite enough to waste it on average but close. i'd be willing to house-rule any in-contact explosive device gets this effect. of course, you have to hit the fucker, so massed fire, lots of explosions, not so good. the demo charge solution at least lets you use wireless detonation to minimize the problem.

2) alchemy. it's basically trivial for a decent alchemist to turn out contact-activated punch preparations at force 7. With only 2 drain, these should go off for around 10S magical damage on contact with the spirit. again, hitting him isn't easy, but attaching these to crossbow bolts, long sticks or drones gives a security team at least some chance of hitting it enough times to hurt it, and a soak pool of 12 against 10 damage is still a hell of a lot better than most other options.

i'm not convinced either of these do enough to totally mitigate the problem, and as has been noted, you try hard enough you can probably get anybody. it certainly doesn't mitigate the paranoia issue. and, of course, now bodyguards are all but required to carry high explosives around or have an alchemist whip up some preps before they head out.

*so the text of explosives says "attached", and that's great, but attached is kind of a bad way to put it. i put a bomb on top of something, and it doesn't halve its armor. i tape it down and it does. yeah, makes sense. so i'm willing to interpret attached as touching in the correct manner instead of literally affixed to something. i think that's reasonable.

And if it uses Edge, it's out of reach for all but the most elite summoners. 12 dice to resist means you've got to have Magic 6 and Summoning 6 plus either a focus or specialization just to have much of a chance (and it takes very high stats to be able to survive). Remember also that only PC's, spirits, and Prime Runners have personal Edge, and that people don't know about it - just that high Force spirits can resist the summoning far more powerfully than they're supposed to be able to.

Of course, things like a Mana Static spell on a contact preparation that is protected by a leather holder would be very interesting. Getting attacked by a spirit? Open the holder, hit the preparation.

For someone directly accusing the setting writers of misunderstanding the implications of the rules, you make a gross misreading of the RAW yourself.

Remember reading "Magic is rarely subtle" (p. 280)? The rules state that any use of magic can be perceived (extremely easily). In this case, any force 12 magic is guaranteed to require AT MOST a threshold of 1 on a simple perception check. So over half the people present are sure to know precisely who summoned the spirit. Not to mention any reasonable GM would consider such a major (force 12 for god's sake!) magical action automatically obvious to everyone in the vicinity with clear line of sight.

Back to the setting discussion, I can't agree more with arguments about the rarity of awakened metahumans, and even greater rarity of magic 6 ones, not to mention ones with very high skill levels as well. That the rules state these guys can exist doesn't imply at all that it would be a common occurrence.

Now, this being said, I find spirits too impervious to damage. Immune to Physical damage should be toned down to half the armor it currently provides. Or summoning spirits of force greater than magic rating should be made even more dangerous, such as the often suggested idea of making edge use automatic for those spirits. I'll argue that properly role-playing an entity with willpower in the double-digits should mean that you have a strong sense of self-determination and that getting summoned by an extremely weak (in comparison) metahuman will piss you off enough that you will use edge every time.

Consider the following

Given Summoning + A + B + C we should get outcome SHINRYU
However we are not getting outcome SHINRYU
Why aren't we getting outcome SHINRYU?
There must be something other than Summoning + A + B + C that makes "outcome"
What is it?

Compare to

Summoning + A + B + C can only give us outcome SHINRYU
outcome SHINRYU is silly
Here are the silly things we must do when outcome SHINRYU occurs
Silliness ensues

And to finish

Gamist versus Simulation
Are SR5 rules gamist or simulations?
Using SR5 ruleset for simulations results in lots of silliness.
Using SR5 ruleset for gamist results in fun roleplaying table top pen and paper social fun.

Silliness can be fun and entertaining, but if you rely on simulationist precision for your happiness then I am afraid that SR5 is not going to satisfy you in nay way whatsoever. Trust me, none of the SR rules sets have gotten any of the magic dragon elf stuff right yet.

this isn't so much simulationist as it's about how this change in the rules causes inconsistency in the setting, and i note that people seem to continue to literally misread my posts; as an example, i think that 20 drain out of a force 5 spirit is actually exceptionally rare, not the other way around.

to address the points made :

0) 1% of several billion is still a fucking big number.

1) you have to compare payoff of the intended target versus sacrifice of the munition. it's not worth pulling this on dumbshit dan the security man, but damon knight? there's somebody that needs to go (according to some).

