I have no problem with allowing drug bonuses to stack with other things (for instance, focused concentration and Psyche. I don't remember the rules for psyche, but presumably the problem is that it reduces the penalty for sustaining spells?) Even assuming we make drugs reasonable, there's always going to be an inherent danger in using them. If people are willing to risk that in order to get an edge, give it to them. They'll almost never use drugs otherwise.

Another thing we should consider are more detailed pollution rules—acid rain, smog cover, and the like. This would both add flavour and provide clearer drawbacks to certain Allergy flaws.

~J

What precisely do you have in mind? A statement on the approximate pollution in Seattle and how much damage it does annually?

Rules for possible TN mods or damage (to individuals or gear) for certain activities in certain environmental conditions, and guidelines for the frequency of said environmental conditions.

~J

So odds of acid rain and the damage it does? I like that.

How about a chemical treatment that will reduce the effects of enviromental conditions, but at the same time will be more likely to set off chem sniffers.

For the overall effect, maybe setup a table like the one for magical background count or the one for wild magic in MITS? Or do we want to further revise the biohazard material on p. 109 of Target: Wastelands?

The way I look at it:

Disadvantage: it's One More Thing To Keep Track Of (One More Thing for short). Guidance for frequency would either have to be given a rule for calculation that could be done badly or would have to be redone for every major city.

Advantage: it provides clearer guidance for things like Allergy: Pollutants and Allergy: Smog, gives little-used equipment and 'ware like air filters and the like a boost, and gives the polluted atmosphere of the fiction a firm basis in the rules.

My opinion: probably worth doing—guidance for cities other than Seattle can be done at any pace, and the advantages seem to justify adding One More Thing.

~J

I would agree, it's worth doing. It wouldn't be that hard. You would have basic rules for each type of pollution (or environmental threat) and likely a chart for how common these threats are for the major Shadowrun cities (leaving the rest to GM's discretion). A page, maybe two, of more material that's easily ignored but adds a new degree of depth to it?

I also think we should probably nuke the incompatibility between Combat Monster and Combat Paralysis. The authors apparently viewed them as opposites, but nothing to my mind prevents someone from being bad at getting adjusted to the start of a combat situation but then also being as bad or worse at getting adjusted to the end (or rather, the need to cause an end).

~J

I have no complaints against that (although I doubt most people would take it).

The Aztlan book had a rule on the effects of air pollution on newcomers to Tenochtitlan. I can't recall the exact details and the book's in storage but if someone can dig the rule up, it may be a start.

From the Aztlan sourcebook, Los Humo Grande is simulated by the GM rolling a D6 and halving for a range of 1-3, determining the 'pollution index' for the day. The effects of pollution can be countered by wearing an air-filter of equal or greater rating than the day's pollution index. Cyber-implants provide protection according to their rating.

If you don't have a sufficient rating protective device the character must make a Body test against a target number equal to: (pollution rating - rating of incomplete protection device) x 2. The damage caused is equivalent to Moderate Stun, but it heals like physical damage. Base exposure time is 30 minutes, reduce target number by 1 for every 10 minutes less than 30 spent exposed to pollution.

For the effects of acid raid, everyone is assumed to have at least a Mild allergy to it. (SR II effects)


I would suggest that Seattle pollution be treated as having a Rating of 0-2 as Tenochtitlan is described as being more polluted than Seattle; and having either Smog or Acid Rain. IIRC Smog is created in still air so it tends not to rain simultaneously. It doesn't rain in Seattle all the time, honest!

BTW, as Tenochtitlan is at high altitude the Aztlan book says that the Body rating for disease and toxin resistance tests is reduced by 1, unless characters are equipped with extended-volume bioware. (That's the first time I've ever found a use for it!) A Mage's Willpower for Drain Resistance tests is reduced by 2 unless character again has extended-volume bioware.

Probably the easiest way to do this is as such:
Determine what different environmental effects we want to account for (in this example, pollution and acid rain).

Determine how the Rating affects the given condition (so for pollution, we'd say the city has a rating of 3. Roll 1d6, a success up to the rating of the city blah blah blah).

Finally, determine appropriate ratings for each city, so say the example city would be Air pollution: 3, Acid Rain: 2, Volcanic Eruptions: 0, whereas Seattle might be Air Pollution: 1, Acid Rain: 4, Volcanic Eruptions: 1.

Thoughts?

The 'blah blah blah' would be extended, for instance in the air pollution trait, as such.

