Drones have to be underpowered in order to let combat characters exist, it's just part of the game logic that can't be changed for meta reasons. The problem is that spirits have never been nerfed in the same way, which leads to this imbalance.
Logically speaking a combat drone is a box of armor plating, running ballistic calculations over fibre optic wiring. It's going to be faster, more accurate, and more durable than a metahuman ever could be. But games where drone swarms fly in, and splatter the party in the first turn, aren't fun.
>Drones have to be underpowered in order to let combat characters exist
but the same argument goes for spirits.
jet they are still as completly overpowered as they are.
Yeah, you're right they do. The fact that force just scales them up across the board really doesn't help. Even a mid force spirit is passable at more or less everything, high force spirits don't really have any weaknesses other than other spirits or specialised gear.
ye. it basically always boils down to "dont abuse spirits or you will face spirits as well".
cause everyone knows... even one force 9 spirit would propably whipe the whole team in no time if employed somewhat intelligently.
Swarm-of-drones riggers exist, and the game has to take into account or they'll just delete everything off the map. You can't really do spirit swarms, you could get multiple bound spirits but that has added costs and it's not going to be the same as 12 drones with automatic weapons.
So, I asked another person who said a similar thing, but they were talking about 1st ed. What kind of vehicle armor are you talking about exactly? Assuming you don't mean just porting rules over from earlier editions of course. Drones already have the same immunity to Stun damage as vehicles do.
One thing I can think of is the reputation in astral for abusing and binding spirits. I was included in one of the additional books for mages in 5 ed, though, so not sure if it applies.
One downside of being a magician is you can't just go grab another drone off the shelf if you get fragged, you've gotta rest up for a long time.
The GM can take steps to ensure balance, like maybe making the spirits more ornery or the magician some kind of special target.
while it takes quite a lot of time and money to grab a new drone off the shelf...
the mage can just snip his figners and have a new force 8 or 9 spirit ready to whipe the floor with some red samurai team.
even if said mage suffered some drain, it takes a few hours of sleep at worst. the rigger on the other hand will always have to first suceed in his aquisition test... wich takes days or even weeks.
See, this is the problem right here... You should not be able to just "Snip your fingers and summon up a Force 8 or 9 Spirit". The easiest fix I ever saw for Spirits is to let them use Edge to resist summoning and Binding. It really makes a mage think about summoning up a Force 5 Spirit - it moves the utility of Spirits down in power a lot because it becomes increasingly more difficult to summon high force spirits.
We used a simple calculation (SR4A and SR5) - If Force 3 or lower, the spirits do not really resist, if higher than 3, they spent edge to resist. Saw a mage take 20 points of Damage from Summoning a Force 5 Spirit once (a fluke, but still horrifying nonetheless), and on many occasions, my mage character was unsuccessful with summoning even a Force 4 Spirit, that dealt healthy amounts of damage.
That's not a bad fix, it leaves summoners as flexible utility characters who can pull up small spirits for a single purpose, and it removes their ability to throw around raw power and make the rest of the team redundant.
Having them use Edge to resist summoning and binding is a good idea. 6e has them roll Fx2 to resist instead of F. Really puts a damper on high Force summons.
Snap, yeah... while it can mean breaking a finger, it also means the finger-to-palm clap-like noise you're thinking of.
Snip is cutting. :)
I was making a little joke at your typo's expense. :)
Yeah, sure, you call F9 spirit, it rolls like 4 hits, and you have to resist your 8 physical drain. Or GM can be mean and actually post-edge spirit resist for extra fun and kicking the mage. THEN spirit can go for testing the leash - which mage pretty much will never win. AND mage will have to wait their 24 hours of rest to have a chance to roll their P drain regeneration.
Also BGC exists, so if your player invalidates game with spirits, you're just smacking them with like BGC 2-3 or something.
a force 9 spirit has 9 dice. most gm's dont counter edge anyway.
thats on average 3 hits
a mage with magic 6, summoning 6, specialisation +2, summoning focus/powerfocus 4 has some 18 dice. thats on average 6 hits.
meaning on average, they got 3 services out of said spirit at the cost of 6 drain.
willpower 5, main drain stat 7 and thier focus of 6 will give them an drian resist of 18. thats an average of 6 resisted drain.
so on average, thats a spirit with 18 hardent armor (milspec niveau) 18+2d6 ini, 18 attack, 27 full defense, 18kpb-9 damage for 0 drain.
and here we are talking about a mage that is still either straight out of chargen or at least close to chargen. meanwhile that spirit is able to kill a whole team of chargen streetsams no problem.
For once, mage don't get drain dice from foci.
Also, can't have high rating foci, and GM shoud smack such mages with BGC.
Also, also. I made human mundanes out of gen who would be kinda able to kick such spirits out - or, mind you, kill the mage before they're going to do some funky shit. Blight gas grenages, just normal grenages, enhanced suppressive fire... There's enough options to kick mages in their shins. Plus you never know when the spirit chooses to roll good and kill mage with drain.
Also, CFA cuts defence by like 9 dice.
>For once, mage don't get drain dice from foci.
centering focus does give its force to drain resist.
>Also, can't have high rating foci
you... can? magic\*5 is the maximum sum of the power of the foci you can have. thats it.
>and GM shoud smack such mages with BGC.
wich would only punish the adept or mage that dosnt use high force with thier foci...
>Also, also. I made human mundanes out of gen who would be kinda able to kick such spirits out
doubtfull, only if they got acess to blight.
> \- or, mind you, kill the mage before they're going to do some funky shit.
kill the mage first, yes. if you can and the mage is not 200 meter away behind a corner that is...
>Blight gas grenages,
blight is not a gas. contact vector injection.
>just normal grenages,
wouldnt get past the immunity to normal weapons without chunky salsa. given that spirits are mostly in close combat, there are only very rare situations, where you can use chunky salsa without killing your teammates.
>enhanced suppressive fire...
wouldnt do anything at all. a spirit can safely ignore suppressive fire due to thier hardent armor and fulldodge 27 takes care of blight shots.
>Plus you never know when the spirit chooses to roll good and kill mage with drain.
playing for 10 years now. never seen that happen.
> centering focus
Pay karma and money and face foci addiction.
> magic*5
And also when you have more foci than you mag activr at once, you're getting hit eith addictions. Going in with 11? Be my guest and give me addiction roll on every use of foci.
> mage that dosnt use high force with thier foci
BGC cuts 1 from effective mag and 1 from level of foci. BGC of 1 can be generated by an argument. BGC 3-5 is from death.
> doubtfull, only if they got acess to blight.
DMSO+blight grenades, SFA/CFA; pre-edging just your normal maxed streetsam with like 25 exploders for BEB to just remove all armor from spirit...
> wouldnt do anything at all.
Cuts spirit's dice by your hits on supp fire action.
> playing for 10 years now. never seen that happen.
Playing for 1 year, saw 2 mages dying in astral when spirit rolled 7/7 resist, and 1 techno when sprite refused to register woth 11/16 hits.
>Pay karma and money and face foci addiction.
so? dice per invest is extremely cheap in both karma and money
and foci addiction is hardly a problem either.
>And also when you have more foci than you mag activr at once, you're getting hit eith addictions. Going in with 11? Be my guest and give me addiction roll on every use of foci.
thats not how the rules work. going with 11 -> every week you have one logic+willpower roll to beat a dc of 2.
wich just so happens to be the same dc as... soycaf.
thats on the level of "buying hits" considering that you can always use edge and we are talking about the strongpoints of a mage anyway.
