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Stahlseele
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Post by Stahlseele »

or on dumpshock . . there's more people there that can rules lawyer and minmax to hell and back alone than there are posters here all in all i think.
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Post by Lokathor »

Street Magic Pg121 has the writeup on what level of background count is common to what sort of place.

Basically though, most places don't have a background count to them.
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

I plan to run a game for a group including two mages. Is there a mechanical way to stop them from chain summoning spirits, telling them to "ruin that guy's shit", and then sicking the mother of all spirit bombs on them? Besides talking to them, of course.

Also, how remarkable is an AI in the 2070s? A potential run involves the PCs having to extract a gynoid that spontaneously developed sentience from the warehouse she's in and the rival team that wants to grab her.

Finally, what sorts of runs do you personally favor in SR?
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Post by virgil »

Well, after seeing this thread, the girlfriend has decided to be an Intuition-based Ork with a focus on spirits (secondary focus of Gymnastics and Stealth); you bastards ;)

Any advice for her? For me?
Last edited by virgil on Fri Feb 01, 2013 4:26 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Lokathor »

Silent Wayfarer: You can only have 1 unbound spirit at once, and the drain is kinda nasty on summoning larger spirits. Medium spirits aren't a huge problem though. Probably just cap the Force of a summoned spirit at their Magic and it'll all work. It'll still be a good option, but won't be the be-all-end-all.

virgil: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... pNGc#gid=0 :tongue:

Advice for you: put the assensing results chart on a notecard and keep it handy. If you've got lots of intuition as a mage then Assensing becomes a fun thing to do.
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Post by virgil »

This is a very rough draft made by my girlfriend, specifics for stuff like equipment, spells known, and knowledge will be chosen when she's rested.
Body 6
Agility 4
Reaction 3
Strength 6
Charisma 2
Intuition 5
Logic 2
Willpower 5
Magic 6
Edge 1
Initiative 8

Conjuring 4
Summoning 5 (Spirit)
Spellcasting 4
Counterspelling 4
Assensing 3
Astral Combat 3
Infiltration 4
Perception 3
Exotic Weapon (Monowhip) 3
Shadowing 2
Athletics 3
Gymnastics 5
Hacking (Stealth) 1
Parkour Counter-Culture 1
Knowledges 3

Spells [7] Turn to Goo, Shape Metal, Physical Mask, x, x, x, x
Gear [15BP]
Contacts [3BP]

Positive Qualities (15)
Magician

Negative Qualities (35)
Incompetant: Ritual Spellcasting
Incompetant: Cyber Combat
Spirit Bane (x)
Incompetant: Pilot Aerospace
Incompetant: Aeronautics Mechanic
Incompetant: Pilot Aircraft
In response to Koran0's mentions, the mistake on skill maximums had been rectified and the notation for how many points in negative qualities has been fixed (she might switch out one of the incompetences for a mild allergy to banana or something).
Last edited by virgil on Fri Feb 01, 2013 2:46 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Korgan0 »

I'm pretty sure the limit is that you can have one skill at 6 OR two skills at 5, not both. I can't remember if Astral Combat is useful or not. Exotic Weapon needs a specific weapon attached, like monowhip or whatever. You might want to raid some points from somewhere (I think shadowing is kinda useless) and pump Gymnastics since you can use that as your Dodge dicepool, and more defense is always nice. Remember to take Stunbolt. Stacking FFBA, PPP and cheap armour (like a lined coat) can give you insane defensive numbers, but that can go later. I thought the limit for negative qualities as 35; if it is, you may as well go the whole hog. I'm sure I'll think of some things in the morning.
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

Is the limit for positive qualities also 35?
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Post by Stahlseele »

it's not really made clear anywhere wether the limit is 35 points in both directions or 35 points all in all, as far as i remember . .
most people use the 35 positive and 35 points negative to come out at plus/minus 0 or something like that i think . .

armor is limited on the body stat, i think you can go to twice body for worn armor maximum or something like that.
magical armor and cyber/bioware-armor does not count against this limit though. which is one of the uses of cyberlimbs. armor from steel parts!

lower force spirits ain't that hard to defeat using either stick and shock or apds ammo with automatic weapons.
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Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Captain_Karzak »

In all the recent back-and-forth, I'm not sure what house rules are in effect.

