Quantamboost wrote:
Looking this up - "Channeling", Street Magic p. 54. You can use your own skills and have fine motor control, but you still have to spend services to use the spirit's powers, you use the lower Mental attribute between the two of you for resisting mana spells/powers, . Which isn't a bad deal since you really want the physical attributes of the spirit, which shouldn't require actually spending a task (beyond what you normally would).
Yup. The biggest problem with possession without he 'Channeling' metamagic skill is that it's easy (if you have a dick GM) to accidentally spend a service doing something mundane like driving a car wicked sweet through traffic--which you won't be able to do too well anyway since spirits don't drive, which is the other reason why you would want it.
Of course, possession also has the very ambiguous clause of 'mundane or minor tasks don't expend services' so the salami slicing comes into play by dividing all of the activities you want to do into little chunks and taking the path of least resistance whenever possible.
If you want to be uber-stealthy I would still pick Masking first, especially if everyone else on the team are unawakened. If you build your character correctly not having Channeling is just an inconvenience.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
The way I see it, Edge is a very expensive way of "conditionally" increasing your dicepools, where the condition cannot be manufactured to happen all the time (such as from a Specialization bonus). Yes, it is useful, but luck dependent characters seriously have 6 or so times they can alter probability untill their luck runs out and they die because all their dicepools are smaller because they invested in an expensive tempoary bonus instead of more skills with a cheaper constant bonus.
"Besides, my strong, cult like faith in the colon of the cards allows me to pull whatever I need out of my posterior!"
-Kid Radd
shadzar wrote:those training harder get more, and training less, don't get the more.
Lokathor wrote:Anything worth sniffing can't be sniffed
Hound, it sounds like your group sounds a lot like the one I'm playing with.
I also wanted to play an unarmed combat monster and so went the touch spell possession mage specialist route.
In short, go for an Intuition tradition (Voodoo or Psion) and pick up the spells Knockout (general fighting) and Shatter (physical dmg). Pick a mentor spirit that will give you arbitrary bonuses to the shtick you want. Make sure to grab Frank's Utility Spells (TM), so between them and your spirit you can do stuff noone else can. (Also see wards)
It depends on your GM, but if he isn't hardcore on the Astral Tracking (or you can spend the time to clean your signature remnants; 1 complex action = 1 Force of spell cleaned) you'll be able to pump the Touch spells up to 1 hit KO levels (Force 9-10) and can, due to the low drain, split your spellcasting dice pool and cast 2 spells per IP.
You'll want to pick up a Power Foci and a Sustaining Foci (or two). You'll have Increased Reflexes sustained for the additional passes. The Power focus will help you hit people with your split dice pool.
You'll want to pick up the Metamagics Flexible Signature @ 13 Karma (to spoof your aura due to the high force spells cast), Channelling @ 16 Karma (so you can just be full of awesome while possessed) and finally Masking @ 19 Karma (to hide in plain sight). Remember to do ordeals to get the 20% off (rounded up) which will save you 11 Karma overall (3 + 4 + 4).
In addition to spellcasting, conjuring etc. purchase Unarmed Combat (Spec Martial Arts after the first session and remember that touch attacks are at +2 and the toucher wins by default) buy the Athletics group and some Infiltration; you'll also want Perception and at least 1 point in First Aid.
Have fun and if you find it necessary, Hulk out by inviting a spirit to possess you.
Last edited by Rathe on Thu Oct 08, 2009 9:10 pm, edited 2 times in total.
hound wrote:so... to fulfill a role that I find intriguing and damn the party necessities... I rolled a technomancer.
I'm sure he's not optimized, so I'd love to take some advice, but I think I'm gonna have a lot of fun with him.
Good luck. I strongly suggest using Frank's alternative matrix rules if at all possible, because otherwise technomancers are a bit of a mess (though not unplayable). I mean, Frank's alternative matrix rules are great on general principle, but particularly for cleaning up technomancy.
The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor from stealing bread, begging and sleeping under bridges.
-Anatole France
Mount Flamethrower on rear
Drive in reverse
Win Game.
-Josh Kablack
Rathe wrote:In short, go for an Intuition tradition (Voodoo or Psion) and pick up the spells Knockout (general fighting) and Shatter (physical dmg). Pick a mentor spirit that will give you arbitrary bonuses to the shtick you want. Make sure to grab Frank's Utility Spells (TM), so between them and your spirit you can do stuff noone else can. (Also see wards)
Frank has a set of must-take utility spells? I missed this and shouldn't have.
