SR5 only!

I'm playing in a game (different from the new one starting soon...) as a Mystic Adept, I'm the party's only magic source and I run almost entirely as support rather than combat. Manipulation, Detection, Healing, Illusion etc.

I've been saving karma for a while mainly because I've not had anything pressing to spend it on and decided to go look at the other magic options and ended up kind of drawing a blank.

Why does a runner go off and spend time and effort learning, practicing and then putting into use Ritual Casting or Artificing? Alchemy I can see some uses for as long as the spell you want is never opposed by anything but even then couldn't I just buy more sustaining foci?

When do you ritual cast? And is it something you find yourself using frequently enough to justify expending large amount of karma on? Anchored means I defend my home...but if they've found my home then it's rather stupid to try and match my power against theirs. Watchers and Homonculi could be of use I suppose, but worth investing so heavily in when a Spirit is easily available and far more versatile? Curses and Prodigal Spells to attack people at range? I suppose...but...meh?

Artificing allows me to build Foci. Well...I can buy those. I guess if I wanted to set up shop and make profit selling them I could do that? Where's my option to bind magic into glasses or have stuff like that?

Alchemy. I can see uses here but not for anything I;d actually want to use it for. Never on a run have I found myself going 'I wish I could throw a really weak combat spell at that guy' or 'I wish I could create a physical barrier over there that's so weak it won't stop them for more than a few seconds'. I can see stat buffing but then you've go to weigh up the drain taken in advance of the run (all prepped a few hours in advance) giving penalties. Then if you rest to recover the drain you lose any sustained spells in your foci (unconscious from sleeping!) and have to recast any spells you were using as buffs in your foci (I tend to run with an Armour and Combat Sense foci).

And it's a whole load of busywork prepping that stuff to get +2 or 3 dice for a few rounds.

There's just nothing in these options that makes me go 'Yes! I want to invest my karma in that skill right there!'

At no point on a run have I found myself wishing I'd brought something alchemical along or cast a ritual in advance or whatever.

Are they the type of thing that becomes useful when more supplements come out? Are any of you using them? If so how and do you feel they are really worth your time and effort?

Maybe I'm naive but...Spellcasting and Summoning and Assensing are the only magical skills I've used in anger so far and Counterspelling I keep high just in case. I have Arcana because I find it hard to justify a Hermetic not having that skill at a meaningful level.

tl;dr

For the highly mobile, often unpredictable runner on runs why do I care about spending karma on Artificing, Alchemy and Ritual Casting?

alchemy mostly becomes interesting when you spend edge in the process of making it. it can let you make a high powered spell with a very low drain code.

circle of healing and renascence rituals sustain a spell for you for a certain amount of time. how much value you get from that spell is of course based on the spell), but just as one example you could make a renascence that grants +body to help you recover from damage, +will or +(drain stat) to help you with summoning/binding spirits, and so forth.

the watcher and homunculus rituals also should allow you to exceed your regular spirit limit, which can help a fair bit if you don't have a high charisma, and using a watcher or homunculus means you don't have to give up a service from a full-fledged spirit for simple tasks. note that you can expend additional reagents to lower the drain on a ritual, which is not an option for a regular spell.

so, for example, you could cast a ritual mob mind at high force (specifically, high enough to make sure your targets have no dice pool to resist), and get control of a group of creatures for an extended period of time without having to sustain the spell, and while reducing the spell's drain down to 2 (stun or physical shouldn't matter much at that point). of course, there are potential drawbacks to mind controlling large groups of people for hours on end, so you may want to carefully consider whether it's a good idea to use this (on the other hand, so long as PETA doesn't find out, you could probably use this with impunity on paranimals if you can get some use out of them while they're stuck in a relatively small area).

also, while this is not always useful for all groups (and in particular it looks like it may not be useful for yours), you can use the teamwork rules for ritual casting, which is not the case with regular spellcasting.

as to artificing, it's mostly there because people want to be able to make their own stuff. that being said, while you could theoretically buy some of the stuff you can make, the availability rolls you're going to need to make are... well, we'll just say "not easy", shall we?

oh, and on a side note, i don't think you lose sustained spells that are in a focus while sleeping. do you know any specific rules that say you do? because as i read it, you aren't sustaining the spell any more. the focus is. and the focus doesn't sleep.

artificing there is not much use for as you really need a teamwork test to make a decent focus, though I took it for style reasons, matched with the artisan skill a character can make focuses that are works of art on the physical and astral.

