Can you bind a spirit from another tradition?, (and also make it an Ally spirit?) Options

[Buster]

Can you bind a spirit you don't have access to from another tradition? If you can, can you then transform it into an Ally spirit (because it's a bound spirit)?

For example, if I was a non-possession-tradition hermetic mage and gained control of a possession-tradition voodoo Task spirit through Banishing, could I then 1) bind that possessing Task spirit and 2) could I then transform that bound spirit into a possessing Ally spirit?

[FrankTrollman]

Ally spirits are not normal spirits that are transformed into allies, they are ally spirits to begin with. So you can't get other traditions to cough up their Blue Eyes White Dragon so that you can have that as your ally.

But you can banish and then pokemon other people's spirits and then bind them.

-Frank

[Buster]

Ah I see what you're saying. I was confused because the book says the mage first summons then binds the ally spirit and finally pays karma to make it an ally. I was thinking that a normal spirit had to be conjured, bound, then transformed, but you're saying it is the ally spirit itself that is originally summoned then bound. Cool, thx.

[Karaden]

Yeah, you conjure and bind an ally spirt, then, in order to make it your personal ally, you do the fancy dance and spend karma. At least that is how I understand it. On a related note, if you manage to conjure another tradition's spirit by banishing and conjuring it with LOS, can you then proceed to bind it?

[Ryu]

Yes, that is what Frank was saying. "Must collect them all", indeed.

[Karaden]

I forget, are ally spirts at all based on a type. Like is there a fire ally spirt and a water ally spirt?

[Whipstitch]

No.

[knasser]

[Whipstitch]

You can't bind an insect queen through normal means. They are free spirits by definition. With the exception of the recursive Blood Spirits Street Magic is really not very munchkiny at all, really. I'd say there's some traditions that have less redundant Spirit types to summon than others, but that's about the closest I think the book comes to a balance problem, which is to say that it's pretty much a non-issue because you're typically only going to have one spirit out at a time without binding anyway. Seriously, I consider it overall to be the best book that's come out for SR4. Just about everything that gets people up in arms turns out to be a non-issue in practice.

[Karaden]

[Ryu]

Yes, Street Magic is great. But I must say that from what I´ve read in my friends copy, I think Augmentation is as good.

You can only aquire spirits this way if they were Bound Spirits to begin with. So I as a GM would allow a player to get, say, an ant soldier spirit. But not the Queen. And he´d better be careful in presence of other spirits and powerful magicians.

[Whipstitch]

Aug's got some stuff like conflicting price tables with no clear resolution in sight, plus some goony stuff like the Learning Stimulator nanites. It's kind of hard for me to be too fond of a book that seems to acknowledge the idea that Knowledge skills are pretty expensive for what they do, but whose only solution is to reward metagamers for taking as may freebie skills as possible at rating 1 only and then blowing their first wad of nuyen on some nanites that they only intend to keep for a month or two depending on how the gm handles learning. Plus, I can't wait to get into an argument with my GM over whether or not the Trauma Control Nanites are subject to nanite degradation from taking physical damage. I say no because the system is safely tucked in the hive and inactive until the biomonitor tells them to spring into action, but my GM is kind of a dick and I think he enjoys killing me, so he'll probably say that they're degraded despite the fact that by definition the TCS only comes into play once you've taken at least 9 boxes of physical and thus need stabilizing. It's a decent book overall, and the cyberlimb rules are rather nice, but it's no Street Magic (which, in all fairness, has an awful lot of page numbers listed wrong, but mechanically is pretty solid).