How to differentiate magical traditions in 5th edition like it was in the old days of 2e/3e where hermetic, shamanic and possession were really different ?

I don't have the new Grimoire so don't know if its already Implemented. Otherwise how to house rule it ?

Playing a shaman right now and missing the spirit domain rules. And binding just feels... wrong, for a shaman, can't explain how though.

Thanks in advance.

You differentiate them by role play, not by rules. Streamlining rules was, is and will still be a very good idea and should be extended.

SYL

Well, Im all for simplicity and faster rules (my fave game is Apocalypse World), but the magical traditions from old SR editions was one point where the added complexity really translated in awesome flavour, at least for me. Right now it feels really bland.

And frankly, I never found these rules complex at all. At least not when you have the kind of mess that are the decking, rigging and combat sub-systems at its side.

+1
It's up to you as a player to different Your Mage from another and not:
"Oh, the Rules say I can have only Domain Spirits and he can have only Elementals"


they aren't complex because they where never complete.
They're complicated and based on Fiat. (F.E. If You're a shaman and You lean out of a Window in the 20th Level , can You summon Spirits of Hearth or Spirits of Air ? )
I guess

It's because you have fond Memories of former Adventures and You don't have any new ones
( Grandma's meals where allways the best, even if they where greasy and unhealthy and maybe unclean, but it was Grandma's meals )


You can acheive that only by erasing your Memory and start again from the Beginning
OR you start working at your Char ,give him Personality, make him fun to play, play awesome adventures
ImO its not so much the Rules but the Player ( AND GM !!) who's responsible for Grand Runs and for a Char with a distinctive "Flavor"

HokaHey
Medicineman

Traditions differ in what Drain Attribute they use, which spirit types they can summon (and which spell categories those spirits are associated with), and whether their spirits manifest or use the possession power. This is in addition to the fluff differences (someone who sees spirits as untrustworthy imps will deal with them differently than someone who sees them as revered ancestor spirits).

If you want to house rule something approximating the SR3 approach, then have shamans exclusively use summoning and hermetic mages exclusively use binding (or the summoning skill, only it works like binding - they can only call up a spirit to bind, rather than getting to summon them as needed like a shaman does). Also, revise the rules on binding to make it the hermetic norm rather than something that will make spirits hostile towards the mage. And change the conjuring skill group as well, maybe adding astral combat to it, since it will effectively drop to only two skills. I'm not sure if you want to use domains or not, but if you do, I would just port them in from SR3 as is.

This bears emphasis... It really is not all that difficult...

I'm in the process of writing my own Shadowrun rules, and for the magic part I've decided to do this:
- One set of rules for all traditions
- A "build your tradition" mechanism, that let you choose options that restrict what you can or cannot do. These options can be things like "need to bind spirit after summoning", "can only summon spirit in their domain", "tradition forces you to do weird stuff that society doesn't approve of", "tradition only allows some kind of spells", etc.

This way, players don't have to learn many different rules, but tradition differences are still enforced strongly by the rules.

It would be worth making a list of those so numerous rules that discriminated traditions in SR3… Everyone tells me that they are amazingly numerous while I don't see that many…

- Shamans get totem modifiers
- Shamans have shamanic mask
- Shaman can be in one domain at any time, summoning one spirit that disappear at sunrise or sunset or when they leave the domain
- Mages have to make a ritual of force hours paying ritual stuff at a price linked to force and must bind the spirit they got, granting same service as nature spirit + a few and disappearing when their services are over…
- Shamans use lodge (not expensive) ; Mages use library (expensive)

Of course, I might forget something more or less essential, but that's all I see for now…

EDIT: As for the original question, I think I will support Glyphs: just make some kind of traditions that will have to respect the limitations in the SR3 books (BBB and MiTS)…

-Shaman Spirits have other Abilities than Elementals
-Shamans can't have Elementals (except for a special kind of Shaman Elemental Shaman IIRC that was from Aloa Oe, the Hawai'ian Run)
-Mages can't have any Patron
-There is a difference between Shamans and Shamanists (but don't ask me which one, its been way too long since I played SR3....10+ Years)


and Shamans use a Hut.
different Name, same Thing


ImO they're rather Profound than Numerous

HougH!
Medicineman

Shamanist are just aspected magicians… There are no aspected magicians in SR4? (I checked the book so long ago) Apparently not, but this has nothing to do with traditions anyway.

