[SR4] Mystic Adept Improved Ability

[LibraryOgre]

Would you allow a Mystic Adept to improve Magic skills (Spellcasting, Summoning, etc.) through the Improved Ability adept power? At what rate?

[TeChameleon]

Based on the reading of the Improved Ability power description, I'd lean towards 'no' for allowing it, but if you did, for simplicity's sake if nothing else, just using the same rules as improving any other combat skill would probably be best. Frankly, from what I've seen of Shadowrun, any magic-user is going to be so hungry for Karma anyhow that allowing this wouldn't likely be game-breaking.

[Earthwalker]

I would say No.
What you can increase is stated in the book and magic skills are not allowed.

[TheOOB]

By the rules no, by my sense of internal logic and game balance, also no.

Adept powers are designed to increase your basic physical(or mental) abilities, often to supernatural limits. It's about being better at what you already can do. Magician powers are about doing things that mundanes can't do, namely sorcery and conjuring(and enchanting). It has little to do with your own natural abilities and is entirely supernatural. Adept powers just don't make sense enhancing magical abilities.

From a game balance perspective, Mystic Adepts are kind of a weird hybrid. You have your adept magic score, and your magician magic score, they are, for the most part, completely separate, they give you different abilities. Using your adept magic to enhance your magician abilities doesn't make sense when you are supposed to just raise your magician magic for that.

[LibraryOgre]

Actually, my initial concept for it came from Earthdawn, where more or less everyone is a mystic adept. Similar to realizing that you could use Spirits of Man as Spell Matricies (summon one to cast a given spell, and let it take the drain).

[Dimers]

I'm of the mindset that I can correct any balance problem in some in- or out-of-game fashion, guaranteed (mostly because I don't play with jerks). So even if it turns out to be a bad idea to let the Mystic Adept improve Spellcasting, no big deal, it can be solved. My gut reaction is "yes but you pay a lot for it" ... I'd probably go for something complicated, like .25 per level for each spirit type or spell category.

[TheOOB]

I'm of the mindset that I can correct any balance problem in some in- or out-of-game fashion, guaranteed (mostly because I don't play with jerks). So even if it turns out to be a bad idea to let the Mystic Adept improve Spellcasting, no big deal, it can be solved. My gut reaction is "yes but you pay a lot for it" ... I'd probably go for something complicated, like .25 per level for each spirit type or spell category.

Or they could just increase their magician magic rating. The only reason to use improved ability to increase your magical skill is to be twinky.

[Dimers]

Or they could just increase their magician magic rating. The only reason to use improved ability to increase your magical skill is to be twinky.

Well, like I said, I don't play with jerks, so someone doing something just to "be twinky" doesn't happen in my paradigm. And my suggestion would actually provide an additional reason to buy Improved Ability in place of overall Magic. But you're quite right by RAW.

[LibraryOgre]

I talked with my GM; he would've let me do it, but I stuck with full magician


Or they could just increase their magician magic rating. The only reason to use improved ability to increase your magical skill is to be twinky.

How is it twinkier than using Improved Ability to boost your Combat skills?

[TheOOB]

How is it twinkier than using Improved Ability to boost your Combat skills?

It's simple. When you raise your magic, you can decide to have it apply to your magician magic, or your adept magic. The balancing factor of a Mystic Adept is that they have to raise both magic scores separately, so that when you raise your magic you get better at being an adept, or better at being a magician. Not both.

There are only two reasons to use PP gained from Adept magic to increase your magical active skills. The first is so that you continue to gain power as a magician while increasing your adept abilities as well, which flies in the face of the entire balancing point of the mystic adept. The second reason is that you can get a bigger bonus to your magical active skills than just by raising your magic, which would make you a better magician than a pure magician...which makes no sense. In either case you are breaking the idea that a Mystic Adept is worse than either a full Adept or a full Magician, but has abilities from both.

Asking why it's different than increasing combat skills is kind of silly. It's already easy to get large combat skill dice pools without adept powers, and in fact you can already increase your skill rating with 'ware(such as reflex enhancers). Furthermore, increases to combat skills just give you a minor increase to your accuracy, and by extension damage. Magic skills, on the other hand, are very hard to get a higher dice pool. Aside from your skill rating, magic rating, and foci, there is very very little that gives you a boost. This makes any sort of dice pool bonus to magic rolls much better right off the bat. When you consider the kinds of power effects high magic dice pools can consistently get you, you should come to realize that magic dice pools are hard to increase for a reason.

