Help me Shadowrunners, you're my only hope. OOC

[lonewolf1210]

I´ve been reading up on Aztlan in the (old) Aztlan Sourcebook. Can we assume that the information in there is still posted on ShadowLand and thus available for us? It is partly very outdated, but some of the information in there would still be helpful.

[kind_of_a_ROBOT]

If old stuff is still relevant (even if the info is out dated, maybe), there's also information in Shadows of Latin America and the old Corporate Guide. I haven't look through any of it yet, but I plan to...

[TheMightyQuinn]

Drat the luck! I didn't have a lot of those older books!

Still - if you guys can find anything out through them, awesome.

[a_humble_lich]

Yes stuff from those books is all easily available. However, those data files are widely know to contain many inaccuracies. So don't believe too much from the contents. Shadows of Latin America seems to be a bit better. (In other words I don't have access to those books. As far as I know, Shadows of Latin America was never published. However, the draft version have been released by the authors, and the people at Dumpshock compiled it as an attractive pdf.)

[kind_of_a_ROBOT]

Originally Posted by a_humble_lich

the people at Dumpshock compiled it as an attractive pdf.)

I'll say! Besides the lack of cover art, its pretty great. I love that the first piece of art is totally Danny Trejo with a suit and datajack.

[kind_of_a_ROBOT]

For contact networking, do I make a roll for that, or not?

[lonewolf1210]

Well, I didnt envision Lady as the leader of the group, but if noone else steps up she can fill it. Just dont be suprised to get ordered around like this if she is.

[Destrude]

Originally Posted by lonewolf1210

Well, I didnt envision Lady as the leader of the group, but if noone else steps up she can fill it. Just dont be suprised to get ordered around like this if she is.

Should prove amusing, to say the least.

[a_humble_lich]

THe Lady seduces well. I do worry that it is the Con skill to be used in seduction.

And kind_of_a_robot, I missed you question, sorry. Sure you can make a roll for contacts, or if you prefer I can instead.

[lonewolf1210]

well, I assumed that it is the correct skill because seduction is one of the listed possible specializations of the con skill, and also because the seductress mentor spirit gives a bonus on con checks

[lonewolf1210]

binding a Great Form Force 9 spirit of air
optional powers:
- Elemental Attack
- Energy Aura
- Guard
- Psychokinesis(bonus from great form)

conjuring:
conjuring 5+ Magic 14 + domain 2
(21d6)[6][1][1][2][3][4][1][1][5][1][5][2][6][6][4][1][4][2][6][1][6](68)
vs
Spirit 9
(9d6)[1][5][3][5][1][6][1][2][5](29)

Drain
Willpower 5 + Charisma 7 + Centering 3
(15d6)[5][2][2][2][3][3][2][4][5][4][4][6][6][4][5](57)

(if necessary, the Lady will make a break between conjuring and binding to heal any Drain damage)



Binding:
Binding 5+ Magic 14 + domain 2
(21d6)[3][5][3][6][4][5][2][3][5][3][5][6][6][2][6][1][4][3][1][1][1](75)
vs
Spirit 9*2
(18d6)[6][5][6][5][4][5][6][6][2][6][2][6][4][5][6][3][6][6](89)

Invoking Test:
Binding 5+ Magic 14 + domain 2 + Spirit 9
(30d6)[2][1][1][4][2][6][2][6][4][4][1][5][2][6][6][5][1][6][6][6][6][4][6][3][5][6][4][5][5][4](124)

Drain
Willpower 5 + Charisma 7 + Centering 3
(15d6)[1][6][6][1][3][6][6][2][3][1][1][1][5][5][6](53)


EDIT: Wow...
This looks like my shortest lived character ever due to horrible dices. The spirit rolled 13 successes with 18 dice on binding resistance. That value gets doubled to determine drain and then another +50% due to great form, so I have to resist 39 nonleathal damage. I can resist 7 of those which still leaves more than enough to easily fill both condition monitors even I use edge to resist a bit more...
@humble_lich: any chance you would allow me to spend an edge to force the spirit to reroll his binding resistance? Otherwise my char will simply be dead.

[TheMightyQuinn]

Wow. that's a lot of damage - Best of luck to you!

I'll get a post in tonight after I work if it's a quick trip, or in the morning if not - one way or another, I'll get a solid post in shortly. Scouts honor. (And I really was a scout, so I'm good for it. lol)

[douglas]

Randomly checking in from the other game...

Wow, yeah, that is some horrifically bad luck. Crazy dice there.

On the other hand, after doing a little math, I have to ask: what the hell were you thinking trying to bind such a spirit in the first place? The average drain result, after drain resistance, is 13 stun damage. Which, unless I am greatly mistaken, is more than enough to knock you unconscious and make the spirit uncontrolled, which the book explicitly states will most likely end with it attacking you - and you wouldn't be able to fight back because you're unconscious.

In other words, the expected result of this little exercise is total disaster. You just got a worse case of it than usual.