2) this is likely a much higher-success option than many other similar attacks on hard targets, making it much more appealing. you'll never snipe that son of a bitch, and you probably can't car bomb him. but one good spirit at the right time might be just fast enough to work.

3) i do include summoners losing their shit as another case where this is problematic, either due to actual insanity or due to in extremis situations like red samurai up their assholes. in these cases, it may be a desperation tactic, but that doesn't matter much to the people on the receiving end.

3b) have i mentioned conjurers talk to powerful extraplanar entities with unknown agendas? universal brotherhood ring a bell? toxic spirits? lots of reasons these guys might talk someone into a real bad idea like this, especially since it's not necessarily suicide.

4) I see a force 8 spirit and a magic 4, conjuring 4 summoner about even on dice, not exactly the realm of "only elite summoners." plus it's actually LESS likely to kill the person involved! i don't really buy that npcs don't get edge, either; all the contacts have them, for example. plus he gets edge cause he's a named npc and i said so, so there.

5) define obvious, cause the book don't. can you tell prayer from stomach cramps? why should summoning be physically obvious when all the action is happening astrally, not from fire shooting out your hands or something similar? shamanic masks might be a giveaway if they still happen, but even that assumes that in a crowd of people that security recognizes the exact guy pulling shit right off the bat and shoots him immediately without hesitation. like i said, lot of dead street people if that's the standard for cops to shoot people. i think that's actually one of my less radical ideas though, since real cops do that already if you twitch wrong at them.

why was this never a problem in earlier editions? because it was two orders of magnitude less likely to happen. if 1 in 1000 mages is willing to do this and they succeed 1 in 1000 times, it's a one in a million nightmare scenario. if they succeed even 1 out of 10, then it's scarily plausible. i think it's more like 1 in 3 to 1 in 2 now. so, yeah. even odds on getting a tank. yep, game balance, everyone!

The book actually does. Obvious is exactly that, Obvious. The difficulty to notice magic use is 6-Force of the magical Effect. It may take many forms, but that is irrelevant. If they are summoning as stupid powerful as Force 12 Spirits, there would never need be a roll. Hell, there would never need be a roll for Force 6+, if you asked me, because it has moved from Threshold X to Threshold Zero. And the first rule of counter magic is to geek the mage. A mage casting/summoning at that level is prime fodder for being targeted, especially since he is involved in doing something that has his attention.

I don't know why you are casting this as a surprising scenario, since the same topic has come up at least twice in the past week or two.

I don't have the SR5 rules yet, so they might have changed this, but there's still my go to for dealing with all sorts of threats, Dodge Ninjas, Tank Trolls, etc. Combat chemicals. At least in SR4 it seemed like it was up to GM whether or not toxins worked on spirits and if they could us ItNW against it. But if SnS works on them, why not chemicals? At least contact chemicals, since the other vectors might require biological descriptions of a spirits manifested form. So I don't see why security wouldn't incorporate chemicals, especially from dual-natured sources for fighting spirits.

The area effect neutralizes the dodge bonus and spirits have high body scores, but until you get to the uber level, they can't shake off chemicals easily. If you let ItNW apply to toxin resistance, the damage won't be high enough to get through for most of the 5+ spirits, but secondary effects will work. -2 to everything is a start towards dealing with the spirit and paralysis will take it out of the fight.

-1) Then there was an implication in what you said that was contrary to your intent.

0) 1% is all Awakened. A portion of that has 6 Magic, and a different portion can Conjure. The intersection between the two is already quite small. Then drill down to the portion with high drain stats and high skills and the resources to acquire the right foci... It's going to be an incredibly tiny number.

1) Not worth it for Damien Knight when the guy you'd be sacrificing could instead be used to hit a wide array of high-value targets. It's not worth it to anyone.

2) Actually most of those could, potentially, work. Without killing the one doing it.

3) Toxics and such are more likely to grow in power until they can do something without needing to kill themselves to do it - they have agendas that are better served by their continuing to be around. This is actually more true of bug shamans, for that matter.

4) Force 8 with Edge. And if you're giving someone Edge, it's because they're plot-significant. Other then entities that ALWAYS have Edge, Edge is not a part of discussions of in-setting implications.

5) Noticing magic is a Perception + Intuition [Mental] (Skill-Force); the rules are on page 280. So, with high Force spirits, usually very easy.

As far as the game balance goes, you're choosing to ignore quite a bit.

