Free spirit PC: Vanilla flavor VS possession, And they cost the same to take?? Options

[volkmar77]

Hello there!
First time I write here, came back to SR4 after some time as my group changes game quite often... anyway, as there was interest I picked up some books, especially the runner's companion, and me and my players started mulling somethings over. Of course someone wanted to make a Free Spirit and here is where the issue came up.

Premising that I am aware of the 4 page long topic about free spirits and how they can, technically, gain massive amount of karma in little time, let's just ignore that for the time being.

So we have free spirits, they cost 250 points to make, give you 2 in all attributes and a list of strength and weaknesses quite long indeed, so much that I could honestly not justify the ridicolously high race cost as with 150 points left, you are going to be either a gimped magician (cause you cannot access neither other spirits nor foci) or a somewhat competent physical fighter (but allright, you get 12 points of hardened armor if you get Force to 6, but you are limited to 2 IP without magic augmentation). 150 points to get skills, rise your attributes etc seems a bit little.... until you figure out possession spirits.

There are no guidelines given for creating a free possession spirit's vessel, they could technically possess about anything and it is of course left to GM to limit them. But hey, here is the deal: someone mentioned how by spending, say, 7 points for a 1/6 troll contact, you could have a pretty nice body to inhabit. This would counter most of the problems with the spirit as the physical attribute of the Troll add to your own, you now just need high Force and you have a quite decked out combat mage or a natural raging fury. This... does not sound right, I wondered if anyone else tought about this. Mostly on 1) how to handle vessel creation for a possession spirit and 2) isn't the difference between them quite remarkable so that the racial cost should actually be different?

I'm tentativly running with these set of rules, but they are prolly a bit unbalanced and ask for your advice and ideas: 1) I will assign some points out of the 250 racial cost to "build" the vessel. These points are to be used for racial selection and physical attributes alone. Building an object body is still something I am thinking of. And yes, I am aware the spirit can just fly out and possess something else, but I assume a possession spirit was summoned for some important reason and a prepared vessel of good quality was done for him/her/it so that the spirit will prolly want to stick to it for some time at least.

2)I'm thinking of reducing the racial cost for a non-possession free spirit to 150 BPs. The extra 100 points would help to make a better balanced character.

Any comments?
Thanks anyway ;D

[Karoline]

Yes, a possession spirit could possess a big bad troll and have some decent stats, but there are alot of disadvantages inherit in that.

First off there is an opposed test to get into the body (Not hard, but it must be made), second, even a loyalty 6 contact isn't going to let a spirit play around with their body during illegal activities which tend to be highly deadly.

Second, a possession spirit needs to keep that body around, unlike a materialization spirit that can just pop into astral and then pop back up wherever they want. In other words the possession spirit is much more bound than a materialization spirit.

That said, possession spirits are still qutie powerful because they can always just possess one of the first enemies you come across, putting a rather sudden ally in the enemy ranks, causing all kinds of confusion and damage.

Anyway, what I've found works well for keeping free spirits balanced to others is to use karmagen with a few house rules. First make sure that you do 5x for attributes like in SR4A, then assign a cost for race equal to the BP cost. This means that a free spirit will only have 500 karma to work with, which should generally create a character that is fairly balanced with other 400 BP characters.