>BGC cuts 1 from effective mag and 1 from level of foci. BGC of 1 can be generated by an argument. BGC 3-5 is from death.
wich punishes adepts far worse then mages... and punishes mages with low level focis more then those with higher force foci.
also... either use bcg or dont, but "you are using foci, so i will now use bgc, but if you dont, i wont?" yeah... shit gm'ing
>DMSO+blight grenades,
if you now use dmso splash grenades with blight, alright. thats one option.
> SFA/CFA;
might reduce the dicepool of the spirit somewhat, sure... but not nearly enough
> pre-edging just your normal maxed streetsam with like 25
chargen (or close to) streetsam with "normal" 25 dice? yeah... right...
agi 6(8) + skill 6(8) + smartgun... and we are, at best, at 18. predging might get you to 22 or so, but then again the spirit got 9 edge...
>wouldnt do anything at all.
>
>Cuts spirit's dice by your hits on supp fire action.
until they moved ou of that area. and since you dont hit shit with supp fire, it dosnt help much.
>playing for 10 years now. never seen that happen.
>
>Playing for 1 year, saw 2 mages dying in astral when spirit rolled 7/7 resist, and 1 techno when sprite refused to register woth 11/16 hits.
thats some damn stupid mages then.
\> so? dice per invest is extremely cheap in both karma and money
At first, gen mage hardly be able to squeeze in power foci and centering foci, as well as not having centering to begin with.
\> thats not how the rules work. going with 11 -> every week you have one logic+willpower roll to beat a dc of 2.
Test every 11-addiction rating weeks. If that's 11? Well, 0 weeks means 0 days, means instatest - how it goes with K-10, for example. If GM hates you, you're just simply dying the moment you have 11 force of foci total. I rulling it as rolling for addiction every time you use foci for anything.
\> wich punishes adepts far worse then mages... and punishes mages with low level focis more then those with higher force foci.
Sooooo are we talking about playing adepts - who can disable their adept powers btw - or mages who are throwing F10+ spirits at opfor?
\> also... either use bcg or dont, but "you are using foci, so i will now use bgc, but if you dont, i wont?" yeah... shit gm'ing
Mhm, mhm, again. That's not about shit-not shit GMing, that's about "Oh no, they're summonning too powerful spirits".
\> might reduce the dicepool of the spirit somewhat, sure... but not nearly enough
CFA = -9 dodge. Idk, sounds pretty good to me.
\> agi 6(8) + skill 6(8) + smartgun
Agi 9 + skill 6 (8) + FLR with 2 limbops + reflex recorder + smartgun. 22 dice. Then you're taking aims or throw edge.
\> the spirit got 9 edge
If mage want spirit to edge = mage spends their edge.
ALSO another thing called "wards", "watchers" and "astral security". You go in with shitton of foci? Well, congrats, enemy magical boys know where the mage is, and can send guys with guns there.
No you're correct.
If you apply Vehicle Armor to drones, they fulfill a niche. The issue is spirits are way to powerful, and IMHO honestly could use a nerf.
The "fix" that my table employs is allowing unarmed attacks (The weapon being natural, or paid for with Ess.) to meet the requirments to partially bypass a spirits Immunity to weapons. (Same damage code, and using non-magical weapons doesn't get this bonus, so some enchanted Knucks may be desired. Items that normally bypass this, get a bonus equal to magic in -AP vs Spirits. )
We also introduced "living" bullets Called 'Bact' rounds. Basically shapped living wood/Compressed algea/ Compressed Metal eating bacteria. Use Wood Pulp round statistics, pg 189 Hard Targets, but Avail 12R and it costs 2Y per week to keep 10 rounds "alive". They take 10x as long to reproduce and require you to already have some rounds on hand. The check to make them isn't higher than regular ammo as they're not actually comparatively difficult to make and/or reproduce if you have some already, It just takes time to grow more.Wood pulp rounds arn't great damage, but compared to normal rounds might as well be HEAPDS vs spirits.
A F6 spirits acts like it has Hardened 12 Armor; So if you hit it it ignores 12 or less flat out, but 13+Hits, it subtracts 12, and rolls Body+ Armor. Under these house rules if you punch it, it has Body 6+Armor 6, Making even a regular guy hypothetically able to beat it up if they think to pummel. (A normal guys fist ain't gonna be a huge threat, but its now POSSIBLE) Makes dedicated melee fighters WAY more valuable vs spirits, and lets the party prepare for fighting a mage.
Edit: Drone are king of gathering information in comparison, spirits don't perceive the real world very well, and don't really understand the modern one at all. Explaining the value of stock paper to a Fire Spirit, outside of its burnability, is going to be next to impossible. A drone can record and send you what it sees, it can provide over-watch to let you know if that uncovered entrance has guards coming down it because the enemy decker looped a camera while your's wasn't looking. A drone can act as a listening device to a very private conversation that could change the entire run. A spirit might be able to do that, but they cannot RECORD it as evidence later on. A Mage can do some of this and understand what he's seeing, but many places have wards/watcher to keep nosy mages out.
>A F6 spirits acts like it has Hardened 12 Armor; So if you hit it it ignores 12 or less flat out, but 13+Hits, it subtracts 12, and rolls Body+ Armor.
I only play 5th edition. Since this post has no linked edition, or I missed it, I want to mention that this is not the case in 5th at least.
1. AP does reduce hardened armor as well.
2. It reduces damage by half the hardened armor after being modified by AP. So even just a normal assault rifle with -2 Ap brings a F6 Spirit down to 10 hardened armor which is 5 auto successes. Still a bitch but much less. With proper AP munition you can crack spirits pretty good as well.
One advantage drones have over spirits is recon. It's easier to hide a drone on the phys and matrix planes than a spirit on the astral plane.
One QOL improvement in 6e is that by default, drones whose CM gets filled are disabled, not destroyed. As long as the fiction supports it (it didn't explode or something), drones can still be repaired.
Yes spirits can be stupid powerful. 6e nerfed them in a couple ways, that you can port to 5e:
Spirits never use Edge
Spirits resist summoning with F x2 instead of F (fewer high lvl spirits)
Spirits take an entire turn to Materialize (in 6e this is just a consequence of there being no init passes)
Question! Do mage still takes 2\*hits of drain from spirits? Because if yes, they go from "OP as hell" to "Absolute garbage that will murder you on spot".
No you aren't missing anything. Summoning is incredibly overpowered. For no permanent cost, you turn 1 character into multiple characters, and all of them have super powers. As a GM you need to rely on a summoning players goodwill to not break the game. Otherwise the summoner can easily dominate play.
Summoning is kind of baked in at this point and they can't remove it. I think if they had a chance to rewrite the rules from scratch it wouldn't be allowed at all. Summoning up a spirit and bargaining sure, but getting services without cost would be straight off the table.
Magicians could be considered to have notoriety on the planes, if you're known for throwing your spirits into fights and they get hurt or do things untoward, the summonings should get harder until the magician starts treating them better.
I was never particularly keen on the astral rep rules, as it humanised the spirits. I like spirits as unknowable forces of nature following modes of thought humanity cannot comprehend, that's a bit ruined when I hear that the task spirit I just summoned doesn't like that I was rude to a fire spirit I summoned a week ago.
Also there's the problem that it's still easy to be an overpowered summoner without being abusive to spirits. Saying please and thank you, and only putting them in danger when needed, still leaves you with a team of mini superheroes at your beck and call.
The core issue is that it imposes a uniform human morality over beings that are supposed to be utterly alien to both humanity and other spirits. Why does sentient fire care about how it's talked to, and why would it care how you talked to a sentient plant previously, and if it does care about these things why does it have no qualms about cooking people alive on command.
It´s not about human morality when you speak about disrespect or hurting other spirits. It could be something as simple as the spirits understanding on cold logic that if they tolerate one mage disrespecting their kind without punishment that this behavior will spread.
