That's why I'm just throwing ideas out. Everyone else seems to be doing so.

I don't think the "double-digit initiate" part is the problem... the problem comes with high sorcery skill, diversified high-powered spells, and powerful foci - doesn't have much to do with initiating.

I assume they go hand-in-hand. They do in my games anyway. Initiation does help, but Sorcery skill is the key.

From Dawnshadow's description though, the mages wer definitely being downplayed, and probably didn't have that high a Sorcery skill in any case.

You know, this is a good point. How's this for an idea: everyone gets access to Spell Pool. Before you object, let me explain. Everyone (with or without access to Sorcery skill) get Spell Pool just like casters equal to (WIL+INT+MAG)/2 (note that this is an increase across the board, and that mundanes will have a Magic Attribute of 0, so they will almost certainly have less Pool than a mage.) Spell Defense is now a function of Spell Pool, which is really the only thing a mundane can use Spell Pool *for*, and represents basically how much your active willpower comes into play in resisting spells/casting spells/etc. Most of the limits to Spell Defense outlined on pg. 183 of SR3 apply: you can protect a number of other people equal to your Sorcery skill, and only if they're within (Magic * 100) meters.

Thus for all practical purposes mundanes get Spell Pool equal to (INT+WIL)/2, but it's only real use is for resisting spells cast on them.

Sound like a good idea? Hell I'd try to put something like this into a current game as a house-rule, but a new edition would be a perfect place to muck around with this as an idea.

Ok, let me elaborate further. Take a samurai. What can he do in any given situation against a random hostile target? He can go into melee, smack 'em up personal, maybe with spurs, maybe with bare hands, maybe even a dikoted katana. He can use a flash or a smoke grenade to make a bunch of guards or gangers helpless. He can use a frag grenade to make them slightly dead and send some of them running per their professional rating. Finally, he can shoot 'em. Pretty straight forward stuff. Now, if you have an imaginative roleplayer as a samurai, he can be creative. Use the terrain, bounce off walls, herd the enemy over a cliff, use cover, bluff, intimidate, etc. Now look at what the magician can do.

Hell, the sky's the limit! The magician can alter the battlefield in a way that makes a flashbang grenade look like a match. You want solid cover in a wide open field? Shape earth or Physical Barrier. Enemy's getting away in a limo with your target? Ice sheet. Outnumbered and outgunned? Hot potato. And I haven't even started with the spirit powers.

The power of magic is the power of improvisation. Where it takes a normal person half a day with a shovel to dig a trench, or a couple hours with a make up kit to disguise, or a full day with paint to alter the look of a vehicle, the magician may decide that he wants that done in a complex action. And presto - another tough situation avoided. Oh, I know about the new wiz carpaint and ruthenium polymers and the license plates that change. But these need installation and money. Vehicle Mask spell can be cast out of the blue on any vehicle down the street. Even the one you had to hijack because the run went bad.

Shadowrunning is all about improvisation - because no plan survives contact with the enemy. And magicians are the masters of it.

Try to see the big picture. How much does a submarine cost? Compare that to the cost of a spell formula that allows one to breathe water - or the physical barrier to make an -improvised- air bubble around the team. Just as the enemy wonder, where the hell did they go? If you didn't know you'd have to make a getaway through the sewers and across the bottom of a lake, you wouldn't have that submarine where you needed it. Oh sure, you could have a bunch of scuba diving suits and stuff stashed in the right place, but the problem is you need to do that in advance. Not when the drek hits the fan.

Yeah, if you had the real thing, and paid for it with real money, permits and all, and then had it magically appear just where you needed it to get your team out of a deadly situation, you'd be golden. And what if you don't?