Mages not able to have Patrons is included in the fact that shamans got a totem… I seem to remember that Patrons were equivalent to Totems for the LOA tradition by the way…

I had also got that "traditions" in SR4 had a limited number of spirits, so saying that you have to differentiate between the spirits summoned by a mage and shaman is pretty obvious by the two books.

About the Hut: it's specifically called a lodge in SR3… And there are mechanical differences in how they are acquired vs library (BTW, might have been a reason for the low number of mages chosen in certain games: library were quite expensive, you had to change a priority to get a force 6 one).

I just mean, it was not like there were real differences in how you applied Sorcery, Drain, Astral perception and abilities to the different traditions… The real differences remained how you conjured spirits and whether you they were bound or not… Unified Magic Theory can pretty much be summed up as Unified Conjuring Theory.

The problem in SR3 was the support for traditions other than Shamanism and Hermeticism. They all had their own set of rules: Houngan possession worked differently from shedim possession which worked differently from insect spirit possession, etc.

There are indeed Aspected Mages in SR4/SR4A.

Each Tradition in SR4A has 5 of the 8 Kind of Spirits,
BUT
A Spirit of Air for a Shaman is the same as an Spirit of Air for a Hermetik (Cruunchwise)
whereas a Spirit of the Sky in SR3 is crunchwise totally different than an Air Elemental


OK, than I stand corrected and its one more point for the List of differencies between SR3 Shamans and Hermetics


thats right
(and I have to admit that I'm a follower of the UMT.ImO it makes playing/learning the rules easier so You can concentrate better on roleplaying)

HokaHey
Medicineman

So the problem is still more linked to the wide range of spirits available rather than with unifying magic theory…



Thanks!



So still linked to the wide choice of spirits…



Which I already took into account

The logical conclusion would be to hand everyone the same character sheet and tell them to roleplay it differently.
Generally a reviled practice in RPGs.

While I do miss the Shaman Spirit/ Mage Elemental divide it can be a bit of work if you want to bring it back.

Assuming you want to go down that road there are some thoughts to consider.

Domain Spirits are 'born' and reside here on our plane/local Astral space.

Elementals typically come from their elemental metaplane (Plane of Air, Plane of Fire, Boat of Water, Bus of Earth )

The issue gets a bit muddied when you consider Spirits of the Elements. Are they from here? Are they another form of elemental?

Just more wonders to ponder.

As per SR3, spirits of the element could be summoned close to their elements only, with a limit to how far they could move from it… While elementals actually needed some more "symbolic" ritual material… All in all, considering you didn't have to make a ritual and bind them, I would consider they are more similar to nature spirits… But one could argue otherwise.

You mean playing a Char that you didn't create yourself ?
Yes, I think thats not liked very well

He who wants to Dance himself
Medicineman

I mostly agree but there seems to be no real incentive to play Hemetics anymore as you can just play a shaman that wears a suit and get more cost benefit out of your stats, unless you really really really have to have fire elementals.

Well, for a Shamanic Tradition, you have two options.

Option #1: Incompetent (Binding). This covers the no-bound spirits issue, but not the domains.
Option #2: Code of Honor (Shaman). A magician following the shaman Code of Honor swears to be respectful of spirits. The code prohibits the binding of spirits, summoning spirits outside their domain, and ordering spirits to leave their domain (except for a final remote service). The code also requires the magician to select a totem and to abide by the tenets of said totem.

