Ignimortis wrote:Noted, thank you. Now I wonder how much would it hurt mages to implement either one of the following, since most broken spells are reliant on their Sustained duration:
A) Sustained spells deal their Drain each combat turn/some other short time period?
B) Sustained spells can't be sustained if you've got a previous one still going?
Would those things balance mages somewhat, be a hard but reasonable nerfbat hit, or really bring them down?
The issue you have there is that
most sustained spells aren't all that great to begin with. The idea of paying double drain to keep an ice sheet going for 6 seconds instead of 3 is pretty insulting. More importantly, combat rounds are ridiculously and problematically short in Shadowrun, so taking any drain at all on a per-round basis is going to make you pass out in a number of
seconds.
Which essentially means that such a plan would cross off every sustained spell from the list unless it either cost no drain to begin with or was one of the cherry spells like Shape Metal or Control Thoughts that could do all its dirty work in one combat round anyway. So it would cripple mages and set fire to most of the things people want to do with magic
and it wouldn't stop the worst abuses you were trying to target. So that sounds pretty terrible.
Would it be possible to deconstruct those things to base Karma values and go from there in determining a unified cost per Essence loss/Nuyen cost? Note that I'm not saying "feasible", as that's probably out of question, but I might as well as try, since my new GM is very receptive to my advice on balancing.
Well the issue here is that Shadowrun has been badly in need of a rethink of how much cyberware costs since
first edition. The fact that Muscle Replacement needs to be recosted has been generally understood for nearly thirty years.
The history there is that in first edition the concept was that an Essence point was worth an attribute point. That in a platonic ideal you'd spend one Essence and get one Quickness or some shit. And to obfuscate that, they let you buy conditional stat points for half a point of Essence each.
Now that's fucking awful. It was aful when there were less stats and mages could do less things. It's just factually true that a point of Strength just isn't very impressive or good and spending one sixth of your soul to get one is laughably terrible. Which you'd think would sink the entire Street Samurai concept right at the beginning - and it almost did. If that had been all Cyberware did,the cyborg warrior would have been completely unplayable. Fortuitously, the first edition also simultaneously undervalued bonus senses and super speed that let you take extra actions. Those pieces of cyberware were
way better than the official standard of what cyberwarewas supposed to get you. And the error in design and the error in evaluation
kind of balanced out. Players with a bit of system experience rapidly figured out that all the shit likeMuscle Replacement was basically worthless and thesuper senses and super speed were the bomb diggity. And thus the Street Samurai archetype ended up having an actual place on the team - the guy with super vision and super speed.
That's not because any of the original designers actually figured out what they had done. This was an emergent fact from actual play. The players of Shadowrun adopted the assumption that all Street Samurai were supposed to have cyber eyes,smart gun links, and wired reflexes, but that's because all theother layouts that people tried were fucking terrible. The reality that most of the cyberware the designers envisioned peopleusing were actually fucking useless sank in pretty fast, and the
very first book introduced various schemes to improve some basic cyberware or make cyberware cost less essence.
Throughout the following three fucking decades, what should have happened is just to have someone go back and do a big rethink about what they actually intended cyborgs to do with their lives and thus what kinds of price incentives should exist. That never happened. Instead, people built various epicycles into the system to make new grades of cyberware to bring essence cost down, new layers of bioware, alternate and improved versions of existing ware and so on and so forth. It's been a fucking mess.
And since 5th edition is the most inexcusably terrible of the editions, obviously whatcould have been a time for a great rethink of cyberware costs and functions was instead used to fiddle around with costs in a totally fucking random fashion and make them make even less sense.
-Username17
