I was thinking exactly that. It would be like saying that if you use Fling (did it make it to SR4 yet?) to throw a mundane knife it counts for circumventing Immunity Natural Weapons.

they could conceivably be taken out that way. Telekinetic smashing against walls, perhaps? I suppose if you've got spells that can do that, though, you can just make a magical attack - rendering the whole point rather moot.

At the risk of repeating myself, it is because Immunity to Normal Wepaons actually describes what counts as a magical attack:

So Fireball is a spell, therefore it is not not a spell, so Immunity to Normal Wepaons does not apply to it. Meanwhile, a grenade is simply not a spell, nor is it a critter power, a weapon focus, or an adept power, so Immunity to Normal Weapons does apply. It really is that simple.

Of course they do. And so does absolutley every single other thing tht says it halves armor. However, they don't halve armor again because they are elemental. They simply halve the armor value once, because that is what is on their AP value. Similarly, bullets, and other "elemental metal" weapons do not halve armor at all.

The set of thigs that cut your armor in half is limited to the set of weapons that actually say that they do that, and I am entirley uncertain as to whether the guy saying otherwise was making a joke or just being intensely silly.

-Frank

It doesn't matter if the fire is magical or not. If the fire is generated by a spell, focus, adept power, or critter power, then immunity to normal weapons does not apply.

Like how in D&D, Damage Reduction does not apply to energy attacks. It doesn't have to be "magical", it just has to be in the list of things that specifically exclude ItNW from applying. So fireball can go ahead and be "non-magical", and handgrenades can go ahead and be "elemental" if you want. It doesn't make a lizard tit's difference. The game important information here is whether or not the attack is a spell. Period.

-Frank

Right.

So a Spirit gets Force x 2 Armor vs. bullets.

It gets Force x 1 Armor vs elemental attacks.

And it gets 0 Armor vs any magical attack, whether or not it is elemental.

It is perfectly clear that elemental attacks are very much more effective against spirits than non-elemental mundane attacks.

No. A Spirit gets x2 Armor against all attacks except spells, foci, adept powers, and critter powers (against which they get dick). Some weapons have AP values, some of them even have very good AP values. The best Armor Penetrating weapons have AP values that are "minus half", and that still isn't enough to make a decently large spirit care.

This gets tossed around a lot as if it were true. But it's not. Let's consider a character capable of reliably summoning a Spirit that can openly laugh at any mundane weapon in the basic book (which is to say, something which is Force . This requires that you roll 11+ dice, and if you want to take little enough drain doing it that you can heal it before leaving the house, you'll want to roll 9+ dice on drain resistance. OK.

So you have a character that has:

Magician (15 BPs)
Mentor Spirit (5 BPs) - pick one that boosts your favorite spirit.
Focused Concentration (10 BP)
Magic Attribute 5 (40 BPs)
Willpower 5 (40 BPs)
Logic 5 (40 BPs)
Conjuring Group 4 (40 BPs)
Specializaions for Summoning and Binding for your favorite Spirit (4 BPs)
Specialization in Health Spells (2 BP)
Spellcasting 6 (24 BPs)
Counterspelling 4 (16 BPs)
Healing Spell (3 BPs)
Resources Sufficient for a Rating 6 Lodge and Force 3 Summoning and Binding Foci (20 BP - leaves over 10 grand for toys)
A Force 3 Summoning and Binding Focus (21 BP)

OK... that's 280 points. And 3 of your stats are already at 5. With just a few more points invested you can be a decent medic, or a scout, or a sniper. Or a Rigger/Hacker. Or a bomb planter I don't care. You can buy up a pile of spells that do anything from controlling minds to telekinetically hurling stuff around. You have 120 points to spend on anything you want, and you can seriously multiclass into any other stupid pet trick you want. You can even take some negative qualities if that floats your boat. I hear Sensitive System is what all the cool kids are doing this edition.

And what happens when you summon a force 8 spirit (like you do every morning)? You roll 16 dice, and it rolls 8 dice, and if you roll more hits, it shows up and "tags out" for you the first time you get into serious fire - and since it's invincible to all mundane forms of attack, you go a whuppin and a whompin on everything to within an inch of its life. But wait, you also have to resist Drain. Boogy boogy. It generates somewhere between zero and 4 successes normally, and you have to get double that number to take no drain. But you don't really care if you take Drain, because you also roll 15 dice when casting Healing on yourself, so as long as you suffer less than 5 physical wound levels off that bad boy, nothing happened to you at all. And you roll 11 dice for resisting drain (assuming for the moment that you didn't get a rush of brains to the head and transfer your focus to drain resistance instead of summoning, in which case you get 14 dice).

