SR3: Our Magic is Different

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Fri Sep 02, 2016 10:09 am

Schleiermacher wrote: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?

In SR4 and 5 they no longer get that extra stat. They are still unplayable though because the book strongly tells GM to not allow you to play them, and because blood mages have extra broken mechanics.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Sep 02, 2016 10:29 am

*cough*bloodzilla*cough*

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Sat Sep 03, 2016 11:59 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:EDIT: Oh dark gods! The SR5 Homunculi/Corps Cadavre shit pisses me off so bad. Sorcery can't do that in Shadowrun. It just can't. It's against the rules of Shadowrun magic for sorcery to make decisions. It can all kinds of crazy crap, but making decisions is off fucking limits. Animate Object does not and cannot make an independent servitor. It remotely puppets things around, it does not give a target animus of its own.

-Username17

Oh, and making Watchers is now also Ritual Sorcery. And so is Invocation.

Rawbeard · Post by **Rawbeard** » Sun Sep 04, 2016 6:44 am

I really like to know who made that call and why. I have the nagging suspicion it's Earthdawn influence, intended or not.

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Sun Sep 04, 2016 8:56 am

Now what I'd like to see is a comparison between this and SR4 magic. Shadowrun magic is so fascinating and cool, but doesn't seem to be talked about that much outside of our circle.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sun Sep 04, 2016 11:53 am

The main difference between sr3 and sr4 magic is that sr3 had differences in how magic works and sr4 does not. Shaman. Hermetic. MysAd, it basically all works the same in sr4. Which, granted, makes the system easier to learn and understand, but also it reduces what was a meaningfull choice in your character in sr3 to a mere fluff change.

Rawbeard · Post by **Rawbeard** » Sun Sep 04, 2016 6:00 pm

To be honest the choice was not quite as meaningful. NPC mages were hermetics, PC mages were shamans.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sun Sep 04, 2016 6:14 pm

Not in my experience.
In our group it was usually about 50/50, depending on player and playstyle.

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Mon Sep 05, 2016 12:28 am

Stahlseele wrote: In MOST Gaming Universes it is best to powergame and do silly stupid funny shit and not give a rats ass about what the world thinks.
Because once you start to think about what the world should - and i hate to use this word in this context - realistically think . . it simply all starts breaking down.

That was where Frank shined. He actually figured out how to make things interact in reasonable (mostly) ways that at least were internally consistent.

Rejakor · Post by **Rejakor** » Mon Sep 05, 2016 6:25 pm

Hrm, I now have a sneaking suspicion that all the bits of SR mechanics I liked were designed by Frank. As I specifically liked that writeup, and how it gave actual rules for stuff that weren't stupid, but were still scary.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Mon Sep 05, 2016 7:20 pm

He is also the one who made cyber replacement limbs kinda sorta viable, i think. Not sure about that though.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Wed Sep 07, 2016 12:04 am

Here's a question. What was the reasoning behind making space a Fuck Magic zone, resulting in it being effectively inaccessible to most parties? Did someone want to definitively win an argument about magicians blowing up the sun or something?

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Wed Sep 07, 2016 6:14 am

Probably just the physics of the setting, though I could be wrong.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Sep 07, 2016 7:02 am

Two reasons. The first is the magic is life physics implied that astral space wouldn't work as well in a vast lifeless void. The second is that magic works out to line of sight and you can technically see billions of years into the past just by looking up. By putting a ceiling on Earth magic, the essentially removed all time travel arguments by making any object you can see that's significantly affected by light speed delays off limits.

-Username17

Rejakor · Post by **Rejakor** » Wed Sep 07, 2016 4:20 pm

That last part is boggling. Who actually makes the argument that magic can go into the past due to speed of light delays, assuming magic ignores time (and speed of light) and also ignoring physics while trying to use physics to break the game? Well, significant numbers of people who play ttrpgs I guess.

That it requires actually addressing their 'concerns' by inventing some bullshit reason in the actual setting design why it 'doesn't work' is.. hrm.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed Sep 07, 2016 5:16 pm

When you have interplanetary stock brokering, speed of light or faster than speed of light(read instantaneus, which is how spells work in SR), is a huge fucking difference.

And that is just a single snowflake on the iceberg.