[lonewolf1210]

well, I honestly didnt do all of the math before. I havent played that high of a mage before and up until now binding drain was never the constraining factor in binding spirits. The problems I had was more having enough hits on the binding check to do a successful binding. Drain was always annoying but never dangerous. That turned out to be very different at these levels were playing now.
I also expected that even if the dice didnt turn out how I´d want them to, I could still fix that by using edge to reroll. But again that turned out to not really be enough to save the day.

So yeah, I should have done the math. So what Im asking is if there is any way to not kill my Char because of that.

[douglas]

I've never actually played in a Shadowrun game that managed to get off the ground and go anywhere myself, so I don't really have any practical in-game experience to draw upon for this. I have built several mages for games that ended up fizzling, though, and just from the rules drain always jumped out at me as being of paramount importance. Building a mage, to me, has always been more about what you can do without passing out from the effort than about what you can do period, so I would have naturally checked the drain up front.

Then again, my focus has always been more on the spellcasting portion of magery than on summoning spirits, and that has much more potential for small amounts of repeated drain building up on you without time to recover, so maybe that skewed my viewpoint - I tended to go for as close to zero drain as I possibly could because every little bit might matter. For binding spirits, it seems like any drain short of unconsciousness is nearly irrelevant because it's a down-time activity and you should have the opportunity to sleep it off afterwards.

Anyway, to end this little diatribe, my opinion on it is that you should be allowed to retcon this obvious mistake that your character would have known was a bad idea even though you didn't, and roll up a new binding attempt on a less draining spirit - after calculating what you actually have the drain resistance and stun track to manage reasonably confidently.

[a_humble_lich]

Dear god, that is a lot of damage. I'll give you three options

a.) You die. (I would suggest not taking this )
b.) As douglas suggested, your character should know her own limits, feel free to retcon that and try for something less painful. This will cost a point of edge. If I was less nice, I'd say you should burn a point of edge, but this seems to be a special case (i.e. getting killed due to self inflicted dice rolls on your first roll.)
c.) I guess I'd let you spend edge to reroll the spirits binding resistance, but I don't like that option as it seems to set a bad precedent (only Great Dragons can use Edge to force someone else to reroll, and I doubt The Lady's real name is Lofwyr).

That was horrificly bad luck. Sometimes the dice are not your friends.

[douglas]

Here, I'll do some of the math for you.

With 5 willpower, your stun track is 11. You need to keep drain below that. Your 15 drain dice will, on average, resist 5 drain. With average results, you need no more than 15 drain before reduction.

If summoning a great form spirit, you get on average 1 drain per die the spirit gets to roll, or 2 drain per point of the spirit's force. Thus, a force 7 spirit would have an average result that would be acceptable.

If summoning a regular spirit, you get on average 2/3 drain per die the spirit gets to roll, or 4/3 drain per point of the spirit's force. Thus, a force 11 spirit would have an average result that would (barely) be acceptable.

Both of those cases are borderline, though, and have a high chance of tipping over into the disaster area. You want a hefty margin of error here. Let's try plugging numbers into an online calculator...

I'll get back to you with numbers from that, I need to go.

[lonewolf1210]

Im taking option b, thank you very much.

Im going for a Great Form power 6 spirit of Air instead. Should I simply remake all rolls or just the ones that the spirit makes?

Also I missed that due to the domain, I also get those 2 dice on drain resistance. Wouldnt have changed much on the first try but now it makes stuff safer.


EDIT to avoid another doublepost:
@ROBOT: what your char would probably think of and mine wont is that the Zodiac should be equiped with noise reduction, chameleon coating or something like that to help avoid detection if at all possible.

[a_humble_lich]

For simplicity, just remake all rolls.

[douglas]

Ok, dice calculator results time. If I understand correctly that you forgot something and actually have 17 drain dice, binding a force 6 great form spirit has a 21.4% chance of hitting you with at least 11 stun damage, thereby knocking you unconscious, freeing the spirit, and probably resulting in your death. I don't know about you, but slightly over a 1 in 5 chance of disaster seems a bit high to me. You might want to go lower to be safe.

If you want to fiddle with the numbers for yourself, go here, select the "Shadowrun 4E drain from spirit binding" entry from way at the bottom in the "Or select user-contributed roll" dropdown, alter the four parameters at the top as appropriate, click the calculate probabilities button, and scroll down. Find the row with value 11. The first number to the right of it is the percent chance of getting exactly that much damage, the second is the percent chance of getting at least that much damage.

If you want to use edge on the drain resistance test, you will have to both change the edge variable to 1 and manually increase the drain pool to account for the extra dice. The edge variable itself only turns on rule of 6 calculations.

[lonewolf1210]

@douglas: While your numbers are apparently correct, there are 2 reasons why a uncontrolled spirit wouldnt attack my character:
- As noted in the uncontrolled spirit section, Spirits with a rating of half the mages magic attribute or lower automatically flee instead. My effective magic rating is 14, so I should be safe there.
- Also Im doing the binding in my magical refugium, so the spirit would have to fight through that astral barrier first if he really wanted to attack me.

Under those circumstances, I feel its worth the risk to get a rating 6 spirit.
Thanks for the work though!

---

* post roll count doesn't match database

[lonewolf1210]

forgot to do rollv instead of roll above...