For hermetics, you need the GM on board to house rule that allows you to take Incompetent (Summoning) and still summon spirits as part of the binding ritual (and still summon watcher spirits). Actually, you could probably spin hermetic conjuring as a code of honor, too. Hermetics believe that nature spirits are dangerous and should not be given an opportunity to roam freely. While unproven, hermetic traditions believe that nature spirits that have not been bound to the summoner can choose to stay in the world puon completion of their services. While most nature spirits voluntarily return to their own plane of existence, the hermetic code of honor finds this to be an unacceptable risk. Thus, the hermetic code of honor prohibits a magician from summoning any spirit of nature unless the magician immediately performs a binding ritual.

I think this should be 'outside their domain, ordering spirits to leave their domain, and keeping a spirit on hold while leaving its domain (except for a final remote service)'.

Yes, you are right, it should be.

A few anecdotes.

The first mage I ever played in Shadowrun was a Voodoo priest, and that made it really easy to be different than the team's Hermetic mage - night and day essentially, with his dry formulaic magic and my nailing dead snakes to doorframes or throwing handfuls of chicken feathers at people. When it came to spirits, he did by-the-book summonings of elementals, and I got liquored up on venom-infused rotgut and start quivering and gesticulating while singing bawdily.

One of my players for my upcoming campaign is playing a Germanic Druid changeling (his SURGE triggered by a manastorm during a ritual on a major leyline) and his magic revolves around stargazing, communing with trees and rocks, and making use of talismans of power. His previous mage in an earlier campaign was a self-taught mage who didn't really give much thought to his magical talents, operating through intuition chiefly, but who ultimately started down the path of Chaos magic.

The mechanics don't need to change between any of these. Roleplay and character behavior manage it all nicely.

~Umi

I gotta be frank, a lot of these responses are hogwash.

The best rules are not the most 'streamlined'. If you honestly think this is the case, I invite you to come play CoinFlipRun with me, and just limit your own characters appropriately.

The best rules are those that best support the world you're trying to establish, while being as simple as feasible. SR1-3 created genuine differences between the traditions through genuine differences between their mechanics.

Granted, for some people, all the difference they need is "my character drinks scotch and yours drinks goat's blood". That's great, have a blast! But don't imagine for a moment that you are playing 'right' and everyone else is playing 'wrong'.

silva (and I, and a lot of other players) enjoy having actual, meaningful, mechanical differences between different character types. This is something we enjoy, it makes the game fun for us. The question is, does the new Shadowrun ruleset support how he wants to play, or does it not? The question is not 'hey, am I having rightfun by playing this way?'




The rules were quite complete. In that case you could summon either, but only one at a time.



Shadowrun offered two traditions by default, but added additional ones for those who wanted it. No one was mandated to play them, just like we weren't mandated to run aircraft carriers even though we had rules for them. Yes, the Shadowrun body of rules got to be substantial. No, this isn't a bad thing unless you choose to make it one. Yes, this means players had plenty of options, if that enhanced their gameplay.

From what I'm seeing here, the answer to silva's question is 'no'. Spirits and elementals have been mixed so much that even with SR4/5's pick-and-choose method, you're going to need to rewrite a lot of rules (plus you're still not going to get the totem benefits like you're used to). However, I've never gotten too deep into SR4 or 5, I could be wrong. Just noting from the answers received so far.

@nezumi: I'm not sure if my comment is considered "hogwash", but just in case I precise my point. Beside Lodge and Library, need of totem or not (actually mages can choose an element, so that's only for MITS added traditions) the only things that can vary between 2 traditions are only linked to conjuring, and can be summed up as:
- Spirits can't be bound or must be bound.
- Spirits that can be conjured have different characteristics.

While I might not really have taken into account the limitations or lack of limitations of SR4+ spirits, and thus be ambitious on translating them easily, I deny the fact that SR3 traditions were that complicated to play, use, or involved so much mechanical differences… Sure it was not "streamlined", but nothing like the abusive complexity some described.

