Okay, here's the thing...

I've been playing sams for most of my shadowrun-career, but whenever it came to a fight with a spirit, it ended up kinda frustrating in most cases.

So, what do you guys do to increase your odds? carry a clip full of 7.62mm with granite tip? against bad boy wind spirits? and an ice-cube mortar against fire elementals? just use ares IPE grens for maximum damage against spirits, runners and everything below a barrier rating of 20?
Or just a Bolt Thrower (formidable music, teeheehee) with about 50 wooden bolts for autofire? a friend of mine (could be reading this, hellooo *waves*) took insect spray along for fragging bugs...though I prefer DMSO-pesticide-splash-grens

looking forward for some hints and suggestions

With heavy firepower you can kill spirits up to force 10 (using an heavy machinegun on full auto with EXEX ammo and alot of successes).

Above that....uhm, well.....run......

Or attack them with willpower and do charisma M? damage.

hm, yeah...

at times of peace (in opposite to open war) i don't usually carry a HMG along with me...neither EXEX-ammo...i prefer APDS as long as i got some...or silent standard-ammunition...

and do (CHA) M damage...well....since most spirits got an unarmed combat rating minimum equal to their force, this could be rather difficult when charging a force 10 bug or something...

Nobody said it would be easy, eh? *g*

That's why protecting your mage is important. Sure, they may be a liability if they focused solely on maxing out their spellcasting and not on combat-type stuff, but you're just not going to be able to handle a spirit without one. At least not very easily. That's also why a lot of groups/corps in canon fiction will put up with a lot of crap from a mage/shaman that would get anyone else killed/fired/both. A magic user is rare, a skilled one rarer, and one who is willing to work with/for you ever rarer still.

The Abstruse One

HMGs won't do drek against force 5 or higher spirits. As per the errata, immunity to normal weapons is compared to the base power of the attack, unmodified by burst fire, ammo type ETC. You could get a base power 11 version using the firearm design rules though, which would be able to hurt force 5s, but not 6es.

The most damage you can do is with a huge lump of C12. A 9kg block has a power rating of 36 which is enough to take-out F17 spirits. Your GM might allow you to mix other elements in with the attack, making the attack elemental damage but reducing the power of the attack somewhat.

The best weapon mundanes can physically wield for taking out spirits is a laser weapon. The 12M elemental damage can in theory hurt elementals up-to force 11, but it's dammn hard to get hold of. Very few man-portable mundane weapons can rival the heavy laser plus for 18M elemental damage (Can kill spirits up-to F17!)

Trolls may be able to get their strength up high enough to rival the les powerful laser weapons with Bow and Spur attacks. Mileage varies by troll strength.

White Phosphorous Mortars can hurt F11 spirits with the 12L elemental damage they get. With no way to stage it up, however, it probably isn't that effective.

The defiance Super Shock is remarkable effective, ding 10S Stun Elemental damage. That can be used to disrupt F9 spirits or lower.

Then there is the Great Dragon ATGM... 20D kills most stuff, dead. They can hurt up-to F9 spirits.

Next we have the shotgun firing Big D's Temper shells. Can be risky due to barrel-warping which is why it comes below the great dragon. 10S fire damage really tells spirits (up-to F9) who'd boss on the physical plane. 13D tells them more-so, but is likely to warp your SPAS-22.

Riddleing a spirit with incendiary bullets from some automatic/high velocity weapon should kill them eventually, but with it takes a while as you only do light damage each round. They may be able to de-materialize.

White phosphorous grenades can kill F9 spirits with their 10L elemental damage, but with low damage level and no way to stage-up the damage it's not all that effective. The 14M blast radius can also hurt F6 spirits or lower.

Just below that are the Assault canon and the man-portable mortar, which can harm spirits up-to F8.

Can't forget the regular 16D rockets and missiles that can hurt spirits up-to F7.

AZ 150 Stun Batons do 8S Stun Elemental, enough to hurt F7 spirits.

The 16M stun of concussion grenades can hurt F7 spirits too.

Flamethowers are probably next on the best mundane weapons list. 8M can hurt elementals up-to F7.

Incendiary grenades also do 8M elemental fire damage if you get close enough. Again, F7 spirits are the cap.

IPE grenades are next, again they can only hurt elementals up-to F7.

The 7S stun of the shock glove can hurt F6 spirits.

