This is inaccurate. At priority B, you lose 2 points of Magic and have no free Power Points. At C, you only lose 1 point but get no free skill. At Priority D, you cannot be a Mystic Adept.

These losses can be recovered, but they require expenditures from other areas that mean that you're still losing stuff.

Indeed.

OK, so the mage pays 5 Karma for each seperate gun (if he for some odd reason, is not allready equiped with enough of them out of char.gen). The mudane (or adept) buys each gun with ammunition and extras for credits. So one could say, the mudane has a good deal there, as he can use Karma for skills and Credit for guns and stuff. There is that fact however, that guns can be lost in a multitude of ways, spells usually can not. Spells are not just tools they are abilities, that cannot be unlearned just like that.

As allready has been pointed out rather often, it does not stop with guns... with 5 Karma each, the mage can learn new abilities, that have a whole different use and utillity, than to kill outright. All of these abilities use ONE and the same skill, making it rather easy, to optimize. Not to forget, we are only taking spellcasting into account (which is the more or less the most powerful skill there is in Shadowrun, rivaled only by perception), it is however not the only angle there is to mages. I can build a character right out of char.gen, who can: deal damage, heal damage, avoid damage, turn invisble, "turn" into someone else, fly, control other people, summon powerful spirits (that may be a good sidekick, on par or even more powerful than a pc) and then some.

Direct combat spells are very powerful. Sure, they do not unfold their full potential right out of char.gen, but if you want to be a combat mage, you focus and get to be nasty rather soon afterwards (and won't necessarily stop growing ever more so). If you are not a combat mage however... well then what is your problem anyways? Why should any character, who is not focussing on combat, be on par or beyond with those who are?

Direct combat spells are also powerfull because of the way, combat works in SR5. It is based on not being hit and direct combat spells, take that option away from most targets, most of the time.

I still do not see, how mages are supposed to be over-nerfed, they simply have been overpowered for a looong time. It may well be that, playing a "formerly" overpowered profession, the feeling of being nerfed to hard, is a sign of balance happening.

ok so. the mage spent 5 karma on getting a single spell, the Sam could spend 4 karma on getting a skill to rank 2 that he did not have before. No one is arguing that mages have more flexibility, but if your mage is going around mind controlling everyone? Sounds like a GM problem, not a mage problem. If the mage throws a Fireball around in the middle of town...why was Lonestar or KE not arresting them or making them show proper mage paperwork & locking them in mageproof shackles? Summoning Spirits, they can resist, in fact I imagine most spirits of decent power would try, they do not like being trifled with by mere mortals. Fly? roll a skill roll, Levitate only allows basic movement, trying to fly, I'd make the mage roll a skill roll for that because the spell does not confer the ability to know how to fly. Turning Invisible, ok, roll those perception checks for the sound his boots make. also take the penalty for BGC in the middle of a facility.

Long story short, if someone is allowing mages to be the most powerful, maybe its time someone showed the GM how they can & maybe should let the world work around that mage.

As a GM it usually is not that hard to go hard on PCs and yes, one can limit powers there. This is not about "how to work around a mage", though. This dicussion started off, with someone saying, that mages are not powerful enough and I do not agree with that. Mages are very powerful and powerful enough for sure.

anyone can be powerful if no one is using basic limits.

I'm sorry, but that's total and complete BS.

EVERY game depends on the skill of the gamemaster. The GM depends on the structure of the game. If the structure of the game is poor, a talented GM can make up for it, but that tends to drain creative energy from other areas, like plot and excitement.

If the game does not support the GM, if it makes them houserule everything and constantly waste energy trying to fix things, then it's a poor game.

in other words, if your claim is that something is not broken because the GM can fix it, then whatever that something is must have been broken in the first place, otherwise the GM wouldn't have had to fix it.

if it actually isn't broken (one way or the other, underpowered or underpowered or just non-functional for some other reason), no modifications will be required. it will work cleanly with the rest of the system without causing problems.

and seriously, we're comparing vehicles with levitation? well good, next time i want to sneak into a corporate facility through the vents, i'll just let the GM know that i'm carrying a GMC banshee in my back pocket. i'm sure there aren't any flaws at all with that plan.

