[Shadowrun] Perfect Crime Edition {Frank Keep Out}

[Longes]

It's not like anyone ever takes Willpower tradition anyway. It's always Logic or Charisma.

[Username17]

There are no Willpower traditions. The normal SR4 drain mechanics are "Willpower + XXX" where "XXX" is either Charisma, Logic, or Intuition. People use all three because Logic is easy to jack up with bioware and helps with technical skills, Charisma is a boost stat for Elves and is the required attribute of diplomancers, and Intuition is rolled to find clues and go first in combat and is thus very useful to all characters.

Now if you're getting rid of Willpower, you'd have to replace the dicepool mod with something. You basically have three choices:

• Magic.
• Edge.
• Skill.

That's pretty much in order of how happy it would make spellcasters.

-Username17

[Longes]

Darn. Confused with the Technomancers.

[Nath]

Now if you're getting rid of Willpower, you'd have to replace the dicepool mod with something. You basically have three choices:

• Magic.
• Edge.
• Skill.

That's pretty much in order of how happy it would make spellcasters.

Drain is described as fatigue, exhausting or injuring, straining the body and the mind. As any other damages are resisted with Constitution or Strength, I don't see anything inherently wrong with doing the same for Drain.

Except possibly for the changes it would incur to game balance.

[Username17]

From a fluff standpoint, small and weak people are supposed to be good mages if they have strong inner somethingsomething. If Drain were resisted with Strength, then Ork witches would be just as good as Elf Shamans at casting powerful magic - which would be weird for Shadowrun. Now as an overall balance move, I don't think it's a bad idea necessarily. But "Troll Mage" is supposed to be at least a little bit of a weird choice in-setting. When an Ork or Troll is good at magic or hacking, people in-world are surprised (not that such characters are especially rare, just surprising to people every time they show up).

One thing you could do is to have each category of spell have its own fixed drain resistance stat, and the dice pool for each would be [Category Stat] + [Tradition Stat]. That would actually help balance, tradition differentiation, and mage differentiation. If a character was actually better at resisting drain for Illusions (and for summoning/binding spirits associated with Illusions in their tradition) than for resisting drain from Combat spells (and the spirits associated with Combat spells), you'd expect that character to specialize a bit more. As is, by the time two mages know a dozen spells, they are most likely going to be casting the same spells most of the time.

Anyway, if you did something like that, having Combat spells run off Strength for Drain as a normal thing would make a lot of sense. Of course, then you're back at it being a good idea to get rid of the Combat Spell category altogether and merge all those spells into the Health Spells.

-Username17

[Orion]

I'm all for merging Charisma and Willpower, but why not call the result "Willpower"?

[CatharzGodfoot]

Part of the 'wimpy but powerful wizards' trope is that they can make big explosions.
But if the attributes used for different types of magic were tradition-based, that wouldn't be a problem.

That said, that sort of a change might be beyond the scope of this revision. If Charisma and Willpower were combined, you'd have two or three sets of attributes for magic traditions: Willpower + Intuition, Willpower + Logic, and (maybe) Intuition + Logic. The first two would work fine; the third might be overpowered.

[Username17]

More generally, without an equipment list we can't really go into the nitty gritty of the system proposal. We have to keep things fairly high level and abstract. We can tell that if you want to be good at hitting people with a sword, that requires all four physical attributes plus intuition (five total), while if you want to cast huge spells that requires two mental attributes plus magic (three total). We can tell that you can be an awesome spellcaster and conjurer with four skills under your belt, but that being decent with "weapons" is split up between twelve skills. That's not an exaggeration, it's seriously twelve in this writeup.

Now obviously, we can't run any real comparisons of what a Street Samurai is capable of so long as the cyberware isn't in here. But the view from here looks pretty fucking bad. Street Samurai appear to be required to buy more attributes and more skills to achieve basic functionality in their idiom than Hackers or Mages are. And let's be honest: the idiom of the Street Samurai is actually pretty fucking limited compared to what Mages and Hackers can do.

This strongly implies that you need to rethink basic principles of skill and attribute assignment. Remember that the more you focus on something from a design standpoint the worse it is. If there are more skills and attributes devoted to a task, that means that the task costs more points to be good at. Street Samurai would be objectively better characters if all weaponry and dodge skills were collapsed into a single skill called "Combat."

