Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => General Discussion => Topic started by: jman5000 on <02-26-20/1335:01>
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Hey all,
before I start, I'm aware of the critiques of 6th edition Spirits and how they are over powered. I agree. However, before I house rule and nerf hardened armour and other changes - me and my players are attempting to play spirits Rules as Written.
I believe (but don't know for certain), that overpowered spirits are mitigated (somewhat) by the following:
1) the total # of services looks like, on average, to be between 1-4, with 2-3 being the norm
2) the action economy, especially when the conjurer acts in relation to spirits (so far, the conjurer seems to go AFTER the spirits in turn order), means there is always a delay between when the spirits want the command and when the conjurer orders the spirit - this creates a situation where the battlefield changes, sometimes drastically, between command and action often times invalidating the initial order - thus wasting the service.
the above assumes the following:
as the GM, my bias towards "acceptable" commands will lean towards the specific. thus "kill the bad guys" will not be acceptable. "attack mook A" would. This also implies that as a "thinking" spirit, if the command is "attack", then the spirit would use the powers available to it, in the context if they're in the Astral or Material realms - so "attack mook A" when the spirit is in the Astral, may involve using Confusion or Accident powers, as that would be true to the order, while "kill Mook b", would entail materialization before attacking, thus taking at least 2 turns. in 2 turns a LOT can happen
So, with that out of the way. While *I* don't have a hot clue how to necessarily combat spirits once a fight begins, I have to imagine that thugs, HTR squads and runners would have developed strategies in combating spirits knowing how over powered they are.
I've come up with the following tactics that I think *might* work to a certain extent. my assumptions here are that a) services are limited, and b) more actions to get a service completed is good because combats typically only last 4 or 5 rounds.
1) you have to see or know what the target is that you are commanding the spirit to attack: Thus, anything a target can do to obscure themselves from the Conjurer makes explicit orders more difficult. "kill anything inside that smoke cloud" is not a precise enough order. "find the troll inside that cloud", then "kill that troll you just found" would be good, and hopefully (for the troll), having to "spend" multiple service commands may cause the spirit to return to its home realm.
2) you have to be able to give orders: Thus, riffing off of the recognizing magic section (pg. 128), if you know spirits are in play, then the foes should do everything within their power to first find, then eliminate the conjurer. once the conjurer is down (or trying to stay alive), then the spirits will go idle once their current service order is complete. Sure, bad for the person under attack, but everyone else could remain safe.
3) have sacrificial mooks. assuming you survive your first round with the spirit, or you have time to prepare, then go full defense and use whatever gear etc. you have at your disposal to "anchor" the spirit to you. While the service is active, it will not do anything else and assuming the conjurer isn't going to change the orders (for fear of using up the available services), dodge, hitting the dirt, Taking cover, blocking etc. are all potential tactics that can keep the spirit nailed to a spot.
4) if the bad guys know they are going up against PC's that have a conjurer, purchase enchantments from the local talismonger or wage-mage, with mana barrier or confusion or mask or other spells to disrupt the spirit(s). the drawback here is the time limits on these enchantments and being able to setup the ambush.
5) figure out how to disrupt service commands. Change the state, so that the command is invalid or otherwise unfulfillable. I don't personally know how to do this - but I can theoretically see this being possible. *if* you can make the order invalid, then that service is expended, and the conjurer needs to issue another command - hopefully, this becomes a war of attrition between the conjurer's commands and the enemies ability to disrupt.
what else could PC's and bad-guys do to "combat" spirits? any idea how, mechanically, one could go about invalidating orders? Any other strategies 6th worlders would have come up with to stop or limit the nigh unstoppable spirits?
my motivation here is 2-fold:
- really tough spirits to kill is, IMO, a good thing, because I can throw those against my PC's from time to time and let them sweat. Anything that I'll do to nerf spirits for bad guys (who are typically less powerful than runners), would mean the PC's would have a much easier time combating them.
- having to come up with reasonable tactics for very difficult situations (But not uncommon ones), feels to me like something that would be taken seriously "in real life". I'm less interested in balance and more interested in creative problem solving. if that makes sense. having a kick ass spirit means the use of tactics and hard choices, rather than simply having a wall of HP's where you statically trade hits until one side or the other drops.
Cheers,
J.
