Something that's been bugging me about Shadowrun is Elementals for Mages. To me they seem prohibitively expensive. If you try to conjure a force six spirit with six levels in Conjuring. You'll roll about one service from it, and it'll cost you a cool $6,000 nuyen. You can use one service from it and then it's gone forever.

Basically a $6K grenade.

Even if you lower it to Force four it's still alot less powerful and you'll only get an extra one or two services out of it.

So what's the big deal with them? Why would you want to spend the time and energy trying to summon up these cash guzzlers?

One theory I have is that with the Aid Sorcery service, after the Spirit is reduced to 0 and vanishes, you can recall the spirit with an exclusive complex action and have it go back to Aiding Sorcery without expending another service. This would make it much much more useful.

I could see summoning up some force two and three elementals to get those few dice out of them for a whole run (and not just a single spell), and having different types of elementals bound for different spells.

Is that how it works, or does it take a whole new service after it gets reduced to 0 and gets Recalled to get your Elemental Aiding Sorcery again?

Is there something else I'm missing? Something I'm not getting? Please let me know. Convince me that Elementals are a good investment for a SR Team and not a waste of nuyen.

Using Enchanting to create your own Conjuring Materials greatly reduces the costs involved.

Permanent circles are a big help too. They cost a bit more, but if you summon like...6 elementals at a time, it's already more than paid for itself versus the cost of summoning them all individually.

Then you get to do it all again after the services are used up. Unless you're on the move...then well, it already more than paid for itself yesterday, so you're still ahead.

Wait till you initiate... Great Form Elementals on stand by are a surefire tactic of cleaning house.

Enchanting and using permanent Hermetic Circles are particularly useful techniques for lowering the cost of Elementals. Having a nice Negotiation skill rating and friendly talismonger contacts also helps.

Also note that Force 5+ Elementals, given their inherent physical Powers and the rules for Immunity to Normal Weapons in particular, are pretty good allies to have on your side in a firefight.

The way I always looked at it was that thy were cheaper that hospital time. If you are at a serious wound and being surrounded, having 6 force 6 elementals pop up and cleaning house will really help out. So most of my elemenals are really saved 'for a rainy day. IIRC you can call all your elementals with complex action, so if you are a 'fast mage' you can call them with action one, and tell them to start the killin' with action two.

I prefer shamanistic characters but the elements are "expensive" but useful. Usually I've only had them at level 4 and used them for spell support or their secondary effects-like having a wall of flame materialize inside a building can cause all sorts of nasty surprises.

Can't you attempt to get more services out of an Elemental without spending materials? Crap, I don't even know what the term is to look it up in SR3 or MitS. Rebinding?

No, you need more material components for the additional summonings, too.

As Fortune said, but got slightly wrong, all you need is a decent Talismongering skill and you can produce all the conjuring materials you want for next to nothing. You can either go out and harvest your own raw materials, or just buy the cheaper raw or refined materials (such as Herbal materials) from a Talismonger. Once you got 'em, it's just a matter of a little time to change them into Conjuring Materials.

If you do it during your downtime, you can have a stockpile of 'em in no time.

D'oh ... I knew that too!

Elementals have to avantage that that you can send them to perform a service half way across the world while you remain in the comfort. Want someone dead, just summon a fire elemental and command it to find and engulf your target untill he is dead. That's only two services. Grenades and guided missiles can't do that.
If you like the more hand-on aproach, try channeling a high force great-form elemental while under the influance of Spirit Strength. Your stat bonuses will make the initiate adept and the wired Sammy cry.

Elementals can also help with spell research, making foci and ritual magic. In each of these cases the money spent on the elemental probably more than makes up for guaranteeing sucesses - especailly when making foci, because if you get no sucesses, you still use up that chunk of very difficult to get dragonscale/orichalcum/vampire dust/drop of harlequin blood in the process.

I suppose refining your own materials would save a good deal of money. How much do you think a Talismonger would sell unrefined summoning materials for? About $350 a unit? It not too much and not quit half (Unrefined summoning materials make $500 worth when refined).