Regular concussion grenades can hurt a bunch of F5 spirits with their 12M stun attack.

The standard stun baton can hurt F5 spirits with a 6S physical attack.

We also have the 6M Elemental Shiawase Blaser which can hurt spirits up-to F5.

The 6M Stun vehicle-mounted Water Canon belongs roughly here too, but as a vehicle weapon it probably dosen't count.

I don't have my books with me, but wasn't there some melee combat technique called "focus willpower" or something? At the time I read it, it seemed to me like there finally was a way for a mundane to damage a spirit. I never got to use it, though.

@Lilt:
All very good weapons but you missed the Defiance Super-Shock. Inexpensive at only a couple thousand nuyen, easy to conceal, and 10-S (Stun) electrical can disrupt up to a force 9 spirit. It has the drawback of pathetic range but it's still useful, and can double as a non-lethal incapacitator for metahumans.

Cool... Updating. I also forgot high explosives, but I'm not sure where to put them on the list...

Very nice listing Lilt, thx alot..
there were some in it that I missed in my previous search for effectiveness...

@Moonstone: also a very nice...i just ask myself if electricity counts as elemental damage...if so, it would be a great combination of low costs and concealability...in addition to the option of stunning an opponent which is find quite desirable...hate killing...or..so do the majority of my chars..
I could also forget the gel ammo and use the ammoswitch for something different...maybe Norm/APDS for heavy combat and normal/cold ammunition for stealth shooting....though this shouldn't be any necessary with the taser onboard...

anyone got rules for homemade napalm? %) splashgrennies with napalm should be quite tough for lower force spirits..just kidding. i think

I like the taser most up to now i think, cause it's safe and you can carry it all the time without any problems...maybe do some combined weapon? taser barrel mounted maybe? since the taser-tech is quite old it should be possible for a guy with a nice B/R-Skill to modify a taser to an adequate format...or even as a bracelet or something like that...GM!!!! *scream* too much ideas....aarghh...

I in the past though that the spirit got no counterattack, but I've been corrected twice since then. The Spirit *may* use it's Reaction + Combat pool to couner-attack, meaning that the force of will attack is dangerous against powerful spirits.

One possible plus-point for the mundane is that reach does apply, so wielding a whip or a polearm should help a *lot* against reach 0 spirits, even high-force ones.

If you can make the area you're in heavily smokey (IE: Use a smoke grenade), then a thermo character, particularily natural thermo) should have better vision than a spirit which only has normal vision and astral sight (+2 bonus versus +1/+0 of the char with electronic/natural thermo).

Shotgun loaded with rocksalt (regular ammunition) should do the trick nicely, especially a Burst-Fire one like a Franchi SPAS-22. A heavy pistol with Capsule Rounds filled with water can take down a Force 7 spirit, too.

I think explosives would do blast damage (elemental effect). So a concussion grenade (16M) would damage spirits up to force 15.

Also, don't elementals have a vulnerability to their opposing element? If so, then concussion grenades would be treated as if they had an additional +1 to their power against earth elementals.

{deleted} - Question already answered...

booklord: That's really silly. If explosions do not damage to them, then neither should any Blast elemental effects, direct hits with explosive ordnance (such as a Grand Dragon ATGM), Explosive ammunition from any weapons, or anything else that depends mainly on heat, pressure or flying projectiles. Indeed if explosive devices which rely mostly on fragments to do damage are useless against spirits, then no non-elemental projectiles should damage them at all.

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying those books are full of shit. The authors obviously didn't think about the implications of what they were saying. The nuke does kill all the flesh-forms, though. If it hadn't, I'd be forced to torture the authors to death. "No, see, flesh-form spirits are immune to heat up to millions of degrees of any grade, and to overpressure up to 500,000 kPa." [Edit]Sorry, you already said fleshforms were destroyed. Replace "fleshform" with "materialized trueform" above.[/Edit]

I was going to suggest LAWs or MAWs, but it seems LAWs aren't effective against Force 6 or bigger, and MAWs cost just as much as ATGMs while doing much less damage.

All this makes you want to take back all the bad things you said about the guy in your group that wanted to play a phys-ad with killing hands and distance strike, doesn't it?

Austere Emancipator:

Well, like you said at the beginning, the current rules do not support what you're saying in the the least.