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Genie Logic is a solid Nerf to spirits. Although if I was planning on using Spirits in Combat the first command I would give them (Like right after I summon one) would be "Hold an action until I give you a command" so they acted as soon as I gave them a command.
Killing Hands, Weapon Foci, Spells all cut through Spirits fast. Neurostun, Pepperpunch and the like have high enough damage codes that even ItNW usually isn't enough to stop all the damage. Grenades also have a high enough damage code.
Honestly for small to medium sized spirits (up to Force 6 or so) just shooting them works. Explosive rounds, Called Shot, Tight Burst, big dice pool, big gun, two Major Actions, a little Edge.... gets the job done. True story.
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There's lots of ways to house rule in nerfs for Spirits, but if you want to just use the tools available to you yes retaining control of what the spirits actually DO and what sorts of commands are viable is key. (or as Hobbes put it, make sure you use Genie Logic so that commanding a spirit can be a dicey proposition where you never know exactly what they're going to do)
Immunity to Normal Weapons makes spirits very, very tough for mundane opposition to deal with. At least on high-force spirits, anyway. Hobbes suggested using toxins, but it can be rough to explain why a pillar of living fire is somehow affected by narcoject... on the upside there was a toxin in 5e that explicitly worked on spirits. So it's not totally crazy to think that others might as well.
Of course, you could also just engage in some tit-for-tat with the players. Just let them know, on a meta level, however big the spirits you bring to a fight, is how big the spirits the NPCs will have when they call in their backup. When the corpsec goons scream about being under fire from mojo-slinging shadowrunners, the reinforcements are spearheaded by spirits to handle the PC's spirits so the mundane NPCs don't have to.
Honestly for small to medium sized spirits (up to Force 6 or so) just shooting them works. Explosive rounds, Called Shot, Tight Burst, big dice pool, big gun, two Major Actions, a little Edge.... gets the job done. True story.
I'd agree that 6 is the upper end of "reasonableness" from a game balance point of view. Once you go beyond F6, the dodge pools become so significant and the ItNW becomes so steep that in combination, they're abusive to employ on non-magical opposition. As a GM, you can simply refrain from doing it. If the players cannot or will not refrain from doing it, then those countermeasures described upthread become appropriate.
EDIT: I wanted to add that if the realm of House Rules enters this discussion, I'm a big fan of adding Vulnerabilities to every spirit type.
Water: Fire
Fire: Water, Asphyxiation
Air: loses ItNW in enclosed or sealed environments
Earth: Loses ItNW if not in direct contact with the ground
Beasts: Silver
Kin: Iron
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Another possibility, outside the realm of house rules, is to decree that summoned spirits come with diminished essence when summoned in non-ideal situations (due to damage from pollution, ambient misery tainting the local astral plane, or simply being summoned in an inappropriate place like an air spirit underground). By saying a summoned spirit has damaged essence, that in turn reduces its ItNW protection. A Force 9 spirit, for example, with 4 essence is still quite manageable by mundane options. Its dodge pool makes it a monster compared to a Force 4 spirit with full essence, but at least it's not an "I win" button.
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vulnerabilities and essence adjustments are super cool. I can just imagine my player hating these though :) but once we really get into it and decide that house rules are required - I think those are good discussion points.
so, how would some low level go-ganger mooks handle the conjurer? would they just turn tail and run? would they come equipped (normally) with some anti-spirit ordinance like things that go boom! :) (however, I can only imagine if everyone starts lobbing explosives around at the sight of every spirit, HTR and other high-end security forces are going to take a very dim view of THOSE shenanigans).
is there any in-game way to disrupt the mind-link between conjurer and spirit? (other than knocking the conjurer out?)
Cheers,
J.
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vulnerabilities and essence adjustments are super cool. I can just imagine my player hating these though :) but once we really get into it and decide that house rules are required - I think those are good discussion points.
As your one conjuring player, I think the idea that spirits may have vulnerabilities based on their composition or be better or worse depending on how they conjured is perfectly fine, even interesting. So I'm not sure who you will think will hate it? :-)
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so, how would some low level go-ganger mooks handle the conjurer?
