The Gaming Den

I think it's more the "growing quickly" part. If it starts at 1% of the population and six decades later it's still at 1%, that's not growing quickly. It isn't even growing at all.

Also, "the mana level is rising", so part of the increase in mage population is from the fact that some people have "less active" Awakened Genes, so they don't awaken until the mana level is higher (just like not all meta-variants showed up at the same time). So a lot of families are still getting first generation mages out of no where.

Once the mana cycle gets closer to the peak in a few hundred years, the entire world population would basically be Magic 1 characters at least. Earthdawn cross-over metaplot, hell yeah.

A Man In Black wrote:

kzt wrote:Also it's a US thing that that restricts silencers that much, I understand that in France, the UK and most other places they are sold directly over the counter without any significant regulation and are required to be used for some purposes.

It's a prohibition thing, like the bulk of US firearms/munitions laws. They're restricted under a bunch of laws that existed mainly for mafia-busting. Assaulting someone with a silenced weapon is mentioned in the same part of the law as assaulting someone with a submachine gun, for example, and has extra penalties at the federal level.

It makes a sort of sense that suppressors would be restricted anywhere that there was a similar moral panic about shadowrunners.

So I was curious...

Mages can be incredibly powerful because they can pack a fuckload of firepower into their bodies, and the only way to tell a mage from a muggle is by assensing. And I don't think you can assense spell knowledge. So every mage is a potential assault weapon.

In light of this, how stringent are magical licensing laws and how can they be enforced?

Silent Wayfarer wrote:

A Man In Black wrote:

kzt wrote:Also it's a US thing that that restricts silencers that much, I understand that in France, the UK and most other places they are sold directly over the counter without any significant regulation and are required to be used for some purposes.

It's a prohibition thing, like the bulk of US firearms/munitions laws. They're restricted under a bunch of laws that existed mainly for mafia-busting. Assaulting someone with a silenced weapon is mentioned in the same part of the law as assaulting someone with a submachine gun, for example, and has extra penalties at the federal level.

It makes a sort of sense that suppressors would be restricted anywhere that there was a similar moral panic about shadowrunners.

So I was curious...

Mages can be incredibly powerful because they can pack a fuckload of firepower into their bodies, and the only way to tell a mage from a muggle is by assensing. And I don't think you can assense spell knowledge. So every mage is a potential assault weapon.

In light of this, how stringent are magical licensing laws and how can they be enforced?

If memory serves me, all combat spells are Forbidden. The real power of mages is not in the combat spells, but in Control Thoughts and Alter Memory. And spirit summoning.


My personal problem with SR magic has always been the insistence of "Nukes are bad" and "Blood magic is bad". Radiation isn't inherently evil, so I see no reason why mage using nuclear magic is worse than the mage using fire magic. Blood magic is just mechanically weak, and, if you want to use it, can be used by sacrificing chickens. You don't need to murder metahumans to fuel your rituals.

Grek wrote:I think it's more the "growing quickly" part. If it starts at 1% of the population and six decades later it's still at 1%, that's not growing quickly. It isn't even growing at all.

I thought that 1% was for 2050, not 2011. If we start with 1% in 2011, keeping the same percentage to 2050 would be impossible, unless there's some universal masquerade-like law in place to regulate magic users.

FrankTrollman wrote:Manabolt in SR4 is not "broken" it's "effective." With the two shot problem in full effect, it is rather expected that you can take two consecutive simple actions to drop an opponent with your firearm of choice. Manabolt is very good at dropping an opponent (if you overcast it), but that takes a complex action to cast, which is two simple actions. Also it causes Drain. There are enemies against which you are better off casting Mana Bolt than you are shooting bullets, and enemies where the reverse is true. But that certainly doesn't make it "broken" or anything like that.

Mana bolt is more than just effective. At Force 10 (starting mage level) you deal minimum of 11 damage with only one defence roll while firearms give two defence rolls. And one of those two defence rolls is based on good stat while spell resistance roll is based on dump stat. Receiving 5 drain in return is practically nothing compared to the effect.

I won't go as far as to say that Mana bolt and direct damage spells need a nerf, but in my experience they are much more effective than firearms. And I can't imagine a situation - while fighting humans - where spells would be lacking while firearms won't. At the very least one can always boost his resistance to firearms with armour, while against mana bolts it's always willpower+counterspelling

Mana bolt is more than just effective. At Force 10 (starting mage level) you deal minimum of 11 damage with only one defence roll while firearms give two defence rolls. And one of those two defence rolls is based of good stat while spell resistance roll is based off dump stat. Getting 5 drain in return is practically nothing compared to the effect.

That effect is impressive, but the cost is quite high. If you spend a complex action overcasting a manabolt at a dude and I spend two simple actions shooting them in the chest with a gun of my choice, the likely outcome will be the same: the target will have fallen down. Now the time costs are in that case identical - both you and I will have used our entire action and having nothing left but a free action to fall prone behind cover and hope for the best. But the other costs are that I will have spent 24¥ on bullets, and you will have filled in two boxes on your physical condition monitor.

Needless to say, there are enemies against which the manabolt is a better deal than the gun. But if you intend to go up against, say, five enemies, the bullets are trivially obviously the better idea.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:But the other costs are that I will have spent 24¥ on bullets, and you will have filled in two boxes on your physical condition monitor.

-Username17

Which is why you actually use Stunbolt and not Manabolt
Against groups of enemies magicians have the advantage that Manaball still uses spellcasting, while grenades use Throw.

FrankTrollman wrote: Needless to say, there are enemies against which the manabolt is a better deal than the gun. But if you intend to go up against, say, five enemies, the bullets are trivially obviously the better idea.

