Why is Shadowrun's magic so praised?

[K]

Its funny to me that people blame DnD magic for breaking the DnD economy and not the DnD economy for being so breakable.

I mean, there was a Paizo adventure path adventure with a pretty uninteresting trap room that shot iron balls at PCs as they crossed a bridge over a pit of the ammo for said trap. This was uninteresting until someone noticed that there was several million GP in iron in ball form resting in said trap, thereby breaking the DnD economy.

The Dungeons and Logistics mini-game can be easily solved by just making magic items not something you can buy, and make it a whole campaign to try to sell a million GP in iron balls rather than a video game where there is automatically a buyer for every rat pelt and broken twig you find in every town and hamlet.

Shadowrun's brilliance is that it was built to be small. There is a cred value for a weapon focus and a shop where you can buy one, and that's actually not that important because the things you can buy with money are strictly limited. DnD magic items are incredibly powerful at even the low levels, where the best Shadowrun items are small additions to a character's power.

Honestly, this is a 3e and up problem. DnD 2e just had people getting titanic hordes of money and it didn't matter. They spent them on inns, armies, castles, and plot hooks because the goal of DnD was the adventure and the items, not the GPs.

Shadowrun's smallness is its whole design. It doesn't deal with teleport because that would require imagination to figure out the setting implications. For example, Star Trek has teleport and people always feel a little cheated when the transporters don't work because there is "interference" or the target it deep in a cave or something, because you actually limit the stories you can tell when there aren't limits on big effects.

[SeekritLurker]

There are certainly things about Shadowrun Magic that I think are mistakes. The fact that you can't use a magic sword without Chosen One DNA means that a lot of things that could be checks on the power of big demon summoning actually isn't. But it's a system you can describe the edges and boundaries of and as such it's one where you can have meaningful discussions about its effects on the world.

I had a question about this - and apologies if the fix I'm thinking of has already been proposed as "Yes, this is a thing you should do."

Would it work to allow, say, a street sam to use their essence to be bonded to a weapon focus? Something that would let them a) chop spirits and shit with magic katanas and b) give a reasonable excuse for why not every street sam has their essence chopped down to 1/60th or less of its initial value?

(Also, I should probably note that I haven't looked at SR seriously since second ed.)

[Username17]

Shadowrun's rules of enchanting aren't very useful or good. This keeps the effects of enchanting down severely. Magic foci only do anything when in physical contact with a magically active person that has soul bonded to that object in particular. We don't have to ask why enchanted brooms and enchanted pots don't revolutionize housewares, we don't have to ask why magic shoes and magic shirts don't revolutionize the fashion industry. Because magic items are artisanal, non-transferable, and shut off when they break contact with their owners we don't have to ask any questions about what magic items do at all. They are functionally merely a part of the magical person that owns them; a physical extension of their body and not actually different from a spell they know or an adept power they possess.

This is substantially worse for game balance than if Street Samurai were simply able to pick up and use magic swords. People who already have the ability to cast Mana Bolt don't fucking need a magic sword. But people who normally shoot hot lead at enemies and are inconvenienced by opponents who have immunity to non-magical weapons would like to get on that train, thank you very much.

Changing magical objects so that they could be used by mundane people changes the world tremendously. Shadowrun enchanting is so low footprint that literally every part of the world building can be written as if enchanting doesn't even exist. If that was no longer true you'd have to discuss whether hospitals dunked people into cauldrons or the 1%ers all had glowing angel wings or whatever. The world would look extremely different.

I think that would be a positive move overall. Magic being strictly confined to the playground of the ubermenschen is not over all a good thing for the game. But this would not be a small change. It would be a very large change that would be easy to fuck up and would require a lot of brainstorming, mathhammering, and editorial control.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

It's also worth pointing out that why Shadowrun's magic system is very systemic and well-integrated into the setting, there are a couple of things it does fall down at.

The first, and this is more evident from the earlier editions of the game, is that the designers fell into the D&D3 content-generation trap fairly early, but the way the system was initially set up made actual expansion of the basic system difficult and largely idiosyncratic. What I mean by this is that it was very easy to add new spells, new foci, new totems, new adept powers, and new types of spirits, but it was very difficult initially to expand the playspace to accommodate the kinds of things that the designers wanted to do.

