Possession vs Materialization, Which spirit path is better and why? Options

[Buster]

Are possession or materialization traditions better for the shadowrunning conjurer? Possession and materialization are fairly well balanced, but which do you prefer and why? What tactics and strategies do you use with possessing or materializing spirits that make them more useful/powerful/versatile than the other?

Possession
Pros:

• Bonuses equal to spirit force to host's physical attributes (also works when possessing conjurer).
• Hardened Armor bonus equal to spirit force (including on unwilling hosts).
• Guardian Spirit + Psychokinesis power = animated sword!

Cons:

• Need a host for any task that affects real world (may be difficult to possess unwilling target if low force). However this limitation can be mitigated if the spirit has Psychokinesis or a useful spell and possesses some easy target like a pebble.
• If possessing a host, it is blocked by wards. However, it can jump to hosts on other side of ward by abandoning current host and using metaplane shortcut.

Materialization
Pros:

• Does not need a host.
• Not blocked by wards if conjurer is on other side of ward (metaplane shortcut trick)

Cons:

• ?

[James McMurray]

I prefer summoning, but my next character will be a houngoun. I think they're both fairly well balanced, although spirits with low force are a lot more useful when summoned unless you've got someone willing nearby for them to possess.

[Buster]

Good point, but how are the lower force materializing spirits more useful than possessing spirits?

[FrankTrollman]

[Jaid]

even at low force, spirit powers can be nice. when you consider that, strictly speaking, a spirit cannot use it's powers on you unless you are in the same plane as it, and possession spirits can only get to the physical plane by possessing stuff...

also, there's the fact that high force possession spirits are apparently slated for a random nerfing for no reason whatsoever (that is, making their attributes subject to the attribute cap).

generally speaking, i would say manifesting spirits are just more all-around useful.

[James McMurray]

They can actually do things on their own. Maybe not big things, but it's better than nothing. For instance, a swarm of rating 3 gaurdian or beast spirits with materialize can cause someone some problems. Same with some air sprits and their lightning bolts. If they have to possess someone before they can attack they'll need a swarm of weak-willed targets nearby.

This is strictly from a combat on a run standpoint. If you just want them to use their powers and aren't concerned about them getting blown away or trying to smuggle a bunch of vessels into a corp you can have the possession spirits jump into a nearby bird or something.

[James McMurray]

[Shinobi Killfist]

I generally consider manifesting spirits to be more useful, possession spirits to be a it more raw powerful. Also immunity to normal weapons is a fairly bad assed survival technique when you let your self get possessed. If you see something really bad coming your way its one of the best outs in the game.

[Shinobi Killfist]

As a side note to making a houngan, I think there stats are a great starting point for a necromancer or if your a earthdawn fan a nethermancer. Make it a summoning instead of possessing change the drain stat to logic, and write some flavor text about communing with the underworld and bang necromancer. If I wasn't playing Yos my troll boxer I might try to convince our GM to add this tradition into the game for me.

[Lilt]

Whilst materialisation certainly has advantages when dealing with low (easy posession) and high (no attribute caps) force spirits, I think that possession also has some advantages that haven't been mentioned yet.

Firstly, note that Posession-tradition watchers may gain posession as an optional rule (P95). You can also get force 1 great-forms quite easily if you have the invoking metamagic.

Posessing corpses is fairly easy. I don't think that it's explicitly stated, but I can only assume that a corpse has an OR of 1. Maybe 2 or more for someone who's cybered, but 1's not a tough nut to crack. You're talking about a 55% chance for a force 1 spirit to posses a corpse the first time it tries. Add more spirits (can anyone say watcher-pack, if using the above optional rule?) or add more corpses (most fights I've seen have several dead) and the chances increase a fair bit.

These 'easy zombies' can be dressed-up, probably come with the armour they were wearing during life, and might be fairly hard to identify as being possessed. There's a threshold of 5 for force 1, so unless they've obviously taken lots of physical damage (mannabolt might say otherwise), it might work as a functional ruse until interaction is attempted.

