Shadowrun 4e newbie questions

[Stahlseele]

That's always been a point of contention.
Mainly because one of them is supposed to be able to give you animal like features and no animal has synaptic accellerator and the other means your parents(no idea wether just one or both need a certain augment for it to be able to travel down the line) would need to have it and genetech is, in universe, no older than 20 years and thus you would happen to be probably much younger than 20 so not a valid runner . .

Strictly RAW it would probably work though, because even though no animal has synaptic accellerator per se, certain animals do have more initiative than metahumans which opens up the route of it being an animalistic feature . .

Then we come to the delta part, which should not matter at all, because if you are born with it, it is part of your makeup and thus should technically not count as taking up essence, because it does not change you from what you are born as but it is what you are born with . .


And then there's the point that the free of cost is, according to some semi official postings, only meant to account for monetary/nuyen cost not for essence . .

Welcome to the world of poorly worded ambigous RAW in the world of Shadowtech, not Logitech. Enjoy your stay.

[virgil]

I know Frank was involved in the writing for Augmentation; does he any insight on the Genetic Heritage question?

Can you install cyberware into a drone? Can you consider an anthroform drone's limbs as cyberlimbs for capacity guidelines rather than modification slots when adding cyberware?

[Stahlseele]

He was, but i have no idea if he had anything to do with genetics or just cyberlimbs. But he's Dr.Trollman, he probably STILL has a better grasp on most anything SR than most anybody else around here . .

I think there was an optional Rule in one of the Books for exactly that, but i am not sure where exactly that was and i am at work right now, sorry <.<;,

[Whipstitch]

I'd bet you cash money that he'll just be annoyed because this shit is almost exactly Pun-Pun all over again. It's a vague ass option that boils down to "ask your GM because we aren't providing an exhaustive list" and then people wank to the most fucktarded interpretation possible even though the other "free" stuff you get from Genetic Heritage is all roughly comparable to (or outright cheaper than) Genetic Heritage to begin with.

[JesterZero]

I know Frank was involved in the writing for Augmentation; does he any insight on the Genetic Heritage question?

Frank said "no" both earlier in this thread and here.

[virgil]

I know Frank was involved in the writing for Augmentation; does he any insight on the Genetic Heritage question?

Frank said "no" both earlier in this thread and here.

Danke.

[Whipstitch]

Kinda bewildering to find that I've posted about it here before although I guess it totally makes sense given my earlier confidence on the subject. I wonder when exactly my memory went down the tubes.

[virgil]

Are there more advanced holographic devices than the 200¥ holo-projector in the core book? I haven't seen any mention in the books I've read so far.

EDIT: Another question. How well can a Virtual Person pass the Turing Test? I'm not expecting a set of Pilot Accessories and Firewall Programs to be able to be able to be a full-fledged PC, but I'm wondering how easy it is to make people think your drone is controlled by a rigger. Hell, can you throw a fistful of nuyen at some Artisan (Guitar/Singing) Autosofts and create your own boy band with original music?

[Stahlseele]

@Holographic Projector:
I don't remember there being anything else, but there might be in one of the gear books.

@Virtual Person.. You mean an AI?
Or do you mean a Knowbot/Agent?
Because yes, a player AI is actually a Pilot or Firewall or some other kind of Programm that is a fully fledged PC . . without a physical body usually.
It kind of sort of probably depends on what you use as the basis for your AI.
You have, i think, to chose what kind of program it evolved from.
So if it was something like . . i don't know . . a semi intelligent autonomous knowbot Agent that has to deal with Customer-Support(yes, i am talking about phone computers), it might be pretty damn close to being indistinguishable from a real asshole . .

