[Noble Drake]

An interesting thought: The optional net hits add to damage rule actually better emulates the way damaging spells worked prior to 4th edition - back then you deliberately chose the wound level, and had to soak that level of drain so you would always have to soak enough drain to knock you out (or kill you) if you cast the spell with enough "oomph" to knock out or kill your target

Basically, if you wanted to do at least 10 boxes of damage, you were guaranteed to have to soak 10 boxes of drain.

[Glyph]

Kind of.  Spells back then sometimes had modifiers that increased or lowered the damage level.  For example, Death Touch had a Drain of (Damage Level-1).  Also keep in mind that damage levels staged up and down with every 2 hits, so even for Deadly damage, you didn't have to get ten hits on your Drain roll - just 8.

Damaging spells were worse for the defender in SR3.  If you cast a spell like manabolt for Deadly damage, you killed the target with a single net success.  Also, targets did not have Edge, counterspelling was rarer (since it came out of your spell pool), and foci and totems could add a lot more dice to a mage's roll.

[Noble Drake]

Glyph, all that you say is correct. One part, however, is a both true and not quite true at the same time - characters in pre-4th edition games did not have Edge, but they did have Karma Pool, and Karma Pool did most of the things that Edge can do (such as re-roll any roll) and refreshed by encounter by default in every edition I have read about it in.

and instead of having to choose to invest your build points into it, you simple got more and more of it as you gained karma... though I guess you could say that the option to buy your Edge higher than 1 in SR4 is about equivalent to getting to use your 1 Karma Pool point for one roll every scene rather than one roll per session.

[Falconer]

Yeah though to be honest... back then I don't think I ever learned a spell at higher than serious.   Because the difference between needing 1 or 2 hits to get to deadly was normally pretty small.   But if so it would be at a lower force like 5 (so your TN on drain was the minimum possible of 2... because you needed a lot of successes to bring drain back down and wanted those anything but a 1's)...  The problem being you needed 6 net hits to stage the drain down to nothing... 4 to get it to light.  Also didn't SR3 change it to you chose the damage level at time of casting IIRC.  It's been a while. 

I also would see people learn spells at light or medium damage but at really high force.   More or less... counting on their dice pool getting a lot of successes staging damage up and the defender getting few to none at say force 12 to stage the damage back down.   Also it only took 2 or 4 successes to stage the drain back to nothing making the higher TN on drain less of an issue.

Re: karma pool...
rarely used it I found... but I had no issues with the spell pool, combat pool, etc.  But understand why they went by the wayside... My only catch with SR4 is that adding the attribute to every test instead of attributes working into your pools... then you needing to parcel those dice out carefully over the combat turn.   It's made the skill a lot less important since it's typically only a quarter of the dice pool anymore (25-50% is the attribute now, another 25% from equipment/modifiers, and 25% from the skill on many optomized builds).  It took a lot of the decision making out...

[Noble Drake]

yes, SR3 had it so that you chose the damage level (and thus the drain level) at the time of the casting... so you didn't have to have to learn the same attack or healing spell at different forces and levels too.

[Falconer]

Actually you did... you still needed to learn spells at a given force.   That was the maximum force you could use for that spell.

[Noble Drake]

Actually you did... you still needed to learn spells at a given force.   That was the maximum force you could use for that spell.

That's what I said... you didn't have to learn it at different force and levels - meaning you had force 5 powerbolt and then would have to buy force 6 powerbolt if you wanted it, but you did not have force 5 powerbolt (moderate) and force 6 powerbolt (deadly) and then have to go buy a force 7 powerbolt (moderate) because you wanted to upgrade.

[XarXar]

If you're that good, just multicast two lower force spells for the same drain.

Or overcast the spell for less drain. Wherein lies the idiocy of that rule.

As an example: Force 5 Stun Bolt dealing 10 damage = 7 drain
                             Force 10 Stun Bolt dealing 10 damage = 5 drain

Hmm, I wonder what the smarter mage is gonna do...