We found stunball to be the better solution to those sorts of problems.

And then the comparison just become your grenades vs. stun ball. Look, everyone here agrees that magicians are too good relative to the other archetypes, but that's crucially different from saying that combat spells are outright broken and render the game a farce. Direct spells are better than they have to be, but it'd actually be pretty trivial to do some math hacks that get combat spells and guns to exist in a rough sort of parity while shining against different thematically appropriate targets. We're actually pretty close to having that right now with the current DVs and object resistance--the single biggest stumbling block is that Counterspelling is a fucked up way of handling the spell resistance of living targets and needs to be overhauled. Problem is, fixing all of that wouldn't change the real issue: combat skills are very narrow and Spellcasting becomes a very broad skill as you staple on new features to it at 3 bp a pop.

Hell, in my experience people actually seem fairly comfortable with the idea that powerful combat mages can murder people super hard with death magic. What seems to annoy people more is how any dipshit wage mage with a Magic attribute of 4 or so can cheaply learn how to threaten to hit a crowd with 9+ DV even if everything else they do with their magic is based around other schools. As Frank pointed out earlier, people justifiably get super jealous that magicians are the only ones who get to say "I use my iconic shtick until there is no longer a problem" in such a wide array of situations.

Problem then becomes:
Why would you risk drain for the same result you get with a gun?

Smirnoffico wrote:Is gift guaranteed to be inherited by the children of the mage?

According to Shadowtech, "the Magus factor only has a tenuous link to hereditary genetics (in as much as any mental predilection is hereditary)."

It's not clear if the person who wrote the Fifth Edition Magic chapter used the word "generation" because he thought only magicians' children could be magicians, or if he meant it in a broader sense (the 2nd generation being the people who were taught magic by the first magicians, and the 3rd generation those who were taught by 2nd generation).

Stahlseele wrote:Problem then becomes:
Why would you risk drain for the same result you get with a gun?

If nothing else, it's the hammer issue. Lots of things look like nails to you. However, you are more likely to have your stunball with you then a vehicle mounted automatic grenade launcher, and stunball is considerably less likely to wake up the neighbors.

kzt wrote:

Stahlseele wrote:Problem then becomes:
Why would you risk drain for the same result you get with a gun?

If nothing else, it's the hammer issue. Lots of things look like nails to you. However, you are more likely to have your stunball with you then a vehicle mounted automatic grenade launcher, and stunball is considerably less likely to wake up the neighbors.

I prefer my mages (4e) with automatic weapons.
Stun-Bolt Ball as backup weapon, yes. Not the only weapon (because vehicles drones, high Background Count and drain).
I also dislike more than one combat spell, because char. advancement in SR is not something I see often and the limited amount of spells I get at char gen are all I will ever get.

kzt wrote:Problem then becomes:
If nothing else, it's the hammer issue. Lots of things look like nails to you. However, you are more likely to have your stunball with you then a vehicle mounted automatic grenade launcher, and stunball is considerably less likely to wake up the neighbors.

This is one of the things that really chaps my ass about the aversion to change on the part of the dev team. There's a lot of things they could do to re-calibrate the magic system under the guise of changing mana levels and a growing Awakened population. For example, they could have made assensing knacks and other magically sensitive people far more common than in past generations so that magic security is more commonplace. Likewise drain could be re-jiggered so that people are more dependent upon using fetishes, foci and limited spells in order to cast big time room-clearing effects. It's not a perfect fix, but if you need to light yourself up like a christmas tree on the astral and wear a face full of woad in order to reasonably cast your Force 10 Power Bolt then some of the stealth advantage begins to melt away a little bit.

Stahlseele wrote:Problem then becomes:
Why would you risk drain for the same result you get with a gun?

Well, I think the issue becomes that sorcery skill does a lot more than guns skill does. Firing stunbolts at people is only a fraction of what magic can do, while guns skill does a single thing. With a mage you're paying for versatility and concealability. If you want a spell to imitate a gun, you can do that. If you want a spell to ignore armor or turn invisible, then you get that too.

A street samurai should be the master of straight out power damage. The mage's arsenal should be less potent damage wise.

Section.8.2: Moar Magic

So I drank all the beers and took some prescription medication that I lack a prescription for, so let's read the rest of the magic chapter and ruminate on how amphetamines and alcohol make lousy company. Or how Catalyst shouldn't be allowed to write rules. You know, whatever.

When Shadowrun debuted in 1989, Sorcery, Conjuring, and Astral Projection was all there was. Yes, magic items existed, but they were boring bonus items that cost experience points to activate and also didn't have any rules for being made. It was certainly implied that someone knew how to make them, but the rules didn't exist. With the creation of the first magic expansion book, a number of new things were added. Rules for making foci yes, but also the Adepts. We'll talk about the enchanting first.

Throughout Shadowrun's history, people who wrote the enchanting and alchemy rules seemed almost pathologically afraid that someone might actually use them. Magic items didn't just take karma to bind, they also took karma to make. Alchemical processes took so long relative to the cost of the outputs that you're basically better off just working at Taco Temple and having your paycheck direct deposited in your talismonger's account. This culture of fear that players might actually do things that were useful during downtime isn't just evident from the results, it was actually quite explicit among the writers and developers even when I was there. At one point I think I actually asked AnchientHistory (who was writing the enchanting section for 4th edition at the time) whether a Houngan had killed his dog. I think I managed to shame the developers into allowing alchemy to be a little less terrible, but only a little and they actually quite resented me for it.

