SR3: Our Magic is Different

[Stahlseele]

@Longes
And now remember that as per more or less official canon watching a summoned ghosts behaviour was was good enough testimony in a court of law to sentence somebody as the killer of the ghosts human version.

In NAN, not everywhere.

I admit to being fuzzy on the specifics, but the general point stood out as stupid enough to me for me to remember it.

[Rawbeard]

Thanks for repeating what I said. I wasn't vague because I didn't remember the details, but because they didn't matter to the point being made.

[Longes]

Thanks, after reading that I just feel empty inside. Now just to add insult to injury, please tell me players do not meaningfully interact with that storyline. I kinda need to know how much masturbation is going on in that "plot".

"Shadowrun: Lockdown" book has three adventures. The first is about finding and extracting from Boston a disappeared son of Ares executive. The twist is that soon after you get into Boston the lockdown begins, so even when you find the kid you are stuck in Boston and can't leave.

The second is about fighting a gang of Dissonance technomancers working for Pax (who is now working for Deus once again). You are hired by a mob family who wants to control the train station, while technomancers want the train station because it has a dissonance pool. You never meet Pax in person, but she bricks (no save) your commlinks once you are done and in general sends technomancer goons to fuck with your gear. Ahaha, good luck without money or documents or matrix connection in the quarantine zone.

The third is about doing crossover events with the shitty MMORPG and fighting Deus' Mini-Me AI and I don't feel like reading it.

[Rawbeard]

Ah, I remember when they crashed the matrix to get rid of those metaplots. good times. of course CGL had to reboot that Deus shit.

[Stahlseele]

*snickers*

[Smirnoffico]

But the bottom line is that Spirits behave in all measurable ways like the spirits of place that shamanistic worldviews predict, but the game refuses to say unequivocally that this is in fact what is actually happening.

-Username17

So, can I summon a spirit to be vitness in court? Can i summon it to be used as a source of information even if it's not legal in court?

I don't really care about god existing or not, being spirit or not, I'm still on the stage wherei'm figuring out if spirits are just mana constructs with some level of intelligence that mages conjure or all-out wod-style umbra thing with heirarchy, spirit memory, mentoring and stuff. Or it is both at the same time?

[Longes]

But the bottom line is that Spirits behave in all measurable ways like the spirits of place that shamanistic worldviews predict, but the game refuses to say unequivocally that this is in fact what is actually happening.

-Username17

So, can I summon a spirit to be vitness in court? Can i summon it to be used as a source of information even if it's not legal in court?

I don't really care about god existing or not, being spirit or not, I'm still on the stage wherei'm figuring out if spirits are just mana constructs with some level of intelligence that mages conjure or all-out wod-style umbra thing with heirarchy, spirit memory, mentoring and stuff. Or it is both at the same time?

It's undefined. Some magicians claim that spirits and metaplane are a construct of magician's mind and don't exist normally. Others claim that spirits are totally real and there is a hierarchy and spirits live in the metaplanes. Neither side has been proven right.

It's like Chronicles of Amber. Some amberites believe that their ability to travel shadows creates worlds. Others believe that there is an infinite number of worlds and they can travel to any they can imagine. All agree that it ultimately doesn't matter.

[momothefiddler]

Nobody in world has just done a battery of tests to see what a spirit can accurately know? The fact that you can summon a spirit to teach you a spell seems to pretty clearly cut out the "fragment of caster's consciousness" idea.

Can a spirit answer basic factual questions that the caster doesn't know the answer to? Can we have a caster summon a spirit and then use future drugs to wipe the whole experience from his memory and then see if he can summon the same spirit? If it's a separate persistent being that should be fine, if not there are likely to be observable differences.

I dunno. I get "the writers haven't decided and/or told anyone" but I'm hesitant to accept "it's completely indistinguishable in-world" unless you accept, for example, that every summoner's mind contains deeply buried knowledge of every spell, etc.

EDIT: All I'm really saying here is that it's a metaphysical distinction that really should be made within the company, even if it's not made public, because as far as I can tell it does make a difference.

[Stahlseele]

Now that Longes has actually broached the subject:
The Bouncer and Metaplanes.
If this is all inside ones own head, then why do different people that go on astral quests with each other experience more or less the same things?
Is this like the matrix? Is Astral space just a magical consensual hallucination?

[Longes]

Spirits can very obviously have skills that the caster doesn't possess, but what does that prove? Magic can do mind reading and shit, who's to say that the spirits are based purely on what caster knows and not created by the caster by carving out pieces of noosphere or something. Just because you wiped caster's memory doesn't mean that that memory didn't continue to exist somewhere else. We know Resonance does that kind of shit because there's an entire Resonance realm that has all information that has ever existed in digital format.

[momothefiddler]

Okay, so we do already know that spirits and realms aren't merely constructed on the spot from mana+the mage's consciousness. What's even the metaphysical question, then?