And I'd like to support your opinion that some people like mechanical differences in order to have fun roleplaying. I do. And I never really understood the idea that taking off mechanical differences could support better role-play.

Magic is complicated enough without having two or more different sets of rules.

Using a single system for all magic isn't reducing it to Coin Flipping - it's making things that ought to be accomplished in essentially the same manner consistent with one another. We don't have substantially different rules for using melee weapons versus firearms, despite being very different "traditions". Why, then, should we for magic?

But let's tackle this from the opposite direction. What actual benefit does mechanical differentiation offer? It absolutely makes things more complicated, but what's the pay-off in return? I personally can't see one - I don't believe most mechanics have any meaningful impact on roleplaying, except to determine whether you succeed at something or not. So what tangible benefit is there in splitting the magic rules, and how is it significant enough to outweight the inconvenience of having to use two different mechanical systems for what can easily be handled by one with no real loss?

~Umi

It adds flavor to the world. There is a huge difference between roleplaying a shaman in a world where ALL shamans can't bind those spirits and roleplaying who refuses to bind spirits despite the fact that few, if any, other shamans refrain from doing so.

Except when those 2 'sets of rules' actually don't make so many differences vs most aspects of magic… Astral, Sorcery, Drain, Initiation… are the same. Only some aspects of conjuring change with the same basis.



Yeah right, shotgun and assault rifles are guns no? What do we benefit form mechanical differentiation here? Just tell players to roleplay that their 'gun' is either one, so that one is good for close quarter and the other is better at distance.

More to the point, the mechanical differences induced vastly different behaviour to the different traditions. Shamans had this day-to-day on-the-fly feeling that was essentially due to the fact that they could and had to summon spirits here and now when they needed them. They had to feel close and respect their environment because the spirits they used came from here. They could call nature for help any time, at the price of direct drain and limited power. Mages had to prepare powerful spirits at home, in hours long and costly ritual, hence their more nerdy, corporate, or at least modern occidental society feel. They could call much stronger spirits with sorcery aiding powers that would stay around them.

You can deny that it gave you more roleplaying options. But it made for a much richer game, where you had to deal with shamans and mages differently, and where you had to really behave differently if you were a mage or a shaman. Sure, you can roleplay those differences, but in the end, if you just want to bind spirits at home when being a shaman, you can, and employ the same strategies as a mage. It's just not the same. I mean, sure, you can just say I shoot them full auto or I carefully aim and shoot, in the end let's just say you make the same damages.

You could theoretically replace every rules with RP: You could do without wound modifiers and have players roleplay the effects of their wound and decide not to do anything too strenuous when they're wounded.

Having rules for something isn't just for balance or fairness, it also gives that aspect more importance in the game. Some RPG have sanity rules, to handle PC becoming crazy. This could theoretically be completely handled with RP, but having rules for this makes sanity a central part of the game. For example, many things the runners do in their jobs would probably cause PTSD in many people. Yet, there are no rules to handle it, and as a result, few players actually care about it. If you had rules for this, the tone of the game would change a lot and players would explore the impact of their actions on their character's mind a lot more.

It's the same for traditions. Having specific rules for them gives the divide an importance in the game, and makes players care about it more than they would without it. But I think that the SR3 solution still wasn't enough: many players who play hermetic mages have no idea what hermeticism is really like.

Separated Mechanics do not add flavor, they add complexity... FLUFF adds flavor.
There are lots of ways to approach that fluff.