-Username17

[Smirnoffico]

I'm all for merging Charisma and Willpower, but why not call the result "Willpower"?

That wouldn't solve the problem of other derivative stats. For example, Composure roll is used pretty much for anything that goes beyond the scope of physical damage/fatigue.

[Username17]

I think I've seen about 2 composure rolls called for on the player's side in all of ever. Shadowrun doesn't have a lot of psychological effects for people to have, and what few it does have are either so crippling that people avoid them (ex.: addiction), or have their own special rules such that they don't matter for composure rules discussions anyway (ex.: Totem drawbacks).

But if you did want keeping a cool head in combat or personal bravery or whatever to be an actual thing, you have to ask yourself who you want to be good at that and who you want to be bad at it. Tying it to Willpower and Charisma means that grizzled veterans are terrible at it (as it runs on two dump stats), while the people who really rock your socks off with it are Elven pornomancers. That's weird. That means that the bravest character on the team is Cinnamon Carter and the least brave character on the team is Willy Armitage. I submit that if this is the case, that you need to seriously rethink your attribute assignments.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

In general, I think exceptionally fucked up situations are better served by simply sticking with the morale/wound penalties setup. In such a paradigm James Bond seems cool under pressure because his social pools are stupid high, and whether he is actually scared or not in that instance is indistinguishable to observers. By contrast, if John Rambo gets upset, he can still fight well but isn't much fun at a dinner party. If you want to both fight OK and seem like a decent dude to have drinks with afterwards there's always the John McClane package where you maybe tone down the combat pools a bit but have some points in etiquette.

[Heisenberg]

Hi everyone, I've been AFD (away from Den) for a week or so, so it's going to take me some time (and possibly a few posts) to catch up to all the opinions and discussion flying around.

Because I have a lot of stuff to respond to, most quotes will not be sourced. I am sorry, but for the purposes of this thread I'll be wanting to respond to ideas more than people anyway.

How about Body equals (Strength + Agility) / 2, and Willpower equals (Intuition + Charisma) / 2? Alternatively, you could have them be (Attribute + Edge), in which case Body could be (Strength + Edge) and Willpower could be (Charisma + Edge), or whatever.

Intuition + Charisma determining Willpower makes sense to me and seems workable. But Body being determined even partially by either Agility or Edge is just nonsensical to me. I guess being luckier could effectively make you tougher, so Edge helping determine Body isn't horrible, but I really don't think that being faster could/should/will make you tougher.

General note: Keep in mind that my mission goal is to make something that is very accessible to players of vanilla SR4(A), so I am generally shying away from change for its own sake, or change that doesn't have ironclad justifications behind it.

That said, there's a lot of support here for losing or modifying Strength and/or Body, so I'm definitely at least considering it.

I think Frank uses 2BP for Skills and 5 PB for Skill Groups in his other HR.
Why did you use 3BP and 8BP?

I think Frank's pricing makes BP go a bit too far in general. But I do agree with his rationale that Skill Groups costing the same as Attributes is fucked.

Btw. I hate the exotic weapon skill. Please find another solution.
(You allready created the Whip skill and placed it under the Meele Group.)

Consider me to now officially be taking suggestions on this.

Will read more later.

Thanks, please do. : )

1) You're insane. Logic is already one of the best stats, with a huge list of linked skills and being a major thing for Deckers and Mages (you know, 2/3 of the major archtypes).

Um, have you played SR4(A) at all? Logic doesn't do SHIT for deckers except help them be better Medics and Electricians. Attributes have no bearing on hacking in SR4. Hacking rolls are Skill + Program. (This is a glaring problem I will be fixing.) And only Hermetic mages benefit from Logic. It's not as useful as you think.

As for me being insane, I'll cop to that. I mean I did write 110 pages of Shadowrun house rules, and I'm not even done yet.

More in next post.

[Heisenberg]

'm all for merging Charisma and Willpower, but why not call the result "Willpower"?