Also I suppose if you're just going to use it for Aid Sorcery, basically a glorified Expendable Spell Focus foci, it's cheaper per level than an actual Expendable Foci. And you get a chance that it has more than one use. Also a chance that it goes crazy and eats your face during summoning.

Look at Magic in the Shadows. Raw herbal or iron-based enchanting materials cost 50 a pop; tin and lead 30 a pop. Refined versions cost twice as much, and radicals (used for foci and orichalcum) twice that again. Generally the only time you don't want to buy pre-refined units are if you're looking to get gold radicals for orichalcum (gold costs 10,000 raw, 20,000 refined and 40,000 radical); everything else is fairly cheap to get pre-refined or radical.

"Unrefined summoning materisl" are Refined Materials. "Unrefined refined materials" are Raw Materials. Both are listed in the back of MitS, and it doesn't matter one iota which type you use -- the process for creating Conjuring Materials works with any material.

Raw Herbal or Iron Materials are 50 nuyen a unit, and Refined units of the same are 100 nuyen a unit. Tin and Lead are even cheaper at 30/60 a unit. Once you have a bunch, each unit can be transformed into 500-nuyen worth of any type of ritual material (including Elemental Conjuring Materials) by making a Talismongering (4) Test with a base time of 24 hours. Each success divides that time.

In otherwords, anyone with Talismongering 6 can turn a 60 nuyen investment into a 500 nuyen investment every 8 hours. That's 55-nuyen an hour, just FYI. If you have an appropriate Comlimentary Skill, it'll add 1 or 2 successes on top of that each time, lowering the time to 4.8 to 6 hours a go.

Thus my suggestion to just do it during downtime. After a while of doing that, you'll have all the materials you'll ever need... especially if you have a reasonable amount of downtime in between runs (a month or so).

This leads to an interesting question. If materials are easily made for almost nothing, why do they cost so much to buy?

Because prices for magic, software, and cyberware (and a few other things) are absolutely idiotic.

I personally think that the rules for creating magical gear and software are the idiotic parts, but yeah, there's idiocy in there.

~J

Even moreso because they can't be mass-produced. Each unit has to be hand-crafted by a specialist, and so the pricing guides tend to look like what people charge for works of art rather than for mass-produced goods.

The hardware/software stuff that deckers have to deal with... I honestly can't find any reason for that other than balance. Especially annoying is how the vast majority of the "hardware" costs are from *software*; an MPCP's software, for ecample, costs anywhere from 25 to 130+ times more than its hardware. It's like decks are actually made by spending thousands of man-hours carefully wiring up pieces of string.

Out of interest, how much will they cost?

~J

Well, as an analogy it's probably why government toilets cost $10,000 each.

Read/Write is not "special hacking software," just like most Operational Utilities (such as Analyze or Browse). It simply makes it easier for a user to transfer, create, or edit files. It's essentially a word processor/simple media editor/upload-download utility.

There's nothing illegal about it in any way, shape, or form. It's not rare (someone with an Etiquette of 2 or higher pretty much can get it, guaranteed). It's not a specialty item. And it's most certainly not a state-of-the-art recent breakthrough of technology.

In other words, it's the equivalence of charging 14,4000 nuyen for something like Microsoft Office. As a comparison, Microsoft Office Professional 2003 is only $500. Even a Rating 3 Read/Write utility (which would be closer to Wordpad in its "power", with Notepad being closer to a Rating 1 utility) costs 1,800 nuyen.

Note that without the utility, you're basically doing the equivalence of a COPY CON command in DOS. These utilities help you work more efficiently and better.

Find me a quote that says that all Utilities are for illegal users only. Then try to explain to me the point of having legal Cyberterminals with MPCPs over 1.

There are illegal Utilities. Just like there are illegal Cyberterminals. That doesn't make all Utilities or all Cyberterminals illegal anymore than riggers or the occasional illegal accessory make all vehicles or vehicle accessories illegal.