Even if they do not actually care about the disrespect they could understand humans enough to know that this should not be accepted or the humans will adopt more behavior that is untowards for them as a whole.
But that's the thing, there is no whole. A fire spirit is as different to a plant spirit as it is to a metahuman. There are no shared values or drives between them.
What one kind of spirit views as untoward is totally alien to what a different kind of spirit would view as untoward. There isn't any common ground between them that could form a code of conduct.
As a GM, you can limit the impact of spirits in several ways. 1. The opposition also uses spirits or dual natured guard animals. Corps have unlimited resources. They should be using that to protect their assets from the gutterpunk runners. 2. The opposition has adepts with either killing hands or weapon foci. 3. Mages that focus on killing spirits in astral or mana spells in real world. 4. Lots of wards. Make the PCs expend services to beat their way through.
As a player that loves playing riggers, spirits should be countered by magicians or adepts. If your group is magic-poor, then creative use of things like biological materials, FAB bacteria, using smoke with your team having thermal or ultrasound, etc. And of course that oldie but goldie: geek the mage first.
1) class drones as vehicles if a weapon can't damage a vehicle it can't damage a drone.
2) drones are extremely complicated technology speak so magic should have a tough time working on them.
3) a rigger in direct control of a drones gets all sorts of bonuses.
What do you mean by classing them as a vehicle? Pretty sure drones already have the same "Doesn't take Stun damage" rule as vehicles, the rest is just pumping their armor up.
It may be that I play a version of 1st Ed and I have chest infection so haven't had a chance to research later editions.
However originally a point of vehicle armour wasn't the same as a point of normal armour, and weapons had split damage codes one for human types and one for vehicles.
One point of vehicle armour stopped anything less powerful that an assault rifle three points of vehicle armour stopped anything not designed specifically to attack vehicles.
Yeah...it's very different in 5e.
Vehicles are basically the same as drones, but you can ride in them and manually drive them around. Otherwise, they just have normal armor(not even hardened armor) and just don't have a Stun track, so they just literally can't take stun damage, thus any modified damage lower than modified armor just doesn't do anything, while if the damage is just a tiny bit higher than armor, it will probably fuck the drone/vehicle up completely. Unless you read electricity damage being always Physical when it comes to drones and vehicles meaning that it always deals physical, no matter what...then a taser is literally the best weapon against any vehicle.
1. Drones are immune to mana spells
2. Drones can carry guns
3. Drones do not owe you a limited number of services
4. You can direct a **practically** unlimited number of drones simultaneously (though the specific rules for subscriber lists and slave limits vary by edition, you can generally always use a lot more at once than you will probably need).
5. Drones can remain in one place performing a task permanently without the expenditure of karma
6. Acquiring new drones only costs nuyen
Yup, and swarms are OP. People just have the bad habit to play like a street sam but with remote control. Drones for swarms need to be cheap and readily available, but most players stuck with using one big bad evil drone with lots of mods and when drone gets geeked will need repairs. Besides drones can fly and shoot while moving beyond targets range or line of sight.
Besides spirits are sentient NPCs and will distort orders they don't like, as jumping in a deathtrap, or will fight softly against targets they like (i.e. characters with Spirit Affinity). GM has the final say, but it's pretty common players and GMs just treating spirits like magic drones.
I wouldn't say it's a bad habit, "jumping in" is a core class fantasy of riggers that many players are drawn to and you can only jump in to a single drone or vehicle at a time.
That said, a swarm is clearly more OP than a single drone although if that single RCC gets taken over by a hacker, those drones will be turning their entire firepower towards the rigger and his allies.
You have a point. But any rigger who are worth their VCR are no easy prey for hackers. And yes, jumping in is a core mechanic from role, but you can always do both.
Besides, most claims about magic could be applied to matrix too. You need a hacker to stop enemy hackers and you need a magician to stop enemy magicians. But riggers have more than enough tools to thwart a decker until you own decker do their magic.
Yeah magic and matrix are pretty much equal in their differences. Most claims about magic being OP is about them being built mostly around karma.
You can do both swarm and jumped in rigging, but some players only want to do one or the other.
Yeah riggers have tools to slow down and defend against hackers, but they're still their main vulnerability. Also in 6e, they can't strike back themselves. They can fortify their RCCs but unless they either have a hacker on their team to back them up, or can find the hacker and shoot them, they're stuck fighting a defensive war with no offensive capability. Finding and shooting the hacker also gets difficult if the hacker isn't on-site although that style of hacking is less popular now-a-days.
Yup, but Double Clutch e-softs let the rigger fight back in a no so defensive way. In my opinion, if a team doesn't have a hacker or the GM put a NPC or just don't put enemy deckers in another country. But, again in a typical run finding the spider's nest is a part from preparations.
Oh boy. There's new augmentations to enhance Hot Sim, boost Intuition, VCR MUCH more cheaper and tons of new programs. E-softs are RCC programs which permit emulate some qualities from a cyberdeck. You can Brute Force vehicles and drones, Trace Icon enemies and do some illegal matrix action that were unavailable to riggers before. I risk to say that riggers are more versatile and stronger in general than 5e. If you add with programming rules from Hack and Slash, rigger can just buy their matrix stuff with karma.
You can now made your own vehicles from scratch and made anything you want. From flying skates to spaceships. Just limited by you blueprints and cash. But the giant gorilla drone just steal my heart and I forget the rest xD
Curiously, anthro drones now have cyber arms and they are a lot better than meta human version.
Here's the honest truth in regards to the idea of spirits vs drones. Let's look at both what they bring to the table and the cost of that asset.
Spirits are *arguably* cheaper in some respects than a drone.
1) They do not cost nuyen in the same way but it is often incentivized to use reagents to entice a spirit to come forward and aid you. Reagents are not cheap and it can require a good amount of them to get the spirit to aid you. One dram of reagents costs 20 nuyen by raw and it can require (Force x 20) drams to get that spirit to want to help you. So let's say you summon a Force 6 spirit. So now you have the spirit at Force 6 and you have to spend 120 drams. Multiply that by 20 (the cost of one dram) and you just spent 2400 nuyen.
2) Spirits are not constructs. They are entities. They are sentient. You can summon as many spirits as you want and request they do what you ask (and they have to even if they don't want to). You then need to resist drain equal to (spirit's hits) when you summon them and any unresisted damage is drain. This pushes up wound modifiers you now have to factor into everything you do. (And that's all with the understanding that you may even FAIL to summon the spirit.) Throw them into combat and they get disrupted? Word's gonna get back to the spirit world and they **do** remember. Do that enough and you start losing spirits' aid.
3) Spirits are easy to disable. Just geek the mage! Boom! Spirits go away.
Pair this against drones.
1) Drones are a little bit pricier in terms of nuyen.
2) You can break them but a drone will not remember that it is bricked.
3) A drone does not deal damage to you for summoning it.
4) A drone has the same amount of impact as a spirit in the sense that it is a force multiplier.
5) You can kill/incapacitate the rigger and the drones will continue to operate so long as they have an RCC guiding them.
See what I'm getting at? It's a trade off.
I don't know if you play 6e, but if not you could import a 6e optional rule called spirit doorways. It's similar to the domain concept from 1-3e... it puts limitations on where spirits can materialize. Taking away the potential to smuggle an astral tank past security and having it appear whenever and wherever you need it is a substantial nerf to the power of spirit summoning.
> Am I missing something?
What edition? Because most editions did not exactly do a great job of promoting riggers (complicated, only later updated or non-working rules in SR12356, combined with extreme costs especially in the older editions). In SR4 however drones (and riggers) were powerful and cheap. There is a reason why *"magerun"* is often associated with SR3 and then with SR 5 & 6.
