Okay, in the "Ages of Magic and Shadow" thread, Kagetenshi had some points that I disagreed with but in the long run correctly pointed that I'm rusty with respect to the SR"n" rules. Definitely a fair cop for a system that is as wide as it is deep, and one where the mechanical consequences of decisions can lead to significant emergent effects/properties.

While the other thread is on hold pending some clarification and review--well, unless you're a GURPS-head and just want to help out!--I thought that it might be interesting to explore Q&As on the system and what it actually means/does. This way there is no misremembering or misinterpretation, nor an answer hidden by this-or-that additional supplement, or supplement from an earlier edition or whatever.

I expect that the questions will run from the mundane (even on magical questions) to the magical (even on mundane topics)--the full gamut. This is just me (or anyone else for that matter) that doesn't require me spending the next six months to re-learn the system inside out and I can shortcut to just playing/GMing the game.

* * *

Point in case, I was just looking up what I expected to be "damage codes" for the Fireball or Powerball spell from SR4 and found them absent in core and only in Street Magic. Yet even then there was no damage code (L, M, S, D) that I could find.

Result: Turn back to SR2 and the memory comfort hole.

* * *

In the other project, I had a pre-determined notion for what mages could "do", on of which was their damage output in purely physical terms as measured through things like Fireball or even Powerball. So, assuming no Physical damage/drain, how much damage on average are they looking at? Does this radically change throughout the editions?

(I'm looking up the answer as I type, buit I didn't want to leave this thread as entirely a place holder.)

Correct, they ditched the damage codes between 3E and 4E. Now it's just a number that represents boxes of damage. There's usually a base value (sometimes set by Force in the case of spells) plus any net hits from the Spellcasting test.

To answer the question directly, the damage does change significantly between editions. In 4E, direct damage spells (e.g. manabolt, powerbolt) were your go-to combat spells 90%+ of the time. In 5E, direct damage spells were no longer as effective (a good change) and indirect damage spells (e.g. lightning bolt) were more common to use, especially since AoE rules were poorly defined/contradictory, which made it hard to miss with those versions.

In 4E, you can one-shot a goon with a manabolt. In 5E it's going to take you three or four of them. So in 4E they were an alpha strike but in 5E they were a way to reliably chip away at the target little by little. That was a big change.

Drain is another component to take into account. In 4E and 5E you could accomplish more while risking less in terms of drain compared to 2E/3E. So, yes, you can cast a Mega Fireball of Doom in any edition and potentially have it be equally effective in each ruleset, but the consequences for doing so were much harsher in earlier editions.

TY.

Urgh. SR2 is a little bit more involved than I remember. Then again, I was much younger.

So, Fireball or Powerball? The latter as it seems more magick-y and I'm channeling The Covenant at the moment.

Seeing Kagetenshi's last character, I'll just work on someone churning out a Force 6 Powerball. Not as deadly as a Fireball, but the Drain is more manageable. So that's a 6M spell with 4S drain. Say an equal spread of the Magic Pool (by three) leaves 2d to buff the spellcasting test, 2d for drain, and 2d for spell defense... just in case.

they ditched the damage codes between 3E and 4E. Now it's just a number that represents boxes of damage. There's usually a base value (sometimes set by Force in the case of spells) plus any net hits from the Spellcasting test. The target is high average (Body 3) with no an armour. Not that it matter for combat spells. (I always thought it was just mana spells--ah well.)

So, Body 3 against 6D attack charitably gets 1 success which isn't enough to stage down. So, the chap in the nuddie is toast; in hospital.

Right?

In SR3 looking purely at damage dealt to a living target the Elemental Manipulations are strictly worse than Powerbolt/Ball—6M is 6M either way, and the drain code is much worse (4D vs 4S). The benefit to the elemental manipulations is their side effects—lighting things on fire and cooking off grenades/ammo for Fireball, damaging armor and creating a short-term environmental hazard for Toxic Wave, nasty extra effects for electronics and especially Rigged vehicles/drones for Ball Lightning.

In SR3 the drain is a serious limitation; I generally found that AoE stopped at Manaball or Stunball with Powerbolt and the single-target elemental manipulations taking over. After all, if you deal 6M damage but face 4S Stun you might well be on your way to a Pyrrhic victory.