Here's the kicker tho. Suppose you do have a Citymaster APC, with Lone Star corp colors and illegal riot control weapons and all. You stole it. The Lone Star is out to get you, but eh, wouldn't be the first time. And when the go-gang decides they don't like your car, your face and your girlfriend, that Citymaster sitting in the other side of town under the shed where Lone Star will never find it - won't do you any good at all. And you just might die, and the last thought just might be 'if only my Citymaster was here'. Ok, I'm making it a bit melodramatic, but I think I get my point across.

It makes a whole lot of difference when they're carrying things that do. Oh, in a different setting (say, Rifts) I would agree with the gung-ho attitude of the munchkinism, so bring forth the cyberzombie trolls and let the heads roll. But we're talking about Shadowrun, and shadowrunners simply don't have the luxury of lugging around assault cannons and milspec armor to every job. Sometimes all you can smuggle in is a ceramic little pistol and form fitting body armor. And sometimes - nothing at all. Buck-naked, magician is still dangerous.

He doesn't need to see you when you're casting it. Furthermore, if you didn't check for astral bodyguards, serves you right.

You bring that thing everywhere you go? The MMG, I mean? Because I get a feeling that you don't. Now magic, on the other hand... you have everywhere. Even when tied up and being interrogated by the mob, you can go out with a bang by detonating a fireball at ground zero. That is, if you didn't have any better ideas at the time.

Ever try flying that drone through a corridor? On the tenth subterranean bunker level with elevator doors this narrow?

Are you telling me that drones can track a loose cannon shadowrunner better than spirits can? He really shouldn't have bled on that crime scene... Spirit domains don't really factor into that, because that's what you get Watchers for. They'll find you on the other side of the planet if the magician knows what he's doing. And the worst of it - you won't hear any helicopters or see any baloons in the sky, or strange, extremely large insects on the wall. You might see a shimmer or two. But it'd be too late then.

As to being less powerful? Drone vs. Elemental, one on one death match? Immunity to Normal Weapons? Engulf? Even if the Elemental somehow starts to lose (say, the elemental was tiny and the drone was tricked out), the elemental has the luxury of going astral to disengage, and get healed up back to full if the magician spends an extra favor. How fair is that?

Oh and lets not forget the bottom line. What did your rotodrone cost you? 10-30k? With all the guns and custom parts? A nice elemental costs 6k for a force 6 riot control monster. If the magician is experienced he can summon up force 10 elementals for 10k a pop. More bang for your buck? I think so.

But let's not degenerate into statistics here. The magician has the rigger beat here, just by the flux rating. The rigger's drone has to be within N kilometers of rigger's body. The magician can be in Russia. Which makes the rigger a lot more vulnerable once the magician in astral form notices the drones buzzing around and starts following them with watchers. The drones will eventually run out of fuel, and the watchers - out of time. But it's a losing battle for the rigger, because the drones may lead the magician either to the rigger himself, or to one of his safehouses or drone-carrying vehicles ("motherships"). Then it becomes a trivial matter to track the rigger down and assault him with six elementals on a leash while he's in the shower, naked. With no chance of striking back - because the magician stays in the "asshole space".

You pay some karma or nuyen to have a watcher around for days, and it's a lot cheaper and more convenient than replacing a broken milspec drone...

Tell you what... if samurai had guns that could be smuggled anywhere and be virtually non-detectable (concealability infinity+) and those guns didn't need combat pool to be used, I'd agree with you. But they don't, and that's too bad. (I know that you're going to say about the drain, but drain is what happens to amateurs before they learn how to use magic well. No magician will suffer drain unless he chooses to.)

I'd keep one pool around and use those dice for everything. Because, really, when a magician fries someone with a mother of a manaball, he should be in the same position as a sam unloading with an assault cannon - wide open for return fire. I see the combat pool as dividing your attention between different activities - dodging, aiming, kicking... Certainly, magicians may be generally more aware than mundanes about the world around them, but they don't need the extra attack dice. They could stand to be a little more vulnerable, given all the other perks they get.

