Not a single example you give has a ratio remotely as high as 1/100.

~J

I was responding to the false premise the nothing could be rare if there is 6,000,000 of them. (BTW do you know how many Black Holes there are? Becuase not even Hawkings knows that one.)

False assumption.

According to MITS the vast majority of the magically active are full mages, with aspected, adepts, the insane and the undiscovered making up only a fraction of that number. Far more than half of the 1% of the population is discovered, finds the training, and is a full mage. Only a fraction of the awakened are undiscovered or limited according to MITS.

Also, would you consider doctors rare? lawyers? cab drivers? Well there are more magically active trained and able folks in SR than there any one of those groups.

You can eat at the chinese restaurant every day and still hate chinese people. You could live in Chinatown and hate chinese people.

Some nice 'ware (biocybernanowhatever) that gives protection against maig influence. Raising your willpower i.e. Don't have it thought trhough, that came to my mind. Would be nice, but could bring us to a race of arms and armor.

I like the idea of USB for cyberware. Just plug in som parts But not manufactured by microsoft...

Hawkings..? Don't recognise the name. Is he a famous physicist? Sure would be coincidental to have a name /so like/ that of a real famous physicist.

</dead pan>

Dunno if racist people are aware of that. They tend to be very boneheaded and somehow stupid. You don't have to accept the people you see every day - you can interact with them and still hate them. Humans are not open for rational arguments though (otherwise history would have been much different).

It is in M&M under the chart that has the vision modifiers. I will get a quote up asap.

I don't. Stop sucking my CPU cycles! Negotiate your own damn bus conflicts!

I agree with your larger point, though.

~J

yes, but most people don't. i'm not saying that rubbing shoulders with the Awakened every day will make everyone love them--i'm saying rubbing shoulders with the Awakened every day will decrease the general level of animosity among the populace towards them.

That's true.

(Catched the point before, just wanted to start some traffic )

Well, you saw my response to cynic_project's post.

The GM can do anything... If they are willing to put some thought into it.

BTW, exactly how effective is Kinesics or most of the Social Adept powers in the Matrix?
Did I hear, "Not at all?" Thought so. You want to screw with a Social Adept, then throw them in the Matrix. Throw high social test TNs at them, have the Johnson be an SK.

Just... Don't lie down and take it in the ass from your Players.

Yes, it sucks that magic--which inherently makes people better at performing certain feats than mundanes--makes magical character better.

Like I said before, Screw Mundanes. They're mundane. They also outnumber mages, and control the world. This whole argument is like complaining about the lack of white NBA players. You're missing the bigger picture.

BTW, I do think magic is special. It should be. However, that doesn't stop me from playing mundanes. Maybe if you're being innundated by cybermages, you ought to be questioning the people who are doing it, rather than those of us who actually think magic is special and allows magicians to do some things better than mundanes.

Rules for Otaku PCs first appeared in VR2.0.

1. No.

2. Two physads. One Social, one Stealth (w/ facial sculpt and melanin control).

It'd be nice to see someone else answer Synner.

Like mfb said, how are they going to be badass at everything once you factor the necessary karma and cash expenditures to make them baddas in everything?

They also must take multiple Gaesa. I want to see this cyberphysmage with 6 pts. of cyber with any decent magical abilities (OBTW, I thought DS eschewed even mid-grade Initiates), skills, attributes, and toys to go with all that cyberware.

Then I want to see how they can fulfill three GM-chosen Gaesa, which (since I'm a bastard) might just be contradictory. How's your mage-sammy going to shoot straight when he's singing, dancing, and being under the open sky in the middle of a firefight to recast the low-force Armor spell the non-cybered enemy mage just nuked to Hell.

I don't even know what to say to this.

Oh, I know.

Would you play this PC?

Would you allow this PC as a GM?

Indeed. But if you don't apply evey conceivable TN mod for all of your other PCs, including your mundane Face, you're just being a hypocrite.

No, it isn't.

It's funny how I've mentioned my Social Adept here at least twice. I posted her Adept Abilities, and yet no one seems to think I'm going off the edge because in two game years she's going to get Cultured Pheromones 2.