Anyway, 4S requires 6 successes to stage down to nothing, which only needs 12 dice to expect but needs substantially more (focus? Extra Willpower from something? In a pure SR3 environment, totem bonus?) to reliably take no drain. A Trauma Damper drops this to 4 successes and means 6 Will 6 Pool is generally adequate for avoiding Drain. You’re only dealing as much damage as a Heavy Pistol against light armor, but you’re dealing it to an area and heavier armor won’t faze you. If your targets are Body 3 you’ll have a nice low TN and expect 4 successes off of 6 dice which means your odds are pretty good to stage up to S and solid to stage to D—no high-probability one-shot, but against this kind of opposition you’re unlikely to need more than two casts.

Move up to Body 5 opposition and suddenly you’re down to two expected successes against a solid chance of one on the resistance test, meaning you could well just deal M and require three or four casts to bring down a target.

Moving to Manaball or Powerbolt drops the drain level and allows more Spell Pool to go into casting rather than resisting drain.

Edit: remember, staging happens on net successes: base M plus 4 successes against one soak success isn’t D, it’s M+3=S damage. Except for melee combat, strangely enough.

~J

Completely right. I blame looking up ISBN codes at the same time.

I'm answering this from an SR3 standpoint only.
I'll assume The Covenant is a magical group from an adventure I have not played. Normally you can only channel spirits which owe you Services, which excludes Watchers and Allies.

The big difference between Powerball and Fireball is their Category. Combat spells' TN is derived from the target's nature (SR3.182) so a vehicle is going to be nigh impossible to affect whereas Elemanips' TN is a lot more attainable: Combat spells hit only things you can see while Elemanips flow beyond Line of Sight. You can get armour mods in Cannon Companion that help you against Elemanips but not against Combat spells. Combat spells can be fired through glass / fibreoptics while Elemanips must have direct line of effect (SR3.182). This is because Elemanips create an offensive projectile which you then launch at your target using a ranged attack which can be augmented with Combat Pool and which can be Dodged by the target using Combat Pool:
In astral combat, Sorcery is also used as a Combat Skill: The disadvantage to using Sorcery is that you then don't have it available for Spell Defence or Spell Casting.

Outside magic, R3.67 talks about using a Vehicle skill as a Combat skill: and riggers use Combat Pool for attacks (SR3.151). So the fact that Fireball is an Elemanip spell greatly changes the way it works. Your TN is lower but your Drain is higher. Your target can Dodge and Stage using their Combat pool, but you can also cast your spell using your Combat pool and Stage using your Spell pool. Obviously, doing so makes those pools unavailable for more defensive options.

For a small dose of wyrdness, "The Laser spell fires a beam of coherent light at the target that causes burning damage like a laser" (MitS.145) "Because an elemental spell creates actual matter or energy, it is impeded by physical obstructions like glass" (SR3.182) so the security mage watching you through the fibreoptic network (SR3.181) can pop off Powerball on your team but you cannot fire a laser spell back through the fibreoptic network to blind / kill them. It hits the glass and stops.

I have a vague recollection that this doesn't mage a huge difference.


It's a movie, and the "channeling" comment was a reference when one is visually or otherwise inspired by media and integrate it into current projects. It's a pop culture expression, so my bad for any confusion.


If you will forgive me, but I just bounced off this information pretty hard. I suspect that it's just a case of too much additional information that I don't really need at the moment. Mea culpa.

(FWIW, you can see what I was referring to in this video.)

I suspect that I'll use this simple spell as a base to determine how "powerful" a mage can be to start out with and use that as the system point of reference and then stick with how the system handles the abstraction rather than continuing to rely on how SR does it.


FWIW, those are the kind of things that along with the borken Shaman thing, are not things that I'm going to shy away from "fixing".

Given that the thread is about "Deciphering the mechanics", my point is that an elemental manipulation spell has you rolling Combat Pool for your attack. That's a different mechanic from all the other spells where Spell Pool is your only option.

The emergent effect of that is that magicians slinging Powerballs continue to be effective at Dodging because their Combat Pool is available for it whereas magicians slinging Fireballs cast their spells with Sorcery + Combat Pool, and resist their Drain with Willpower + Spell Pool, and then have to hope that no opposition remains standing because they're unlikely to be able to Dodge anything.

SR4a.204 confirms that you can Dodge "Indirect Combat Spells" in 4th, but without the Dice Pools mechanic, which Pool gets used for them is moot. I am not familiar with 2nd Ed. but your "So, Fireball or Powerball? The latter as it seems more magick-y" analysis seemed oblivious to significant emergent effects/properties (eg casting through windows, or affecting objects). It's not as simplistic as fluff and flavour. There are mechanics to decipher.