But aside from the fear that the Enchanting rules might actually be used, there was also the vague acknowledgment that the lack of magic swords that people could use was actually a thing that disappointed people. See in order to get any benefit from a magic sword you have to activate it. In order to activate it, it needs to be in your hands and also bound to you (this is why magic guns and even magic bows don't work – the moment it leaves contact with you, it turns off – jury is still out on magic lasers). And only magically active people can bind foci at all. But the whole point of magic weapons is to hurt things that are resistant to mundane weaponry, and mages don't care because of Mana Bolt (or at least, they didn't care in any edition other than 5th, because Mana Bolt was worth casting). Your mundane Street Samurai would kind of like a magic katana and he can't have one and no one else gives a shit so no one used magic swords for anything. So they created a framework where magic could enhance a weapon in a way a mundane player could actually benefit from. There was Anchoring and Quickening, which were essentially ways to keep a spell going for a long time – ostensibly so that you could make a flaming sword that the Street Samurai could hunt nature spirits with.

Of course, in a game where spells can be easily dispelled whether they are permanent or not and you're supposed to spend a lot of the time being subtle and avoiding detection by arbitrarily large numbers of corporate security goons, paying actual karma for an always-on firesword that glows like a column of flame on the astral plane and literally as a column of flame in the real world turns out to be a kind of terrible idea. So while these subsystems have existed from very early in Shadowrun's history and fit smoothly into Shadowrun's canonical metaphysics, they are a minor footnote that no one seems to give a crap about.

Shadowrun 5 has made a concerted attempt to bring enchanting into the realm of things people care about. I have no objections to this as a design goal. Enchanting has been sort of supposed to be a coequal branch of magic to Sorcery and Conjuring since it was created in the Grimoire. So lavishing more love on Enchanting seems reasonable, even perhaps long overdue. So when I criticize this crap, it's not from a grognardy “how dare you change stuff” standpoint, it's from the standpoint of their new products being really dumb.


Not the attack I intend to make here.

So first we have to talk about alchemy, which has always been pretty weird. Basically, natural stuff has a certain amount of magical affinity for magic, and by taking it to an old school alchemist's shop you can refine it down to small piles of rose petals or piles of black sand or something that are nebulously useful in enchanting. Also, there's a magical metal called “orichalcum” that is even more useful for that sort of thing. First edition had a rant about how orichalcum was a special alloy that was made out of a bunch of metals that was considered chemically impossible and formed only through magic. The specific metals they listed actually allow just fine, so that was always pretty strange. In the first four editions we had discussions of “refined materials” and “alchemical radicals” and shit, which was probably based on someone having read some sort of newage (rhymes with “sewage”) book about alchemy or alt-medicine or something. It was confusing and largely pointless. Fifth edition attempts to simplify this nomenclature – which I approve of – but their followthrough is to call alchemical things “reagents” which is frankly just as bad. When it tells you to “expend three reagents” and you end up ticking off one unit of alchemical hemlock extract and two units of alchemical salt, that's just... that's just not what the fucking word means. They prevaricate on how they don't have room to talk about how orichalcum is made, which is not true, but they seem to be walking back or at least downplaying the atrocious metallurgy from the late 80s, so for now at least it might be a step forward. Probably they are going to punt and end up making the orichalcum process just as stupid, meaning that they'll have gained nothing except to make information harder to find, but I withhold judgement.

The big thing they introduce here are “spell preparations.” These are kind of like anchoring, in that they are spells that are locked into an object to be released later. This completely fails to give us the magic swords that we wanted and instead means that basically everyone is firing magic bullets. Armor Piercing bullets cost 12¥ a piece, and making them have a Force 5 spell go off when they hit costs 100¥ per bullet, and you pay the Drain and use the combat action last week. It just doesn't really make sense to fire non-magical bullets at people who offend you.