Druids, for example, had no less than 5 different flavors by the end of 2nd edition (British mages, Celtic shamans, Elf path magicians, European shamans, and Cornish bards); there was a proliferation of totems with only very vague guidelines of where the limits were for advantages and drawbacks. When it came time to introduce new traditions, like Voudoun, the designers tried to adapt either Shamanism or Hermeticism as the default paradigm. It wasn't until Magic in the Shadows was released that SR was able to overcome its basic Sorcerer/Wizard divide by re-examining and re-working the idea of what a "Tradition" was and how it worked and operated. It gets even wiggier with adepts - nobody knows what the fuck an "astral adept" was supposed to be, and a lot of Totemic adepts were just unplayable because nobody wrote a totem thinking "What if I have a totemic adept one day?"

It's kind of ironic, but the whole spell-generation aspect of Shadowrun was the least painful; spell bloat is less of an issue overall because there's been a rigid formulaic approach to spell generation, and even if the individual spells change, spell bloat is still like 2-3 lines of code for most of them. You don't care that someone knows Detect Cockroach, but as far as you do care, it is exists and you can probably reverse-engineer what it does and what the cost is just from the name.

Much more difficult was "What spirits can you summon?" which was fixed at character generation and basically never changed, no matter what new options became available for other characters, and by the same token which totem you picked, which was likewise immutable and had only vague guidelines as to how many dice you were adding and on what, but it was still usually providing a static number of dice. When Dice pools grow vast, that's like half a hit, at best. The more dice you have in the pool, the less you give a fuck about what totem you have. That can be an issue, and it's one they probably should have worked out in 4th or 5th edition.

To add to what Frank said about foci, fetishes, and other materials, it was really cool that there was a mini-game where you could save nuyen by designing and building your own focus and magical gear from scratch - like with building your own cyberdeck or coding your own program or customizing your own vehicle/weapon/etc., there's a portion of the game audience that loves getting into that "build shit" design space. But at the same time, you're at a table and making week-long rolls checking if your herbs have dried enough yet, and a lot of other people at the table aren't playing because you and the gamemaster are stuck in your mini-game. (The same issue also applies to astral quests, which are like hacking for magicians.)

But the really big one for Enchanting is that the process of transforming raw materials into refined materials/radicals/finished products/orichalcum meant that you had literally embedded a money-making job in the middle of the game. Shadowrun doesn't have a lot of grindy elements to it - you don't farm gangbangers for XP or anything like that - but if the average Shadowrun brings in less nuyen then sitting at home watching your forge, there's a serious fucking problem, because a non-zero subset of your audience will wonder why they're getting shot at when they can just sit home and make money relatively safely.

Enchanting, basically, cannot or should not be a road out of poverty, or else there would be no Street Mages and Street Shamans. It's an issue that SR never really addressed, beyond jiggling the numbers a bit (fair admission: I jiggled the numbers in Street Magic). You just have to take it as given that most of these people either didn't develop that level of skill or didn't use it.

[Emerald]

I'm gonna stop you right there. The Spellcasting Services rules are pretty much totally incompatible with characters actually using their spell slots for mercenary purposes because the amounts of money are relatively speaking titanic. Our hypothetical wizard may get 660 gold for using a 6th level spell slot, but they also get 550 gold for using a 5th level spell slot. If they were able to sell all their non-cantrip slots for the day at supposedly market prices, they'd take in 10,670 gp each day in service fees.

No D&D economy can have someone working a normal job that pays 27 pounds of gold per hour. That's just not a thing the D&D economy can support. Also too, there's be no reason to adventure, because 3e treasure piles are much smaller than that.

-Username17

Even if you were to use the service casting, that really only is intended to apply to the PCs. Something like a 'court mage' is supposed to be a thing, and if you're on retainer, it seems that demanding you cast the spell regularly is a thing that can happen.