You want social penalties? She's from Chicago. She worked in DeeCee for the UCAS government during a period when mages were not exactly the most beloved group of people in the UCAS. She was so afraid of her abilities until she reached college because her parents and family were old-school Irish Roman Catholics and the first time she astrally perceived she had a nervous breakdown. And she'll be 41 when she gets the pheromones.

But I might as well cram in a ton of combat cyber, too, right? Because she's magically active, and I can... You know, because no one who plays magicians thinks of anything except how to be totally outrageous and silly caricatures.

Hmm.... Now, where can I scrounge up a million nuyen and a beta clinic...

His subconcious is probably why they got the powers in the first place.

I agree with mfb. Any GM who even thought about imposing a Flaw on one of my PCs is dead to me. No one should have to put up with that.

Hence the requirement that it be A or B priority or 15, or 25 BP. Magic is different, and special. It should be treated as such.

Except that they've usually made lousy PCs.

We have. They are complicated, but there's nothing inherently wrong with them.

Nope. Not since Virtual Realities, 15 years ago... And +8 TN to decking was a real pain.

Your statement is inherently contradictory.

Nothing in the rules suggests classes. SR3 may simplify things for starting players.

It is telling, however, that at the beginning of Magic in the Shadows, Man and Machine, Rigger 3, and Matrix the books start out describing how they fit in the world and how all of these abilities can and do affect everyone.

Thanks, audun, for making the same suggestion that I would have.

One of the things I've noticed is people mentioning anti-cyber magic that makes magic less effective.

1. How would it work within the game mechanics? Cyber can't displace astral impressions or anything. At least, AFAIK.

2. Are you going to make it lame and not work like the Poor Link edge, which applies TN mods for beneficial magic, too? If not, why?

I never understood the desire to regain essence either. You can still plug in the hole. But there's no logical reason why you can regrow lost essence anymore than you can regrow lost magic or a lost arm (and I do mean regrow, not buy a vatgrown replacement).

... Or saving someone's life from certain death, or using it to rescue a kidnapped 6 year-old unharmed?

You say to never underestimate people's fears.

I would add, "Never underestimate people's faith in the goodness of the amazing," either.

And over a very, very long term they may just be good at one or two of those things.

What's the saying, "Jack of all trades, master of none." It's pretty apt to this whole discussion. It seems you are working on the assumption that not only will they want to do everything, but they will do everything, and do it as well or better than mundanes.

This is a fallacy of assumption backed without a shred of proof.

Ditto

There is clearly a disconnect in what people consider rare.

1% is not rare, it's uncommon.

1 in a million is rare.

Several. Next question.

Your question is based on a false premise. The question isn't how many we've each encountered. It's how many the average person will encounter in their lifetime.

I guess you refer to this sentence ...

???

Now, let's look at this a bit closer:

1. No explicit statement that Adepts cannot turn off their powers in general or their vision enhancements in particular.
2. You're making a reverse conclusion. Something that's not that easily allowed
3. Let's assume that your reverse conclusion is valid => Users of natural vision cannot turn off those systems. Unless of course another rule or fact would says so
4. While Adept Powers are treated as "natural", they still are subject to willfull use by the adept (otherwise Powers like Kllings Hands would be always "on"). There's no exception being made to this for any (sofar) known power.

=> Conclusion: There's nothing that says that Adepts cannot turn off their "natural" Lowlight or Thermosight that comes from an Adept Power.

Move...

You don't live in TT if you hate elves. You move to the UCAS or England if you hates mages.

Or you seclude yourself in the woods, form a militia, start a militant anti-magic Matrix site, kill some mage wannabes, and end up in prison for the rest of your life.

ooooooh... That's hilarious.

Clearly.

No ... I just made it very short

Of course it's that question ...

... since we can only give average numbers for such encounters, once we have representative number of individual answers

</racist>
I'm a born english, so why should i move out of the part of the city occupied by the chinse? Should they move! Damn fuckin' yellowfaces...
</racist>

Well, that's why I presented you with a second option.

