Should an all magician game drain with Willpower? [SR4e-ish]

[Hicks]

Imagine a hypothetical game ripping nearly word for word shadowrun 4e's dicepool resolution and magic system. Like wholesale. And in this game everyone is a Magician. It makes sense to not charge the characters points to be a magician, because every character is a magician, you can't not make a magician, the premise is every player is a magician. Giving the players points that must be spent on being a magician seems dumb because all players will have the [is a magician] tag.

Choosing possession or materialization spirits, different combinations of spirits for different types of magic, and using different characteristics for drain are all OK because they lead to differences between characters. But the sticking point is literally everybody is going to max out Willpower because it is added to drain soak tests.

So, in a game where everybody is going to max that out, should willpower add to drain soak tests?

Because it seems like a toggle for a trap option if you don't max it out and a useless character generation point sink because.... everybody should max it because all characters are magicians.

Or am I missing something and the difference between having a Willpower of 6, 5, or 4 is really meaningful? Because as far as I can see the design space for keeping it is 3 dice wide.

[phlapjackage]

I'd say yeah it should, because without adding Willpower, the drain tests become much harder and drain becomes a more constant thing (unless that's what you want your game going for). If you didn't want drain to be such a big player, you'd need to either spend a lot of time redoing drain codes (and hope to get them playable), or you'd need to have a different stat add to drain tests, which is the same problem as initially.

[Kaelik]

I'd say yeah it should, because without adding Willpower, the drain tests become much harder and drain becomes a more constant thing (unless that's what you want your game going for). If you didn't want drain to be such a big player, you'd need to either spend a lot of time redoing drain codes (and hope to get them playable), or you'd need to have a different stat add to drain tests, which is the same problem as initially.

Presumably you would replace Willpower with Magic + some tradition stat which could also be Willpower.

[Whipstitch]

Unless you've removed all the cool stuff you should be spending money on in Shadowrun this actually hits me as much ado about nothing.

In Shadowrun it's never a given that every Magician should pump the bejesus out of Willpower given that it's otherwise a pretty damn useless attribute. Not every spell effect in Shadowrun requires high force or drain codes to be effective and in fact many of the tasks that that actually threaten high damage--such as binding, for example--do so in a swingy enough manner that you'd prefer to be performing them during downtime with plenty of Edge as a backup plan. In such instances, you can usually do just fine with a soft capped complementary Drain attribute like Charisma, Logic or Intuition and whatever minimal amount of Willpower is required to keep the GM from sneering at you when you claim your character has normal impulse control. You're only giving up a hit or two on average, which is fine, since your goal should be simply to remain conscious long enough to keep a spirit from going uncontrolled before popping an advil and taking a long nap.

[Hicks]

I am explicitly dropping literally everything from shadowrun 4e except the magic system and the characteristic + skill + modifier dicepool resolution system. Dropping everything else. Magicians only, final destination. The cool stuff is the magic system slightly altered by After Sundown: Magic skills are gone. Different traditions use different skills based on their drain atteibute.

RITUAL/SPELL CASTING
[Logic]+[Research]
[Intuition]+[Expression]
[Charisma]+[Tactics]

SUMMONING
[Logic]+[Bureaucracy]
[Intuition]+[Empathy]
[Charisma]+[Persuasion]

COUNTERSPELLING
[Willpower]+[Sabatoge]

ENCHANTING
[Willpower]+[Artisan]

And Arcana doesn't exist. Because I hate it.

The spell categories so far are Astral, Body, Energy, Matter, Space, and Time. Tho I may merge space and time into Space-Time if I can think of more spells for Matter. Astral and Body deal with magic affecting living things and astral space directly; Astral deals with emotion magic, mental illusions, and mana static, while Body is where stuff like Polymorph, Heal, Poison, Harm, and Panacea are. Energy, Matter, and Space/Time deal with literally anything not alive and can only affect living creatures indirectly; you can't cast the Energy spell Radiate on a living thing, but you can Radiate a beam of energy to fry an enemy with a successful Marksman skill test.

Transmuting matter into other matter is a spell that can be made permenant, and it isn't so much magical counterfitting of money as magical replication of goods down to the atomic level with an Artisan skill check. This isn't the game where you buy grenades, this is the the game where you Transmute any nonliving matter as a combat action into hypergolic rocket fuel and make shit explode.

As an alternate to adding Willpower, drain could be soaked with [logic, intuition, charisma]x2. Willpower can still be it's own thing in resisting Astral and Body spells cast directly on you and reducing wound penalties, but it is no longer mandatory to not explode from casting spells when literally every character is a spell caster.

[Username17]

Willpower is indeed a worthless waste of space that should not exist. Like Body, it only exists to soak damage and there are other stats that also soak that also do other things. Willpower is just Charisma overflow for Shamans. Once they've maximized Charisma, they might buy up some Willpower iff they want more drain soak than their Charisma gives them.

SR4 would be a better game if Willpower and Body were simply erased, damage soak was done with Strength, and mages picked two of the remaining mental stats to soak drain with.

-Username17

[Hicks]

Ok. So let's talk about that then. I'm using your After Sundown characteristics:

Strength
Agility
Logic
Intuition
Charisma
Willpower
Initiation Grade (think potency, limits characteristics and skills to 6 + Grade)
Edge

And then there are a few figured statistics like Initiative and Size

I fully intend to lift a large chunk of the AS combat engine, but alter it slightly to include my ideas on relative Size, an independent attribute that is divorced from Strength, for targeting modifiers, soaking, and dealing damage.

So a two fold question: why did you include willpower in AS, and what should replace its functionality to soak? Like is Counterspelling, Enchanting, and reducing wound penalties, plus however Willpower interacts with AS social stuff enough to justify its inclusion?

Willpower should probably be the equivalent of mental strength, resisting mental damage and astral damage, but acting like Strength on the Astral.... honestly, if I had to choose i'd pick Willpower over Charisma. To me there is a lot of conceptual overlap between the two.

[Username17]

After Sundown is a hybrid of SR4 and WoD, and one of the things that entails is an aspiration towards "social" as an equal sphere of influence as "physical." Shadowrun itself is more modeled on the D&D methodology, in which "physical" is considered an equal sphere to "literally everything else." Challenges that aren't literally enemy soldiers are still likely to be traps, locks, or barricades.

So the question of whether you want six stats that are:

• Strength, Agility, Reaction, Intelligence, Perception, Charisma
  or
• Strength, Agility, Intelligence, Perception, Charisma, Willpower

Has to do with how you want to divide up the challenge space. A dungeon crawling shooter probably wants the former, a costume drama probably wants the latter.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

but it is no longer mandatory to not explode from casting spells when literally every character is a spell caster.

I agree with your impulse but I wish you'd stop saying this given how so many of the best magician builds have 1 Willpower.

[Usamimi]

I have little experience with Shadowrun, but I advise you to consider whether or not willpower has uses other than soaking drain. If not, you may consider removing it entirely and assuming a flat soak rate or letting players assign soak to any mental attribute. The latter option is a simple solution, though I cannot say how effective it is for your purposes.

[OgreBattle]

I think stamina and toughness stats can work if you have an active actor offensive use of the stats instead of it only being passive

Like if a warrior dude rolls body to exhaust a foe with relentless grappling or a wizard rolls body to channel the illusion to eat someone