It looks like it went unquestioned, but I do want to confirm that Bodak is correct about a whole bunch of advantages to the Elemental Manipulation approach that I had forgotten. In my defense, the whole Drain issue does still manage to make actually using them a fairly difficult proposition, but the issues aren’t insurmountable (especially post-chargen) and the payoff is there to avoid TN=Body (which can get stratospheric) or TN=Willpower (which is likely to stay lower, but 4 isn’t unreasonable at all and you only get the Willpower TN by accepting zero damage to anything nonliving).

~J

The other main advantage to elemental spells only really applies to the ball/AoE versions, in that if you cast a fireball at the corner of a corridor, it can and will explode and damage anything in the Aoe, even when they're out of sight. Having a F6 fireball go off next to the squad of goons waiting to burst around the corner, and hitting all of them for a 6D - half impact armour can really ruin their day. A powerball / manaball is just incapable of being targeted like that. Even if one of the goons was peeking round a corner, only they could be affected by the spell - the rest of the squad is completely immune.

And there are ways to mitigate the drain a little, if you're willing to accept the restrictions. Learn the spells at odd force levels, as the drain is F/2 round down. Learn the spell as an exclusive spell, for a -2 modifier. So you could throw a F7 fireball that was learnt exclusively, and the -2 mod lowers it to a effective force of 5, which then becomes a 2. Even with a +1 DL+2 modifier on the fireball, that means you can throw a F7 fireball at Moderate, and be soaking a 3D. Sure you need to throw some spell pool in there to make that doable for most characters, but it's possible - and with a TN of 4 for the casting (base) it's likely you're going to get a bunch of successes and start to stage that up towards deadly on the impact with the target.

Definitely some good information about the specifics of the SR system. I don't think that I need to worry about most of it, though the reminder about the differential targeting of certain spells is well taken. (And, FWIW, I am reading through the replies to determine what seems to be the most relevant/actionable items and what is SR-specific stuff that may be left on the cutting floor [as it were].)

I think that I have enough information to begin to decipher the damage question, which is then going to feed back into the question of character generation. (I way over-pitched the power level by about 100%--3 levels is probably sufficient, which would also given some upward mobility for Initiation, though that would need some tweaking, too.) Going to have to put the legwork in to convert some spells, or at least the intent of the spells. It should be interesting to see how the non-combat spells turn out in comparison with the combat ones.

The irony here is that I normally run away from "lite" mechanics, but now I'm snuggling back in with GURPS for something a bit simpler.

( ^ Please note that the tongue is firmly in-cheek.)

* * *

Oh, quick question from memory while I'm away from books. I'm right in remembering that most (many?) spells don't require "targeting" in the more traditional sense. If you can see them "naturally" then the spell arcs from the "aura" of the caster to that of the target, right? Assuming, of course, that nothing gets in the way.

(My brain is telling me that "Arch" is how it is termed in Equinox, and it's a rule of magic there...)

I hope somebody benefits in the future, then.

It seems my responses haven't worked for you whether I am brief or verbose. Eclipse Phase is "a good starting point for continuing the exploration of the Sol system" and I can't think of any way to embellish that. I know the mechanics for spellcasting, but that also seems to be not what you're looking for.
Interestingly if you are considering a (fox/eagle) Shapeshifter, it's more efficient to overcast and take Physical Drain because you heal that rapidly at 1 box per minute (SRC.36) just like a spirit (MitS.98) than if you cast normally and take Stun Drain which heals at 1 box every (hour divided by successes) (SR3.126). To make this a little easier, Shapeshifters do not have Magic equal to Essence like everybody else: it's two points lower, bringing the threshold for overcasting within reach.
Spell Targeting (SR3.181). You need to establish a Magical Link to the subject or target (MitS.47). That can be through touching the subject or target with your meatware or any cyberware paid for with Essence (eg a cybertail). It could be through observing the subject or target with your meateyes or any cybereyes paid for with essence, but not mere pictures of your subject or target rendered on a security camera television screen, pin-up poster, digital scope, etc. or relayed from drones (regardless of how much Essence your VCR paid for). It could be through a material link such as their favourite scarf (MitS.37). Maybe you've got a Focus bound to them, or you've found a Ward constructed by them, or the astral signatures of spells and spirits created by them and you can use that to track them across the astral in order to set up a Spotter for ritual sorcery. But yes, once you've established the link from the subject or target to the spellcaster, the spell happens at the subject / target's location (The spell does not actually travel... the caster manipulates mana to create an effect at the location of his target: SR3.182) except for elemental manipulations which create a supernatural grenade you launch through the air from your current location. So no fireballing someone's bedroom from the other side of the city (MitS.34) unless their window is open and you have Optical Vision Magnification in your eyes, paid for with Essence.

