Heh, yeah, or even worse: "I was the Queen all along. Thanks for freeing me, suckers!"

Or really any other kind of reversal, Starcraft's-Kerrigan-style

Unless someone makes an adept or Magician's Way with a lot of centering...

All I was saying is put any magical PC next to a non-magic PC, and 40 karma later at best you will have magical PC with 20 karma placed into skills and a non-magical PC with 40 karma in skills. Its not meant to be a rip on magical PCs. The non-magical PC doesn't really have any thing to spend karma on but skills and attribute raises, and attribute raises cost so much and have so little clear pay out that they are rarely done.

Over time SR game mechanics lead to non-magic PC having a broader range of skills then magical PCs.

Thanks to the wonders of caseless rounds and how nearly all weapons use them in SR, I'd say very few sams pick up their shells.

~J

What dose centering have to do with skills a mage may not have?

It is not like you can center against defaulting penaltys. Well maybe is you have an extremely kind GM.

I knew someone would say that...

And I wouldn't say that nearly all weapons in SR use them. Its more like nearly all weapons in SR are available in caseless.

OR that non-magical PC could convert that karma to cash and go buy that wiz MBW system he's been eyeing.

You pretty much have to specifically look for cased ammo firing guns in the 2060s since they're a minority. The only real reason to have/use them is because you can make your own ammo (in mechanics terms, at least). Here's a question for people who know. Can you use caseless ammunition in a weapon with an internal magazine or a revolver?

Anyway, I dislike throwing lots of things at the mage which he can't handle because his karma and character points are tied up in magic. Do you ambush the sam with spirits or penalize him in a similar fashion for not being magical? Not generally. The only time I'd do this is if all of the PCs face the same kinds of tests (ie, if you're going to pick on the mage for not having a lot of social skills, don't spare the troll street sam). Unless the mage has taken some flaws which warrant it, of course.

Instead, I think the goal should be to insert some challenge to the mage while challanging the other PCs at the same level. It's hard to do, of course, but it gets easier with practice (or so I'm told). Some ideas:

Geek the mage first. Enemies look out for the mojoslinger and shoot him ASAP. This in no way prevents your mage from doing what he does, it just means that he has to be more careful about it and invest effort into not being an easy target.

Enemy mages. One of those six nearly identical guys in security armor carrying assault rifles happens to know manaball 6. And he's got the whole team in LOS. This is a challenge for the mage since he'll be splitting his efforts between defending the team magically and taking out the opposition. Of course, the enemy mage has to do the same thing, but it'll generate some sort of balance.

Astral combat. While everyone's fighting on the mortal plane, another fight could well be waged on the astral plane. The enemy mage just ordered his four great form fire elementals to materialize amongst the party and toast them. The mage might use his own spirits and astral combat skills to make sure that the elementals don't leave the astral plane.

Wards, wards, wards. There are a variety of uses for wards. They limit astral recon, they serve as a barrier to active foci, and they stop sustained spells dead in their tracks. A cheap security measure is a door with a camera on it and a ward. The camera can't be fooled by magic since you can't get through the door with a spell on, and if you don't know the camera is there (pretty easy to keep it out of LOS from outside the door) you can't even try to get a spell at it through the barrier (the best you could do is an elemental manipulation or indirect illusion targeted in the room, but you'd still have to have a reason to know the camera is there).

Magical Forensics. Lone Star has a division set aside to track down magical criminals and may have access to those funky metamagics (symbolic linking and psychometry) which make life even more fun for mundanes as well as mages. Corps definitely have this kind of stuff. The only question is does it meet the corp's cost:benefit requirements to use them to track down your team... sometimes.

Loudly playing "Flight of the Valkyries" while incoming for a kill.
Ahh, sweet memories.

Remember, the Cleansing Metamagic is your friend.

Um, no. All you have to do is hit the OR with even one success and the drone is hit; they can't even make a resistence test because they're nonliving, and extra successes stage the damage as appropriate. Powerbolt/ball cast at a low Force and high Damage Level are probably one of your best bets for taking out drones, actually; E. Manips at low-Force/Deadly damage run just behind it. Other good ideas include Trid Phantasm or Chaos over the vehicle's sensors, the Accident power from a handy spirit, and the various Glue-type spells.

OTOH, gel rounds and Stun damage are good ways to take down a mage (or for that matter anyone but the sammie, see below) but then any mage worth his salt will have a trauma dampener installed at some point so it's got to be a *lot* of Stun damage. The sammie's probably going to have a pain editor or the like installed, so he probably won't even notice the stun damage, let alone be affected by it.

That's an exact quote from my edition of the BBB, including the improperly used parenthases... which is REALLY MAKING HULK MAD. That line should clearly be it's own paragraph, since on the same page there is a section called "elemental manipulation spells". The first paragraph should just read "non-manipulation spells against vehicles..." AAARG MISS USED PARENTHESES WILL GIVE ME A CORINARY!