Can you please explain this math to me used to figure out drain in your exmaples?

Thanks

[Critias]

If you're that good, just multicast two lower force spells for the same drain.

Or overcast the spell for less drain. Wherein lies the idiocy of that rule.

As an example: Force 5 Stun Bolt dealing 10 damage = 7 drain
                             Force 10 Stun Bolt dealing 10 damage = 5 drain

Hmm, I wonder what the smarter mage is gonna do...

Can you please explain this math to me used to figure out drain in your exmaples?

Thanks

Force 5 Stun Bolt (base drain 2), "dealing 10 damage" (means +5 hits on the roll, so +5 drain) = 7 drain

Force 10 Stun Bolt (base drain 5), "dealing 10 damage" (means no extra hits, so no extra drain) = 5 drain.

[Falconer]

Xarxar; we were discussing the optional rule for direct spell drain published in the core SR4a.   There are a few people on the forums who are very vociferous in being against it.   The basic rule for spells is you roll successes then you MAY but not must use any net successes after resistance to increase damage for combat spells (remember your pre-comparison successes are capped by force).   Another thing you'll notice is I try and pick odd numbers for force... because drain is force/2 round down + drain code (-1 for a stunbolt).  Direct spells always require at least 1 net hit or they fail.

Since generally direct spells are a better pick than indirect combat spells against living targets.  Indirects are better for dealing with drones and things with high object resistance generally... or for producing instantaneous secondary elemental effects.   The optional rule in SR4a is that direct combat spells add any net successes used for damage to the drain.   Direct spells are all or nothing affairs... while indirects don't have to worry about overcoming object resistance... but the target gets to soak the damage just as if he were shot with a gun.

This produces 3 cases in the rules... the first is the mage continues to cast as if the rule was not in place.  This results in 2 base drain... going up to 7 potentially if all the successes are used.  This is the least drain friendly way to do it.  (normally the force used is 7 or 9... because it produces enough damage after net hits to knock something out or kill it in a single action... while only incurring 2 or 3 drain on the caster without the optional rule.).

The second, is the mage just overcasts at force 10 or 11 right away if his magic is 5 or 6 or higher (enough to knockout something with wilpower 6 or less).  The Drain goes up by one to 4 (11/2 -1 round down).   Given the vagaries of prob and stat... if you have 12 dice to resist drain... you average 4... but average is skewed by when you roll 5 or 6 or 7... and can't use the extra successes.  In practice it works out to between 30-40% of the time with 12 dice you suffer 1 or more drain, as opposed to only roughly 20% of the time with the lower 3 drain above (roughly doubling the drain suffered on those spells).

The 3rd least used option, is the mage multicasts.. casts more than one spell at the same time by splitting his dice pool.   Each spell has +1 increased drain for every spell also cast at the same time past the first... so in this case... lower the force from 7 to 5... but cast it twice... this results in two spells each with 2 drain.  (5/2 -1drain code +1 multicast2).  So the drain is the same as the force 7 in the first case... but it's resisted with the full drain pool twice.

Guys, wasn't stating all this to restart the argument... we've all said our peace... only trying to explain the ropes a bit better to the newbie.

[Glyph]

The biggest drawback to overcasting is that the damage is physical.  On the other hand, with decent first aid, it can still be viable (when the optional rule is used), since often those few, occasional boxes of damage can be taken care of by a teammate.  Of course, an even more viable tactic is to switch to areas that have not been nerfed, such as summoned spirits or mental manipulation spells.

[JustADude]

The biggest drawback to overcasting is that the damage is physical.  On the other hand, with decent first aid, it can still be viable (when the optional rule is used), since often those few, occasional boxes of damage can be taken care of by a teammate.  Of course, an even more viable tactic is to switch to areas that have not been nerfed, such as summoned spirits or mental manipulation spells.

Ayup... Force 5 Mob Mind + "Kill Yourself" = Dead, and Force 11 Powerball = Dead.

Same result, just a different Mentor Spirit and Specialty.