Have a spirit of man sustain, like, 6 force 1 spells, and then bind it. It'll have no dice pool, and you'll have all of yours, and you'll get 6 services out of it.

Don't spirits have to be bound first to perform a magical service? (SRCorep178)

That's not a magical service. A spirit of man has the power innate spellcasting, it's just a simple use of a power.

EDIT: As an optional power of course.

So tell a force 6 spirit to armor 4 rocks and then bind him. He'll have no dice pool to resist, and the book doesn't specifically tell you that there is no way to modify the dice pool the way you can't modify the drain pool with spells and pain editing.

Negative dice pool modifiers don't apply to resistance tests.

For what kind of resistance tests? I thought it was just for drain resistance. Rules posting, plz? I can only find the part where drain resistance pools aren't reduced.

It's a gray area. Sustaining spells provides a dicepool penalty on all other tests, but that penalty doesn't apply to damage resistance or spell resistance tests. But assuming it works:

It's a net loss in services, though it's a net gain in Drain resistance.

Every service you expend on having it sustain a spell reduces its dicepool by 2 - giving you on average 2/3 of an extra service on the binding test.

It's only a net bonus to services if you immediately rebind (since you're paying X services to pick up 2/3 X services on each binding attempt).

-Frank

No, the rules say that it can use any powers that it sees fit to use on a service. So if the service is "Armor these 6 worthless rocks so I can rebind you," then it's only a loss of one service.

I somehow think spirits are not that stupid....
Once you start the binding ritual the spirit would drop the sustained spell as a free action, spirits dont like to be bound and would resist any way they could. Even if your plan worked (any GM willing to let you do this...) the spirit could still make a long shot test and roll its edge which would be bad if your sumoning anything over force 6.

Not to mention that repeated uses of this would build up some massive ill will with the spirit world and eventually the GM could start slapping Spirit Banes on you.

Oh... I thought you could have it sustain the spells indefinitely with a single service, even if you were binding the thing. I thought it didn't have a choice in the matter.

And how would it get a spirit bane? It's not particularly painful to the spirit, just difficult.

And you could have it sustain it over multiple binding attempts, which would rock.

You can gain the Spirit Bane Quality (I really really want to use the word Flaw) by mistreating Spirits. Think of it as beating your slaves. Sure you can do it a time or two and nothing will come of it, but keep it up on a continual basis and the whole damn slave community gets all riled up, and one day you just might not live to regret it.

1.) One service at a time. The number of targets is restricted, too. In the case of spells, I´d call it one service per spell. So you´d be out of luck with armoring your little friends.

2.) There are no modifiers at all for defending against a binding attempt. Before reading this thread I´d have rejected the idea. Now I´d just allow you to have the spirit suffer the -2 dice and have the spirit react accordingly.