Levitate according to the spell does not technically grant flight... in fact in 5E you only move force meters as a rate so probably slower than walking. Realistically many spells have been tweaked to be better.

Why wouldn't we compare magic with tech, we do it all the time with augs vs. Adepts. We compare invis with camo suits all the time.

With sams vs adepts, it's very easy to objectively measure things. You just compare dice pool sizes. In SR5, adepts always come out on top.

Comparing spells to guns, however, can't be done objectively. They're apples and oranges.

Does this Banshee make me look fat?

I have heard of Junk in the Trunk, but a Banshee in the Panties?

I make you the friendly proposal, that you should turn on your brain and calm down before you write down unqualified comments. The game gives us more than enough options to create a balanced game and I think that even SR5 doesn´t need more than 2 or 3 house rules before it fits to any possible gaming style. What I am talking about is a GM, that is focused on certain parts of the game (e.g. Matrix or Combat) using all the small, tiny special rules, while ignoring the options other parts (e.g. Magic) because he has no personal interest. Only in these cases, the character-class that is not hindered and kept under control can run wild. If this happens, the other classes will justifiable feel like they are nerfed or – even worse – another class outshines them.

The user-signature that was mentioned some comments ago, is the more detailed version of what I was trying to summarize shortly. You should have a look. It doesn´t get any more true than that.

My comments are hardly unqualified, and you'll note that I never once mentioned SR5 in my argument.

No matter how many sound bites you might reference, the truth of the matter is that a good system supports the GM, not fights them. Blaming the GM for a poor system is not a good argument to make. A hogwild player isn't the GM's fault if the game itself devolves into system mastery supremacy. You shouldn't need to learn the minutae of rules just to control your game: the basic rules should do that, and the advanced rules should flesh those out, not replace them.

Is SR5 like that? The jury's still out on that one. However, I will point out that adepts outshine sammies in just about every objective measure, and have a ton of non-objective measures where they shine as well.

The bottom line is this: Quit blaming the game masters for piss-poor game design. Blaming the victim never achieves anything good.

Guys, this is not the tone we would like to see in the discussions here. And that goes for both of you.

It is very possible to offer your opinion without resorting to personal attacks.

So, calm down, take a step back, and when you are able to write in a more friendly manner again, you can continue here.

Bye
Thanee

Please read my comments more careful. I was talking about "the game" in general and SR5 in particular (because it seems the most difficult one up to now).

Unfortunately you still don´t seem to understand what i am talking about. The rules may be weak, but they exist. Real problems only occur if you don´t use them. THIS is what I am talking about. NOT USING EXISTING RULES. If you f**ck your Sammies on the airport with MAD-Scanners and Cyberwareblockers, but you forget to tell the mage (which is running around with several sustained spells) that there are wards everywhere, THEN you get a problem. If you hack into the Sammies ´ware but you forget to count in BC for the mage if you work into the deepest Barrens, THEN we get a problem. If you think a damage code of 10P AP-5 is balanced, but you complain if a spell does the same damage, THEN you got a problem. If you allow the mage to use the levitate-spell to be used as some kind of “darth-vader-suffocation-trick” because you know a sh**t about the rules, it is YOUR SELFMADE problem. Do you now know what I am talking about? Balance comes with knowledge. The system is - most of the time – not the problem.

They can't astrally project. They must spend a power point to be able to astrally perceive.

This, exactly. The fix for one broken rule shouldn't be another broken rule, or even a good one. It should be a nonbroken rule in the first place.

Using SR5 as an example: Mystic adepts were seriously broken when they only needed 2 karma to buy a power point. Rather than slap a new rule on them, they fixed the old one-- corrected it. Now, they're less broken, and certainly more within range of what a GM can cope with. That's doing it right.

Background count as a balancing factor? Not so much. Now you have two rules you have to balance. What's more, the new BGC rules don't even hurt adepts (as far as I've seen, at least) because Adepts have very few Magic-linked tests that they roll. So, hypothetically, another nerfing rule will get invented to try and fix that. Now we've got three rules that would be totally unnecessary if they got adepts right in the first place.