And that way of explaining it has some serious problems. So your will is transferred with the bullet when you see the target. What if you're shooting in pitch black, and can't really see the spirit? Wouldn't the spirit be damaged, if you're shooting it with a Barret through a cardboard wall? What about large-caliber explosive ammunition, that doesn't do damage with the kinetic energy of the projectile but with the ensuing explosion? Then what about missiles? What about a missile through a wall, or a TV-guided missile fired indirectly? Would a handgrenade kill the spirit if you saw the spirit when you throw the grenade?

Immunity to Normal Weapons takes care of the most ridiculous Hurting Pillars of Flame With Bullets cases. If it takes a cannon to hurt a water elemental, I don't see a problem. But exactly why don't explosives hurt water elementals, then? 9kg of C12 would vaporize the water and spray it all over the place, while no bullet or sword could ever manage even a fraction of that power.

You don't have to have will behind an attack on a spirit. That's just silly. That only applies to astral combat. A spirit defeated while materialized on the physical plane through physical attacks is just as disrupted as he would be if you attacked with your will and charisma on the astral plane.

A drone with a water cannon will put some serious hurt on a fire elemental. That's perfectly canonical elemental attack performed with no will whatsoever.

Likewise, materialized spirits only resemble the form that they're composed of. Each one is just as solid as another despite the way they look; it's the very first line of the Materialization power. An air elemental may look like a misty humanoid, but he's just as solid as a stony earth elemental while materialized. The differences in their solidity is reflected in their Body attribute.

I consider a materialized spirit to be just like any other dual-natured critter, its physical and astral forms are completely tied together. When one gets destroyed, then so does the other.

In my games, any materialized spirits within the area of effect of a nuke are goners. They get whatever fate the canon rules give them when their materialized forms sustain Deadly+ Physical damage.

I try to limit the effectiveness of weapons that would not severely disrupt large masses against spirits. That means bullets are pretty useless against materialized spirits of any kind in my games. Explosions, on the other hand, would certainly disrupt any of the elements that occur as elementals -- blasting the air and earth away, vaporizing the water, extinguishing the fire.

Materialized spirits can be spotted by sensors, and I doubt any missiles in the 2060s are detonated by impact. However, Air Elementals, like all other materialized spirits, are capable of physical attacks that do Stun or Physical damage, so they obviously also have hardness and mass. If they didn't, they'd be incapable of physical attacks.

You can explain the Air Elementals attacks like the "Invisible Stalker" of D&D fame, localized whirlwinds and blasts of air, and similar logic could be applied to the Fire Elemental, but all others basically need hardness and mass to do their physical attacks. Thus they have something to destroy, apart from what I already said about the 4 primary elements.

[Edit]Actually, the way I currently run it in my games is much like A Clockwork Lime put it. I assume every spirit and elemental to have a semi-solid materialized form with mass. The way I describe them varies from spirit to spirit and elemental to elemental, but the game effects stay the same except in some extreme cases.[/Edit]

In 2nd Edition (Awakenings 2057, actually) they clearly state that indirect attacks like explosions have no effect on spirits, that bullets and melee weapons and the like have a reduced effect (hence Immunity to Normal Weapons) and that you can damage them with your Willpower, doing CharismaM (I think) damage.

That's where it comes from. 3rd edition changed alot of things, however, and that seems to be one of them. The only real problem of such changes is to confuse long time players, and to make back story abit weird (if I can kill a spirit with a few kilos of C12, why did the spirits survive a tactical nuke in Chicago)

I don't think either the 2nd edition rules or the 3rd edition rules are perfect, though. The whole 'Immunity to Normal Weapons is halved against elemental attacks'-thing is too open to interpretation and can give some odd results (for instance, shouldn't bullets count as an elemental attack since they are made of metal? We have a metal listing as elemental effect in MiTS... ) The 2nd edition rules may have had some odd things too, but they were abit more consistent with the whole 'force of will' thing.

We are getting ready to attempt to deal with a Toxic Spirit that a Blood Mage has summoned up to munch on us. We already nailed them both with Incendiary Grenades (which neither really liked to much), but most of the crew has been injured by this time). So I guess it's time to pull out the Couger Fine Blade and hope the hoard of Watcher Spirits our Mage has summoned up can help smack this sucker down. So that brings me to one way of dealing with Spirits that our crew has used a few times: Summon up a bunch of Watchers and send them into the fray all at once if possibe. Use those friends in melee bonuses to the max. This way when your Sammie jumps in to try and beat on the Spirit, it's target numbers will be high.