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XUiC4HxF1F2fhpNwDeNeYnRTBs1hJLtP9uaytnVb4eXcul5S+JDW8akiY7ruOqh4re51W7GPceBccrR7+Kit2VTb3gzNabTI6xxT8VRDRly6icvlN46KdT418svtFOo5/ee+SODbNHrr4qPhHy4un8RjWP8AmwUeoMoIboLGJFnEka66a/7JaFSBx1Pir8fTLy3VmMSInnp9e6i/a2do0VXFtPOA9wBJDJ7xgXNpVZitoxYKO+k40qlQ/lt6hLHHXZZZ79R9H7N2jSr021KD2vpmzSwyBH4ehHI3UmV88bg72PwOIa8k9k9wZWbwLSYzx+ZszPiOK+hpWzGUspZTQnIBUJEspgqEiEBxBSymApUiOJTSUSmykZHFeH/Fbep1fF/Zmn7rDuiAbOqj5nHw+UeB5r2LbO0fs9F9Y3ytkDmSYaPUhfNu2nF2IrE6mtVJ8S9yU7OpmMdlquI/MfcyuPaDN0MJcQ/N3uYB9QFwjgmS2w9eNPTjJi+vRWFPEknlctABBkkxczECdeiz1N4AM2v/ABSRyHD1hdzjxliLwBHDnPr+iVm1TLTSl5IMEAwOcd4xJHL5ffzi1sQ55yzYEySdG/KL8CZ9lU0doQ0xqZE8h099efgn1toCCG8YkHkDMDzy6/lSmJ3PaRisS0F0fLMwb6cBGttTxgecOvjO6ANeJHG6j1K2fxNyfaP0VvsbYpeczvRO2QsZcr6cNmbJNQ5nacOqtdsYbLQeP4D+ivMLggBACqd5qwYzLxdby/EfT9Vh5eWUkdXhMMLaxgZDWjib+q91+F+8X2rCdm92apRcWGT3jT1puPO0t/pXhwuS7krbdHb9TA4gYhkkNtUYPx0nEBzfH5SOoC664H0alCj4LGMrU2VaZzMe0Pa7m1wkHp4LvKSzpQmyllBFQkQgI4KdK5gpZSoOJTC5Um8W+WGwI++f34kUmd6oeXd/COroC8u2z8RsTjXllMnD0AC54pu+8NNt3F1SxmLQ2BJAuke2m+Ie88/aMOw92jSZnP8Am1Kjco8mNd5v6LyrbrQMRWjQ1Xub/K45m+xCtMK91XA4yodTWoOceQAqW9S0eapq9TPlcfyNab37gDZ9I9ESEdh3y2OSdC4Yc3UkiyVVHOq2CgBON1Iw1IOsi0SbR4MR1n69E5tGVYfZANTqp+CwA1j14eSm5tJx7cNlbMkgkLYYDAxFo8OXiouz8PBA4n60Wio04F1y8nJt2YccxR6zQxpOgAJPKBxPkvPN4cZ2j54kWB/BT/DPU/MR1aFrN59rtYzLrezf/wBHi4af4RIc7nLW/itjKFG7q1Qzck5tHu1LTFxIJuuj8fDU8q5fyOTd8Z8Qy3KLaH6MptCqWGeFwRzB+vZdMQPxRAOg6JMn3YPHNC6XK0OwfiDi8CBRpvY6kHEhlRuYAOMkBwhwEyYnivU90/iFRx0U3Dsq35CZa8/5b+J/hMHxXhjmiQY4XB6fQTA8gyLHojQfUMoXjG7HxZr0Ip4kdvT0zTFZo/m0f/VfqvUth7z4fGiaFQOPFh7tQeLDfzEhSe1shIhBs5t3e/DYIffVBm4U296of6Rp4mF5tvD8Wq9aWYYdgzTNZ1U9Z0b5eqwr3lxLnEkmSSTJJ5knVPaz9JRpJlRxc4ucS4kyXOJJJ5km5KY+sRIBs4QfCQY9WhOeE2sNCg06hjyMM7DN/wC5Ua53Mlo7vuq8CLcjf3CAb+aWJmLTp05JAxlipjLqI5t5Xeg7gpq4VrbqfQwZdcKNVp6FdKOMe35Tp0U6t6XLJ2uMLgnDUq2w9G397LPUd5KjTcNPldSam2q4Z2uVhadD4QCLG5BcAVnePOt5zYRrcAwC/uuO3d4G0GQILyO6393ch+vqs07eCu6nmptbABzOaC4gi85fwjTWQo+wdtikX4irTp4h9srqzi7KeYZMOtzEBLH8e7/Ys/yZr9VpT2VlpjG40hwcAadKYL2ku7wLT3YdmMRqTMHSlxGas7MYDdAP4QuOP2w6s4udA5AABrRMw1osAuLMS6RF+n+y7PTidNpCCAF1wbA+i6mbGQ9p/ls4T4On+lca9N7pc4GyVswKQNzqfyg6weoTCM8ySfIJCFrdlbrMqA1IIYBa4vzVdi9nU5IpAmOaNFtSNYnUa7mEOaSCDIIsRHI8FK+xuEyDwHqQuVTD3t9eaNBs9g/FnEUW5K2WsALF8hw/qGvn6oWEcxCQNAsnv1jw9guuHpZnMbBuZMDgPori50ku5kn1KDc6iR4kH19E8hI0JBHlOBiyZUbBhEpKTKTA5puARBH8Q0IHW4PkVzLIuEmExGQgkBwn5XTB9LjyT3YgEQGtGt7k69T+iVmxLpIZUBamYWr3iOdvrz/VQ3OHikpPgpSap27T8RhXC5aYOhgwfApKOILAWkBzTq06HhNrg9VbYTHNcyK2IrBnCk063EgSYbxMwoGIrse4tY0NEjKHEudy7z7D2WqENtRzDmpuc08CHEOHgQutXEPrHvvaT1a1pPVzrAnqTK60MLmBdkJaCWkgiQYkSJn/AIK49jyDj5JaCVQ2U2AXVWNJEgEGCP5oibKdgK1CkYg1XEEQLaiLHS11XjZr8pdkMDXM6PYeS64TZxe0ucYbxAtI/dOQtpO0Mf2sNpMEx3i3TXiNJgCYtyXWvutUpMFWQ5pbmzNN+shTftLaVLsqYGZ+WI/CRxB6/stJsygTVZQdMHDvzTzMH9Uwym7+2HNmm4kg8JUnaeB7BrqlrmR59FCxOBNOo4AQQT7KfjanbYUibtQSLgana0HvOrX0gPN7Qo21MF2dZ7ADrMniCAZHquGyMXFCszj924cu7UaSSpO0JdiTrdrdfASgK2pQKFefZgRYIT0PJQNMZzMw3s2xzNj+r1wngu76Ra1jOJ+8d52aD5Sf6lHyqVQjmppC6ZUtSlCRuFRuYdfqy4tpE2GvIruW3Q4A+I48Ug4acL9UhJNjZd3OMcxz4pKlQEQPdAdmBgDg4XAaGgRBJHeLjrb0104xKYulbe14/ZScNgyRIv0Svs44Psu+BoRFQ6Zw27XRaHG8ZTwtM3FoMplWmRqIUmhApNiJzVHH5CRDWgTBLhx+YAcjrCxPLpZ7PxGTCutJdUdGn5Wg9U3Z1Bzjl5mT4DgpFDDFtClyIc7zL3D9GhandvZHczkX18Nf7has0LaFBlHCuqOu5wDWtPM6nraVlqVYnu8Fdb64qagpt+VvDrzVFhBLh6IDR7vbPz1mvcJa2/otdu5RNXGOrR3WsIE+HRcN29m/dZtZtH19XWqBbhcK50AFwPvN0qcijOw2V31JbrPqqKruq6nnhpiDqbALQ7G2jAzcSZHmpe2NpGnhalR0GxA0+uCBqPFcCYfVZzZVb7Ej3Cu8TLn0nAWdRaAcusEg343VDs5wNdpdoX38Cb+xWnYCaGFebZXVKcmBJsQL+BThVYCg1rRz48ULi+kTYA2Qmln8IwPzVTq4usNGgWDR0AgeSqCLeaEKaqHArtVSIQpGcmwlQkHNroKVwukQkRrRfy/ZaZ2y2ta2J085j+6EKonJwxVHu3v5KvqmG0xw+8gS6BL4MAkgacAOspUIpxoaTppUW2gUmHQXLiSSf/L2W22J/wDXMWgH+10qExHm+2qmao4nmouCMOH1xQhH0fHuO6mCaaDHEaAGOepWR3y24+o8s0aDAA4BCEvqr0kbujMQD+X9gqz4kbRcKYpjQ6+3BCEF8YLY9HNWYD+YLebbwbWUK7B/2sVTeyDECoGkt/8AcpUIhVKNK4i3dB8yAShCFRP/2Q==[/img]
Must've pissed somebody off, he's got 1,000¥ worth of bullets in his ass!

