The rules imply If you do something dangerous have plenty of Armour.....

Jaid, I tend to think that it is exceptionally appropriate because everything else CAN be cured up with some med-kit, some Heal, and a bit of rest thanks to the gamism. We are establishing drain as a "whole different level of scary." Which it truly needs to be, because right now mages essentially press free I WIN buttons, secure in the knowledge that there is no real mechanical downside to acting like a demi-god with a batman utility belt. Which, at reasonable casting levels, is not that bad - but it does not scale upwards well at all. While a powerful stunbolt might cause a headache, summoning Cthulhu causes...a bad cut? If summoning Cthulu or firing off a second sun might really, truly, end your character rather than cause a few P, I think we would see a lot less of it.

....

are you playing SR4, or SR5?

because in SR5, you don't summon Cthulhu. you can summon a powerful spirit, but it can probably die in a heartbeat. it's plenty strong on the offence, but a halfway-decent street sam, or even just a competent security force, can probably destroy it in a couple of shots with the right weapons. and firing a massive ball lightning spell generally speaking will fry yourself, unless you're in one of those extremely rare situations where your enemies are both far away and also grouped up, in which case you could more effectively deal with them by, say... running away. going invisible. having the street sam fire a grenade. not drawing their attention in the first place. or any number of other solutions that don't require your mage to go unconscious in the middle of a firefight.

the really terrifying stuff doesn't even need to be high force anyways. i don't give a crap if you can summon a spirit that one-shots everything. an idiot with an assault rifle can one-shot almost everything. i'm far, far, FAR more worried about the force 1 mob mind with 8 drams of reagents backing it up, causing nearly no drain (and most magicians will soak what little there is) while generally wrecking the opposition far more thoroughly than some stupid force 12 ball lightning or even a force 12 spirit could ever hope to do.

If we are going to bring up Mind control, this almost needs it's own thread as drain is just one of the issues with that subject, though your point about the reagent = minimal drain is well taken.

I agree with the general idea of your argument, but not all the specifics. A force 12 man spirit can also cast mob mind, and most likely better than you. You can even ask it to attempt to control all hostiles in the building with a single service (if you word this well, unless I'm mistaken). I greatly fear force 12 spirits, and much more than force 1 mob minds (which imo shouldn't even be allowed to do as well as it does), no matter how you put it. Thankfully, force 12 spirits don't get summoned very often, because at that level, they get pretty tough also

that force 12 spirit of man will also probably make you eat a lot of drain. 8 points on average, but it's not even remotely unlikely for it to go up to 10 or 12 points, and you're not by any means guaranteed to actually call it up (a dice pool of 14 on summoning is pretty respectable, maybe as much as 16 for an area of focus, but 16 dice vs 12 is not at all a sure thing). you really don't want to be spending the entire run on the brink of death just on the off chance you might need it, and it's dangerous to try and call one up in the middle of a firefight because at that point, it's likely a stiff breeze could knock you over, never mind something like full auto assault rifles.

simply put, force 12 mob mind is terrifying, yes... but not significantly more so than force 1 with a bunch of reagents. at least, not to the GM. it's not like they would realistically be able to actually hold on to their indefinite control of the enemy... all you really need is to control 2-3 enemies, in most cases. at most, you could go up to force 3-4 to try and hit a group of targets that is spread out a bit more, but the reality is, you don't need to control *everyone* with mob mind. you just need to control enough to provide a distraction.

the really scary stuff doesn't come from high force spells. it's from low force spells used to maximum effect.

also, it makes absolutely no sense to try and make long-term consequences. if it's too good to be able to summon a force 12 spirit and suffer no drawbacks (note: there are definite drawbacks to trying to summon a force 12 spirit), then the solution isn't to get all passive-aggressive and make sure to secretly punish the player for the next 20 sessions. it's to fix the problem in the first place. the permanent damage "solution" doesn't solve anything. people can still call up a force 12 spirit if they would have been able to before. only now, you've got to put up with grumbling about it for the next 20 sessions, *or* they just retire that character and make a new one.

there are really 2 possible solutions to the problem:

1) deal with it by speaking to your group.
2) make the cost immediate and equal to the benefit.

if you want to change the rules to prevent people from calling up a force 12 spirit, then make it hard to call up a force 12 spirit. rule that spirits do have edge which they can't be compelled to use on your behalf, and rule that spirits above a certain force will use their edge. suddenly, it becomes very hard, and extremely risky, to call up those high force spirits. you'll note that this is the rule a certain poster on these forums uses, and as a result, he doesn't have problems with force 12 spirits rampaging through his games (i expect that facing 24 exploding dice will persuade *most* magicians to scale back their ambitions when it comes to summoning, in fact). in contrast, a permanent damage rule doesn't mean you can't do it, it just means you need a new character when you do it, if you get unlucky... but there's also a fairly significant chance that you'll get away with it regardless.

Yeah, permanent damage from drain is ridiculous, and in my personal opinion (I have no evidence), a completely unintended consequence to the way the rules are written. It doesn't change the RAW (which is, tbh, quite misleading, especially given the example), but here's hoping for an errata.

@Jaid
Meanwhile, we've discussed the use of reagents at lengths before and you keep forgetting some details. While I hate the use of reagents for making many higher force spells pointless if you got money for drams, this does not really apply to area spells. At force 1, I doubt you'll catch a lot of bad guys in your mob mind within a 1 meter radius. At force 12, within a sphere of 12 meter radius (nearly 80 feet in diameter!), that is one nice spell. So yeah, the reagent trick doesn't work so well on area spells, although you might be able to tone them down if you know how strong a spell you need for a given area.

Furthermore, summoning a (much more reasonable) force 6 man spirit is very effective, with drain likely to be 6 or less (more likely 2 or 4). While that spirit can in turn cast your own spells at force 6, yielding greater drain, and suffering the sustaining for you. It also stands in LOS for you to cast it while you can summon it well hidden. All this also without spending reagents. Anyway, this is obviously besides the main point of this thread.

[/digression]

I believe we have conclusively and mathematically proven that high force spirits are quantitatively better than sammies in SR5...they dodge more, soak better, move faster, hit harder, have more utility tricks, and are infinitely cheaper than a sammie. In fact, an F7 air spirit will kill two Renraku Red Samurai dead, while your classic AGI 9, REA 9, INT 6, full armored sammie with an Ares Alpha behind cover dies to the same odds. But this is only tangential to the current topic.

The point is, right now all the restrictions on mages are, for all intents and purposes, "soft" restrictions, not mechanical. In no way whatsoever does magic carry the element of risk that the tagline says it does. There is no actual downside to magic, no offset for the mage by RAW. only by what the GM handles. Everyone else has a "hard" mechanical limitation. Mages are left solely to the behest of the GM.

Permanent consequences would hopefully move that problem in the right direction.

I don't follow. How is drain not a consequence of casting spells? What's the consequence of shooting a gun?

When the drain is in no way an actual effect for a mage, then it is not a consequence. Take your F6 spirit, against a magic 6 mage with an 11-12 DP drain pool (surprising how common those are), 2 hits..4S, the drain pool cuts it to 1S.

I'm still not following. Your own example has the mage taking 1S damage. This assumes that everyone rolls averages which of course isn't the case. Move each roll maybe 25% down the curve and you might suddenly take 3-4S and fail to summon the spirit at all. Are you assuming that spirits are always summoned 6 hours before any combat?

What do you actually want to happen? A mage to cast one force 4 spell and have their arm fall off requiring cyber-replacement? How much drain is the right amount? Do you want a fire and forget system like Pathfinder where you can only cast X spells per day? (no thanks).

Smash - bad math. The chance for a marginally optimized mage to fail an F6 is 15% before edge is involved, and 4% once it is. The chance to have to soak more than 6S is less than 10%, and actually causing more than 3S of drain is just about 3%, before edge.