What about living foes? Your average opponent will have 6 dice to resist, that's only about a 7.8% chance a force 1 spirit will be able to posses them. Send 5 force 1 spirits (possession watchers, or great-forms) at a group of 5 mooks, however, and there's around a 70% chance at-least one will be possessed within a round (remember: they get 3 initiative passes, and mooks are unlikely to get many IPs) and an 87 % chance of being able to posses at-least one before they're out of attempts (assuming one per opponent). Similarly, if you send a force 3 spirit at a group of 3 'norm' opponents, the chances that it'll be able to posses one of them within a round increase to 75%.

Remember, non-sentient creatures are options for possession also, so this trick can be used with some ferocious animals also. Who cares that they're missing their combat skills if they're possessed by a watcher? All you need to do is get them near opponents and end the possession, their ferocious nature plus the fact they're probably quite spooked and potentially hungry should put them in a bad enough mood. If you're not using watchers, even a moderate-force spirit is a formidable opponent when possessing a tiger.

What's the OR of a baseball bat going to be? Some clubs might have an OR of 1 for a 55% chance to posses a given weapon, many might have an OR of 2 for an 11% chance. Even an OR2 possession is generally achievable for a force 1 spirit if you have a few clubs to choose from (they're not too hard to find! and they have an 11% chance each). That gives you a weapon able to damage spirits! Sure, your mage might not be the best club wielder in the party, but it can give more options to the party troll when facing astral opponents. I also see no reason you couldn't get watchers to posses wooden arrows. You'll have a bunch, they're bound to posses one of them eventually (assuming OR2), and when they do you have a ranged weapon usable against astral opponents. Ranged combat against astral forms becomes possible!

[SCARed]

i'm pretty sure (without havin the SM by my side) that these "magic arrows" won't damage astral entities - the only ways of dealing damag on the astral plane are socery (combat stuff ...) or astral combat.

and even if it would do some damage: a force 1 spirit is likely to vanish on the "impact" IMHO.

[Whipstitch]

This has been discussed in a possessed bullets thread before. My personal stance is no, you can't used ranged weapons on the astral. The book says you can't and for good reason. You need astral combat to harm astral beings because astral combat is freaky rpg mumbo jumbo that refuses to be stopped by any silly concerns like logic, physics or reality. Astral forms are described as being able to move at the speed of thought and therefore mages can just think of locations and even circumnavigate the globe in less than an hour (and it may very well only take that long due to human mental limitations). They might run into a barrier because they are moving too fast to for the human mind to possibly comprehend, but even then they don't suffer any special penalties due to speed of "impact". Velocity apparently isn't an issue on the astral, since it follows its own rules and is affected by little but raw magical power. Not to mention, can you imagine even trying to hit something that fast with a physical projectile? Astral forms make rockets look pitifully slow. Even the dual natured are reduced to wielding their raw Will and their Astral Combat score against purely astral forms. Bonded weapon foci probably harm astral beings because they essentially operate as an extension of the wielder's magic. After all, an inactive or unbound focus is essentially worthless against even a materialized spirit. It is rather weird that weapon foci still use their meat damage codes, but I guess we'll just have to live with a few contradictions when dealing with our fictional metaplanes.

[Buster]

I don't think they meant using the ranged weapons on the astral but in the real world against materialized spirits.

This could be fun, it reminds me of the "dum dum" bullets in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

[sunnyside]

First off don't forget about wards, they're relativly cheap and easy to get in secured spots.

These are more problematic for low level possesion spirits since they either have to find vessles on the other side or they have to risk getting disrupted/stalled/stopped trying to break through.

Now I haven't actually had one in my games yet, but from a GM point of view I seem to recal that when you get possesed the spirit is running the show. And I anticipate troubles with players suddenly wanting to play the spirit that you don't get with materialized spirits. Is that right? I'm away from my book.

[Kremlin KOA]

hey, where is this nerfing being talked about?