You seem to be having trouble with spell selection. Here's some suggestions.:

A mage needs to be able to buff their drain attributes. this is because Shadowrun mages cast (and summon) from Hit Points. So having a really big drain pool is even more important than having a really big magic attribute (good to have both though).

(1) Increase Intuition (or whatever drain stat you end up choosing)

(2) Increase Willpower

(3) Stunball. Reliable AoE damage is hard to come by in Shadowrun. Stunball is in a league of it's own in this regard.

(4) Heal. I don't know why any mage would not take this spell.

(5) Mana Static. Keep in mind there is errata that makes this spell a while to power up, but it's still good for supressing wards and creating traps or safe zones filled with high background count.

(6) Mind Probe. Fucking amazing for gathering information from unwilling sources. Can even find memorizes that are suppressed or forgotten.

(7) Trid Phantasm. Good for distractions, misleading people, displaying information. It has high drain but innumerable uses. Not great for shadowrunning, just general utility. It's the only Illusion spell I can recommend.

(8) Increase Reflexes - should have been listed this first. It is the easiest, and arguably best, source of multiple IP's. Also gives a nice boost to initiative.

(9/10) Shape Material - both metal and earth are good. Earth is a mana barrier, so there's a lot of useful things you can from being able to move it around. It's also a good compliment to shape metal for infiltrating underground bases, since you'll have to tunnel down to them anyway.

(11) Levitate - being able to move in 3-D is very useful. There are not a lot of good ways to emulate this with Tech. If you are really good, you can fly very fast, especially with the help of movement.

(12) Fix - could save lots of money, can repair critical equipment (like guns, gas masks, etc) even in the middle of a run. Only good for mages who can reliably beat object resistance of 3 to 5.

I don't really like Turn to Goo. It doesn't transform cyberware and the goo is very viscous. You can't really use it all that well for infiltration, and it gives barrier grade armor, which is really, really sucktastic form of protection, so it's not good for defense either. It's okay as a single-target attack spell - although it only affects living creatures.


Most illusion spells and active detection spells are total shit. The reason why is that they are subject to counterspelling detection.

If a security mage is present, they will provide passive counterspelling protection to to himself and/or other guards in his LOS, and when any of them are are hit by any active dection spell, or are affected by any illusion spell, the security mage gets to roll an intuition + counterspelling (3) test to realize that they just passively counterspelled something. More net hits tell give them progressively more detail. The weakest security mage (profession rating 2) you are ever likely to encounter gets 3 hits 40% of the time.

So basically you cannot rely on any kind of illusion or active detection spell if your group is trying to infiltrate. Also illusion spells have an added layer of suck in that astral perception see's straight through them automatically. Improved Invisibility is complete fail - you can only use it to punk dudes who have no magical back-up - which means you were going to curb stomp them anyway.
Last edited by Captain_Karzak on Fri Feb 01, 2013 11:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by kzt »

Silent Wayfarer wrote:I plan to run a game for a group including two mages. Is there a mechanical way to stop them from chain summoning spirits, telling them to "ruin that guy's shit", and then sicking the mother of all spirit bombs on them? Besides talking to them, of course.
There was a stupid bit in the first printing of SR4 that allowed you to summon a spirit, send it on a remote task, then summon another. If that is what you are talking about, that was a mistake and was fixed in errata and subsequent printings.
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Post by Captain_Karzak »

Yeah, I'm really glad Frank fixed the way remote services worked. The original core rules for that were batshit crazy.

Anway, with that loophole closed - generally, the super-random nature of summoning drain will eventually screw of people who are overly-reliant on summoning.

On average, summoning drain is very manageable, but events on the nasty end of the bell curve can be very dire indeed. And drain can't be healed by magic - only first aid, and natural healing (possibly accelerated via a medicine check).

Take a force 12 spirit. Near 2% of the time, they will hit you for 16 or more points of (physical) drain. Even with edge, that is pretty scary shit for most mages. Summon often enough and results like that will occur, especially if your summoning pool is not big enough to nearly always win the opposed summoning tests with big spirits.