The rating of the air pollution determines how physically damaging it is. Roll 1d6. If the result is above the air pollution rating, the air is relatively clean and causes no damage (although penalties still apply for people allergic to air pollution). On any other roll, multiply the result by 2. This is the Power of a Moderate stun 'attack'. Every hour of exposure requires a Body test against this attack. For every ten minutes out of those sixty not exposed to the air reduces the Power by 1. This damage is stun damage, but is healed as though physical. Air filters, rebreathers and other appropriate technology reduce the power of this attack using double their rating.

Then we would say Tenochtitlan has Air Pollution: 3, so we'd roll 1d6 and continue with the rules stated previously. Seattle has Air Pollution: 1, so only on a roll of a 1 does anything happen, and the power of the attack is 2M. That make sense?

Yes.
Tenochtitlan's Air Pollution rating of 3 would mean 50% of the time there's no pollution whereas Aztlan says it's always polluted. Increasing the rating to 5 for instance, would lessen the proportion of clean air days but could make the damage irresistible.
The volcanic activity check could increase the ambient air pollution and acid rain by it's rating.
Add a radiation background rating.
Would air pollution, volcanoes etc add any magic background. This could tie into the idea from the magic thread about using BG count more to thwart mages/astral scouts.

Having an air pollution rating of 3 doesn't mean the air isn't polluted 50% of the time, just that it isn't so polluted that it is a serious health risk for otherwise healthy people. You'll still have issues if you have allergies or asthma, and it may still have other ongoing effects. So 50% of the time the air is so polluted it's authentically dangerous, the other 50% of the time, it's only immediately dangerous to a small portion of the population.

If we really want to include volcanic activity, we'll need to decide whether it immediately impacts air quality, or if the air quality number should already be higher. (In other words, does volcanic activity guarantee the air pollution is +1 on that day, or is the the air pollution rating +1, so on the particular day of volcanic activity, the air can still be clear. Direct link vs. indirect link. That make sense?)

All pollution above a certain level should add background count. That's pretty kosher. By how much would have to be decided. Right now, speaking for myself, I just want to know whether we should add the feature at all, then we can hammer out the details afterwards.

Negotiation needs a big bonus for "following procedures", though it should be relatively narrowly applied.

More stuff on the individual topic threads when my brain reconstitutes.

~J

OT, but I was looking through this thread and noticed several mentions of the idea to create a multi-book index as a fan project.

Anyone know if this was ever done, or at least attempted?

Go Go Power Environmental Science Type!!!!

All this talk about altitude and pollution sounds like its going to lead to a pretty internally consistient environmental system being put into place.

Exhaustion is cutting through indecision. I'm picking some threads in the project, requesting final comments on certain thorny issues, and just choosing an option. Like everything the decision will be set in EPROM rather than stone, but some things need to fall into place so they can be built on top of.

~J

Woot!

As a head's up, I'm keeping very busy at work and in my personal time, so I am more liable to make silly mistakes in my note taking. Please do be sure to double check me as I work.

Looking for proposals on how to best integrate the idea of Awakening during life into the rules, as well as the idea of young Awakened spontaneously using magical abilities despite not being able to default. In particular, the tension between the existence of the Assensing test and the flavourtext implication that testing for magical ability is more than a matter of sending someone with high Aura Reading into a classroom for at most (number of students)*3 seconds needs to be resolved.

Note that I am emphatically not looking for a way to allow a mundane adult to Awaken. As noted above, however, the flavour strongly suggests that it's much harder to determine if a child has magical ability than the rules suggest.

Also looking for opinions as to whether the current 1% Awakened population number should be reduced, and if so by how much.

~J

Spell Defense. Should it exist? I'm really not keen on the idea of the people least vulnerable to magic being the people who can use it, but I'm willing to listen to arguments to the contrary, especially since it would muck with several metamagics.

~J

Why not have it as just a metamagic, then? In a visually appealing "mage duel" sort of way, I like the idea of folks blocking spells cast at them, locking in a contest of magical might with another spellcaster, yadda yadda yadda (so I don't think it needs to be removed completely). It's also great when a team mage can help a group work like a team, by exerting himself to protect them from incoming mojo. But I can agree that it feels weird sometimes, so I wouldn't mind if it were harder to get ahold of, rarer to run into, and that sort of thing.

It seems like making "spell defense" a choice upon Initiation (and having those other metamagics require it as a prereq) might be a decent compromise.