Sorry, really couldn't resist and I'm on medication

(but only for 'flu)

I get the impression that this discussion should be dead by morning...

Stephen Hawkings. Did a lot of math with black holes. Most famous for writing a couple of books explaining high physics that can be understood by an average (not genius) person. Expected to die from a debilitating nervous disorder during the early 90's but was still alive in the early 2000's. Stuck in a wheelchair and uses a voice synthesizer to talk.

Did you actually see me claiming that anywhere?

Well, let's see they go out there way to say cybernetic can be turned off. Do they ever say that adept powers can be turned off? I know that some powers only work when you want to. So really if they both could be turned off when you do not want them one then why would they bring up only one?

By the way,there is nothing to say that milk doesn't kill dragons on contact. Nor anything in regards to elves not blowing up when in thinking they aren't the best in the world.Nor anything on the grounds that vampires die when drinking diet cola..Or many other things. They do not talk about a lot things.

Indeed. But there is precedent for magic to affect social situations.

And while the powers don't leave astral impressions, neither do the physad abilities which mimic spells like Increase Reflexes or Increase Attributes. The description of physads is that the magic has "grounded" into the auras.

But also, it's a false analogy. While Compel Truth will leave signs on the Astral while it's being used, and leave the astral signature once it's gone, it also directly affects the vict... target of the spell, and they get to oppose it.

Kinesics, for example, does not do anything to other people. It's control of the body's unconscious physical responses to social interactions. Likewise, Improved Ability (Anything) doesn't affect other people--It strengthens the physad's opwn abilities in that skill up to the level of the skill. Basically, I treat it like automatically refreshing karma pool providing supplemental dice and, karmically/magically, reinforcing the abilities so that there is a greater chance that they succeed in what they are doing.

It is moreso the Way of the Speaker powers which attempt to affect other people, and those are all resisted powers. Whether they leave any astral impression is up to you, but I see them similarly to Innate Spell in terms, and could (YMMV) leave such astral signatures.

Finally, while Social Adepts can also make use of the spells (As I described yesterday), so can mundane Faces. But it doesn't make it inherently unfair beyond the fact that magic makes life inherently unfair between magicians and mundanes.

Touche. Makes me wonder why I mentioned it.

Except that the -3 TN doesn't apply universally. Sure, they can talk a secguard out of his pants, but the Security Rigger's not going to be affected. Nor will a J they meet at the Wiki Stopover. Their abilities have weaknesses. In a stand-up face-to-face squareoff between two maxed-out Faces, the Social Adept will walk all over the mundane. They also paid for it at CC, and can lose those abilities if they are hurt sufficiently, or even if someone slaps a stimpatch on them. A Face will never lose their skills or attributes, and can progress faster at gaining new skills. It's easier for a mundane to increase Etiquette to 7 than it is for the physad to Initiate. But... they also have to increase their Etiquette 6 to 7 before they can increase IA (Etiquette) to 7. It's not fair. It's magic. They're supposed to be better.

Indeed. But you didn't answer my question. What rational argument is there to inflict penalties on physads other than "they can't do this?"

I play mundanes almost exclusively, so don't think that just because I'm arguing that physads shouldn't be punished for the mere act of existing that I am going to replace every street sam, Face, and non-Decker/Rigger with magicians because, "I can." I thing that the entire premise that cybermages will become common is not born out of anything other than a worst-case scenario that I don't buy into.

I think that, frankly, there are better reasons to play any character than how quickly I can get as many extra dice and TN mods at Creation. I actually do think of the characters first, whereas too many people here seem to think that everyone but them is some number-crunching rules lawyer bastard, and that magic's not fair!

Magic isn't supposed to be fair. That's the whole point. You pay out the nose for the privilege, and live with the consequence--good and bad--of playing a magician. But there is no reason why someone who can effectively create something from nothingness with a flick of the wrist should be equal to you or me. Any fears that magicians will replace every mundane PC because they can perform magic and everything else without penalty does not, to me, seem borne out of any facts. No one here who suggests that they will has even pointed to this trend in their own games, let alone proven where this transition is occuring in the source material.

