OK, the Vampire in the old editions was the nastiest mo-fo around. And not just because she could cast spells at any force and be up the next round as if nothing had happened. It was also because of those little words "enhanced physical characteristics" - a vampire walked out there with a strength of about 24 and would juts tear you to little pieces if she got her hands on you. That's all over. Regeneration doesn't work on magic damage (so it presumably no longer wipes away drain), and it goes fairly slow and it only does physical damage or stun damage each round, so once a vampire goes down once it's just a exercise in doing knee drops on her head for a few seconds to make sure she stays that way. And the enhanced physical characteristics is gone (well, you can enhance a single attribute by 1 point at the cost of an essence point so long as you have at least 2 essence points, but who are we kidding?).

By the way, did anyone else notice that losing essence drops your magic attribute, and gaining essence does not raise it? That means that the sample Vampire is going to "burn out" in three months. So much for their immortality (their ability to drain essence is magic attribute based, so once that's gone, they are dead).

Obviously, if you want Vampires as anything close to the end-of-the-campaign major villains they were in every previous edition, you'll have to do something drastic. At the very least I suggest a rule that says that gaining a point of Essence makes you gain a point of Magic Attribute. Otherwise they are just dead. Like, right now.

---

Spirits. Oh my goodness, Spirits are horrendously powerful. A Spirit has a relevent skill and stat equal to its force. That means that on any test that is important to it (like a Fire Elemental kicking your hoop, or Spirit of Man casting any single spell the summoner knows), it rolls a number of dice equal to double its force.

But in order to summon it, you just need to roll more successes on your Magic + Summoning skill as it does on ts force times one. So what does that mean in practice?

It means that for any magician with a Magic Attribute of N and some positive Summoning skill, that magician is more than likely to successfully summon a spirit of man with a force of N, who in turn has a Spellcasting of N. That means that outside of combat situations, virtually any magician should strongly consider summoning a spirit of man to cast her spells rather than casting them herself. Because while her magic atribute is also N, I'm guessing that her Spellcasting skill is probably less than that.

It means that any magician can generate attack rolls of approximately {(Magic + Summoning - 3) * 2}. That means that a character with a magic of 6 and a summoning of 3 can consistently send in spirits that roll 12+ dice in combat. Every 1 extra die for summoning the magician can scrounge up can on average add 2 dice to that roll.

Suggestion: Spirit Skills should probably be equal to half force for summoned spirits (they can still be double force for bound spirits, because bound spirits are at a lower force relative to the number of dice a conjuror has available).

---

And on a purley personal note: am I the only person who remembers the 1st edition Ghoul? The one where it was a form of goblinization, rather than a template that is layered on top of normal PC Metahumans in order to add to their natural maximums and therefore cheese out to an unbelieveable degree?

Dangnabit, Ghouls are supposed to be a Metatype that's largely unavailable to PCs, not a variant of HMHVV (despite not sharing any of the signature features of HMHVV strains). The entire Krieger strain plotline was a stupid pice of powergaming, and it should be editted out of history. Reading it being grandfathered in makes me feel old.

-Frank

It is about time they balanced out Vampires to make them easier to play as PCs. They should have done Great Dragons too. Hopefully Running Wild has revised dragon stats to bring them down to more reasonable levels.

Well, I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, I want to bitchsmack blakkie and say that they were never intended as PCs. In fact, the SR3 text of their infection ability outright makes it impossible. On the other hand, I want to grasp his hand and say he's right.

Now, as for dragons: Excuse me, but no. Dragons in SR were always intended to be major badasses. In fact, that's true of most games. A Great Dragon should be that campaign-defining battle, after which the group is either dead or have vanished.

Dragons Reasonable? Dragons are not supposed to be reasonable in shadowrun. If some one wants to go dragon hunting or play a dragon there are many games out there that will let you do it. Blackie this is not a personal attack or flame to you. It's mostly my annoyance with the current trend of decreasing the power level of shadowrun. Fanpro decided to change the basic game to street level which while I find annoying I can deal with but the creatures really should not decrease in power or why the change in setting? After all there should be no way street level characters should ever be a threat to creatures that can take over entire cities with just their own personal power. As for vampires obviously something is wrong there. Either it will get house ruled or in the errata it will be corrected eventially.

quickly, men! shoot them with your Ridicule Rays, now that we're sure their Sarcasm Detectors are switched off!

My biggest beef with Vampires (not the other HMHVV infected ones, just Vampires) in SR2 and SR3 was the fact that Vampiric Pawns get Immunity to Normal Weapons, but Vampires don't. It was utterly bizarre, and made no sense.

You have good points about spirits, but one thing that I noticed is that spirit armour is no longer hardened. So technically, your basic weapon has a chance of killing even a force 6 spirits. Sure, they roll Body + Force x2, but you *could* take out a spirit with some solid full auto, whereas previously any Force 4-5+ spirit was simply invincible to typical shadowrunner weaponry.

Also, I was surprised to see that the caster chose the spell the spirit of man knew. It might be a better idea to make it random.

Ah, well then. I hadn't read the actual power, just the description of spirits in the magic section. Yeah, spirits are nasty.

Note: Spirits have all attributes equal to their force. Even Edge. That means that a Force 6 spirit has an Edge of 6. A Force 8 spirit has an Edge of 8. That means that a Force 7 Air Spirit (Agility +3) can spend one of its seven Edge on an attack and hit the 24 die cap on an attack roll. All while having 14 points of hardened armor against incoming non-magic attacks.

And when I say "all attributes", I mean "all attributes except Reaction". A Force 7 Air Spirit has a Reaction of 22, and the Dodge Skill (at 7). Which means that I'm not sure how any attack is supposed to connect against one in the first place.

-Frank

Except sniping him with a Laser?