I have actually seen/designed games where this is the case. It becomes weird in cases where for instance you are lying to someone and how good you are at lying is based on your Willpower. "Roll Con + Willpower". It doesn't exactly make sense. If I merge them (sizeable if), I am going to call the resulting stat Charisma, as Charisma has always been fluffed in Shadowrun, weirdly enough, as being force of will/force of personality.

***

A lot of people are in favor of reducing the number of Attributes. This would also, among other necessary changes, necessitate lowering the amount of Build Points available, yes? Less things to spend them on. We are all in agree on this?

I am (tentatively) considering merging Strength + Body into one Attribute called Body, and merging Willpower + Charisma into one Attribute called Charisma. So possible attribute sets for my game include (not including Edge or Magic)...

{Body, Agility, Reaction, Strength, Charisma, Intuition, Logic, Willpower}
Advantage: Most accessible to people coming from SR4 or SR5, with least changes. Less arduous for me to go through 50,000+ words already written and remove/conflate references to one or more attributes on 110+ pages.
Disadvantage: Neither Strength or Body is ever going to be as good as Agility or Reaction, and since every attribute should cost the same amount of BP (since we're not going the HERO System route where Dex is explicitly king), this is problematic.
# of Attributes: 8

{Body, Agility, Reaction, Charisma, Intuition, Logic, Willpower}
Advantage: Body is now a better stat than either Strength or Body, as it combines both of them.
Disadvantage: Physical and Astral Attributes become harder to map parallel to each other, as there are four mental attributes and three physical ones.
# of Attributes: 7

{Body, Agility, Reaction, Strength, Charisma, Intuition, Logic}
Advantage: Charisma now serves as both Willpower and Charisma.
Disadvantage: Physical and Astral Attributes become harder to map parallel to each other, as there are four physical attributes and three mental ones.
# of Attributes: 7

{Body, Agility, Reaction, Charisma, Intuition, Logic}
Advantage: Body and Charisma are much better stats that Body/Strength and Charisma/Willpower were. All six stats are roughly in balance, at a glance. Three physical attributes and three mental attributes slightly reduces the complexity of the game
Disadvantage: The vanishing of two attributes will cause at least raised eyebrows to people coming to these rules from actively playing SR4(A) or the shitheap that is SR5.

Right now I am still cleaving towards option one, as I am very wary of "fixing" anything that isn't super clearly broken. Arguments have been made that Strength/Body/Willpower is broken, but I am not entirely convinced by these arguments. I am definitely giving it some serious thought, however.

We can tell that if you want to be good at hitting people with a sword, that requires all four physical attributes plus intuition (five total), while if you want to cast huge spells that requires two mental attributes plus magic (three total). We can tell that you can be an awesome spellcaster and conjurer with four skills under your belt, but that being decent with "weapons" is split up between twelve skills. That's not an exaggeration, it's seriously twelve in this writeup.

Now obviously, we can't run any real comparisons of what a Street Samurai is capable of so long as the cyberware isn't in here. But the view from here looks pretty fucking bad. Street Samurai appear to be required to buy more attributes and more skills to achieve basic functionality in their idiom than Hackers or Mages are. And let's be honest: the idiom of the Street Samurai is actually pretty fucking limited compared to what Mages and Hackers can do.

This strongly implies that you need to rethink basic principles of skill and attribute assignment. Remember that the more you focus on something from a design standpoint the worse it is. If there are more skills and attributes devoted to a task, that means that the task costs more points to be good at. Street Samurai would be objectively better characters if all weaponry and dodge skills were collapsed into a single skill called "Combat."

I don't agree with how you're counting only four necessary skills for mages but twelve necessary skills for combat characters.

There's Spellcasting, Counterspelling, Summoning, Binding, and Banishing. That's five things you're gonna want to do right there. We'll call Ritual Spellcasting optional and not count that one, and say that Astral Combat is not something every mage needs, but Astral Perception definitely is. So that's at least six skills every spellcaster's going to need.

I strongly disagree with your assertion that a Street Samurai needs to be good with every single melee and ranged weapon to be effective in combat. I also think that taking Automatics (SMGs) 5, Pistols (Heavy Pistols) 4, and Blades (Cyber-Implant) 5 versus taking Firearms Group 4 and Close Combat 4 is a meaningful choice, of Breadth versus Depth.