AI-Tech is pretty damn advanced in the world of SR4, even though most AIs are still not an actually wanted endresult of trying but something akin to spontaneous digital evolution. One of -if not the- the first evolved from a Psychotropic Medic Program made by Fuchi IE for Echo Mirage and called itself Mirage. That more or less created Otaku when it felt lonely. A pretty damn advanced autonomous knowbot matrix security system made by Renraku suddenly evolved into Morgana when confronted with the Elven Spike Baby Decker Prodigy Dodger. And later on was trapped and experimented on and basically taken apart and re-assembled by Renraku and changed to Megaera. And from what was learned and extracted from her Renraku made DEUS. Which was still not really a wanted AI but something more than a simply Expert-System for running the Arcology. And then somebody pushed a wrong button and it went all Master Control Program/The Alien AI from the VIRUS Movie. In SR4 there are actually 3 classifications of AI. One of them is a feral AI, which is more or less a programm that evolved not into logical thinking(ironically) but more animalistic behaviour, then there's a Proto AI which is a somewhat middleground between the feral and the third kind of AI, the sentient ones that are actually as smart or smarter than most Metahumans alive but have of course completely alien thought processes . . And no, they don't come with Asimovs famous three laws of Robotics either . .
Neither the Feral, nor the Sentient nor the Middleting are actually wanted results of corporations trying to make AIs. They all come into eXistenZ purely accidentally.
But not nearly as seldom as the first 3 real AIs.
Something, maybe the Crash 2.0 Virus, was something akin to the Comet that induced Surge and the 2nd wave of UGE/goblinization in some kind of digital awakening it seems.

As for the Boyband . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku
You of course know about this yes?

[virgil]

Hatsune is a synthesizer application; which is different from something like the New Sync Boys.

I'm referring to Agents, like the SR4 equipment of Virtual Person, rather than the feral/sentient/middleting things that PCs can ostensibly play. How well do they pass the Turing Test, essentially? Hell, can you attach it to an Emotitoy or something just to make it all the more convincing?

Opinion request: Should Empathy software be modified? I was thinking of having its rating not act as a bonus but as a teamwork test.

[Stahlseele]

The agents are usually not described as something able to pass the touring test . .
The emotitoy is basically a kind of agent(software) combined with biometric sensory equipment that allows it to give advice to it's owner on how he should act towards certain persons he is in contact with. If you made an agent that could do social stuff, yeah, sure, i don't see why it should not be able to make use of the emotitoy bonus.

[virgil]

Spirits; can they see light and therefore interact with holograms and computer screens? I notice that the Spirit of Beasts/Man at minimum have Low-Light Vision and therefore there's a baseline interaction with light, at least when manifesting.

[Stahlseele]

That is up for debate.
Mainly because of the difference between manifesting and materialization.
Technically, no, they can only use astral perception, which does not work with electronic stuff. That is when they Manifest. No real body, no real eyes etc. Now if they materialize, this is where things get iffy . . technically, now they do have sensory organs/inputs and a cns . . And i actually have no idea why the hell spirits of beast/man come with low light, when astral vision is just so much better because they don't get the penalty for it not being natural for them . .
On the other hand, how would they target spells if you need to have a line of sight connection on the physical plane to use physical spells/powers due to the different layers of reality . .

[JesterZero]

Ok, this is from memory, so hopefully I don't lead you down a wrong path.

AGENTS AND TURING TESTS

From what I recall, Agents were supposed to be relatively dumb. The problem with them from a conceptual standpoint wasn't their intelligence, it was the fact that they could be used to break the action economy (and the entire Hacker role, as Frank as written about quite a bit).

AI's (of both the NPC and PC variety), should be able to pass a Turing Test no problem.

EMOTITOYS

From what I recall, the issues with emotitoys were twofold. 1) There was an aesthetic issue with shadowrunners running around with what basically amounted to cute little stuffed animals. 2) There was a mechanical issue because emotitoys basically do two things: they give a bonus to Judge Intentions tests AND they add their rating a bonus to Social Skills. It's the later that's the problem, because that more or less allows you to bypass all the limitations of a Judge Intentions test and just throw extra dice at everything.