The SR3 FAQ boasts that you can cast Invisibility on a wall and deliberately fail to resist the spell yourself so that you do not notice the wall is there and therefore see straight through it, gaining Line of Sight for spellcasting purposes to all subjects and targets on the far side of the wall. This is universally panned by everyone who has actually played SR3 as being an embarrassing newbie powergamer failure to exploit a perceived loophole, by overlooking that Invisibility is an Illusion spell and Illusion spells (no matter how realistic) cannot provide magical links to what they depict - just like high resolution digital video feeds can't. What one would need is a Transformation Manipulation spell which turns objects into optical conductors so that the photons carrying the subject / target's mojo can travel unassisted and unmolested into the caster's eyes. Quite how the professionals in charge of the FAQ made such a fool of themselves on this issue remains a mystery.

And this is one of the sentences where the rules don't quite add up between Core and Core/MitS and create a bit of a contradiction due to lack of precision in wording:

• It doesn't quite add up because just there's no (other) explicit limitation that precludes a caster from developing and castinst a "Mana"-based spell that targets "Astral Perception" as a sense and must be cast while being present on the Astral - be it perceiving or projecting. And in order to be able to do so, such an Astral "Illusion" would have to at least "disguise" a potentially observable aura underneath the illusion or even create an illusionary one along with the even more colorful / vibrant astral bodies. In this situation there simply are no plane considerations or different perception forms involved. Otherwise there simply cannot be any "Astral Illusions" that involve anything "living" or "magically active" ... something that IMHO would have to be spelled out more explicitly
• While the intent of this wording seems to be that no Illusion spell that creates the "image" of a living being on the physical plane will create an aura that matches said illusory being when looked upon with Astral Perception, the spell itself most certainly should (and does) create an aura of its own and thus we see a contradiction with the sentence when looking at the rest of the rules.

I'm sure that they will.

On my own behalf, at the moment my questions are mostly really simple and primarily aimed at not making newbie mistakes because of memories of how SR2 worked. And, TBH, I look at the SR rules now and I wonder how I kept them all in my head. Still, fun system and in some ways I wish that I had taken SR2 and converted it back in the day to what I want rather than using an entirely different system.

(The reason that I didn't? I really don't like the way that damage is handled in the system with regard to "soaking" with Body. Ridiculous, I know.)

I would imagine that the answers to my questions are on the realm of a sentence or two at first, with perhaps more detail with follow-up questions if that makes a difference?

Perhaps instead of "Deciphering the mechanics" the thread title should have been "Answer some simple questions to put me on the right track"? (I actually tried to change it, but was unable to do so.)


And I'm looking at that for that part of my lil'project, so thank you.


Oh, I do. I have several easy-to-answer questions.

For example, as I was converting spells from SR2 last night I was stumped at the differences between "Combat Sense" and "Personal Combat Sense". Don't get me wrong, I can literally see the difference: one is Limited range and the other is Self. But what does that actually mean given what it is described as doing?

Otherwise it's just a single topic Enhanced Time Sense spell. Done.


Sounds awful.

You're certainly right, I feel, that the various laws of magic should be front and centre.

This is just one of, IIRC, several places where the FAQ produced answers that flatly contradict the written rules without claiming to be errata or even clearly recognizing the contradiction, which lead to the general consensus that the FAQ had no canonical authority. Since FanPro never asserted its authority beyond hosting the FAQ page, that consensus stood pretty solidly.

I recommend generally forgetting that it exists.

As for where spellcasting happens, one of the big unanswered questions was what Background Count you used if you decided to Powerbolt the moon. Some people said caster location BC, some said moon BC, and there was even a minority position for the space BC in between, though I believe the already-noted “does not travel” quote eliminates this possibility.

~J

"GM: You hit the moon. NEEEXXXXTTT!"

It does have practical consequences—I forget what the resolution limit is on earth-based telescopes, but it’s quite possibly possible to get a giant telescope and cast spells on people on the moon from earth or vice versa, and I believe there’s at least one permanent moon base that might have targets or casters.

I also once made a character with the spell Wreck (Sun) whose life ambitions depended on the answer to this question

Edit: it wasn’t a real character, apparently. From a “most useful 3 spells” thread:




~J

Mostly a slap up the side of the head, I would imagine. Suffice to say, not something that I would consider as being serious regardless of their being astral space to arc through.