1. Heal - it operates separately and cumulatively with First Aid and is therefore not replaceable by anything. It is the best spell in the game. 2. Detect Life - bypasses all senses and goes straight for the Star Trek Tricorder bullshit. As per the example in the basic book it is capable of telling you not only where creatures are, but what they are and even what they are doing. Awesome covered in awesome sauce. 3. Physical Mask - also doubles as an attack spell since you can mask yourself as someone who doesn't have a light machine gun. 4. Fix - cumulative and separate from technical repairs. Game mechanically it is used before getting to normal repairs while the Heal spell is used after First Aid - but whatever. The point is that you shouldn't leave the house without this spell. 5. Mana Static - The answer to spirits and enemy magicians. It's a one-stop nut-punch to essentially any magical threat. It's hard for you to do anything while you're doing it, but who cares? 6. Trid Phantasm - Information is power, and Trid Phantasm allows you to create any information you want. Drain is intense, but seriously - holy crap. 7. Control Thoughts - The long term effects of this are pretty small, as it takes anyone just a few combat rounds to shake it off. However, this spell allows you to get pretty much anyone to do pretty much anything they could do in 15 seconds. In Shadowrun, that's a lot. 8. Shape Metal - Yes, you read that right, this is a sustained spell. That means that you can use it to open things and close them again. It's like having a portable door that also doubles as virtually unbreakable restraints. 9. Mind Probe - It's actually really hard to interogate people. Almost anyone can hold out against torture if they think they are going to die anyway. Mind Probe ends all that. 10. Turn to Goo - It serves double duty. First, it can be used as a simple Save-or-Die to drop an enemy right out of the fight, but secondly it can also be used to store characters in relative safety. Once in goo form, a character is actually pretty hard to hurt and doesn't need to breathe. You can use this spell on hostages to sequester them out of harm's way and on teammates you are smuggling through security. It serves as an attack, a defense, and a utility spell and operates on a completely random set of physical laws that other things do not apply to.
I mean sure, special shout-outs go to Power Bolt, Improved Invisibility, Resist Pain, Levitate, Sterilize, and Animate - but the ones actually on the list are the best. Ones which if you know one or more of them you can automagically be on my team, whatever else it is that you do.
If you're the Hulkamania kind of arcane spellcaster, if your body is at 3-5 you can just transform into something like an orc or a troll and get enough hits to boost your physical scores into the stratosphere. I'm not sure if this stacks with possession; I haven't read Street Magic in a long while.
Wards are your greatest enemy of all time if you're a spellcaster that uses foci or sustains spells--and since you want a power/sustain foci, this will apply to you. Unfortunately, I don't know of a good 'Fuck You' answer to wards unlike every other problem a spellcaster might face.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Fri Oct 09, 2009 6:41 pm, edited 3 times in total.
You can actually take some of these even further with customized spells, since the limits on SR magic leave a lot of this stuff WIDE open.
For example, Invisibility and Physical Mask only cover visual senses, but its only a small adjustment to drain to make them cover ALL senses so that your chattering machinegun fire makes no noise at all. Also, you should be able to stack them as one spell with combined effects as its all a very complex illusion, saving you from sustaining them.
Mana Static? There's nothing but an arbitrary Drain surcharge that keeps this from being a one-way effect that allows you to cast freely.
Levitate should be Fly. Poof.
Most every spell can be altered to "willing or unconscious subject only" or "caster only" if you're a selfish dick. Note that Mind Probing doesn't need a conscious subject and actively beating your subject unconscious means you're sure to get your full Stun penalty to their resistance.
Thanks for the spell suggestions. I've put together a decent combat mage for the new campaign I'm joining...however, I need one more piece of advice: 'ware. I've been told that since magic is limited to sight, good cybereyes are worth the essence loss; once I cut any essence at all, I should go ahead and lose a full point, though, shouldn't I?
Alpha eyes with flare, low-light, smartlink, thermo, vision enhance 2, vision mag 1 are 0.32 essence. Add a reaction enhancer 1--initiative is king, right? and now I can spent 0.88 essence on bioware. Is that worth /doing/ at chargen? I'm short on cash (well, BP, that is...) and am having trouble picking out bioware that'd be helpful (past the stuff I really can't afford like synaptic boosters.)
