I have a question about wards and masking. Any opinions are greatly appreciated.

1) Any awakened meta-human can create a ward. SR3 pg. 174

2) A ward can be placed on nearly anything (Wall, rock, vehicle). SR3 pg.174

3) An initiate with the meta-magic technique Masking can create a masking ward. MitS pg. 89

4) A group of awakened can create a ward with a force equal to the sum of their Magic attributes. SR3 pg. 174

Questions:
1) Could a group of awakened create (however unlikely do to probability) a force 18 ring of masking?

2) Is the area of the ward set in stone (or printer's ink at the very least) by its force or can it be dictated (READ: reduced) by its creators? Say, to cover a human/elf/troll/dwarf?

wards can only be placed on non-living objects. i suppose you could ward someone's clothing. a force 18 ward is possible, but the TN to create it is 18. good luck. the area of the ward can be anything up to the maximum, as determined by the ward's creator(s).

i pretended you said "ward" instead of "ring of masking", since i don't know what the latter is, and you were talking about wards for the rest of your post.

My question was basically: Could you create a force 18 masking ward, on a ring, that only covers the wearer?

The ward's extent is determined by the physical boundaries that delinate it. You could put a Force 18 masking ward on a ring, but it wouldn't cover anything but a slice of the wearer's finger.

So you ward a jumpsuit instead.

Yep, and his jumpsuit would be really hard to affect with magic, like a rogue Fashion spell cast by a nefarious clothing designer. Unfortunately, the person wearing the jumpsuit would be completely vulnerable to everything else (thanks to all those openings and exposed areas in particular).

Wards aren't huge areas of protection linked to an object, they're areas of protection that protect the item they're warding. For instance, you can ward a room, but everything in that room is completely unprotected -- it's only effects that have to cross that ward to get to you that run into a stumble. If that ward has a single opening -- even a little pinhole opening -- it's pretty much worthless.

So a room with a window, a door, or a small hole in the wall may as well be unwarded? I don't think that's how wards are supposed to work.

Nope. What I'm saying is that if, say, you have your arm sticking out of it (or like how your head, hands, or feet is sticking out of a jumpsuit, or the 99.99% of your body not covered by a ring), you might as well be completely unwarded. The ward only extends to the item its warding. The ward in the example is protecting the room, and the room only.

SR3 states that a ward can be placed on a rock. As far as I know that would be pretty much useless as you can't put anything INSIDE a rock. I took the wording to mean that regardless of the size of the actual ward, the maximum area protected by it was equal to 50 meters times the combined magic rating of the creators. Kind of like a field generator.

It wouldn't be worthless if you were trying to protect that rock (say, like the Hope Diamond).

But hey, if you want to assume every character who can use Astral Perception is rocking around with a pebble in his pocket protecting him with a permanent bubble of magical protection, knock yourself out. It's clearly not the intent.

Not that I would use this idea (if a player of mine suggested it, I would throw something at him), but you could probably carry a warded tarp, throw it over your self. Just hope no one throws a wind spell.

Hold down the corners with warded rocks

hm. i dunno about the pinhole thing. i mean, there's nothing in the books about being abled to change shape to fit through small openings, in astral form, and casting spells at targets behind cover incurs cover modifiers. i guess ritual magic would go through a ward with a pinhole easy enough, and attempts to locate you would not be hindered by the ward (since neither of those applications includes astral objects which would need to pass through the ward).

Other than that, just apply cover for the pin hole?

The idea of a portable ward isn't new, but realistically it does become impractical.

Classically speaking, in magic if you breach a zone of protection, you forfeit such protection. In SR, it's less cut-and-dried. I, personally rule that any part of you not within the warded space is fair game...and if most of you is outside the barrier, your ass is grass as far as ritual magic goes (not to mention the fire elemental waiting for you to come outside).

If you're going to do a mobile ward, it practically has to be three dimensional to be of any value. Wearing a warded poncho is fine until you head out to the parking garage to get your car and the city spirit comes up under your street to very messily kill you inside your poncho.

