This page is for brainstorming. As such, *please* don't edit it, just add signed comments to the end. I want a list of everything old-style Shadowrun mages could do, with a rough idea of the fatigue cost involved for a cookie-cutter mage (WIL 6, CHA 6, Sorcery 6, Conjuring 6). --bts * We need a drain mechanic. * Cause serious stun damage to an average opponent at no cost to himself. * Cause medium stun damage to a mage opponent at no cost to himself. * Block 50% of the effect of another mage, or all of the effect of a much weaker mage. * Combat spells: Mana/Physical, Area/Targetted, Stun/Kill, Touch/LoS. Some have elemental side effects (a limitation?). Don't think that misses any. Mana should be in TP, Physical in TK. Physical/Stun should look to the gravitic bruiser rules, the rest just need new skills. * Detection spells: Ultrasense / Divination, Mana/Physical: lots of this goes under ESP, a bit under TP. * Illusion spells: Mana/Physical, "Willing only" limitation. Mana = TP again, Physical goes under photokinesis. * Health spells: Treat/Heal. yech. should be easy to mechanic, just needs a mechanic. * Manipulation spells: Heh. Heh heh heh. --bts * Hermetic Conjury: summon a small handful of spirits equivalent to an average person at only financial cost, or equivalent to a top-notch runner at moderate cost. --bts * Shamanic Conjury: summon a single spirit equivalent to an average person (force 2) at no cost, or to a top-notch runner (force 6) at moderate cost. Summon a very powerful spirit (force 10) at risk of life and limb. * Watcher Conjury: summon a force 2 spirit for a couple of hours for free. Summon a force 1 spirit for a day for L drain. * Shamanic and Hermetic conjury both only get the spirits for a few services: 1 service from a force 6+ spirit, 2 from force 5, 3 from force 4, 5 from force 2. * For shamaic conjury, these services must be used before sunchange. For hermetic conjury, they can be used at any time. * Some new skills are needed. Many of them should cost strain or fatigue. I'm inclined to either have a drain-resistance test in there somewhere, or perhaps allow Mystic Tuffness help with drain resistance somehow. "+1 DRT" effects should be "+1 strain" and "+1 DRL" effects should be "+1 fatigue," perhaps? Alternately, DRT stays as the penalty to the drain-resistance roll, and if you fail that roll you take 1d fatigue damage per drain level, same as what getting manabolted would do to you. Mystic Tuffness protects from that, of course, so L damage will just be shrugged off much of the time. * Damage from spells: L damage should be about 1d. M should be about 2d, S 4d, D 6d. Anybody think this is wrong? --bts * Many skills should exist under multiple powers: for example, Mind Shield should be learnable as an Antipsi ability as well as a Telepathy ability. --bts * Antipsi should be 5 pts/lvl. --bts * Mana combat spellss are clearly in the Telepathy group. Damaging manipulations (fireballs, telekinetic punches) are mostly in the Psychokinetic group. Physical combat spells, which represent discharging mana into the physical body, should be in... Health? That's where other body-manipulation stuff should be. In Shadowrun these were at gun speeds... not sure I want them anywhere near that fast for most mages. * As per the BostonMagicPenalties, a mage trying to use a Manabolt as a weapon in a gunfight would be at -15 for "unfocused", plus 3 for a close target, +4 for presence of target, +1 for a focus, gesturing and speaking quickly for +2, for a net of -5. Hm. Perhaps the default "unfocused" threshold should be -10. Alternately, perhaps the "causes strain" limitation should be used to *replace* 5 points or so of Unfocused. Ooh, I like that. --bts * Different types of mage are differentiated primarily in their rituals for sorcery and in the spirits they conjure --- the sorcery effects should be pretty similar. * A requirement for a power level will be expressed as Healing/12+. A requirement for a skill level will be expressed as Healing-12+. I'd say L 1d - Will roll margin, M 2d-will roll margin. S 3d-Will roll margin, D 4d - Will Roll margin for both taking drain and damage. Possibly adding skillroll success margin to the effect of the spell... Or possibly 2d,3d,4d,5d - (will margin+ mystic tuffness+mystic toughness) -jss * 1d,2d,4d,6d maps fairly closely onto the effects from SR. 6d is right about enough to kill most people, and makes even a Troll think seriously. Hm. The manabolt-nuking-a-Will-2-troll thing isn't going to work nearly as well, but I think I'm OK with that. I don't want to add will roll margins if I can avoid it... normal damage doesn't get that. Normal damage just gets DR/Tuffness. Though normal damage does get a dodge roll. You shouldn't be able to dodge a manabolt, but some form of Will-based "active" defense might be interesting. Maybe give only magicians a "Parry", but