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> Reducing the time spent Spiriting/Spirting Up, I'm finding it breaking the table rythm.
Brahm
post Jan 4 2007, 06:28 PM
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I've got a mage and a techno at my table. I'm finding that the techno especially is eating up time going through a Sprite Up cycle. Partially it is timing, we get a mental head of steam up are all ready to go somewhere and *bam* the Compiles and Summonings come out of the woodwork.

It is like if you are getting ready to go and he sammie says "wait, I need ammo!" Sure that happens occationally, but it's easier to stockpile ammo. With the spirits and sprites it happens a lot. Also in terms of game time Compiling and Summoning takes a few heartbeats but a lot more RL time and has this significant "damage you" risk, which is all the opposite of obtaining ammo.

Maybe I'm overestimating the time it takes, but the perception is what kills so I'm not ready to discount it on that basis. It also doesn't feel right to curtain having sprites and spirits ready for them to tap. Especially for the Techno since it tends to be a fairly key ability for them, and only marginally less so for the mage.

Has anyone tried anythig to address this? Or am I alone in noticing it?
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James McMurray
post Jan 4 2007, 06:53 PM
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Make Binding and its technomancer counterpart cheaper and easier and they'll be more likely to summon things once and then call on during the fight. The opposite route would be to add dangers to having a spirit or sprit on call. Perhaps wards have a chance of breaking the link between spirit and summoner, manking a pre-run summons riskier.
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Thanee
post Jan 4 2007, 07:19 PM
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Let one of the other players look over his dice, while you just go on.

Bye
Thanee
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Brahm
post Jan 4 2007, 07:24 PM
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QUOTE (James McMurray)
Make Binding and its technomancer counterpart cheaper and easier and they'll be more likely to summon things once and then call on during the fight.

I'd considered this. It would really help with the timing of the rolls, which I think is my main issue.

I don't really have a problem with doing that for the mage, but given what happened with the techno initially before I realized you needed a Registered sprite to sustain Threading? The dice pools he had were just gross, making it tough to provide any challenge to him in his native environment. :(

Hrmmm, I hadn't implemented the -2 dice rule for Registered Sprites yet though.

Of course it reduces the damage component mostly to a live/die thing. But maybe the little bits of damage for these prepared spirits/sprites isn't really important.
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sunnyside
post Jan 4 2007, 09:20 PM
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I haven't had a technomancer yet so I'm not an expert with them.

However with mages the summoning bit with spirits is key to balance. I mean it's almost like they get a whole team of runners all to themselves.

The trade off is the fact that they might pick up a little stun and they might have a spirit go uncontrolled.

To speed things up you could do the rolling fast (have dice of appropriate pool size set up.)

Or if you really want to speed things up make a queue of die results. Just roll a whole bunch of d6's and write down what you get ahead of time. Then your player can say something like I'd like five force five spirits please. You you look at the page a moment, look through the die results and a second or two later announce the amount of stun they got, or, if something unusual happened, like they got hurt bad on the third spirit, tell them that before going on.
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Aaron
post Jan 4 2007, 10:00 PM
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I haven't found this to be a problem. The player tells me a Force, and we both roll at more or less the same time, just as with gun fire or melee combat. I wait for the player to spend Edge, if desired, and to tell me their result, just as in other rolls. The player gets a result, and has the book open to the spirit's stats. The player rolls drain as I'm asking for the next player in the initiative sequence; the player interrupts if a glitch is rolled.

Of course, we play regularly, and it wasn't so quick in the beginning. Is your player new to the process?
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Brahm
post Jan 4 2007, 10:15 PM
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QUOTE (Aaron @ Jan 4 2007, 05:00 PM)
The player tells me a Force, and we both roll at more or less the same time, just as with gun fire or melee combat.

It isn't the one Summoning/Compile that's the problem. It's the 3 or 4 each. And the selecting of the Force and the additional powers, where-in that process they will inveritably develop Old Lady's disease and waffle and change their damn mind a few times.

They are relatively new to the rules, but not total noobs for sure. And they are pretty good rules readers, so it is definately more than that.
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RunnerPaul
post Jan 4 2007, 10:26 PM
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QUOTE (Brahm)
And the selecting of the Force and the additional powers, where-in that process they will inveritably develop Old Lady's disease and waffle and change their damn mind a few times.

Start enforcing a 45 second rule for those sorts of decisions. If they can't pick a force in the time limit, no summoning/compiling and no further attempts during that specific encounter. If they can't pick an optional power in the time limit, they get a spirit/sprite that has no optional power.
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Faelan
post Jan 4 2007, 10:58 PM
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It sounds to me like your mage at least is just summoning up a bunch of spirits and not binding them. The limit on unbound spirits the mage may have at any one time is one, no more. Check p.179 SR4 Core third paragraph down. Enforce that and he is going to have to start spending beaucoup nuyen to bind them, and you should stop running into that problem.

For the Technomancer he can only have one unregistered sprite at any one time, p.234 SR4 Core under Compiling Sprites. Which means he will have to have a bunch of registered ones.

Put this together and you should have to deal with a lot less of that kind of torment.
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Brahm
post Jan 4 2007, 11:02 PM
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QUOTE (Faelan)
It sounds to me like your mage at least is just summoning up a bunch of spirits and not binding them. The limit on unbound spirits the mage may have at any one time is one, no more. Check p.179 SR4 Core third paragraph down. Enforce that and he is going to have to start spending beaucoup nuyen to bind them, and you should stop running into that problem.

For the Technomancer he can only have one unregistered sprite at any one time, p.234 SR4 Core under Compiling Sprites. Which means he will have to have a bunch of registered ones.

Put this together and you should have to deal with a lot less of that kind of torment.

D'oh! How did I overlook something staring me right in the face like that? No wonder I had this nagging feeling that something wasn't right. What wasn't right was me! Thanks a heap folks!
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