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Question on Astral Combat, Weapon Foci, and skills

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adzling:
When you astral perceive your dual natured.

When your dual natures you can attack astral things with your meat stats and skills.

As long as said astral entity is within reach you don’t need astral combat.

Finstersang:
Astral Combat is hardly needed by mages. Same goes for Banishing. It´s far more effective to Combat Astral Targets with direct combat spells. I think both skills deserve to stay and receive more utility instead.

Ideas for more versatile Astral Combat:

* Astral Blocking: Equivalent to blocking/parrying. Usable against Standard Astral Combat and other forms of awakened CC, including unarmed Attacks by Dual-Natured Beings and melee Attacks using Weapon Foci or Adept Powers
* Astral Grappling/Interrupts/Other Ways of Binding enemies Considering astral Movement Speeds, this is badly needed to make the skill an actual threat.
* Astral Stealth: Rules for Astral Stealth are very sparse and seem to use the Sneaking Skill. However, you can argue that sneaking is a form of Warfare as well. Consider a broader sense of the word "Combat" here. In future editions (insert 6th edition joke here), the skill might as well be called Astral Movement then.
* Astral Running/Navigation/Tracking...: See above.
* Options against Astral Barriers
However, I´m not totally opposed to scrapping astral combat as a skill. If so, it should stay as a specialisation to all the Close Combat skills (and to other forms of astral movement, see above).


Since I mentioned Banishing: Some ideas to make this skill more versatile as well.

* Temporarily force a Spirit into the Astral Plane: Alternative way of disabling a spirit
* Temporarily force a Spirit into the Physical Plane: Wanna hide in Astral Space from the Scary Chrome Guy? Don´t think so, buddy!
* Temporarily prevent Astral beings from switching planes
* Confining a Spirit to a Certain Location
* Keeping a Spirits out of a Certain Location
* (Speaking of which: Why not use Banishing as the skill that is used for creating Mana Barriers?)
* Countersummoning: Like Counterspelling, but against Summoners
* Options against Possession: I think there is already some kind of Metamagic, but I don´t have the books ready atm...

Beta:
FWIW, to make banishing more useful (we hadn't realized how problematic it was at character creation, so valuable points were sunk into it), I'm testing allowing it be used in a manner similar to counter-spelling, but versus spirit powers.  So far it seems reasonable -- it puts free actions at a premium because both that use and counter-spelling use free actions, but it does make large spirits not quite as reliably powerful, and I like what that does for game-play.

Xenon:

--- Quote from: adzling on ---When your dual natures you can attack astral things with your meat stats and skills.
--- End quote ---
Wait. What??

When you use astral perception you can no longer hear, see, feel, taste or smell the physical world. You can only sense the astral plane. Yes, the physical world cast a shadow on the astral that you can sense and you would still hit anything with a physical body using your physical attributes and physical skills but your strength and skill to swing a sword mean nothing when fighting a wholly astral form that doesn’t have a physical body. You need to use mental combat spells or astral combat using your mental attributes.

SR5 Astral Combat
Astrally perceiving and dual-natured charac- ters use their physical attributes and skills to fight op- ponents with a physical body, and their Astral Combat + Willpower to fight wholly astral entities.

Michael Chandra:
When you use a weapon focus, page 315 lists the following rules:
Attack: Astral Combat + Willpower [Accuracy] v. Intuition + Logic
Damage: By weapon (using Charisma instead of Strength)

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