I hope I didn't sound too abrasive with my rant, it's just a sore subject for me. Years of playing Shadowrun online made me a bit cynical about the game balance. I've seen one too many ubermensch magicians played by very sad people. I should say that I enjoy playing magicians myself the most out of all the other archetypes in Shadowrun, but I prefer a more fair field for all archetypes, just to make the game more fun. Unfortunately, in all 3 editions of Shadowrun, magicians remained off the scale in power levels. Proof of that is the statistics on the various MUSH sites. On most of them, magicians are restricted in the same way visas and green cards are restricted in the United States. Otherwise there's too many of them coming in and the game becomes a magic la-la-land instead of Shadowrun.

Was that aimed at my post?

If so, the reason is because those damnable color inserts seem to be the primary culprit for why the bindings of my sourcebooks go to hell within a couple of weeks of purchase. It's no coincidence that they're /always/ the first pages to fall out. They also don't serve any real purpose other than to hike printing costs (and thus our costs) up.

So, in summary, they only prove to make the books more expensive, serve minimal purpose, and seem to ruin the book. At least in my experience they have.

I'm not offended, you're just wrong

Providing that you've got those spells. A mage's repertoire is finite.

Then it was a bad plan. This is almost as fallacious as "if it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid".

Anything the size of a molecule passes right through, so I think the team just drowned. If it helps any, they drowned in algae-free water. It doesn't cost that much to enviroseal most drones.

And if you've just spent six weeks on an epic bender, those spells won't help either. First off, I wasn't referring to a L-S wagon specifically, and there's absolutely no reason why a good Rigger's combat-wagon should be out of range to help them in an emergency.

But Riggers do have the luxury of staying in their combat-wagons if they built them properly and don't take jobs they aren't suited for.

What was that about being prepared? Like being prepared for him having someone with Masking watching his back? Or possibly an intermittent Astral patrol? Or maybe just the chance that he'll make his not-difficult-at-all test and notice the spell?

Funny, I get a feeling that I do. Rigger, remember? Those things hide real good in vans.

Unless they've as much as bothered to put you in a mage hood and stay a bit away from you. The second they're already going to be doing because of cranial bombs.

As a matter of fact, I have. Ever tried flying something with twelve dice and a -6 to all TNs?

Yes.

Except they won't unless the magician burns a lot of karma or cash on it, and they're stopped dead by wards.

If you're sensitive enough to notice that at twenty kilometers, you deserve to live. It's also not too late then with Watchers, because a mage can catch up. The drone can relay the info immediately rather than having to report back.

Unlike vehicle armor, they're vulnerable to Power increase from autofire. Unless the Elemental is seriously high-force, my money's on the Drone.

If they're powerful enough to survive the first salvo, odds are the mage only has one more favor, if that.

And one service each. What was that about going astral?

Gee, what was that stat that's really useful for Riggers? Was it Willpower?

And a lot less useful.

~J

And this is one thing that really bugs me about casters in general, and shamans in particular. Although it *say* that magic is difficult to detect and subtle and crap, in practise it's really easy to notice all but the lowest Force spells, only getting more subtle if you have a high grade of initiation. Shamans have it even worse, with a net -3 to the same already-easy test. There is no way to make your magic less obvious except as a side-effect of upping your Magic Attribute, and there is no way to make your magic obvious when you Magic Attribute is high. The rule here was obviously not throught through very well.

No! FanPro has started implementing a RP (Request Police), which means that personal requests are forbidden.

Yes so highly balanced that deckers and ECCM rules are unusable.

Yes mages are so rare as presented that they needed to coin the term "wagemage".

Remember the brain DRAIN.

Please, mallet, read my previous post carefully.

The drain is not an issue. At all. It doesn't take a math degree to figure out how to cast spells so you don't suffer any drain at all. It's all up to the magician. If he wants to hurt himself just like a weight lifter trying to lift something too heavy for him, he has that option, yes. But most magicians are smart enough to deliver spells that don't hurt them, only the enemy.