[LibraryOgre]

To your first, this is patently not true.

Any points put into Improved ability are an opportunity cost... you cannot assign points put into Improved Ability to increase your combat ability. If used at the .5 rate (per combat skills), the result is a larger dice pool for magical skills, but at several costs. An increased magic will improve ALL magical skills, not just the ones for which you select improved ability. Your magic is still effectively what it is, limiting maximum force and maximum stun force.

Let us compare two characters, a mystic adept and a full magician. Both have Magic attributes of 5, and both have put 4 points into the Sorcery and Conjuring skill groups, as well as Enchanting. We will assume they are otherwise identical (though the adept has 5 points less of flaws).

The mystic adept puts 1 point into Improved Spellcasting (rating 2, since we're going with .5 per point), giving him an effective 4 Magic, and a Spellcasting dice pool of 4+4+2, or 10. His Dice Pool for all other magic skills is 8.

By comparison, the full magician has 5 points of Magic, and an effective pool for Magic-based skills of 9... he's slightly worse than the Mystic Adept for Spellcasting, but better in everything else. He can also astrally perceive and project, which will help him later.

Later, they each add a point of Magic. The Mystic Adept funnels it into more Spellcasting, and the Magician just puts it into Magic. MA now has a Spellcasting pool of 12, but a regular pool of 8. Magician has a pool of 10 for everything.

Mystic Adept is a better spellcaster than Magician, but he's falling further behind for every other application of Magic. He's also limited in his Force, and thus maximum hits for spellcasting. When they initiate, he's also at a disadvantage in available metamagics, and will never be able to take an astral quest or many other astrally-aspected metamagics... and if he DOES devote a point to Astral Perception (or any other adept power), he falls behind the full mage, even in his chosen specialty.

It's a specialist course, and somewhat equivalent to taking an Aspected Magician Flaw (you gain 5 points, but are -4 to using magical abilities outside your specialty).

Metaphysically, I'd point to the Earthdawn magician classes, who explicitly used magic to improve their ability to cast spells... ALL spellcasting was done via the magical Spellcasting talent, rather than a spellcasting skill. That was at a different point in the magical cycle, however.

[TheOOB]

I understand, but your arguments still don't address the basic issue here. A Mystic Adept is fundamentally two different character with different abilities, they are an adept, and they are a magician, with the balancing factor that they can only raise one of those two's powers each time they increase their magic.

So when you raise magic, you make the choice to become a better adept, or become a better magician, but saying you're going to become a better adept and a better magician is just wrong, it defeats the entire idea behind it. Furthermore, as mystic adepts are weak adepts and weak magicians, it doesn't make sense that you can gain an adept power and adept cannot gain, and gain magic skill bonuses a magician cannot gain.

If you want to allow it, by all means, rule 0 and all that. I just don't think it makes sense, either thematically or mechanically.

Also, an aside, comparing SR to Earthdawn isn't always a good idea. The settings or only vaguely related, and the mechanics are vastly different. Even if you agree that Earthdawn and Shadowrun are the same thing just different times, Earthdawn magic is vastly more advanced than Shadowrun.

[a_humble_lich]

I would be leery to allow raising Spellcasting and Summoning; however, more interesting in my opinion would be using Improved Ability to raise other magic skills. A Mystic Adept with Improved Counterspell and Banishing could be interesting, as could one with Astral Perception, a weapon focus, and Improved Astral Combat. There is even some precedent for allowing the latter, as Enhanced Perception adds to Assensing test as well as Perception.

[Earthwalker]

I think my main problem with this, is it is just one more way to increase the dice you can roll by specializing.

for casting spells the Mage is

5 magic + 4 skill + 2 Specialized to combat + 4 from a power focus.
Total 13

A Mystic Adept can always beat him at number of dice at what he chooses.
2 Magic + 4 Skill + 2 Specialized to combat + 4 from power focus + 6 from imp ability.
Total 16

Each extra magic attribute the MA gains one more dice on the mage.
The Mystic Adept gives up a lot of things for this but if its about getting the spell past someones defense then he has it made.

[Seerow]

In the Way of the Adept pdf (I think that's what it was called, it might be something else. It was a small booklet with new adept 'ways' that could be bought as qualities to make certain powers cheaper and unlock a few new powers), I'm pretty sure there was an adept power that allows a Mystic Adept to boost Counterspelling. I thought that was a pretty neat trick.