Generally speaking, the ward should be a barrier of some sort (this can be a very loose interpretation, as I shall demonstrate). For example, a bolt of cloth would make a fine ward, and could be wrapped around you as a shroud...although it would be very difficult to see or move in such a wrapping. Mobile wards should either be thin enough to see through or contain a special portion of see-through material for that precise purpose.

The ideal mobile ward, then, would be a full-body suit, not unlike the more expensive and protective armors, and sealed so as to present a single barrier. Chemical suits would work fine, but appearences would be against you.

Destroying the integrity of the suit negates the effects of the ward on that portion. When you're behind a warded wall, this is less of a problem, as a bullet hole probably won't give the other mage line-of-sight and you can plug those easily. When in a mobile ward, this becomes a much more serious issue, possibly solved by keeping adhesive, warded "patches" on hand.

Please note that even if the ward is masked, someone would notice the individual in a full-bodysuit or bubble-boy outfit...and perhaps wonder why they have no aura.

Last, but surely not least, wards can make life difficult on magicians who are within them. Unless specified at the ward's creation, a magician may be trapped in the mobile ward, unable to astrally project, unable to astrally perceive much (note: polarized wards are your friend), unable to access any talisman, fetish, or focus outside of the ward (i.e. your weapon focus is probably useless), and unable to cast spells through the ward. GMs may allow spirits to be conjured within a mobile ward, but I think the astral space within would get rather crowded.

I just had am image of a quadraplegic mage with a level 1 VCR running around in a rigged, warded JIM suit.

Frater, if I were the GM, I would not permit it.

Basically, a ward needs some kind of boundary to anchor itself to; the boundary can be just symbolic, but it must exist. "A bubble around a center point that is a ring" is not a boundary. "This circle of salt I am laying on the ground" IS a boundary.

While the rules don't explicitly state it, I would also argue that for a ward to be mobile, the scale of the system the ward is in has to be such that the system dwarfs the average human. A suit of armor wouldn't cut it. The engine room of an aircraft carrier or submarine would, however.

And for what it's worth, it appears that FanPro agrees with me: http://www.shadowrunrpg.com/resources/faq.shtml

O.K. Good points all around. But how about creating a masking astral barrier spell? The barrier would be all but invisible, make everything inside look mundane, and cover the entire target. Problems, ideas, suggestions?

Sure, you could do a masking astral barrier spell. I would argue that it should be designed by an initiate with masking; it might even require that the caster have masking, or if not, it should have a slightly higher drain power or drain level than the regular astral barrier spell. And if you want it to be mobile, it should also have a higher drain power and/or drain level than the regular astral barrier spell.

Really, a spell is a spell is a spell, and they can do basically anything that isn't prohibited by the metaphysics of magic. The ones that I know of specifically are teleportation, time travel, and healing of stun damage, if I recall correctly. Other than that, anything is fair game -- just use the rules for spell creation in Magic in the Shadows, and use existing spells as your guide.

I would also like to correct myself; for a moving ward, I would argue that the system needs to dwarf the area warded instead of the average human. In a moving automobile, I suppose it would be reasonable to ward the glove box, but certainly not the entire cabin, for example.

Sorcery also states it doesn't cover things that are covered by other abilities, like conjuring and divining. I wouldn't let sorcery make a spell ward beyond how the normal wards already work (spec the time they take, and materials), if that's what you meant. If not.... well.. just throw something at me and I'll shut up.

from what i recall opening a door into a warded room do not make a hole in said ward. so if a astraly active entity or item tryed to walk thru said open door they would still encounter the ward.

so im all for that symbolic interpetation Vaevictis presents.
want to ward a area of space, use a ring of stones or something similar to mark out the edge of the ward. in fact that kinda mesh nicely with how some warding are represented in mystical texts. like covering all opening into a room with a line of salt (or maybe around the whole edge of the room).

going by that one could in theory ward a car or similar enclosed vehicle but a open one would maybe need a spray painted line (preferably neon green or something in color ) to mark out the edge of the ward.

hmm, why ward a person when he can wear a sustaining foci? either rule that astral armor helps against spells and astraly active entitys or just combo a sustaning foci maintaining a spell shield with one that maintains a personal version of the spirit barrier. only problem then may be dual natured being. but hey, isnt people allways complaining that awakend characters are to powerfull?