So, first the Conjuror goes "Attack the people attacking us". The Spirit, during its turn, Materializes with its Major Action and uses a Minor Action to move to a decent spot. The gangers see the spirit, judge how tough it is based on whatever way they can estimate a Spirit's size or whatever, and then run like hell. The Spirit, seeing that everyone not on the mage's side (mage mentally communicated their own side through the mindlink during the Service command, after all) is running away so there are no attackers left, decides that the service is done. On its second turn, it dematerializes since the service is done. Ten minutes later, the runners run into a well-set ambush that separates the team from each other and allows the gangers to take a decent shot without a spirit getting in the way.
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vulnerabilities and essence adjustments are super cool. I can just imagine my player hating these though :) but once we really get into it and decide that house rules are required - I think those are good discussion points.
As your one conjuring player, I think the idea that spirits may have vulnerabilities based on their composition or be better or worse depending on how they conjured is perfectly fine, even interesting. So I'm not sure who you will think will hate it? :-)
'cause I'm playing devils advocate!
:P
Cheers,
J.
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so, how would some low level go-ganger mooks handle the conjurer?
So, first the Conjuror goes "Attack the people attacking us". The Spirit, during its turn, Materializes with its Major Action and uses a Minor Action to move to a decent spot. The gangers see the spirit, judge how tough it is based on whatever way they can estimate a Spirit's size or whatever, and then run like hell. The Spirit, seeing that everyone not on the mage's side (mage mentally communicated their own side through the mindlink during the Service command, after all) is running away so there are no attackers left, decides that the service is done. On its second turn, it dematerializes since the service is done. Ten minutes later, the runners run into a well-set ambush that separates the team from each other and allows the gangers to take a decent shot without a spirit getting in the way.
Ha!
OK. that's pretty close to how I was thinking. big difference is we've already negotiated (between myself and Skalchemist) that commands for services need to be MUCH more explicit than "attack the people attacking us". so in your example, the Conjurer will most likely say something like "kill go-ganger B", at which point the mooks will flee, the spirit will materialize then give chase to go-ganger B until that poor fool is dead. Depending on # of services remaining and visibility of the enemies in relation to the conjurer, the conjurer *may* be able to continue the attack if they can see other mooks. Otherwise, the spirit can be commanded to do something else, or it goes into a holding pattern until the mooks setup their ambush or something else...
if the conjurer suspects an attack is coming, he'll summon a pile of low force spirits
if the conjurer is surprised, he'll summon a big gnarly spirit
summoning can be noticed (I assume), so the surprise summoning would have a chance of being detected, but pre-emptive summoning before battle would not. mindlink suggests there is no obvious physical detection possible - unless you squint your eyes and suggest that the spirit will do "human"ish things like "turn to the person who has the mindlink", and if things like "turn in a direction" even make sense in this conext.
so, my thought of detecting the conjurer and simply Nuking from Low Orbit, seems to be a really hard task in all cases except for the emergency summoning. is this a correct line of reasoning or would the conjurer be easier to spot?
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It is not unreasonable for a successful gang to include a Physical Adept with Killings hands. Or a conjuring adept with a Spirit or two of their own. Gangs will absolutely try and recruit anyone in their turf with a hint of magical talent.
Yes small, local gang that is nothing but a pack of threat 1 or 2 mooks with no magic support will be wiped out by a Spirit. But honestly a decent Street Sam would mulch them pretty quick too. Don't worry about the NPC Cannon Fodder. They're Cannon Fodder, let the Cannon's Fodder them. Or however that works.
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Yes small, local gang that is nothing but a pack of threat 1 or 2 mooks with no magic support will be wiped out by a Spirit. But honestly a decent Street Sam would mulch them pretty quick too. Don't worry about the NPC Cannon Fodder. They're Cannon Fodder, let the Cannon's Fodder them. Or however that works.
yeah. cannoning fodder is fun, and I agree, there are many ways beyond a spirit which can deal with PR 1 or 2 mooks. one point though, my assumption of the prevalence of magic is based off of the first sentence of the magic chapter: "If you’re a mage, you’re rare. Powerful. Desired. Hunted." I know this is an "it depends" kind of question, but I assumed that facing off against magical opponents would be somewhat rare - but in typical games, how common are adepts or mages in gangs, corp-sec, or law enforcement? would you normally expect there to be some form of magical backup 1/2 the time? all the time? only in response to a magical escalation (such as spirits rampaging through an office tower)?