I still prefer a shotgun with rocksalt. That's a base Power of 10. Failing that, those water-filled capsule rounds are both cheap and very effective (as much as insectide-filled ones are against bug spirits).

Eh? Rocksalt should easily count as Elemental Earth, halving the benefits of Immunity to Normal Weapons (even against an Earth Elemental, oddly enough). Both that and water-filled (or dirt, or citric acid, or anything else) capsule rounds are a dime a dozen, and certainly cheaper than Gamma-Scopolamine. Not that I understand your reference to that to begin with, considering materialized spirits have a complete and total immunity to toxins and drugs (as well they should since they're not biological), nor is it elemental in nature.

And yes, I know I wasn't 100% accurate about the willpower thing. What I was trying to say is that it's not the only way to deal with a materialized spirit, but it is about the only way short of a dual-natured character to deal with an astral one.

Think that's weird? A flame thrower will burn a fire elemental as well as an air elemental.

I don't think that water-filled capsule rounds should do anything except mildly annoy fire elementals. The rocksalt shotgun is an old classic, though. Fun stuff.

Rocksalt is far less processed than simple tap water or the fuel used in a flamethrower, yet both of those work just as well. As far as why bullets don't work, I have no clue; they should have left Metal out of the Elemental Effects category to avoid that inconsistency in the rules.

Likewise, a water-filled capsule round will work just as effectively as an insecticide-filled capsule round (or splash grenade for that matter) will against an insect spirit. The latter is definitely canonical, even though the insecticide-filled rounds should "provide the base damage code."

And yes, it is easy to get around a spirit's Immunity to Normal Weapons. You just prefer not to.

I personally consider anything with an OR above 2 to be unnatural and thus unable to qualify as a natural element. Which is pretty much everything.

I don't think he's suggesting that it makes sense. Just that the rules say you can do it with capsule rounds.

If the spirit has a vulnerability to it, maybe (I don't think so myself, but I can see this as a candidate for lengthy debate). If the spirit doesn't have a vulnerability to water then those rules don't say anything about them.


And really, if that worked then the water would be superfluous; you could leave out the water and shoot empty "elemental air" rounds. You could also just hit them with a nice air-filled wiffle bat so it breaks upon impact and spills its damaging air-payload all over the hapless spirit. Although it would be pretty funny watching hardened street samurai wrap balloon-animals around their uberkatanas so they burst on a successful strike.

I think that if a fire hose can constitute an elemental attack, then so too can shotguns using Water/Ice rounds. I think I would allow Rock Salt too.

One problem with firing abnormal ammunition at the spirits is that the power might be reduced. Oddly enough, as the immunity to normal weapons works on the base power rather than modifications from ammunition type, I think that could lead to 0 power getting through the immunity, but it still being effective. Obviously high-force spirits aren't going to care much about 0-power attacks, but modify that by burst or full-auto and most spirits are in danger again.

DMSO-Laes. If the spirit is freshly summoned, it will forget who its summoner is! And there is no damage so Immunity goes right out of the window.

Any GM who allows toxins and pathogens to have full effects (or any effects at all) on spirits needs to get his head examined.

But that's Canon.

Regardless.

If you don't play by the rules, then what are you playing?

Air isn't an elemental effect. The elemental effects are: Acid, Blast, Fire, Ice, Light, Lightning, Metal, Sand, Smoke, and Water. So elemental Air attacks won't work but it is peculiar that bullets aren't elemental metal.

I'm playing my own game by my own rules. People from FanPro haven't come over to sue me yet.

And that's why you need to get your head examined. I dread the possibility of you finding a bible or quran or similar literary work...

It is worth noting that I always mention when I'm using logic or referring to house rules instead of quoting the rulebooks.

[Edit]Back to what got this started: Would you allow Laes to be effective against materialized spirits in your games, then? Seriously, if it came up, would you allow that to happen? How about some nice CS/Tear Gas? Pepper spray to get rid of that nasty Fire Elemental, maybe?[/Edit]

Nope, but I have an alternative interpretation of rabbits chewing their cud.

And bats being birds.

And four-legged insects.