And I really don't think it's necessarily a bad thing if everyone runs around shooting magic bullets that explode into fireballs or give people gonorrhea or something. It's just not part of the Shadowrun setting. And I don't mean that in a “stop pissing on my childhood” sort of way, I mean it's not the Shadowrun that these people envision. None of the sample characters have magic bullets on them. No one has a spare clip of caster shells loaded with lightning rounds or a signal flare that also creates astral static. It's the obvious core functionality of spellcasters and indeed firearms in this system. Actions are highly limited in supply and casting may require twenty minutes of sit down after using, but by loading your spells into a belt fed machine gun you can have ten spells go off in a single action and have the good nap that requires during regular sleeping hours last Tuesday. Under this system, virtually all magic used in combat should be pre-bottled into devices that can be fired at things or special pouches in peoples' pockets. The total lack of those things in any of the descriptions of how people operate in the world indicates that this is a serious failure of worldbuilding, not just a radical departure in canon.

Actually making magic items is a six step process and I can't figure out how it works. The writing here is really really bad. You spend some Karma to “finish” it, but I don't know whether it counts as “bonded” at that point or not. If the answer is “no” then the enchanting skill is essentially worthless and no player will ever enchant their own foci. If the answer is “yes” then it's a pile of hoops to jump through and a mandatory expenditure of edge during downtime to make your own power focus for nearly nothing and all player characters are going to run around at essentially double power all the time. Much is made over Formula Force, but all formulas are rating one because everything a higher rating formula does is bad except set the limit on how many hits you can make on your enchanting test, and obviously you're going to spend Edge on this because you're not a fucking idiot. So it's actually like a one day process that costs about twenty bucks and 6 Karma to make a Force 6 Power Focus. I'm just unclear whether you can actually use that Power Focus or if you then still have to bond it for regular price.

Essentially, the game is trying to present you with the same fucked up choice as in summoning, where if you select a low force formula you won't get a good number of net hits because your limit will be shit and you could easily outright fail. While if you select a high force formula you won't get a good number of net hits because you will have a lot of dice arrayed against you. But the reality is that you probably only make yourself a single Power Focus (and a single one of any other foci you want) during your entire career. So spending an edge out of your edge pool during a bit of downtime is a total fucking no brainer and all those supposed limits don't mean dick diddly and you can reduce the costs to basically nothing. So really the only question is whether you still have to pay the base bonding price or not. If you do, you're looking at paying trivially more than what you'd pay if you bought it from the store and didn't bother even having enchanting. If you don't, then you're paying trivially more than nothing at all. Either reading is broken, though it makes a pretty big difference as to whether Enchanting is must-have or must-avoid.

Also in the very first magic expansion, they introduced Adepts. The things we call Adepts now were called “Physical Adepts” then, and the things we call Aspected Magicians were called things like “Conjuring Adepts” and “Sorcery Adepts.” This began the bizarre and counterintuitiveshrinking of the demographic pool of magicians. In the big blue book, 1% of the population were mages. But starting with the Grimoire, 1% of the population were magically active, and that meant that some non-zero percentage of that 1% were bullshit flavored bullshit who weren't mages at all. As new books came out and introduced new flavors of shittily magically active characters you could play, the implicit number of actual mages kept falling. Which was pretty much the opposite of the claimed mana levels rising plotline. As of SR5, specifically 9 in 10 magically active people aren't actually full mages. Which means that unless more than 10% of the population is magically active, the number of real mages has fallen considerably since the big blue book laid down the law twenty five years in the past.

But we should probably talk about Physical Adepts. Or as they are called today: Adepts. They were much more popular than the other B priority magic types, because they were the ones that had their own unique shtick. So they got to keep the name and Enchanting Adepts and shit got to go be Aspected Magicians. I personally liked playing Aspected Magicians, but I was the only person I knew who really did. Adepts, on the other hand, have always been fairly popular. Adepts have a number of power points that they use to buy kung fu powers. Ideally they are supposed to be like magic martial artists, which is why they had the word “physical” in their name in 1st edition. However, the authors have always been cautious as fuck when it comes to actually giving Adepts powers that were even tangentially useful in combat, yet much less circumspect about giving powers useful in other parts of the game. In 4th edition, the main Adept archetypes the powergamers talk about are the “hacker adept” and the “pornomancer” who use adept powers to tweak electronics and social situations respectively.