Alchemy I actually really like. Yes it creates weaker spells, but sustained spells are awesome with it. My current character Invisible Drone, use magic fingers as a spell which he uses to pilot around guns, shooting up the opposition. I use a preparation clairvoyance spell to help navigate around corners and to line up shots. Attribute boosts can be pulled of pretty easily as well and with a simple action to activate and no sustaining penalty they are fairly solid. If they add a touch range physical damage indirect spell soon, it would be a pretty sweet shape charge door opener. A force 12 for 8 drain wouldn't be that bad.

Ritual magic, yeah I'm not to big of a fan of the more 4e style spells from it, but circle of healing, protection are cool, wards, minions and watchers are cool. So I dig the skill.

Not quite. Renascense only supports Manipulation spells and it takes Force hours to cast. I suppose useful for an ambush if you don't know when the targets are going to enter the affected area



Yeah I can see the use there. It still feels quite niche, homonculus especially as a find of Fantasia feel but I don't think I'd trust them as much as I'd trust a Drone.



That's pretty evil. You would have to trap the targets within the ritual area in advance but yeah if you have a long haul plan requiring mass mind controlled minions.

Is this something you've needed on a run? Or is this a tool in search of a problem?

A lot of these feel like useful stuff for the GM to use against players rather than the other way round.



Yeah, only spellcaster so I'm trying to carry the entire magical load for the team.



But is it worth it compared to - for example - Quickening a spell and expending a volume of karma on making those spells really hard to shut down? E.g.: Quicken a Willpower buff and spend 20 karma on that buff to make it really hard to dispel. Vs. Buying Artificing to rank 6 (42 karma), buying the focus formula and getting a telesma, casting the spell and spending karma equal to force to seal it and then spending karma to bond it to you for another YxForce karma.

You can only benefit from one focus that grants bonus dice at a time so I can't imagine you'll be festooned with them, main use I see is for sustaining foci and they compete with Quickening.

Unless I really misunderstand Quickening.




I thought you had to be conscious to use a Focus and hence speeling = unconscious = not using focus.

Alchemy was a great idea, but the execution was terrible. The rules for it are not only poorly balanced against normal spellcasting, but also incomplete.

For example, there is no real clarification of how things like Indirect Combat Spells work when created as Contact Trigger preparations. (Okay, so the guy unwittingly picks up the preparation and doing so Triggers the dormant Flamethrower spell, causing a jet of fire to shoot out towards him from the preparation in his hand, which he then rolls to Dodge... waitaminute...)

Likewise, there is no clarification of how preparations handle things like Sustained Spells, and Manipulation Spells which require "Inputs" from the spellcaster to operate. If I leave a Levitate preparation with a Contact Trigger on my desk, and then someone breaks into my apartment while I'm out and picks up the preparation, what happens? Does the spell just do nothing, because I'm not there to control it? Does it form a psychic link with me through time and space, alerting me anywhere in the world to the activation of the spell and requesting my remote input on which direction it should attempt to levitate the target?

If it goes off while I'm busy in a firefight, do I suddenly have to suffer a Sustaining Penalty? If I'd really rather not suffer that penalty, can I cancel the spell early, or am I forced to sustain it for the full (Potency) minutes duration? And if I don't suffer a sustaining penalty because the preparation somehow sustains itself, then how am I able to control the spell effect itself? Can you "pre-program" the operation of such a spell effect for a preparation? Can I just tell the Levitate preparation to Levitate it's target upward for the full duration, pinning them to the ceiling if they're indoors or lifting them to quite lethal heights before dropping them when the spell ends if they aren't?