2nd try on Binding:

Spoiler

binding a Great Form Force 6 spirit of air
optional powers:
- Elemental Attack
- Guard
- Psychokinesis(bonus from great form)

conjuring:
conjuring 5+ Magic 14 + domain 2
(21d6)[6][3][6][6][2][6][5][6][5][3][1][6][5][5][6][5][3][4][2][3][6](94)
vs
Spirit 6
(6d6)[6][4][6][4][3][2](25)

Drain
Willpower 5 + Charisma 7 + Centering 3 + domain 2
(17d6)[1][2][3][6][3][2][6][3][2][1][3][3][4][6][6][4][1](56)

=> successfull conjuring with 11 services, drain resisted



Binding:
Binding 5+ Magic 14 + domain 2
(21d6)[6][3][1][1][2][1][1][1][6][2][4][4][2][4][4][5][5][1][5][1][5](64)
vs
Spirit 6*2
(12d6)[2][1][4][2][5][6][2][1][4][4][4][1](36)

Invoking Test:
Binding 5+ Magic 14 + domain 2 + Spirit 6
(27d6)[5][3][2][4][3][6][3][3][3][5][4][1][3][4][6][6][5][1][4][3][6][4][6][2][2][6][2](102)

Drain
Willpower 5 + Charisma 7 + Centering 3+ domain 2
(17d6)[5][1][6][5][6][2][6][3][5][1][2][1][6][2][5][1][3](60)


=> successfull binding with 3 additional services, so 14 total, drain resisted
9 successes on invoking, so all great form powers and +4 on all physical attributes while manifested

[Destrude]

Should be able to post after dentist visit today, assuming I'm not in too much pain (ouchies!).

Also: Dem rolls! *Kanye face*

[TheMightyQuinn]

Originally Posted by Destrude

Also: Dem rolls! *Kanye face*

This +1. Wow.

Spoiler

[Destrude]

Sorry I haven't posted in a bit, work plus trying to keep up with my game and play in another one on top of this one has stressed my posting mojo a bit.

Should get something up tomorrowish.

[a_humble_lich]

I understand. PbP seems to go in waves for me. I'll not have any games for a while and then at once seem to get accepted into several.

[lonewolf1210]

Small aside:
Im looking for a replacement player for the shadowrun game I am running here on the boards with a_humble_lich as one of the players. Its based on the Ghost Cartels module and were just about to start the 2nd run. Its normal powered with a 400BP start and I am looking for a hacker or technomancer since the player of our current technomancer vanished.
If anyone is interested PM me.

[Galvain7]

Sorry to Intrude!

I'm posting on behalf of TheMightyQuinn, whose computer has crashed. Please forgive a temporary absence. I've noticed a few repeats from 'Shooting Stars for Money' but its best to be through.

Thanks!

[lonewolf1210]

Im attempting to move this preperations along a bit faster. While roleplaying these preperations out is fun, it seems to take forever and we´re always waiting on only a few people. If Im assuming too much, feel free to reign me in.

Equipment we need and are in process of shopping:

Spoiler

Zodiac:
I didnt really find stats on a zodiac in any book, so we would have to approximate how much something like this costs. A quick google search tells me that today a zodiac with 4-5 person capacity costs something between 2k and 3k $. I would assume that price would be around the same in nuyen, right?
We could also want some of the following vehicle mods:
- chameleon coating (Body x 1k nuyen)
- ECM (rating x 1k nuyen)
- Signiture masking (rating x 2k nuyen)


Linguasoft Atzlaner Spanish(5) 2.5k nuyen each
fake SIN(6) 6k each

anything else Im missing?

transportation:

Spoiler

I am assuming that the contact James got can get us onto a freighter? Does the freigther captain need any special convincing? What is that going to cost us?

@Destrude: Im not entirely sure where you are going with this azzie customs guy. The plan as I understand it is to get over the border undetected, right? Care to enlighten us?

So after this quick calculation I think we will need about 65k for the Zodiac, SINs and linguasofts and should have at least another 35k cash available for bribes and everything we need to buy in Atzlan. Does anyone have that kind of cash at hand? Cause I dont.
I believe that we have no choice but to wait until Mrs. Johnson contacts us again and we can demand some kind of advance, at least 15 or 20%. We´re going into hell for her and if something goes wrong The Lady doesnt want to get stuck with the expenses.

[kind_of_a_ROBOT]

Originally Posted by lonewolf1210

So after this quick calculation I think we will need about 65k for the Zodiac, SINs and linguasofts and should have at least another 35k cash available for bribes and everything we need to buy in Atzlan. Does anyone have that kind of cash at hand? Cause I dont.
I believe that we have no choice but to wait until Mrs. Johnson contacts us again and we can demand some kind of advance, at least 15 or 20%. We´re going into hell for her and if something goes wrong The Lady doesnt want to get stuck with the expenses.

Sorry I've been AWOL, my boss got laid off and stuff has been pretty crazy around the shop.

I'm not sure how a woman locked up in a prison will get us an advance,. To be honest though, I'm not sure what else to do but wait.