Premise #1: Magical ability is supposed to be rare in the Sixth World. I don't know if there is a canon figure, but you definitely don't bump into Awakened peeps every day.

Premise #2: Magic is incredibly powerful in Shadowrun, to the point that every group I've ever heard of (and certainly the groups I've run) has included at least one, and often multiple Awakened characters. Full magicians, in particular, often eclipse non-Awakened characters in terms of utility.

I would like to reprice magic (in terms of build points and karma), both to bring the cost of being Awakened more in line with the power it bestows, and to make Awakened characters rarer.

Qualities
Magician
Base cost: 15 BP
New cost: 30 BP

Mystic Adept
Base cost: 10 BP
New cost: 20 BP

Adept
Base cost: 5 BP
New cost: 10 BP

Qualities are pretty straightforward. Right out of the gate, it costs twice as much for any category of Awakening as in the base rules. A full magician who wants a mentor spirit has just enough room to purchase both (assuming you enforce the 35 BP limit on positive qualities).

Magic Attribute
In character creation, each point of Magic costs 12 BP up to Magic 5, with the sixth point costing 30 BP. In play, improving the Magic attribute costs (new rating x 6) karma, rather than (new rating x 5). Again, pretty simple: Magic is just more powerful than other attributes, and should be priced to reflect that fact.

Spells
I'm going back and forth on whether to raise the cost of learning spells. My hope is that the up-front and back-end costs will reduce both the number of Magic 5/6 archmages coming out of chargen, as well as the number of Awakened characters overall.

Magic Resistance
For each full point of Essence lost, characters gain 1 extra die on all Spell Resistance Tests, as if they gain a level of the Magic Resistance quality. This is to make magic less of an I-win button in general, as well as to give cybered characters a little bit more of a reason to live.

I experimented with the Magic Resistance rule the same as what you described during a one-shot. I thought it worked well. There's a possibility it could be abused by a troll tank who basically can't be damaged except by Direct combat spells, but you'd have to weigh how much of a concern that is to you.

I haven't played a campaign with them yet but I am considering house rules that bring the costs of non-Magic down rather than increasing the price of Magic. Skills would be New Rating * 1 karma, skill groups would be new rating * 2 karma, and attributes would be new rating * 3 karma. The idea would be to speed up the advancement of mundanes rather than to slow down the progress of magicians.

Of course, this is all dependent on how what sort of progress you are comfortable with at your table. I love the sweet, sweet dopamine hit of upgrading characters, and I like it when my players show meaningful progress after just a couple runs. Of course, I've never had a campaign last longer than ~300 karma, so that's informing how much advancement I'd like to see over the years.

Would the Magic attribute also be (new rating x 3)? If so, I think that would exacerbate rather than alleviate the problem. Maybe leave Magic at the x5 multiplier and reduce the other attributes to x3.

Shadowrunners are far from the norm, so how rare Magic is in the general populace should have no bearing on the cost to play one. Honestly, mages are already burdened with a wide array of costs.

The existing costs are fine. What might need fixing is overcasting (it needs to have more Drain), spirits (there need to be more viable ways for mundanes to attack them, and some of their powers need toning down), and possibly augmented adepts (if you consider them a problem, ruling that bioware doesn't work on them nixes that).

Also, have limits on Magic rather than letting it increase in a never-ending loop. Maybe a cap of 6 on number of initiations and an absolute maximum of double Essence for the Magic rating. If everything else has a hard cap, so should Magic.

Stick to your second premise. The first is a terrible one.

The goal for any non-random character generation system should be to balance characters' abilities with the other group members.

Chances are, anyone claiming that a non-random character generation system that will enforce setting rarity is either lying or having a shitty system. Because the number of people having Danish as their native language is also supposed to be rare in the Sixth World. Yet no one expects Danish to cost more than English as the Native language skill. One might answer that language is nowhere near as important as magical ability, but the simple fact to label it as "important" is switching from "setting consistency" to "game balance".

As far as the rules go, I can build at chargen a New Zeland dryad teenager who know how to perform brain surgery, fire a sniper rifle and pilot a space shuttle and speak fluently Hopi and Hindi. That should be exceedingly rare, much more than a mage or a street punk with a quarter million of cyberware, but the system is doing nothing to prevent it, and should try to, because it's not its purpose.


Regarding changes to the rules, one I am experimenting a "unified" Drain formulae equals to Force/2 + modifier + resistance hits, which I apply to both summoning (with modifier 0) and spellcasting (when a spell targets several characters, the highest number of resistance hits is used). It results in a higher Drain when summoning high Force spirit, and introduce more randomness in spell Drain - it makes far more risky to cast a spell at someone who may benefit from counterspelling or use Edge to resist.