More to the point, a Street Samurai who's exceptionally skillful with SMGs and blades, and more-than-decent with a pistol is perfectly combat capable. In most situations, he's not being seriously penalized by having a few less points in Longarms or Clubs.

Let's call it six skills to the street samurai, Automatics, Pistols, Unarmed Combat, Blades, Perception, Parkour. That's as many skills as a mage is going to want (again, Spellcasting, Counterspelling, Summoning, Binding, Banishing, Astral Perception). Some of these skills, in either case, are more necessary than others. A spellcaster can probably get by with just Spellcasting, Summoning, and Astral Perception; they'll be less useful to their party than if they had Counterspelling. But a samurai can likewise get by with Pistols, Unarmed Combat, and Parkour, even if likewise they'd be more useful if they could use a sniper rifle.

Anyway, I'll upload some sample characters soon so you can see what I mean. I have remade the SR4 sample characters with a friend (since they were terribly made in the first place), and most awakened versus mundane characters are stacking up pretty even. I haven't touched deckers or technomancers yet, though because that section is still under construction.

More generally, without an equipment list we can't really go into the nitty gritty of the system proposal. We have to keep things fairly high level and abstract.

Apologies, but the equipment section, to whatever degree there is one, will follow my work on the Matrix chapter which will probably take some time. That said, for evaluation purposes, you should picture something that cleaves very, very close to SR4's Street Gear chapter. Most alterations will be just to the most glaringly broken pieces of equipment (i.e. the efficacy of Stick'n'Shock ammunition versus every other fucking thing in the game). The rest will be minor balance tweaks. The idea is that you will be able to play SRPC with just the SR4 gear chapter, it doesn't need a gear chapter of its own, just a few tweaks.

Anyway, my current focus is on the Matrix rules and I am considering making a thread for those soon. (Question one: should Technomancers even be a thing. I know some people really like them, some people really hate them, and I've always been strongly indifferent.)

[Stahlseele]

lying to people is all about willpower.
don't have to be charismatic to lie at all.
it's just that people want to believe stuff charismatic people say more because . . well, look at them! that charisma! he'd never lie to us!
doesn't mean i can not lie. it's all a matter of controling myself to not be nervous so i don't give off any telltale signs or something . .

[Username17]

There's Spellcasting, Counterspelling, Summoning, Binding, and Banishing. That's five things you're gonna want to do right there.

Have you ever played a mage or seen one played? This is a serious question.

Banishing doesn't do shit. I am literally the world's greatest expert on Shadowrun 4's spirit rules, and I am telling you that Banishing is a dump skill. Literally the only thing it does that Stunbolt doesn't do better and for less drain is to take control of spirits from other traditions that have powers your tradition doesn't have access to - something that a majority of GMs won't even let you do because it's fucking bizarre. And most of the spirits that have really interesting powers you might want to Pokemon actually have banishing resistance.

Banishing is extraordinarily niche at the tables where you're allowed to use it at all, and that's a minority of tables. At most tables it does literally nothing.

When you're making a new version, your primary task is to create a set of skill and attribute combinations to cover the available playspace. If you can't successfully identify which skills are completely fucking useless in the previous edition, it doesn't inspire confidence.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

Banishing is basically a NPC skill, yeah.

Plus, I think it's important to acknowledge the difference between what players want in this instance and what people actually need in order to operate as functional shadowrunners. I say this because yes, players certainly want to take both Spellcasting and Summoning--both those skills are individually fuckin' sweet and are governed by the same attribute, after all. But with that said, skipping one or the other only makes you a chump relative to other min-maxed magicians. Making an ork summoner/gun bunny who basically pisses all over your average martial artist or lightly cybered mundane is seriously not hard. You can do a lot just with Infiltration and a couple Ares alphas for you and your Guardian Spirit.

[virgil]

Making an ork summoner/gun bunny who basically pisses all over your average martial artist or lightly cybered mundane is seriously not hard. You can do a lot just with Infiltration and a couple Ares alphas for you and your Guardian Spirit.

That is my wife's character, except with a monowhip instead of pistols, and she actively lowballs her in-game tactics to make sure the street sam of the party doesn't feel small in the pants.

