[FST_Gemstar]

Chrome Flesh helps a lot.   

Aspected d sorcerers make good street sams, usually billed as anti-magicians, made to fight enemy magicians/spirits. Counterspelling and assensing are not dependent on magic rating. You get to use weapon foci. You also can get a mentor spirit.

[Kuirem]

To sum it up :

Adept : always good stuff to pick even with only 1 Magic especially with Mentor Spirits. Powers like Traceless Walk or Wall Running can open a lot of options or just go for some extra Dice in whatever.

Aspected Magician : work well too, you want to take Sorcery as Conjuring and Enchanting are weak without Magic. Counterspelling, Assensing and Astral Combat do not scale on Magic so they are all good to build a burnout magician around. Combat and Illusion magics are big no as it is mostly opposed test, Health can work if you are not targetting yourself. Detection does not scale too much on the spell Force so it is a viable choice. Manipulation has some good utility spells like Levitate and can also work as well without too much magic.

Magician : Pick that only if you want to have access to Astral Projection (but the time is scaled on your Magic so it is pretty risky).

Mystic Adept : Not a bad pick since it combines the small benefits of both Adept and Aspected Magician but too costly. Too bad there is not an Aspected Mystic Adept.

[gilga]

Counterspelling is a good skill with magic 1 - the most common use  -spell defense- is not effective from magic 1. 

Asensing  is a really cool ability - no need to use magic. (I'd go for it).

summoning - summon F2 spirit and get access to concelment (-2 dice to spot you), or movement (x2 speed) not bad for 1 magic.

Levitate is a good spell - 1 hit does a lot for you.

Shape change - endless utility just 1 hit necessary to become any animal you like (+-2 body), or to change others.

Magic fingers - most of the utility stuff you can do with agility/str 1 or 2. (push buttons, deploy grenades, fetch little objects.

Shape material or element wall

because the ability to tunnel into a cooperate building, or to create a small wall can be very useful.

CLAIRVOYANCE  - the ability to look around corners - again 1 hit is enough to do so. 

You cannot do combat stuff - but you can still do many utility spell that would give you a lot of flavor.

[dposluns]

Counterspelling is a good skill with magic 1 - the most common use  -spell defense- is not effective from magic 1. 

Spell defense is just your Counterspelling skill, it doesn't rely on Magic. So it's actually very useful with Magic 1.

Some other neat ideas there.

[dposluns]

So I messed around with this a bit in Hero Lab and discovered the following:

• RAW, you can't do Burnout's Way with Aspected, since ways are only for Adepts (and this particular Way even references "the adept" in its text). So it's either an Adept or a Mystic Adept.
• It's maybe a bug in Hero Lab, but if you, say, have a Magic of 1 and drop your Essence by 2 then under the hood your magic goes to -1 and you need to raise it back up to 0 before you can raise it to 1 again. RAW I don't think this is how it's supposed to work but if you go with RAW there is something very questionable about the loophole that through BP you could start with a Magic of 1, reduce it to 0, pay nothing for the essence loss for a bunch of cyberware you get and then raise it back up for only 5, 10, 15 karma etc.
• Hero Lab also exposes some other corner cases in RAW that make this difficult to :
  
  • Essence loss not only drops your Magic stat but your MAX Magic stat, which means if you take >5 points of Essence (unless you take Exceptional Attribute, which you can't take in addition to Burnout's Way at chargen) you burn out and can never be magical again, via Initiation or otherwise.
  • Your Initiate grade can't be higher than your Magic level. So if your Magic gets to 0 you can't initiate at all, and if you Initiate before the essence loss that initiation goes away. So you can't Initiate at chargen (assuming that's houseruled as okay) to get around the Essence problem above.
  • You could take Burnout's Way after chargen for 0 karma (if you dump 2 points of Essence first without its benefit) but then you don't have the money from chargen to get the augments you want. (GM houserule to let you carry the money over for purposes of "secondary chargen" would solve this.)

I'm still playing around with it, but the challenges are daunting.

[dposluns]

Another issue is that if you want Astral Perception to fight spirits, projecting mages, etc. you can't ever technically let your Magic have hit 0 or you will lose the Adept Power, and you must have had it if you want to have the Assensing ability at chargen. You can gain it back via Initiation and Power Point but that's an expensive proposition.

[FST_Gemstar]

There are still some disagreements re: chargen rules and hitting magic 0.  Some would even argue that hitting magic 0 burns you out (even though that this is clearly not the case in crb, it is the case for technomancers in crb. instead of ruling as is, or more broadly to have technomancer rules work more like magic user rules, some would say that the magic rules are the incorrect ones and have them work more like the technomancer rules. Given the consensus that the technomancer rules are of much poorer quality and depth than the magic rules, I tend to favor keeping the magic rules in place and using them as a guide for techno rules.)