I like that idea. Anyone else?

~J

Seconded.
I play mages and I keep forgetting about it. I think making it a metamagic (or beefing it up a tad and THEN making it a metamagic) would be a great idea.

I also would like to see spell defense tied in as a metamagic. That would be interesting to see. However, on the flip side, we either need to up the drain on magic or up the natural ability to resist magic. Either one would be fine to my thinking.

For the manifestation of magic, are you just looking for flavor text? You said specifically excluding the awakening of magic in an adult, which seems to me would be a critical part of the rules for the awakening of magic in a child. Regardless, this is a spot where I like how SR4 does it. Magic should start at 0 and be bought up like an attribute. I'm tired of every mage already being full powered straight out of the gate. Just reduce the cost for being a mage to compensate, or use the system Sphynx was working on which really worked well at mixing and matching stuff.


The 1% is fine. Remember that most of them are probably adepts and aspected. The only reason we assume everyone is full mage is because that's the sort of characters we make. We need to see a lot more aspected mages in the opposition. They're still super useful, after all. They can still make wards (or did we open that up to mundanes too?)

Well, there's also the fact that the Sam has a Willpower of, IIRC, 9.

~J

That... would make a difference. I don't have mages in my group with 9 willpower.

Yes, I'm starting to think your group may not be the best test bed for some of these rules : P

Yeah, we're a good test group for highly-optimized characters, but feedback from more normal groups is highly appreciated. Unfortunately my experience is that most of the groups mathematically inclined enough to give high-quality feedback are optimizers themselves...

~J

In my experience spell defense is a very key part of your basic necessities and I would err on the side of making it too strong and available rather than too weak and not available.

This is because I have seen mages using Control Thoughts consistiently devastate groups of characters who didn't have the juice to defend. I would never consider sending a group of non-trivial NPCs up against the PCs now without them having at least one magician who, if nothing else, just sits there focusing on spell defense.

See, here I think of Control Thoughts as too difficult to use to be threatening most of the time—the drain code is moderately nasty, it needs to be cast at high Force (6 is pretty much a minimum, IMO) so that gets compounded, the TN is probably high (where "high" is anything above 4, since it's resisted), and they get to resist a second time if you tell them to do anything interesting (and only need one success to resist if you haven't stayed with them the whole time). At least with Control Actions you can make them shoot themselves in the head without giving them another chance to break free.

That said, if magic is going to be made more resistible, I'd like to make it more resistible across the board—not just when Yet Another Spell-Slinger is nearby protecting you.

~J

The only way I can think of to deal with the issues many people have with overpowered magic is to find a way to furthur discourage mages from dropping all their dice on offense. I have only seen this done as an act of desparation, so I have not had it as an issue and similarly have not had mages who were horribly game-abusive (despite one built on misunderstandings of bioware and layered armor).

I suppose you could discourage this by having a few battles where after the PC mage blasts everyone, the NPC mage uses a held action to get into range and drop a massive powerball right on the PC mage. But I'm sure players who choose to be problematic in this regard will see that as another challenge and will immediately invest in lots of sheilding foci.

I agree with EB on everything EXCEPT the Magic starting at 6 point.

Currently a standard group (as in, not the type Kage plays in) cannot run without a mage in the canon setting. One mage can basically rape them up down and backwards. The only effective defense against mages is another mage. Now I don't think we need mundanes and magicians to be balanced, but one cannot be completely and utterly defenseless against the other. And like EB said, the way to fix this isn't to make it more difficult for mages to protect mundanes, but to make it either more difficult for mages to do their stuff, or easier for mundanes to fight back. Hence, making spell pool a metamagic is a poor idea, however increasing drain codes, allowing mundanes to build wards, etc. would directly address the problem at hand.

re: magic rating at 6, what other attribute do we have that starts at its maximum and goes down? Why is it that a mage with 40 years experience casts his fireball with the same radius as someone who just awakened yesterday? Magic, like strength and everything else, should be something that increases with practice. Now granted, we COULD make everyone start out with 6 Strength as well, and have flaws to lower that Strength, but why would we want to do that either?

EB argued that this shouldn't be a focus because it's such an unusual case. The reason it's an unusual case is because the rules don't allow for any other case. In SR4 it certainly isn't unusual, nor should it be. I think the paradigm used in SR3 is fundamentally flawed. This is one of the few changes made in SR4 that I really agreed with.