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> Spirit pacts at chargen, Why are they priced by edge?
emo samurai
post Oct 18 2006, 01:26 PM
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The price has nothing to do with the force of the spirit. Does that mean we can get the aid of a force 12 free spirit for 5 BP?
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The Jopp
post Oct 18 2006, 02:31 PM
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I find it a bit confusing as well.

You could have a F1 free spirit that gave you immortality 2000 years ago - what would the Edge have to do with it - it would not affect the pact itself.
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Mr. Unpronouncea...
post Oct 18 2006, 04:55 PM
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Normally a spirit's edge is equal to it's force.
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FrankTrollman
post Oct 18 2006, 05:04 PM
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QUOTE (Mr. Unpronounceable)
Normally a spirit's edge is equal to it's force.

A Free Spirit's Edge is almost never equalto Force, and is in fact generally a very small number.

Practically speaking, a spirit with less Edge is more vulnerable than a spirit with more edge. However, you are correct that the benefits of getting a spirit pact often have relatively little to do with the spirit's edge. Honestly, I have no idea why spirit pacts are charged by edge rather than by pact. But then, I didn't write the qualities section.

If you wanted to do it in that manner, I wouldn't blame you. Just off the top of my head, costs would be:

Dream Pact : Free
Formula Pact: 5 BP
Life Pact: 10 BP
Magic Pact: 15 BP

And honestly, the Power Pact and Drain Pact are not appropriate things for chargen anyway because they are by definition so very temporary. Both of them could be over before you even finished the lgwork for your first mission.

-Frank
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Mr. Unpronouncea...
post Oct 18 2006, 05:08 PM
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Oh, yeah, that's right....but I'm still betting that's where the cost originated - before the full free spirit rules were written.
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emo samurai
post Oct 18 2006, 05:12 PM
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What part DID you write?
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FrankTrollman
post Oct 18 2006, 05:19 PM
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QUOTE
What part DID you write?

The spirit chapter, though the costs on Allies was changed out of recognition after I wrote them. Also a few other bits that got moved elsewhere. For example, Invoking was for a while in the spirit section, so that metamagic is virtually a cut/paste of my draft.

So the fact the Cola Wars is in canon now? That's totally my fault.

QUOTE
Oh, yeah, that's right....but I'm still betting that's where the cost originated - before the full free spirit rules were written.


I'll take some of that action.

-Frank
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Wanderer
post Oct 18 2006, 09:12 PM
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QUOTE (Mr. Unpronounceable)
Oh, yeah, that's right....but I'm still betting that's where the cost originated - before the full free spirit rules were written.

Yeah, but does not this mean that the Spirit Pact Quality would be in need of a rewrite, does it ??
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Mr. Unpronouncea...
post Oct 18 2006, 09:45 PM
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Well, yes - a lot of stuff still needs clarifications (see the entire matrix section) or erratas. Sadly this seems to be SR's fate.

Of course, from Frank's response - this was apparently an intentional, if completely incomprehensible (since edge isn't linked to force for free spirits, the cost of the quality is completely arbitrary - the GM can have a F1 free spirit make a pact with one character, and a F20 with a second character, and have the second one be significantly cheaper!) decision.
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Eleazar
post Oct 19 2006, 02:32 AM
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Another thing that could use some clarification is the dream pact. Is it actually even useful or is it just there to make things more interesting and flavorful? Is it a possible way to pay a spirit for another pact? It seems like something that benefits the spirit and not the character.
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RunnerPaul
post Oct 19 2006, 03:19 AM
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QUOTE (Eleazar @ Oct 18 2006, 09:32 PM)
It seems like something that benefits the spirit and not the character.

Oh, I don't know, I can see the benefits of having someone take over your body for the 8 hours a day you would have been sleeping and generally unproductive. Although this isn't D&D and the runners aren't an adventuring party camping out in the wilderness, having a team member who can be alert and watchful 24/7 can still be rather handy for staking out locations, for monitoring the external sensor feeds when the party is holed up in their safehouse and so on.
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kzt
post Oct 19 2006, 05:08 AM
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QUOTE (RunnerPaul)
having a team member who can be alert and watchful 24/7 can still be rather handy for staking out locations, for monitoring the external sensor feeds when the party is holed up in their safehouse and so on.

Why would it want to do that? I rather suspect you wake up a lot still drunk and wondering who the hell this is curled up next to you and where the hell you are. :)
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RunnerPaul
post Oct 19 2006, 06:10 AM
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QUOTE (kzt)
QUOTE (RunnerPaul @ Oct 18 2006, 10:19 PM)
having a team member who can be alert and watchful 24/7 can still be rather handy for staking out locations, for monitoring the external sensor feeds when the party is holed up in their safehouse and so on.