TBH, it feels pretty lame to me to simply "counter" the spirit problem by overloading opposition with magical counters. I would expect popcorn to be thrown at me if I consistently did that. Players gotta be awesome and shine amirite? ;)
Cheers,
J.
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Corp stuff flat out has magical security. Period. They spend the nuyen on Wards, Patrolling Spirits and Watchers, and if really sensitive on site Mages.
Gangs... the big ones have Magic. Smaller, local guys, not so much. Ancients, Halloweeners, ect, have magic. Local chapter of the Puyallup Bad Boys.. eh.
The fuzzy middle ground is the "everyday" stuff. Apartments, strip malls, small businesses, town home developments that Shadowrunners will be visiting. If the Plot dictates magical security, then it has them. Otherwise let the neighborhood rating be your guide. C or lower, not meaningful enough to matter. Occasional Lone Star Watcher or Spirit cruising through. B, sure, somewhat regular private security Spirits. A or higher, yes, meaningful Spirit and Watcher patrols with an Astral Mage showing up in seconds of an alert.
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As a GM, I treat low-force spirits as needing specific commands, and high-force spirits as being able to handle commands that are generally worded.
Low: beat up the people behind that wall (character pointing) until they stop moving.
High: help all of us (character waves at team) defeat those guys (waves at arriving vehicles) starting with that guy (points at the one grasping the MMG in the pintle mount).
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It's also important to remember dispite the prevalence of magic and spirits among PC's it is supposed to de rare and very frightening to "common" folk like low level mook gangers when someone pops a spirit out most of the time.
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Giving spirits a weakness is the key then really doesn't matter how op they are. i think of like superman needs krytponite to be interesting.
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Giving spirits a weakness is the key then really doesn't matter how op they are. i think of like superman needs krytponite to be interesting.
The best Superman stories tend to not feature kryptonite at all or use it extremely sparingly. When writers lean too hard on kryptonite it generally is a tell they aren't really writing the Superman character.
This goes doubly in RPGs, most editions of the D&D DMG for example heavily warn away against constantly nullifying player power because its a feels bad moment where the thing you were promised would be cool and fun isn't working and its not realistic for a player character to respec to deal with the problem. The classic "Fire Sorcerer not having fun because you keep throwing fire immune enemies at em" or "Taking the decker's deck away to 'challenge' them but they just mope unless the removal is extremely short term because suddenly everything their PC was about was poofed away" problem. Luckily, spirits for both PCs and NPCs don't really have that issue.
I would say, however, that a key fix to Spirits needs to be 'build agnostic.' It is totally, 100% fine if different archetypes have different ways of handling a problem and some are more direct and efficient than others, but the response to the question "How do I interact with a bit of the shadowrun world and overcome challenges related to it" should never be "Be an entirely different type of PC."
That is why a viable solution to the problem should be weapon, power source, and build agnostic: You shouldn't be out of luck because you didn't take killing hands, rolled mundane, or use bows or guns or melee. Its fine if it isn't fair for NPCs (in fact its ideal that NPCs can't casually have a plan for dealing with spirits in their back pocket in the same way runners can) but spirits are too big a part of how corporations deter shadowrunners to make the answer "Get a mage or adept to deal with it" acceptable.
As for Genie Logic, it strikes me as a poor substitute for actually balancing the spirit, similar to how background counts didn't really balance mages they were just a shrug to the GM telling them to arbitrarily penalize their mages and adepts till they felt it was alright in a way that wildly varied in actual outcome and targeted 'honest' uses of the abilities in question more than dishonest one. Genie Logic just encourages you to use spirits in simple, powerful ways, which often are the ways that sorta make other archetypes feel redundant and steal their spotlight (Especially samurai) rather than in nifty cool 'magey' ways. It also encourages very legalistic spirit services that are likely to slow the game down, and if a player is more casual about it they may feel 'gotcha'd' for using an iconic mage power that SHOULD be strong.
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One thing I have been sorta toying with for 6e is to make it so EVERY attack vs a spirit that is nullified by ITNW generates an edge (ignoring the edge limit), every offensive/negative spirit power you are subjected to generate an edge, and every attack a spirit makes against you that fails to hit or kill you generate an edge, and make an edge action (probably 5, but maybe 4) that allows you to make an attack against a spirit that ignores its ITNW and defense action. And, if a spirit a mage has summoned is banished or disrupted, that summoning 'slot' becomes locked for a bit to prevent just spamming spirits.
