I was putting some final touches on the much improved Magic sheet of the SR4Chargen.XLS and i noticed something very odd. The character generation rules do not list the Binding skill as a requirement for buying a spirit with BP. The PC is limited to Charisma # of Bound spirits bought, and the maximum services you can buy them at is the ranks of Summoning skill, or Conjuring skill if the PC bought that instead. But nothing about a Binding skill requirement, at least not directly and only indirectly as one possibility if they had bought Conjuring.

Can anyone see a means by which a metahuman could Bind a spirit without having at least 1 rank in Binding? I can't find any in the BBB. Maybe there will be some contrived way in Street Magic for transfering ownership of a Bound spirit, or for a free spirit to help someone without a single rank in the skill to bind a spirit.

But in the meantime at least it seems an oversight? Not a huge one because eventually you'll burn up the services owed, and if you still haven't learned Binding there is no way to rebind that spirit or to bind a new spirit. But still somewhat an issue.

I suppose a Sorceror or a magician without Conjuring could do an Astral Quest to learn the spirit's True Name. Or maybe they found the chain for a ghost and control it somehow.

Ya, those are other possibilies for when Street Magic comes out. Even a Mystic Adept without Astral Perception might be able to Astral Quest if Gate is a power that will be continued in canon.

But it's hard to use MitS and other SR3 non-BBB rules to do direct parallels because the skill for summoning no longer includes as part of it the ability to bind. Therefore i'd rather not assume that even with a True Name you'd be able to Bind a spirit. You might be able to bargin with a spirit (with or without the threat of the True Name), although that would require it either be a free spirit, or that unbound spirits are able to choose to stay past sunrise/sunset and only disappear now because they want to get home.

BTW this is also mirrored with technos where the Registering skill is not listed as a requirement for creating a techno character with registered sprites. It sure looks like to me this is either an oversight where the issue wasn't noticed, or it was decided it wasn't worth the effort and/or word count to explicitly make it a requirement.

Defaulting to Attributes?

Not allowed.

I don't know about sprites, but couldn't another magician bind a spirit then pass over the services to PC. This could even work for non magicians.

Erm, there is a mechanic for it. It's on p178, under "Loaned Services". You can effectively loan the services of a bound spirit over to any other character. It must stay within the vicinity of the recipient character to receive orders, and cannot be "called".

The key being "proper". With that the spirit has to stick around the borrower, and it is still Bound to the original Binder so counting against their spirit limit not the borrower (which i suppose would have no limit on spirits they could borrow?). So it's not actually transfered at all. Also it is not clear what happens when the loan becomes a remote service. Once it becomes a remote service what is required for the Binding magician to regain control of the service, if they even can?

There is somewhat of a conflict there, with the Loaned section saying saying the Binder can reclaim a service loaned, but the Remote Services seem to imply [IMO] that the Binder loses the ability to immediately recall a spirit that has been sent on a Remote Service. The resolution that fits best for me is that the magician could still reclaim the loaned service but would have to locate the spirit, by whatever separate magical or mundane means, and then get within the Magic x 100m of the spirit to countermand the loan.

EDIT: But in fairness Loaning is i guess clearer in many cases than my last post portrayed the overall options, even if the mechanism bears very little similarity to a Bound spirit purchased in character generation.