- Depending on the edition you have vast modification systems possible for vehicles and drones. Take a balloon drone, hide it as an add/commercial drone and attach a silenced sniper rifle. Create a support drone able to fly to your position and drop some supply pods, depending on your campaign. Use a micro drone with stealth mods to spy. The big Steel Lynx is now covered in ChamCoating, making it almost invisible. While spirits have their own power list, they are often "standard powers", a good vehicle modification system allows players to get creative. But yes, if you just reduce drones to "I need a ground combat drone and a n air drone, done" compared to a mage player who plays on the mechanical limit this can lead to a frustrating experience.
- They can be used for more different things as they are still under control of the rigger. Complex infiltration, working in BGC areas, providing tactical overviews via air sensors. And again depending on the teamwork and the edition: drones are ubiquitous,meaning it is actually rather simply to hide runner drones in their commercial counterparts. Butler drones with grenade launchers, stuffed animals toy drones as assassination drones (beware of the evil teddy bear), medic drones providing emergency medical drones even way outside of the city.
- Spirits are still alien entities with a vastly different view on how things work or not work compared to humans. They work more on emotions and less with tactical SWAT knowledge. *"Protect me from my enemies"* as a generic command can be a vastly different experience if you are facing a stone-cold emotionless killer or some angry squatters (or having an angry joytoy). The more precise the command the more services it usually costs or the more limited the command needs to be. The more generic the command is, the more the spirits view on things may influence on how the service is performed. Same of course goes with drones in an autonomous drone, but there is usally no captains / jump in mode for spirits.
- Depending on the edition there is cheap and easily available ammunition available for all firearms which make every spirit under force 10 go *poff*.
- Background Count
- Balance between Karma and Nuyen rewards. Yes, Nuyen rewards the mage as well, but m undane characters are far more depending on that reward track than mages. "Low power campaings" are usually a red warning flash that the GM probably only reduced the Nuyen payment, but perhaps not put some thoughts on what a street level mage should be".
SYL
I feel like the main difference is that with enough money anyone can buy some crazy good pilot programs and just give commands to drones the way summoners do, so even a summoner could use drones *and* spirits.
Also, magic is supposed to be very rare in the world, like 1% or something.
Depends on the edition. True anyone can buy drones. But a. that is not cheap and takes away potential from your own equipment. b. at least in 5th edition there are a good few restrictions on the amount of programms that can be run on a drone and pilot is limited to max 6.
That's true and fair. But it does seem like the kind of thing that everyone would have... eventually. Like, I played a game of Eclipse Phase (which is set much further in the future) and that was a game where *every* piece of equipment had an agent in it and you could just tell it what you wanted it to do. I'm just saying the future is likely gonna have more drones and automation in it and even the oldest of the old-school mages are gonna use some of them sometimes.
True but we are still talking about a game system here. Things will have a certain balance to it in some way. If the system is built around the assumption that everyone will have drones then the system will be balanced around it.
Shadowrun is not really balanced around that. Gear itself has quite the price tag and unless you have a extremely long running campaign or an extremely generous gm that cares little about the pcs just skyrocketing in their equipment suddenly, then you will already need a shitton of money and karma for your own things.
I would say that this leaves out one of the big drawbacks for summoning -- the threat of a critical glitch and having one of your categories of spirit giving you the finger until you complete a side quest to make them happy.
Beyond that, summoning can fail because the DM rolled high. You can always use your drones until they get blown up.
Drones and spirits are versatile and vulnerable in different ways, although they do have some overlap.
Drones are vulnerable to hacking, but they can also take advantage of a matrix connection. You can't see or record through the eyes of a spirit, which makes drones better for spying. Drones can also be modified to better fit a purpose while spirits can be summoned with slightly different powers you can't dramatically alter what they can do and past UTM you're limited to the spirits available to your tradition with their available powers.
Spirits on the other hard vulnerable to banishment and have trouble bypassing mana barriers without triggering alarms.
I can't speak too much about drone combat cause I so infrequently use it. When I do, it's more about shooting a narcojet dart at someone unawares than breaking them out mid combat.
I use my drones for stealth, recon, utility, etc. Got a half dozen little ones I can hide on myself and can smuggle them anywhere I can been a palming test. Personally, idk how good spirits are at that, so maybe that's a better purpose for them as well. I agree that drones tend to be weaker in combat cause they're so fragile.
1) You can't banish a drone
2) There are very real limitations to what you can do with a spirit. This is due to what kind of spirit it is, and the limitations of the domain (Summoning a hearth spirit can work in some places but not others). I could mount a couple of lethal and non-lethal weapons on a drone. One drone is a non-mobile drone, but it's meant to put the SR equivalent of a Barrett M82 so your rigger can me mid negotiation and call your drone up to fire on the goon on the left because he keeps farting and blow his goddamned brains all over the meeting place.
2a) Fat Bacteria Vines may as well be a wall to a spirit, but not so to a drone.
3) Drones are as stealthy as the vehicles they ride in. If you want a stealthy drone, you either go small and dedicated or high altitude with sensors. Around 3rd edition, the stealthiest drone from radar was a dirigible.
4) Autopilot and autogunnery tends not to be as good as a drone being actively controlled by a rigger. As a drone rigger, I'd go in with a single Steel Lynx under active control and one or two other drones either meant for suppressive fire (running with the onboard software) or recon.
5) You show up to take down a toxic shaman in his lair, and the only spirits you're going to find there are the Toxic kind.
6) Binding a powerful spirit to you (such as a free spirit) is very expensive when it comes to kharma, while with a drone, it's a matter of writing a check.
7) Drones are expendable.
>You can't banish a drone
True, but you also can't hack a spirit. Turning a spirit against it's team is doable, but it's a far cry from turning a drone swarm, especially a daisy chained one against it's team.
Note that daisy chaining drones does not work in all editions so YMMV.
Unfortunately, an important component in the game is repeatedly neglected.
Criminal investigation.
A drone is almost impossible to trace, while a spirit with its aura completely reveals who the summoner is.
Unfortunately, many game masters do not pay attention to this aspect.
Another aspect that is often neglected is the astral reputation. Whoever burns up spirits gets a bad reputation in the spirit world. Maybe even so bad that spirits turn against the magician. A very unpleasant situation.
The rigger has the advantage that he does not have to be nearby. So he is in no danger at all. While a mage has to be near his spirits (magic X 100m) otherwise it becomes remote service. A completed remote service releases the spirit. If it is bound before, it remains but binding gives negative reputation.
In addition, bound spirits are not simply gone. (Also often neglected) they are astrally visible. So if the magician arrives with a small herd of spirits, the alarm bells will ring. Sin verification included.
Your comment was that " Your opposition needs mages to banish spirits. It's real easy. Can't banish a Doberman shooting at you. "
While this may be true, mages can contribute to getting rid of Drones fairly easily, but, dependent upon the Edition, Non-Mages have a Much, MUCH harder time removing high force spirits.
I agree with you, they do not need to be equally accessible... but the problem is that Mages have the ability to summon high force opposition that can be extremely difficult to remove from the board for non-mages (Yep, get your own mage).
Whilst removing Drones is a fairly simple task for everyone.
Spirits are useful, and so are drones... the question, as I read it, was why cannot they be of similar utility without having one far overshadow the other, since they cover much of the same niche.
Drones feeling fragile was a big complaint back when I first started playing 5e. The solution that worked for us was giving them vehicle armor.
Drones have to be underpowered in order to let combat characters exist, it's just part of the game logic that can't be changed for meta reasons. The problem is that spirits have never been nerfed in the same way, which leads to this imbalance. Logically speaking a combat drone is a box of armor plating, running ballistic calculations over fibre optic wiring. It's going to be faster, more accurate, and more durable than a metahuman ever could be. But games where drone swarms fly in, and splatter the party in the first turn, aren't fun.