The only thing GM can do about it is watch each dice roll like a hawk - but the magician's player doesn't need to cheat on those to get away with no drain. Most of drain TN's are 2's and 3's. It's very simple to predict how the dice will roll, add a few extra and you're safe.

'Cept for all those vaunted Force 6 and 10 spirits.

To be fair, it's not quite as cut and dried as you make it out to be. For most spells worth the casting, you're going to need 4-8 successes to avoid drain completely. With a TN of 3 and a base Willpower of 6 (because we're munching our mage here, and that's not meant as a critical comment so nobody get up in arms about it) you're already having to allocate a couple of dice from spell pool to play the averages and get the result you're after. Your pool dice refresh every turn, so if you've got a couple of actions you're dipping into your spell pool again. And indeed, probably again because you'll need extra dice for casting if you want to maintain even basic spell defence for your team.

As long as a mage is riding the crest, he's doing okay. But it only takes one bad roll to start him on the slippery slope. And unlike any other character, that slope doesn't flatten out any time soon - no stim patches for you, old son, not without serious consequences.

On a personal note, and feel free to stop reading at this point if you don't rate other people's experience, I've played and GM'd Shadowrun since 1st edition, and I've yet to notice any imbalance of the degree you believe exists. In fact, the most successful PC that has played in my games started life with no cyberware at all (and no bio, it wasn't available back then). Even today, all he has is a synaptic accelerator. He regularly played along magical types initiated to 3 or 4 levels, and nobody ever complained about power levels.

Well, if you have no respect for Murphy's Laws, at least have some for Sun Tzu and his 'Art of War', which mentions this problem as well. Plans have a tendency to fail at the least fortunate moments. In such situations wins he who a) foresaw it and had a backup plan b) he who can improvise.

It's unfortunate that most night clubs require one to check the weapons and vehicles at the door, as opposed to letting you drive through and park it by the bar, across from the bartender. It's also unfortunate that some meetings with double crossing Johnsons had the audacity to go wrong right in the club - and that's disrespect to the host (even worse than parking the monster 4 by 4 truck in the bar). Sometimes a complex action is all the time you have to save the team (and your own ass)... I suppose you could play a paranoid rigger, like the legendary japanese swordsman Musashi, who wouldn't bathe for the fear of being assaulted while defenseless and unarmed. A rigger that never plugs out, never stops the engine, never has a personal life... and even then, you're not safe from marauding elementals manifesting inside your fortress on wheels.

He won't be making that test if he fails the perception test to spot the magician. And the magician can be casting the spell before the meet, from the roof of a skyscraper with the aid of a pair of good old-fashioned binoculars. Magicians, too, can prepare in advance. Speaking of which, their range puts any sniper rifle to shame.

Unfortunately, the vans don't fit everywhere. See above.

No dice roll will let your drone with a 1.2m diameter rotor fly through a 1m wide door.

Yes, that's the problem you see. It takes a magician to stop a magician. Fighting fire with fire. If you have a special sort of fire that can't be doused by anything other than the same sort of fire, then you have a problem. It's like having rock in rock-paper-scissors that can't be beat with anything other than a rock itself, and even then, it's a draw. People just stop playing with paper and scissors and that's precisely the problem I'm talking about. In Shadowrun, magicians tend to rock.

Notice shimmer of a non-manifest spirit at 20km through drone's sensors? Oh, that's um, erroneous. I direct you to the page 173 of Shadowrun 3rd edition. A mundane can detect an astral form going through them - the tingly sensation with a TN 10. Absolutely not through a camera or a drone's sensors - even when manifest!! Sure, there's the funky bacteria to spray to notice the thing at close range, but not at 20 clicks!

Yep, you're right there. A good burst can take one out, as can a water cannon if it's the right type. Unfortunately elementals tend to attack in six-packs and nature spirits tend to be a lot harder to spot.