Yes, you can tweak yourself out even more until you literally can't do anything else than just stand there and be a spirit platform. But you don't have to. By just taking everything until it's about to start costing you out of the market you can still be followed around by a basically risk-free monstrosity that is itself immune to panther assault cannons all day, every day.

The most extreme, largest pile-o-dice isn't necessary or helpful. A moderately large pile of dice is plenty large enough to be a Pokemaster that is followed around at all times by an electric rat that will rip any street sam to pieces. And it leaves enough points left over that you can still do other things and be an interesting character.

-Frank

You can't have Specializations for Skill Groups.

True. But you can split skills out of skill groups at any time. So you can buy the Conjuring Skill Group and then purchase specializations for individual skills out of the skill groups, causing the group to fall apart and you to have Banishing, Binding, and Summoning skills that are subsequently all purchased separately.

Of course, the longer you can wait on doing this, the better off you'll be. But the example stands.

Remember, it doesn't say that you can't have specializations of skills that are in skill groups. It says that you can't have specializations on skill groups. So if you have Conjuring 4, you can specialize your Binding. You can't specialize your Conjuring Group in Binding, however. That would be cheese.

-Frank

Every good gamemaster interprets the meaning of a rule, not the letter.

2 * 1/2 = 1.

Surely this is obvious?

Elemental damage *always* is opposed by half Impact Armor. Whether it's Immunity To Normal Weapons generating that armor value, or a finely constructed breastplate made of recycled cardboard and spit.

A materialized spirit has 2*Force Impact Armor, except against magical attacks. Therefore, versus elemental attacks that are not magical, a materialized spirit has its Force in effective Impact Armor.

Since Hardness these days is compared to modified damage values, I think your argument that a Force 12 spirit is virtually immune to everything is specious.

A Full Burst of StickNShock from a full auto weapon will do 15(e) damage. Even a Force 12 Spirit will be scared by that, since it only has an modified Impact Armor of 12 versus the 15(e). Of course, it's true that the burst would have to get through the Spirit's obscene Reaction, which is an entirely different kettle of fish - I haven't tried to analyse that yet.

EDIT: But it doesn't matter. Extrapolating from the rules for the damage bonus for short narrow bursts, it seems clear that the damage bonus for long and full bursts would not aid in penetrating hardened armor either in SR4. I withdraw the above argument, but leave it in the post so that future readers may see what posts below are responding to! END EDIT

Perhaps this only proves that StickNShock is a wee bit broken in and of itself. I have no comment on that at this time.

Still, I think any Force 12 Spirit wandering around a city is going to get the equivalent of the Lone Star magical SWAT team showing up "at the speed of thought". Shouldn't take too long for a team of astral initiates to take it apart, neh? Although I would imagine they would wait long enough to perform astral tracking on your ass, exploiting the astral signature on that Force 12 spirit...

Any time you're spending Karma to raise skills, rather than BP, that is.

I stand corrected on that point. I hadn't noticed that particular provision, since it's only mentioned in the description for the Short Narrow Burst, but I suppose I should have extrapolated from SR3.

I'll note that there is no such specific disallowance made for the DV mods for long & full bursts, but any GM worth his or her salt will see that it is obviously intended to apply to all burst fire.

I thought as much when i brought it up, i just wanted to get others looking over the math & rules to make sure i wasn't out to lunch.

Ya, i'd count that as a proper counterable tactic. It makes Banishing just as important as Counterspelling for personal and team defense. Even sorcery types should look at picking up a few points in it, just like conjurer specialists should consider a few points of Counterspelling.

...and of course this adds yet another reason to geek the mage first.

....which Force 8 Fire Spirits have no problems doing, because they roll 16 dice to see who is a Mage and who is not, and have an initiative of 24 (and a 16+ die ranged attack that does a base 8 DV at AP -half). The Mage on your team is dead long before he can start a banishing ritual.

So really, the only defense against a force 8 spirit is to have ablaitive magicians on your team, where there is at least one extra magician able to banish the enemy Fire Elemental after the first one gets killed outright at initiative count 32 of the first round. That's completely ridiculous, considering that it takes only one magician to have a force 8 fire spirit. And even if you banish it, it takes that guy just one complex action to bring in another one (although that will be his last, since he's likely going to be drained).