[Smirnoffico]

But if you did want keeping a cool head in combat or personal bravery or whatever to be an actual thing, you have to ask yourself who you want to be good at that and who you want to be bad at it. Tying it to Willpower and Charisma means that grizzled veterans are terrible at it (as it runs on two dump stats), while the people who really rock your socks off with it are Elven pornomancers. That's weird. That means that the bravest character on the team is Cinnamon Carter and the least brave character on the team is Willy Armitage. I submit that if this is the case, that you need to seriously rethink your attribute assignments.

This weird situation comes from the fact that, as you noted, Shadowrun has little mechanics for psychological interactions. It can be argued that that's the idea - Shadowrun isn't a game of personal horror, it's a game and break and entry, but I've really never seen a game that doesn't run out of the boundaries of the initial trope. And when the situation arise in the game, we virtually have one roll for everything, be it keeping your cool under fire, keeping your dinner in after witnessing something gruesome, quelling moral qualms at killing an innocent bystander or leaving your buddy behind to save your ass, resisting interrogation, resisting non-spell general mind-fuck. Add there rolls to resist things like adrenaline pump and general not Composure but CHA+WIL rolls like resisting mentor spirit bans.

As it all falls into one roll, that's where the weird stuff starts to happen. Because while grizzled veteran would easily resist torture or facing a blood spirit, elven face would better keep his cool and won't snap when he needs to restrain from violence at any cost. Game-wise it still one roll, which makes the whole thing absurd. Even more, said elven face with 15 Charisma just can't fail those rolls at all because majority of them require 3 successes.

But I wasn't going to protect Composure roll implementation, it's obviously flawed, I was saying that simply merging WIL and CHA without any further rule tweaks would result in even more silliness like resisting addiction with BOD+CHA rolls, shamans rolling CHA+CHA to resist drain or Cinnamon Carter being twice better than Jimmy Armitage than he is now.

[Heisenberg]

There's Spellcasting, Counterspelling, Summoning, Binding, and Banishing. That's five things you're gonna want to do right there.

Have you ever played a mage or seen one played? This is a serious question.

Banishing doesn't do shit. I am literally the world's greatest expert on Shadowrun 4's spirit rules, and I am telling you that Banishing is a dump skill. Literally the only thing it does that Stunbolt doesn't do better and for less drain is to take control of spirits from other traditions that have powers your tradition doesn't have access to - something that a majority of GMs won't even let you do because it's fucking bizarre. And most of the spirits that have really interesting powers you might want to Pokemon actually have banishing resistance.

Banishing is extraordinarily niche at the tables where you're allowed to use it at all, and that's a minority of tables. At most tables it does literally nothing.

When you're making a new version, your primary task is to create a set of skill and attribute combinations to cover the available playspace. If you can't successfully identify which skills are completely fucking useless in the previous edition, it doesn't inspire confidence.

-Username17

To answer your "serious" question, assuming it is such, I have been GMing SR4(A) for several years. During that time a lot of the PCs at my table were running mages of various stripes, yes. I rarely get to PC myself, but some of the time I do, I do in fact play a mage.

In SRPC, the version of the rules we are discussing in the thread (or so I would fucking hope), Stunbolt deals Stun damage equal to twice net hits on a Magic + Spellcasting vs. Willpower (+ Counterspelling) roll, for Force/2 Drain. (This is another way of saying that I have nerfed Stunbolt to the point where it is not glaringly the one spell to rule them all, but not completely to oblivion.)

Meanwhile, Banishing reduces the net hits a spirit owes by one per net hit on a Magic + Banishing vs. Force (+summoner's Magic) roll.

So, a mage casts a Force 5 Stunbolt on a summoned Force 5 spirit unprotected by counterspelling. Magic 5 + Spellcasting 5 = 10 Dice versus Willpower 5. On average, the mage achieves 3.33 hits, which we'll round up to four. On average, the spirit rolls 1.6667 hits, which we'll round down to one. This means the Mage has 3 net hits, dealing six boxes of damage to the spirit. The mage must then resist 2 Drain.