The outcomes of this are interesting. Thematically, it sorta makes sense that spirits would be suddenly vulnerable to a combatant determined enough to fight them for a few passes and for lucky/fateful shots to hurt them. It evokes Neijia a bit but is more general, free to all, and less, frankly, bad.
Mechanically this encourages PC mages to not casually try to throw spirits at problems unless they are a really good fit, because if you toss a spirit at a bunch of mooks your generating edge for those mooks faster than the spirit is likely to kill them. Combat PCs still want to do stuff like target weaknesses of NPC spirits or the mage summoning them, but if they absolutely have to fight the spirit (Ex: The mage is an offsite mage, or they are bugs bugs bugs) they are still rewarded for their investments into combat even if the fight is way harder.
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Also, more tools and things that interact with spirits in a more nuanced way help. In 5e the mundane usable anti-spirit options were 'spooky overpowered bioweapons that cost a ton' or 'niche expensive thing like a magic horn that is likely to not work anyway.' It just didn't work to make 'Only ones able to fight spirits' part of the mage and adept Pie because it meant any tool that was there to help mundanes deal with it felt like it needed to be pretty much unusable to justify more specialized anti-spirit stuff that mages and adepts had that was STILL bad because the best solution to spirits was throwing your own spirit at them.
All 6e really needs to do is print ghostbusters tech and things would be good to go. Like as simple as "Hey this thing turns ITNW into a mere soak bonus when turned on but it isn't a grenade so it needs to be placed on the ground and it shorts out after a minute" sorta stuff.
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For the game as is, and honestly even after spirits get balance changes, SR is a game where secretly there isn't a major street-prime distinction, your either a total chump or you have resources, and the game goes out of its way to be really unfair to total chumps. It is why the street level rules have never really felt good in SR: SR as a system isn't set up to ensure granularity of result among unauged characters with middling skill values and little access to equipment, because the game is about mages, street samurai, riggers, ect who decidedly are not those types of characters, and even PCs who evoke them are so out of their league that the trick to playing a PC who feels like they were a ganger is more in framing than actual mechanical power level. The mechanical difference between a ganger with 2 skill and 2 attribute and a corpsec with 4 skill and 4 attribute may as well not exist for anyone besides maybe the face and decker as they both generally miss in combat and have no way to handle any sort of superhuman combatant like a spirit or street samurai without highly specialized tools.
If a gang doesn't have an awakened member to its name, it is one of those tiny neighborhood gangs that tends to get swallowed up when a major player like The Ancients, a Go-Gang that is essentially a puppet of a hostile foriegn power which regularly funnels things like machine guns and rocket launchers into the Seattle black markets and which can start street wars to casually remove zone ratings from an area in defiance of KE as they refuse to be dislodged, decides to glance their way and have one of their mages start assaulting them with scry and die spirits. That neighborhood gang just... legitimately can't resist any group able to leverage any 'new' resource of the 6th world against it, remember this is a setting where a street gang if it wanted to spend the money could drone strike a building. Cruddy, scrappy gangs armed with sport rifles, pipes, and dreams exist, its just that most gangs who PCs have reason to care about can bring deckers, pseudo-samurai, riggers, and mages to bear, even if they are extremely weak by PC standards. The guys fighting for scraps are regularly just annihilated by anyone, even a somewhat fighty Face who invested in a little combat 'ware can hold their own being ambushed in an alleyway by those guys, a high force spirit is overkill.
Most groups of course can't have anti-magic sitting everywhere, so the way you deal with a hostile spirit if your one of the unlucky people who's job it is to delay superhuman combatants until HTR or backup or whatever arrives, is going to depend on your organization, its resources, and what you got. A gang may just call for Magic Larry to send as strong a spirit as he can, and if Magic Larry's spirit loses, that gang is going to bug out of that fight. Corpsec may try to send drones to sweep for unidentified people to try to neutralize any mages, use suppressing fire on the spirit to try to contain it, or utilize some on site 'ace in the hole' to help hold the line like drones with rifles or warded panic rooms to hold their VIPs in. The Ancients, if they don't have a mage or adept in the area, may just fall back if one of their 'officers' are there, or if they are a more... motley bunch in the middle of a 'turf war' with the government just start firing heavy weapons and explosives into an area because those fraggers are crazy.