Why would it want to do that? I rather suspect you wake up a lot still drunk and wondering who the hell this is curled up next to you and where the hell you are. :)

Well, for one, the reason the free spirit is wanting to timeshare your body in the first place is to earn karma, and being a party animal may or may not be an ideal way to do so, depending on how karma aquisition works in your table's version of the shadowrun setting.

Secondly, depending on the details of the pact, the spirit in question may have agreed to a set of behavorial guidelines that were determined to be mutually beneficial to both parties (i.e. No barhopping when in the middle of a shadowrunning mission or while laying low to avoid the authorities). Seeing as how spirit pact is purchased as a positive quality and not a negative one, it'd hardly be fair if the spirit's actions while the character was asleep turned out to be harmful or dangerous to the character.

Sounds like what you're looking for is to add a new negative quality: Poorly Worded Dream Pact.
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Garrowolf
post Oct 19 2006, 06:40 AM
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Why not do spirit pacts like contacts? Have their force be one part and the level or type of pact as another number then add them together.
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FrankTrollman
post Oct 19 2006, 07:15 AM
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QUOTE
Another thing that could use some clarification is the dream pact.


Well, I wrote it, so I guess I'm as qualified as anyone to clarify it. First off, the reason it was included in the book at all is because I was gesticulating wildly and put my elbow through the Picasso. Figuratively of course.

See, in previous editions, spirit pacts were a methd for a threat magician and a threat spirit to tie their fortunes together and gain an increase to both of their villain bonus values until one or the other was thwarted by the player characters. Needless to say, that was pretty metagame, and in any case the peoples who did that don't even have floating villain bonus pools and many of them are pretty playable as PCs.

So with Spirit Energy gone and Threat Ratings/Potency out the window, what was the position of spirit pacts? One idea was just to drop them, but they fit squarely into the genre in a lot of ways so the decision was made to instead introduce them as something that players could interact with.

And as the guy who was writing the free spirits section, people kept asking me what they were going to do. And honestly, I was getting the runaround from the threat section, which was hard because the old school spirit pact was a threat-only power. So I finally just put my fist down and said "I don't even care what they do, they could do anything..." and then I proceeded to simply go off on one of my bouts of keyboard diarrhea where I just wrote out a bunch of crazy ideas that had a pro and a con built in for both the spirit and the human and told the devs to just pick one.

And they said "yes". Not to any of the ideas, but to the whole tirade. And that's why there's a pile of pacts to choose from. The pacts aren't balanced against each other because they were originally written free-hand on a cocktail napkin as an example of how it was easy enough to write out a spirit pact once you knew what it was supposed to do. Oops. Sorry about that.

---

So anyway, the Dream Pact is perhaps the most subtle of all of them. The upsides are that you are a spirit while you're asleep (which means that you live 50% longer and are much harder to kill), you're important to the spirit (so it has to protect you), and it gets Karma on its own so you don't have to personally give it anything. The downside is... well... sometimes you wake up in a pool and say "I sure hope this is my urine...."

As a person in the world of Shadowrun, I'd sign up for this bad boy immediately. I live 50% longer, don't need a bed, and a guardian angel follows me around my whole life in exchange for which people tell interesting stories about me. Sweet. As an Oyabun, or any other character in Shadowrun who finds themselves to be on the target side more than the Runner side, it's pretty persuasive. You get immunity to normal weapons while you're asleep, it's just that awesome.

But for a PC, it's just not that important. Shadowrun is going to end before your character's increased lifespan is going to come in handy, and if the GM was going to shoot your character in his sleep your game has bigger problems.

---

Now for the costs involved:

That's a tough nut to crack. The value of a spirit pact depends upon many variables. The nature of the pact is the big one of course. A pact that the spirit can end tomorrow isn't worth a whole lot. But beyond that, some pacts are heavily dependent upon the Force of the spirit. And of course, if your spirit gets banished none of this matters, so Edge certainly comes into focus as well. And finally, and perhaps the hardest to quantify, the rapor you have with the spirit is huge. A spirit that doesn't like you may attempt to get you committed to a mental institution (where you and its formula will be "safe", forever), while a spirit that likes you might spend your sleeping hours chatting up lovely ladies that it thinks you'd like to know better.

It's not a simple axis. There are four completely independent variables that combine to show how much a spirit pact is worth. Heck, being the human in a Formula Pact is actually better if the spirit in question has a relatively manageable Force + Edge because you (and only you) can bind it drain-free.

That the Spirit Pact quality was made Edge Dependent in cost is understandable, but often not reasonable. There's a method to it, but as many people have noted on this thread, that method isn't amazingly obvious.

