Shadowrun
Shadowrun Play => Rules and such => Topic started by: Prime Mover on <09-02-19/1422:52>
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I’m unclear as to what are the capabilities of a watcher (minion) are. Can speak, have skills and can’t be banished or counterspelled. But what do they do?
My assumption after reading errata, watchers are a type of spirit that doesn’t get powers and in exchange can’t be disrupted like a spirit. Being Summoned from the conjurors mind as opposed to astral plane? They have a base attribute and skill that can be raised. Do they have the ritual leaders skill list?
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Yeah looks like the stat block is missing. SR5 they had skill wise assensing, perception, astral combat at their 1/2 force. So given this system I’d say 2+1 for each hour spent on this ritual.
Powers astral from, manifest, search and salience.
But hey it’s not like you can summon one anyways. With a 4 threshold you need 5 hits for it to last 3 hours or a average of 15 dice. It’s a watcher things you spun up in a instant in 4e and earlier. They weren’t very useful but they were easy to spin up. Here still not useful but it takes a separate ritual and it a long pain in the ass to summon.
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Yea in previous edition had to houserule they had summoners perception ratings to make search power usable.
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Yeah look at them search with 2 dice or whatever in early editions but at least you spin them up in the field in a instant for virtually no drain.
Ritual magic needs to drop the requirement of having a lodge make it a bonus not a requirement. It doesn’t work for a lot the rituals. The time it do a ritual for some of these should be minutes at most others heck make it days. The thresholds should be halved if not removed with some other difficulty system put in. For watchers net hits should increase the attributes not more time.
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Since every spirit has Astral, Close Combat, Perception, I'd for now assume a Watcher has exactly those 3 skills. The ritual is really expensive for players, only a group of NPCs would do well at one. It's nice for aspected sorcerers and those that don't trust the gossiping spirits to get something done in secret.
Edit: Note that if you're willing to put in a lot of Edge, which a group can easily do with Edge transfers, you can reroll all dice which heavily buffs the average hits (6(skill) + 6(attr) + 6(tw) + 3(exp) + 3(foc) = 24 dice = 13 1/3 hit average rerolling). So right now rituals are balanced around massive NPCs and/or edge usage, I think.
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They aren’t balanced around edge either. A mage should be able to put up a decent ward on their own. 6 magic+ 6 skill+ 6 dice from x, y and z plus edge to reroll all failures would get a rating 4 ward. That’s just pathetic for a dude who went that far in to make rituals and used edge. A 6+6 mage no other crap should be able to handle a rating 4 ward. Add in focusses l, specialization and edge it should be rating 8+. The ritual magic system I seriously doubt was ever tested or mathed out.
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'Mages are OP but if anything of them isn't it proves the designers didn't do their job'.
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'Mages are OP but if anything of them isn't it proves the designers didn't do their job'.
Mages are OP the ability to place wards wasn't something that made them OP though. It's like they went out of their way to target all of the things that were not over powered and weaken them while leaving the broken things intact. Ritual spells were not broken in 5e, alchemy was weak in 5e, why make these things weaker while making Summoning the thing that was the most OP even more OP.
A rating 4 ward again built by a super specialized ward making mage using a large chunk of edge would be bypassed by a mage high school kid trying to peep on his neighbor. Wards are described as a basic ritual mages first learn, but apparently none can cast. A rating 6+6 magic+6 teamwork would on average fail at making a ward without edge. It barely can be made by a team of professional mages using edge. If it was intended just for NPCs as some setting material, save it for a later source book.
The math on many of these rituals don't workout for the setting unless you assume all NPCs are tossing massive dice pools for some reason and still making wards. The cable installer of magic is tossing 20+ die pools with a team of highly professional mages backing him up to ward up basic offices to a decent level. The math not working without these massive die pools is why it looks like they didn't really test this section. Ritual magic isn't common in many campaigns, so I can see why it never got tested but I think it is pretty obvious the math is off here. Make the threshold of the ward the rating of the ward you are trying to make, you have to scrounge on average 18 dice to make a rating 6 ward which is a pretty common ward you want to go past that your die pool is going to have to be teamwork massive.
