Actually, I don't realize that.  I mean, sure, you could cast that spell, you could cast it at 1 magic if you wanted.  But let's look at the numbers on this one.  I'll be generous and say you're an Elf shaman with 8 charisma and 7 willpower, essentially the most powerful drain resistance you could get.  You cast a spell at force 24, which is overcasting (by a lot), and resist the drain code f/2 +3, or 15 DV.  You roll your 15 dice vs 15 DV, statistically rolling 1 hit for every three dice, 15/3 = 5.  Unless your body 5 or greater, you're dead.  Even if you go nuts with foci and increase attribute spells, you're looking at a very hefty chunk of physical damage.

Now, maybe you didn't mean a force 24 or it just slipped your mind that the overcasting limit is set at your magic limit, not double it ;3  That's understandable since the game is new and probably none of us have had much opportunity to memorize all the rules.  But let's assume that you cast a force 12 armor as a grade 6 initiate.  Then you're looking at 9 DV stun damage, which you could reduce to 4, which would go away with a few hours' rest.  And, let's assume that you have enough body to wear an armor jacket without getting slowed down.  That gives you 8 ballistic armor and + 12 from your spell, or 20 armor.  Pretty spiffy.  Now, you get shot with an ares alpha from an equally karma-rific streetsam.  He rolls his automatics (assault rifles) 6(10) [+2 from specializing, +1 from enhanced articulation, +1 from reflex recorder] plus his agility 9 (max agility for everyone but an elf), or 19 dice.  He gets on average 6 hits, which would pump the full auto of his alpha (with ExEx of course) to 6 (base) + 2 (ExEx) + 9 (full auto) + 6 (extra hits), or DV 23, AP -3.  Now you've got your 20 armor minus three, plus your four body, so 21 dice vs DV 23.  That's an average 7 hits- there aren't any pieces of you left which can be seen by the naked eye.  Even if you had good reaction and dodge or were in cover or whatever and the sam only got one hit, you'd still be blown apart.

I'm not trying to talk down here, and I'm especially not trying to get into a hypothetic magic vs streetsam battle.  Obviously that could escalate to silly proportions (but my guy has 18 force 6 foci! but my guy has all deltaware and an army of combat drones! but my guy has 100 bound spirits!).  I'm just trying to prove my point that no matter how beefy a grade 12 mage is, he isn't invincible.  NOBODY is invincible in SR4- I even tried making a bullet eating tank troll, and he still ate it from an assault rifle.  I stacked on every point of body and armor I could in chargen, and he took 7 boxes from full auto (without staging up though), which even for him was halfway dead.  In SR3, the grade 6 initiate was a lot more powerful, since you could have a force 12 armor linked to cast instantly with a detect bullets spell (or something silly like that) which would reduce the 18D of a panther cannon to 2D which was easily soakable by anyone with good karma.  Though SR3 had its own problems- take the mage who ignores a non armor piercing panther cannon and shoot him with an APDS shotgun, and he's dead.  But I digress.

I don't deny that mages are pretty nuts when they reach their cap, and that they have a definite advantage over cyber characters.  Cyber characters can't be invisible, can't fly around, can't triple their armor at will, and can't bypass enemy defense by throwing a powerbolt.  But no matter how tough anyone gets, they're still vulnerable to 1500 nuyen weapons available in chargen.  As long as they can still be gunned down, they're not game breaking and thus I'd say they don't threaten game balance if there are too many of them.  Really, Runefire and I are agreeing on the main point that both of us made, which is that magic quotas are bad.  Since nobody can agree on what exactly is canon, I don't think that's useable as an excuse.  Since mages, though powerful, are never invincible, I don't think that power is an appropriate reason either.  The restriction on mages is already built into the book- they cost a lot of BPs.  Anything beyond that is a house rule.  Honestly, I think the player population will self regulate.  If new players see that the +census is packed with magical types, a lot of them will choose mundane.  There's a lot of value to novelty, and while some people are conformists on muxes, a large percentage are invariably anti-conformists who will always try to do something that nobody else is doing.  All that a cap on mages will do is, like Runefire says, turn away people who had their heart set on being magical before their first login.

Not completely true 15 DV yes.  This is why you don't normaly throw force 24 spells about (and yes thats what i was refering to).  However thats why you have edge.  I was also assuming a mage with enough time to get the spell up.  Thing is its not all that much different than it was in sr3.  To me magic is a bit better now in sr4.  Slower to advance but generaly more powerful in the end.  Wasn't trying to say you were completely off base and mages were invincible, more of trying to say its not 'easy' its very very posible, just not 'easy' as it looked like you were implying there.  so sorry for the confusion

There was one good reason for limiting magic characters under SRIII that may have been mitigated by SRIV, and it is a problem unique to a MU* environment.

Admin Support.

Magic rules in SRIII spanned multiple books, with all sorts of lovely little 'exceptions' scattered throughout various modules. They had their own set of rules dealing with magic that seemed to follow a logic of its own. Not every staff member was adept at dealing with the specific rules for awakened types for day to day activities, even with something as simple as casting a spell. Add in totem modifiers, and even being aware of the limitations that a totem is supposed to put on a character's actions...