Operational Utilities like Read/Write allow you to perform standard operations more effectively. That's all. It's what you do with them that makes the action(s) illegal, not the ability to do so.

To say otherwise is to say that, for example, Adobe Acrobat is an illegal utility because it allows you to edit and manipulate copyrighted PDF files. PGP must be a tragically illegal bit of software because it allows you to both Encrypt AND Decrypt files more effectively. The horror.

You guys seem to be the ones with the preconceived notions here.

Well fine, try this on for size.

Matrix p. 68: "Utilities are the lifeblood of deckers, and are quite useful to non-decker users as well."

Note the use of "non-decker." While the game revolves around deckers, that doesn't make everything a decker uses illegal or dedicated solely to their existance.

I can't imagine how, but I can't argue with the existence of the quote. Point that utilities may have non-security/illegal uses conceded, I'll have to think about the cost issue again.

~J

*baleeted*

eh, nevermind.

You download the file. Edit it. Upload it back. Or just skip the transfer altogether and edit it directly. Just like when you try to edit any file on another system.

It's like the difference between using Notepad and a powerful WYSIWYG Web Editor (or any other program that has special features to make life easier on you) to create a web page. You can do the job with both, but you're going to be faster and more effective with the latter in that it helps you save time and use shortcuts to assist in the creation or editing of the file.

Notepad would be a Rating 1 utility. The WYSIWYG editor would be a significantly higher rated one (depending on the program). COPY CON in DOS or its equivalence would be you doing it with no utility whatsoever.

Several Utilities simply make actions EASIER. It's what you *DO* with them that makes something illegal. I don't know why you guys are having trouble wrapping your mind around that. There are illegal utilities (such as Black Hammer), sure, but that doesn't make all of them illegal anymore than the existance of a Morphing License Plate makes Improved Suspension illegal.

But they for the most part (especially Read/Write!) specifically make actions that the server forbids you from performing easier.

~J

The quote you referred to does. The simple existance of Cyberterminals are meaningless if you're not going to bother with utilities. But whatever. You're running on your own preconceived notions with nothing to back you up in the rules. These utilities are listed, and have rules dedicated to, deckers. So, naturally, they must be decker-only regardless of how idiotic that would be for corporations to mass produce utilities just for all those lovely deckers to buy and use against their facilities.

Well, I think a big part of the argument for the prices of such utilities would be that they aren't mass-produced.

~J

An Availability of 4 strongly suggests otherwise. Your average person will almost always be able to score a copy of a high-end version just by looking around for one. Lower rating versions (1-3) are even easier to find.

Again, Dr F, you are wrong in your interpretation of availability. Availability does not represent how much of an item there exists, but, rather, how easy it is to to convince someone who has access to that item to get one for you.

The sorts of people from whom you could buy utilities would, presumably, have access to resources like hacker house or similar sites, where you simply upload X and download a copy of the utility. Thats why the Availability is low in this case - not because the corps mass market the programs and its easy for a box of Read/Write chips to "fall off the back of a truck," but, rather, because its a relatively simple process, so it doesnt take much convincing to get someone to do it for you, as long as you have the money.

Your average person does not know someone (or, at least, is not aware that he knows someone) with access to those sorts of resources, and, thus, wont be able to acquire them as easily as you claim.

Compressor 6 costs exactly the same amount. The only difference between that and Compressor 1 is that it lets you zip up larger files; like a higher-rated Application such as a game.

But sure, I'll admit that saying that Read/Write isn't necessary a word processor. It's probably closer to a Hex Editor or the like, really, with tons of bells and whistles along the same lines as a top quality word processer at the higher ratings. That still doesn't make it illegal or limited solely to hackers.

You mean like the price for WinZIP's equivalence? That's 1,800 nuyen for the priviledge to compress a Rating 3 datasoft, or 14,400 nuyen if you want to zip up a Rating 6 datasoft. Or anything else that's Rating 3/6 respectively.