Back to the difference between Combat Sense and Personal Combat Sense.

As far as Detection Spells go (and Combat Sense is one) you have to understand that there can be two different "Ranges" for them:

1. The "Range" at which a caster can cast it onto a target. Typically you'll only see "Touch", "Line Of Sight" and "Self" here. Touch means exactly what it says: The caster has to touch the person whom he's casting the spell onto. In case of a Detection Spell the person who is supposed to gain the magical new sense. "Line of Sight" just means that the caster must see the person whom he wants to give the new sense. "Self" is a specialized subset of "Touch" where the caster can only cast the spell and thus grant the benefits of the new sense only onto and to himself.
2. The "Range" that the magically created sense provides. For SRII you'll find this on page 152 of SR-II:
   To determine the range at which the hypersense operates, the magician rolls Force dice against a Target Number 4. He multiplies the successes by his Magic Rating for the distance in meters at which the new sense will work. Such spells are listed as having a Limited range.

Combat Sense is a bit of an outlier and can be messy if you really want to enforce the implied limit because it provides an omni-directional sense to prevent personal harm or increase one's capability of doing harm by giving addional combat pool dice. While its "Range" in terms of casting the spell is usually no problem it's also stated to be "limited" in range which would imply that the provided combat dice should be "limited" in use by said "limited range". Let's just say that the attempt of enforcing the limit can be rather tricky ... Is the target you try to attack with bonus dice from the spell within said range? Can you use those Combat Pool dice in attempts to dodge attacks that come from outside that limited range?

So what's the difference between Personal Combat Sense and Combat sense? The general "Combat Sense" can be cast by a group's magician onto the group's Street Samurai to increase the Sammie'S Combat Pool further. The "Personal Combat Sense" Spell on the other hand can only be cast onto the magician himself.

I'm familiar with this and mentioned it, above.


I don't believe that this stumped me for even any amount of time. In my defense, I never encountered anyone casting the spell on anyone but themselves... :/

That certainly makes it easier, thank you.

I could definitely see Agony (MitS.142: a mana Illusion) being viable between astral targets. Not necessarily optimal (since it must be sustained, definitely imposing a penalty on the caster and possibly imposing a penalty on the target). The same goes for a mana-based variant of Blindness, penalising all Astral Perception tests. Free / ally spirits could escape such effects via returning to their metaplane (the caster no longer shares a plane with the target) but projecting magicians and lesser spirits would just have to eat it unless there was a friendly astral barrier they could retreat behind, leaving the spell behind. The interesting one would be Double Image (the mana version) cast between purely astral beings: a character who does not fully resist the spell will not be able to tell the original and double image apart -- they are both bright glowing blobs of magical intensity in the astral sea.I agree. An astral opponent casting a spell at an astral Double Image can see its aura (the aura of the spell's effect) and cast spells at it, but the spell does not "disguise or create" the caster's aura at the image's location so landing a spell on the double does not count as landing a spell on the caster's aura.

I believe this is intentional or else someone could create a Phantasm (SR3.195) - a "convincing visual illusion... of anything the caster has seen before, from a flower or a credstick to a dragon" and you wouldn't want magicians to be able to just replicate a dragon's aura on demand.
The closest canon spell to this effect would be Astral Window (MitS.140). A Physical variant of it could allow the caster to see through up to Force Barrier Rating of obstructions (like Ultrawideband Radar vision from SR4) but even then, the wording explicitly emphasises "Magicians cannot cast spells at targets they see through a barrier using Astral Window." It would still be handy for information-guided indirect fire (CC.99).
I suppose turning that around, if a Magical Group had Manaline In The Basement or some other Power Site (SSG.138, MitS.85) and they performed Ritual Sorcery to a target that was outside the Power Site, would they get to add their bonus dice or not? I suspect they would, since that's sort of the point, and since Power Sites aren't really portable.
Let's look at another spell or two which accomplish a similar effect. Enhance Aim (MitS.141) grants a -3 TN to shoot targets within 36 metres (or within 360 metres if you customise it to Extended Range). Sounds great. This can be "cast by a group's magician onto the group's Street Samurai" to significant effect. In contrast, if the magician resents "casting the spell on anyone but themselves", they get a +2 TN penalty for Sustaining the spell which might be offset by (most) of the benefits of the spell if they roll high enough. Ah just use a Sustaining Focus, the people cry! Well, since Detection spells allow the Subject to sense Targets (MitS.140, SR3.192) and a Sustaining Focus needs to be in contact with the Target of the spell (SR3.191) it is non-trivial to put a bound, activated Sustaining Focus in contact with the Target around the corner / across the park which you want to shoot. If you can plant a Sustaining Focus on them, you might as well use that opportunity to just attack them. The third option is to use a spirit to sustain the spell for you. But yes, ideally, Enhance Aim is a spell "cast by a group's magician onto the group's Street Samurai" and that can apply to Combat Sense too. The other spell that often comes up in such discussions is Analyse Device (SR3.192). For every two dice which hit a TN of OR-2, you gain a skill rank to use an object. While that's nice, if it incurs a +2 TN Sustaining penalty because you're casting it on yourself, it's self-defeating. It's best cast by the group's magician on someone else.