Then we come to magic characters improving their magical abilities. No KSR for this. It requires admin support to deal with initiation, especially when a player wants to perform a task to lessen initiation costs. Then there's helping the player find a way to learn that metamagic they really want, or the discovery of that new adept power. And if they want an ally spirit, why, that's an entirely different design process! And learning or making new spells... you have to set up the spell design objects, take the rolls, set things up to be worked on, making sure that the new spell designs aren't boken or game-unbalancing (which failed on several occasions), and then _finally_ deal with the spell learning roll. Oh, and of course there's the astral quest to reduce the karma cost for the new spell, then adding it to the +sheet and deducting the karma cost.

And then there's the summoning of spirits/elementals. Making sure the necessary materials are there, taking the rolls, noting on the sheets...

It's all well and good to say, "Everyone should be able to play a mage if they want to!" But, under the SRIII system, mages required different staff support than other characters. In my experience, we barely had enough magic staff to keep up with the number of mojo-slingers we did have.

Erl makes a very good point here, which begs the question, is Magic any less complex in SR4 (its not something I've looked into, which is probably just exasperating the problem right there.)?

Now, I can see liking some complexity in the rules. It can give a player the feel of how complex a topic is IC by making a varied and complex topic, OOC. I mean, you can see that with the Rigging rules too. A character who specializes in Rigging can OOCly know a lot of options and things to do that the Sammie and the Mage might not even imagine.  They talk of CCSS rigging, MIJI tests, and manuvers. In the same way, mages can know a dozen little ways to get something done that the Sammie, Rigger, or Hacker might not. The same with Hacking. In fact, Sammies were really the only folks who didn't have a big wealth of OOC game knowledge to lord over as their speciality. Kinda makes me feel left out.

Now, that and some vaunted and false sense of 'realism' are really the only advantidges to multiple book-spanning rule systems that make someone specialize to really understand them fully. Like your Skillsofts being only as good as your Skillwires, the rules are only so good as the GM who has the time to understand them. If you end up with a lot of any of the types of characters who have uber complex rules, they lose out in the end because there skills can never be fully utilized by a GM who doesn't have the time to commit to memory a book's worth of rules and data, or the player's who don't have the time to sit around and wait for countless rules to be learned on the fly. This leads to winging the rules, just telling a hacker, "Roll Attack. IC rolls attack. Eyeball the numbers, you probably win, keep going." Or telling the mage, "Roll spell dice? Okay, you can fly for however long you need to."

Now, that was all pointless, I'm sure, but my solution to any sort of staff shortage would be to put the rule knowledge on the players. If we can trust the player to not lie, let him or her caculate the pool, the rules, etc, since they will already have committed them to memory. Let the GM's just have a brief over view of the subject, but let the Player's be specialists if they need too. Or just hve the GM run things fast and dirty, with generalized, eyeballed rolls.

Yeah. Its late.

Yes. Oohhhh yes.  Instead of having its own full book plus parts of other books, magic is contained in one short chapter of one book.  There are a few unique quirks to it, but all in all it follows the rules that every action does in SR4- attribute + skill = stuff happens.  Initiation has been pimp-slapped into a proper level of simplicity- you just pay the karma costs, get the metamagic you want, and maybe say what your character is doing to initiate.  There are no more groups, ordeals, or anything.  Initiation occupies one single page in the magic rules.  Everything else is pretty similar... Honestly, any staffers that aren't up to learning (or being familiar enough to work with) one chapter's worth of rules should think about another hobby.

Then again, just because the matrix and magic each occupy just one chapter each of just one book, does that mean admins are going to be willing to learn them?  Tradition might end up holding sway, with people saying "I don't do matrix/magic" because that's how they've been for the past 5-10 years of playing SR3.  If support is an issue though, I know that myself or NES would be willing to write a simplified tutorial on the topics (I think NES is already doing it).

Thanks for the offer, but I think our staff can handle it

I'm posting this here because the rule finagle happened to pop up here.

Force 24 armor spell, means, buggering yourself in the hiney.? I'll tell you why.

First, no one can have magic over 12 anymore.? So, tough luck, physical damage.

Its nigh impossible to resist the drain from a force 24 armor spell (as Tear pointed out earlier).

Third.? It'd be nigh impossible to score enough hits to make a Force 24 armor spell actually count as 24 armor let alone a force 12.? Assuming the 1 hit per 3 dice rolled, you'd have to be rolling 36 dice to just cap out the effectiveness of a Force 12 Armor spell.? Good luck on that, using all your edge, your foci, etc.? Wooo!? Mages.