I wasn't saying that you should assume all NPC casters are being paid at the one-off spellcasting rates, rather that "Aha, I can cast wall of stone for someone and get 796 gp!" isn't as bad as it's often held to be because you can already just go "Aha, I can cast remove curse/teleport/guards and wards/etc. for someone and get 440/550/660/etc. gp!" as an expected thing, and if your DM rules that the PC wizard is for some reason the only person in the world who can't sell his spellcasting services like that, he's probably going to rule that the PC wizard can't sell his conjured iron either. And of course if there are complications like e.g. it being nontrivial to find enough people who want (and can pay for) all of your slots for the day, well, it's also nontrivial to find someone who wants and can pay for several tons of raw iron.

Basically, the wall-of-X-to-gold thing is only a total game-breaker if you assume perfect conversion of any raw materials to gp, video game merchant style, and ignore any legwork needed to sell it off, community gp limits, the rudimentary A&EG supply and demand rules, and other factors that any actual DM is going to apply before you even get into houserule territory.

How iconic is a 'wizard tower'? But once you have Magnificent Mansions, shouldn't every wizard retreat to their more secure extra-dimensional space?

If it was (or could be made) permanent and non-dispellable, definitely, but no extradimensional space is either until you get access to genesis, so until then wizard towers are plenty reasonable, if only as well-defended anchor points to which to attack a bunch of extradimensional spaces inside.

That isn't to say that you couldn't have a lot of the spells you do; they just don't need to work the specific way they do. Wall of Stone and Wall of Iron could be 'wall of Earth' and have a duration where the hardness/hit points apply, after which it returns to normal earth.
[...]
The point of a spell like wall of iron is supposed to be to help you in a dungeon. You block off half the enemies so you can deal with them a bit at a time. For that purpose, having a duration is fine (even though it could be dispelled) or having it be made of 'extra strong stone' would be fine. If you want the spell to be about building castles of iron, you would present it differently. In that case, there's no reason not to have a massively long casting-time.

Yeah, one common houserule I use is that Conjuration (Creation) effects cannot be Instantaneous. Blasting spells move to Evocation and other effects get an appropriate (and usually fairly short) duration; even just swapping Instantaneous to Permanent means it's not trivial to sell off/make towers from/etc. lots of conjured materials.

Because magic items are artisanal, non-transferable, and shut off when they break contact with their owners we don't have to ask any questions about what magic items do at all. They are functionally merely a part of the magical person that owns them; a physical extension of their body and not actually different from a spell they know or an adept power they possess.
[...]
Changing magical objects so that they could be used by mundane people changes the world tremendously. Shadowrun enchanting is so low footprint that literally every part of the world building can be written as if enchanting doesn't even exist. If that was no longer true you'd have to discuss whether hospitals dunked people into cauldrons or the 1%ers all had glowing angel wings or whatever. The world would look extremely different.

But the really big one for Enchanting is that the process of transforming raw materials into refined materials/radicals/finished products/orichalcum meant that you had literally embedded a money-making job in the middle of the game. Shadowrun doesn't have a lot of grindy elements to it - you don't farm gangbangers for XP or anything like that - but if the average Shadowrun brings in less nuyen then sitting at home watching your forge, there's a serious fucking problem, because a non-zero subset of your audience will wonder why they're getting shot at when they can just sit home and make money relatively safely.

Given that I don't know much about Shadowrun either beyond a few one-shots and some wiki-diving, could there be a reasonable middle ground where you could, I dunno, craft a magic item "in resonance with a specific astral signature" or something, such that mundanes can use magic items but those items are still personal-scale and non-transferable, and such that the market for that sort of thing is basically limited to "your personal shadowrunner pals and megacorp bigwigs who don't buy on the open market" so it's usable for equipping other PCs but not profitable as a day job?

That still potentially gives you 1%ers decked out in magical gear--but then, they could already have been decked out in cyberware instead if they didn't care about aesthetics and wanted to drop tons of money on personal augmentations instead of luxury goods and such--without opening magic up to the masses; magic shirts might show up New York Fashion Week, but they're not going to trickle down to Future WalMart when each one has to be custom-made for a certain individual, it can't be sold or lent to anyone else, and it costs as much as a small car.

[deaddmwalking]

Basically, the wall-of-X-to-gold thing is only a total game-breaker if you assume perfect conversion of any raw materials to gp, video game merchant style, and ignore any legwork needed to sell it off, community gp limits, the rudimentary A&EG supply and demand rules, and other factors that any actual DM is going to apply before you even get into houserule territory.