Maybe we'll find out in a splat book. In the meantime, Alchemy as a game system has countless holes in it where you have to just guess at things, or make things up.

~Umi

- renascence only works on manipulation spells, circle of healing works on health spells though (which all of the +attribute spells are).

- it isn't always useful, that's true, but it doesn't have to be amazing all of the time. on a side note, it's also a relatively quick ritual, and has an unlimited number of services, and lasts a while, and isn't restricted to being in your presence. being useful sometimes doesn't necessarily mean that you should pick up the skill, but it does mean that for some people, some of the time, it is worth investing in (and after all, if you do manage to get something crazy like a force 12 homunculus, that would be pretty crazy )

- a mind control area spell isn't something i personally have had to use in a run with renascence. it's just one example of how you *could* use the spell. i will agree that most would hesitate to use it on metahumans or sapient creatures, and many would even hesitate to use it on animals, but it is something you *could* do. right now, i do have to admit the options for renascence seem a bit limited, though.

- artificing is mostly there because people wanted it for the cool factor, like i said. people think it would be cool to make their own focus, so the rules to do so are in the book. that said, have you looked at how difficult it would be to get your hands on, say, a rating 6 power focus? (which i presume is better than what you have in your games, because that sort of thing isn't easy to find). there are also metamagic focuses which i'm guessing you don't have yet at high force values, and of course qi focuses which you can use as a mystic adept. it may or may not be worth it to you, regardless, but for some people they just like the idea. it doesn't need to be a mechanically good idea to invest in it; this isn't craftingrun after all.

- hmmm... you're right about consciousness being required for your focus to be active. hadn't noticed that before, pretty sure it's new to 5th edition. well, that certainly does nerf sustaining focuses slightly. with that said, the requirement to heal is that you be resting, not that you must necessarily be sleeping or unconscious (although it does note that unconsciousness counts as resting).

I'd add that I haven't run into many GMs who actually enforce this, but high level foci used often are supposed to be very addictive, eventually burning you into a husk of your former self. So, there's that for alchemy at least. I like it for some sustained spells you wouldn't need for that long anyways.

DrZ

The biggest problem with high-level-foci is not, that you can become addicted, but that every awakened char. will kill you for it. I often carried similar foci and if you get unconscious by any means, the chance that the foci is gone, is relativeley high. I would rather invest the karma into initiation, raising the magical attribute or the corresponding skill. Of course you don’t get the same specific benefit out of it, but at least nobody can take it away from you and your general bonus is higher.

So very true... Our Combat Mage just recently lost a Rating 5 Combat Focus, and Four Rating 4 Sustaining Foci. Was a brutal Loss indeed. I guess that's what happens when you attack a Prison, lose, and then get captured by the Security Force. At least they let him go in the end with a shiny new Criminal SIN, too bad about the gear he had, though. *shrug*

Ouch, that hurts indeed. Stories like that are the reason we don´t buy expensive bikes anymore. It simply happened too often, that if you park it in the wrong spot, the bike/car/girlfriend is gone after you come back. Tell your comrade that i am with him and i am sorry for his loss.

Yeah... he got over it... Now he just uses his Force 5 Ally Spirit more often to do the grunt work. Too bad it keeps getting dispelled or damaged back to the Metaplanes.
Sad, really... we are about to retire that group.

Back to the original post,

My beef with Artificing: It is waaay too hard to make something of higher Force. On the other hand, it is relatively cheap to just buy it. Heck, the Availability to buy the forumla is the same as the actual foci, and the price is 1/4 the full foci. I might as well save the karma and buy the darn thing.

My beef with Rituals and Alchemy: Not only do I have to spend karma on the skill, but I have to spend more on the spells again (and again for the other skill)! It's like a double-dipping karma black hole.

with rituals, i'm curious which spells you think you're buying "again".

because there are only a few rituals that use actual spells at all, and you don't buy the ritual of the individual spell, you buy the ritual for an entire class of spells, and can slot in whichever one you know.

now granted, you have to buy the spell twice with alchemy (if for some reason you want it accessible in both forms), but with rituals, i actually feel like the skill is pretty worthwhile now.