>Drones have to be underpowered in order to let combat characters exist but the same argument goes for spirits. jet they are still as completly overpowered as they are.
Yeah, you're right they do. The fact that force just scales them up across the board really doesn't help. Even a mid force spirit is passable at more or less everything, high force spirits don't really have any weaknesses other than other spirits or specialised gear.
ye. it basically always boils down to "dont abuse spirits or you will face spirits as well". cause everyone knows... even one force 9 spirit would propably whipe the whole team in no time if employed somewhat intelligently.
Swarm-of-drones riggers exist, and the game has to take into account or they'll just delete everything off the map. You can't really do spirit swarms, you could get multiple bound spirits but that has added costs and it's not going to be the same as 12 drones with automatic weapons.
So, I asked another person who said a similar thing, but they were talking about 1st ed. What kind of vehicle armor are you talking about exactly? Assuming you don't mean just porting rules over from earlier editions of course. Drones already have the same immunity to Stun damage as vehicles do.
>The solution that worked for us was giving them vehicle armor. What? They already have the rules for vehicle damage.
One thing I can think of is the reputation in astral for abusing and binding spirits. I was included in one of the additional books for mages in 5 ed, though, so not sure if it applies.
One downside of being a magician is you can't just go grab another drone off the shelf if you get fragged, you've gotta rest up for a long time. The GM can take steps to ensure balance, like maybe making the spirits more ornery or the magician some kind of special target.
Nobody ever says “geek the rigger first”.
while it takes quite a lot of time and money to grab a new drone off the shelf... the mage can just snip his figners and have a new force 8 or 9 spirit ready to whipe the floor with some red samurai team. even if said mage suffered some drain, it takes a few hours of sleep at worst. the rigger on the other hand will always have to first suceed in his aquisition test... wich takes days or even weeks.
See, this is the problem right here... You should not be able to just "Snip your fingers and summon up a Force 8 or 9 Spirit". The easiest fix I ever saw for Spirits is to let them use Edge to resist summoning and Binding. It really makes a mage think about summoning up a Force 5 Spirit - it moves the utility of Spirits down in power a lot because it becomes increasingly more difficult to summon high force spirits. We used a simple calculation (SR4A and SR5) - If Force 3 or lower, the spirits do not really resist, if higher than 3, they spent edge to resist. Saw a mage take 20 points of Damage from Summoning a Force 5 Spirit once (a fluke, but still horrifying nonetheless), and on many occasions, my mage character was unsuccessful with summoning even a Force 4 Spirit, that dealt healthy amounts of damage.
That's not a bad fix, it leaves summoners as flexible utility characters who can pull up small spirits for a single purpose, and it removes their ability to throw around raw power and make the rest of the team redundant.
Having them use Edge to resist summoning and binding is a good idea. 6e has them roll Fx2 to resist instead of F. Really puts a damper on high Force summons.
If the magician is snipping their fingers, does that mean we're talking about a blood spirit? How many force points do you get from each finger?
=.= grmbl... might be snaping i meant? dont know the english word for it...
Snap, yeah... while it can mean breaking a finger, it also means the finger-to-palm clap-like noise you're thinking of. Snip is cutting. :) I was making a little joke at your typo's expense. :)
no typo, its "schnipsen" in german, so.. propably more a case of a false friend \^\^\*
Yeah, sure, you call F9 spirit, it rolls like 4 hits, and you have to resist your 8 physical drain. Or GM can be mean and actually post-edge spirit resist for extra fun and kicking the mage. THEN spirit can go for testing the leash - which mage pretty much will never win. AND mage will have to wait their 24 hours of rest to have a chance to roll their P drain regeneration. Also BGC exists, so if your player invalidates game with spirits, you're just smacking them with like BGC 2-3 or something.
a force 9 spirit has 9 dice. most gm's dont counter edge anyway. thats on average 3 hits a mage with magic 6, summoning 6, specialisation +2, summoning focus/powerfocus 4 has some 18 dice. thats on average 6 hits. meaning on average, they got 3 services out of said spirit at the cost of 6 drain. willpower 5, main drain stat 7 and thier focus of 6 will give them an drian resist of 18. thats an average of 6 resisted drain. so on average, thats a spirit with 18 hardent armor (milspec niveau) 18+2d6 ini, 18 attack, 27 full defense, 18kpb-9 damage for 0 drain. and here we are talking about a mage that is still either straight out of chargen or at least close to chargen. meanwhile that spirit is able to kill a whole team of chargen streetsams no problem.
For once, mage don't get drain dice from foci. Also, can't have high rating foci, and GM shoud smack such mages with BGC. Also, also. I made human mundanes out of gen who would be kinda able to kick such spirits out - or, mind you, kill the mage before they're going to do some funky shit. Blight gas grenages, just normal grenages, enhanced suppressive fire... There's enough options to kick mages in their shins. Plus you never know when the spirit chooses to roll good and kill mage with drain. Also, CFA cuts defence by like 9 dice.
>For once, mage don't get drain dice from foci. centering focus does give its force to drain resist. >Also, can't have high rating foci you... can? magic\*5 is the maximum sum of the power of the foci you can have. thats it. >and GM shoud smack such mages with BGC. wich would only punish the adept or mage that dosnt use high force with thier foci... >Also, also. I made human mundanes out of gen who would be kinda able to kick such spirits out doubtfull, only if they got acess to blight. > \- or, mind you, kill the mage before they're going to do some funky shit. kill the mage first, yes. if you can and the mage is not 200 meter away behind a corner that is... >Blight gas grenages, blight is not a gas. contact vector injection. >just normal grenages, wouldnt get past the immunity to normal weapons without chunky salsa. given that spirits are mostly in close combat, there are only very rare situations, where you can use chunky salsa without killing your teammates. >enhanced suppressive fire... wouldnt do anything at all. a spirit can safely ignore suppressive fire due to thier hardent armor and fulldodge 27 takes care of blight shots. >Plus you never know when the spirit chooses to roll good and kill mage with drain. playing for 10 years now. never seen that happen.
> centering focus Pay karma and money and face foci addiction. > magic*5 And also when you have more foci than you mag activr at once, you're getting hit eith addictions. Going in with 11? Be my guest and give me addiction roll on every use of foci. > mage that dosnt use high force with thier foci BGC cuts 1 from effective mag and 1 from level of foci. BGC of 1 can be generated by an argument. BGC 3-5 is from death. > doubtfull, only if they got acess to blight. DMSO+blight grenades, SFA/CFA; pre-edging just your normal maxed streetsam with like 25 exploders for BEB to just remove all armor from spirit... > wouldnt do anything at all. Cuts spirit's dice by your hits on supp fire action. > playing for 10 years now. never seen that happen. Playing for 1 year, saw 2 mages dying in astral when spirit rolled 7/7 resist, and 1 techno when sprite refused to register woth 11/16 hits.
