Brief Overview: Spirits can be summoned on the fly by starting characters that can mop entire squads of well equipped prime runner street sams. Higher level spirits (also summonable by starting characters) can be harder to kill than dragons due to unbeatable hardened armor values. The current rule that Immunity (more specifically Immunity to Normal Weapons) grants Hardened Armor equal to twice essence does not scale well and introduces a significant imbalance in the game design. This power has even been improved over 4th edition as it now also grants bonus damage resistance hits equal to half its rating (round up).

Recommendation: Errata the Immunity power to only grant Hardened Armor equal to essense (not double essence).

Detailed Overview: A starting magician can easily have 7 Magic, 11 Drain dice, and 15 dice on Conjuration tests. Depending on how many wounds the magician is willing to take, he could summon up to a force 14 spirit. The following numbers do not take into account any expenditure of Edge which the mage could use to reduce wounds or increase services.

Force Expected Wounds
------- --------------------
7 1 (stun)
9 2.3 (phys)
11 3.6 (phys)
13 5 (phys)
14 6 (phys)

To illustrate my point, suppose the magician conjures a force 13 Fire Spirit. This spirit will destroy anything it attacks. But, to make matters worse (and to make a game system not fun), there is nothing mundane opponents can do against this creature. Per the rules, it has 26 Hardened Armor to bullets, melee weapons, etc. Even the deadliest weapon in the game, an Anti-vehicle rocket (24P, -4AP) due to availability costing the mundane character roughly 5K nuyen per rocket will do just 1 point of damage (14 Body + 22 Armor = 12 hits + 11 auto hits = 23 damage reduction). Any other weapon including firing fully automatic HMG's just bounce off this creature (remember that it is dodging shots with 30 dice!).

As a point of comparison, western dragons which are supposed to be the most powerful entities in the game only have 18 hardened armor and dodge of 16 dice (compared to a force 14 spirit's 28 hardened armor and 30 dodge dice). Is it really the intent of the game design that a starting character can summon a creature that is twice as hard to kill as a western dragon?

The problem exists with lesser force spirits as well. A force 7 spirit is mostly immune to damage. A force 9 spirit cannot be touched by most street sam's. And all of these spirits are summonable by a starting magician.

If the designers errata Immunity to only grant Hardened Armor equal to Essence (not double Essence), this change will at least make mundane characters able to do something! Even with this suggested errata, if you crunch the numbers, a starting street sam will only be able to damage spirits a little. For example, his best tactic will likely be to toss a frag grenade at it (this avoid having to go against spirit's high dodge dice). Even with the proposed errata rule, the frag grenade (16P, -2AP) has the following expected values against a fire spirit:

Force No Errata Dmg Errata Dmg
------- ------------------ ----------
7 3.3 8.6
9 0 6.3
11 0 4.0
13 0 0.6

As you can see, with the proposed errata, at least a mundane can do something while the spirit tears his comrades' limbs off. But being completely ineffective against an unstoppable killing machine does not make for a fun game system. Designers, please consider this simple change to restore some balance to the game system that I love.

~Jason

I've barely poked into SR5 as yet. I'm surprised that the claimed nerfing of the magician allows such a thing. I assume that in your calculations the value for 'expected wounds' is an average one. So for that Force 13 spirit, the 5 physical is at the centre of a spread of possibilities. What percentage of the time does your sample magician kill himself with Drain? How many services does he get for that 5 physical?

All said, a F13 spirit has about a 10% chance of killing a pretty well-statted chargen summoner. This is a really rough estimate, but it's in the ballpark. Most people would consider that an unacceptable risk for the one or two fights you can get out of the spirit.

20% chance of at least 8 post-soak, 9% chance of at least 10.

Problem is, a F13 Spirit should destroy a Starting Character in Summoning every time, and twice on Tuesday (Hell, anything over F6 should be a Major effort, as far as I am concerned... Not impossible, but definitely Major) . F13 Spirits should Cause problems for IE's and Dragons, let alone a starting character. The fact that you have players thinking that such summonings are normal for the game is a major issue. *shakes head*

Agreed. Spirits are tough. F13 spirits should be nigh-unstoppable.

Now, there might be an issue for the cost to the magician for summoning one not being high enough, but the answer is not reducing the power of the spirit.