RP is a team-sport, chummers.

Just to throw another spanner in the works (since the OP is trying to tie in Earthdawn), Other Place is an Illusion that allows teleportation. FASA had a… creative view of what “illusion” means.

~J

Note that I didn't say there couldn't be any illusion spells on the Astral when taking this (too) literal. I said that this sentence makes it impossible to create an astral illusion where a living being / magical entity is part of the (created) illusion.



For me it's not about the effectiveness or further complications. For me it's just about a small sentence (with a to me relatively obvious original intent) creating a limitation to an entire spell class that - if really desired as such - should have been communicated explicitly instead of comming into effect by implication.



As said, I do consider this "does not cast an aura from an illusory being onto the astral" for an illusion created on the Physical Plane as the main intent there in order to limit the overall power of an illusion and preventing a general discussion about the separation of planes (which still can arise in other places).

But the lack of more explicit references of (mana-based) Illlusion Spells being restricted in their usage on the Astral Plane is a reasonable indicator to me that this particular short sentence was not intended to cause this in this exact manner ... and more in terms of the "cannot disguise" part than the "create" part.



Some magician players will respond that the "Focussed Concentration" edge is a "Must Have".




This one I would mildly object to, because the rules do not provide a clear separating definition of "subject" and "target" for spells and use the word "target" interchangably for both the "subject" that a spell is cast upon and for the "targets" that are ultimately affected by the spell effect (the detection spells are mostly without that flaw but indirect illusion spells have this interchangable [and at times confusing] usage a lot).

The wonderful thing here is that I get to ignore the things that I like--spells, Powers, Talents, and emergent mechanical properties. As long as it keeps the fiction it's all good.

With that said, that doesn't seem like such a huge problem to me. As the (second?) poster notes, it's in Earthdawn. There are clearly things possible in one Age, and one level of magical development, than others.

Having gained some familiarity with Earthdawn since 2004 I’m no longer bothered by the “teleportation” aspect, my main point is to emphasize that this is the kind of ability that the designers specifically classified as an Illusion and thus we need to adjust our expectations elsewhere when we ask the question “does this make sense as an Illusion?”.

~J

I'm not sure that is as relevant to this particular avenue of questioning, but I can certainly see how in other avenues of questioning it would become increasingly relevant.

For sure, I'm getting waaaaay more information in this thread than I need and, well, that's not a bad thing.

I've still got to figure out how to make Ritual Magic a little bit more interesting than it is presented in the SR books (I've looked in SR5 and SR6, along with supplements in SR5).

And before that? Traditions. (And boy do they require a bunch of work! )

You're probably familiar with Project ShadowWatch's work towards reconciling SR2 with SR3 Sorcery.

Have you seriously considered joining forces with the SR3R project? With your enthusiasm and scope, you might find that some of the bugs in SR3 (not insect spirits!) have already been addressed in SR3R and your ideas and solutions for stuff on the SR3R todo list could serve double duty advancing both projects.

I'm not at all familiar with it other than what I could Google in a few short minutes.

TBH, I never really considered SR as the "go to system" for this project because of the damage soak vis-a-vis Body. That and how it selected to incorporate Earthdawn magic into the game through Initiation made it a bit challenging.

With that said, tell me more about SR3R if you would be so kind.

One thing that I remember from the days of SR2 was that hacking was an absolute "fuster cluck". The common solution was just to remove Decker characters to contacts and be done with it.

Did any of the editions past SR2 solve this situation? As I looked through SR4 that answer seemed to be "No" and, indeed, they doubled down on it with the wireless Matrix.

