Munching Out the Ally..., Keep a bucket handy Options

[Big D]

Taking off from the previous thread, I thought I'd throw together a quick'n'dirty demo of just how wrong an Ally can be.

Feel free to shoot down the numbers, I'm just doing this back-of-pad and may miss something. I've gamed out the dice a little, but they really depend on things like how you spend your BP and (when summoning your Ally) Edge.

[ Spoiler ]

You begin play normally, but unlike the rest of the team, you spend as little karma as possible.  While everybody else is racking up skills, spells, and chrome, you spend cash but little else unless you really have to (it's not worth dying for to skip that spell that you knew in advance could save your hide).

Eventually, you build up to 87 karma.  This is where the fun begins.

You initiate, taking the Familiar ordeal to cut initiation costs and avoid having to take Ally Conjuration in advance.  You design a F9 Ally, with 1 form, 1 skill (Exotic Ranged Weapon, for elemental attacks), and 9 powers (little things, like Concealment/Movement/Guard/Elemental Attack).  Total cost, 77 (9x8+1x5) karma, plus 10 karma for the initiation after discount.

To create your Ally, you have to summon at 9 dice and bind at 18 dice, immediately.  This makes it a little dangerous, so get all of the dice that you can--healers, medkits, etc., and spend Edge like a drunken sailor.

But when all is said and done, for the cost of 3-4 Edge (spent, hopefully not burnt) and 87 karma, you will have a faithful best friend capable of scouting, sneaking your team around (and/or hauling tail), blocking glitches, and stunning/killing anybody in sight.

So what?  Any spirit can do that.  But your Ally can do it day and night, without orders, without any further binding.  And that's just the beginning.

Your Ally is going to stick around, so why not invest 4 karma on quickened Improved Reflexes?  Dirt cheap for the huge always-on increase in firepower.

Raise the force to 12 (48 karma), and start adding skills and spells, and you'll quickly gain a high-caliber medic, protector, face, wheelman (sans rigging), and sharpshooter (for those times when you don't want the opfor knowing you're packing mana).  We're talking 24 dice to any activity that your Ally has the skill for; and it costs only 5 karma.  Imagine walking away with a net of ~$200K/month making orichalcum.  In addition, while 18 hardened armor can be penetrated by a good sniper, 24 hardened armor is really, really tough to beat in combat.  The sky's the limit, but you'll want to save up your karma and do the re-bind as few times as possible, to reduce the risk of having to burn Edge on the Bind roll.  Powers scale with F, too; imagine being Levitated at upwards of 450m/turn while effectively invisible

Oh, and if you're nice to your Ally, and they are willing to pay the price, you can have them soak the drain from the re-bind.  It'll be (2xF)P DV for them, but they have a lot more drain dice and HP than you do.

Or, if you're masochistic, you can save 24 karma by waiting until you have at least 101 karma for the initial summoning, and start off at F12.  That's a little dangerous, though, especially since you have no Ally to soak the Bind drain for you.

Finally, you can always pump your Ally to F16 or even F20+, although this obviously requires several levels of initiation.  It also requires burning Edge to make the binding rolls most of the time, so never, ever do this until your Ally has all of the skills and spells that you ever expect them to need.

All in all, a well-designed Ally can be anything from a strong asset to the team to an overwhelming munchkin that causes the GM to send dragons after you, for a lot less karma than it would take to make your mage remotely as powerful. After all, initiation/Magic costs scale, and attributes and skills cap. But Ally spirit costs are completely linear; for example, a F16 munchkin Ally (originally summoned at F9) with a score of skills (all at 32 dice) and three dozen spells would cost about 400 karma--an enormous sum, until you realize that it's less than the karma it would take to initiate a mage to 15 Magic without raising anything else.

Just remember--make an unbeatable Ally, and word will get around that the only way to defeat it will be to geek you.

[Slithery D]

The difficulties in getting a Force 9 ally formula should not be understated. That's a (45, 1 day) extended test with Logic + Arcana.

How many runners take Arcana? How high? What limits does your game put on extended tests? Dice pool attempts? With 12 dice you can get on average before your time runs out...48 hits. You're not likely to have 12 dice. You might get unlucky. And most GMs seem to give a lot fewer chances than the number of dice in the pool, usually based off the skill, instead. Good luck with that.

Of course, you can take the cheap route and do a metaplanar quest. Cheap because your GM probably doesn't have the balls to slap you around the way a SR3 style Force 9 quest could have. Personally, I'd think defeating a spirit identical to the one you propose for your formula should be the minimum asked on such a quest.

