So you get a good Assensing roll and determine the exact Rating of a spirit. How do you go about communicating that information in-character? I can't see a combat mage turn to his allies and say "That's a Force Five air spirit." Okay, maybe if he's a hermetic with a strict scientific paradigm, but what about others? How does a Christian theurge identify that same Force 5 air spirit? How do you ask for Rating 4a skillwires? Do corporations have brand names that correspond to ratings and grades?

An excellent question.

The answer depends on how IC you want to be.

Many tables allow a little bending and let you say, 'Hey, that's a Force 5 Spook!'

But for a more IC response, you might use comparisons.
If you are magic 5 and spirit is Force 5, you could say you are about the same power.
Now would your street sam agree with that? Maybe, maybe not but it gives some point of reference.

I think I recall something from an old SR3 book, IIRC it was Wired, where a program or something was tested at Rating 6.18 or something.

So it might well be an in-character air measurement.

typical example for most games i can think of would be something like "that's a spirit of the 5th circle" or similar.

alternately, if you're lazy, you can just call it a force 5 spirit and assume that your character in-game is calling it something more appropriate.

Thats Meh (ImO). Ingame is Ingame, Outgame is Outgame !!


what about saying:
thats a Low Spirit(lvl 1-3)
Medium (Lvl 3-6) High, very High
or even
OMG RUN !!!

HokaHey
Medicineman

Actually, I recall reading somewhere that some traditions (like Hermetics) actually did have exact values for magical things. Of course, that doesn't mean they all *agree* on what those ratings are called, or where they should be, or so on. Legally, though, most anything Force 3 or greater was restricted, so there must be some standard, somewhere, to tell if something is illegally powerful or not.

I suspect it would be like how people would refer to the speed of a car or the strength of an earthquake.

"The car was doing 50 in a 20 area!"
"A 5.5 earthquake!"

Think about how your / player's character's tradition defines spirits, then work from there.

"It's a spirit of the fifth circle."

"That's Baphomet, He of the Second Chair."

"Holy shit, it's a max'd stat Charizard!"

For gear, check out the cyberware suites in Augmentation. All of the bits that go into a given a suite have a brand name. Ratings are common for things in the real world so I would expect them to be so in the SR world too. We love to quantify stuff in one way or another.

You missed an opportunity there, MedicineMan. You should've signed off "With a Rating 5 Dance" or something.




Oh, that reminds me of the favorite Shadowrun game I ever ran. One of the players was an amnesiac Neotenic elf who looked like she was about 13 going on 14. (She was actually 24.) She had Glamour, and I ruled that that applied to Domestic animals, too. Weird shit tended to happen around her, like big, trained newfoundland dogs ignoring their master to go be with her, or magicians summoning Spirits around her who botch but not critically get exactly the spirit they wanted, only it came out in the form of a Pokémon. (The players liked that one so much I made it a theme; summoning spirits around her gets you Pokémon.)

seeing how a mage can, with a good astral perception/ascanning roll tell in game how much essence somebody has left exactly to dezimals, i think using force in game is completely justified . .

Reminds me that some of my friends had to come up with an in-game measurement of mana for GURPS. They all went, "ok, give me 'the amount of magical energy required to start a small fire.' We'll call that 'one thaum'" (I don't remember what word they used as their measurement).

Because "1 game mana unit" was the amount needed to start a fire and was as small as you could get, crunch wise.

The people living in the Shadowrun world are going to have a similar convention. They might not all use the same one (feet vs. meters) but there will be a framework. So just call it Force and use game terms. Because at the table, no one cares that you're playing a character that has a different gender, so why muddy the conceptual waters by creating a second unit of measure that has a 1:1 relationship with Force?

They can tell mechanically, sure, but that's no different than knowing your own character's Body rating. If their characters are talking about how beefy an enemy Troll is, they don't say "Dang, that fragger has a Body of 12!", they say "Dang, that fragger's built like a brick shithouse!".

Personally, as a GM I always try to convert any such numbers that crop up from things like Assensing into reasonable in-world descriptions, but at the same time if the player prompts me for an actual number, I'll of course supply it to keep them from guessing and being uncertain.

Me: "Although he looks normal enough in meatspace, your close scrutiny on the astral reveals that the Johnson's aura looks like it's been through a meatgrinder. The presence of quite a lot of cyberware is obvious from your assensing."
Player: "Quite a lot?"
Me: "His Essence is 0.9 points."
Player: "Oh. I see. Hrrm."

Sometimes they don't ask for more info, sometimes they do. Depends on the player and the moment.