Factor in their low cost and low availability, and suddenly there was even more dicepool inflation for no good reason. If you played at a table where you could dumpster-dive through the books for anything you wanted (and it wasn't like these things were in an obscure book anyhow), suddenly everyone had to have one of these things. It was dumb.

Honestly, I imagine there could be a very narrowly defined version of these akin to Lying Cat that might be interesting or fun to include, but these were just dicepool inflation pure and simple, and it's probably best to pretend they don't exist.

SPIRITS, ASTRAL PERCEPTION, AND YOU

Stahl is pretty much correct. Astral Perception is a psychic sense, not a physical sense, so things like light levels and visibility sort of go out the window. Explicitly, you don't actually even need eyes to be able to astrally perceive, and in a lot of the fluff it's made clear that you can't actually read things like road signs or computer screens in the physical world. I assume that means that holograms effectively don't interact with astral perception.

Now, when they materialize, spirits are corporeal and ostensibly can see using their physical eyes, or at least that's implied by the Beast Spirit (as you've pointed out). However, from a narrative perspective, I'd strongly recommend treating spirits as more inhuman than human. Frank once described a spirit as "an alien space tree from the fourth dimension" and I think you'd be well-served to keep that in mind. It's helped our games enormously since it also prevents conjurers from using spirits as a solution to everything. Once you open the door to assuming that the spirit you summoned 3 seconds ago has a working knowledge of commlinks, the stock market, and fashion, things can get pretty dumb pretty fast. So it might be easier to simply assume that spirits astrally perceive all the time, full stop.

But that's getting into opinion territory, and YMMV.

[duo31]

Not really a newbie question. but away from my books.

What are the rules/guidelines for what SR magic can and cannot do?

[JesterZero]

Ye Olde Limits of Sorcery (from Street Magic)

1. Cannot Affect Anything Unless the Caster has a Magical Link
2. Cannot Alter the Space / Time Continuum
3. Cannot Divine the Future with Certainty
4. Cannot Summon / Banish Spirits
5. Cannot Raise the Dead
6. Cannot Create Magical Items
7. Cannot Bridge the Gap Between the Astral and Physical Planes
8. Cannot Create Complex Things
9. Cannot Have Intelligence

[Stahlseele]

Err . .
1.) Vague but true
2.) True for time. Movement Power says wrong for space i guess.
3.) Kinda true
4.) Wrong. On so many levels O.o
5.) Depends on the definition.
6.) Weapon-Focus says wrong.
7.) Astral Gateway(is that still a thing in SR4?) says wrong.
8.) Depends i guess. Spirits are pretty complex.
9.) For SPELLS true. For Spirits completely false.

[pragma]

Stahlsteele, those the rules for _sorcery_ specifically. Conjuring and enchanting handle other parts of the magic system. So your inredulity may be a little misplaced.

That said, I recall a spell that worked a little like astral gateway (astral window?) in the SR4 magic book, so they're toeing the line on at least a few of the rules.

[JesterZero]

Stahlsteele, those the rules for _sorcery_ specifically. Conjuring and enchanting handle other parts of the magic system. So your inredulity may be a little misplaced.

This.

Shadowrun has always made a distinction between what magic can accomplish directly vs. indirectly. And while I'm not going to go home and pull one of the old Grimoire books off the shelf just to prove a point, the "Limits of Sorcery" essay has been kicking around various Shadowrun magic splatbooks since at least the 90's. It's kind of famous, so I assumed that was what duo31 wanted.

So once more, without paraphrasing at all:

THE LIMITS OF SORCERY
Though spells can create many amazing ef-
fects, the power of sorcery in the Sixth World
does have limits. Some of these limitations
may be inherent in the nature of magic; oth-
ers may simply be conditions magical theorists
have yet to fi nd a way around.