Hey, the magician is out a 6k elemental, you're out a 15k drone. Nuyen for nuyen, elementals rock. Speaking of rock, seems to me that earth elementals (yes, the ones that can fly despite looking like trolls) are best suited for drone hunting. And nature spirits are even worse, with the power of concealment to hide their materialized form, and the power of accident to cause the drone to land rather unexpectedly and abruptly. And then there's the Lightning Bolt spell posessed by the Storm spirit... that can cast it without drain, over and over, so long as the shaman keeps asking for favors.

I understand that a charismatic enough rigger can do 6M Stun damage with 6-8 dice to roll vs likewise 6 dice of the force of the spirit attacking it in close combat. But then the other five spirits materialize, and having friends in the melee (+1 TN/-1TN per friend), his fate is sealed, even if he wasn't in the bathroom at the time. Remember, that even though you may try to use the force of personality to strike at the spirit, it won't bother to strike back at you with its force. It may suck you in with engulf, or even slap you around in hand-to-hand.

Watchers are like shadowrunners - cheap, disposable and naive.

Drones, you try to save as much as you can - because they get costly faster than the spirits. That price - and the emotional attachment the rigger has for them - is their greatest weakness.

Drones are severely limited by range, compared to the spirits and watchers. By this I mean the travel distance, and the flux rating.

Drones are limited by fuel and ammo (Spirits and watchers have finite services and time, so it balances out).

Drones are limited by travel speed. Spirits and watchers don't have that problem.

Drones are a lot easier to notice - you don't need to hire a 'security consultant' magician to keep an eye out for them, and you don't need to panic when he gets beat down into a bloody pulp by a gang of 6 watchers.

Drones can't detect spirits/watchers (unless spirits choose to reveal themselves). Spirits can detect drones (although poorly).

Drones are limited by their pilot rating - their 'dog brain'. Watchers, too, have a 'dog brain' personality. Spirits, on the other hand, are fully sentient creatures.

And the last nail in the coffin - the Remote Service. A particularly vengeful magician just might summon up an assassin elemental - just for you. It may take a few days or weeks or even a year to walk the Earth to find you, but it will not rest until you're done. While the magician, he can take a long vacation in Europe. Until the drones can become that independant (Ah'll be back!), it really isn't much of a contest.

Is the door also only 1 meter high? Yaw, Pitch and Roll are options for a vehicle in flight, you know. In fact, even if it is a 1 meter square door, there's aproximately 1.4m from corner to corner.

Technically, If you use that system (and I wouldn't), it should be Willpower + Intelligence (+ non-existant Magic) /3.

Because drones are only made of rotors, right?

Force 6 and 10 elementals aren't being summoned during the run. That's the homework the magician does, and he sleeps it off before the big show.

The shaman, on the other hand, is at a disadvantage with his one single available spirit, that has to be summoned within a few hours of the run, or, more often, smack in the middle of a firefight. There are several things he can do to reduce the difficulty of resisting the drain: centering, spirit foci, quickened or otherwise sustained charisma increase.

Then there's the pain editor and the trauma damper...

But even then, the shaman knows the risks and calls the shots, measuring carefully own ability. If he's feeling lucky, he might burn. But then again, for beginner shamans, a good rule of thumb is summon spirits equal to half their charisma in force (Force 3 for Charisma 6, Force 4 for Charisma 7-8 ), until they get into centering and higher grades of initiation, and go up in force only in case of an emergency or when they can rest.

This is offset by the ability to improvise with spirit domains and powers. The nature spirits know a lot more "tricks" than elementals, so in certain situations it's better to have a force 4 nature spirit than a force 6 fire elemental. In contrast, a mage needs to think and plan ahead more with the types of spirits he binds.