Anyway, I though I might comment on Qualities:

Positives [35]
Mage (obviously): 15
Homeground: 10
Mentor Spirit: 5
Restricted Gear (Force 4 Power Foci): 5

Negatives [-35]
In-debt: -30
Mild Addiction to Betel: -5

Homeground is a fat +2 to all skills performed in a certain (small, or infrequently featured) area. Really helps with all those summoning and binding checks that most mages end up making.

Mentor Spirit is a really inexpensive way to get a +2 on all conjuring skills for one type of spirit, and +2 to all sorcery skills for one school of magic.

A force 4 power foci is a really nice thing to start with. If you are not using Karma, I have no idea how you intend to price these things after character creation. Probably 6 bp per force rating? Anway, getting start with one of these is an extremely nice boost to any mage's competency.

In-debt is a way of getting extra money during chargen. It'll bleed you over the long-run, but if you make a lot of money, you can buy down the debt-service very quickly. It also looks less cheesy than taking Incomtpency over and over. BTW, incompetency also tanks your Street Cred - assuming you are even tracking streed cred.

Betel is a (really useful and inexpensive)perception enhancing drug that instantly addicts anyone who uses it once. Your addiction level will never surpass mild however - so it's completely harmless.
Last edited by Captain_Karzak on Sat Feb 02, 2013 12:48 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by virgil »

Captain_Karzak wrote:In all the recent back-and-forth, I'm not sure what house rules are in effect.
The following books are allowed: Core Book, Ends of the Matrix, Street Magic, Augmentation, Arsenal. The following house-rules are in effect.
  • Skills, Specializations, and Skill Groups at half BP cost
  • Karma replaced with BP; cannot be spent on contacts or nuyen after character creation
  • Magic, Resonance cost flat 10BP per, regardless of maximum
  • Contacts cost (Loyalty x Connections)cp, which are bought at 3cp per BP
  • No sustaining foci
If a player chooses to mess around much with the adept and isn't looking all that effective, I'll probably give him some of Frank's reduced values as seen in his house-rule section

As it stands for the rest of the group (three other players), it sounds like they're taking the stance that they're going to try their best to have each 'role' filled, so my girlfriend will likely be the only magic-user of the group. I'm setting it in 2071 or so, in the general DC to NYC area, which means I need to start researching like crazy.
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Post by Captain_Karzak »

More questions:

If everything is priced in BP, how much does it cost to raise a magic attribute beyond 6 (recall that magic is technically an uncapped attribute)?

10 BP per point is insanely low.

25 BP per point >5 is insanely high.

When I GM'd SR4a, what I did was priced Initiating at 25 BP, and each Initiation automatically raised magic by 1, and didn't allow anyone to buy up magic past 6 outside of the Initiation route. I never worked out what to do for Group Initiation discounts and Ordeal discounts.

I'm also curious to know how Foci are supposed to be priced when everything is in BP.

I'm also not sure what is so broken about SR4/4a sustaining foci that merits them being banned. They are a pretty mediocre resource. Bound spirits of man are usually a much better means of spell sustaining.

Is the plans still to make a Magician / Stealth parkour character?

Subtlety and Magic (excepting adapts) are on opposite sides of the spectrum in Shadowrun. About the only thing that mages have that helps with stealth is Concealment (a spirit power) - it's quite good, but pretty much everyone else in the party will be much better at stealthing.

Also all spellcasting is super obvious. As is it's really easy to detect a spell being cast at decent force (often it doesn't even require a perception check) and sustained spells make you glow like a beacon in the astral.
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Post by Mask_De_H »

It's easier to recast into a spell sustaining focus than to rebind and bargain with a spirit when you have to go through security, I would assume. Walking around with a spirit in you is bound to raise questions a random object (which you could fake a license for the contained spell) wouldn't. Also, much less downside to a botched spell than a failed binding, as your spell won't go haywire or try to kill you.

Being visible on the Astral doesn't seem to be that big a deal, especially if you have Astral Chameleon or Masking. And Improved Invisibility/Physical Mask makes you stealthy enough to most threats.
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Post by Captain_Karzak »

I strongly disagree with all of that.

Astral Chameleon is useless. It doesn't make sustained spells any less visible, nor does it make spellcasting any more subtle. It just halves the amount of time your signatures linger, which seriously does not matter because they still last for fucking hours. So either you made a clean getaway, and no one is even looking for your signatures, or you screwed up and astral backup is going to be on your trail at 6,000 kph - so even if your signatures degenerated in combat rounds instead of hours they will still find them.