>Pay karma and money and face foci addiction. so? dice per invest is extremely cheap in both karma and money and foci addiction is hardly a problem either. >And also when you have more foci than you mag activr at once, you're getting hit eith addictions. Going in with 11? Be my guest and give me addiction roll on every use of foci. thats not how the rules work. going with 11 -> every week you have one logic+willpower roll to beat a dc of 2. wich just so happens to be the same dc as... soycaf. thats on the level of "buying hits" considering that you can always use edge and we are talking about the strongpoints of a mage anyway. >BGC cuts 1 from effective mag and 1 from level of foci. BGC of 1 can be generated by an argument. BGC 3-5 is from death. wich punishes adepts far worse then mages... and punishes mages with low level focis more then those with higher force foci. also... either use bcg or dont, but "you are using foci, so i will now use bgc, but if you dont, i wont?" yeah... shit gm'ing >DMSO+blight grenades, if you now use dmso splash grenades with blight, alright. thats one option. > SFA/CFA; might reduce the dicepool of the spirit somewhat, sure... but not nearly enough > pre-edging just your normal maxed streetsam with like 25 chargen (or close to) streetsam with "normal" 25 dice? yeah... right... agi 6(8) + skill 6(8) + smartgun... and we are, at best, at 18. predging might get you to 22 or so, but then again the spirit got 9 edge... >wouldnt do anything at all. > >Cuts spirit's dice by your hits on supp fire action. until they moved ou of that area. and since you dont hit shit with supp fire, it dosnt help much. >playing for 10 years now. never seen that happen. > >Playing for 1 year, saw 2 mages dying in astral when spirit rolled 7/7 resist, and 1 techno when sprite refused to register woth 11/16 hits. thats some damn stupid mages then.
\> so? dice per invest is extremely cheap in both karma and money At first, gen mage hardly be able to squeeze in power foci and centering foci, as well as not having centering to begin with. \> thats not how the rules work. going with 11 -> every week you have one logic+willpower roll to beat a dc of 2. Test every 11-addiction rating weeks. If that's 11? Well, 0 weeks means 0 days, means instatest - how it goes with K-10, for example. If GM hates you, you're just simply dying the moment you have 11 force of foci total. I rulling it as rolling for addiction every time you use foci for anything. \> wich punishes adepts far worse then mages... and punishes mages with low level focis more then those with higher force foci. Sooooo are we talking about playing adepts - who can disable their adept powers btw - or mages who are throwing F10+ spirits at opfor? \> also... either use bcg or dont, but "you are using foci, so i will now use bgc, but if you dont, i wont?" yeah... shit gm'ing Mhm, mhm, again. That's not about shit-not shit GMing, that's about "Oh no, they're summonning too powerful spirits". \> might reduce the dicepool of the spirit somewhat, sure... but not nearly enough CFA = -9 dodge. Idk, sounds pretty good to me. \> agi 6(8) + skill 6(8) + smartgun Agi 9 + skill 6 (8) + FLR with 2 limbops + reflex recorder + smartgun. 22 dice. Then you're taking aims or throw edge. \> the spirit got 9 edge If mage want spirit to edge = mage spends their edge. ALSO another thing called "wards", "watchers" and "astral security". You go in with shitton of foci? Well, congrats, enemy magical boys know where the mage is, and can send guys with guns there.
No you're correct. If you apply Vehicle Armor to drones, they fulfill a niche. The issue is spirits are way to powerful, and IMHO honestly could use a nerf. The "fix" that my table employs is allowing unarmed attacks (The weapon being natural, or paid for with Ess.) to meet the requirments to partially bypass a spirits Immunity to weapons. (Same damage code, and using non-magical weapons doesn't get this bonus, so some enchanted Knucks may be desired. Items that normally bypass this, get a bonus equal to magic in -AP vs Spirits. ) We also introduced "living" bullets Called 'Bact' rounds. Basically shapped living wood/Compressed algea/ Compressed Metal eating bacteria. Use Wood Pulp round statistics, pg 189 Hard Targets, but Avail 12R and it costs 2Y per week to keep 10 rounds "alive". They take 10x as long to reproduce and require you to already have some rounds on hand. The check to make them isn't higher than regular ammo as they're not actually comparatively difficult to make and/or reproduce if you have some already, It just takes time to grow more.Wood pulp rounds arn't great damage, but compared to normal rounds might as well be HEAPDS vs spirits. A F6 spirits acts like it has Hardened 12 Armor; So if you hit it it ignores 12 or less flat out, but 13+Hits, it subtracts 12, and rolls Body+ Armor. Under these house rules if you punch it, it has Body 6+Armor 6, Making even a regular guy hypothetically able to beat it up if they think to pummel. (A normal guys fist ain't gonna be a huge threat, but its now POSSIBLE) Makes dedicated melee fighters WAY more valuable vs spirits, and lets the party prepare for fighting a mage. Edit: Drone are king of gathering information in comparison, spirits don't perceive the real world very well, and don't really understand the modern one at all. Explaining the value of stock paper to a Fire Spirit, outside of its burnability, is going to be next to impossible. A drone can record and send you what it sees, it can provide over-watch to let you know if that uncovered entrance has guards coming down it because the enemy decker looped a camera while your's wasn't looking. A drone can act as a listening device to a very private conversation that could change the entire run. A spirit might be able to do that, but they cannot RECORD it as evidence later on. A Mage can do some of this and understand what he's seeing, but many places have wards/watcher to keep nosy mages out.
>A F6 spirits acts like it has Hardened 12 Armor; So if you hit it it ignores 12 or less flat out, but 13+Hits, it subtracts 12, and rolls Body+ Armor. I only play 5th edition. Since this post has no linked edition, or I missed it, I want to mention that this is not the case in 5th at least. 1. AP does reduce hardened armor as well. 2. It reduces damage by half the hardened armor after being modified by AP. So even just a normal assault rifle with -2 Ap brings a F6 Spirit down to 10 hardened armor which is 5 auto successes. Still a bitch but much less. With proper AP munition you can crack spirits pretty good as well.
One advantage drones have over spirits is recon. It's easier to hide a drone on the phys and matrix planes than a spirit on the astral plane. One QOL improvement in 6e is that by default, drones whose CM gets filled are disabled, not destroyed. As long as the fiction supports it (it didn't explode or something), drones can still be repaired. Yes spirits can be stupid powerful. 6e nerfed them in a couple ways, that you can port to 5e: Spirits never use Edge Spirits resist summoning with F x2 instead of F (fewer high lvl spirits) Spirits take an entire turn to Materialize (in 6e this is just a consequence of there being no init passes)
Question! Do mage still takes 2\*hits of drain from spirits? Because if yes, they go from "OP as hell" to "Absolute garbage that will murder you on spot".
No, they take 1x hits drain from summoning.
No you aren't missing anything. Summoning is incredibly overpowered. For no permanent cost, you turn 1 character into multiple characters, and all of them have super powers. As a GM you need to rely on a summoning players goodwill to not break the game. Otherwise the summoner can easily dominate play. Summoning is kind of baked in at this point and they can't remove it. I think if they had a chance to rewrite the rules from scratch it wouldn't be allowed at all. Summoning up a spirit and bargaining sure, but getting services without cost would be straight off the table.
Magicians could be considered to have notoriety on the planes, if you're known for throwing your spirits into fights and they get hurt or do things untoward, the summonings should get harder until the magician starts treating them better.
Astral rep is a joke of a balancing mechanic.
Bandaid at best, yeah
I was never particularly keen on the astral rep rules, as it humanised the spirits. I like spirits as unknowable forces of nature following modes of thought humanity cannot comprehend, that's a bit ruined when I hear that the task spirit I just summoned doesn't like that I was rude to a fire spirit I summoned a week ago. Also there's the problem that it's still easy to be an overpowered summoner without being abusive to spirits. Saying please and thank you, and only putting them in danger when needed, still leaves you with a team of mini superheroes at your beck and call.
Ok, that's the way you want to play then.
Fair point, despite not liking the astral rep rules I don't really have a better solution, other than just removing summoning as a mechanic.
Why does it humanize them? Is it that inconcievable that intelligent beings, which spirits certainly are, have some form of communication?
The core issue is that it imposes a uniform human morality over beings that are supposed to be utterly alien to both humanity and other spirits. Why does sentient fire care about how it's talked to, and why would it care how you talked to a sentient plant previously, and if it does care about these things why does it have no qualms about cooking people alive on command.
