[SR 4] Is Bloodsucking Only For Suckers?

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Captain_Karzak
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Post by Captain_Karzak »

FrankTrollman wrote:Shadowrun4 basically worships the double tap. It pretty much doesn't matter how accurate you are, you are not going to drop anyone in less than 2 hits. On the flip side, it pretty much doesn't matter how much armor you're wearing, you are not going to take much more than 2 hits without going down.

Soak pools are pretty much meaningless, since the difference between a cosmic and massive soak pool and a naked man with a minimal body is seriously just 2 to 4 hits before you drop.

The defense roll is pretty much 100% of how survivable you are in combat. The soak roll is a fucking formality.

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But isn't the defense roll reduced against each subsequent attack? How I get a defense pool that is big enough to matter against multiple attacks/attackers? Especially as a mage?

Reaction 6 + Gymnastics 6 + Dodge specialty 2 + X? Is this basically how I need to build a character?
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Post by kzt »

Captain_Karzak wrote: But isn't the defense roll reduced against each subsequent attack? How I get a defense pool that is big enough to matter against multiple attacks/attackers? Especially as a mage?
Easy. You drop them with a stunball before they attack. Or you do something else that prevents them from shooting the hell out of you.
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Post by Captain_Karzak »

kzt wrote:
Easy. You drop them with a stunball before they attack. Or you do something else that prevents them from shooting the hell out of you.
Yeah, that's exactly that line of thinking that prompted me to ask if a character really needs dodge/gymnastics.

See, thing is I've never played the system and I've had very little time to read some of the rules - I just don't what SR combat looks like and what it takes to survive the various types of encounters that could occur.

So this debate over whether generating ginormous soak pools is better or worse than generating ginormous defense pools is really important to me.

I also don't know how reliable AoE's like stunball or mob control are at taking care of the opposition thoroughly enough so that I don't have to fear return fire.

There's also house rules. I believe that my GM is allowing any character (inc NPC's) to take the counterspelling skill (or introducing a new skill that has some of it's functionality), even if they have a magic rating of 0. Also I'm pretty sure Stunball / Stunbolt are having their drain codes raised. So house rules might change things up a lot.
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Post by kzt »

a F9 stunball will, on average, take down anyone in the AoE without special defenses. The mage will, on average, get 4-5 success and normal people will not.

With edge for rerolls a F9 stunball will take down anyone who isn't protected by some sort of very heavy defenses. And if 6 guys are about to ventilate you I'd suggest you consider edge.

You can also multicast, which might work very well depending on where your dice pool comes from.

If someone messes with the magic system then things will change. Oh, and if everyone can take counterspell your team should always use teamwork counterspelling. 12+ dice of counterspelling will often allow you to soak crazy stuff like F9 stunballs without having to use edge.

We banned the mind control spells, we decided they were just too gross, so I don't know how people play them.
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Post by Murtak »

Stunballs are nice, but they only work on humans that you can see. Which is often but not always. "Shoot first, fuck defense" works quite often, but the first time it does not work you are in trouble.

As a mage you do have more trouble getting a dicepool large enough to dodge multiple shots. Or rather, anyone not built for high initiative and multiple passes (which often includes mages) has trouble doing that. If your character is not built for speed or resilience, your best bet is to let the combat specialists do their thing and provide backup. Hang back, seek cover, deal with whatever you can deal with without exposing yourself. As a mage, seeking cover can be as easy as casting invisibility. Then you can summon a spirit, throw some mana bolts, or even throw grenades and shoot guns like everybody else.

But even if combat is not your speciality, you can still get dodge 6, specialize in ranged, have a reaction of 4 and sit on a somewhat reassuring 12 dodge dice, which is a hell of a lot more survivable than your regular 4 dice.
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Post by Archmage »

Dodge 6 is way overkill for a magician. Run Reaction 4 or so and slap on the increase reflexes spell (sustained via spirit of man or focus). Get Gymnastics with a spec in "gymnastic dodge." Should be easy enough to manage 12 dice, and invisibility plus ruthenium armor makes the prospect of accurately shooting you at all fairly slim.
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Post by UmaroVI »

I'm not that big of a fan of Improved Invisibility because it only works against sight, and there's a zillion ways to bypass that in SR, many of which are either cheap and easy for ordinary people to use (ultrasound goggles, for example) or very common (dual-natured opponents).

For mage defenses, try grabbing Sustaining foci and maintaining spells like Increase Reaction, Combat Sense, and Deflection. Those are also all passive effects, which I like.