Meanwhile, a Mage tries to banish a Force 5 spirit that is not bound. Magic 5 + Banishing 3 versus Magic 5. On average, the mage achieves 2.667 successes, which we'll round up to three. On average, the spirit rolls 1.668 hits, which we'll round down to one. This means the Mage has 2 net hits. If the spirit's summoner had 2 or less services from it, the spirit is banished. If the spirit's summoner had 3 services owed from it (after the services used by whatever it is doing while being banished), it is 2/3rds of the way gone. If the spirit's summoner had 4 services owed from it (again, after subtracting the service for whatever it's doing), then it is now halfway gone. If it still owed more than 4 services...that's a lot of fucking services. In any case, the mage has to resist 1 Drain.

Either way, it's looking to me that in SRPC Banishing stacks up decently against Stunbolt, attacking a much smaller alternate "health bar", possibly even for less drain. And that's before you even factor in the possibility of straight up jacking a motherfucker's spirit.

***

In SR4, less importantly, I simply don't agree with you about the relative usefulness of Banishing in the SR4 playspace. It has seen a fair amount of use at the tables I have GMed. Also, I am not sure how getting a no-cost spirit of the same tradition you have is somehow worthless, because hey, free spirit ain't bad. However, these observation are really tertiary to the discussion we're actually having. The relevant comparison is SRPC Stunbolt to SRPC Banishing, not SR4 Stunbolt to SR4 banishing.

(I really do understand what you're saying about a knowledge base and a playspace, but that doesn't necessarily have to mean always agreeing with you about everything at all times.)

Plus, I think it's important to acknowledge the difference between what players want in this instance and what people actually need in order to operate as functional shadowrunners. I say this because yes, players certainly want to take both Spellcasting and Summoning--both those skills are individually fuckin' sweet and are governed by the same attribute, after all. But with that said, skipping one or the other only makes you a chump relative to other min-maxed magicians. Making an ork summoner/gun bunny who basically pisses all over your average martial artist or lightly cybered mundane is seriously not hard. You can do a lot just with Infiltration and a couple Ares alphas for you and your Guardian Spirit.

I don't disagree with anything you're saying right here, but I'm not entirely sure of your exact point either. Dedicated combat characters should have plenty of points/resources to dedicate to being able to out-infiltrate, out-shoot, and so-on the above described character and his or her Guardian Spirit.

That is my wife's character, except with a monowhip instead of pistols, and she actively lowballs her in-game tactics to make sure the street sam of the party doesn't feel small in the pants.

Nitpick: the Ares Alpha is an assault rifle. : )

But I wasn't going to protect Composure roll implementation, it's obviously flawed, I was saying that simply merging WIL and CHA without any further rule tweaks would result in even more silliness like resisting addiction with BOD+CHA rolls, shamans rolling CHA+CHA to resist drain or Cinnamon Carter being twice better than Jimmy Armitage than he is now.

It would, hypothetically, be collapsing WIL + CHA into just WIL. Which would then, hopefully obviously, become a clearly important stat for "tough-guy" combat characters. This is all hypothetical, though.

***

Anyway, for a general progress update, still at work on the Matrix chapter. I should have enough words to post up to a thread for discussion here within a week or so.

[Username17]

In SRPC, the version of the rules we are discussing in the thread (or so I would fucking hope), Stunbolt deals Stun damage equal to twice net hits on a Magic + Spellcasting vs. Willpower (+ Counterspelling) roll, for Force/2 Drain. (This is another way of saying that I have nerfed Stunbolt to the point where it is not glaringly the one spell to rule them all, but not completely to oblivion.)

I had assumed that was a placeholder and you didn't actually have the damage calculation defined. As written, you have in fact nerfed Stunbolt completely into oblivion. Sure, it doesn't cost any drain, but a complex action that fills in like 4 stun boxes is a joke. And not a good joke. Requiring extraordinary success on an opposed roll to drop a single dude with a complex action is not an ability that matters. At all. You still have the two shot problem hard wired into your bullet attacks, so pretty much anyone can split their complex action into two simples and shoot twice, dropping almost anyone you care to name.

Sure, if you nerf combat spells into unusability, then they aren't[/i] counter examples. But you still have Control Spells. It's not like there aren't ways to remove targets with spells.

Meanwhile, Banishing reduces the net hits a spirit owes by one per net hit on a Magic + Banishing vs. Force (+summoner's Magic) roll.