I think Shinryu has a point, actually. There are people that crazy - this is really the sort of crazy shit that Toxics would in fact pull. Hell, this is dystopia - the man pushed to the edge (to the point of martyrism) is one of the most common archetypes in the genre. And yeah, 1 in 1000 was both believable and terrifying. Having Force 12 spirits be far more common in a world where highly skilled and valuable people regularly engage in possibly lethal scenarios AS THEIR JOB looks like another sign of not checking setting implications for mechanical changes.

Yeah, gotta go with this one here. The discussion puts me in mind of a situation I remember seeing on the news, years ago, where this guy out in California stole a tank and drove it down Main Street and wrecked shit (he didn't use any of the guns, either. He simply drove over things). Just because.

Did the cops eventually take him out? Oh yeah, you know they did. With many extreme killy-death-bullets. But not before he did a hell of a lot of damage.

And it does beg the question, how the hell did the guy steal a tank to begin with? Why?

I don't think it matters, actually. Maybe the stars aligned in the sky just right on that particular day, for that particular person, and all that magicky jazz. What matters is that it happened. Shinryu's scenario isn't terribly implausible, given the nature of the rules and the setting.

ah, sweet validation! bask, my tiny ego, bask!

i am going to post a few things as far as the new counterarguments:

visibility of summoning: i had thought the rules you mentioned only really applied to sorcery, and i admit my mistake. however, i am fairly certain that you need to be actively looking for magical activity to see this sort of thing, which is not always possible. i imagine expert facial recognition systems might be programmed for such a task, but even then the reaction time is very, very short. there are a number of scenarios where you wouldn't be able to see the summoner at all very easily.

available mages: lacking distributional information on the power of magic, let us assume that it is roughly normally distributed among the awakened population. we can assume a magic of 7 is "extraordinary", belonging to no more than 2.5% of the awakened, and we'll figure 1 takes up the other end of the tail. so that leaves us divvying four standard deviations, we'll give one to magics 2, 3 and 4 and divide the high deviation between 5 and 6, giving us just about 10% of the awakened population able to pull a force 12. of the (shall we say, accounting for slight depopulation re: vitas and such) six billion people on the planet, this leaves us just about six million mages able to do this. if it's one in a thousand crazy enough to do so? still 6000 potential time bombs out there.

worthiness of targets: imma stop you right there. you saying that there's nobody who'd train and brainwash a mage for a few years to get a shot at the president of what is effectively a country like damon knight? i'm sorry, we are playing shadowrun, right? who was the old motherfucker from shadowland, neon samurai or whatever? think he wouldn't go super saiyan and blow himself up to take a shot at the president of fucking ares?

edge: i think this is a circular argument. you say the assassin is a nobody, i say he's a pivotal character, we can agree to disagree. here's the thing: security has no idea which he is! there are no named npcs for them. so security kind of has to assume that just maybe he can pull shit of this nature and plan accordingly. or do you imagine the post-mortem on dead Ares CEO to be "well, we thought he was just a mook! his name and lifebar didn't pop in my AR feed or nothin!"

alternate methods: sure, might work. good old suicide bombing is actually kind of hard to stop. but there are a lot more tells for a bomb (chemsniffers, scanners, traffic surveillance) and basically none for a spirit that hasn't yet been summoned other than "hey, that guy is a burly-ass mage, make sure the snipers have him locked down." and even then masking can get you around that. so there's a better chance your summoner gets past all the other security issues long before your bomber does. i'm not discounting other methods of assassination. i'm saying this one is really hard to see coming and really hard to stop once it gets going.

any time a VIP is not behind a high-power ward he has, has, has to have astral overwatch, and he has to have ridiculously powerful astral overwatch. anytime an HTR team engages a magical threat they have to bring the heavy artillery. this wasn't a problem in-universe before the ruleset made it way too easy to have death tanks on demand from astral space.

i pose to those who see no problem with the summoning rules then: how, exactly, does easy access to high-force spirits serve either the spirit (tee hee) or mechanical balance of 5th edition? how is it a better game for making summoning comparatively easy?

In the real world there is a policy in explosive storage magazines that nothing explosive goes on the floor. It all goes on pallets or dunnage and that few inches apparently enormously reduces the damage to the floor in case of an accidental detonation. So apparently the difference between having it in contact vs close is pretty huge.

1) Actively looking provides a bonus to Perception checks - it isn't required. So people would be entitled to that Perception roll (especially since things with a threshold of one are kind of obvious as hell).

