Ok, now is the time for some stupid questions. I have read through the books and some of these I have forgotten or I am worried have changed since SR2.

1. Can non-awakened charecters, or awakened charecters use combat pool to resist or dodge spells?

2. Does any one who has magic get a spell pool? Or do only mages?

3. Is the target number to assence some one (aura read) always 4 + modifers or is it based on something difrent?

4. Karma Pool is raised by .1 for Humans and .05 for all others. Would Human/Drakes, Shifters, Changlings, or anything that is base humand increase by .1? Or do only normal Humans do that?

5. Do physical adepts who can astraly perseve get to use there physical atributes to fight spirits, or do they have to use mental ones? What about Duel Natured PC's.

Well thanks for not flaming me. I try to read the books with care and I do own most of them so if you want to refure me to a section or page I can look it up. I just work 50+ hours and try to get questions answered befor they come up in game play.

I'll get 4. I think Drakes and shifter aren't human. So it would be .05.

Well very cool, thanks for the answers.

So then when any one other than a mage or Shaman gets hit with Powerbolt or any other spell they just get the basic resistance, not pools. Wow. Bummer.

And thats what I thought for the spirit fighting. This came up because the drake is duel natured and was fighting a spirit, I let him use physical atributes because I could not find the wording in the book.

1) No

2) Anyone or anything able to cast spells has access to a spell pool. Anyone or anything that can not cast spells lacks a spell pool.

3) It is always a base TN of 4, though modifiers do apply when relevant

4) Technically, its not that every good karma provides .1 karma pool, its every 10th good karma point becomes a point of karma pool. Changelings that started human retain the human karma pool progression. Shifters are not base human, they are base <insert animal> I dont know about Drakes.

5) All dual-natured beings, which include any astrally percieving mages or adepts, use their physical attributes in astral combat - which, for them, is exactly the same as physical combat, except on the astral. Note however, that sometimes specific rules - such as engaging spirits in a contest of wills or attacking astral objects such as foci - supercede this general rule.

Edit: /me = slow today

I'm sorry, that last one had me? Can you exspand on that?

Are you saying a mage can exstend protection with in his line of site???

You have to divide the dice when you announce the defence and not as spells are cast? does this apply to using spell pool dice for spell defence for yourself?

Yes and yes. You have to state how you're allocating your sorcery and spell defense dice on your action. This matters because it means less dice availiable for you to cast spells with. However, I believe it's a free action to do so, so you can reallocate those dice pretty much anytime.

*Edit* replying to GrinderTheTroll's assertion that dice need to be split up per target:

Actually, Spell Defense doesn't work that way. You can protect a number of people equal to your sorcery skill, but you don't allocate dice for each individual person. You allocate dice for spell defense, then can use up to that amount of dice whenever any of the protected people are targetted by a spell (Spell defense dice don't refresh until the next Combat Turn, though). You roll against the Force of the incoming spell, and your successes negate the enemy spellcaster's successes. If you reduce their successes to zero or less, their spell fizzles completely.

The main points have been made, but there are a few errors, so I'll step in and clarify in case any confusion remains. (for reference, see page 183, SR3)

As a free action you choose whether to allocate sorcery/spell pool dice to spell defense. This means that you can always have all of your sorcery and spell pool allocated to spell defense to defend against surprise magical attacks, and, as long as you havent used them already in a given combat turn, still be able to reallocate whatever dice you need to cast spells when your initiative comes around.

You can protect other subjects (people, creatures, or objects) with spell defense, up to a number equal to your sorcery skill (or spell defense specialization, if you have one). All of those subjects must be within (Magic X 100) meters, and they all must be on the same plane as the mage providing the defense. There is no specified LOS requirement, just a maximum distance restriction. You do not need to decide how to divide up the dice between those subjects until a spell targets one or more of the protected subects.

One implied benefit that has not been directly mentioned is that the mage providing spell defense can sense when one or more protected subjects are targeted by a spell, though the protecting mage does not gain any knowledge concerning the nature of the spell. At this time, he may choose to use some or all of the allocated spell defense dice to block the incomming spell.

The mage rolls the number of allocated dice he chooses to use to block a given incomming spell against a TN equal to the force of the spell, and subtracts the number of successes he generates from the number of successes generated by the caster. If the caster has any successes remaining, the subject then gets its own resistance test against the reduced number. If not, the spell fails. Note that if one spell is affecting multiple protected targets, the mage providing spell defense need only roll once to block that single spell.

Any dice actually used in providing spell defense can not be used for any other action, including additional uses of spell defense, until the next Combat Turn (the next time initiative is rolled).

Wow, thanks so much for the detailed answer. That really helps.

GaiasWrath8: No problem.

elbows: It is true that once dice are allocated to spell defense, you cant use them for anything else... until you reallocate those dice. Which is a free action.

... I think I understand ...