I don't play that magic score goes negative during chargen, especially for priority and sum to ten. There are no negative stats. If you start off as an aspected sorcerer priority d. And take 3 essence of 'ware. Your magic hits 0, your max magic drops to 3, and you can spend your meta special points to raise magic up or edge. Alternatively, you could use karma to buy back Magic during the last phase of chargen process, but of course your cannot say spend 15 karma to get Magic back to 2 and use a special point to get to 3.   

Karma buy may be a different story, but it may be edition carryover bias. Let's say you pick up aspected magician for 15 karma and the free Magic 1. Some would say that if you got two essence worth of 'ware on chargen, you would have to pay the karma to raise that Magic to 3 to let it drop back down to 1, because there aren't the same kinds of steps in karma buy, it just kind of happens all at once.  However, doing the math, this actually makes produces karmicly worse off characters than in the other two chargen systems. Karmicly similar characters can be created if that 15 karma and free Magic 1 is a floor. So let's say your aspected magician gets 2 essence worth of 'ware, their Magic would still be 1 without paying more karma and their max magic would be 4. If you want to raise Magic higher, you would pay the regular karma.

[Kuirem]

All those are perfectly normal except maybe for this magic/essence thing :

• There is no such thing as Negative attribute. 0 is always the minimum so it's true, if you have 1 Magic you can take -3 Essence at chargen and raise it back to 3 without further cost. This is a common cheese with Priority D Adept to get some cheap Adept Powers along with Cyberwares. Your GM might decide to rule that you have to spend your Special Attributes before buying Wares to avoid that though.
• If your magic get to 0 at chargen it is assumed that you can raise it back, else you would just wasted your priority on magic. Because there is no karma cost to get your Magic from 0 to 1 karmagen can abuse it even better because you will never waste points on your magic rating.
• If your magic gets to 0 during play you can kiss goodbye to your magic. Even if you manage to raise back your essence there is no way to get back your magic (unless your GM is super generous and allow a second awakening, not sure how it fits lore wise though). All your Active Magic skills will become Knowledge.

[FST_Gemstar]

You are allowed to raise magic back from 0 during play. Per the CRB, if your max magic hits 0, you are burned out. As long as your max magic stays above 0 you have the option to be magical. So if someone with magic 6 and essence 6 in play initiates. Their max magic becomes 7. They could then get 5.99 essence worth of 'ware. Dropping their magic to 0 and their max magic to 1. They have a Magic 0, but they are not burnt out. They can still buy back Magic to 1 and regain their magic abilities.

[dposluns]

You are allowed to raise magic back from 0 during play. Per the CRB, if your max magic hits 0, you are burned out. As long as your max magic stays above 0 you have the option to be magical. So if someone with magic 6 and essence 6 in play initiates. Their max magic becomes 7. They could then get 5.99 essence worth of 'ware. Dropping their magic to 0 and their max magic to 1. They have a Magic 0, but they are not burnt out. They can still buy back Magic to 1 and regain their magic abilities.

I agree with this except that in CRB it states that your Initiation grade may not be higher than your Magic level, and if your Magic drops below your Initiation grade then you lose that Initiation grade. The only way I see that working with the 5.99 Essence version is if you take Exceptional Attribute to keep your maximum from dropping to zero.

[FST_Gemstar]

Ah. good call! so you wouldn't be able to use initiate grades to hit 0. 


But you could start with Magic 4 And Max Magic 6. Hit Magic 0 with 5 essence lost, as your max magic would still be 1.

[dposluns]

Ah. good call! so you wouldn't be able to use initiate grades to hit 0. 


But you could start with Magic 4 And Max Magic 6. Hit Magic 0 with 5 essence lost, as your max magic would still be 1.

You can start with Magic 1 and Max Magic 6 (if you're doing point buy) so long as you don't spend more than 5 Essence, spending more than 5 is what gets you into the tricky corner (which basically dictates you must spend 14 Quality karma to take Exceptional Attribute to preserve your Awakened status).

[dposluns]

It's also hampering that in point-buy you can only spend 200 karma on resources, i.e. 400k nuyen, which is 50k less than what you can get with priority or sum-to-ten... 

[Glyph]

All those are perfectly normal except maybe for this magic/essence thing :

• If your magic get to 0 at chargen it is assumed that you can raise it back, else you would just wasted your priority on magic. Because there is no karma cost to get your Magic from 0 to 1 karmagen can abuse it even better because you will never waste points on your magic rating.

It isn't free.  You have to buy a special awakened quality to be an adept (20 Karma) or an aspected magician (15 Karma), which gives you a Magic rating of 1.