If it's so big a deal, go back to the SR1/2 prohibitions on astral travel. Increase drain. But there is nothing that has been proven in the hundreds of posts made to this thread that shows it is any sort of trend, threat, or problem other than exasperations equivalent to, "but it's just not fair."

So what? Life's not fair. Neither is Shadowrun.

Yes.

You're trying to use DS as a statistical sampling pool.

Club: He's mocking lorthazar because the good doctor's name is Hawking, not Hawkings.

[totally off-topic aside]
On at least one occasion, he's made a bet with a fellow astrophysicist about the fundemental nature of black holes where if he'd have won the bet, the other astrophysicist would have given him pornography.
[/totally off-topic aside]

Just an aside, it no longer is considered ALS or Lou Gehrig's Disease. It has progressed similarly, which led to the misdiagnosis, but is currently classified as a yet unknown genetic variant of a variety of neurodegenerative disorders. His lateral horns have not degraded as much as parts of his peripheral nervous system, which requires a reclassification. That, and ALS patients rarely survive after the age of 40.

Ill perceived I guess

I nowhere said I wanted to use DS as statistical sampling pool
You're interpreting there a lillte bit too much

1/100 would constitute rare as it would be considered uncommon. Rolling a 1 on a d100 or percentile dice would constitute infrequently occuring. By the definition of the word, lorthazar has a point. The fact that you would almost probably run into an awakened individual has nothing to do with what degree of rarity "rare" means. This is all a bit of a red herring anyhow, as its more an issue of semantics than anything else. The point mfb and Kage were making (sans disagreement on definition of the word's usage) is still correct.

2) In response to Synner's questions:

1. Absolutely not.
2. We have two physads in my group. One a phys/mage who hasn't even tapped into any of the new powers and the other a straight physad who has only purchased the gliding power... and I believe the wall running power is on the table.

Exactly the opposite, IIRC. I know for certain that the other guy started receiving Penthouse.

~J

The thing is, they're kinda right. Before geasea, every time you took a point of cybeware or two points of bioware, you lost a point of magic. No arguments, no caveats, just heads I win, tails you lose. But with geasea, all you have to do is carry a gold(1) ring(2) with an inset ruby(3), and there's your Magic point back, free and clear. Some people have even contended that they can use blinking to fuful a Gesture Geas, or a whisper to fufil an Incantation Geas. I happen to think those are incredibly cheesy, but that's not the point.

The point is, the introduction of geasea has made getting a couple of points of cyber much much less costly for the Awakened character in terms of power lost over power gained. On the flip side, there has been very little improvement in the realm of cyberware, and any improvements that do come down the pike can easily be pre-empted by the Awakened character just as easily as the mundane.

I'm actually more of a fan of taking Response Increase out of the deck, and instead making the encephalon responsible for it. It would even make more logical sense; how on earth does something *outside* of your brain, only connected to it through a datajack, increase the speed of your brain's response time? But that's an issue for a later version of SR.

I think the single greatest concept that can be added to SR canon--maybe in the new SOTA or something--can be summed up in two words:

Anti-Magic Field.

Now, before you all groan and skip the rest of my post, hear me out. In the Star Wars novels (none of which were written by George Lucas and therefore do not inherently suck) there is a creature called the ysalamiri which produces a sorta anti-Force field. I imagine something similar could be dreamt up for SR; maybe another variant of FAB (FAB IV? )

Besides the obvious tactics of tying these things to soldiers and using them as anti-magic fields, the Star Wars ysalamiri also made it easier and faster to clone people, explainning it as the lack of Force interference making the cloning process more stable or something. So imagine, if you will, Mana-free environments for cyber/bioware implantation and gene therapy. The Essence loss/Bio Index increase would be lessened for mundanes because there would be less astral interference for the soul to work against (or insert some other pseudo-scientific crap here), but for Awakened it would be disasterous. The sudden influx of Mana on a somewhat weakened but still mana-sensetive body would cause them to lose twice as much Magic.

Or something. Sound interesting?