~Umi

I'll try harder next time

with Essence I often use traffic light ranges
Ess 6-3 Green Range
3-1 is Yellow Range
and <1 is Red Range
thats what Doctors and Mages use to describe a patients Essence range or when they assense him

with an essential Dance
Medicineman

isn't it in universe described as how powerfull of a "light" source it is?
colours were always used for emotions instead.

that too
(from the pure assensing-Point-of-View)
But its a good way for a doctor too describe a Patients condition
So a medical Mage could say:
"the Patients Essence is in the green range, his Aura is bright and of Orange Color.
we can transplant the Cybereyes now"

HougH!
Medicineman

Doctor looks at Mage:"Dude, i told you to stop smoking before work"

Mage looks at Doctor with a "Mr.Spock raised Eyebrow "
....ooO( I woul SO like to work with Professionals,....just once ,Oh Gods,please just once)

with a silent Dance
Medicineman

Actually, some magical traditions do refer to magical stuff by rating numbers. I seem to recall encountering this in Awakenings, but I might be wrong on the book reference. There is a standardized measuring system for magic. The problem is that there's actually several of them, and not everyone agrees on which one is better. (E.g., metric versus Imperial measurements.) For game purposes, it's easier to simply use Ratings, of course; but there's no reason to worry if a character uses ratings in game.

It's more immersive if they don't use rating in game, of course - unless they do follow one of those traditions that rate via numbers, but even then, it's unlikely that most such traditions would just happen to measure Essence on a 6 point scale.

~Umi

are cyberware's appearance based on the grade right, standard/alpha/beta/delta? not the rating of the ware.

so standard cybereyes look like you have 2 little camera's for iris's while alpha look almost human. then beta, which is custom made, looks very human-like and delta are basically impossible to tell. then when you add rating, you're basically adding more capacity and not a different model. right?

like buying 2 mp3 players both 16gb memory but one's an ipod that worth $185 and the other's a sandisk worth $40. same capacity but the nicer one has a lil more bells and whistles but really does the same function

Grades have nothing to do with appearance and everything to do with better design, craftsmanship, materials, and installation, minimizing the amount of dissonance between the machine and the body, and thus damaging one's Essence less. Higher grade cyberware is specifically built to "mesh" more cleanly than lower grade stuff does.

Cybereyes look like whatever you want them to, regardless of grade - they are specifically stated in their listing as coming in a number of varieties, ranging from Batou style sensor discs, to completely natural looking, to natural-if-not-for-being-bright-pink, to whatever else you feel like. They're even specifically stated to often be programmable via a user's PAN, with it being trivially easy to swap out "skins" for your cybereyes.

Further proof: if grade determined appearance, Cyberlimbs wouldn't come in their two styles of Obvious and Synthetic - or if they did, those options would be restricted by Grade. They are plainly not.

~Umi

Wrong !
All Cybereyes (no matter what Grade)
can look totally normal/Human or totally cyber
that depends upon your taste, not the grade of the 'ware

with a tasteful Dance
Medicineman

ok

I guess it's intuitive for the character.

It's like if you watched sports. You'd tell yourself Leo Messi is incredibly quick and agile more than Dani Alves and so on.

You're able to class them, and pretty accurately if you're an expert. I guess you could score them, even if necessary.


I see it as just the same for the assessing mage: the Player knows he's Force 5, the character knows he's stronger than last he conjured, weaker than the one from last weak and on par with the whone he banished a month ago. Hard to describe, but pretty intuitive.

The Aztlan book also has Force used in character (when discussing the summoning of blood spirits). And IMO it makes sense, because prices, legality and other stuff are based on Force. Without IC Force ratings, how would anyone judge that a focus is illegal? "Based on my training and experience™ it kinda felt, like, a bit too far on the strong-ish side"?

Just because there's numbers for something doesn't mean everyone will understand them.

I don't know much about cars. I know that engines are rated in horsepower, but what exactly that translates to in practical terms is beyond me. So, if somebody tells me an engine has over 9000 horsepower, I'm going to smile and nod, since I have no idea what that means.

The same thing applies here. Most characters in the Shadowrun world aren't going to have a clue what Force ratings actually mean. The players get to figure out how to tell one another, in game. Using the actual ratings is shorthand for that description, but you can assume that they've accurately described things to one another. If someone tried to explain horsepower to me, I'm sure I'd understand the examples they used; shadowrunners can be assumed to do the same.

Not so sure about that one... I have looked... there sure as hell isn't room in an engine compartment for 500 Horses. Not even in the BiG vehicles.

500 MLP maybe?

Driving is Magic™

Please... No, for the love of all that is Holy.

good point!

I dunno - they could be in liquid form. Probably have to be, to fit.

*polishes an industrial blender*

Anyone want smoothies?

~Umi

but.... but I bet it moves like greased lightning .

Plenty of cases in Sr2 and 3 where things like Force is used IC

I can see an officer saying that, but more for bribery purposes than because they actually believed it.

Overall, I'd say that making players figure out how their characters understand rating is like making the figure out how to spend the corporate script or foreign currency (especially in Denver) they got paid in. Interesting for fluff reasons, but it's easier to assume your character knows the sixth world better than you do.