3% odds of suffering a -1 penalty hardly seems very consequential. I've no problems with lower level stuff being flung around pretty freely, but when you can fling gamechangers for no personal investment?

as i said, you don't need to mind control *everyone* for mind control to be valuable. if you hit 2, maybe 3 guys, you've got a distraction. you're a shadowrunner, you don't need to control a small army. you just need someone who's going to buy you enough time for you to escape, whether that be by shooting at their allies, dropping grenades at their feet, opening/closing doors using their security clearance, or whatever else, you ultimately don't *need* a 12 meter radius of control (not that you're actually likely to have LOS on a 12 meter radius at a time, and your own team may take exception to the fact that you're dropping a nigh-inescapable mind control spell on them).

and a force 7 spirit will generally speaking die quickly to the right weapons. crazy dodge, decent soak = use explosives.

using a force 6 spirit to cast your spells for you isn't too bad... the dice pool won't be anything unstoppable, but for the most part you're not really getting a huge boost out of it. i suppose if you have a specific individual spell that you were planning on repeatedly casting (and don't feel that you will need an extremely optimized dice pool to successfully cast, although it certainly isn't by any means a terrible dice pool either). mostly, i don't see the need to repeatedly spam spells (apart from perhaps damaging spells, and i've already established that i don't really care one way or the other if you throw damaging spells, because they're not noticeably superior to bullets and explosives).

And this is why Confusion is the best spell in Pathfinder. Creatures have a chance of attacking nearest creature and if attacked, will attack back until one of the two is dead. Throw that into a room of goblins and watch them kill each other, doesn't even matter if some of them make their save.

That's probably a bad example, given that a room full of goblins can also be taken out by a sleep spell.

Touche. I was just looking for "generic fantasy monster" not thinking about difficulty.

I just happened to have been building a bard recentish and read a guide on bard building (particularly which spells to take, as I hate the bookwork involved*).

*Speaking of, I've heard tell of some mixed classes that'll be showing up. One was the barbarian/bard cross over ("Hey Steve, you're raging now"). The other was the Sorcerer/Wizard, which cast spells like a sorcerer (limited list, cast as often as you want) but prepares spells like a wizard (so that limited list can change day to day). Which I think I'd really enjoy, as it has the per-encounter usefulness of the sorc combined with the general flexibility of the wizard, without all the bookwork.

Anyway, haven't seen any evidence, this was just an offhand comment from a friend of mine after our session last week.

Indeed... Spirits using Edge to resist summoning/binding is the most effective control on their usage I have ever witnessed at the table.
And yes, It DRASTICALLY curtails the summoning of Ludicrous Spirits.

Thanks for the Plug, Jaid.

Drain (and Sustaining Penalties, natch) always has an effect on the Mages I play. Not sure what you are playing or why it never seems to effect your characters.
Even with the Really Decent Drain pool for my current Magician, the fact that the threat of Drain is there always forces me to consider the Power Level of Spells the character uses.

Nm covered enough... wish I could delete my own post.

There is of course the other logical extreme we could take permanent drain damage to. Anything that requires several rolls in a row is an extended test, even if each roll has some measurable impact and represents something.

Therefore, combat is an extended test. So each time you shoot at someone you're making an extended test to kill your target and each shot gives you a -1 on successive shots. And since you're constantly rolling to soak damage, that's actually a "stay alive" extended test. So that decreases each time you get hit (hey they managed to include ablative armor, cool).

Other things that are probably extended tests:
Chases
Leadership
Running
Anything else you do regularly towards a goal

*Sigh* I weep for Shadowrun.

You're not the only one.

Weeping may also count as an extended test given all the grief of late.

True... which is why I won't be purchasing SR5.

Just a quick note... SR4 also has healing listed as an Extended test...

Yeah, but your dice pool didn't go down with each attempt (at least in SR4; SR4A may have changed it), and there were options for attempting a test again. SR5 seems to have ported a lot of things in from SR4 in a half-assed way that results in headbangers like this one.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, stayin' alive...

Living is an extended test, it just has longer time between checks, but that cumulative penalty gets you sooner or later.

Unless you got wireless enabled of course.....

Yeah, what do you think the limit for your "Living" roll is? Elves obviously get a bonus on their roll.

No no no. It's clearly a dying test. As soon as you get enough successes you keel over. There's just a special condition that if you run out of dice you also keel over.