everybody gets a Will "Dodge" at Will-4, contesting the attacker's skill. For Extra Crunchiness, replace 'd' with the MoS from that roll. So if you have a low will, you fail by a bunch and get toasted. --bts D is enough to take someone down, but not kill them, and if you resist a bit, you won't fall down. I think 6d is a bit much against human/elf types. What about multiplying damage by racial st/10 to renormalize mana, so trolls are just as toast as windlings? -jss * Perhaps anyone can "dodge" with a WL-4 roll (representing their own control of their internal mana state) but mages, as part of the unusual background, can learn to actively defend..effectively they can learn Spell Resistance (WL/Easy, give a good reason...like being a mage). Could SR mages bestow this on friends in LoS? -zebediah * We could just transplant a munch of mechanics by reshuffling subpowers...make there be an AntiMagic power, a Health power, an Illusion Power (with some parts of telepathy and photokinesis), Detection (ESP), and a number of manipulation powers (maybe some health, TK, EK, etc.)---no, wait. A problem with that is that some spells off a power will have limitations, and some won't...not all Illusion spells are "willing target only", but some definitely are. * here's an important question: Do we want the "illusion, health, manipulation (various), detection, combat" distinctions to be largely arbitrary, spells are all distinct entities, or do we want theri category to matter? I.E. to be a "good combat mage" do you just take all the combat spells, or do you buy up the "combat power"/take some advantages? Do we want to keep the fact that various totems/loa/spirit aminals give bonuses or penalties to certain spells? -zebediah Other tricks, a bit more rare the fireballs and manadarts: Frob a stat by +-1 to 4, for a drain level per point for cybered, or one less for not. Frob reflexes by +- 1d to 3d for a drain level per d. Armor, 2-3 points for L. Shapechange for M. -jss * Bear in mind that throwing a 6d manabolt is going to cause 6d strain to the magician. That averages 20. I think perhaps it's time to frob the [Strain] mechanic to make 200 strain/turn worse than 20 strain/turn. --bts * Magicians should (as they could in SR) be able to "lend out" their parry to anyone within line of sight. It shouldn't be as easy to improve mana-parry as it is to improve a skill -- this is an innate ability, more in the way of a stat. So something like "normal people resist magical effects at WL vs. the magician's skill. Magicians have a +4 bonus which they can distribute among anyone in their line of sight; by default it rests entirely with them." --bts * 6d is mid-range assault rifle damage. Rifles in SR do 7S with a single bullet; D Manabolts do (Force)D, so 6D. And yes, "D" damage in SR isn't quite "-(Racial HP)" in GURPS, but I think they're pretty close. I'm trying to figure out what to do about Trolls and heavily cybered humans. The fact that physical Tuffness and DR doesn't protect is going to hit them pretty hard, bu t they *do* have twice as many HP as humans. A couple levels of Magic Susceptability is a possibility, but that's excessively cruel in Camrish. I think I'm just going to leave Trolls as is, and figure a manabolt is still way better than an M-16 against a Troll. --bts * It's a given that some spells (which are mechaniced as skills) will have limitations which won't apply to the rest of the power; there's already a mechanic to deal with this: just apply the percentage to the skill. I'm considering changing that to making 10% for advantages become +1 ease category for skills, so a -20% limitation would become a +2 ease category to the skill, moving a Hard skill to Easy. --bts * Shadowrun's division of Combat,Illusion,Detection,Health,Manipulation always seemed artificial to me. Illusion, Detection, and Health are mostly OK, though Detection should be split into Divination and Ultrasensory, but the Combat and Manipulation groupings are totally artificial. The Combat group is there just to make magicians battle-capable. I'd prefer to achieve a similar effect with better combat-capable spirits and a sprinkling of combat-relevant effects across the Anti-Magic, Telepath, and Psychokinesis powers. Totems which give benefits are a neat idea, and I like most of them. I know when I was playing a SR shaman, I always took totems which gave benefits to Manipulation, as that was the most-used college. So I'd prefer to get away from that, and say Racoon gives bonuses to being thiefly, Coyote to trickery, Dog to loyalty, that sort of thing. --bts * sort of like a Higher Purpose (theivery/trickery/loyalty)? --zebediah * So here's a new restriction, akin to "Unfocused": Fatiguing: Causes one point of Strain per level of Fatiguing per level of power per use. So if you have Telepathy/10 with five levels of Fatiguing, it causes 50 points