Yep, it 'refreshes' just like Pools. The is no restriction other than the use of a Free Action to adding or subtracting dice from (unused) Spell Defence though.

[edit] Nice edit Kanada Ten!!! [edit]

Nice edit, indeed.

Well I got it. Thanks for the help. My players were very happy to hear about this.

Yes, every mage should walk around with all of his sorcery and spell pool dice allocated to spell defense for himself and sorcery-1 of his friends, or, perhaps, rather than a couple of friends, to his foci or other valuables.

I understand your confusion concerning sorcery dice allocation - its the only skill in the game where you have to split up the dice between different uses, and the rules concerning what happens when you use Sorcery dice vary. If you read carefully, you'll notice that every application of sorcery except dispelling - spellcasting, spell defense, and astral combat - all talk about allocating sorcery dice. (I personally think they just forgot to use the terminology in the dispelling section) So you're not 'de-allocating' the dice, you're 'reallocating' them. You'll also notice that only two of the uses - astral combat and spell defense - mention that using dice allocated to them render those used dice unavailable until the next Combat Turn. Dice allocated to Spellcasting and Dispelling can be used multiple times, assuming you have multiple initiative passes.

I completely agree that the section could have been worded a lot more clearly. However, it never says that dice, once allocated, can not be reallocated until the next combat turn, though it does say explicitly that allocating sorcery dice is a free action and specify exactly in what situations the use of Sorcery dice prevents them from being used again until initiative is rerolled, so I think its fair to assume that the rule that isn't in there isnt a rule.

As an aside, I can think of exactly one way in which having spell defense dice allocated would be a bad thing, and that is if an ambushing mage suspects that you are providing spell defense and triple-casts force 1 L stunbolts at 3 different protected subjects. The caster probably wont take any drain from doing so, and doesnt need to bother using spell pool. As the protecting mage you know nothing about the threat level presented by the spells - all you know is that, suddenly, three protected subjects are simultaneously being hit with separate spells. Choosing to protect them eliminates sorcery dice you could be using for more important things.

Ok, you've convinced me on the reallocation thing... but now I'm confused about dice refreshing

4. The two dice used for spell defense are unavailable until the next Combat Turn.

Now... should I confuse you with a technicality you're violating, but that I, personally, ignore? Or should I leave you with the functional understanding you currently have, since its how I run my games?

Speaking of Line of Sight, there's another defense that can be used against spells.

Don't get targeted.

"You can't kill what you can't see" especially applies to magic in SR. Almost all the spells require some line of sight ot the target.

If you're facing enemy mages and you don't have magical defense of your own, it's time to break out the thermal smoke grenades and switch to ultrasound sights.

One favorite of mine is also splash grenades filled with a DMSO/Hyper/cayenne pepper combo. Generally anyone hit by that at the very least will have serious penalties to do anything, and more likely be on the floor crying in fits.


-karma

Well alright, the technicality is as follows: if you check the rules concerning spell pool use on SR3 page 44, youll notice that the maximum number of spell pool dice you can add to a particular Sorcery Test is equal to the number of Sorcery dice used for that test. What this means is that, when spending dice allocated to spell defense, you can only spend a number of allocated spell pool dice equal to or less than the number sorcery dice spent.

In your example, if you had sorcery and spell pool of 6 each and spent a total of 8 dice blocking spells before your first action, optimally you would have had to spend 4 sorcery dice and 4 spell pool dice, leaving two of each remaining. When your turn comes around and you spend your free action reallocating your defense to spellcasting, you still have 4 dice to use, but only 2 of them are sorcery dice and 2 of them are spell pool dice. If you use them all to cast a spell, by the time your second action comes up you only have 2 sorcery dice remaining, and no spell pool.

I ignore this largely because its easier to keep track of things if you assume that defense dice are subtracted from allocated spell pool first rather than figuring out what balance of sorcery and spell pool dice are used. Additionally, the whole dice allocation mechanism is sufficiently strange and limiting that I dont mind granting a little extra leeway to the use of spell defense, especially since mundie's are f*cked against enemy mages without it.

In my games, I have changed the way the whole Spell Defence system works. Basically I have removed any hint of alloting Sorcery dice (by totally removing Spell Defence as a specialization of Sorcery), and only allow Spell Pool dice to be used for Spell Defence. This not only puts a reasonable limit on the amount of Spell Defence available, but brings the Sorcery Skill back in line with the way every other skill works.

New stupid question.

Okay and I'm not joking about this.
Dealing with insect shamans and their bugs.
If you drop an ant shaman from 100m high what's the damage? FACT: Ants in real life reach terminal velocity at 10cm, thus no matter how high they are dropped they can't be killed.

That's due to mass and surface area. Flesh-form insect spirits are much closer to metahuman in density and surface area than they are to ants in those matters. To answer your actual question, ant shamen are still human and have all the aerodynamic properties of a human until magic changes those without warning.