2) I'm saying if you've got a mage with that kind of power, it is always, and I do mean ALWAYS, more useful to get them to do a lot of things for you than to kill themselves doing one thing for you - and they're too rare to waste.

3) I'm saying that as far as the argument regarding in-world implications goes, Edge isn't a factor; it's an out of game construct, a purely metagame element. If we're arguing the metagame, that's one thing. But metagame elements are not relevant to a discussion of in-world implications.

4) A sniper can still get a high-value target if he needs to. Counter-snipers and such are a risk, but there are a number of ways around that. There's also the sniper blimp drones that come up on here from time to time. It's quite possible that there have been, at this point, many Damien Knight decoys assassinated through various means.

And I dispute your definition of easy, frankly.

Knight may very well have a fucking astral army backing him up 24/7. But minor execs? Hell no. It /is/ that easy. Magic, after all, is fucking terrifying.

And on the note of normally distributed magic I seriously question this assumption - it seems like it should be a descending order of commonality.

couldn't an even semi-well placed executive pay a LOT of money to have an initiated magician anchor a super-high level protection spell, triggered when the detection spell linked to it detects the presence of magic within a certain range? And also, another bonded spell that detects magic and automatically fires a force 98 manabolt at the caster? I don't think this stuff is easily achievable for an average shadowrunner, but for those with access to near-unlimited resources (or are handed down certain protections from those that do and want to protect their assets) and nearly unlimited time and prefect conditions to get the spells just right, this stuff wouldn't even be that hard to accomplish.

Yeah, but you need magic in the Sixth World. Mind Probe, Detect Truth, Mob Mind - a corp exec will want to be able to order /his own/ mages to use those spells (like say on a recently extracted scientist that he's not completely assured the loyalty of.)

Point..but the trigger could be more specific than ANY magic...

Security is always an over-reaction. A too-specific trigger will never go off, and a too-vague one will torch his own men. He's better off staying behind wards or having magical security of his own at all times. In fact, that's the only half-assured way he won't get ganked willy-nilly.

An F12 spirit with concealment can to a metaplanar shortcut past the wards and likely get away with it. Particularity if it has countermagic to deal with the defensive mage for a moment.

Yeah, even having spirits protecting the VIP in the astral just as a defense against such an attack is only a half-arsed solution. But then, that's the point.

A high force (12 or above?), triggered mana barrier would work, especially given that regarding mana barriers, RAW say "the gamemaster has the option to have certain ranged and sustained critter powers (such as Concealment or Movement) suffer the same fate as spells." (p. 316)

An effectively played F12 spirit is a monstrosity. It's almost impossible to see, it moves at impossible speeds, you virtually can't hit it if you do see it and when you finally do hit it the spirit mostly ignores the damage. It, on the other hand, notices everything, essentially never misses and can pretty much drop anyone with a single action.

If the game really allows a starting character to have a decent chance of summoning one and still being able to direct it then I'd suggest there is an problem. Either with the rules for the capability of the spirit or the rules for summoning one.

And, having run the numbers, I do not think such a thing happening is a realistic possibility. The odds of outright killing the summoner are really quite high if the spirit is using Edge.

Can we see the numbers? I was just thinking about kzt's post, and wondering if there was a "decent chance" of a character summoning F12 and living to tell about it.

The use of Edge to resist the summoning is a critical point that needs to be addressed/clarified in some errata *sigh*

This is without accounting for exploding dice, because I haven't found a way to get this site to do that and be counting hits properly: http://anydice.com/program/2802

Without exploding sixes, you've got about a 40% or 29% (depending on Body score) chance of straight up dying, and only about a 17% chance of coming out with 1 service. Once the spirit's Edge is in play, the numbers would be getting a lot worse for the summoner.

So, what is the big deal?
People die to spirits from time to time, they also die to suicide drones or snipershots or toxins or alot of other nearly unstoppable attacks. Who cares? This is supposed to be a dystopian future, people are expendable and there are 20 others who want to take over that job you just opened up.
Of course there will be some security, but there is no reason to waste so many resources on something as replaceable as a CEO of a megacorp.
The gameworld does simply not care if some people die or a building explodes for <insert reason here>. The running costs of highed security are simply measured against the replacement and insurance costs. And you can guess twice what is cheaper.

