Snow:
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For improved invis. Roll sensors against the force of the spell to see if the sensor, or the guy watching the CCTV (in which case it would be his intelligence) can see past the invisibility. There is always a roll to try to counter it.
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House rules to make it a bit better that I like:
net successes between the spell caster and the perceiver are applied to all attacks against the target. IE Firefox got 4 successes on her test and Biff the Guard (who is much smarter than his name would let on) gets 2 successes on his perception test. he is at +2 against Fox because he cant see her clearly but he can see her enough that he knows something is there to shoot at.
taking a page from DnD:
attacking while invisible breaks the invisibility (or may give perceivers a bonus in looking for the person).
Snow, you make good points. I like the second excerpt particularly, though I'd probably say the cap for net successes = Spell Force, because that's how most other spells work. So those 8 billion successes you got on casting are still useful (since the more successes, the harder it is to see through), but you also have an in-spell justification for investing in higher ratings of the spell. I.E. even with 52 successes on the spellcasting, if you only cast a Force 3, it only provides a 3 point penalty - as long as your target rolled less than 40 successes.
Far as I'm concerned, an Invis spell on Astral is like a duck blind. Yes you can "see" it, but you can't tell what "it" is. So a character using AP can tell there's a (mundane, uninteresting) blob in their vision, but you have to beat the save to actually *recognize* it as a blind. Remember, Astral is basically Magic Vision, and a Mana version of the Invis spell is all magic.
Note: this also makes it so that the Mana version and the Physical version are both equally (or at least more) valid. The Mana version keeps you safe from mages, while being useless against cameras. The Physical version keeps you safe from cameras, but is useless against mages. I am most pleased by this because it tidily echoes the Armor spells.
The real kicker here is that there are so many spells based on the mind correlating instead of the eyes being absolute sensors. Hell, look at MITS description of why Illusion spells work on people with cyber. If that's true, then someone who's well and truly invisible is completely invisible to Standard, Lowlight, Thermo, Ultrasound, etc
AS LONG AS IT'S IMPLANTED. So either you have an invisibility spell that can't be pierced except by a high enough INT, or you have to have individual invis spells for astral, normal, thermo, ultrasound...
That said, it also means that the
mana version can still be kneecapped by video cameras, camcorders, guncams, and ultrasound sights. BB has voiced a number of times that there are not enough mundane trumps to mages, so this could be one. It would also be really funny having a mundane who runs around with a digital camera trying to find invisible people on film.
The Physical version is a little more wonky on this. I am inclined towards the Phys version being the full electromagnetic spectrum, but not other sensors. So active Ultrasound detectors still work (carried or implanted), but Infrared/UV cameras would not (without a save, anyway). Laser tripwires make my head hurt, but any canny hunter will just use thread instead. In the case of CCTV units, the spell has to affect the
camera, not the operator because magic cannot be transmitted through tech (with the exception of those nifty magesight fiber optics). So the camera makes a Rating test vs the spell, the operator cannot do anything to assist.
What I would say is think of it more like the Sanctuary spell from D&D. You get one save vs spell under normal circumstances. If someone is acting directly hostile towards you or someone significantly important to you*, you get a second save at a lower TN.
*bound spirits count most areas they patrol as "significantly important", so they become that much more important to magical sec, and keep every Tom Dick and Parrot shaman from going invis and pissing on the Renraku CEO's desk. And even if a ward didn't automatically strip spells, it isn't a visual sensor, so it would be tripped as soon as the invisible guy walked through.
Also BTW, masks + Invis are smart.