According to hotfix errata BC impose penalty equal to their rating on any test that utilize or use magic in any way. Including any skills that benefit from active adept powers such as killing hands, critical strike, great leap or improved skills.
So any test that is in any way affected by adept power suffers that BC penalty, not just Magic related tests.

a) Page 278 Drain: Drain damage, regardless of whether it is Stun or Physical damage, cannot be healed by any means other than the natural properties of the body—that means no magical healing and no medkits. Page 311 Rapid Healing [adept power]: You recover from damage more quickly, magically healing yourself over periods of time.

b) How on earth can you get 6 net hits against a dice pool that's double your Magic? Do you plan on having your Alchemy dice pool 18 dice greater than that somehow? If you use reagents to limit your hits, your potency will be that limit minus hits of double your Magic. At Magic 6 that's 6 - 4 (expected hits of 12 dice) = 2. At Magic 7 that's 7 - 4.67 (expected hits of 14 dice) = 2.33. This assumes the Alchemy dice pools of 18 and 21, respectively, to expect 6 or 7 hits to meet the limit. Failure means potency of 1 or failing outright. You still roll that terrible drain though.

c) Heal the stun drain with high body. The assumption I see often is that magicians will max Willpower and Logic/Charisma depending on tradition. Now they need to max Body for this trick, Agility if they want to toss their preparations like grenades (or simply learn a firearms skill to be effective in combat as they are sometimes advised on these forums), and Initiative and Reaction if they want to dodge (Geek the mage first, right?) or engage in astral combat. All while having lower priority slots, because they max Magic too.

What I plan to try is getting Magic 8 and using preparations of slightly less than double my Magic. I think I could pull this off as an elf shaman with maxed Body, Willpower and Charisma, all buffed to +4. Would those buffs count as "magical healing"? I would use a power focus and possibly a centering focus (along with the centering initiate ability).

I think the Quick Healer quality would work for this. Do you think the Magic 8 is overkill? (I've noticed several things in 5e that higher Magic helps.) Would the Karma be better spent on another initiation (centering die) or something else?

Astral Projection has a Pizza Problem anyway.

If having access to spells is really so wonderful, why not put Priority D in Magic to be an aspected sorcerer? The cost difference from D to E is 2 Edge/Magic points for humans (sorry elves), 2 attribute points, 4 skill points, or 44,000 nuyen.

So, unless I'm missing something, are the rules for BGC layed out at any point in SR5? I see references in some of the qualities, but other than that nothing- it looks like a rule that is implied from previous versions, but if you don't have the previous experience as a new player coming in you'd have no way of knowing what they're talking about. If anything called for a table it'd be this- there are certainly enough of them in the book.

-DrZ

Only if you make it a problem... We never seem to have any issues with it at all. *shrug*

You are apparently missing something, since a Hotfix Errata has been produced for Missions. That information is in that document.
It may not stand the test of time, though.

I don't know what this means

He is equating it with the Hacking Issues of previous editions.

Ah right. I've never heard that referred to as the Pizza Problem either. Guess I'm just not 'down wit da kidz'

Specifically, the idea that "the rest of the team has enough time that they can go get a pizza" while the GM and Hacker resolve the matrix tests.

It's a scenario where one player is involved with the GM so everyone else goes and gets pizza.

The rules for what people are constantly touting as the thing that keeps mages from needing a nerf aren't in the core book, no.

There are suggested ones in the Missions errata, but as Bull notes, that is not official SR5 errata.

You are right, i apologize.

hmmm... missed that. should still work fine though. potency of 2 means area effect of 2. if it's force 12, you'll still have a dice pool of 14 to increase damage, but now you have some very localized grenades. only drawback is the duration. and of course, you don't have to go all the way to force 12... you can "settle" for only 10P base damage on your mini-grenades. but really, small area instagib attacks are probably even better than large area ones, most of the time...

also, willpower factors in to healing stun damage, and a power focus should help generate the hits you need when making the opposed test.

I'm thinking that 3-4 is a good spot for potency. Having 6-8 hours (7-9 hours depending on rule interpretation) for full potency and a 3-4 meter radius aren't bad. A strategy might be to prepare low force, high potency preparations first, capped off by a higher force, medium potency preparation (the ball lightning, for example). Then rest, create one more with very high force, minimal potency (a more intense, but more localized ball lightning). Rest off that drain (hopefully) and then it's showtime.