Just get a full body tattoo and use it to ward your skin.

Sure, your clothes aren't protected, but hey, at least the rest of you is?

the only wards that are not bounded by physical surfaces are those created by hermetic circles and shamanic lodges. all other wards conform to the surfaces they are created on, up to and including doors. if you ward a room, and someone opens the door of that room, there is a hole in the ward that an astral being can pass through.

tattoos can't be used for wards, either. wards can't be placed on living beings; a tattoo is a part of a living being.

Because a sustaining focus is visible on the astral. Imagine you're dual-natured and you wanted to ward your astral image because those darned spirits just won't leave you alone, or perhaps you are a mage with foci at higher force than your initiate level and you want to mask them. A portable masking ward is the only option available to you, right?

i don't know of any spells which fool astral perception, with the possible exception of mana static. even that doesn't so much conceal as simply blind. based on that, i wouldn't allow a spell that did, especially a spell that fools astral perception in the same way that masking does.

I've always run mine the way AH describes. So, you can put a masking ward on the pope-mobile, and astrally-percieving catholics won't notice that he's actually possessed by a high-force bug spirit (or horror, etc.). Similarly, high-threat security forces (Red Samuri, Seraphim, etc.) that wear full-body security armor can put wards on their suits to help their spell defense. But if that same security dude takes off his helmet, then the protection of the ward is negated.

I believe the ideal solution would be an anchoring focus carrying a personal version of the astral barrier spell. This way, you are protected with the equivalent of a ward, and if you possess masking you can hide the focus.

The difficulty, of course, lies in successfully arguing that the spell, when triggered, is likewise masked. I won't even go into the difficulties of group ritual spellcasting into an anchoring focus.

huh. damn gnomes must have inserted that into SR3 when i wasn't looking. that, or my nonsense filter kept me from being able to see it until it was specifically pointed out ("wards have to conform to physical boundaries, except they really don't!")

Note that wards are a specific type of astral barrier. The rule Eyeless Blond quoted was in reference to astral barriers in general, not wards, and even cites two examples of non-ward barriers that don't have to conform to its physical contours (hermetic circles and shamanic lodges).

Doc makes a very good point. The specific rules for wards are a bit ambiguous in this regard: it's possible that wards specifically do need to exactly correspond to their physical components. The biggest objection I have to this, however, is that this ruling for wards--that they do not "stretch" over gaps in the physical components--means that they are much much less useful for keeping mages from sustainning a dozen spells on themselves all the time. If you can just walk past a ward by opening a door, a window, or a hole in the wall, then wards really don't provide much more protection than a normal wall itself provides.

(Edit): Either way though, no matter how much you stretch the rules on ward stretching, you're never going to have a ring or a t-shirt creating a ward large enough to protect a whole person. The warded suit of armor might work though, as would anything with total (or so near total that there is no real difference) body coverage, like a chemsuit. I'd go as far as to say that most full-body chemsuits would be warded (Force 2-4 I'd say), as such suits will typically stray into Toxic areas and those are much more dangerous in the Sixth World with spirits and crap around.

hm. a sensible way to manage this would be to say that wards can stretch to cover gaps equal to (force) centimeters^2.

I don't think that the intent of the ward rules was to say that warding a room was negated when you opened a window, but I do think the general outline of the ward is set by the physical component of the ward.

So, I'd let a mage ward a room, with the perimeter being defined by the walls. The ward would stretch across the windows and doorway, and not be broken if they were opened. The ward might be damaged in that area, however, if the door (or window, or wall, etc.) was destroyed.

I'd let a mage draw a chalk circle on the floor, or a circle of rocks/bones/whatever outside, and create a spherical ward with its diameter defined by the circle. Or maybe even just put down 4 rocks to define the corners of the ward.

But I wouldn't let the mage ward a pebble, and have the perimeter of the ward extend any distance out from the pebble. So carrying a warded pebble in your pocket (or a warded ring on your finger) wouldn't protect the person.

Apathy has it down right.

I agree as well and oddly enough, was always my take on Wards.