I'm not sure. Are you really arguing that mages having to carefully prepare their powerful spirits at home way ahead of the runs, using material and time, while shamans just summon on the fly spirits with environment linked powers, doesn't add any flavor? (Not to mention voodoos having to unearth dead bodies in order to create zombies or having to lose their consciousness and abilities to loa spirit possession to use their powers on the physical plane…)

Well, for a starter, this explains a lot more why mages are mages and shamans are shamans, with their habits and views on magic, without you having to look like a stupid geeky wageslave or spread chicken feathers at people. It meant different strategies, different behaviors in game, different decision to make when looking at a situation. So in the end, different role-play. And don't forget that mages and shamans are ALSO NPCs, which opens a whole range of option for interaction and risk assessment…

Sure, it might be too much complexity (actually, not so much) to obtain a difference in gameplay, feel, and "flavor" of characters, that you deem insufficient (while actually really big).

To sum up, maybe it doesn't add enough flavor compared to its complexity for you, bit it adds some flavor nevertheless .

Everything you describe can be done in game, with no actual change in the Mechanics.
Resolution of those actions would remain the same for both practitioners.

Sure, you can completely ignore fluff and treat them the same for all aspects, but then that ignores the actual TRADITIONS of the Magical Practitioner. There is no reason the underlying mechanics need be different, though.

Well, someone told me that Air elementals were like Sky spirit in SR4. So that's not true. But so you mean these incredibly numerous mechanics that were discriminating traditions in SR3 are still in SR4? Damn, this needs streamlining!

Plus, and more seriously, I might add that HAVING to do something because it's the way it is is really different than COMPELLING YOURSELF to do this same thing because you like to limit yourself in roleplaying. I really doubt that as a mage, you won't try to save your friends' day if suddenly you have no bound spirits but can summon one on the fly…

Maybe it's only me, but I don't find that the separation was very complicated.

I find that very similar in complexity than having a mage and a priest in a med-fan setting. Actually, even less so since you seldom have both on you table.

I do not see where that was complex.

It's even more ironical than that.

It's saying: ok, just roleplay like the old rule was (which implies that you know the rule and hence would be able to play it if it was written)

It was rarely the separation that was the problem in SR3. It was that the mechanics were DIFFERENT. For almost every aspect of the game that mattered. After a while, 53 separate (and different) subsytems gets frustrating (Even different modes of combat were resolved differently in SR3 - Talk about frustrating). UMT is awesome in that the underlying mechanics for resolution are identical. I can always fluff differences in Spirit powers but the resolution of those powers should still be the same.

Well, there's a flaw in the reasoning. In what the different traditions created "subsystems" were unified since all the "different" magical abilities (namely being able to have totems, to conjure on the fly or having to bind, and that's almost all of it…) were conserved in SR4?

Maybe for the rest of the game, streamlining got you rid of mechanics differences. Getting rid of traditions was not part of this goal. The complexities that was gotten rid of was linked to the huge variety of spirits the game encompassed being strongly reduced. But might be it's more important to role-play spirits… I mean, a horse and a cow should be almost the same thing mechanically wise. And no matter if suddenly a horse can give you milk and a cow can be rode easily.

Actually, UMT WAS part of the Streamlining Goal. Traditions did not disappear at all. They still exist. Mechanically, however, they are resolved the same. The FLUFF is what sets them apart.

Not sure on your logic on the Horse and Cow, though. You do realize that some cultures DO Ride Cows, and you CAN get milk from a Horse (Amazingly enough, some cultures even DRINK that Horse Milk).

If you'd tell a Mongol that a Horse don't give Milk or a Phillipino that You can't ride a Waterbuffallo He'd call you crazy or stupid


In SR4A and 5 you have even more Traditions than in SR3 and in 4A you could even create your own Tradition
(and that quite easy because of the UMT )

with a Dance on a Waterbuffalo
Medicineman

Some actually make alcohol with horse milk, which tells a lot about humanity if you want my opinion. But you might have noticed it's a tiny bit easier to get a lot of milk from a cow and that horses are generally easier to ride . So four legs 500 kgs animal with some similar abilities but also some noticeable differences. Do you want them to have strictly the same abilities in your game or not? A spirit of the sky is obviously not an air elemental though they share the idea about being gaseous: do you want them to be the same?