There are two problems with hardened armor:

1. Hardened Armor does not work out well at the high end.
2. Spirits have Hardened Armor which is too close to the high end.

The first is made manifest by the fact that for any sufficiently large amount of hardened armor, it is actually impossible to not kill a target in one hit if your weapon can damage it at all. This is because while harened armor negates any attack that it is larger than (negating 1 DV), it only provides a damage resistance die against an attack larger than it (negating 1/3 of a DV). So for large armor values, a weapon with just one more DV than it is blasting through 2/3 of the armor in actual wound levels - which can start being more boxes than you have.

The second is made manifest by the fact that the only weapon in the basic book capable of even scratching a force 8 spirit is an anti-vehicle missile. And of course, since problem 1 is still going strong, the only weapon in the entire book capable of scratching a force 8 spirit is powerful enough to instantly vaporize that spirit with even a glancing hit.

My suggested house rules are two part:

1. Hardened Armor should reduce the DV of weapons by its rating (completely ignoring any weapon dropped to DV 0).
2. Reduce the hardened armor of creatures with immunity to normal weapons to 1x magic instead of 2x magic.

This makes spirits actually more resistant to weapons on the high end that could damage them anyway (in that there is a small chance that they might survive or something), but it drops their invincibility down to the range where characters would have a chance to do something to them with mundane weaponry that they are likely to have.

OK... let's go by meaning. A Fireball, or for that matter any indirect combat spell, has the damage that it generates resisted by counterspelling. That sounds like the damage is magic to me. See page 196. I don't know how you decided that fireballs were not magical, but that's clearly false.

You throw fire at someone, and if you hit them with it, they get to add counterspelling to their damage resistance. That indicates to me that the fire is totally magical. You don't get counterspelling dice to resist the damage from a hand grenade or any other mundane weapon.

-Frank

Force 6 = 12 points of hard armor, Defiance Super shock: 8stun, half amor. The Armor is reduced by half, to a value of 6, the taser does 8 damage => the spirit will get a nasty shock. Streetsams: forget the Ares Alpha, get a Defiance Taser!

SYL

Remote Service does not automatically use up all remaining Services from Bound Spirits in SR4. That only applies to non-Bound ones.

True, but that's a bound spirit rather than a summoned one.

-Frank

Ahh right, I forgot to add in the Spirit's Force in the Banishing test.

So Banishing one of these monster's is not as easy as it sounds. Seems like house ruling the way Spirits get Hardened Armor is the way to go.

milspec

It is MADE by magic, but its not magical. Once could easily interpret, that the counterspelling is effecting the magic that is feeding the indirect combat spell (e.g. fireball) and thus the spell gets weaker when it hits the target.

But I think it would be a good house-rule to exclude indirect combat spells from counterspelling. That would give them the boost over direct combat spell they need.

It is a reasonable enough house rule that lightning bolts are somehow "not magical" and are affected by imunity to normal weapons and unaffected by counterspelling. But that is a house rule. The actual printed rules and descriptions don't support that in the slightest.

-Frank

That would suck! They already have a boost in that they cause secondary effects.

Why? The magic is the propulsion system. No magic and the fire stays put, if it is even created at all. Indirect combat spells do not create the fire, etc. at the target location ala D&D.

For flamethrower that idea will work, but once you deal with fireball you're pretty much wrong, because there the fire will be create at the location (center of area of effect) and it's then still propulsed outwards by magic ...

They may have dropped the requirement of a physical barrier free path from the caster to the targe/target area be free of physical barriers w/o leaving LOS, which was in SR3. I don't anything like that readily in SR4.

However the propulsion is still described, as well the magic needed to be able to create the "external damaging medium".

EDIT: Oops. I forgot you only roll AoE Counterspelling once now. So actually you do either defeat/reduce it for all CS protected targets or not. But still basically it only cancels out the parts of the spell that would create and/or send the element at the CS protected target.

EDIT: What i don't like is that there doesn't seem to be an explicit option for just choosing to designate Counterspell by caster or "anyone casting except persons X, Y, and Z". Instead it only gives the option to specify the triggering on a person as a target.

P.S. These indirect elemental combat spell are real physical spells in that create for example real flame, not magic flame. As i already quoted, "external damaging medium". It is the fire that does the damage, not the magic.