To make things simple, I'm either tempted to use the SR2 solution or just chalk it up to another form of magic. Err, but different from the Technomancer magic... O.o

The answer in SR3 was “yes, but”. Decking is fully functional and not that bad in SR3, with the caveat that the GM and especially the player need to know exactly what they’re doing. It breaks down in places (is security tally a property of the icon or the host? What happens when two non-system deckers are active in a system simultaneously? Who knows?) but those places are mostly rarely-explored corners—how many group really have two deckers on one system at one time?

The problems are the massive proliferation of Utilities (probably the single biggest thing we achieved at SR3R was boiling down and combining a huge number of niche utilities into a set from which a player could reasonably be asked to pick and choose) and the fact that high-powered decking devolves into deckers and hosts throwing giant piles of dice against each others’ giant TNs. A lot of people still wanted nothing to do with it, but it really wasn’t bad provided you actually knew the rules going in.

SR4… well, Frank Trollman can tell you about SR4 decking better than I can (am I the only one who still thinks of him as an SR4 partisan?). Search for his posts here.

~J

It sounds like the solutions are still a problem?

I’m not sure what you mean here?

In SR3, the rules are functional. They are rough around the edges and by canon are fiddlier than they need to be, but for a PC decker in a standard-ish campaign they work. They aren’t really good enough to support a full-scale decker campaign where all the characters are deckers and most of the action goes through the matrix (the way you could run a rigger campaign, or a mage/astral campaign if you wanted), but the typical campaign doesn’t need that or anything close.

~J

Let me come at this from another way, then:

What problems did SR3 fix from SR2?

And why were the utilities an issue? On the face of it, they seem to be giving some spread to the character's options?

* * *

Does the decker actually bring something to the game that couldn't be done by an "off camera" hacker?

I’m not sufficiently familiar with SR2 decking to be sure. I can only tell you that SR3 decking was functional.


They (and their corresponding operations) were too numerous and too specialized, which in practice reduced options because people tended to stick to a few operations and their corresponding utilities and avoid swapping them in and out of memory.

Edit: ok, it was mostly Operations rather than Utilities that we changed: see the spoiler tag in the SR3R Decking thread.


Does the Face?

I thought so, at any rate.

~J

Ramble warning...


My sense from this is that, no, the issues were not addressed as they were not a function of the mechanics but rather a table synergy thing. It's one of the reasons that you'll see not insignificant numbers of discussions about, as mentioned above, tossing the Decker as a PC, having troupe-play for "Decker Circles" (or whatever), and so on. Not withstanding the fact that the background of the game didn't age well out of Gibson and the times to be replaced by Google. ( <-- Note the smiley for the last!)


The Face does work around the edges of "The Run", sure, but they could also be involved in "The Run" on a direct basis. The main shtick of the Decker involved hacking things for the other 'runners, which in my experience (and others based on the discussion) ending up being a huge bag of no-fun for the other players as they sat around and twiddling their fingers. On the face of it, this isn't inherently badwrongfun. They are, after all, being given their time to shine. It was just such a huge time-suck and essentially re-created the issues of the "split adventure party" problem--just more problematic because their was a chronological connection between what happened in one of the groups impacting the events in the other.

Same deal with mages and Astral Projection, to be honest. They, too, deserve to have their moment of screentime.

(FWIW, the game that I'm thinking about was also the origin of the, for me, notorious statement, "Shut up and tell me how many dice to roll!" as even the player wanted an end of the hacking to get back to the 'run. Or, at least, that's the positive interpretation on why they pulled out that phrase.)

I had just hoped that someone more creative/imaginative/clever had solved the issue for me.

(That is, find a mechanical solution to the party-split that didn't ditch on the premise of being a Decker as much as saying, "Nah, I don't allow Deckers in my game as PCs".

* * *

Again, though, this is a table synergy thing--not inherently a fault of the mechanics even if it was partially a product of it.

I imagine that SR4's wireless Matrix/hacking was a direct reaction to this, perhaps, common problem around peoples' tables. It just seems to have opened up a huge bag of worms, at least from deciphering some of the conversations on the subject.

It's also one of the reasons that I'm personally thinking of "Ritual Magic" being used before a 'Run--just one that takes into account deck, software, and number of hackers than mystical space, material components, and numbers of mages. You attempt the main hack, then can also produce "talismans" that can represent zero day exploits, backdoor hacks etc. where the players plug in doodads to "do the thin" that they might want, e.g. spoof security systems, open doors etc.

Other alternatives have been in the past that aforementioned Troupe play where you Highlander-esque transition into the Matrix run where you Google/Dark Web Search Deck for the information, find the system, get the plans, etc.

