Greetings folks! We had a GREAT day yesterday playing for nearly 6 hours and one friend played the entire time 'Skyped in' over 200 miles away!

These were things that I did not address in order to keep the flow of game going. Please bear with me as I had several things crop up that we quickly said ok its this way and kept going. I will do this rather than halt the game and spend 5 minutes looking for a rule.

When you approach someplace like the Lodge in the Mercy Module there are no distances given on 'when you see things' such as the spirits in the Astral Plane. This kinda irked me as I could not readily set ranges. On this encounter I had the spirits 'materialize' on top of them which was a mistake as the Giant Troll simply took two whacks with his axe and killed one at initiative 31!

For the sake of our game we have ruled that melee weapons get a choice of accuracy, either your physical limit or the weapons accuracy as listed on the book, whichever is better.

Where would the encounter with the Spirits start? Again I had them 'materialize on top of them and this was a mistake on my part.

When the party approaches the lodge do they see the gangers in astral space and in physical space there? Is there a range? I know this encounter takes place PRIOR to the party entering the lodge.

Order of actions:

Roll initiative. I had everyone roll, Does everyone declare actions NOW or wait till their action come up?

I will have more to add, I am at work remembering some of our issues. I apologize for the broken thread.

On the initiative question, they declare actions on their turn. Or at least this is how we've always done it. I find if you declare and then go people tend to forget what they were going to do by the time their turn comes up. Just easier to have them declare on their turn.

For encounter distances, use whatever would work in the real world for sighting. Remember, in the astral things like trees are still a visual obstacle and folks can hide behind them in the astral. If it is a dense forest or has lots of scrub or ground cover, then spotting tings may take a perception test and will definitely require one if the targets are hiding. If it is open ground then both sides can see each other fairly easily. This applies, again both in the physical and the astral. So figure out the terrain and you'll have a good idea of how far out the encounter starts.

For the spirits, it will depend on the spirit where they appear. Most of them have some sort of ranged or LOS attack they can use and are likely to materialize at a distance to use that to either attack or soften up targets. Some spirits though, like beast spirits would likely prefer to attack from close range and would materialize closer to their targets. Remember, these things have logic and intuition equal to their force. High force spirits, while not as well versed in human culture or ideas are deadly smart. They will use their powers to their best advantage and the more closely they are aligned with humans (spirit of man for example) the more likely they will understand the nuances of human interaction. Plus their summoner can straight out just tell them what to do (avoid the troll).

Thank you. Your response really helps. There was an issue in the book which was not really clear.

If you are attacking with a melee weapon, what do you roll? Is it JUST your Blades skill (if you are attacking with a sword) or is it (Blades+agility)... It reads kinda funny but I wanted to be clear. We ended up JUST using the direct skill its tied to and not double pools.

So Pistols is Just pistols and Blades are Just blades. If I am wrong please let me know.

In general you can look at the effective ranges of weapons and the visual modifiers tables to get a general sense of when what range you see something at matters. Many of the visibility modifiers also affect astral perception.

Note that Astral movement is at the speed of thought, so it is quite reasonable for a spirit to Materialize at 0 range and not be noticed till then. Especially if they can use the summoners mental link to "home in".

A Spirit with Energy Aura power is especially effective materializing at 0 range.

Apply visibility modifiers to assensing tests as applicable. Use Assensing to perceive astral entities and Perception for Physical,s o two tests. You can get where something is perceived astrally but not physically and vice versa.

SR 5 tests are almost all Attribute + Skill for the pool.

Also, for spirits getting whacked out so fast in Melee, remember that Materialization means they come with Immunity to Natural Weapons:





So a Force 4 spirit once Materialized comes with 8 points of Hardened Armor :

Glad you all had a good time, and that skyping in the one player worked

As was said above, spirits are reasonable intelligent (or even extremely intelligent in some cases), and depending on their orders they may have a fair bit of latitude in how they do their assigned job. The module didn’t lay out details, so you can presume that they were not given precise instructions. Of course, they are smart, but they are not always all that knowledgeable of meta-humans and of technology, so they may still make some odd choices.

In my game they came in astrally at first, aiming to drive off the player group’s two spirits while not even being visible to the mundanes, to sort of divide and conquer. Then one materialized by the shaman in order to try an engulf attack to take him out of action (I decided that they considered all things magical to be the prime danger, so prioritized those). Another materialized at fair range to use elemental attack, and the other was taken out in the astral.

With regards to dice pools, as said above it is skill + attribute. Did you allow dodging? (at intuition plus reaction), because it would be impressive if the player characters even managed to hit force 8 spirits (with 16+ dodge dice) while only rolling skill in dice! But absolutely, a serious melee troll (high strength and a big axe) will do terrible things to spirits if he/she hits (also will do terrible things to pretty much anything else they hit – probably has a base damage value on par with an assault cannon).

That said, dropping a force eight spirit in one hit is impressive. I don’t promise that I do this math right, so I’m going to spell out how I understand it, and others can jump in with other interpretations if they disagree:
- I’ll assuming that the troll has 11 strength and is using an axe with DV of Str+5 +16) and AP -4
- Assuming no net hits for the moment
- Spirit has hardened armor of 2x (essence = force=, =16. 16+attack AP =16-4=12. DV = 16 is greater than 12, so damage can be done
- Spirit still has 12 points of hardened armor after AP, which grant half their value in automatic hits on the soak roll. They also get their body (varies by spirit type, but assume 8 for the moment) in soak dice, so call that typically giving about 3 more successes, for a total of 9 successes on the damage soak roll – this gives damage to the spirit of 16-9=7 damage.
- Assuming the 8 body mentioned in the previous point, the spirit should have a damage track of 8+(body/2)=12 boxes. So it has taken 7 of its 12 boxes, and is at -2 on initiative and on pretty much every roll but damage soak going forward. But it is still very much still in the fight!
- If the troll had even higher than that strength, or rolled a lot of net hits on the attack roll, then that damage could have been higher. But five points higher, to drop the spirit in one shot, would still be impressive.

The Troll has 14 strength, and a base dmg on the axe is 19P. HE rolled 9 successes. The spirit mitigated 11 but still took 12 boxes of dmg.

This particular first run the players toons are over powered. WE know this and are going to restart AFTER we play a bit with lots of power. I allowed the troll some perks since he was the ONLY mundane. He got 1 million in cash and access to 1 piece of deltaware while the rest of his bio is all beta and he built with 1000 karma in addion to the above on the premise he was going to go 'huge n stupid' with his troll. ...aptly named Grog.

Betx...

The Spirits gets to Soak Damage with Remaining Armor (in your example 12) + Body (in your example 11) and gets an automatic 6 succeses from the Armor in addition to what is rolled.

So...
23 Dice is an average of 7.6 Hits so call it 8, plus the 6 autosoak from hardened armor = 14 DV Soaked of 16 DV inflicted. The spirit takes 2 Damage.
In the Corrected Damage Assessment provided by Larsenex, that would be 28 DV -14 Soaked is 14 DV Taken... Bye Bye Spirit.

Oh, that explains it.

Yeah, if you build a character with 1k+ karma, 1 of -anything- that isn't a Greater Dragon is going to die pretty absurdly fast.