It does somewhat depend on your GM, but I'd rather everyone have -6 dice to shoot me than some people not be able to see me and other people have no penalty to shoot me, especially when the stuff that can see through Imp. Invis is also generally the most dangerous stuff.

EDIT: A decent Infiltration skill, Ruthenium, and the Concealment critter power can make you darn hard to see if you're sneaking around; I certainly agree that investing in Infiltration and a ruthenium-coated poncho is a good idea.
Last edited by UmaroVI on Sat May 07, 2011 3:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Captain_Karzak »

As a magician with a decent (~14) conjuration and drain dice pools, can I depend on possession by a guardian spirit to provide the combat capability I need? It sounds easier than having to somehow sustain several high-force buffs.

Because of the huge number of BP's I'm flushing down the toilet by trying to roll up a Nosferatu character, I have minimal physical attributes and very few skills. Is possession a durable enough method of stat and skill replacement to be a good workaround?
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Post by Murtak »

Possession is definitely a way to get all your dicepools up. Of course it is even better if the subject has high dicepools to begin with.
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Post by Fuchs »

Simple wards can mess up your sustained spells though - and often at inopportune times.
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Post by UmaroVI »

Possession, if you build around it, is really, really good. It's also a frequent target of houserules. I would suggest checking with your GM how he feels about this one.

Theoretically, the major drawback of the "Channeling, run around possessed 24/7" mage is that being possessed is blatantly obvious, as in any casual observer will notice hey that guy is possessed.
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Post by Captain_Karzak »

UmaroVI wrote:Possession, if you build around it, is really, really good. It's also a frequent target of houserules. I would suggest checking with your GM how he feels about this one.

Theoretically, the major drawback of the "Channeling, run around possessed 24/7" mage is that being possessed is blatantly obvious, as in any casual observer will notice hey that guy is possessed.
Would you mind briefly detailing what are the key characteristics of a possession-oriented build? Aside from: be a magician and take Voodou as your tradition.

I'm not too worried about house rules. I'll be trying to running a Nosferatu, so in terms of anti-optomization, I've already dug myself a deep hole. I'm just trying to find a way to not be a severe liability to my team despite my near complete lack of non-magical skills and infantile physical attributes.

Also, would possession be less obvious if I were to sustain a physical mask over it (sustained by a focus)?
Last edited by Captain_Karzak on Sun May 08, 2011 4:02 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by UmaroVI »

There's 2 ways, to the best of my knowledge, of working as a Possession mage.

Way 1 is to build a normal mage, and summon spirits to possess stuff. How good this is, nobody knows, because the rules basically say that the GM should arbitrarily decide what does and doesn't get force added to it. Do ballistic/impact armor ratings get boosted? Does this count towards encumbrance? Catalyst doesn't know and neither do I.

Assuming that your GM allows for something useful to happen (which is either going to be stackable armor or adding to the DV of guns, most likely), you want to focus on being able to summon a spirit type with useful sustainable powers, like Man. Have it hop in and sustain stuff like Movement, Concealment, spells you give it with Innate Spell, etc. "Sustain this power all day" is one "service."

Way 2 is Channeling. This is a metamagic so you will suck for a little while until you get it. Without channeling, possessing yourself is generally sucktastic, because you have to use services to do anything.

With channeling, building around this is a matter of understanding the pants-on-head-retarded rules for what the combined you+spirit actually has for abilities. The way it works is this:

First, you can do stuff without expending services. You cannot use the spirit's active powers (ie, stuff like Concealment or Engulf) without using a service, but you do get the passive benefits of being possessed.

What you use is:

Physical stats: Your stat + Force, max of your augmented maximum.
Mental stats AND special stats: Spirit's stat, except when defending against something in which case lower of your or spirit's stat.

Skills: Higher of your skill or spirit's skill.

Initiative is recalculated based on the above, but initiative passes are the spirit's.

ITNW equal to 2x force.

How do you abuse this? Well, the idea is to take advantage of the things that get replaced by the spirit's stats. An example:

Be a Logic mage of a tradition that gets spirits of Man. Have a high Logic and Willpower, base magic 5, reaction 3, body 3, edge is no more or less important than for anyone else. Dump all your other stats through the floor. Get 2 points of ware, including in particular Trauma Damper, Platelet Factories, and Cerebral Enhancers. Past that armored cyberhands and feet are your best bet if your GM allows it.

Skill-wise, grab Spellcasting 4, Summoning 6, then whatever skills you want that a Spirit of Man does not have. For example, social skills, or Infiltration.

