Ah, but we're not talking about open-heart surgery here. We're not even talking about learning to cast a spell like invisibility. We're talking about knowing that mages can become invisible but there are still ways to tell that they're there. Easy stuff like footprints and noises when they bump into something.

That's what I'm saying. While you may not understand the specifics of how something is happening, you can still see the results.

A guard can know zilch about how someone can use magic, but he knows what the signs are of someone being invisible.

I would agree with the argument that any decent security corp would be knowledgable about magic and security countermeasures for defeating magic, and would brief all their employees on the basics. If they thought that their site was valuable enough to merit an intrusion by a shadowrun team, then they'd be sure to spend a couple hundred per guard for some cheap ultrasound goggles or something similar. Also, security companies that are too cheap to use paranimals can still detect invisible mages with dogs (primary sense -> smell).

Any of the AAA corps are going to have at least a minimal magical presence at all of their facilities. A single security mage can have a watcher or two on patrol at a half dozen different facilities simultaneously with minimal effort, which puts a serious crimp in a runner's style.

Someone referred before to runners using masking to defeat wards. I don't have my books handy, but I think I recall that alarm wards (or was it masking wards?) weren't fooled by masking. They don't do squat to stop the intruder, but you immediately know that the intruder's there.

If you're playing a street-level campaign, then many of the gangers and lowlife drug pushers you come across won't know squat about magic countermeasures, true. But then you're talking about an 80BP game anyway, and spending 30 of those points on magic is going to leave you weak in a lot of other areas.

I do agree that mages/shamans can be exceptionally powerful, and only get more so once the karma builds up. But full-power mages shouldn't be settling for robbing stuffer shacks and fighting with street bums, and decent corp security has countermeasures for most of what you can do.

Thats kinda like saying that watching the A Team has shown people what combat conditions are like. Hearing about something and seeing it first hand/experiencing are two different things. Sure they can get on the Matrix and find general information but would they know specifics? Like can the mage attack while invisible? Are objects invisible when the mage touches them? Can they even be seen via ultrasound? How bout thermographic? How long does it last? Can any mage do it?This what I mean when I'm talking about playing your character's knowledge vs. playing your own knowledge.

I'm still not quite buying your view of that aspect of setting. We just have to agree to disagree. One player in my group has a character who is a former wage slave new to SRing and new to just about everything shadowlike. He delights in playing her that way...inexperienced in combat, knows that magic exists but not specifics certainly not how it can be defeated so readily. I applaud that rather than the easy way out where your character magically knows how everything works becauase it's in the SR3. Just seems rather vanilla. But hey that's just me. There certainly is a case for what your saying and it is probably appropriate in alot of circumstances I just don't prefer it really.

None of that is necessary except the "seen by ultrasound" bit. See an invisimage, trigger an alarm. That's sufficient for most corps.

~J

Your example player's character is the exception in Shadowrun, rather than the rule. Standard chargen assumes that the character is at least moderately experienced before play even begins, unlike D&D.

I would like to know Solstice's character's answers to something: have his semi-normal in extenuating circumstances characters missed the Awakening, and pretty much everything that followed (the outside coverage of Bug City, Dunkelzahn's bid for presidency, etc et al.)? I can't imagine anyone being ignorant to the existance of magic; history classes would mentioned the Great Ghost Dance, biology classes would probably have a few interesting mentions of meta variations. It's perfectly reasonable that they don't know how magic works, but that should not in way hamper their ability to work with or against it.

Likewise, it's perfectly reasonable for Joe Normal to know zilch about the difference between Invisibility, Improved Invisibility, and the force levels there of. However, I would be just as incredulous that he could be ignorant of people turning invisible as I would be if he were ignorant of the existence of dragons. Day to day life would contain too many passing references for ignorance to be possible, unless you live on Mars etc.

*over heard in the corp soycafeteria amongst the mundanest of the mundane sararimen*
"Oh boy is Sandoval Jr in trouble. I just found out why'd he'd been hoarding his allowance like Lofwyr during a bad quarter. He's been in deep drek all the way around for keeping his his girlfriend out too late (she might be an ork, but I can't really blame him; she's hotter than than a fire elemental in a naptha factory), and the both of them were grounded. So he paid a street shaman to sustain a little 'no-see-um' on him, then tried to sneak in through her bed room window. Her family's about as awakened as a box of rocks, and they only live in an A neighborhood, so who would be the wiser? How was he supposed to know that the troll across the street, and local busy body, was Emily Vaun Baud? You've read, 'Dogs, Cats, Toasters and you: The Beginner's guide to Shaman traditions?' Yeah that Emily Vaun Baud. She'd gone astral to get a gossip update from her Watchers, and saw someone that she couldn't see, if you know what I mean. Fortunately, or maybe not, for Jr, she called his girlfriend's dad instead of the 'Star. So Jr thought he'd be sneaking into his girlfriend's waiting arms. What he got was her pissed off father, who since he was waiting for the footprints in the flower beds, and that window to slide open on its own, saw through the spell pretty easily and... DocWagon says it was all just soft tissue damage, so Jr. should be off the crutches in a couple of days. Emily offered to speed things up a little, since she felt bad about Jr getting the thrashing he did, but I think healing naturally is a good lesson for him. So, how was your weekend?'