Currently, sorcery obeys the following limi-
tations, which form the base-line assumptions
according to which all spells in this and other
Shadowrun books were created. Players and
gamemasters may choose to ignore or alter any
or all of these assumptions, but doing so may
unbalance their game.

Sorcery Cannot Affect Anything to which the
User Does Not Have a Magical Link.
In the case of spellcasting, this link is pro-
vided by line of sight: the visual image of the
target provides the magical connection between
the caster and the target of the spell. For ritual
sorcery, a sympathetic link (see p. 28) can provide
the magical connection, in addition to standard
line of sight or a ritual spotter. Without this link,
sorcery cannot affect a target.

Sorcery Cannot Alter the Fabric of the Space/
Time Continuum.
Spells cannot directly change distance or the
passage of time. Teleportation and time travel
are the holy grails of magical R&D departments
the world over, but no one has been able to un-
ravel the knotty problem of affecting space or
time with magic. Spells can speed up or slow
down processes, such as healing or chemical re-
actions, and allow subjects to move quickly, but
they cannot directly alter time or space.

Sorcery Cannot Divine the Future with any
Certainty.
Spells are rooted in the same present as their
caster and cannot pierce the veil of time to pre-
dict the future with any great accuracy. Reliable
techniques of long-range precognition do not
exist. Spells designed to predict the future only
provide clues and hints about possible events,
and then only over a short span of time. The fur-
ther into the future one attempts to divine, the
more unreliable the results.

Sorcery Cannot Summon or Banish Spirits.
These abilities are the province of the art of
Conjuring. Spells can, however, be used to dam-
age or affect spirits or to create barriers that
block or contain them.

Sorcery Cannot Raise the Dead
Though spells can heal, once a person has
passed away, they are gone forever (though
some view conjuring spirits as raising the spir-
its of the dead).

Sorcery Cannot Create Magical Items
Foci, vessels, and other items imbued with
magic may not be crafted with spells; such
handiwork requires the hands-on efforts of
an enchanter.

Sorcery Cannot Bridge the Gap between the
Astral and Physical Planes
Spells only have an effect in the plane on
which they are cast. Spells cast on the astral
have no effect on the physical, and vice versa.
Likewise, spells cast in the astral or physical have
no effect on the metaplanes, and vice versa.

Sorcery Cannot Create Complex Things
Though spellcraft can transform energy,
spark elemental forces, and even provide nu-
trition, no magicians have yet determined a
way for sorcery to create complex items (such
as a gun or even a hammer) from mana alone—
despite the best efforts of research corps to
date. Sorcery can be used to fi x and some-
times transmute complex items, but the days
of summoning weapons from nowhere have
not yet arrived.

Magic Is Not Intelligent.
Mana only does as it is told when manipu-
lated by Magical skills such as Sorcery. Magical
effects do not make independent decisions.

[Cochise]

Let's just say, that most of these rules were kept intact both in 3rd and 4th Edition ... except for No.7 which was regularly broken by health spells that healed physical bodies and the associated astral form as well through spells like Mana Static.

And I do seem to recall a certain spell from a very bad 4th Ed sourcebook that had to be either errated or removed due to its non-fitting nature.

[Username17]

Technically neither heath spells nor mama static break the astral gate rules. Both change the state of the physical world, which then has a completely normal effect on the astral plane coterminus with it. That's a kind of a dickish distinction to make for mama static, but it's importantly true. Physically present emotions and crap impact the background count in the astral, and the background count in the astral can hurt magical things in the physical - but it's not the spell bridging the barrier in either direction, just the normal permeability of the physical and astral to background count operating in the normal way. Mama Static goes as close to violating that rule as spells can, but it's still legit.

-Username17

[Cochise]

Technically neither heath spells nor mama static break the astral gate rules.

To openly requote the important part: Spells only have an effect in the plane on which they are cast. Spells cast on the astral have no effect on the physical, and vice versa.