Mages in SRIV are not Mages in SRIII.? One of the big differences now is Force limiting hits to a spell.? And that IS NOT net hits.? Its regular hits.? So if I have a Force 3 manabolt flying your way, and roll 20 5s or higher.? Whoops, only 3 matter, and you resist getting 3 5s, well too bad for me.? Should've cast it at higher Force.? There's a lot more a mage has to decide on these days.? Do I utilize the tool-based spells, like Health and Increase Attributes and Detection stuff.? Cause all that's important now (afterall raising your streetsam's agility 4 points would rock!).? Do you use the combat spells?? Where you will forever be mitigating whether or not to cast the spell at higher force for more successes and base DV or lower force to not take drain.? Or do you use the skill-based spells?? Like Invisibility, Stealth, etc.? You will mix-and-match but you'll also have burned a lotta BP by the time you are done buying Magic Attribute, spells, money for Foci, the many different skills available now, and be left with crappy attributes and a LONG way to go before even competing with a streetsam.? In SRIII I could chargen an earth elemental summoning god who could bring out 6 force 8 earth elementals to pummel you to death even if you had a sniper rifle with EXEX ammo (in fact none of them would take damage from that).? All the gloves are off in SR4, you've gotta be smart, a good well-balanced team, and you can't go without anything but have to sacrifice some of it.

I really like the new system, can you tell??

Please, NES, if you would: tell me what page it says that a magic attribute caps out at 12. I can't help but be curious. As far as I have read, the magic attribute can be bought up ad infinitum, so long as certain requirements are met, i.e initiate grades. (pg. 264, SR4)

SR4 p. 73:  "Magic and Resonance can both be raised to a natural maximum of 6 (+ initiation grade) regardless of metatype"  Also page 264, "Magic or Resonance may only be improved up to 6 plus the character?s initiation/submersion grade"

All attributes have a cap and magic is no exception.

On p. 189: "A character?s initiate grade cannot exceed her Magic attribute."

The best place to look for rules specific to initation is the initiation section of the magic chapter, not the karma costs section of the running the shadows chapter.  From these two rules exerpts you can see that 6 is the maximum magic/resonance can be raised to, and initiate grades are limited by a character's magic, so 12 is the highest magic one could have including initiation.

Well, hold on a minute. That rule that a player's initiate grade may not exceed his or her magic attribute is relating to the loss of magic due to essence loss or other things like that. Remember. Each time you initiatie, you get another magic rating.

So if you had a magic of 3, and initiatied once, you would have an initiate grade of one, but a magic rating of 4. Again, and you'd have an initiate grade of 2, magic of 5.

What that quote deals with, as far as I see it, is if you have say, a magic rating of 3, and an initiate rating of 3, somehow, if you took some essence stuff to lower your magic rating by one, your initiate grade would go down as well... or something. I could be wrong.

That quote is a universal statement.  The following statement does not modify it or limit it in any way shape or form.  The following sentence is simply a clarification about what happens to initiate grades if you lose magic. You are correct that losing 1 point of essence would also drop you 1 initiate grade, but this is not due to the 2nd sentence alone.  The fact that your initiate grade can't exceed your magic rating means that logically if your magic rating went down, your initiate grade went down as well.

A character's max natural magic is 6.  A character's max initiate grade is his natural magic attribute.  It's incredibly concrete and clear.

Magic does NOT go up when you initiate, only the maximum does so. You have to buy the actual increase separately. The only limit placed on initiation grades is your actual magic attribute, not your maximum magic attribute, not 6, not anything but what you have on the sheet. Similarly, the limit on Magic is 6 + Initiation Grades - Essence Loss. If you have 3 Magic, you can initiate up to 3 times, at which point you'll still have 3 Magic, but your maximum magic will now be 9, barring magic losses for whatever reason. If you then buy your Magic up to 9, you can initiate up to grade 9, at which point your maximum Magic will be 15. There is STILL no limit on how high your magic can go, as long as you've got the karma.

Thanks, waffle, I read it that way, too. 

Ok, wow.  I dunno how I missed that, prolly by being locked into the SR3 system of initiation and only looking at the rules which seemed to impose more sanity on it   

Now, my hope is that raising magic will eventually become so expensive as to be a virtual limit if not an actual one, let's see...  Improving an attribute costs new rating x 3 karma, and initiating costs 10 + grade x 3.  So grade one and magic 7 costs 13 + 21 = 34, nothing to sneeze at but ultimately doable.  Getting to grade 6 and 12 magic costs 18 + 36 = 54, getting pretty steep... And adding up all the karma from grades 1-6, I get 81 for the initiations and 171 for the increases, or 252 karma total.

I don't think anyone can argue that that's not a pisston of karma, and it only goes up from there.  Yes, MUX players have been known to achieve 500+ karma, but provided NS doesn't dole out karma by the bucket like Denver, it will take someone a loooong time to achieve this sort of power level.  And that's assuming they don't work on their skills or their attributes other than magic.

So yes, magic users have no overt power cap, so ostensibly the same issues with high karma magic characters who go up in initiate grades through bar RP that were present in SR3 muxes might still exist.  However, the serious limitations on spells (ie force limiting max hits, spells having affect based on rolled hits) means that this will still be less of an issue.

All in all I apologize though for not reading the rules more carefully, i'm going to go smack my roomate who's the one who initiatlly made me believe that initation was capped at 6.