Any security concern should be fully aware of the potential for intruders to be using magic. Otherwise I'd expect shadowtalk to be pretty ripe with messages of 'hey, if you're a mage, hit XYZ. They have drek for magical security. Levitate alone will get you to their company safe.'

Regular people would not be so well versed, but I doubt they would have trouble coming up with quick solutions. Flour bomb, activate sprinklers, listen to see if they can hear anything.

As for TV, the A-Team would show me all I need to know about noisy firefights and bullets being bad. All you need is the action movie of the week to have the high tension run, where everything is planned to the smallest detail, but when the invisible mage is sneaking in, tension and heat make him sweat, ominous camera angles showing the trail of water droplets left behind, an astute guard noticing them and sounding the alarm, leading into the exciting final act. That doesn't mean everyone watching it is suddenly an expert in mage detection, but if they ever find themselves facing an invisible someone in real life, "Well, X worked on TV, so maybe Y will work here."

*edited because other people are fast posters*

I think we are getting off topic. Instead of discussing whether mages were unbalanced, we are coming up w/... "how to counter invisibilty". Sure, you can counter. But is the power of a force 1 invisibilty spell still overpowered. Bet your bottom nuyen!

As for Solstice's character not having magic background: yes, his character would be aware that invisibity spells exists. It's doubtful he'd be aware that there are two versions of the spell. It's extremely unlikely that he'd know that invis defeats thermo, et al, but doesn't work against ultra sound. That is game knowledge. Again... this is off topic though.

I've seen and play tested new to 100 karma characters, and even 200 prime runners. At every level, the mage owns. Especially sorcerers! They can take attributes as Priority A, then be a troll. Soon as you get Spell Shielding when you initiate, you are a tank mage. They can be killed, but they are much harder than any other character type. Plus, they can recon w/ extended range clairvoyance.

Also take the broken Stun Bolt spell. It's more versital than mana bolt, and is easier to cast. Knocking someone out is just as good as killing them, b/c you can just coup de grace them while they sleep. Plus, if you need them alive, you have that option too. In addition, you can stun ball into a group w/ your allies as a last resort, b/c it won't kill them. AND... if you hit an astral form, it does killing damage, b/c there is no stun damage in astral space. AND... creatures that regenerate, don't regenerate stun, so it's more effective against some paranormal creatures. It should have a higher drain code, not lower. This is another imbalance.

You can come up w/ counters for mages, but at the end of the day they are still vastly superior. The priority system is supposed to balance mundanes w/ awakened PC's. At the very least, allow mundanes to have a sand box to excel in. This is not the case.

Have you tried killing a properly equipped Rigger recently? How about even getting into a position to kill a properly equipped Decker? Or finding a way to kill a good Face and get away with it?

~J

Or just a sam with a bunch of guns? Any highly skilled person is going to be hard to get rid of or counter, that's why the bodyguarding of heads of state can be so difficult.

What exactely do you mean by mundanes? Just by definition, they can't excel in anything, they're mundane. I can't say I really give a fig if Joe Schmoe can't beat even a force one Invisibility spell. He's also not going to be able to beat the sammie with wired reflexes on intiative. Does that somehow make having cyber unfair?

Or if you mean mundane as in 'non-mage' does that also include adepts? Because I'm seen some pretty wicked examples posted up around here. Same for riggers. Most espcially for sammies. And deckers. That's three or four sandboxes for them to play in.

I still really can't understand the problem you're having with magic. Just like a regular person is not going to have any chance at all against a sammie, rigger, decker, et al. so are they going to get worked by a mage.

I think by mundane he means non-Awakened. The problem is he's completely wrong; in most cases the sammies end up being much more powerful than the mages right out of the box, due to the exponentially increasing amount of cash you get per point invested. Most mundanes tend to have 15-20 more points invested in resources, on average, than Awakened, which gives them access to much better startwing equipment. Cyberware in particular makes this large extra influx of cash worthwhile; no matter how much a mage tries to cherry-pick and geas off the loss he's never going to get all the nifty cyber- and bio- tools that the mundane character will start with.