Not to mention actually getting light / laser based communications to actually fucking work via stellar distances being fucking hard.
Whereas with magic, you otherwise just need a really good and big optical telescope and someone who know which of the lights is mars and tell them:"cast there!"

Imagine interplanetary combat spells being cast.
How do you find him who dealt it?
How do you persecute him then ?

Or let us go into the logistics of fucking space travel:
No limit in space for magic? Space-Travel hard, expensive, slow?
Summon the biggest invoked spirit you can that gives you movement power!
Get to Mars and back in 44 Hours!
Get to Luna in Minutes!
Need something up there guys?
I'll fucking magic you some air!

Fucking magic is the fucking most broken thing in the entire shadowrun universe, due to blatantly breaking the laws of physics!
They HAD to implement some laws and rules for it, because i am pretty dumb and look what i can come up with in regards to this bulldrek in a matter of seconds!

Think about what people like Frank would do with unlimited cosmical power!

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Wed Sep 07, 2016 5:28 pm

Also keep in mind, the genre of the setting is to look for exploits and loopholes to take advantage of, so it's not even out of character to figure out whether magic could be abused through FTL edge cases.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed Sep 07, 2016 5:37 pm

*snickers*
yeah, many of the idiocies you do in char gen can be explained away by in game considerations actually, it's pretty great in that regard ^^

Don't believe me?
A magician with a high enough success Astral Perception or Aura Reading or whatever that bullshit was called can tell you the exact ammount of essence left in your body/character. And see implants kinda sorta and wether or not you are sick.
Yes, you can get game-statistics through in game actions.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Wed Sep 07, 2016 5:43 pm

My question was more of "why is there both a horrible mana void where awakened are useless and space stations where PCs might be expected to go?"

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed Sep 07, 2016 5:57 pm

Longes wrote:My question was more of "why is there both a horrible mana void where awakened are useless and space stations where PCs might be expected to go?"

So that you have some things where you can tell the magic users:"fuck off, you are not taking our spotlight tonight"

and as a GM you can force the players to be more creative rather than just going:"i magic something magic so magical that will solve the magic problem using magic"

and in universe it is justified by pretty much exactly. the. same. fucking. reason.

Nath · Post by **Nath** » Wed Sep 07, 2016 8:07 pm

It lacks substantial canon backing, but the French France sourcebook, hinted the Horrors were not hidden in a metaplan, but just above in spaaace, waiting for the Gaiasphere barrier to break. France was written by local authors, but FASA originally planned to translate it and provided early in the development phase one page with plot elements that ought to be inserted. Then the plan were scrapped and Dunkelzahn died. To this day, we don't know what was written on that page, except that a number of items were Horrors-related.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed Sep 07, 2016 9:51 pm

Err, that would go against anything ever else written about horrors and shadowrun . .

sendaz · Post by **sendaz** » Wed Sep 07, 2016 10:31 pm

Well to be fair, the France Sourcebook did a lot of that with all sorts of things.

Plus in the early editions space was a bit of an oddball.
In one sentence they call it a massive mana warp, with it's astral space being like a raging storm of mojo that would shred you as you get buffeted about if you went projecting into it, but in the next breath they called it a void, which sort of was the opposite of this.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed Sep 07, 2016 10:50 pm

Yeah, and sadly, the french side of the SOX Collab was never available anywhere outside of france.
Much less translated into a more usefull language like english <.<

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Sep 08, 2016 7:14 am

In the original BBB, there obviously isn't described any mana void, because that concept was developed later. There also wasn't even a background count, because that hadn't been written either. What there was, was an arbirtary ceiling of how high your astral stuff could go. And I think that was put in there to keep from having to answer how fast magic traveled and to make the space stations actually defensible. The original writeup actually implied Cthulhu monsters lived in space - that pushing through the barrier could drive you mad. But obviously no one ever went anywhere with that.

That concept gradually got fleshed out, and the whole idea that you'd magically exsanguinate if you astrally projected while in space came from an adventure where the players take a suborbital flight and the author wanted to make sure everyone felt powerless. So they like disable your cyberware and you can't use magic and shit. Unfortunately, that tirade fit the magic physics pretty well so it stuck.

-Username17