My point is that the gold you can 'earn' from wall of iron isn't a problem. Having a million gold pieces SHOULDN'T be a problem (and in prior editions it was not). Actually having a magical source of ANY MATERIAL that is supposed to be valuable is a problem not because of the value but because of the implications for the world.

Why hire 1000 miners when you can instead hire 10 intelligent novices to produce the iron in less time and for less cost than starting a mining operation? Why hire 1000 miners when you can summon planar ally an Earth Elemental to gather up gems from deep within the earth? Why fight a war for natural resources when you can move your society to the deep desert and magically generate everything you need?

The gold value that a wizard can earn is insignificant compared to the post-scarcity society that they could just as easily create. That's the problem.

[Ancient History]

Given that I don't know much about Shadowrun either beyond a few one-shots and some wiki-diving, could there be a reasonable middle ground where you could, I dunno, craft a magic item "in resonance with a specific astral signature" or something, such that mundanes can use magic items but those items are still personal-scale and non-transferable, and such that the market for that sort of thing is basically limited to "your personal shadowrunner pals and megacorp bigwigs who don't buy on the open market" so it's usable for equipping other PCs but not profitable as a day job?

That still potentially gives you 1%ers decked out in magical gear--but then, they could already have been decked out in cyberware instead if they didn't care about aesthetics and wanted to drop tons of money on personal augmentations instead of luxury goods and such--without opening magic up to the masses; magic shirts might show up New York Fashion Week, but they're not going to trickle down to Future WalMart when each one has to be custom-made for a certain individual, it can't be sold or lent to anyone else, and it costs as much as a small car.

There is a fine line to walk here. One of the implicit givens in Shadowrun is that each subsystem is complete in itself - that is, every Matrix system has both the cause and the solution to every Matrix-related problem; every problem Magic creates, magic also has specific remedy for - within reason. A street samurai can shoot a computer or shoot a spirit, but that is only ever going to be a rough-and-ready "all I've got is a hammer" approach. It's not going to get you the information out of the computer, and you can piss away a lot of bullets without hurting a spirit. Because magic has traditionally only worked for magicians, this means that some of the "obvious" solutions - like handing the spirit-killing sword to the combat expert - don't work.

Shadowrun had strayed back and forth between how much they want to play with that basic concept. There have been, in various editions, different ways that non-magician characters can interact with magic without actually being magicians - a mundane character in Shadowrun 1st edition, for example, could learn Conjuring, they just couldn't summon any spirits with it - their uses for it were thus highly limited (basically, an arcane use for feeding karma to free spirits and an exceedingly weird case where they could use it in astral combat, which in 999 out of 1000 should never come up). Some of the things that have been come up with involve things like "quickening" (i.e. making semi-permanent) certain spells on mundane characters, or giving them magical gewgaws that held "anchored" spells (i.e. set to go off under certain conditions), or made them easier to possess by Voudoun spirits.

But the hard-and-fast rule of "don't hand the spirit-killing sword to the fighter guy" has stayed. The "why" is basically so Shadowrun doesn't end up like Dungeons & Dragons, where players deck themselves out with the more expensive, high-powered magic bling they can buy or pry off the rapidly-cooling corpse of their dead foes. It also lacks a lot of the variety of magic armaments that D&D has, probably because the low-level of demand (only magicians can use weapon foci, they're situational in use) and high cost (they're expensive, they cost Karma to bond).

Weapon foci were also created before Earthdawn, which tried to have a best-of-both-worlds approach in having very powerful magic weapons which almost any character could use, but access to their abilities was expensive, but the expense was tiered so the item could "level up" as you did. Unfortunately, pretty much none of these magic items were quite balanaced, but that's another kettle of fish.

So if you allow mundane characters access to magic weapons, you greatly increase the demand for them - that's not necessarily a bad thing - but you also have to create some justification that keeps simply every character from having them. Cost can be an effective limiter, be it the bonding cost in karma, the material cost in nuyen, or some combination of the two.

However, when that happens, you get all the top swordsmen and swordswomen in the world wielding the most powerful magic swords. Which hey, if that's how you want your game to run, so be it.