[Stahlseele]

No.
That is the problem.
We. Do. Not. Know. That.
The fluff and crunch and the entire setting are upsettingly inconsistent about this exact issue. And it is on purpose and by design as well.
On the one hand you have those points that tell you:"AHA! This is persistent!"
On the other hand . . you have at least as many, if not more, points that tell you:"OK, so this is completely randomly generated each time."

[Ancient History]

The folks that put together magic for Shadowrun way back in 1st edition wanted a level of ambiguity. Some things worked, others didn't. The suggestion was that a lot of magic was shaped by belief - which is why in later editions, they allowed stuff like Psionics and even individual traditions. This excuse let them play fast and loose with what was "real" or not - let them get away with the "everything is real for a certain degree of 'real'" kinda bullshit that was the same thing that Mage in oWoD played with. Now, SR1-3 didn't really abuse this too much...the rules were rather limited, and most of the fluff followed the rules, not vice versa. SR4...started to get off a bit. I remember there was one atrocious piece of shit in the Spells & Chrome anthology where a magician pulls a copy of the Necronomicon out of an alternate reality where it was a working grimoire...and if you ask me how that shit got passed the editor...well, keep in mind regular Shadowrun freelancers weren't even allowed to submit for that book.

[Smirnoffico]

It's like Chronicles of Amber. Some amberites believe that their ability to travel shadows creates worlds. Others believe that there is an infinite number of worlds and they can travel to any they can imagine. All agree that it ultimately doesn't matter.

But they agree that the worlds exists in a way.
I can accept that mages debate what exactly is metaplane, but here we have mages debating if metaplanes actually exist. After all, we don't have any reason not to assume that the whole metaplane is just a layer of collective subconsious and magic brings forth the shadows out of it. Then insects, for example, are really what aliens are - a figment of rather sick imagination.

As momothefiddler says, there are some tests that surely were made. Can I summon same spirit twice? Can the react in certain ways (after all, magic in shadowrun can't make decisions as Frank said)? And so on. But there's nothing on that. and the book even doesn't say 'we didn't bother with the question, go incent it yourself' as wod does

[OgreBattle]

Has there ever been an instance of two different people contacting what they believe to be their departed loved one's spirit, and then the spirits are different because those two people had different ideas of what that person was like?

[Username17]

Spells can't make decisions. Spirits totally can. Spirits can walk around the corner and then come back and tell you what's there. But then, even no-decisions sorcery can give you information with things like clairvoyance and shit.

As for the metaplanes, you do not show up in the same place as other people when you go to the "same" metaplane. Also you can't take pictures there and your perceptions are astral constructs influenced by your emotional state.

It is literally impossible to prove whether when I go to Agwe's ship that it's the same ship that you go to. Also you couldn't prove that my astral form is in fact going anywhere at all rather than folding into itself while I have magically induced hallucinations.

The game treats the metaplanes as real places with real things in them, but the writers have mostly been careful to cover their asses as regards the possibility that they are not.

-Username17

[Smirnoffico]

That really sucks... Don't know hat to add

[Stahlseele]

Sadly, that is the best way to save yourself from people simply using necromancy as an effective tool. need some knowledge?
Have the people who know killed. Nobody suspects that you are after knowledge if you kill all the people who know.
Then wait a few days, dig up their graves, do your necromancy by summoning them as ancestor spirits of man and demand they answer your questions.
This way they can simply go:"no, does not work like that in this universe, kindly show yourself out, you filthy powergamer, kthxbye"

But anyway:
We covered . .
Hermetics VS Shamans.
Spiritual Nonsense.
Toxics.
Anything else of interest?

[Nath]

Sadly, that is the best way to save yourself from people simply using necromancy as an effective tool. need some knowledge?
Have the people who know killed. Nobody suspects that you are after knowledge if you kill all the people who know.
Then wait a few days, dig up their graves, do your necromancy by summoning them as ancestor spirits of man and demand they answer your questions.

Which is frankly a lot of hassle for a game that has Mindprobe, Control Thoughts and Influence spells available.

[Longes]

Sadly, that is the best way to save yourself from people simply using necromancy as an effective tool. need some knowledge?
Have the people who know killed. Nobody suspects that you are after knowledge if you kill all the people who know.
Then wait a few days, dig up their graves, do your necromancy by summoning them as ancestor spirits of man and demand they answer your questions.
This way they can simply go:"no, does not work like that in this universe, kindly show yourself out, you filthy powergamer, kthxbye"

But anyway:
We covered . .
Hermetics VS Shamans.
Spiritual Nonsense.
Toxics.
Anything else of interest?

Um. What? Since when can you summon a specific spirit? You feed into Conjuring black box Force and type, and you get what you get.
Not to mention ancestor spirits not being a thing in SR4/5.