Adept powers in 5th edition have been somewhat cleaned up actually. The premium charged on combat skill boosts and physical attribute boosts have been removed. And the really powerful social powers have been nerfed into oblivion. All told, the basic Adept seems pretty much pointless, especially as the primary draw of Adepts in 4th edition is their ability to bypass skill caps. Now that anyone can eventually jack themselves up to a skill of 12, that ability is a lot less sexy. Essentially meaningless in fact. But while Adept power points are not really very exciting, they are mysteriously incredibly cheap. I've been told that even the head-in-sand designers of this edition were forced to realize that the by-the-book prices were laughably low and have introduced a slightly higher power point cost. I haven't read the fucking errata for this garbage, so I'm not going to quote a number, but it's still apparently not that high even so. So basically, being an Adept is a convoluted piece of point accounting to determine whether you'd be better off as a pure cyborg or as a slightly magic cyborg to squeeze out a few bonuses here and there. Back of the envelope looks like you're better off being an Adept than a mundane, pretty much no matter what you want to do. The thing is that if you fiddled the numbers to make being an dept less attractive it would just go the other way – there'd be essentially no reason to be an adept as opposed to a skilled dude. Adept powers just aren't interesting enough for it to be much more than a simple mathhammer exercise as to whether your skilled dude should be one or not.

When Shadowrun first debuted, it had just two magical traditions: Hermeticism and Shamanism. Shamans summoned nature spirits from the domain they happened to be standing in at the time, and their spirits vanished the next time the sun rose or set. Hermetics bound elementals in long and expensive rituals, but could kept their spirits on-call indefinitely until their services were called upon. This created a weird dynamic where Shamans were generally more useful, able to conceal or speed up the team car at will, while Hermetics were generally unwilling to commit their spirits unless the need was great – but when things went crazy they really went crazy with like half a dozen elementals tearing shit up until it was good and uptorn. Additional traditions were developed and essentially they were all pale hacks of those two, or Voodoo (which was pretty cool and had spirits possessing things instead of materializing at all). In 4th edition it was all rationalized, and everyone got the ability to summon temporary or expensively bind permanent spirits. It was a pretty big powerup across the board, but did make things overall better. They also made new traditions easy to writeup, and we went from having essentially 3 traditions of magic that didn't make us feel dirty to like thirty. SR5 kept that system, but went back to just describing two traditions in the basic book because this book sucks.

One of the biggest differences between Shamans and Hermetics in 1st edition was that Shamans all had a totem and Hermetics did not. A totem was generally an animal (though later books introduced shit like “oak” and “the sea”) that gave the shaman cryptic advice and imprinted its personality quirks on the shaman. Or possibly they only called potential shamans who had the right kind of personality to begin with. In any case, you got some bonuses and penalties. In the original writeup, the totems were extremely nothing at all like balanced. And obviously players would select a totem that gave them bonuses to cast spells they wanted to cast and penalties to spells they didn't even know because that shit is hilarious. The whole thing where totems were supposed to give cryptic advice is a thing that almost never happened – shamans rarely felt like they weren't getting their share of screen time, so GMs rarely felt the need to give them even more screen time by making their totem a major character. In 4th edition, the totems were standardized to a great degree and magicians of all traditions could get one. They were called “Mentor Spirits” now, and you could have one as a Hermetic. In 5th edition, you can have one even if you aren't a magician at all, because they have different bonuses that kick in if you're a mage and if you're an adept. This makes it a lot harder to figure out what any mentor does, and makes the powergaming potential significantly greater. The short version of powergaming a mentor spirit is that each one gives you +2 to a mundane skill, and then either +2 to a magic task or an amount of Adept powers (which varies from a quarter of a power point to a power point and a half, but I assume at some point during writing they were all worth the same amount and were just allowed to drift apart as adept powers and mentor spirits got edited without reference to each other), and most disadvantages are essentially that you have to check to resist a modest compulsion to do a type of thing when certain circumstances show up. Now obviously some skills are used a lot more often than others, and some compulsions are basically “do what you were going to do anyway, but now it's 'good roleplaying'” while others are “Kill yourself, LOL.” And of course there's the minor issue for adepts that getting more power points is usually better than getting less.


Picking a Mentor Spirit is pretty much just this easy.

In the original writeup of Shadowrun, magic went away. Each person started with a clean slate of Essence and a full Magic attribute of 6 and as you got cyberware, took injuries, or just snorted too much hypermeth you gradually lost those things and they didn't come back. Much was made of the idea of mages who lost all their mojo and could no longer tap into mana for anything. It was called the Way of the Burnout, and it was supposed to be a major thing. That lasted... a couple of months. As soon as the Grimoire came out, the came up with ways to mitigate magic loss. Geasa were things you could do to slap limitations on your magic to avoid having your magic reduced, and Initiation was a thing where you could open yourself up to higher magical learning and raise your magic attribute. The way variable target numbers worked in the early editions, having a 6 in magic was much better than having a 5, but having a 7 in magic was scarcely distinguishable from having a 6 – so mostly players used Initiation to “offset” magic loss from getting cool cybernetic mods and shit. If we had an internet with memes on it back then, that would have been the start of the “Magic Run” meme. After all, if the other major archetypes are defined by skills and cyberware and Magicians can just initiate themselves into having the appropriate skills and cyberware while still being hardcore spell jockeys, and the other archetypes can't ever get magic under any circumstances... why would people play characters who weren't magicians?