It's not an unfuckable problem, but like a lot of things with such an old game, there is a lot of resistance to changing long-held preconceptions like "mundanes can't bond magic swords."

[Nath]

A core idea the people who designed Shadowrun got right was to set rules that protect the setting itself from magical effects. Like, if you want to have the wealthy use private jets and limousines, limit or outright ban teleportation (which also leave some chances for paid criminals to reach valuable scientists and executives). Though I don't think they got everything right (I believe for one that the Mindprobe spell is wholly incompatible with the CIA existence and the very notion of state secrets, and also that spirits at Force 10+ make jet fighters entirely irrelevant).

While Shadowrun is based on our world, the idea of an Awakening shifts the issue away from question such as "Why did the Punic Wars turned out the same with magic on both side?" which would make the setting diverge from what the audience can expect. They let magic alter the political and legal landscape of Oregon, but it still makes sense to drive a car on the Interstate 5 between Seattle and Portland rather than fly on a magic carpet.

People who create medieval fantasy setting very often consider that just because it's another world that don't have Rome and China and San Francisco it can have magic and looks like pretty much how they want. If you take a close look, you may realize that castles, hereditary knights and medieval armies, or even blacksmithes and farmers, may have no reason to exist once magic is factored in.

To me, the one really brilliant thing in G.R Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice/Game of Thrones was how he set his story when magic is coming back: there are castles and cavalry and everything, because magic was not available before, but also dragon skeleton and a giant wall of ice that prevent character from denying magic could exist. Shadowrun pulled a similar trick through a modern Awakening and a number of rules that prevent magic from making the setting too different from modern Earth.

[Username17]

The vast majority of Shadowrun authors did not understand what the Movement power did in a commercial setting. Like, they could accept what Movement did when used on a shadowrunner team's van to escape pursuit, but the same logic being applied to a delivery van or an ambulance just broke their fucking minds. Reducing travel times by 80% is kind of a big deal, and only a couple of Shadowrun authors were prepared to respond with anything but anguished guttural noises when it came up.

Considering how common that power is in the Critters books, every ship and plane of any particular commercial value should have some kind of century ferret in a hamster wheel or something. And that just wasn't part of the setting as written.

-Username17

[phlapjackage]

The vast majority of Shadowrun authors did not understand what the Movement power did in a commercial setting

Wasn't there some attempt to fix this kind of issue in (4e?), where the spirit could only use the Movement power on something depending on force of the spirit and the size of the something affected. So Movement on a shadowrunner was no problem no matter what, but Movement on a plane needed a really high force spirit.

[Username17]

The vast majority of Shadowrun authors did not understand what the Movement power did in a commercial setting

Wasn't there some attempt to fix this kind of issue in (4e?), where the spirit could only use the Movement power on something depending on force of the spirit and the size of the something affected. So Movement on a shadowrunner was no problem no matter what, but Movement on a plane needed a really high force spirit.

In 3rd edition there was an attempt to nerf Movement's effects on vehicles by making the acceleration weirdly gradual with a bunch of die rolls involved. There were target numbers involving vehicle size, which roughly meant that it would take between two and thirty six combat rounds to get your full speed multiplier up. This was very strange because while it was a giant pain in the ass, it didn't actually do anything on major long distance freight. Shadowrun's combat rounds are three seconds long, and if it takes a lot of those to crank up to full speed you are still talking about a few minutes on either end of a journey where you speed up at the beginning and slow down at the end. For any journey of an hour or more, the fiddling was largely meaningless.

But really, the example is just to highlight an underlying truth: while Shadowrun's magic system was carefully designed to have relatively minimal effects on the setting, there wasn't actually a stable of firefighters on hand to solve issues when magic ended up having world warping interactions that hadn't been foreseen. When stuff like Movement Freight or Bloodzilla happened, the Shadowrun development teams mostly just threw temper tantrums or engaged in angry denialism.

We talk blithely about how game balance between Mages and Street Samurai would be better balanced if the Street Samurai could use magic katanas and use them to fight astral monsters. But that would require a large amount of world building, because that's something that would have big effects on the world at large. And the history of incorporating that sort of thing hasn't been great.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

For any journey of an hour or more, the fiddling was largely meaningless.
-Username17

And of course none of that is touching on the impact Movement could have on the economics of vehicle engineering. How big of a plane you need is very much a question of how much operating range you need and how few engines you can get away with. I'm no aviation expert but I'd imagine things would get rather interesting with much smaller numbers than Movement provides.