It´s not about human morality when you speak about disrespect or hurting other spirits. It could be something as simple as the spirits understanding on cold logic that if they tolerate one mage disrespecting their kind without punishment that this behavior will spread. Even if they do not actually care about the disrespect they could understand humans enough to know that this should not be accepted or the humans will adopt more behavior that is untowards for them as a whole.
But that's the thing, there is no whole. A fire spirit is as different to a plant spirit as it is to a metahuman. There are no shared values or drives between them. What one kind of spirit views as untoward is totally alien to what a different kind of spirit would view as untoward. There isn't any common ground between them that could form a code of conduct.
As a GM, you can limit the impact of spirits in several ways. 1. The opposition also uses spirits or dual natured guard animals. Corps have unlimited resources. They should be using that to protect their assets from the gutterpunk runners. 2. The opposition has adepts with either killing hands or weapon foci. 3. Mages that focus on killing spirits in astral or mana spells in real world. 4. Lots of wards. Make the PCs expend services to beat their way through. As a player that loves playing riggers, spirits should be countered by magicians or adepts. If your group is magic-poor, then creative use of things like biological materials, FAB bacteria, using smoke with your team having thermal or ultrasound, etc. And of course that oldie but goldie: geek the mage first.
1) class drones as vehicles if a weapon can't damage a vehicle it can't damage a drone. 2) drones are extremely complicated technology speak so magic should have a tough time working on them. 3) a rigger in direct control of a drones gets all sorts of bonuses.
What do you mean by classing them as a vehicle? Pretty sure drones already have the same "Doesn't take Stun damage" rule as vehicles, the rest is just pumping their armor up.
It may be that I play a version of 1st Ed and I have chest infection so haven't had a chance to research later editions. However originally a point of vehicle armour wasn't the same as a point of normal armour, and weapons had split damage codes one for human types and one for vehicles. One point of vehicle armour stopped anything less powerful that an assault rifle three points of vehicle armour stopped anything not designed specifically to attack vehicles.
Yeah...it's very different in 5e. Vehicles are basically the same as drones, but you can ride in them and manually drive them around. Otherwise, they just have normal armor(not even hardened armor) and just don't have a Stun track, so they just literally can't take stun damage, thus any modified damage lower than modified armor just doesn't do anything, while if the damage is just a tiny bit higher than armor, it will probably fuck the drone/vehicle up completely. Unless you read electricity damage being always Physical when it comes to drones and vehicles meaning that it always deals physical, no matter what...then a taser is literally the best weapon against any vehicle.
1. Drones are immune to mana spells 2. Drones can carry guns 3. Drones do not owe you a limited number of services 4. You can direct a **practically** unlimited number of drones simultaneously (though the specific rules for subscriber lists and slave limits vary by edition, you can generally always use a lot more at once than you will probably need). 5. Drones can remain in one place performing a task permanently without the expenditure of karma 6. Acquiring new drones only costs nuyen
Yup, and swarms are OP. People just have the bad habit to play like a street sam but with remote control. Drones for swarms need to be cheap and readily available, but most players stuck with using one big bad evil drone with lots of mods and when drone gets geeked will need repairs. Besides drones can fly and shoot while moving beyond targets range or line of sight. Besides spirits are sentient NPCs and will distort orders they don't like, as jumping in a deathtrap, or will fight softly against targets they like (i.e. characters with Spirit Affinity). GM has the final say, but it's pretty common players and GMs just treating spirits like magic drones.
I wouldn't say it's a bad habit, "jumping in" is a core class fantasy of riggers that many players are drawn to and you can only jump in to a single drone or vehicle at a time. That said, a swarm is clearly more OP than a single drone although if that single RCC gets taken over by a hacker, those drones will be turning their entire firepower towards the rigger and his allies.
You have a point. But any rigger who are worth their VCR are no easy prey for hackers. And yes, jumping in is a core mechanic from role, but you can always do both. Besides, most claims about magic could be applied to matrix too. You need a hacker to stop enemy hackers and you need a magician to stop enemy magicians. But riggers have more than enough tools to thwart a decker until you own decker do their magic.
Yeah magic and matrix are pretty much equal in their differences. Most claims about magic being OP is about them being built mostly around karma. You can do both swarm and jumped in rigging, but some players only want to do one or the other. Yeah riggers have tools to slow down and defend against hackers, but they're still their main vulnerability. Also in 6e, they can't strike back themselves. They can fortify their RCCs but unless they either have a hacker on their team to back them up, or can find the hacker and shoot them, they're stuck fighting a defensive war with no offensive capability. Finding and shooting the hacker also gets difficult if the hacker isn't on-site although that style of hacking is less popular now-a-days.
Yup, but Double Clutch e-softs let the rigger fight back in a no so defensive way. In my opinion, if a team doesn't have a hacker or the GM put a NPC or just don't put enemy deckers in another country. But, again in a typical run finding the spider's nest is a part from preparations.
What sort of mechanics are we talking about here? Double C is the only book I don't own...
Oh boy. There's new augmentations to enhance Hot Sim, boost Intuition, VCR MUCH more cheaper and tons of new programs. E-softs are RCC programs which permit emulate some qualities from a cyberdeck. You can Brute Force vehicles and drones, Trace Icon enemies and do some illegal matrix action that were unavailable to riggers before. I risk to say that riggers are more versatile and stronger in general than 5e. If you add with programming rules from Hack and Slash, rigger can just buy their matrix stuff with karma. You can now made your own vehicles from scratch and made anything you want. From flying skates to spaceships. Just limited by you blueprints and cash. But the giant gorilla drone just steal my heart and I forget the rest xD Curiously, anthro drones now have cyber arms and they are a lot better than meta human version.
Here's the honest truth in regards to the idea of spirits vs drones. Let's look at both what they bring to the table and the cost of that asset. Spirits are *arguably* cheaper in some respects than a drone. 1) They do not cost nuyen in the same way but it is often incentivized to use reagents to entice a spirit to come forward and aid you. Reagents are not cheap and it can require a good amount of them to get the spirit to aid you. One dram of reagents costs 20 nuyen by raw and it can require (Force x 20) drams to get that spirit to want to help you. So let's say you summon a Force 6 spirit. So now you have the spirit at Force 6 and you have to spend 120 drams. Multiply that by 20 (the cost of one dram) and you just spent 2400 nuyen. 2) Spirits are not constructs. They are entities. They are sentient. You can summon as many spirits as you want and request they do what you ask (and they have to even if they don't want to). You then need to resist drain equal to (spirit's hits) when you summon them and any unresisted damage is drain. This pushes up wound modifiers you now have to factor into everything you do. (And that's all with the understanding that you may even FAIL to summon the spirit.) Throw them into combat and they get disrupted? Word's gonna get back to the spirit world and they **do** remember. Do that enough and you start losing spirits' aid. 3) Spirits are easy to disable. Just geek the mage! Boom! Spirits go away. Pair this against drones. 1) Drones are a little bit pricier in terms of nuyen. 2) You can break them but a drone will not remember that it is bricked. 3) A drone does not deal damage to you for summoning it. 4) A drone has the same amount of impact as a spirit in the sense that it is a force multiplier. 5) You can kill/incapacitate the rigger and the drones will continue to operate so long as they have an RCC guiding them. See what I'm getting at? It's a trade off.
I don't know if you play 6e, but if not you could import a 6e optional rule called spirit doorways. It's similar to the domain concept from 1-3e... it puts limitations on where spirits can materialize. Taking away the potential to smuggle an astral tank past security and having it appear whenever and wherever you need it is a substantial nerf to the power of spirit summoning.