That's completely useless. You're making a Stat + Skill roll against a Stat + Stat roll. The defender's dicepool is, as a rule, considerably larger than the attacker's dicepool. And the attacker's dicepool is a skill that doesn't do anything else, while the defender's dicepool speeds up cars, hides from authorities, and changes the fucking weather. There's a huge utility mismatch.

Even if you nerf combat spells to the point where they aren't worth knowing, the Banishment action still isn't worth taking in combat. Or at all, unless your GM will let you pokemon spirits of other traditions. The skill is a dump skill. It serves no purpose except to power an action you won't take because you have better options.

In SR4, less importantly, I simply don't agree with you about the relative usefulness of Banishing in the SR4 playspace. It has seen a fair amount of use at the tables I have GMed. Also, I am not sure how getting a no-cost spirit of the same tradition you have is somehow worthless, because hey, free spirit ain't bad.

What the fuck are you talking about? Capturing spirits with Banishing has literally exactly the same drain as summoning them raw does. Plus any extra drain you take from the banishment itself. It's not a "free" spirit (in any sense of the term). It's objectively more expensive than summoning a spirit from scratch (costing at the bare minimum more actions). It is therefore by definition a useless action unless the specific spirit you are looking at has something you couldn't get from spirits you could summon yourself (either because it has powers your tradition doesn't have or because you believe the specific spirit has memories that are in some way helpful to your mission).

Right now you're defending a useless skill by proudly holding up that you've made a specific spell useless at the same time. That doesn't say what you seem to think it says.

-Username17

[Seerow]

So why not just make Banishment a specialty spell instead of a skill?

I mean there really isn't any way to make it strong enough to justify taking without making spirits effectively useless (and thus in turn making Banishment useless except as a deterrent in the metagame). Make it a spell, and suddenly you have a low resource cost option you can pick up if you want to be awesome at killing spirits. Done.

[Orca]

If you're assuming that Banishing lets you have multiple unbound spirits I can see it having a niche though not a big one. If you try to use it offensively though you have no way of knowing whether it has 1 service or 6 services remaining, so even if that's somehow effective you risk getting your face burnt off sooner or later.

[Whipstitch]

I don't disagree with anything you're saying right here, but I'm not entirely sure of your exact point either. Dedicated combat characters should have plenty of points/resources to dedicate to being able to out-infiltrate, out-shoot, and so-on the above described character and his or her Guardian Spirit.

My point is that most of the power of being a magician is condensed into two skills, with counterspelling being a nice but passive addition. Thus balancing magicians vs. non magicians under the assumption that mages will be routinely spending points on 3 or 4 other bullshit skills in addition to the good stuff isn't going to do your game balance any favors. Magicians get by not because everything they have is good, but because Spellcasting and Summoning can do a very passable job of imitating other pools at need on top of providing unique effects--Summoning comes out the gate with Task Spirits, Concealment, unfair Will save attacks and proxy warriors while Spellcasting+Magic lets you purchase one pool and then graft new functionality to that pool for 3 bp/5 karma a pop. It can actually be a pretty point efficient way to go about your business. And honestly, I don't really give two shits if some mundo samurai has 15 gun dice to an ork combat summoner's 12, because the difference is frankly rather unlikely to matter, since Shadowrun isn't a game built around death matches with "level appropriate" prime runners.

[kzt]

And honestly, I don't really give two shits if some mundo samurai has 15 gun dice to an ork combat summoner's 12, because the difference is frankly rather unlikely to matter, since Shadowrun isn't a game built around death matches with "level appropriate" prime runners.

Yeah, when the summoner can have a fire spirit magically track said orc down at his hideout and materialize with energy aura on top of the sleeping orc I tend to suspect that the summoner is going to not going to lose the kind of fight that will happen.

[Smirnoffico]

So why not just make Banishment a specialty spell instead of a skill?

Why not just get rid of Banishment altogether?
Or make it a direct damage Simple Action skill bypassing drain, immunity and everything else. Just your Magic+Banishing against spirit's Force (not using summoner's Magic or make a special metamagic to add summoner's magic to pool for bound spirits), net successes equal damage done. It will still be inferior to Stunbolt due the need for a separate skill to cause damage but no drain will give it some use.
Still, I'd rather drop the skill