Sorry, but this doesn't make any sense. If you buy cyber/bioware then it should work. Doesn't matter if it's in an Awakened or Mundane. Besides you dealt with the problem in your very next statement.


I've been arguing for this for a long time now.

Although I agree with you in principle, how big a problem is this? How many PCs have you seen with 12+ Magic?

The only concern I've seen is mages with very low essence and high magic, but I've never seen one in practice. Maybe limit initiations to the lower of magic or essence?

My problem as a GM is using background count to reign in spirits and mages, without making the adept and their foci useless. Allow for a cheap adept centering (or make it a skill adepts have) that allows them and some amount of their foci to ignore X points of BC, and I can focus on the mage more.

Although spirits are more of a concern than mages themselves. Their hardened armor especially. No over-summoning, and reduced armor?

I have yet to see any. In my own writing the highest Magic character I have used is an Adept at Magic 10 (grade 6 initiate), while of the duo that are the focus of my works, the strongest would be at Magic 7 (also grade 6 initiate) if she didn't have a bad incident with some infusions.

On the other side of the coin, I have never seen or used a Technomancer with a Resonance higher than 7. If the other main character hadn't gone through an old school fading he'd probably be at Resonance 9 now.

Official Numbers:
in SR1 to 3, 1% of the worlds population was awakened.
all of the different kinds of awakened were in that 1%.
every singe last magic 1 attribute phys ad or whatever.

As of SR4 i think that number has been bumped up to 5%.
Still, that does include all of the awakened.
Not all of the 5% are full mages with magic 6.

Clearly, it's very usual when you look towards power, security and criminality.



I'm not so sure I understand the goal here… You would expect a functionnal group of shadowrunner to NOT have at least one magically active character? That would be a very atypical group accomplishing missions that are very non usual for shadowrunners…

Maybe I'm not a typical player, but my groups, including multiple times initiates, have not experienced any problems of magic overshadowing other characters. Background count and adapted magical opposition have always limited awakened characters pretty efficiently. It's worth noting though that the two main GMs (a friend and me) had a good knowledge of the magic rules and potential power. And most groups have been at least half awakened characters… I am really not sure the problem can be solved via the mechanics. Everything is there to limit a magician ability, within the game.

The Mechanics are there, as you said.
Technically, there should be no spot in any bigger city with less than 1 Background count.
Subways, dark alleys, the gutters, at least BGC2. Sports-stadiums and places where somebody was murdered (so pretty much everywhere outside the better areas) is according to the rules in the books at least 3.
Powerfull magic? Especially used to hurt or even kill somebody?
BGC can completely rules legal and as per the books go above 6.
No more magic for you boys!
The Problem? Nobody fucking uses it.
Same with actual magical security as well.
But electronic scanner devices and armor and everything that will make a mundane face problems?
SURE! LOADS OF THEM! BECAUSE REALIZARMS!
Technically, no mundane characters player should ever have to accept to play in a game like that.
But we have to. Why? Because fuck you, that's why!


And it is the same with the stupid wireless nonsense . .
As a mundane, you can actually make yourself competely immune to being messed with by any hacker or otaku.
And you get punished for it. Because no, you are the mean one trying to cheese the system in your favour!

I'm really not sure what this all is supposed to fix.

If it's a magicrun thing, then maybe what you need is a rule that you can only have so many awakened per group.

If mages are too powerful, winning every combat with a snap of their fingers, then the number one thing that will help is simply slowing magic down.

If this is some ritual kneeling to the Gods of Game Balance, you're shit out of luck because between such inherently different groups there simply can't be balance in every variety of situations.

Yes there can actually.
There are fragging rules for this sort of thing.
Demand they be used, or simply ignore things that take away dice from your pools so you always have 20 dice to roll for your akimbo style assault cannons.
That should be the single lowest denominator that makes playing in all groups equal. Adherence to the rules.

Who is not using it? People are wrong, that's sad :'(. Background count is a bitch, spirits patrolling all the time, even good wards can ruin the game for even a good initiate… I remember we relied really heavily on the sam to kill mots mundanes while we pissed our pants checking for magical stuff that might fall on our head.



If the mage is winning every combat with a snap of his fingers, it means he really doesn't have to care about a lot of stuff the mage should have to care about… The number one thing might actually be to scale up things a bit concerning magical opposition…

Honestly, we've gone in the other direction - we embrace MagicRun.

Remember, what the players can do, so too can the NPCs. If a group is known for having a lot of magic, then any opposition group will have a lot of their own [anti-]magic to cope with it. I don't know the rules for FAB-III in SR5, but in SR4 it can be nasty.