Funny... I used a Lot of Rituals in SR4A. It was extremely worthwhile then.
Not so much now, in my opinion. I hate that you have to pay for the privilege of performing a ritual.
Not sure how much I like the Ritual for Watchers, either. Again... something that any mage could do is now something that you have to pay for the privilege of performing.
It irritates me...

yes, well, it's not like mages weren't better than basically everything else. oh wait, yes it was

i mean, really, the only thing i see that's kinda screwy with it is that aspected conjurers can't get watchers, and aspected sorcerers can.

So... Aspected Conjurers don't get Watchers? That's Stupid.

well, rituals are a sorcery group skill, are they not?

so sorcerer aspected magicians get them (and homunculus), while conjuring aspected magicians do not, because the former can get and use the sorcery skill group while the latter can't.

yeah, it's kinda screwy. relatively easy to fix, mind you, but still pretty screwy.

Isn't that because they are created rather than summoned?

The same is said of Spirits and Sprites, at least in 4th ed. Nobody knows if either is just waiting around to-spec of the conjurer's/compiler's potential wishes for that very moment when they're summoned or if they're put together piecemeal from bits of spirit-/data-stuff and energy (Magic Force/Resonance) when brought forth from their respective ethers. Also speculated to be a bit of both on either count.

5th seems to be moving away from that.

oh, i very much doubt they gave any actual thought to what it means to the setting when they decided to add those particular spells to ritual magic.

I've found quite a bit of use out of ritual magic. As someone mentioned earlier, the ability to buy off drain means that you can cast some very potent spells without a care, as long as you have the time to get through the ritual. Also, as was said, the more people with ritual casting in the group, the more powerful it becomes. One of our groups is predominantly magical, so, being a specialist in rituals helps distinguish my character. Here are some combos that I've used or conceived of:

Circle of Healing (Increase Intuition) - Every time the group sits down to do initiation, here's a +4 to everyone's arcana test

Curse (Dream) - this one requires pulling in a 4th ed. spell, but I think this is a very cool use of the ritual. Need to get to someone you can't really get to? Use this to manipulate them from afar. All you need is one of their possessions.

Renascence (Shape Sand/Earth/Stone/Concrete) and Homunculus - Getting 10 net successes on a renascence ritual gives you a spell that lasts for over ten days. Use this to shape a slew of golems then enchant them one by one to form your own personal army. Add spirits to direct their dumber compatriots. With a charisma of 9, this becomes 18 minions at my disposal, granted, with quite a bit of preparation.

Remote Sensing (Detect Individual) - Picked this one up when we decided to chase a blood mage to another metaplane and weren't sure what we'd find when we got there. Cast this one with the rest of the group and now everyone will know if our target comes anywhere within a few miles of any member of our party.

Anyways, raising a decently high magic attribute or magical skill group costs a ton of karma. Learning rituals is a way to incrementally increase your magical capabilities without expending huge sums of karma. There are some power combinations to be found in there. I've always preferred to buy skill groups for magic because you never know when the one odd-ball skill will be essential.

that particular spell maybe not, but the nature of spirits on the whole, i think so. I think they are solidly going with spirits are sentient beings as opposed to a a we dont know, every tradition is different.

Then does that mean I can't craft my Porn Spirits like in 4th ed? ;_;

Farewell, porn awards

Unless we find the Plane of Porn, with Ron Jeremy as a Mentor Spirit of course.

More, much more, research is required....

Even if there isn't a porn spirit there must be porn Sprites for technomancers. Considering the internet and all...

but you can't dikote a sprite

(i guess you could make it hang out *next* to the icon for an ares viper slivergun, but in 5th edition i don't think they can actually hang out inside one either)

I don't know. In my experience sentient basically means wants to have sex and lots of it. Maybe the reason why spirits are cool about getting summoned is they want to experience earthly delights which might not exist in that way on the metaplanes. And with totems like seductress, I expect some porn spirits are summoned. Some shamans give burgers as gifts to the spirits they summon, maybe some mages appease the spirits with sex.