I was cruising through NSRCG today thinking about stuff to do with my character's Karma, and I ran into the Sensing metamagic technique. I've never heard of this technique before, but just from the name it sounds kinda interesting, and right up this character's alley. Could I get some details, hopefully including the book it's from? Is it really any good at all, or am I better off taking Shielding or Divining?

Target: Awakened Lands, but you'll have to wait on full details from me. It's basically the adept power of Magic Sense on crack. Super crack.

it's only useful for detecting large-scale happenings on the astral plane, like astral shallows and mana storms and whatnot. you couldn't use it to detect a shaman's lodge, which the adept power would.

Really? When I was making my physmage for Dr.Funk's game he insisted it did everything the adept power did and more.

funk's funk is full of the funk. check the last paragraph on page 110 of T:AL; it specifically disallows such.

Like I wouldn't have posted it if I had it in front of me. What you slacking for?

i hear and obey: no wards, no spells, no foci, no spirts, no astrally projecting mages, no and so on--only changes within the mana field and astral terrain itself.

IIRc it will let you detect things like background counts, astral rifts, etc

Which is great for finding out things that cause background counts... Someone with a large background count in their basement might be worth looking in to...

hisss. you do not know the havoc Divination can wreak. of course, said power can only be unlocked by gaining several hard-to-gain Divination-based homebrew metamagics. but trust me, once you get those--or meet someone who has? you won't laugh at Divination anymore.

I have a game with a PC who has it. I love it, one of the best plot hook generators ever. The last question they asked was "Is there a malignant 'they' out to get us?" I laughed so hard I had to go pee.

haha, wow. "signs point to 'there is now'."

The same could be said for Centering, only they're not homebrew.

Honestly, though, what I want is a metamagic that does something like the Otaku's Info Sortilege. None of this seeing the future mumbo-jumbo crap; none of this vague, "You will meet a kind stranger," junk; just useful info, tied to a Knowledge skill so it's not stupidly expensive to make it work decently.

Meh, that sounds more like an adept power. Or a spell.

Eh, I guess I could just not bother with initiation other than the first for Masking, and spend the karma on more spells, though I can't think of what other spells to get. Eh, maybe I'll just cash it all in and buy more stuff for my deck (playing a decker/shamanist).

Shielding is very good.

Invoking is damn near priceless for a shaman.

It's possible, no TN modifiers like in SR2. Just no astrally projecting while decking.

Whatever, there is no conjuring while in the matrix, maybe that's what I was thinking.

I think you also suffer dumpshock when you project out while decking.

It is rather unfortunate that there is basically no synergy between a decker and a shamanist, save for the reliance on mental abilities rather than physical ones and a relative lack of Essence loss for the decker. I kinda wanted to stay away from summoning, otherwise Invoking would be a good choice. Shielding sounds interesting though, as does Divination though it's skill-dependent. Any other suggestions?

If you're into information gathering Psychometry is cool. It lets you read "past impressions" on items, place, ect. Sort of like that guy from that movie where he could touch stuff and know things about what happened to the stuff before... Vibes was the moive. Man that was driving me crazy.

Why you dissin' on conjuring though? Having a spirit guard your meat while decking sounds sweet. Great Forms are like a chrome nine in pocket the for a Shaman on the Projection. And plus, then you can have more than one spirit going at a time.

Metamagic wise, I don't know about summoning having synergy with decking. But it is nice to be able to conjure a few spirits to guard your body, maybe conceal it, maybe confuse anyone that tries to disturb you or just attack them. Maybe something as simple as jacking you out when they see smoke coming out of your ears.

I'd get Divination.

"What kind of IC will the host system have at a certain time?"

"How many deckers are there in the system?"

"Are there any worms in the paydata?"

None of that is a good substitute for actually knowing. You'd have to scan the paydata and so on. Not saying it's not good, just skill intensive and doesn't save you much used flippantly (Grade 1 = 1 Question per week). Though the iconography of video taro is funny.

And oops, on the B&R skills being active.

Hm. Okay, I suppose I can just default on Electronics and Electronics B/R off of the respective Computer skills. It's a +2 modifier, which in turn gets cancelled by microscopic vision, and I can put the points gained into other skills I neglected (like Stealth; I can't believe I forgot that!)

But that still leaves me with no conjuring until after chargen. Think I should cash in my gun and gun specialization for conjuring? I'd say yes in a heartbeat, except for the fact that it leaves me essentially helpless in a fight except for Great Form spirits. Tell me, how useful are Great Form force 4 nature spirits (probably the best I can hope for with my stats) in combat? Enough that I could just forget my piddly little gun?

Depends on where you conjured it from, some have Engulf, Confusion, and Storm Strike. Certianly enough to hide behind and let soak the bullets.

Whenever you play a character that "fills" two archetypes, you are going to have to make sacrifices. You can't be great at everything. I've found that usually I fall back on my character's background and history to resolve compromises.

Still, I can't imagine how you ran out of skill points, especially if you had enough to pump into Electronics AND Electronics B/R at one point. Really, I would probably focus on having a Computer 6, Sorcery 6, and a Conjuring of 3 to 4. Everything else is just fluff and generally useful instead of central to the character.

It'll be interesting to see how it turns out, that's for sure. I played a Decker/Fire Elementalist for a while with excellent results.

As a Priority B snake shaman, you are only going to get to conjure your choice of 1 spirit of man. City spirits are probably most useful. Getting invoking to use on one type of spirit seems expensive, but if you don't, you will only have spirits available in one domain.

City may have more powers and be more generally applicable, but I'm going for Hearth. It will be much easier to summon Great Form Hearth spirits, which can be done in your own home surrounded by a lodge and several wards and usually leaves you feeling drained, than City spirits, unless your lodge is a bus stop or something. The Fear power that the city spirits get really doesn't make up for that. Looking it over, I guess Force 4 great forms are mostly only useful for the COnfusion and COncealment powers; nothing else is all that great at that level.

Plus it fits my character better.

I used up all 8 of the build points I gained from dropping Electronics and Elec. B/R taking Stealth 3, raising Cha to 4, and bumping Computer B/R and Ettiquite up 1 each. So yeah, that's all the build points.

Anyway, thanks a bunch guys, you've given me a lot to think about.

An Awakened cult/revolutionary leader who fancied himself a prophet, complete with advanced custom Divination-related metamagics and a cabal of similarly talented individuals, was able to do things like placing timed bombs at places where he knew my primary character would be standing, and another one a certain distance and direction away, because he knew my character would detect the trap and attempt to evade it(right into the real trap). He is the Kwitsatz-Haderach.

Divination is the devil.

heh. wk doesn't need houserules to make anything insanely good. though it helps.

having never been exposed to SR2 anchoring, i think SR3 anchoring is pretty swell. you just have be careful about how and when you use it.

Some people consider the list of canon metamagics as a good start...