Sustained spells lighting you up in the astral is a huge deal because it makes it super obvious that you are loaded for bear. It's guaranteed to draw further scrutiny, hence the opposite of subtle.

Masking metamagic does not conceal any affects - it will not cover any spells of spirit powers that are active. That requires Extended Masking, so you have to have initiated twice, ans they need to be your first two initiations!

Improved Invisibility and Physical Mask dramatically decrease the chance of successful infiltration against any target with a security mage or two. Basically a security mage sits in a safe room that has a medical workshop/facility installed and a mage sight fiber optic security system. His watcher spirits and bound spirits do the actual patrolling - usually near wards.

From there he gain LOS to nearly area in the facility, greatly expanding counterspelling coverage. This means that sneaking past a mall cop while under Improved Invisibility may actually trigger a counterspelling detection test. This can happen even if the counterspelling mage doesn't have LOS to you - all that's required is that a person under counterspelling protection is resisting the spell - and the resistance roll is automatically granted - even for illusions.

Recasting a spell after passing a ward can be difficult because all building security will assume that an infiltrating magician would begin to recast spells once passing the ward, and layer their security accordingly.

If you are well-built magician, you can get a lot hits against relatively low force spirits of man. You maximize net hits on summoning tests, and take what you can get on the binding roll. With a mentor spirit, homeground, aspected domain 2, power focus 4, summoning 4, specialization, magic 6, you should be able to get about 22 dice versus force 4 to 6 spirits. You can also spend edge to get a lot more hits. So the per-service cost on a spirit of man will not be exorbitant and they will never cost you BP/Karma.

Is sustaining focus sometimes better? Yeah a little, some of the time. Not nearly enough to merit bans though.
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Post by Username17 »

Astral Chameleon is useless. It doesn't make sustained spells any less visible, nor does it make spellcasting any more subtle. It just halves the amount of time your signatures linger, which seriously does not matter because they still last for fucking hours. So either you made a clean getaway, and no one is even looking for your signatures, or you screwed up and astral backup is going to be on your trail at 6,000 kph - so even if your signatures degenerated in combat rounds instead of hours they will still find them.
This is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. Astral Movement is wizard fast. But Astral Tracking is an extended test with a time interval of one hour. So every one hour you shave off your spell signatures is one less tracking test that a forensic magician can make in order to fuck you.

Of course, SR4A is contradictory about whether an Astral Signature is enough to track you at all, because in other places it requires an Astral Link, which isn't the same thing at all. But that is because SR4A was poorly compiled by people who didn't know what they were doing.

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Post by Captain_Karzak »

My bad. I was sloppy with my wording.

By "on your trail" I meant that they will have your signature, which they can easily pass around via a mindlink spell or replicated for memorization via a mana illusions spell cast in the astral (ex manascape or maybe even a phantasm). They can maintain an organic database of these enemy signatures via an adapt or mystic adapt who has the eidetic (sp?) sense memory power. I think there's also some kinda magic camera that works for this too.

If shadowrunning mages are as incredibly rare as I think they are, then having their signature discovered is a significant blow to any mage 'runner's ability to remain anonymous - especially if the mage runner is shit hot and only gets paid to raid hard targets.

Thanks for the astral tracking info though. I've been doing that wrong as a player.

Although, if the corp wants to astrally track you, they'll just cough up a medium-force spirit, cast increase intuition on it, have the mage teamwork assess, and tell the spirit to rush the job. They'll be astrally tracking you in half an hour.


Hey, Frank I wanted to ask you something totally different:

In Street Magic , under the guidelines for how spirits spend edge (under Spirits and Edge, p. 95) there's this statement:

"Spirits can also use Edge to assist their resistance roll to the original summoning, but will generally not do so unless the discrepancy in power between them and an impudent conjurer is large or the conjurer has a history of mistreating spirits." - p. 95

How should a GM apply this ruling?

When I GM I tell my players that spirits will edge against summoning/binding if their force is more that 1.5 times the mage's magic rating. Actually I use a graded probability - 0% at force <= 1.5x summoner's magic, rising linearly to 100% chance of edging at Force = 2x summoner's magic.

