I was idly fiddling with characters today (God bless the NSRCG) and whilst messing with a physmage I remembered something that I don't normally think of.

Spells like Death Touch and Stun Touch require, naturally, touching the target. A touch must, by definition, be an Unarmed Combat attack. As far as I can tell, there is therefore no reason why that "touch" can't be a smackdown from the attacking mage.

Suddenly my habit of picking up decent hand to hand skills for even my normal mages seems a much better idea. A physmage specialising in martial arts on the physad side becomes a terrifying thing to behold.

Am I right? Wrong? So far off the page I couldn't see it on a clear day with Vision Mag 3?

It's not a bad one-two punch, but I'm not sure if it's strictly rules legal since both casting a spell and engaging in full-on melee combat are Complex Actions. I certainly do remember there's some sort of TN bonus if all you're out to do is touch someone (and that that sort of touch is allowed, even if a balls-out damaging attack isn't).

And, well, being able to mix it up a little isn't a bad thing. Have your Bruce Lee physmage dude barely graze a few people with touch-effect spells, and then go crazy and kung fu 'em once they've got a few TN mods. It'll cut down on his Drain and look cool.

No Hammer Time for you!

Also be careful, by making an Unarmed Combat test, the opponent may end up dealing damage to your PC instead.

As an added bonus, if your enemy wins the melee role and hits you instead, the touch requirement is still met and they still get zapped!

N ow there's a defence... "I just cast a touch-based spell. Still wanna punch me out?"

Even logically if your opponent is armed and hits you back he has not touched you, his weapon has.

Edward

I did this once and the GM allowed the character to design spells at the beginning of the game, too, so I remade all those low-level wizard spells from that other game, too: chilling touch, burning hands, shocking grasp, etc. Called them elemental manipulations, too, so the secondary effects would kick in, too. Drain sucked, but after I got Centering it wasn't too bad.

SR3.178 about Range for spells, mentions that "since you only need to touch a target you get a -1 TN". So reading that, it looks like if you intend to issue an ass whoopin' you would resolve as normal, otherwise you get a -1 TN for the purposes of touching only (no melee damage).

Sounds good.

S'okay, every bookninja has their offdays.

That overrides SR3 which states:

The real fun of Touch Based spells is social situations. Say you have to extract an unwilling corp exec during an office party. The standard approach (blow it up with an assault cannon) may not work too well.
Instead put on a three piece suit and strut around like you belong, exchange business cards with your target, and shake his hand. Bam! 6D stun and he doesn't even hit the ground. You carry him to the door. "looks like my firend has has too much to drink. I'm going to call him a cab."

There needs to be a spell that makes people drunk.

I think a "drunkeness" spell is highly appropriate. There are already a few "buzz" style spells out there (the original UB book has one, if I'm not mistaken) and "Boozify" is only another type of high, so to speak. It's a really useful spell, too; make it powerful enough, and the person will have no memory of what happened for an hour before and three afterwards. Elves would also be at a terriffic disadvantage, while Trolls will be almost unaffected due to their absurdly high mass. (The amount of alcohol needed to make a Troll tipsy may kill an Elf.)
The issue of Drain is easy enough; make it equal to the drain of an equivalent Stun spell but make it slightly higher to reflect the other side effects, etc.

As K-10 said, there is already a Health spell called Intoxication in canon.

It has some hard numbers as I recall, but it's strong! Same modifiers apply as a chaos spell! +1/force/successes.

Cast at a low force at.. say... a social party for an extraction...
Someone that's already been drinking may not catch on, but that +2 you do will be a killer. Plus, since the force is still low, it's harder to spot (just don't have the shaman cast it).