So you have 3 magic, summoning 6, you can probably scrape up a few more dice from specializations, mentor spirit, foci, whatever. Make sure you have a force 3 sustaining focus, and the spells Increase Reflexes, Physical Mask, and Stunbolt at a minimum.

Summon a force 6 spirit of man. This is overcasting, but you can still on average get several services (you really only need 1, but more is useful), and you are unlikely to take more than 1P drain. You're going to be rocking a 8 or so logic, so with a rating 6 first aid kit that's no problem for you. Hit it with a force 3 increase reflexes through your sustaining focus.

Have it possess you. Now you use the spirit's mental stats (6), and you also use the spirit's 6 magic rather than your 3 magic, and it's 6 spellcasting rather than your 4. You also get shit like Assensing, Perception, Dodge, and Unarmed Combat at 6.

Now you cast like you have Magic 6, Spellcasting 6, Logic 6 (or maybe 9, who knows if Cerebral Enhancers work like that), and Willpower 6. You also have ITNW 12. And all your old skills. And 2 points of ware. And 4 initiative passes.

Variants include possessing yourself with a Guardian spirit to get whatever weapon skill you want at the time and shooting people in the face, or possessing yourself with a spirit that has Elemental Aura, sustaining some [Element] Aura spells on yourself, and punching things in the face.
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Post by UmaroVI »

I should add - I'm not sure how well this works with Nosferatu, but I think Nosferatu are in fact doomed to suck. Let me look into that.
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Post by Stahlseele »

UmaroVI wrote:I should add - I'm not sure how well this works with Nosferatu, but I think Nosferatu are in fact doomed to suck.
ba-dum-bum-psh!
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Post by UmaroVI »

EDIT: Forgot to account for focus binding BP.

Okay, looking at Nosferatu, here's my take on it.

Nosferatu have to be humans, but you can be a Changeling Nosferatu I think and you probably want to be, from a maximum-effectiveness standpoint.

Small bonus to all your stats, and this actually raises the minimums and maximums which is quite good.

You get the Compulsion and Fear critter powers. These are actually superb because they bypass Counterspelling and are in general cool.

No cyberware.

Based on this, you for sure want to be a Charisma mage - probably a Mystic Adept.

You want to jack your Charisma as high as possible. You can totally have Fear be your main attack in combat - you can pretty reasonably be rolling 12 dice with it and people can only defend with straight Willpower, and it pretty much removes people from combat. You do need something to do about things that are immune to fear like drones and vehicles - Heavy Weapons + Physical Mask is a classic.

If I decided that I really wanted to be a Nosferatu and was going to optimize around that, I would probably do something like this:

0 Human
150 Nosferatu
10 Mystic Adept (4 PP/ 1 casting, choosing Voodoo if the GM will let you possess armor for +force to B/I that doesn't add encumbrance, which IMO they will unless they are being a dick, or some Charisma materialization tradition with not too shitty spirits otherwise)
5 Mentor Spirit (Sky Father [Detection/Manipulation]
5 Restriced Gear (force 4 power focus <- note this is cheaper to get this way than post chargen, because it's 4 BP to bond it or 32 karma)
10 Surge II (Glamour, Nasty Vibe, take some meaningless negative metagenic qualities like Impaired Attribute: Strength, or ones that don't make you any more distinctive than "being a Nosferatu" already is)
-35 in negative qualities.

Stats (150)
Body 5 (30)
Agility 2 (0)
Reaction 2 (0)
Strength 2 (0)
Charisma 7 (40)
Intuition 3 (0)
Logic 3 (0)
Willpower 7 (40)
Magic 5 (40)
Edge 2 (0)

Skills (68)
Spellcasting 6 (24)
Influence 4 (40)

Gear:
f4 Power Focus (20+4 <-100kY + bonding)
10k Y in other stuff

Spells:
Physical Mask, Mind Probe, Lightning Bolt, Levitate, Alter Memory

Adept Powers:
Kinesics 3 [1.5], Heightened Concentration [1], Commanding Voice [.25, note this is useful despite your having Compulsion and Fear because you can get multiple people with one command], Enthralling Performance (with Con (Impersonation)) [.5], Improved Ability (Negotiate) 1 [.25], Improved Ability (Con) 1 [.25], Improved Ability (Etiquette) 1 [.25] <- You could have +2/+1 instead of +1/+1/+1 if you so desire

Putting it all together:

Many MANY corners were cut because of the 150-point cost of being a Nosferatu. I went with the philosophy of "better to be good at something and shitty at other things than to be mehhh at everything."

How it works: you're a social adept. Charisma 7 + Glamour 3 + Kinesics 3 + Skill 4 + Improved Ability 1 is 18 dice which is a very respectable pool for social skills. Also helpful for convincing people that you totally aren't a vampire.