While I can see your argument being made for treat / heal since the connection between physical body and astral form is not an effect created by those spells it imho just doesn't work out for Mana Static:

That's a kind of a dickish distinction to make for mama static, but it's importantly true.

Your "dickish" distinction would work out if the spell created an effect that in turn caused background count. Unfortunately the spell explicitly creates background directly and thus the spell's effect is technically or rather seemingly generated on both planes at the same time.

The real culprit however ist that background count itself is a phenomenon that - rulewise - exists on the astral and is a (non-spell) magic effect that has a plane traversing effect on magic => By the targeting conventions for spell casting the caster without an active "connection" to the astral (via astral perception) the caster should even be able to successfully "target" this spell.

Mama Static goes as close to violating that rule as spells can, but it's still legit.

I cannot subscribe to that point of view.

[Username17]

I of course don't give a single rat's anus whether you can or can't subscribe to that view. That view is right and canon and any other view is wrong. Background count flows across the boundary between the physical and the astral in very specific ways and Mana Static takes advantage of both directions. You can cast it on the physical and snuff out a purely astral spirit because conditions on the physical can and do create background counts. And you can cast it on the astral and rob a purely physical mage of his powers because background count in the astral fucks with the powers of coterminus physical magicians.

In neither case does the spell cross the divide. It just interacts exclusively with a part of physics that has predictable effects on the other side of the divide. Mana Static is very powerful and totally munchkin, but it very precisely conforms to the limits of magic in the game.

If you want to talk about a spell that breaks the rules: Corps Cadavre (or however the fuck that is spelled). That spell got dumped down the memory hole because it obviously broke the rules. And then of course in SR5 there are sorcery rituals that make homunculi because of course there are.

-Username17

[Cochise]

I of course don't give a single rat's anus whether you can or can't subscribe to that view.

As usual that had to be expected. Now do you think that I care a single's rat anus about your not giving a rat's anus?

That view is right and canon and any other view is wrong.

I love such binary thinking

Background count flows across the boundary between the physical and the astral in very specific ways

If anything - under 4th Ed canon - it's Mana that floats in that manner. background count was - for whatever reason - changed into a delta of available Mana at a given location. What was somewhat lost in the transition from 3rd to 4th was the overall flow direction. Mana explicitly flows from the metaplanes into the physical world and the Astral simultaneously ... but it appears that the flow between physical and the Astral got lost (at least in core rules and Street Magic).

Interestingly enough Mana did not flow from the Astral back into the physical world in previous editions but then again background count wasn't some form of delta in the mana flow during that time either.

You can cast it on the physical and snuff out a purely astral spirit because conditions on the physical can and do create background counts.

See, that's the part where things get "fishy", because the spell's effect is "background count" that in order to comply to the other limitation of spellcasting should be incapable of taking effect on the plane you're currently not on and the flow mechanism seems to be broken as well.
As said: I would certainly agree with you and what you consider "canon" if the spell actually created a "condition" that in turn created background count. In your own words: A "dickish" interpretation but just as valid within canon thus resulting with a broken limit.

In neither case does the spell cross the divide.

Unfortunately the limitation does not talk about the spell itself crossing the divide but the spell's effect:

Sorcery Cannot Bridge the Gap between the
Astral and Physical Planes
Spells only have an effect in the plane on
which they are cast. Spells cast on the astral
have no effect on the physical, and vice versa.
Likewise, spells cast in the astral or physical have
no effect on the metaplanes, and vice versa.

... and we're still missing a suitable "Mana flow" in SR4

Mana Static is very powerful and totally munchkin, but it very precisely conforms to the limits of magic in the game.

Still not subscribing

That spell got dumped down the memory hole because it obviously broke the rules.

I'd go with the Slow spell from WAR! but I guess you wouldn't agree with me on that one either.

[Stahlseele]

i'd guiess he'll agree with you on that because of one simple fact:
WAR! is stupid shit no matter what part of it you pick.