Not sure what sparked this thought, but here it is:

Rather than have all magicians start with a magic rating of 6, require that they start as mundanes. Magic could then be purchased through initiation rituals, as per current rules - but with the magic attribute starting at 0, and increasing as magic points are bought through initiation. Of course, these initiate levels can be bought at creation using spell points, or better yet, by using BECKS.

This would seriously lower the magic level in the world, while making it more common to have magical ability at a low level - after all, any mundane could acquire magical abilities if they spend the time & karna on the training.

To maintain balance, this might require some tweaking to the initiation rules, possibly to make it a little cheaper, or to add different magical abilities in as initiated powers (i.e. intiate to level 1, gain sorcery, level 2, add astral sight, level 3, gain conjuring, .etc)

Thoughts?

It changes the flavour a lot.

You wind up with very few if any surprising magical, shamans dot feal as workable (how would a totem be chosen) and you need to integrate adepts somehow. You would probably actually wind up with more magicals but fewer not beholden to a corp. magical training would be available relatively easily but would come with a long term contract and carefully planed indoctrination.

I would not want to use it but do what you want.

Edward

hmm. I would not want that for any game I played in. The point of being magical is that you were born that way, you 'awaken' to your magic sometime in life, or you don't. Most magicians and adepts Awaken around puberty, some a little earlier or a little later. The vast majority of the population in SR will NEVER be awakened, no matter how much time, training and karma they try to put into it. For an interesting SR AU game it might work, though.

so a charictor who puts an A in magic gets nothing. This is a game, how are you going to ballance these Harry Potters with the Street Sams in the party? Make the Sams start with no cyber? Make the Rigger start with no car or drones? If you want to start with gamgers and work them up to profesional Shadowrunning, this could work.

Interesting idea, but sadly pre-SR4 magic is "all or nothing" in its approach. Other than initiating to advance your Magical skill there is really no mechanism to allow this aside from house ruling it.

We often play "low tech" campaigns and the lack of magic is usually money centric rather than having low powered magic.

I'm sure everyone will LOVE flushing their 25-30 build points (or 60-90 karma) right down the crapper.

Smiley - I'd make the assumption that the point outlay for just the ability to use magic would be one thing tweaked away. So those points could then be used to purchase the initiation level(s) that would provide the lowest levels of magical ability.

To balance this, awakened couldn't cost more than 5 bp, spell points would need to be cheaper, and the max upped to 80 or so instead of 50. As long as you completely reshape the costs related to being magical, it may work.

However, then you face the problem that every PC can buy up a point or two of magic to get the little tricks that most support their other skills. I think it will shift the scale from "1% are awakened (10% of mercenary criminals)" to "50% have some degree of magic, but only 1% have mastery." Of course, your games may result differently.

Kinda fits in more with the 'Earthdawn' roots of SR, eh?

and how do you prevent burnouts from just buying right back into the system?

Well, you could make awakened characters start with a magic rating of 1 and one spell at force 1. You could make magic cheaper... say priority C or D (or some equivalent points value). You could make low level initiations quite cheap, karma wise, but not give metamagic feats until the 6th one.

JaronK