In combat, against living opponents, you can spam Fear to take a person out of the fight every round. You roll 12 dice vs. straight Willpower (no Counterspelling) and every net hit is a round before they even get to roll again. After you get 4 karma to buy Summoning 1, you can also summon fairly decent spirits to help you - 14 drain dice means you can handle summoning drain, which will quickly be more of a limiting factor than summoning dice pools.. Against things that are immune to fear, Lightning Bolt (also, you can give Lightning Bolt to spirits of man) but you aren't really very good at it. Other than that your spells are for utility outside of killing things.

Wear good armor - use Form Fitting Body Armor (Arsenal), Softweave (War), PPP (Arsenal) and a stylin' and appropriately neo-gothic armored clothing of your choice. That+Regeneration should help you at least not die.

What your adept powers are for:

Heightened Concentration has lots of uses. The simplest is: cast Physical Mask on yourself, Heightened Concentration away the penalty for sustaining it. You can also remove Called Shot penalties with it. Remember it takes a complex action to "set" to what penalty you want to ignore so do that in advance.

Commanding Voice should be obvious. If you are fighting a bunch of schmucks, commands like "Drop your guns" are invaluable. You can roll a whole shitload of dice with this and a lot of people will only have 2 dice or so to oppose you.

Enthralling Performance is absolutely hilarious. Apparently you can do like a Charlie Chaplin impression, and make people forget about the entire world around them. This guy can seriously make people have to make a threshold 6 perception test to notice anything besides how accurate his impersonation of Nadja Daviar or whoever is. The uses abound.

I don't know how the fuck Essence Drain's ability to boost your stats actually works. I think Frank had a rant about it somewhere. It may or may not be useful but it should be obvious what you do with it.

Things to buy with XP/money:
More skills, dear god. Starting with Summoning. The reason this sheet is so skills-lite is that buying 1-2 points in a skill and a specialization is cheaper with Karma than with BP, so you probably want to spend your first 8 karma on buying 1 rank in Summoning and Perception at the very least and probably some more skills too at some point.
Astral Perception adept power (and then Assensing)
Force 6 sustaining foci, and stat-boosting spells/Deflection/Combat Sense
More spells

Actually this character isn't bad. The only really terrible thing is that Severe Allergy to Sunlight and I don't think you can do jack or shit about it.
Last edited by UmaroVI on Sun May 08, 2011 6:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Stahlseele »

why?
there's a SPELL for that!
Alleviate Allergy, needs one force per "level" of Allergy.
Also makes you sparkle.
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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 UmaroVI »

I'd forgotten about that. You probably do want to squeeze that spell in, but you can still potentially get screwed hard. Sunlight does a box per minute, so if you're maintaining alleviate allergy and someone KOs you, then you catch on fire and die.

That said, having the option of traveling around in the daytime would be good.
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Post by Stahlseele »

solution:
sustaining focus or sustaining it through a spirit.
alternatively, you can argue that improved invisibility leads all light around you . . but then you get to be blind too . .
Wonder how shadow sphere or however that spell is called would work in this regard?
of course, these are pretty unpractical and not very hard to notice . . but they are options . .
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Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

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 Fuchs »

How do you get sustained spells through wards?
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Post by kzt »

Fuchs wrote:How do you get sustained spells through wards?
Isn't there an initiation ability to do that? Or am I thinking of a spirit power?
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Post by Murtak »

So you are a mage with a magic of 1, letting you cast up to a maximum of force 2? Am I missing something here?
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Post by UmaroVI »

Turn spell off, walk through ward, turn spell on.

Murtak: In SR4A (this is a change from SR4) you check your total Magic for that purpose and for the purpose of maximum rank in Adept powers.
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Post by Fuchs »

UmaroVI wrote:Turn spell off, walk through ward, turn spell on.

Murtak: In SR4A (this is a change from SR4) you check your total Magic for that purpose and for the purpose of maximum rank in Adept powers.
That means you have to spot the wards first. And I am not sure whether you have to recast a spell after you turn your focus off or not. You also need a rather powerful (and expensive) focus, both to resist disruption and to resist Background count.
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Post by UmaroVI »

I agree that, for a variety of reasons, planning on running around in the daylight with Alleviate Allergy is not a good idea. I do think knowing the spell is a good idea, though, because that way you an at least do something like cast it on yourself and run for it during the day or whatever.

Basically, the whole "light on fire in the daytime" thing is a huge drawback, you can do various things to make it less bad but you can't really negate it entirely.
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