Once again, if you say that streamlining eliminated differences in game mechanics, suppressing the traditions wasn't streamlining. Those different game mechanics still exist, it's all the more that SR4 actually added a specific binding test that didn't exist in SR3. All that changed was a few conditions on binding or not, and the properties of the various spirits.

Horses and Cows both give Milk, and both can be ridden. Works for me.
Having the Same Abilities does not make them the same, and you seem to miss that. I can adequately describe the differences in their APPEARANCE while still using the same Mechanics to resolve situations. After all, the only differences between Air Spirits and Air Elementals is appearance, outlook, and how they are treated. Mechanically, they can do the same thing and still look different.

Mechanics are not Fluff... And I think that is where your argument fails. I can resolve all actions by Spirits of Air and Air Elementals the same way. Their abilities do not have to be DESCRIBED in the same manner, however.

No, I think your comments have been pretty spot-on. I'm not sure if we're agreed on how profound the differences between the two impact play, but that's just opinions.



I'm surprised to hear that. I don't think I have heard any player ever complain the magic rules are too complex, excepting odd fringe cases or calculating the range of fireballs and such. The complexity added by traditions is negligible.







This seems to be a common view, and I'm rather surprised.

If the game rules made the damage code for handguns equal to 20D, and for rifles 1L, would you say that this has no meaningful impact on roleplaying? What if we just reduced all skills down to a single one, "Shadowrunning", which you used for driving, shooting, spellcasting, et al. You'd be okay with that?

The answer for some people is yes, and that's fine. Most of those people play freeform, or "lite" systems. I won't tell you there isn't a market out there for that.

But if you're doing that, I have to wonder why you're paying so much for a fat Shadowrun rulebook, when you can pickup "Cyberpunk Freeform" for so much less.

The fact is, the mechanics establish the game world. If your mechanics let people jump forty feet in the air, you should expect people to jump forty feet in the air. If your mechanics make vehicles effectively invincible, you should expect players to operate their cars as though they were tanks. And if your mechanics make two archetypes operate identically, you should expect that people playing those archetypes will frequently play them identically. You personally may toss those rules out and rule at your table that they are not in effect. However, at that point you are no longer playing canon Shadowrun; you are playing your own, homebrew system, and you should not be surprised that other players are dissatisfied with the rules as written.

So if your character suddenly needs to make a trip and the only vehicle at his disposal is a cow, you'll let him ride it as easily as if it were a horse? Well, I think the ideas are clear anyway. Depending on how much you want them to be real and on how much you will use them in your game, giving them different abilities will become relevant or not.



Well, precisely, that's where your argument fails. In SR3, nature spirits had, and it was the point, some very specific abilities, which were linked to the domain they represented. Generally, for example, they had 'concealment', which made kind of a sense, as a myst or storm spirits could hide you within the open air environment, or a forest spirit could ease the way you're not seen in the forest. Another example was 'accident', which once again relied purely on the fact that the spirit controls a domain. Elemental, on the other hand, were totally different creatures, created or summoned out of the pure will of a mage to assist and empower him. As such, their power were generally much more offensive and linked to the element they were made from. There is no sense in having an earth elemental having an accident or concealment power.

All this was bare, and necessary, translation of the fluff. It would make no sense explaining what elementals were in the fluff and giving them concealment power, for example. So if in your game elementals and nature spirits are the same, it means that you suppressed a lot of the fluff and the variety associated to having different magic traditions. It's perfectly acceptable to say you trade poorer game fluff for less complexity. It's just not the same as pretending suppressing the unified tradition system has the same feel as the SR3 one.



I wasn't remembering that spirits lost so much of their variety and feel going from 3rd to 4th. It might indeed be impossible to bring it back without massive house rules and number crunching…

Better Game Fluff, not Poorer.
There is a reason there are Optional Powers in the rules. Or did you miss that?