Ever after the mages have a hard time catching up as they really have to spend *so* much Karma on their magic. They really only start outdistancing their non-Awakened bretheren under a few corner conditions: 1) the GM awards much more Karma than cash (in general a character should earn around 1 karma for every 5,000 nuyen), 2) the GM severely limits the runners' access to mundane power-ups, namely beta/delta cyberware/bioware clinics, or 3) you start getting into really high karma ranges (500+).

That said, the completely mundane non-cybered characters tend to have problems. The only real options for lightly-cybered (cyber + .5*bio index < 1-2) mundanes is decker and face, and decker's pretty tough to pull off.

I have not made that many mundane characters, but the ones that I have made have not lacked for power. I think people tend to favor awakened characters for a much simpler reason than power level -

Mundane characters take so long! I can whip up a sorcerer, mage, shaman, or adept in no time flat, but creating an effective sammie, decker, or rigger is much more complicated. Cyberware, drones, decks, and the like take a lot more math and careful tweaking.

That is becuase GMs usually do not enforce Background count. Factor in an average background count of 1 to 2 in the sprawl and you'll have your leveling of the field. By the way, I've not even added that all time favourite of mine: MADS. Or the 50/50 Magic test that awakened must do when they walk into a containment room filled with NueroStun, can you spell burnout?

I thought the magic loss test was only for a) deadly physical damage, b) improper medical treatment, c) stim patches and some other drugs, and d) disruption in astral combat. SR3 p. 160

Yes, they include those conditions listed above, but it is not limited to those conditions. The first rule states Deadly wound, of which the second rule iincludes a subset of the first. No conflict.

Toturi: Fine if you want to GM it that way. I read it that the rules under Magic Loss that MITS refers to and other parts of SR3 refer to mentions every way to test for magic loss. Even MITS doesn't add to that list. They do specify when to test for stimulant use, but that's covered on SR3 p. 160. Under the section about treating (physical--since stun can't be effectively treated) wounded magicians, they also mentioned the magic loss part but got lazy and didn't say physical. To me the main thing is the plain thing. The more specific section explains the unclear section. I pity GMs who have to deal with rules lawyers that takes quotes out of context.

Edited to address intended recipient.

Don't forget the otaku face insuing a warrant for your arrest and giving you a bad rep in the shadows at the same time.

What I'm seeing here is a case of two people who just aren't willing to conceed that maybe they aren't right. One still fighting, the other having pulled a "screw you guys, I'm going home."

So, lets stick to the topic at hand, rather than the "my character's too dumb to ask someone how they might get past the invisibility spell that's talked about all the time" sub-topic.

Mundanes suck, eh?

Well let's go with my favorite mundane of them all: Jon Snow.

Snow is what I term a pure mundane. No magic, no augments. Canon fodder, right? Wrong. Not only does he have a thorough skillset, contacts and extensive gear (at initial build) which allow him to adapt to any situation, but he doesn't have to deal with the problems other charaters might face.

He doesn't trigger cyberware scanners, have an aura in need of masking, or (and here's a big one) get screwed over by mana warps, background count, null magic zones, etc. Oh, and he can go into space without that nasty little dying thing. He's the everyman who can go anywhere.

So he doesn't have a smartlink? Smartgoggles or a lasersight, or hell, the ultra-fashionable SOTA tres chic shades with smartgoggles and ultravision built into them (along with a HUD) deal with that.

Mage gonna fry him? Well with the BPs not spent on making him Awakened, I had a few points left over to buy a decent Willpower score. Oh yeah, there's also that nice little magic resistance edge.

Sure, he's not perfect, but I don't have to waste karma, essence, or money masking magic or cyber in him, and he's adaptable to any run you might throw at him.

Magic may be powerful, but it's not -all- powerful.

Just kind of seems to go against the grain

Karma is of course, the great equalizer.

Going back to the whole invisibility thing... Some of the countermeasures discussed here are needlessly exotic (from the point of view of corp security). Beaded curtains? Unprofessional from a corp-culture standpoint. Flour bombs? Jury-rigged.

Corp security just needs the following: Closed fire doors, security lock-downs, motion detectors, mundane dogs, laser-trip systems, MAD checkpoints, and the like. All these are already in use for mundane intruders. Once an intruder is detected, there are multiple ways of locating and isolating the intruder. Nothing is particularly complicated about it.