Did you take the Spirit Edge into the Drain ?

At our table, the cost to the Summoner is that a Spirit of F4 or greater will spend edge to resist Summoning and Binding, though there are ways to mitigate that, if the character takes the time to do so (it may spend to reroll failures, instead of prior to reroll 6's, for instance). However, the higher the Force, the harder it is to mitigate. And honestly, most of the characters do not take the time and effort to mitigate it.

Still only knocks the PC unconscious. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)

Yep, so he cant give order to the Spirit who is now able to do just what it want...

why not make a soft Limit for it? say Magic +tradition stat. so a Hermetic uses charisma+magic/2 anything above that is attempt-able but the spirit will use edge.

That's assuming a fresh condition monitor, though. And knocking yourself out with damage that cannot be healed via First Aid or the Heal spell (meaning you're not getting back up for at least 24 hours) is a Bad Thing.

Elf Shaman with Magic 6 and 8 Charisma sets that to 14 out of chargen. Too high for a baseline or constant.

How about any spirit whose Force is equal to or greater than the magician's Magic spends Edge to resist summoning; the fluff justification being that the spirit resents being ordered around by a creature it considers its equal or inferior (and let's face it, any metahuman is inferior to every quantifiable way to a Force 13 spirit). That gives the F13 demigod a pool of 26, 8.66~ hits on average, of which 4.33 explode for an average of one additional hit. Suddenly the "Angel Summoner" is a whole lot less attractive.

Magic score makes for a good baseline, but there still needs to be room for variation from that in either direction.

This is a Force 13 spirit. The Drain damage is physical.

Why? What would that add? What kind of variation?

Does this all stem from the fact that the book doesn't explicitly state that starting characters magic rating can't exceed 6?

"Bleeding out" is still "unconscious" and not "dead."

Bleeding out is actually "Dying."

Still a fixable problem.

not in the short term, and not if you intend to get any use whatsoever out of your *summoned* spirit.

i dunno, i still feel like just upping the drain to whatever point it takes to make summoning massively powerful spirits less attractive, and making it harder to summon higher force spirits, does the job pretty well. i'm not a huge fan of random drain, since only the middle results on the spectrum are particularly desirable... you don't really want the character's head to randomly explode (note: this remains true for high force spirits. you want it to be consistent) because that removes someone from the session while they make a new character or while they are unconscious for the run, and you don't want them to randomly walk away with no damage or next to no damage.

so yeah, i'm gonna stick with suggesting non-random damage set to a sufficiently frightening amount of drain to keep it from looking tempting when someone wants to summon higher force spirits. increasing the dicepool of spirits resisting summoning also sounds like a good idea, since at present a summoner calling up a force 12 spirit can fairly easily get to a better than 50% success rate without spending edge... and it shouldn't be so easy for a magic 6 main stat 6 magician to call up a spirit with double his/her magic and main stat. if you insist on keeping that part random, why not make it the spirit's magic + the tradition's main attribute for the spirit to resist?

Fixable by whom... the magician's teammate(s) standing by to help while in the presence of an entity utterly unaffected by any power they can bring to bear? "Flash, you and Digger hold it off for a few seconds while I stop the bleeding."

Uh huh.

Simple: If you're an ass to your spirits (like using them as a meatshield, or micromanaging them, or asking a water spirit to put out a fire - actually an example used in SR4A) , they should be more likely to use Edge. If you're good towards them, if you perhaps help them further their own agenda, they should be less likely.

Here's a clever house rule for spirits:

Spirits of Force equal to or less than the summoner's Magic rating deal 2S per hit, as normal. Spirits of Force greater than the summoner's Magic rating deal 3P per hit.

So for the Magic 6 summoner, the Force 6 spirit does an expected 4S, while the Force 7 spirit does an expected 6P. The high-powered F12 spirit, however, does an expected 12P, which is potentially life-threatening to the summoner. However, the F12 spirit likewise has a considerably high chance of dealing 15P or 18P, which rapidly gets into "kills the summoner" territory.

This makes anything over F8 on average a bit like soaking a gunshot wound. F7 and F8 are still pretty dicey (4+ hits on 7 and 8 dice happen, sometimes!) unless your summoner has significant Centering (and possibly a Centering focus) to bring to the party.