In Shadowrun 4, they introduced rules changes which made magicians actually want all their magic points, and also made them buy their magic up as a stat starting at 1. Initiation no longer gave you extra magic points, but merely raised the cap on how many magic points you were allowed to buy. This made being a magician who also shat all over the role protection of the other archetypes much more difficult. Mages were still crazy powerful, and people talked about “Magic Run” a lot anyway. But it was genuinely true that it was harder for mages to do literally everything. 5th edition basically uses 4th edition initiation rules.



Late in 3rd edition, they introduced the concept of the “Mystic Adept” for players who were discontent in the knowledge that there was anything any other character could do that their character could not. They could buy up adept powers and they could buy up spellcasting and conjuring. Which sounds like a powergamer's wet dream, but in 3rd and 4th edition they were basically terrible because they ended up paying so much for being able to do two sets of things extremely poorly that they couldn't do anything well. In SR5, the costs have been made... much lower and instead of being shitty at two things you're liquid awesome at everything. So that's pretty much where we stand there: Mystic Adepts are overpowered, which is quite a turnaround from what they've been in other editions.

FrankTrollman wrote:At one point I think I actually asked AnchientHistory (who was writing the enchanting section for 4th edition at the time) whether a Houngan had killed his dog.

You did, but it was a misunderstanding about the vessel rules we were adding in Street Magic. I never got to write the rules for the foci in the main SR4 book, but I pretty much changed/refined/expanded everything else that I could. Not that many people noticed.

So they created a framework where magic could enhance a weapon in a way a mundane player could actually benefit from. There was Anchoring and Quickening, which were essentially ways to keep a spell going for a long time – ostensibly so that you could make a flaming sword that the Street Samurai could hunt nature spirits with.

Foci were one of the big departures from other games specifically because they didn't have a lot of magic swords. The foci and fetishes were designed to be tools made by magicians for magicians, and again came out of the Real Magick background of the original SR1 designers.

Of course to compensate, there's been a lot of additional crap added over the years - magical compounds, tattoo magic, awakened drugs, manatech like the much-hated FAB net gun, etc.

Late in 3rd edition

Awakenings, but whatever.

Which sounds like a powergamer's wet dream, but in 3rd and 4th edition they were basically terrible because they ended up paying so much for being able to do two sets of things extremely poorly that they couldn't do anything well.

There were some tangential limitations, like that they couldn't astrally project (unless they took a special metamagic that was only put out in late 3rd edition and even then only worked for like 10 minutes at a shot) and they had to buy the Astral Perception power which most other magicians got for free. Likewise, in previous editions that big "balance point" for these guys was supposed to be dividing up their Magic attribute - like, if you had a Magic of 6, you'd say "Alright, I want four points in adept powers and two points towards spellcasting." Which was about as ultimately confusing as you can imagine.

There was also the concept (though never rules) for something called an Astral Adept whose entire shtick was supposedly just going to be astral perception, astral projection, and astral combat (with, I guess, a sideline in astral photography), but Kenson apparently forgot to write the rules or something.

But while Adept power points are not really very exciting, they are mysteriously incredibly cheap. I've been told that even the head-in-sand designers of this edition were forced to realize that the by-the-book prices were laughably low and have introduced a slightly higher power point cost. I haven't read the fucking errata for this garbage, so I'm not going to quote a number, but it's still apparently not that high even so.

Frank, you seem to misunderstand. "Adept powers are cheap" thing is the problem with Mystic Adepts. Mystic Adepts have the same priority and benefits as magicians do, BUT they also get to buy power points for 2 karma per point (5 karma now). So Priority A MysAd does everything the magician does, and for 10 extra karma does everything the PhysAd does.

He can't Astrally Project (yet) and by extension cannot go to the Metaplanes! That is a HUGE drawback!

Also wouldn't he need to spend 12 Karma (pre errata) to get his full share of Power Points?

12 karma is how many runs? 3?
Where a Sam gets how much money? 15k? which is not even enough to buy certain guns . .

Stahlseele wrote:12 karma is how many runs? 3?
Where a Sam gets how much money? 15k? which is not even enough to buy certain guns . .

You can just take all those 6PP at chargen. You have 20 chargen karma to spend (or something like that, I don't remember exactly)

Longes wrote:You can just take all those 6PP at chargen. You have 20 chargen karma to spend (or something like that, I don't remember exactly)

In fact you actually should maximize on adept power points - even at the new cost of 5 (pseudo-) karma - due to the low opportunity cost and the restrictions on how mystics can acquire more power points under errata.

Cochise wrote:In fact you actually should maximize on adept power points - even at the new cost of 5 (pseudo-) karma - due to the low opportunity cost and the restrictions on how mystics can acquire more power points under errata.

Yep, at 2 points it was "get all the power now", and at 5 points it's "invest in the future". Either way, Mystic Adepts end up better than everyone else. The only thing that changes is whether they're better than you in the first two sessions.