Going back to mundanes, A mundane character generally has good stats, great skills, and cool gear. It's not like those points are going to waste. The one way that a mundane tends to suffer is in the realm of initiative enhancement. And that can be dealt with, with proper planning and a cool head.

I think Lantzer has it right. Nothing exotic is really needed to protect against the invisible. A simple guard dog with a keen sense of smell can ruin somebody's day. Even gangers might have pit bulls or other nasty surprises around.

I came into this a bit late, but isn't around 1 in 8 of the mundane population immune to the invisibility spells - trolls and dwarves.

Let just stick with stereotypes. Trolls are guards/bouncers/doormen, dwarves are riggers. Puts the odds up even higher that the person looking at you has thermosense and then just how many restricted areas don't require you to open a door? We haven't even spent any money on counter-measures yet. IMHO invisibility is broken simply because of how easy it is to defeat, not because of how easy it is to cast.

All meta-humans are subject racist abuse, because MAGIC changed them. How many people effected by the 17th Century slave trade are completely unaware of the situation 4 centuries later? Whether they are exposed to correct information is not really an issue, they WILL BE exposed to information.

How many of you DSF'ers never, ever, thought it would be cool to be invisible when you were a child? I think the answer is very close to zero.

Invisibility affects all types of normal vision. That includes low-light and thermographic vision. Non-normal vision refers to things like utlrasound vision and astral sight in much the same way "normal weapons" doesn't include elemental attacks or weapon foci.

I find it really irritating that healing a sam is now harder than healing a mage in shadowrun.

Used to be that the magical charachters had an edge in magical healing, but were somewhat screwed after that and often had to just go the slow way. Now cybered/biowared charachters are even more screwed for technological healing than magicians even if you don't use stress.

The edge and first aid are also available to magicians. The trauma dampner is another peice of healing related bioware, and a favorite of magicians.

Besides the platelet factory and trauma dampner don't help you heal they help you not get hurt in the first place. Like armor spells and invisibility.

The point is not that it is impossible to make a sam that heals pretty fast, but that the typical sam now heals much more slowly and much more expensively, while magicians heal about the same as before.

Just as a side note, has it not Errated that the likes of Platelet Factory and Symbiotes don't count towards the Bio Index for healing purpose's?

If thats the case, take a Pill form of Anti-coagulant and with the -2 to Healing from quick healer and a high body, That fatal gunshot wound puts you in bed for less then 6 hours if memory serves.

[EDIT]Ok so not the platelet Factory, but with Trauma Damper and the effect of Symbiotes to heal stun as well....

The first SR character I ever made, and played for the next five years, was a total mundane. He was an ork private detective, back in 2ed. This would have been '92 I made him, I guess. From what I can remember:

Whereas all the mages I ran with blew all their karma on intitation and spells, I put it into skills and attributes. A Q and I of 7 gave me a natural 7 Reaction, which meant two actions about half the time. I had an Unarmed Combat of 8 and a Firearms of 7 and a Specialization of 9 in the Skorpion MP. Most people thought I was an Initiate Phys Ad after the first couple of years. Plus, I had tons of skills at 3 and 4. My goal was to get every skill in the book, and I came pretty close.

Whereas all the sams I ran with blew all their money on upgrading their cyber to squeeze out a few more points here and there (e.g. the last sam I played in 2ed needed something like 2mil to beta his Reaction Enhancers to get a beta'd Encephalon which would give me my last point of Reaction ever), my PI just racked up the cash. I had the best gear in the group. High lifestyle, a dozen safehouses, a warehouse with 8 or 9 vehicles; rating 8 tech on anything I planned on using (taps, scanners, jammers, white noise, transceivers, and so on). The closest thing I can relate it to would be somewhere between James Bond and Batman. I retired the character when I had enough to buy a lifetime luxury lifestyle (10 mil in those days, I think).

The downsides were plenty. I was slow. Even at 7+1d6, I was pretty much always the slowest guy in the group, never faster than the second slowest. I took a lot of free actions to fall flat. I didn't get into stand-up confrontations with sams. My stats, except for Int, were never maxed (Body and Str were 8 and 7, Willpower I think was 6, Charisma I don't think ever went above 4).

But the thing that made me the heavy in the group was the karma pool. A 43 karma pool is a significant advantage. It pretty much trumps anything else.

Er… the karma pool everyone else will be getting too. Faster, if they're human.

~J

Not to mention that with the minimum of 840 Karma you had to earn to get that Karma Pool of 43, *everyone* should have been a god, especially the magicians.