There is no reason to be a douche about things and make spirits roll edge. High Force Spirits are broken for many other reasons and if you start to draw the line only at this point I question your sanity.

i'm kind of surprised no one hit me on the "not all awakened can conjure thing," thought about that after i posted. still, would only reduce the numbers to a couple thousand nutball mages instead of 6000.

rhat,
i'm pretty sure we just aren't going to see eye to eye on this. you think a mage is always more valuable alive, yet armies send them to war with some expectation of attrition. i would just say that i'd think it was insane twenty people spent years learning to fly planes into buildings if i didn't know it happened, i guess. the very idea of suicide terrorism on that scale is utterly repugnant, and yet people did it. worse yet, some of these people were well educated, well off... exactly what a mage should be, no? ideology and insanity can trump everything, even self-preservation. if we don't have similar ideas about that, there's not a lot of common ground on the setting issue.

edge doesn't have nearly, nearly enough of an effect at force 12 to make the odds as bad as they need to be, in my opinion. granted, just an opinion, but i would say that in previous editions i never, ever worried about this coming up. if edge were equal to force like back in 4th, absolutely would make a huge difference. 24 exploding dice is a rough expect of nine or ten successes, and soaking 20P enough to live is a bitch. at half force, though, it just doesn't cut it nearly enough; on 18 dice, you're talking about an expect of 7 and 14P, which is just low enough to be survivable by a mage with a slightly better than average drain resistance using edge. the way force for spirits has been handled is a big dumb step back for the game. if that gets errated back to edge = force, i'm on your side then.

normal distribution is just a best guess without solid information. good old central limit theorem and all. you could model it as a poisson-ish distribution, i suppose, but that means there are a lot of basically useless force 1 mages running around doing, uh, birthday parties? you can skew the normal too, but it's all just conjecture unless the writers give some solid stats somewhere. (incidentally, are you in fact an estimated variance?)


kzt:

i think the touching explosives thing making a big difference argues for the interpretation that "attached" means contacting, yes. it's a bit more complex with shaped charges, but close enough. you could interpret it to mean the planting of the explosive, but i note that the demolitions role seems to cover the construction of the device rather than the planting of it. i meant the "makes sense" sarcastically since it totally makes no sense that taping the bomb down makes the difference as long as it's oriented correctly. tone of voice, internet, dammit.

the whole "magic screws you dead" thing is bad enough without summoners having a decent chance to conjure up a flying tank. at least you have some defenses against sorcery or ritual sorcery. even if a force 6 spirit is a terrifying thing, enough security can shoot it dead and a decent conjurer can defend you against it. in every previous edition, i think you really only ever had to worry about force 6 or so spirits with the old edge rules or the old conjuring rules. it is literally two or three orders of magnitude easier to summon a force 12 now and get away with it. so, yeah, obviously i concur the rules for summoning them are... poor.

quentra:

you grasp the salient point precisely. damon knight, maybe he's got his own force 9 pet and quickened mana barrier spells and god knows what protecting him, but not everybody gets secret service level magical protection like that. and the idea of force 12 uber-spirits would have everybody shitting their pants in fear. your magic guy could protect you when force 6 was the tops, but now if he's not willing to take deadly drain to throw himself in front of the flaming god-monster then you're boned. i submit this sort of world looks different from the shadowrun we know and love, and has a much more brutal "shoot it or recruit it" attitude towards mages. the best option for mundanes starts to look like not only "geek the mage," but "geek the mage in his teen years, as soon as he manifests anything that looks like conjuring." it's the only way to be safe for everybody not CEO of an AAA, so basically everybody. even adepts, sorcerers and alchemists would probably want to off the conjurers, because they're nearly as vulnerable as anyone else to this shit. so it doesn't really serve the game to have it around.

Neat site! Didn't know about this...

Looking at your link, X is summoning pool, Y is drain resist, and Z is spirit resist, right? Why graph Z-X? Wouldn't it be X-Z (summoner net hits?) And why (X+X)-Y? Wouldn't it be (Z+Z)-Y (resulting drain) ?

Unless I have X and Z reversed, but then your numbers seem off, as X (spirit resist) is using Edge, which you seem to indicate in your post that you didn't do ("Once the spirit's Edge is in play, the numbers would be getting a lot worse..."), and a summoner pool of 12 is pretty low for a character that is expected to summon F12.

1) I'd assume the population is something like Adept>Aspected>Magician+Mystic Adept in order of commonality (yes, I mean to say that Magicians and Mystic Adepts combined are a lesser proportion of Awakened than Aspected mages are).