As for Willpower, it's good for not getting the drain in the first place. Body is good for healing it. It still makes (shamanic) elves preferable to trolls in my opinion.

in SR5, so long as the drain is stun damage, willpower is *also* good for recovering from it. you also get to use your body in the same test, but willpower *is* included.

Thanks for setting me straight on that. Trolls, orks, and dwarves get +4, +3, +3 extra dice per hour to heal stun drain. Shaman elves, all dwarves, shaman orks, and shaman trolls get +2, +1, -1, and -2 dice per casting to avoid it.

But unless I'm wrong, the mage can buy that solution too?

Ok... so 3 Willpower and good cover = 7 dice... ~2 hits. Magic 8 + Spellcasting 6(+2 combat spells) = 16 dice = ~5 hits... cast at force 8 = 11 stun damage. At force 16? 19 stun damage. Lights out for everybody.

And again the AOE of a F16 stunball is a circle with a diameter of 32 meters or roughly 100 feet across. If you tell me that the grunts need to each keep a 1/3 of a football field distance from each other as a defensive measure... no way.

Why wouldn't the GM give you an Athletics test for attempting to "fly" with a grapple gun? And hey, let's not forget that grapple guns are fired using an Exotic Weapon skill, making it totally useless for anything else.

Not to forget, that one cannot solve everything by carrying around yet another piece of gear.

Sure, but why would he when the spells are so much more versatile? Isn't that what we are talking about here?
See, Mages have MANY other things to spend Karma on other than their spell selection, foci bonding, magic rating or Initiation. And yet, there are a lot of individuals who seem to either forget (or ignore) that truth.

having more good options than everyone else is an advantage, not a disadvantage. having so many good options that it isn't possible to have them all at once out of chargen is not an argument that does anything to convince me magicians are in any way weak.

they have a ton of power in utility, more than any other character, and they still have a very respectable amount of power in combat. as i pointed out, levitate is generally a superior choice in the setting over a flying vehicle because it is very concealable and easily portable. it can be placed anywhere that you can see whenever you need it. it is a very powerful, versatile, flexible tool that lets you do some very impressive things, and it is in no way replaced by having access to a flying vehicle because it offers some extremely impressive options that a flying vehicle simply do not even come close to.

Mages advance mainly by Karma, so yeah, they can use a buttload of it. One should however, not confuse, not being close to ones potential, as not being powerful. Mages can accomplish quite a lot, right out of the door. Being able to go anywhere from there, may be hard for some, but still is a luxury.

So, mages have a justified craving for Karma (growing is great after all), but that still does not justify, that every single option (in this case direct combat spells [DCS]) needs to be on par or even more powerful, than mudane ones. If a combat mage really goes for it, his casting of DCS can become something, mudanes do not even dare to crap their pants about.

Would it be better if the magician made other player characters fly? I mean float. Provided it's at a high force to resist dispelling, of course, to prevent the character from falling to their death.

Hold up, flag on the play: the argument was never "magicians are weak." I doubt you'll find much support for argument anywhere.

The position put forth by the MagicRun adherents is Magic is OP. Those that are arguing against that position are NOT saying magic is weak and you're committing a logical fallacy by excluding the middle and forcing a black/white binary choice of either magic is either OP or weak. Other than indirect aoe spells, I haven't found much in the way of OP, but that's intrinsic to indirect aoes (grenades included- which frankly are a much more efficient option) and not magic.

The argument put forth to prove Magic is OP, is that because Magic is capable of X, and Y, and Z it is therefore OP. And the counter is that yes magic has a lot of potential, but unless you're living in InfiniteKarma Land, that potential is never realized. As soon as the mage spends the karma on a new spell, the mage cannot then learn a different spell, bond a focus, initiate, improve attributes/skills/qualities/whatever without additional karma.

Every character has a pool of resources. If character 1 has 50 options to spend those resources, but they can only achieve a realized power level of 9000, they will still be weaker than a character that only has one option, but can achieve a power level of over 9000.

Just the fact that magic characters have more options, does not in itself, make them OP. You have to show that one of those options that is exclusively available to the mage character is demonstrably more powerful than any option a mundane could acquire, when both character types - and here's the important part - have an equal pool of resources (such as a starting character or with an additional X Karma and/or Y Nuyen) to draw from. And if proven, it's proven only under those conditions and not in general.