-Frank
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emo samurai
post Oct 19 2006, 01:50 PM
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Maybe make the Force of the spirit Edge x 3. That is what it will be on average for a spirit going free, anyway.
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Steak and Spirit...
post Oct 19 2006, 02:01 PM
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Thanks for the explanation, Frank. It's nice to get in the designers head, as always.
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Rotbart van Dain...
post Oct 19 2006, 02:34 PM
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QUOTE (FrankTrollman)
So the fact the Cola Wars is in canon now? That's totally my fault.

Care to elaborate?
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FrankTrollman
post Oct 19 2006, 04:42 PM
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QUOTE (Rotbart van Dainig)
QUOTE (FrankTrollman)
So the fact the Cola Wars is in canon now? That's totally my fault.

Care to elaborate?

Sure.

In 2006 the "cola wars" are fought in the US with the expenditure of large amounts of ad revenue between the principle combatants: Coca Cola and Pepsi Co. However, in Latin America and Southeast Asia, they fight a little more literally. Mercenary gangs enforce monopolies in isolated rural areas for one cola giant or the other at gun point.

So how do we bring that into 2070? Well, corporations are allowed private armies. No longer do they have to leave crates of Pepsi on the front porches of mobsters and say "Boy, we'd really be able to leave a lot more Pepsi here if noone could sell any Coke. Wink-wink." - now they can hire and train their own armed forces directly.

Which brings us to the contents of Street Magic. The current rules on copyright are pretty severe, and even parody isn't really protected speach in the US when it comes to trademarks. So while we can't mention Coca Cola or Pepsi, we can talk about the Red Cola Company whose elite special forces are the Minute Men, which are based in the CAS. Which is pretty obviously Coca Cola, with their Minute Maid brand's private army, and their headquarters in Atlanta (now in the Confederate American States).

So when Jimmy No is doing some merc work for the "Blues" in New Guinea in Street Magic during the Cola Wars, against the Minute Men (special forces of the "Red" Cola Company based out of the CAS) - he is participating in a militarized Coke/Pepsi conflict. Which is on a much larger scale than the militarized Coke/Pepsi conflicts of 2006, but it's Shadowrun so that's what you'd expect.

As of page 89 of Street Magic, Coca Cola had seized the airport in Goroka (in what is today Papua New Guinea), but we also know that Jimmy No managed to survive and get back to Hong Kong, so either he managed to retake the airport or he escaped overland to Pepsi-controlled territory and was evacuated. In your home campaign it could be anything from a daring assault on Goroka to a last ditch evac out of Jefman Island.

-Frank
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emo samurai
post Oct 20 2006, 04:01 AM
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They seriously hire mercenaries in RL?
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FrankTrollman
post Oct 20 2006, 04:12 AM
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QUOTE (emo samurai)
They seriously hire mercenaries in RL?

Not in the United States, but in Columbia and Thailand, yes.

As a cola merc, you get paid in Coca Cola. They sell tribal chiefs enough cola to fill the cola needs of the entire region, and then if the tribal chiefs happen to send in the brute squad to shut down whoever has the distribution contract for the other cola brand, oh well.

It's really inefficient right now, because the cola companies demand plausible deniability. In the shadowrun future, plausible deniability isn't even desired, so it's way easier.

-Frank
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hyzmarca
post Oct 20 2006, 05:08 AM
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Edge determines the maximum number of Spirit Pacts a spirit may have active at any one time. This means that a higher edge free spirit will either give you access to several potentially high-power contacts with spirit pacts of their own or it will give you several more spirit pacts for your own personal use.
Canon suggests that a spirit will only have one or two different types of pacts, but the GM has final say. The advantage is most obvious with Power Pacts because of this. If you make a Power Pact with a Edge 1 spirit then you'dd have access to 1 power. If you make a Power Pact with a Edge 5 spirit then you can have access to up to 5 of its powers (if it will let you) and you'll have 4 more powers to choose from.

If you GM allows two different types of pacts you can have a Edge 5 spirit and one perment pact (such as Formula) and then negotiate with it for up to 4 of its powers as needed.
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Wanderer
post Oct 20 2006, 07:22 PM
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I see the reasons that moved the author, but personally what I dislike in the current rules is the fact spirit Edge is wholly arbitrary, so it needs to stand on GM fiat every time (likely source of contention). I would prefer a flat price based on the number of pact one has with a spirit.
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emo samurai
post Oct 20 2006, 09:08 PM
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Mmmm.... multiple pacts...
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Wanderer
post Oct 20 2006, 09:48 PM
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QUOTE (emo samurai @ Oct 20 2006, 10:08 PM)
Mmmm.... multiple pacts...

Dream + Formula + Life IMO is the perfect Spirit Pact combination for the smart, trendy Awakened shadowrunner. Eternal youth, quick ersatz regeneration in a pinch, sleep hours and unconsciousness moments put to productive Karma use and the care of a powerful guardian, affordable Karma bill, a free spirit pal strongly interested in your welfare, for 15 pts at best, 30 pts typical.
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