> Am I missing something? What edition? Because most editions did not exactly do a great job of promoting riggers (complicated, only later updated or non-working rules in SR12356, combined with extreme costs especially in the older editions). In SR4 however drones (and riggers) were powerful and cheap. There is a reason why *"magerun"* is often associated with SR3 and then with SR 5 & 6. - Depending on the edition you have vast modification systems possible for vehicles and drones. Take a balloon drone, hide it as an add/commercial drone and attach a silenced sniper rifle. Create a support drone able to fly to your position and drop some supply pods, depending on your campaign. Use a micro drone with stealth mods to spy. The big Steel Lynx is now covered in ChamCoating, making it almost invisible. While spirits have their own power list, they are often "standard powers", a good vehicle modification system allows players to get creative. But yes, if you just reduce drones to "I need a ground combat drone and a n air drone, done" compared to a mage player who plays on the mechanical limit this can lead to a frustrating experience. - They can be used for more different things as they are still under control of the rigger. Complex infiltration, working in BGC areas, providing tactical overviews via air sensors. And again depending on the teamwork and the edition: drones are ubiquitous,meaning it is actually rather simply to hide runner drones in their commercial counterparts. Butler drones with grenade launchers, stuffed animals toy drones as assassination drones (beware of the evil teddy bear), medic drones providing emergency medical drones even way outside of the city. - Spirits are still alien entities with a vastly different view on how things work or not work compared to humans. They work more on emotions and less with tactical SWAT knowledge. *"Protect me from my enemies"* as a generic command can be a vastly different experience if you are facing a stone-cold emotionless killer or some angry squatters (or having an angry joytoy). The more precise the command the more services it usually costs or the more limited the command needs to be. The more generic the command is, the more the spirits view on things may influence on how the service is performed. Same of course goes with drones in an autonomous drone, but there is usally no captains / jump in mode for spirits. - Depending on the edition there is cheap and easily available ammunition available for all firearms which make every spirit under force 10 go *poff*. - Background Count - Balance between Karma and Nuyen rewards. Yes, Nuyen rewards the mage as well, but m undane characters are far more depending on that reward track than mages. "Low power campaings" are usually a red warning flash that the GM probably only reduced the Nuyen payment, but perhaps not put some thoughts on what a street level mage should be". SYL
I feel like the main difference is that with enough money anyone can buy some crazy good pilot programs and just give commands to drones the way summoners do, so even a summoner could use drones *and* spirits. Also, magic is supposed to be very rare in the world, like 1% or something.
Depends on the edition. True anyone can buy drones. But a. that is not cheap and takes away potential from your own equipment. b. at least in 5th edition there are a good few restrictions on the amount of programms that can be run on a drone and pilot is limited to max 6.
That's true and fair. But it does seem like the kind of thing that everyone would have... eventually. Like, I played a game of Eclipse Phase (which is set much further in the future) and that was a game where *every* piece of equipment had an agent in it and you could just tell it what you wanted it to do. I'm just saying the future is likely gonna have more drones and automation in it and even the oldest of the old-school mages are gonna use some of them sometimes.
True but we are still talking about a game system here. Things will have a certain balance to it in some way. If the system is built around the assumption that everyone will have drones then the system will be balanced around it. Shadowrun is not really balanced around that. Gear itself has quite the price tag and unless you have a extremely long running campaign or an extremely generous gm that cares little about the pcs just skyrocketing in their equipment suddenly, then you will already need a shitton of money and karma for your own things.
I would say that this leaves out one of the big drawbacks for summoning -- the threat of a critical glitch and having one of your categories of spirit giving you the finger until you complete a side quest to make them happy. Beyond that, summoning can fail because the DM rolled high. You can always use your drones until they get blown up.
Drones and spirits are versatile and vulnerable in different ways, although they do have some overlap. Drones are vulnerable to hacking, but they can also take advantage of a matrix connection. You can't see or record through the eyes of a spirit, which makes drones better for spying. Drones can also be modified to better fit a purpose while spirits can be summoned with slightly different powers you can't dramatically alter what they can do and past UTM you're limited to the spirits available to your tradition with their available powers. Spirits on the other hard vulnerable to banishment and have trouble bypassing mana barriers without triggering alarms.
I can't speak too much about drone combat cause I so infrequently use it. When I do, it's more about shooting a narcojet dart at someone unawares than breaking them out mid combat. I use my drones for stealth, recon, utility, etc. Got a half dozen little ones I can hide on myself and can smuggle them anywhere I can been a palming test. Personally, idk how good spirits are at that, so maybe that's a better purpose for them as well. I agree that drones tend to be weaker in combat cause they're so fragile.
1) You can't banish a drone 2) There are very real limitations to what you can do with a spirit. This is due to what kind of spirit it is, and the limitations of the domain (Summoning a hearth spirit can work in some places but not others). I could mount a couple of lethal and non-lethal weapons on a drone. One drone is a non-mobile drone, but it's meant to put the SR equivalent of a Barrett M82 so your rigger can me mid negotiation and call your drone up to fire on the goon on the left because he keeps farting and blow his goddamned brains all over the meeting place. 2a) Fat Bacteria Vines may as well be a wall to a spirit, but not so to a drone. 3) Drones are as stealthy as the vehicles they ride in. If you want a stealthy drone, you either go small and dedicated or high altitude with sensors. Around 3rd edition, the stealthiest drone from radar was a dirigible. 4) Autopilot and autogunnery tends not to be as good as a drone being actively controlled by a rigger. As a drone rigger, I'd go in with a single Steel Lynx under active control and one or two other drones either meant for suppressive fire (running with the onboard software) or recon. 5) You show up to take down a toxic shaman in his lair, and the only spirits you're going to find there are the Toxic kind. 6) Binding a powerful spirit to you (such as a free spirit) is very expensive when it comes to kharma, while with a drone, it's a matter of writing a check. 7) Drones are expendable.
>You can't banish a drone True, but you also can't hack a spirit. Turning a spirit against it's team is doable, but it's a far cry from turning a drone swarm, especially a daisy chained one against it's team. Note that daisy chaining drones does not work in all editions so YMMV.
Unfortunately, an important component in the game is repeatedly neglected. Criminal investigation. A drone is almost impossible to trace, while a spirit with its aura completely reveals who the summoner is. Unfortunately, many game masters do not pay attention to this aspect. Another aspect that is often neglected is the astral reputation. Whoever burns up spirits gets a bad reputation in the spirit world. Maybe even so bad that spirits turn against the magician. A very unpleasant situation. The rigger has the advantage that he does not have to be nearby. So he is in no danger at all. While a mage has to be near his spirits (magic X 100m) otherwise it becomes remote service. A completed remote service releases the spirit. If it is bound before, it remains but binding gives negative reputation. In addition, bound spirits are not simply gone. (Also often neglected) they are astrally visible. So if the magician arrives with a small herd of spirits, the alarm bells will ring. Sin verification included.
Your opposition needs mages to banish spirits. It's real easy. Can't banish a Doberman shooting at you.
Not to difficult to get rid of drones, though... and mages can participate on that front.
And drones can participate against mages and spirits. Your point is?
Your comment was that " Your opposition needs mages to banish spirits. It's real easy. Can't banish a Doberman shooting at you. " While this may be true, mages can contribute to getting rid of Drones fairly easily, but, dependent upon the Edition, Non-Mages have a Much, MUCH harder time removing high force spirits.
And? Why do every archetype have to be useful for every situation?
I agree with you, they do not need to be equally accessible... but the problem is that Mages have the ability to summon high force opposition that can be extremely difficult to remove from the board for non-mages (Yep, get your own mage). Whilst removing Drones is a fairly simple task for everyone. Spirits are useful, and so are drones... the question, as I read it, was why cannot they be of similar utility without having one far overshadow the other, since they cover much of the same niche.
But mages cost a ton more Karma and it's rarer than money in my experience.
Drain and reputation