I mean, it’s true that Decking without a fundamental and complete bulldozing is going to require the same GM skillset as running split parties. It’s not as bad as arbitrary split parties, because the Matrix is fairly well-defined in rules and scope, but split parties are one of the classic separate-the-strong-from-the-weak GM trials-by-fire. I think it’s a basic skill that anyone doing any amount of GMing needs to have or very rapidly acquire, but I’m already in the fortunate position of being able to do it myself and mostly having had GMs who could as well. I suppose it also depends in no small part on the players knowing the rulesets they interact with—if you need to handhold the decker, the difficulty of handling the rest of the party at the same time skyrockets, but at the same time why would someone make a decker without learning the decking rules?

In short, I think the issues you see are issues with the speculated table, not the rules.


“Yesterday’s Tomorrow Today!” is a feature, not a bug! Besides, have you tried using Google lately? Maybe ten years ago it was more advanced than the Gibson version, but these days I’d risk Black IC just to get relevant search results.


It depends on how you structure your runs. Decking the system can be interleaved with meatspace action—especially if you need to jump an air gap or a high-security external connection by either going in to a local jackpoint or having a teammate plug in a retransmitter. It takes practice, but not that much.


Sure. I just don’t think there actually is a set of rules streamlined enough to appease tables unwilling to use the current rules that isn’t of similar depth to rolling Negotiations to hire an NPC decker—you could replace it with a “do Matrix magic” roll, but what does that get you?


It was, it did. Part of it is also the desire to make some sense—if you’re willing to make your matrix a virtual space that for no good reason matches the physical space you could have your cyberblaster zap IC that are basically guards other characters can’t see and then shoot controls that other characters can’t see, I guess that could work until you think about it.

I don’t suppose I can sell you on the virtues of one-game-many-systems, can I?

~J

I was clearly being too delicate with my touch, so I'll rephrase.

It's not specifically the fault of the rules, but rather their RAW application. As soon as you've got an event that has different levels of interaction with the rules in their application, e.g. the sheer amount of dice rolling and adjudication, then you're going to get a situation whereby you've got a bunch of players standing around twiddling their thumbs while the action resolves itself elsewhere.

And that was the problem with Decking perhaps more so than other "elsewhere" types, e.g. mages. The Decker jumping into doing their thing was often coupled with the other players dropping out of "combat time" into "narrative time" as they twiddled those thumbs waiting for the Decker to achieve the thing that they had wanted to achieve. Given the nature of the "dungeon crawl" nature of hacking brought in part by the aesthetic, the action of "spoof that keypad" could take a whole bunch of screen time and potentially lead to the "It was a boring conversation anyway" moments.

When both groups are involved in the same time (combat time)? More to juggle, but since everything is going super-slow anyway it was "just" a case of changing gears for the GM. (This also to address, I believe, your mention of "interleaving".)

I guess if I had my druthers in the SR mechanics, I would be tempted to formulate a "significance" vs. a "comparison" rule, i.e. when you just compare statistics and say "You do it" and when you go, "No, let's roll for that." And those items are abundant in what I remember of the rules but it cyberdecks and software, host systems and bandwidth throttling, passcodes, or whatever. And to be honest, if all that dice rolling doesn't end up being significant then I wouldn't want to be doing it anyway.

Put another way, reduce the amount of dice rolling. Perhaps that's what you did with SR3R?


Back in the day of "friends gaming around a table" in the 90s, I would have agreed with you for the most part. I know at least from my own experience that for a pick-up game, to include online gaming outside of an established group, that's a big ask for me if I'm not super-interested in the setting.

Times are a-changing... Well, technically changed. Plenty of past tense involved depending on where you look on the Interwebz.


You definitely made your point about Google of the now.

I am, however, noting that it broke my groups' sense of verisimilitude back in the '90s when we were playing SR2 in the early '90s and more particularly the mid-to-late '90s.

Heh. Verisimilitude. In a game with magic and elves.


Where there was less frustration at the table at the expense of mechanical screen time for the Decker?

Not a good solution, of course, hence them often being shamed into NPC-hood. All the other types broadly operate within the same simultaneous "times".


Clearly you have not encountered Cybergeneration.

I'm being facetious. You quite probably have, as you may be making a judgement about Virtuality (CGen's upgraded version of Cyberpunk 2020's version of the virtual dungeon crawl that is the Lawnmower Man aesthetic).


Heh. That's what is already done in the SR meta-setting. I'm trying to merge them into a single system with some "improvements" and changes to suit preferences.