2) We might not, but I'll try to be a little bit clearer as to what I mean. If you train a guy specifically to kill himself for you in a specific way, then that is in fact all he's good for to you strategically speaking. You do not suffer a reduction in capability. This isn't the case with a mage or conjurer, who can do far, far, far more for you than that. On the individual scale, someone who has power like that, without going down a pretty specific road in terms of mental illness, will at least care about surviving long enough to do whatever it is that their insanity directs them to do. Its possible, but the probability of it happening (especially since the agency involved in having that kind of power might be negatively correlated to the incidence of many disorders) is low enough that I can easily believe that it hasn't occurred yet. And, for that matter, we haven't exactly gone and put anti-air weapons on skyscrapers, have we? We've taken security precautions both reasonable and unreasonable, but we haven't gone to the utter extreme that you seem to be suggesting that spirits would create.

3) Spirits and Sprites going back to having Edge equal to their Force/Level is something I can absolutely get behind.

4) Okay, I've got to admit something: I have a reasonable grasp of statistics, but I have no idea what you mean by asking if I'm an estimated variance.

X is an edged summoning resist. I'll admit, I could push the summoning pool higher with a power focus, but that does already represent skill 6 and Magic 6. As to the Edge, what I meant (and damn did i ever manage to type something completely different from what I meant) is that with 6's actually exploding like they should it gets worse. The sites explode command, unfortunately, doesn't mesh quite right with their count command (if you roll a 6 and a 1, it sees that as a 7, or at least that's what I expect is happening). Exploding dice would have a strictly unfavourable impact on the spread.

yes, these results look a lot like the spirit is using edge and the summoner isn't, so i calleth shennanigans upon thine simulation. to be fair, the spirit is always going to have more dice than the summoner unless the summoner has ridiculous edge, so it's not like the odds are good for the summoner, exactly. it's just that they're not nearly bad enough.even going by these numbers, the summoner gets a service 16% of the time and survives 75% of the time (cumulative probability of success about 12%), whereas in third ed you got a service about 14% of the time and exploded 99% of the time (cumulative probability of success of about .014%). re-rolled sixes only really bump the curve about a point over, though that makes the cumulative probability closer to 6% or so off the top of my head. it's that survival probability that makes this a viable tactic in 5th, not the actual odds of getting a service, which are remarkably similar between 5th and 3rd. of course, there's edge, specialization, totem modifiers, foci, teamwork, and other things that can tip it towards the summoner's favor as well.

rhat:
i think i may have confused my symbols, i'm thinking r squared proportion of variance, not r hat. dammit. too late for smarts... red hat?

The simulation is meant to get at the setting point. All spirits have Edge, but only 0.000000000000000000000000001% of people do. As such, summoner Edge is excluded as being irrelevant.

I'll admit, though, that I just kinda threw the summoning test in there after having previously written it just for odds of survival.

Ok got it. Thanks for the help

I think summoner edge is relevant, since the number of summoners who have Edge is a MUCH larger group than just "people who have Edge". Also, summoner dice pool will hit 18 pretty "easily", without the need for extreme heavy optimization. 6 MAG/Skill, +2 spec, +2 totem, +2 summoning focus...I think this is way more likely in SR5 than SR4, btw, because it's easier to get MAG 6 in the Priority system as there's no penalty for getting that "last" point of magic. Similarly with 6 skill.

Using Summoner pool of 18, resist pool of 13, F12 spirit resisting with no Edge.
Results: at least 1 service ~78% of the time (avg 2 services), drain > 9P about 2% of the time.
Seems very survivable.

Using Summoner pool of 21 (3 edge), resist pool of 16(inc att), F12 spirit resisting with Edge (18 total dice). The exploding dice don't work for either dice pool, so I call it even
Results: at least 1 service ~57% of the time (avg 1 service), drain > 9P about 20% of the time.
Not nearly as good, spirits using Edge to resist summoning really puts a hurting on this kind of thing.

still, joe summoner without edge has a 6% chance of calling godzilla, whereas under 4th or 3rd ed rules any summoner was almost guaranteed to die. it's a significant bump in probability, and i think security worries a lot more about a one in ten or a one in twenty kind of risk than they do a one in one thousand. it also means that a teamwork summoning becomes a lot more worrisome; maybe a bunch of mages aren't willing to kill themselves, but they might be willing to take one for the team long enough to get your spiritual cruise missile online. i assume you can be stabilized after your condition monitor overflows from drain as long as you don't die. against 14P: calculated risk. against 18P; um, see you next monday, boss. you do lose the element of surprise by doing this, but it's still a threat.