[fistandantilus4....]

Besides, what's the point? It's like mages sitting around and making orichalcum. By then, just make your spirit, get a job, and send the spirit on the job, while you sit at home and make orichalcum. Not much fun really.

[FrankTrollman]

You wouldn't actually have to purchase it a skill to use its elemental attack. The elemental attack pwer probably comes with the Exotic Ranged Weapon skill. This sort of thing is why I originally wrote them with a geometric cost by Force.

Regardless, you could go way cheesier than that if you wanted. While a Force 9 Ally is indeed extremely difficult to create (not impossible, just really hard), once it has been successfully crafted you could do much better than just having a spirit that smacks things around. I mean, you could start with a tradition that has Task spirits and rock out with 9 technical skills at 9 and inhabit into a body that already has a datajack so that you create a super hacker that's better than a mundane hacker could possibly hope to be ever. You could have a spirit that casts spells and knows area versions of save-or-dies like Stun Blast. 18 dice to resist drain takes no drain on average from a Force 9 Stunblast, which in turn will drop just about anyone.

Yes, there were some unfortunate and massive power loops added to that section after I was done with it, but the stuff you're talking about is small cheese. The hope was apparently that forcing PCs to sit through a potentially lethal Binding test was going to keep them in line, but it's really obvious that it isn't going to do that. If two people attempt to make a mondo Ally and one explodes and the other breaks the game, that's two campaigns in the shit hole. I apologize for any role I had in crafting the Ally rules as they ultimately appeared.

-Frank

[fistandantilus4....]

Really I think that it's up to individiual GMs to keep their games in line and not let characters go nuts trying to make an ally that will make the rest of the team superferlous, especially the way Big D's talking about doing it. Besides Frank, no matter what, there's going to be loop holes that someone's going to try to exploit. After seeing how strong spirits were in the SR4 core book, it was a gien that allys were going to be nasty. I like the lower cost, because now they're feasible. BUt when you compare it to the skill caps, it makes for a scary story. Basically allies take advantage of the two things that I dislike most about SR4: skill caps and spirits overwhelming power.

[DireRadiant]

From the title I thought this was a totally different kind of thread.

[Big D]

Don't go there. :P



Fistandantilus, I was attempting to show some of the things that could be done with it, not recommend that it be done in anybody's campaign. Preventing the cheese from becoming unbalanced is exactly where the GM steps in.

For the formula, if there's an extended test that could legitimately be performed in increments (say, between runs), I'd argue that this qualifies.

Frank, I considered inhabitation, but I don't grok it well enough yet. To make a hacker Ally, wouldn't you have to get a living vessel and cheese the roll so that they merged successfully?

Personally, I think having Concealment/Movement/Influence/Guard/Psychokinesis on tap at high levels 24/7 is more important that the killing folks stuff. Then, there's a host of healing/manipulation spells to consider--I wouldn't plan on taking many combat spells, because a couple of elemental attacks pretty much takes care of it. And, of course, the aforementioned social skills.

Regardless of all else, of course, it falls to the GM to keep the game fun, by slapping people around if necessary.

[fistandantilus4....]

sorry, wasn't trying to point the finger. I acutally appreciate you're pointing it out, because I hadn't really put a lot of thought in to it, and now I won't be suprised by some of my players. Hell, one of my guys, when I was running D&D, I had to ban from using the Savage Species book because he was so good at abusing rules and min/maxing. Hopefully he won't notice ally spirits for a while.

[hyzmarca]

Make a Force 9 Ally Formula with Inhabiting and some good skills, prepare yourself as a vessel, summon the ally into yourself and use your conjuring dice to push the merge toward a flesh form. Congradulations, you are now a free spirit and if you're having sex with your GM you might be able to avoid becomming an NPC.

[fistandantilus4....]

excellent.. my wife sometimes runs games..

now all I need to do is think up a name for my Aspected Magician Computer Illiterate Infirm Quadrapalegic Albino Ghoul Cyclops Otaku Changlings Free Spirit with glowing neon green feathers and poor social skills

[Lagomorph]

[fistandantilus4....]

DAMN IT!

[MaxHunter]

Mr. Munchkin?

But nah! I know you were only trying to show what could be done. Sadly, other people with less common sense will eventually try to get away with things like that. There comes a carp handy!

Cheers

Max

p.s. Don't worry Frank, it's not at all the book's fault. I have really liked what I have read so far!

[MaxHunter]

DAMN fast typers!