Anecdotally, I statted up three different characters using RAW chargen: a sammie, an adept, and a cyberadept, all human. I found they were all within a few dice of each other and the major distinction was that Adepts are much better at avoiding damage and sammies were much better at soaking it. (As an aside, I also worked up a couple trolls, and in general they aren't worth the high priority imo unless you're a melee specialist... and then they become kinda OP). Once I polish them, I might throw it up on dumpshock for comment, but my own findings were that most characters were within one or two dice of each other and that was within my own tolerance for game balance to stamp the whole thing with "good enough." Funnily enough, I found the full sammie tended towards having more dice in combat, on average, because his Resources was much easier split between offensive and defensive improvements than the Adept's power points, and while the cyberadept could keep up, there were some glaring weaknesses, like having crap for Edge.


As also pointed out Levitate is SLOW. Yes it's concealable, yes it's portable, yes it's flexible, but levitate will never outrun anything. If time or speed is a factor at all, a flying vehicle will always be the better choice. Further comparing a vehicle is an improper comparison; use a drone. A properly kitted flying drone might be able to accomplish something similar to, while being faster than, a flying mage.

I was under the impression, that the topic, as presented by the OP is, that direct combat spells are, in his opinion, to weak. It sort of translates as, "magicians are to weak". This is the point, I just can not agree with.

Mages can be overpowered in every other respect, and direct combat spells can still suck. The two are not contradictory.

The change to direct combat spells is jarring to anyone coming over from SR3 or SR4, because direct combat spells used to have an entirely different role - they were reusable, effective spells for taking down enemies. In SR5, they seem to be limited to slowly whittling down foes who can reliably dodge or soak indirect combat spells, a much more narrow niche.

My apologies. I was under the impression that he was refuted, and his reaction was more of a knee jerk response to a single change without reading how everything else changed in context.

Perhaps it was my own knee jerk reaction to the fallacy that "mages can do ANYTHING!!!" that gets thrown around constantly that caused my post. Sorry.

Double post. Sorry.

But still a broader niche than was previously assigned to indirect spells.

Really, I think the issue is that people are having difficulty adapting to the idea of indirects as the go-to option rather than directs.

The big problem with direct spells in previous editions was that the caster could inflict a large amount of damage for little to no drain. As a result, direct spells were the go-to spells, and indirect effects were under-utilised.

The possible solutions to these were:

Either 1) Increase drain

or 2) Reduce damage.

or 3) Make the elemental effects of indirect spells more potent and desirable, so that the lack of these in indirect spells is a more serious drawback.

SR5 has done all three at once.

So now indirect combat spells are the go-to spells, and the direct spells are barely worth casting. Even if the target is hard to hit, doing a similar amount of damage to yourself to hurt them is only a good call when you have the numerical advantage, any reinforcements incoming will be on your side, and you have no need to leave the area once the battle is over. In short, it is a boon to corpsec, but all-but-useless to a runner. Unfortunately, in this game, runners are the PCs.

And if mages needs to resort to guns to be effective in combat, I can pretty much guarantee my group is going to demand to go back to 3rd Ed.

I'm sorry, but given that indirect spells are still an effective option (and indirect area spells, like grenades, are too effective), I don't see how this is relevant. As for Direct Spells, keep in mind that the Drain/Damage comparison doesn't actually work like that. At F-3, Force 5 is basically your minimum Force that it makes sense to cast it at (as that entails the minimum 2 Drain). If you have Magic 6, Spellcasting 6, a Combat specialization, a Mentor Spirit bonus to Combat Spells, and a Force 3 Power Focus, that's 19 dice at chargen for at least 5 hits 81 percent of the time, and with a Drain pool of 11 you take no Drain 92.5 percent of the time. The target resists with Willpower alone, and cannot dodge - leading to at least 3 damage after soak most of the time (not bothering with a formula applying the limit right now). That's pretty reliable damage, and is pretty good if the target is otherwise very difficult for anyone to damage. It's a damn useful niche, even if it isn't as flashy as some others.

Also, the Drain on Directs hasn't really been increased - Drain scaling is different, yes, but at Force 6, the drain for Manabolt and such is identical.