[James McMurray]

I have no idea. The FAQ (http://www.shadowrunrpg.com/resources/faq.shtml#5) specifically states that a merge's attributes are limited to (character's attribute + spirit's Force) x 1.5, rounded down. Since the spirit adds it's Force to the attributes, that's going to be a hard limit to bypass. It should actually increase your limit, meaning a guy inhabited by a spirit can get more of a benefit from an attribute boosting spell than he could if the spirit wasn't there.

Unless, that is, I'm missing something, which is entirely possible.

[Jaid]

it was posted a while back. i'd try a search for it, but i can't remember what thread it came up in. i do remember frank posting shortly after the change was mentioned, and saying it was an absolutely horrible idea, but apparently it had already been discussed because i think he said they hadn't listened before.

[Moon-Hawk]

[Buster]

From FAQ:

[FrankTrollman]

Peter Taylor has announced that they are "probably" going to "eventually" write up a change to the FAQ where Possession spirits are limited by racial augmented maximums when implanted into metahumans (but not when implanted into Steel Lynxes or other borderline-powergame possession choices because there are no augmented maximums to apply or not apply in those cases).

It's a bad idea for a number of reasons - not the least of which is that it cannot be universally applied even to possession traditions and there isn't an analagous restriction on materialization traditions. But at least for now no formal announcement has been made - it's still in rumor territory and has been for quite some time now.

One can hope that this particular travesty doesn't actually happen, but with the stage of layout and editting that Augmentation is in right now it is equally likely that the devs have just been really busy (since I know for a fact that they've been really busy).

-Frank

[Kremlin KOA]

gods above and below i hope they are wrong

maybe I should start a petition

[PlatonicPimp]

Frankly I feel that possession spirits and materialization spirits have such sufficiently different tricks up their sleeves that it's comparing apples to oranges. What do you want to accomplish?

Then again, this is coming from the player who broke a DnD campaign with his familiar. Any and every ability a character possesses is a tool to be leveraged. It's just finding the right fulcrum.

[Buster]

[Buster]

I modified the front page to list pros and cons discussed in this thread for each tradition.

[PlatonicPimp]

Breaking spirits:

First, both kinds can hang out on the astral just fine. A lot of people get caught up in getting possessed by their possession-tradition spirits that they forget they still work just as well as astral spies. They can still follow people around and report back. They can still provide astral overwatch. They can still fuck up a mage whos astrally projecting, or anyting dual natured. Don't forget that.

Materializing spirits are best for remote tasks. You send them somewhere, they materialize, they do the job. The simplest example of this is a door locked from the other side. Summon your spirit, send them to the other side through the astral, have them materialize and then unlock the door. Go from there. Kill a man in a locked room with no entry. Go in and have the spirit throw those files you wanted into the trash, which you collect the next morning. A sufficiently intelligent task could operate non-DNI tech if you gave it the skill.

A materializing spirit should hang out on the astral unless absolutely needed on the physical. They make great surprise attacks, because the pop out of nowhere and fade as quickly.

Materializing spirits are easier to use for their powers. Noone has to give up their free will to benifit. (Though depending on what you possess, that may be the case anyway.) And they're easier to bring along.

Materialized watchers are annoying fuckers. Hell, they don't even materialize, they just become visible and audible. Remember, unlike other possession spirits, possession watchers do NOT get to hang out on the astral. Thusly, they serve an entirely different purpose, which is generic pair of hands and eyes. Both spy, but the materialized watcher has an easier time. The possession watcher can also play fetch.

Possession spirits are highly dependant on the quality of their host. A spirit summoned into a sword, for instance, can't move on it's own normally, and would only be good for it's powers. Once summoned into a dog couldn't open doors. A human with shitty attributes would make a mighty spirit weak.

But with a proper host a possession spirit is a fucking tank.

Also, they can be subtler than materialized spirits. Most people can tell a spirit, especially if it materializes in front of them. The unobservant or ignorant might not notice when you let a low power spirit of man possess you.