I've never been entirely clear on this (I've only played a few sessions of Shadowrun): am I a dead useless fish in the water without additional passes? Clearly it's /good/ to have wired reflexes/booster, but are they necessary to be playing The Same Game as my teammates?
You can IP boost with spells, but generally you want at least two with any character (which allows full defense + normal action). Cybereyes and a synaptic booster 1 should do you.
The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor from stealing bread, begging and sleeping under bridges.
-Anatole France
Mount Flamethrower on rear
Drive in reverse
Win Game.
-Josh Kablack
endersdouble wrote:I've never been entirely clear on this (I've only played a few sessions of Shadowrun): am I a dead useless fish in the water without additional passes? Clearly it's /good/ to have wired reflexes/booster, but are they necessary to be playing The Same Game as my teammates?
Entirely depends on whether you think you will actually end up in a fight and if so, whether another action will help you survive. If your character is the party face and utility mage you can actually get by without extra passes. Sure, an extra pass would be nice against rentacops, but against a real threat there is not much difference between dodging with 3 dice or actively dodging with 6 dice. And more passes don't matter if all you want to do is get into full cover with your first pass.
If however you plan on actively contributing to killing people get those passes (or at least one). As already mentioned, a single pass + cybereyes fit into a single point essence and that will probably more than double your combat effectiveness, especially at the lower end of the spectrum.
Type O blood is blood that has neither A nor B surface proteins on it, allowing it, to one degree or another, to be transfused into people of Type O, Type A, Type B, or Type B blood without being rejected. Early Shadowrun Books talked about "Type O Tissues" that you could implant into anyone, which for people aware of how tissue matching works is kind of a stretch. But it was a good pitch if your audience was 10 (as I was when I first got my hands on the blue hardcover of SR1).
Flash forward to Augmentation, and we're trying to give out a bit thicker pseudo-science in the Sci-Fi sections of the rules. But we've got people in canon running around with Type O organ transplants. What to do? So I manufactured a historical coincidence, where there is an actual guy whose cell line was discovered to lack surface proteins that would be rejected by metahuman immune systems on his organ tissues (no such person exists, and probably can't, but hey it's the future). His name starts with the letter O, so by standard convention, his cell line is called "Type Owen' or simply "Type O." Ta-da, canonicity problem solved.
And then that particular story was run with and you can take a Quality that allows you to have that cell type yourself. Which means that your tissues are universal donor tissues. But it also means that standard grade off-the-shelf bio-ware happens to be an advanced tissue match for you, so when you buy Muscle Augmentation in its basic form, it counts as if it was Delta Grade while it is in you.
-Username17
Frank another Question, is Typo O cells compatible with cultured bioware?
Cultured bioware needs to be tailored to your personal nervous system (meaning they have to do science to your existing body to figure out how exactly to grow it for you), but it's not otherwise different than non-cultured bioware. Your Type O System quality doesn't prevent use of cultured bioware and also applies to cultured 'ware (i.e., you can get cultured 'ware and it would automatically be delta-grade at the baseline price).
What do you guys think about buying Bio- Cyberware before buying the Mage Quality.
Buying up the Magic attribute and then buying it down with Bio- Cyberware seems like such an waste.
The Latent Mage quality seems to support the posibility.
And my german rulebook (page 123), says
Das Generierungspunkte-System von Shadowrun soll die Charaktererschaffung möglichst flexibel gestalten. Erfahrene Spieler mögen damit zurechtkommen, auf eine bestimmte Reihenfolge zu verzichten und ihre GP passend zu verteilen, aber Neueinsteigern empfehlen wir, die folgenden Schritte einzuhalten, bis sie mit der Charaktererschaffung vertraut sind.
= if you want choose the order in which you buy anything.
The Latent Magic quality does indeed give you a free pass on all the Magic Attributes you would have lost for any cyberware or whatever you took before you Awakened. Character generation does not give you that option however.
And yeah, Latent Magic can seriously give a cyber mage like 4 free Magic Points worth of not having to buy attributes they were going to lose anyway. And that's not fair. And it still sucks, because you have to buy all your magic skills and spells and shit up from zero with karma gains since you started play. Which means that even though in the world of infinite XP gain you are strictly better than anyone else, the fact is that at any actual point in your character progression you're a fucking laughing stock.