Meh ,Stahlseele, Chummer
please don't make up Numbers !
(Germans are supposed to be exact and not come up with ....alternative Figures )

in 4A it was still only 1 %
in 5the ed it's even Lower !

With an alternative Dance
Medicineman

hmm, could have sworn it was like i wrote . . eh, been years since i nosed though the books by now . .

Based on those 1%, it might be interesting to see how reasonnable magical defenses might be…

How many of those 1% are full mage? And how many of these full mage are available for enforcing security for a megacorp? Or for working for Lone Star?

My intuition is that when trying to access to sensitive matter, you could possibly have quite a few…

indeed. That's why not every warehouse on the docks has full magical coverage, but a sensitive R&D lab will.

Besides, magic defense is a lot easier than you think, if you plan a bit ahead. Things like wards are fairly simple to place, even for lower level mages. Spirits are also a good way to add defenses, both as an attack monster but also as a warning device (if someone unauthorized enters this or this room, come back to me and report).
Things like those awakened plants (I don't know if it still exists in 5th, but in 4th you had a dual-natured species of ivy that was used quite often as magical security, since it creates an astral barrier and you have some green in the office) and as SpellBinder said, FAB (all variants had their uses, but the III variant was indeed nasty, simply draining your magical ability).
Even regular guards can have a couple of magitech items. There was a wand that emited a sound or light when an astral or dual natured creature tried to pass by, quite useful for detecting invisible stuff.
Things like gas can also be used to knock teams out (not everyone has a full gasmask).
And last but certainly not least: drones. They are quite difficult to harm with magic (you have to get through their resistance) and can be cheap, so you can simply swarm a mage with drones, so that the decker can't get them all.

From Forbidden Arcana, page 105, SR5...

For every 10,000 people:
* There are ten full mages, most commonly a hermetic, or shaman, or a physical mage. (Another section breaks this down to a rough world average of 40% hermetic, 40% shaman, and 20% other in the way of traditions.)
* There are forty aspected magicians.
* There are one hundred "Sparks" who are technically magical.
* There are 9,850 non-magical (or mundane) people.

Of those forty aspected magicians:
* There are eight conjurers.
* There are eight physical adepts.
* There are eight sorcerers.
* There are four apprentices.
* There are four enchanters.
* There are four explorers.

Of those one hundred "Sparks"
* There are twenty who are Aware.

Digging a little deeper, these "Sparks" who are Aware are likely those who have the Astral Sight positive quality from Street Magic, page 24 (for SR4a rules), based on the rules presented in Forbidden Arcana.

Now mind, as it has been and likely will continue to be, these are the official numbers based on registered SINners only. It's possible for a SINner to be an unregistered awakened, fake IDs likely are counted, and we all know the SINless don't matter, so these numbers can easily sway in either direction.

Ah yes, the ever-shrinking population of mages. 1% mages in SR1, 0.1% in SR5. I'm assuming there are not 10x as many people as ~25 years ago. Although Catalyst does have to show that they thought about it and are trying to be wrong by breaking down the 1% into specific categories.

Keep in mind that SR1 didn't have any other kinds of practitioners than shamans and hermetic mages.
That being said, I wasn't even able to find a percentage on how many of those there are in my SR1 copy, nor in SR2 core or the Grimoire.

In fact the first hard number I found was in the starting chapter of Awakenings (SR2), stating that 1 in a 100 (so, 1%) has a magical talent and 1 in 10 of those (= 0.1%) are full magicians of whatever tradition. It gives a number of an estimated 3-4 million full magicians in the world (2057), but also states that "their number is rising each year" (p. 9). Furthermore, the amount of growth is given as being 0.43% higher in 2055 than in a census of the previous year.

SR3 keeps silent on the matter, as far as I could tell from the core rulebook and Magic in the Shadows makes another mention of 1% of total awakened and an unspecific fraction of those fully trained magicians.

Only in Street Magic for SR4 is there another mention, and it's still at 1 in a 100, not going into more detail but reiterating what Awakenings had to say (only with less information):


SR5 states on p. 276 that 90% of awakened aren't full magicians, but doesn't mention either a hard number of total awakened nor a percentage of the population. In fact only the section quoted from Forbidden Arcana gives any estimation. Not even the Street Grimoire seems to have that kind of background information in a sidebar or something. Forbidden Arcana also goes into the most detail of all the publications I checked, and has about the same number as the older sources (or even a higher one with 150 people in a 1000, which is consistent with the earlier information given.)

Keep in mind, that I didn't thoroughly check, only skimmed the most promising sections and sidebars in those books and did a full text search for "%" and "percent" where I had searchable PDFs.

tl;dr:
No, the population is not ever-shrinking, nor are the numbers inconsistent with earlier editions. And I really like the breakdown into categories, too.