Section.09: Gamemaster Advice

Yes, we're back to having a 0 before chapter numbers because consistent formatting is for suckers. The chapter starts with three pages of literal advice for the game master. Some of it's pretty down to Earth stuff: get on the same wavelength with your players about what kind of sex and violence everyone is comfortable with and shit. Not bad advice, but also not really specifically shadowrun related. The parts that are specific to Shadowrun are actually quasi-in-character asides, which I think is supposed to make the book more immersive but really just makes the whole thing kind of shitty. I don't really think they cover 3 pages worth of Gming advice in these three pages because they are too busy trying to sound like neo-anarchist punks from 2050. And yes, this book is set in 2075. There's a particularly strange shoutout to Fear The Boot which is apparently where they first heard of the idea of getting players to make their characters together and arrange to have relationships between characters before the game begins. That's just really weird, because that shit was advice being handed out in the literal 1970s, and it seems very very strange that a role playing company would feel the need to interrupt the flow of a book to give a shout out to a fucking web site for giving them the idea. There were no websites on the ARPANET when that idea was being disseminated between gamers in mimeographed strategy fanzines. For fuck's sake.

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[/img]

What follows is a “designing a run” subsection. This is kind of a “how to write” bit more than it is an actual thing on adventure design. The actual adventures they envision appear to be pretty railroady affairs, with individual scenes and dramatic endings planned out before the player characters even accept the job.

Shadowrun 5 wrote:What needs to happen in a scene can be incredibly varied and depends a lot on the story the gamemaster is trying to tell.

Honestly, advice like that wouldn't be out of place in a White Wolf book, but I don't think it sounds like the kind of thing that would go over well with a majority of Shadowrun players. It certainly doesn't go over well with me. Shadowrun is a game about spending two hours making elaborate plans and then kicking in the front door, guns ablaze. It's a game where the players make plans that go to hell during the game, so the whole “Gamemaster as Storyteller” concept that Rein*Hagen was pushing in the early nineties seems a terrible, terrible fit. You can really tell that this book is being made by the Shadowrun Missions team. Firstly because they actually namecheck Shadowrun Missions as a place to get plot ideas (bleck) and secondly because they're really pushing the whole idea that you railroad the players through a series of scenes and then have the plot do the things you want it to and player choices be damned. Suggestions to make the game pop for the players include handouts and mood music, but not branches in the plot in case players decide to make different decisions. It's really more sad than anything else.

What follows is some marginally useful basic runs, of which there are six. It turns out that there are six so that you can roll a d6 on a chart to generate your base job. I... don't even know what to say to that. Not completely useless to be sure, but I would think that if you wanted to jog your game with random missions like you were playing Shadowrun on the Sega Genesis, that you'd want more than six default runs. They can't even get themselves down to six, not really. One of the results is “assassination or destruction” which aren't even a little bit the same kind of mission. There's really a lot of space wasted in this chapter, and I think we could have gotten a d66 table or a 3d6 table. There are also a bunch of other tables that involve rolling a d6 on them, and I have much the same complaint here. The “meet location table” has a one in six chance of giving you a meet “in astral space” which most teams won't be able to even go to because that's stupid, and another one in six chance of giving “Barrens District or Other Urban Hellhole” which is not actually a location so much a region visible from space. It seems gauche to bother with the silly typos like “Secrety Society,” but really editing isn't good in this book and sometimes it gets to me.


The chapter presents a lot of these tiny tables that take up a lot of space on the page and produce only stupid results.

There are some brief ideas of alternate campaigns. Like, what if you all start working for the triad or DocWagon or something? These are mostly just space fills, because none of the alternate campaigns get enough attention for the give-a-damn factor to get high enough. These things were covered better in the second edition Runner's Companion.

Anyway, 23 pages after the chapter begins we start actually talking about security. That seems like the kind of thing that would be modestly important considering that the security is essentially “the opposition” of this game. Several times the chapter extolls you to make the opposition “appropriate” to the player characters, but there is literally no explanation at all of what that actually means. No discussions of player dicepool ranges or attacks and defenses or iterative probability of death. It's pretty empty. Essentially it comes down to “We don't know how this game system works because we can't do math, but you should figure it out and also fit the opposition to the players using the formulas you invent your own damn self.”

There is some discussion of enemy tactics. These are not terribly well thought out. I'm not going to give them any more thought than the authors did.

There are mysteriously a few actual rules in this chapter. The thresholds for certain kinds of scanners are here. The rules for checking fake licenses are here too. You will probably not find these when you are looking for them, because they are hidden in the middle of a fluff chapter. The authors clearly still don't know how the rules of this game work, because each rating point of fake SIN increases the threshold to discover them by 1, while each rating point of SIN verification adds two dice (averaging a successful test against a threshold 2/3 of a point higher).

There are some mini maps that you could I suppose cut out of the book and put on the table. Or something, I really have no idea how you're supposed to use these little floorplans, but I assume they were copy pastaed from something they had lying around. The player characters' Lifestyles are here. Yes, we're still in the Game Master's Advice chapter, and this chapter has descended completely into self parody.

The suggested rewards for completing a mission are also in this chapter. These offend people a lot, and for good reason. First of all, the cash rewards are offensively small. People are expected to go to war for less than they could get boosting cars. Secondly, all the rules for generating monetary rewards are like GTA bullshit. Cash rewards go up because you killed more dogs, not because you actually accomplished anything. It's terrible. This chart is offensive to me.

And that's the chapter. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Some of these things are “stuff that belongs in a Shadowrun book but we can't think of where to put it.” Some of these are a window into the thought process of designing missions for Shadowrun Missions. Fuck Shadowrun Missions. Those things are stupid railroady bullshit. The advice in this chapter runs the gamut from inoffensive to offensive. From acceptable to blazingly retarded. That's just not a good range to have.

Wow, the example rewards cap out at 21,000Y per runner for going up against extraordinarily powerful opposition that overwhelms the runners. How lucrative.
ETA: Also great that the run rewards table has an asterisk that doesn't point to anywhere. It's incredible how unusably ill-put-together this book is.