I don't think there was anything that lets you boost actual casting skills like Summoning/Banishing, but honestly I think that's for the better. Compare the casting skills to just about any other skill, and you see bonus dice there are much more tightly controlled. This I feel is in large part because those casting skills are so much more versatile than anything else. With Sorcery, you use the same dice pool to make illusions, high power offensive combat, single target attacks, multi-target attacks, healing, mobility, sneaking, utility, etc. Any other character would consider themselves blessed to accomplish half as much with twice as many skills. This is a very good reason in of itself to discourage allowing extra boosts to the core magic skills.

The other thing is, the vast majority of characters have MUCH less defense vs casting than vs other types of attacks. A commlink with a rating 6 firewall and some defensive programs can be bought for 10-20k nuyen, and is good enough to protect you from most hacker attacks, or at least hold off the hacker for your own to go after him. You can get all sorts of boosts for perception relatively cheaply, to make stealth less effective against you.

Against physical attacks you have dodge (based off Reaction which is a primary attribute for most characters) which can be bought as a skill by anyone, or even as a part of a skill group if you want to be more athletic. (Okay you get gymnastics instead of dodge, but it's literally the same exact thing), and after that you have both your body and your armor to soak it. Armor is cheap and easy to get, and can be stacked really high if you know what you're doing. Between the two you actually can survive even against the people throwing around 20+ dice on their attacks.

On the other hand with Magic, the similar defenses just aren't there. You get Willpower, and that's basically it unless you're a mage or have a mage watching you at all times. There is no way you can buy gear to boost your resistance to magic. No way you can buy a skill that will boost your resistance to magic (unless you yourself are magic). This, I'm relatively sure, is at least part of the reason why bonus dice for casting is so tightly controlled. With the lack of scaleable defenses to offset it, allowing magic users to boost their casting dice too much makes it more likely anyone facing them has no chance of succeeding.

[LibraryOgre]

So when you raise magic, you make the choice to become a better adept, or become a better magician, but saying you're going to become a better adept and a better magician is just wrong, it defeats the entire idea behind it. Furthermore, as mystic adepts are weak adepts and weak magicians, it doesn't make sense that you can gain an adept power and adept cannot gain, and gain magic skill bonuses a magician cannot gain.

Again, I disagree that this divorces you from that choice. Because the points in adept abilities are permanently spent, putting points in IA doesn't make you a "better adept" in the way adepts are usually used (i.e. as physical combatants). It makes you a better magician, but in a different, more specialized, way than a full on magic increase. Furthermore, a Mystic Adept already has access to one power an Adept does not... magical ability.

[TheOOB]

Again, I disagree that this divorces you from that choice. Because the points in adept abilities are permanently spent, putting points in IA doesn't make you a "better adept" in the way adepts are usually used (i.e. as physical combatants). It makes you a better magician, but in a different, more specialized, way than a full on magic increase. Furthermore, a Mystic Adept already has access to one power an Adept does not... magical ability.

Magical abilities isn't a power, it's a quality.

Also, putting a point into your adept magic does make you a better adept, as it increases your magic value for use with adept powers, as well as increasing how many times you can take certain adept powers.

[Rogue13]

...(snip)

A Mystic Adept can always beat him at number of dice at what he chooses.
2 Magic + 4 Skill + 2 Specialized to combat + 4 from power focus + 6 from imp ability.
Total 16

(snip)...

I know this is an old thread, but just how does a mystic adept get +6 dice from improved ability? Improved Ability DIRECTLY RAISES the skill level, not adding to the dice pool, so: Rule (1) Modified skill maximum is 1.5x skill, maximum modified skill would be 6 (4 + 2 from improved ability) at skill 4, +3 is the maximum EVER, to ANY skill increased by this power. And even if you ignore this, then Rule (2) Maximum adept power level = ADEPT MAGIC rating, which in this case would be +3 (Magic 2/3 Full/Adept), so no adept power, no matter how cheap, could be greater than level 3 at this point.

The rules do not specifically say you can raise magic-linked skills, but if you allow it, there are already clear rules in place to limit and balance it.

[Longes]

Improved Ability
Cost: .5 per level (Combat skills),
.25 per level (Physical, Social, Technical, and Vehicle skills)
This power increases the rating of a specific Active skill by 1 per level. A skill’s maximum modified rating equals its base rating x 1.5. Improved ability must be purchased for a specific skill, not a skill group.

The rules are pretty clear in that you can't use Improved Ability on a magic skill.

[LibraryOgre]

The Mod Wonder uses Turn Undead! It is very effective!