Making some death spell from 3,000 miles away hard is one thing, wards, watchers, healing circles all should be fairly easy to accomplish as they don't make the mage OP.
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You do realise that your constant attacks on the designers poisoned your well? Ditch the toxic attitude and maybe people will actually be able to listen to you.
I'm out. Clicking open negative posts is exhausting.
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I’m unclear as to what are the capabilities of a watcher (minion) are. Can speak, have skills and can’t be banished or counterspelled. But what do they do?
My assumption after reading errata, watchers are a type of spirit that doesn’t get powers and in exchange can’t be disrupted like a spirit. Being Summoned from the conjurors mind as opposed to astral plane? They have a base attribute and skill that can be raised. Do they have the ritual leaders skill list?
Note: We have no idea what errata are in the works, but they very likely will resolve most of your questions. After all, a missing statblock is a big thing. Who knows what else might turn out. Here's hoping the errata are released by the time the physical books release. One more month or so of waiting... :-[
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You do realise that your constant attacks on the designers poisoned your well? Ditch the toxic attitude and maybe people will actually be able to listen to you.
I'm out. Clicking open negative posts is exhausting.
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He's just telling the truth. The ritual rules are a disgrace. No objective excuse for this.
Paying customers can expect something different (like rules that somebody spent 10 minutes to calculate through).
It's just that there is no other competing Shadowrun ruleset one can buy instead . . . It's really sad. So many complete failures in SR 6.
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You do realise that your constant attacks on the designers poisoned your well? Ditch the toxic attitude and maybe people will actually be able to listen to you.
I'm out. Clicking open negative posts is exhausting.
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He's just telling the truth. The ritual rules are a disgrace. No objective excuse for this.
Paying customers can expect something different (like rules that somebody spent 10 minutes to calculate through).
It's just that there is no other competing Shadowrun ruleset one can buy instead . . . It's really sad. So many complete failures in SR 6.
Oh look, you can buy 1st Edition (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/78877/Shadowrun-First-Edition?cPath=4328_6361), 2nd Edition (sorry, no PDF) (https://www.ebay.com/p/Shadowrun-Shadowrun-by-FASA-Corporation-Staff-1992-Paperback/1064129?iid=362733719029&chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-117182-37290-0&mkcid=2&itemid=362733719029&targetid=595232447909&device=c&mktype=pla&googleloc=9003812&poi=&campaignid=2086087614&mkgroupid=76935344043&rlsatarget=pla-595232447909&abcId=1141016&merchantid=100500708&gclid=Cj0KCQjwwb3rBRDrARIsALR3XeYkH35U9x3qQ4YH3uFoHgVHJhBY53Y-2OCuytyGSHDMybysBnb8x8caApjlEALw_wcB), 3rd Edition (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/1893/Shadowrun-Third-Edition?cPath=4328_6359), 4th Edition (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/60553/Shadowrun-4th-Ed-20th-Anniversary-Core-Rulebook?cPath=4328_4543), and 5th Edition (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/115985/Shadowrun-Fifth-Edition-Core-Rulebook-Master-Index-Edition?cPath=4328_10253). Not too mention there are Savage World mods to play Shadowrun, and probably a dozen others. And if you really are desperate, I can look up my old d20 conversion I did over a decade ago. So, there are at least SEVEN alternatives to using 6th edition rules.
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All of which are not the current SR version, which has both the Universe as well as the number of players a current verison has.
Please dont justify bad rules. Just accept that they are bad and make them better. Why do we always have to defend bad rules here?
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*blows whistle* Foul! Moving goalposts!
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All of which are not the current SR version, which has both the Universe as well as the number of players a current verison has.
Please dont justify bad rules. Just accept that they are bad and make them better. Why do we always have to defend bad rules here?
I'm sorry, you don't like the current rules, so the ONLY other option is to purchase other rules. No one is forcing you to play by the current rules and, if they are, you shouldn't let them.