[phlapjackage]

In 3rd edition there was an attempt to nerf Movement's effects on vehicles by making the acceleration weirdly gradual with a bunch of die rolls involved. There were target numbers involving vehicle size, which roughly meant that it would take between two and thirty six combat rounds to get your full speed multiplier up. This was very strange because while it was a giant pain in the ass, it didn't actually do anything on major long distance freight. Shadowrun's combat rounds are three seconds long, and if it takes a lot of those to crank up to full speed you are still talking about a few minutes on either end of a journey where you speed up at the beginning and slow down at the end. For any journey of an hour or more, the fiddling was largely meaningless.

Yeah that sounds fiddly and meaningless, like you said. I broke out my 20th anniversery 4th book, and it kinda tries to fix it here:

MoveMent
...
This power has its limits. If the Body of the target exceeds the critter’s Magic, reduce the Movement multiplier by half. If the Body of the target exceeds Magic x 2 then Movement has no effect

Most vehicles have high Bodies, so (with me being lazy and not crunching numbers) this seems like it basically stops Movement from becoming a new transportation paradigm, unless this causes more vehicles with lower bodies as Whipstich says. A Cessna has a Body of 18, so it would need a F9 spirit to affect it, although it maybe ends up multiplying the speed by enough that halving the effect doesn't matter so much...

[Username17]

The default Essence is 6, and a lot of Critters have Movement, so getting Movement with a Force between 5 and 8 is fairly trivial. A GMC Bulldog truck has a Body of 16, so even with the Body restriction from SR4A you can still quadruple its speed by putting a unicorn in it.

That kind of designer temper tantrum simply creates more optimization questions. If the difference between a speed boat and a yacht is that one can be movemented by a fucking ferret in a hamster wheel and the other cannot, then the logic of shipping changes unrecognizably. It's not just that every fucking trucker will have their own pokemon companion, it's that all vehicles would be made to specifications based on the limits of various kinds of pokemon to accelerate.

Ships today have classes named after the limitations they operate under. Panamax vessels meet the length and width requirements to get through the Panama Canal Zone. Chinamax vessels have draft limits such that they are able to navigate the South China Sea and so on. If movement was limited based on the size of vehicles, then those limits would be the classes of vehicles. How large of a spirit or how powerful of an awakened chicken you needed would simply be the types of vehicles that were available. People simply would not make boats that were one meter too larger for a sonic hedgehog to effectively accelerate, for the same reason they don't make boats that are one meter too long to pass the Panama Canal Zone today.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

Sounds like zeppelins might make a comeback.

[Stahlseele]

Cargolifter sends their regards.

[phlapjackage]

Sounds like zeppelins might make a comeback.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech ... d-airship/

[Stahlseele]

I HOPE they make it and do not go the way of CargoLifter . .

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

In addition to what Kaelik and Frank said, and what I said in another thread, the Drain system and how the mechanicas of spellcasting works with the rest of the system is very elegant. Not quite Euler's Identities elegant, but pretty close.

Would you be able to link me to that one? It might make for good reading.

The pursuit of verisimilitude is not the only means to achieve internal consistency or to support a world. If you view an RPG as a "plausible real life outcome simulator" then yes, you need to work towards verisimilitude, but who actually plays games that are meant to emulate plausible real life outcomes?

Perhaps I was using the word incorrectly, since I think I conflated the two together. Obviously, the actual definition is basically "you get tricked into think IT'S REAL", but I can't imagine doing that without... well, internal consistency? Yeah, you totally want your game to emulate the genre you're aiming for, but unless your genre is some weird metaphysical shit where the rules of the world change whenever, then surely you always want up to be up and down to be down, right? If people can anime jump around once they get to level 5 or something, then I wouldn't expect for some random civilian NPC to backflip over buildings and stuff, because that's not how I was led to believe that particular setting works. I like my imaginary worlds to sort of feel like other places instead of a collection of notes that some guy wrote down.