I think that maintaining spell defense is a futile act if you're trying to cast a spell at the same time (i.e. you get a crappy spell and a weak spell defense). Splitting your force isn't the way to go most of the time. So, if you suspect an enemy magician to try something, spend your action doing mundane attacks (throw a grenade maybe?) or hold action, and keep that spell pool on defense for the team. If you decide to cast something, then by all means, use the Force, Luke. The whole thing. Because the enemy magician will be using the entire spell pool for spell defense, and you need to break through. As far as dividing spell pool between drain and success - well, I see spell pool dice as freebies anyway, so if there are any left after you allocate enough to reduce the drain probability to near zero - yippie! It's like combat pool dice, except you get to keep combat pool for defense and fire your magic guns!

And I rate other people's experience very much! And I know just the type of low-power PC who did the thing you're describing - instead of being ballsy and gung-ho, he played it smart and had lots of friends to do his bidding. The thing you mention about lack of imbalance I believe as well - it really doesn't surface all that much in a friendly table top game - when the players get along and they aren't out to get one another. In an online medium, when there are more players involved, and they play more or less anonymously, for some reason they tend to be at odds with one another and all sorts of rules loopholes surface up to be abused in pointless vendettas. The online games are a sort of a catalyst that help reveal the nuances of game disbalance. In other words, what 5 people playing the game together for a year will find lacking, 150 people playing the game for 3 months will find unbearable - because there'll be a lot more whining from all the people. It takes one jerk to kill off 2-4 players by abusing a rule and there you have it, another rules debate that ends with a house rule or a ban. A popular MUSH can host up to 1500 players, with up to 70 logged on simultaneously with 5-6 GMs running things in the background for them in a single persistent world. Unfortunately, the MUSHes and MUDs are slowly disappearing due to Everquest and WoW and other MMORPGs. I do realise that Shadowrun 3rd edition was never meant to be played online in a persistent world, but such an exposure does reveal interesting things when put into perspective.

Well, as long as we're making up rules I *was* thinking of making it (INT+WIL+MAG)/2. Yes it's an across-the-board increase, but that's all to the good: first it parallels combat pool better, and second it slightly helps offset the fact that now most mundanes will be rolling roughly twice the number of dice on any given resistance test.

Nah, because only the rotor part is 1.2 meters wide. The rest can fit through the bottom corner of the door, usually. I'll admit it's not a perfect solution, but then neither is trying to get an elemental through an equal-Force ward, or even being able to "see" through the ward well enough to know where the target is.

I have no problem with that. You just didn't indicate an across-the-board change in the other post.

I still wouldn't use the rule for mundanes though.

Craft kept aloft by helicopter-style rotors turn when they "roll". Trying to get a drone through a tight doorway will at the very least result in very high target numbers for the rigger (and probably only the rigger, since they can push vehicles beynd their normal limits. A normal driver probaly couldn't do it at all.), or more possibly, a crashed drone.

I think it's a terrible idea, in that you'd need an entire party of mages to have a chance of injuring one shadowrunner with a spell. The mundanes will not be rolling twice the dice on any resistance roll, they'll be rolling (team members + 1) * the dice on any resistance roll, because there's nothing stopping you from stacking spell defence.

Er, except that, if you actually read my idea, you'd find out that it doesn't in fact work that way. Here I'll quote it for you, highlighting the relevant part:

The whole point here was to counteract the fact that mages have access to a sort of "mental" dice pool that mundanes don't have access to. As I see it, the main thing that makes mages unbalanced currently is their sole access to Spell Pool, rather like riggers are really powerful because of their access to Control Pool (which I'd also like to give non-riggers, but that's another argument.) In this proposal, mundanes and even aspected conjurers also get that same pool, but it's of limited solely for defense, rather like combat pool is of limited use for people without a single armed combat skill.

Our group has run into tac-nukes twice, but only once into a double-digit initiate

I agree with this, and have used something similar in games in the past.

This is an idea right up there with the George Forman Grill in that you can look at it, and wonder to yourself "Why didn't anyone think of this before?"