[X] My Assistant

[Monnock]

I just want to point out to all the commentary about my lack of reading on this subject, I do admite that I haven't read the entire book from cover to cover, however I have looked over everything that has come up by glancing at it. Part of this came from running a game the week after I got the book (and that session I had just got it the day before), so I've been a little behind.

At this point I think I've found everything but, at least for me, there are a lot of "one liners." Like the rule for the max armor you can wear before you take penalties is burried in a paragraph. Comming from D&D made me... er, I guess dull (?) to the finer details, when its such a rediculously easy system in comparison.

When someone disputes me in their area (like a mage in the mage department), I figure I can trust them enough to know more about their area than I know about it from passing. I was hoping that we could all learn the game together, but it only takes one bad apple to throw a wrench into that idea. For anyone here who has played Dungeons and Dragons, he had convinced everyone that touch spells (all of them, like cure whatever wounds, Heal, ect.) could affect everyone who he touched. Everyone thought this was stupid (and defied all our experiances with DnD), but I was finally the one who had to look it up and disprove it.

So far everything that I've checked up on him commenting on has been wrong. Every... single... thing. Heck, just saturday he was arguing with me when I said responce limited system, even though I had posted my 2 :nuyen: on a related topic involving how that worked with responce going down from too many programs. I took a look at the wards section and saw the passage that 'gave me the impression' that it was not an area, but he argued tooth and nail that he read it right (as he had just read it) when it came up, so I figured that there was no way he could be so bad as to misinterpret something that he just read when he berrates us for not reading everything.

I like the ideas that you guys are given, especially the ones using the special version of noteriety, just because that gives me something tangable to use without just randomly pulling out the baseball bat out of the blue (well, it's still out of the blue, but only for him).

[dcpirahna]

To add to Shrike's response about the spirits sustaining the spells. Either.
A) He's having the spirit is casting the spell on the players, in which case it's limited to force 1, or force 2 if overcast and easily broken or seen through.

or
B) He's casting the spell himself and having the spirit sustain it. A force 1 spirit uses up 1 task for every combat turn that it sustains the spell for him. That's 3 seconds. (p179 2nd paragraph) So even if the spirit owes him 10 tasks, it run out after 10 combat turns (30 seconds).

[Shrike30]

[James McMurray]

If a spirit casts a spell it is limited to rwice the spirit's force. If a spirit sustains a spell it lasts for a few combat turns.

But guys, he is using spell binding, which IIRC does not have the force limit.

[Shrike30]

I was under the impression that the spirit is the one who cast the spell if it's being used for Spirit Binding. If that's not the case, my point is entirely invalid.

[Monnock]

Shrike30: It could be the one casting the spell, like the Spirit of Man with one of its special abilities, however as far as I can tell, all Spell Binding (got the wording mixed up last time) does is take the burden off of the mage that bound it.

I find this quote terribly ironic in the context of my mage:

[Zeric]

For purposes of Spell Binding, the spirit's force does not matter when determing the force of the spell it can sustain; the mage casts the spell at whatever force he wants and then passes it over to the spirit for it to sustain. The spirit's force merely determines the number of days that the spell will last.

The spirit isn't doing any casting in this case. If you look at the description it says that the spirit must be of the appropriate type for the spell it will Bind (i.e. fire for combat, air for illusion), but the spirit of man is the only type of spirit that has a spellcasting ability.

One thing I would note for this player though is the sidebar on page 178 for bound spirits. It mentions that if the player is abusing his bound spirits (it specifically mentions Spell Binding here), then the spirits will struggle against his will while they are performing active services such as spell sustaining. This imposes a -2 dice pool modifier on all tests while his spirits are active. He might think twice about Spell Binding when his swarm of force 1 spirits are eating his dice pools away to nothingness.

[Shrike30]

That's a rule I'd start applying, if he's obviously burning up his "karma" with the Astral Plane this fast.

[Shrike30]

On a related note, invisible, levitating characters are very inviting targets for airspace defense systems...

"Sir, the radar's picking something up buzzing the building, but we can't get a visual on it."
"It's probably another one of those damn ruthenium-coated rotodrones. Switch the helipad guns over to Stick-n-shock, and give it a burst..."

[Monnock]

Ah, that's a good point Zeric. I had told him that I was using that rule (because I knew when I read something along the lines of "prevent abuse" that it applied to him), but for some reason I didn't think that his use of spell binding would count as them being active, though that makes sense. Then again, in a way it negates that use of spell binding. Hm...

I've already changed how spell assisting works with him, because when I saw him having 3 bound fire elementals and talking about his 30 some-odd spellcasting dice to use when he wanted to nuke someone, I decided to change it. Basically I made it so that the spirit rolls its Force attribute and he adds the number of hits to his spellcasting checks, seemed a lot more balanced to me. After that he dropped his bound spirits and commensed Plan B, I guess.

In this case I would rather not just make bound spirits useless to him, I just wish he would stop trying to take advantage of the system.

[emo samurai]

I was wondering: can you use wards to contain things within them, as a sort of astral cage? And can you change who they contain on the fly? Say I wanted to cage a swarm of insect spirits with a ward; could I change which insect spirit to let through so that I could walk them and let them hunt orphans and then cage them again?

[Kanada Ten]

Well, most spirits can return to their metaplane and then pop back out on the other side of the ward (well, in SR3, they could). Flesh form insect spirits, other dual-natured creatures, astrally projecting mages, and watchers could be caught in a ward. But wards don't "pop up", they take hours to make. You can change permissions, IIRC.