We still have adepts and mystic adepts.

[Stahlseele]

You can't, that is my point.
And since we are dicussing how SR3 magic is different, i fail to see how SR4/5 not having Ancestor Spirits is in any way relevant to the discussion?

Adepts and mystic adepts weren't changed all that much from SR3 to SR4 i think, aside from maybe getting the odd new power, different costs and being able to claim mentor spirits like everybody else they have remained pretty much the same, as far as i can tell. Granted, i never really liked to play magic characters in SR3 nor did i ever play SR4, so take thatr with more than just a grain of salt i guess.
The biggest change to them happened in the move from SR4 to SR5, where they get 6 points of adept powers and also 6 points in magic.
Giving them straight up the best of both worlds, aside from still not being able to freely astrally commute. Not sure if that has been changed or if there is a port of the limited astral projection meta magic you could get back in SR3, which allowed only short stints in the aether. Namely Magic Minutes, instead of a full mages magic hours.

[Korwin]

Somebody, might have been Frank way back, on dumpshock once made a sailor moon tradition.

Was it this?

Unrelated House Rules

• Sample Tradition: The Miroku Ninja Clan
  The Miroku Ninjas are very physically oriented magicians who interact with spirits which they regard as demons of strong desires called “Shikima.” Most Miroku are physical mages or aspected mages, with Path Aspects being very common. The Shikima come from their own metaplane, a terrible world filled with fighting, lust, and other powerful emotions.
  Most Miroku follow mentors that favor Health spells, and the most common Aspect allows Health and Manipulation spells. They are a materialization tradition.

  • Beast Manipulation
    Man Health
    Guardian Detection
    Plant Combat
    Guidance Illusion

Not quite Sailor Moon

[Stahlseele]

No, that wasn't it.
It was specifically Sailor Moon to ruffle some feathers i guess.

[Username17]

I did make a Sailor Moon one at one point. I think the La Blue Girl tradition should also ruffle feathers.

In any case, for what it's worth, here's what I think is the last of the major sections on SR3 Magic: Threat Rating Potenc(e)(y)!

Why can't you play a Toxic Mage? Because they are too powerful.
Why are Toxic Mages too powerful? Because you can't play them.

It is just sort of universally true in Shadowrun that individual enemies just aren't that scary. Your team can pretty much drop any one person or thing in a few shots, so if there's ever a confrontation of the team versus one dude, that is going to be a very short confrontation indeed. Rather than simply acknowledge this reality and create content by which your expected villains showed up in groups of six, Shadowrun decided to try to "get their D&D on" by empowering evil loner wizards to be threats the entire party would face together as a "boss."

This has gone through various iterations over the editions with various names and rules. Originally they just gave the evil wizards a pile of bonuses across the board and called it a "threat rating" because it was the rating they got for being a Magical Threat. This came to a head with the 2nd edition rules, where NPCs got Threat Ratings to make up for not having Karma Pools. And having two things on the same NPC that are broadly similar and both called a Threat Rating was fucking awful. So in SR3 they renamed that shit Potency.

Anyway, as one of the evil traditions you get a modest pile of dice added to everything you do. Which makes you "too powerful" to be a player character. But like the Irish Reincarnated Elves who do broadly the same thing with their Righ Path, it's all pretty much bullshit. As a player, you can't see what the NPC's Quickness or Body attribute is, and you don't know how many times they've initiated or whatever. You don't "buy" these stats or watch them being bought. A character who gets bonuses across the board isn't really distinguishable from the player side from an NPC who just has higher stats and skills. You don't feel the enemy having a Sorcery of 5 and a Potency of 3 or an overpowered Path bonus. They could just have a Sorcery of 8. They are a fucking NPC whose character sheet you don't get to see!

So at the end of the day, why can't you play an Insect Shaman or a Blood Magus? I dunno. You just can't. Those are "villains" and the PCs are supposed to be "Heroes." Except it's still fucking Shadowrun, and you're totally allowed to play a hired killer, a cannibal, or a rapist if that's what you really want to do. But for whatever reason, when it comes to specifically a small group of magical traditions, black and white D&D style morality is totally in the house, and there are some really weak and uninteresting mechanics to back it up. Sad!

And to be the final piss in your Cheerios, it doesn't even work. Fights with Threat Tradition mages don't even last a whole round. Player characters come loaded for awakened bear, and the opposition is still just basically a dude wearing an armored jacket. Sure, he has a Potency rating, but that don't keep you alive when people are firing automatic shotguns at your face.

-Username17

[Schleiermacher]

I don't play Shadowrun so I don't really know what I'm talking about, but it sounds as if this should be a really simple thing to house rule away and make those characters playable - since it's effectively just an extra stat that NPCs have because they're NPCs and PCs can just... not have. Is that wrong for some reason?