In the games I play in, I have everything you describe and so much more... And a Unified Resolution system to boot.

I know you're just trying to score points here, so I won't accuse you of not knowing the rules. But the difference between shamans and hermetics were not significantly different, however they were profoundly different. I believe freudgo has already delineated many of those differences, but perhaps it's worth going into detail.

Hermetics get neither benefits nor penalties to spellcasting. Shamans do, according to their totems (and every shaman has a totem). The shaman needs to know his particular totem and what those rules are. That's not a significant difference, but it is profound--my hermetic has no issues doing any runs anywhere, anywhen. My owl shaman is going to avoid doing runs during the day though; she'll balk at them and during them she'll play more conservatively (or she will suffer). This is due to, and enforced by, mechanical differences. If you are arguing that remembering '-1 during day, +1 during night' is an onerous complexity, and that it has no in-game roleplaying repercussions, I'll know you're just yanking my chain.

Conjuring also uses fundamentally the same mechanics; roll conjuring, drain test, number of services, etc. The only difference is, shamans require no prep time, are limited by domains and time, and choose from a different list of possible spirits. Aside from the list of spirits, I'd hope anyone can keep these fundamental differences in mind. But the effects in game play are, again, profound. My shaman isn't going to prepare much before going in. She'll roll in and conjure spirits on the spot to assist her and conjure at lower levels. My hermetic will absolutely prepare ahead of time, trying to appraise how much he needs to invest in his elementals, and will conjure them before the run so they're available. Everything planned out, carefully estimated and ready before he arrives. If he does otherwise? He won't have any elementals.

Yes, the list of spirits is a PITA, but my understanding is SR4 still has more than a few spirits to choose from as well, so I guess you're not too upset about that lack of change.

They do indeed... And Shadowrun has the UMT with examples and options to explore and use. Some don't like that because it doesn't codify every last little nugget of ability, instead leaving that up to the individual tables to work out for themselves. Others look at that and realize how much more freedom it gives them, since they can now concentrate on the fluff of the Magical Tradition (Practices and Beliefs) rather than the Mechanics (and the difficulty in creating unique and different mechanics for each and every Tradition out there, because the practices and beliefs ARE different after all)... The problem is that the difference is not in the resolution, but in the practice and beliefs (which do not need mechanical representations different from the rest).

The change is in how they are resolved... and in that I am ecstatic about.

Spirit of the air described as having the same ability as elemental = poorer game fluff. Those optional Powers are generally not linked to the old differences between spirits. For example, elementals have accident by default, as well as concealment or search, inconceivable with the richer SR3 fluff .



Which has nothing to do with magic, since the SR3 magic resolution system was the same for all traditions . I'm very happy that you role-play so good that you can ignore some of the spirits powers your character has access too (their stat are the same, but who cares that elemental always were described as vastly more powerful than nature spirits… Who said poorer fluff?), but this doesn't change anything to the fact that the feel is not just the same. No one will blame you for having fun though.



Actually, Hermetics could be "elementalists" having bonus dice for spells assigned to their favorite elements and malus for the opposite elements. Likewise, Shamans could be coyote.

But I agree with you, not so numerous mechanics differences granted a good representation of vastly different stuffs, without the sad blandness of SR4 magic traditions…

I assume when you speak of 'how they are resolved', you're not talking about fixed vs. floating TNs?

In regards to throwing dice, resolving conjuring nature spirits vs. conjuring elementals is identical in SR3.

edit: spellcasting is also handled identically, but we've mentioned that before.

Possession is completely different for all 3 representative Possession Traditions in 3rd.

As for your throwing of Dice, if they are the same, why do you have issue with my position... they are the same in SR4A, too...
And you continue to make my point... the only Differences are the Practices and Beliefs... Which is easily controlled by UMT.


We will not likely come to an agreement, because I greatly prefer UMT and you do not appear to enjoy its benefits. No worries, though.