of Strain every time you use your Telepathy power. It is *always* possible to use less power than you need, thus causing less Strain. "Costs Fatigue" is 5% per level. This is much weaker when you use little Power, much worse when you use high Power, and about the same at Power 10. --bts * And yes, in response to the obvious questions, at higher local levels of Taint, those Strain become Taint. * Straw Man for the new system: All magical powers *must* take "Natural Line of Sight Range" as a 0-point special effect, and may take the limitations "Eye Contact Only" or "Touch Only" on top of that. Also, all magical powers must take 75% worth of limitations, split as the player chooses between Unfocused and Draining (called "Fatiguing" above, but that name's taken). * Perhaps folks will find it useful to look at the [SR2Modifiers] or the [SR3Modifiers]. --bts * or Commonly Known Threads. Can we reconcile the two? Should we? --zebediah * also, didn't see these listed as mage capabilities: switch between being safe and viewing physical space and projecting an astral body and viewing astral space at the drop of a hat. Full mages can astrally project for a number of hours equal to their essence, but all 'drain' is converted to HP during this time. Astral things move about twice as fast as physical things just in terms of actions and reactions, and can travel at fantastic rates. * I wouldn't bother with Threads for this magic system; "Thread Weaving" as such doesn't really apply to it. TW is for a disciplined, studied, academic approach, and every magician using this system was born to it, and uses it intuitively. Yes, *every single one*. Yes, there's plot behind that. --bts * umm...what the hell does that mean for those of us just beginning to develop adept powers? Or is that something that'll hit us like a ton of brick when we get there, and not before? --zebediah * I like the "Higher Purpose" comparison and think that's probably a reasonable way to price that part of the Totem advantage. And yes, the Astral Projection/Perception mechanic may have to change. I'm trying to think of a way that "Astral Power" could still be a relevant number; if I can't, and nobody suggests one, I suppose it'll just become an advantage. Oh, duh, it's useful for the Warding mechanic, and possibly for Astral stats in some way. --bts * Just as a heads-up for what I'm planning on doing with all this: writing some new power and skill definitions, and then giving all of the Boston magic-mechanic users a chance to switch over to the "more Shadowrun-like" mechanic. The rest of the universe will be shifting to make that "the normal mechanic". So characters who stick with the "more G:Psi-like" mechanic will be a bit more freaky relative to the universe, and a bit more likely to get vivisected. --bts * What this means for the magicians developing disciplined magician powers is that if you want the systems merged... your character may have to be the first person in the universe to do the research. To my knowledge there are a few dozen born mages out there who have disciplines, only a few of which are spellcasting disciplines. So you either find one of those, or do the work yourself. For the future, I don't promise to find notes stuck in the middle --- I'll look, but I missed one of these last time. --bts Things I'd like to see considered: * Mana Shield (Diablo Style): Mage puts up a shield, and physical damage is done as mental damage instead, subtracting from a shield level power*willpower*)... -trhyne * Drain: The cost of the spell is a negative modifier for a will or health roll. The failed margin is taken as hitpoints lost (or d6 lost)... (just realized this is perhaps already solved but eh...) -trhyne * I'd like to get all the healing mechanics established, which does what, which is best for what, etc... There are a zillion... -trhyne * How does magic protect against psi and vice versa? Magic shielding is either mindblock, or TK(EK) forcefields. It exists in the current system, and you can get 1-5 DR out of it if you want. There is no psi, there is just magic using the psi mechanic. You can use defensive stuff from either vs. either in universe. -jss * Major issue: what does Power affect? In SR almost all spells were LoS, feel free to use binoculor to expend your range ludicrous amounts. For a number of girps psi powers, which we seem to be modeling from, range is the major thing that power affects. * also, mages resisted drain not with HT most of the time, but with WL. Er, I thought there was "psi" using the magic mechanic, and it acts just like normal raw magic. As for how this interacts with the only other type of supernatural power we've seen, non-raw magic (disciplined magic?), they generally seem to be orthogonal, but we don't know. OK, sorry. Make that that we don't know how Intuitive Magic interacts with Disciplined Magic. --zebediah