I read some post on these boards and see people binding fore 10+ spirts. How the hell do people do this ?

What have I got wrong? Twice the spirts force in dice for the binding? Need one Net hit?

Force 10=20 dice =6-7 net hits on avarage.

Caster has max 6dice+2+6 magic =14 dice=4-5 hits

And then there is A) the drain for the summon B) the drain for the bind ?

foci
edge

you going to need a big foci to help off set those hits!!!

If you use edge then cannot the spirt use it's ? It might not want to be bound ?


What about the drain ?

We have strict rules in our game now that when our mage binds a spirit, a few of us are there with weapon foci and/or elephant guns.

Of course, that is because our GM always rolls more successes than our mage. But she's only not drained it once... still... (You wreck one house in a nice suburban neighborhood and no one ever forgives you.)

I don't think anyone in our game would attempt to bind such a large spirit. Spirits would definately use edge. And I think a force 10 spirit would do a lot of damage to you if you failed to drain it... But the good thing is that the NPCs in our game don't try to bind those big spirits either. Once our mage starts binding force 10 spirits, every NPC mage out there is going to have one or two of 'em standing by.

I took edge away from critters in general.

Yes, this makes the higher-force ones easier to bind... but it also means that I don't have to deal with the "look, my freshly summoned pet has 6 more edge to burn in *this firefight*" effect. It was for the better, I think.

That destroys game balance; then you'll start out binding force 3 spirits.

Leaving the choice of burning edge to spirit instead of the summoner also works.

I'd only allow spirits to do that if they had Spirit Bane; otherwise, the metaplane as a whole has nothing against you, and it actually means something when someone gets spirit bane.

Being bound is being forced into slavery. The metaplane may not have anything against you, but anyone you try to force into slavery probably will.

Dah... GAME BALANCE!!!

Ok. Interesting point you make, if somewhat confusing in it's utter lack of points.

The only spirits they'll bind will be weak-assed ones; even if they could bind 3 or 4 of them at a time, they'll be completely useless anyway!

How does that affect game balance?

The mages will be much, much weaker assets to the team. Unless you hate the way magic works in this game.

A mage can go his entire career and never bind a single spirit and still be an asset to his team. Being able to yank in 4 force 4 air elementals at a moment's notice because ou've got them bound is an asset to the team.

The larger the spirits available are the worse game balance suffers because the mages begin to grossly outshine the people who can't summon.

Bah. That's the way it should be.

Taking edge away from critters was a solution that worked for my game... YMMV. Rather than going round and round about when spirits use edge, if the player can order them to use edge, and dealing with the random issues caused by an on-the-spot summoned F6 spirit whipping out it's 18 exploding dice and beating something to death with them, it was easier to just say "hey, critters don't have Edge," and call it a night.

It also means that I don't run into horrendous overkill problems if I attack the group with a spirit... it doesn't have Edge, and therefore can't pull stupidly amazing rolls out of its butt.

Amusingly, the guy who was trying to bind force 6 spirits (and having a hell of a time doing it) is now working with force 9s, instead. One of these days, it's gonna roll well, and the drain is going to kill him. Should be interesting when DocWagon shows up to respond to his biomonitor and finds a force 9 spirit trashing the place. "Uh, Dispatch, patient is not extricateable, put us back on Active Duty, please."

A bunch of force 4 spirits is pretty close statistically to a bunch of angry mages running around... 8 points of armor, they know their preferred attack ability, have 4 stat and 4 skill... hell, they'll put up a pretty solid fight, and it's not like the number of successes a well-specced summoner would get on a binding test would make a swarm of these guys overly expensive per-service.