Assuming I don't use any other spirit based house rules, is this a fair way of implementing the underlined rule?

Also, how much edge do you think spirits should get? Edge = Force seems kinda.... crazy to me.
Last edited by Captain_Karzak on Sat Feb 02, 2013 9:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

I don't think that an organic database of telepaths is going to bother keeping track of the astral signatures of people who probably cast spells in crime scenes. It's just not a good use of their time. Especially if they have reason to believe that these criminals were hired deniable assets, where catching up to them more than a few months or even in many cases a few days after the crime is basically worthless because they'll have already turned over any stolen data or goods to the competitors and they were hired through a blind intermediary and don't know anything.

Once they've failed to keep Shadowrunners from turning their loot over and making their full report to their anonymous sponsors, it's really pretty pointless to go after them. They no longer have anything corporate security cares about and represent no particular ongoing threat. There's some small value in promising future retribution, but not the kind of value it would be worth having people learn specialist magic to create an organic memory database about.

Anyway, the line in Street Magic was there entirely to screw over characters who were abusing the really absurd high end spirits you can come up with. It was also there to cut off dickish GMs who wanted to shit on conjurer characters by edging all the spirit summonings and stonewalling their entire character concept. The idea was that those Force 12 Spirits would at least potentially blossom up to 24 resistance dice with no warning and thus having characters pull in beasts who could smack around dragons as starting characters wasn't practical.

Personally, I would put the limit at about 5 or 6 points of Force over the character's magic attribute. Not a multiple, just a linear increase. No pressing need to try to fuck over low magic dabblers who "overcast" spirits that are still bullshit small and no threat to anything.

If I had my druthers as regards spirit attributes, I would set all Unbound spirits to having mental attributes of 3 and be across the board unable to spend Edge. I would give bound spirits mental attributes of 4, and have an Edge of 1 that refreshed every time they got a new service. Then Ally spirits would go back to having the mental attributes and Edge of their conjurer, and that would be an actually big deal that would make them cool.

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Post by Lokathor »

Captain_Karzak wrote:More questions:

If everything is priced in BP, how much does it cost to raise a magic attribute beyond 6 (recall that magic is technically an uncapped attribute)?

10 BP per point is insanely low.

25 BP per point >5 is insanely high.
All covered right here:
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=58685#58685
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Post by virgil »

Where do I get information regarding what's in DC in the year 2071, especially the major players and their holdings in the general region? Are there walled off arcologies, laws against hats, greater scrutiny toward trolls, etc?
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Post by Captain_Karzak »

http://shadowrun.wikia.com/wiki/Federal ... f_Columbia

http://shadowrun.wikia.com/wiki/Washington,_FDC

Also, at the bottom of these articles, there is a reference section listing what sources this info was compiled from.

I don't know about the hats, though. You're probably going to have to wing that bit. Good luck.
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Post by virgil »

General astral questions here. Can astral tracking work off of an astral signature; letting the forensic magician track the runner by using the Stunball signature left on the guard? Can an astral photograph act as a material link? Can a mage that's gotten a read on a signature shape their aura to be photographed as a kind of second-hand astral signature database? I'm presuming wards have signatures as well, which would allow a mage to track the mage who set it up? Does assensing a signature give you a diagnosis of the caster, or do you need to read their aura directly?
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Post by Lokathor »

Can astral tracking work off of an astral signature; letting the forensic magician track the runner by using the Stunball signature left on the guard?
Yes, and that's why there's the "erase astral signature" action that takes 1 complex action per point of force in the signature to complete.
Can a mage that's gotten a read on a signature shape their aura to be photographed as a kind of second-hand astral signature database?
I think there's a metamagic for copying someone else's astral signature in Street Magic.
Does assensing a signature give you a diagnosis of the caster, or do you need to read their aura directly?
Pretty sure an astral signature doesn't reveal any info, you need to see their actual aura.
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Post by virgil »

The Empathy Software from Arsenal is confusing. From what I know of the rules, you cannot exceed (skill x 1.5) in your skill rating, which means a functional cap of 3 for a max rating skill user; how does the Empathy Software work at the 4 through 6 ratings?
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