SOOO, taking a gander at the doberman- it's target number for that Powerball is a... 13. 8 + 2 +3. Assuming it was given no additional armor. A steel lynx combat drone would have a target number of 14. A Ares Gaurdian drone would need an ungodly target number of 16... freaking 16! It's not that hard to make astral contact for the purposes of starting your own Magic Group!

Now granted, a 1D powerball would screw it up if it got a success... but with target numbers like that... you would need a modul 13 sorcery dice to hit even half the time. Less than 1 in 6 "Sorcery 6" attacks will land. When you throw in 3 or 4 drones, all firing at the mage first turn with MMG's... or even 2 using MMG's and gel rounds... he won't be likely to hit the drones thanks to his boosted up target numbers from stun damage. Espeically when a rigger jumps into one and gives it his 4D6 initiative.

If you want to get really nasty, toss an enemy mage into the mix who is willing to use his Spell Defense dice to protect the drones and the players won't be able to just toss in a 1D spell and hope to get 1 or 2 successes.

A 1D powerball will do nothing, because another rule (SR3.182 Sorcery Test) says that the Force of the spell must be equal or greater than half the Object Resistance of the Object.

I know it does. I'm talking about increasing the effect.

~J

The various suggestions above are good. I'd like to address a couple of other points.

Perhaps you have given out too much Karma too quickly? In my experience, even Magicians with 200 earned Karma are still afraid of guns. Are these magicians past that? In our campaign, a magician who lives reaches that after about 500 hours of play time. (8 hours per session, 60+ sessions) This may be like the 1st level D&D characters who found CHAIN+3 and SWORD+3 in the lair of the first Kobold they killed. After a few weeks of play like this it became difficult to challenge them.

Are you enforcing Focus addiction? Encumberance/weight limits? Armor Layering penalties?

Do your magicians keep more points in Foci/Spells active than they can mask? Lonestar magicians do occasionally drive by in patrol cars, on their way to something important, and they will stop and ask for ID and spell permit from someone they see with powerful spells active.

Does NPCs use Karma Pool in the same manner and as freely as the player characters? If PCs commonly toss in one Karma pool on their first shot or first spell, your NPCs should as well.

Do your NPCs occasionally purchase an extra success using their Karma Pool, just because they can?

Do you have too many magicians on the team? The players on our team have chosen to limit themselves to two spellcasters on a mission. Who gets to play one rotates among the players.

Can you describe one of these powerful magicians? Attributes, magical powers, etc. Whatever allows him/her to brush off bullets.

I had a magician that specialized in using a Sniper Rifle on invisible mages. She would Astrally Perceive, then fire the gun at the spot on the physical plane where she could see someone on the Astral Plane.

Excellent point OurTeam. So vehicles really do mess up a mages day. I say throw 3 Lynx Drones at him with those MMG's filled with Gel Rounds... that will put a damper on his day.

I'm pretty sure you're thinking of Cyberpunk 2020 here. If what you're saying is true, why do they specifically provide rules for converting standard, out-of-the-book weapons to caseless and giving them a boost of 20% to their ammo capacity? There'd be no need to do so.

I'm pretty sure you're thinking CP2020, where all guns are considered caseless unless it specifically states otherwise (shotguns, the Nova Citygun, etc)

Well, as far as amount of karma, the character in question had about 20 karma dice which they got from several years of play. This did indeed tend to make small arms fire not so pointful when the characters would have like 7 points of ballistic. (armor jacket + form fitting armor)

Focus addiction is something that had slipped my mind. I'll have to look up the details on it an reread it, but I could slap that on. It would certainly make sense as one character was always running around with a mask focus and another with a levitation focus.


Let's see....as far as the specific stuff that caused the problems....

One character had Willpower 9, a pretty powerful Control Thoughts, and a sword focus. That is probably the more dramatic example.

I guess I could go with a few astrally percieving snipers. That's not a bad idea. It also would entail relatively simple rules for me to keep track of.



Someone mentioned vehicles. I always thought it would be cool to run down the party with, say, a Roadmaster, but I always thought it would be tough to handle that rules-wise. In order to run someone over with a vehicle you need to keep track of exactly where everyone is on some kind of map, and then you need to crunch all the numbers to figure out exactly what the Roadmaster is doing. This would be difficult in the contect of an IRC game, which is what this is.

There were lots of excellent suggestions in this thread so far...thanks a lot, everyone. I'm still thinking about this, but maybe a good place to start would be a toxic domain filled with critters and astrally percieving snipers. Yes.....

Don't forget, further down on the same page, it also states:

So low force Powerbolt/Ball may fail before the spell even hits the vehicle.

And for Elemental Manipulations, same Page:

So against an Vehicle Armor Rating of 4, you would need to cast a Minimum force 18M Elemantal Manipulation to do any damage.

Force 18/2 = 9 (As normal weapon against Vehicle Armor)
9- 4 (armor Rating) = 5
5 exceeds Vehicle's Armor Rating of 4. It does L damage.

Meanwhile the Mage is almost dead from Physical Drain (resisting 10S Physical Drain on Lighting Bolt, or 11D on Ball Lightning)