Due to ethical and monetary differences in the group, one player has decided to look the way of playing a Mage. He's leaning heavily toward Either Shaministic Voodoo or Hermeticism, but wants to run the route of having spirits possess when combat happens and then "ride the gravy train to beatdown town," as it was said.

I don't mind this at all, since the player typically isn't the gung-ho combat type, and it's interesting to see some variation. However, having not GM'd for this type of character, I was curious if anyone with more experience could highlight some of the common problems/misconceptions/overlooked drawbacks of this type of character.

As always, thanks in advance for any help.

...speaking from experience, I would keep close tabs on the character at the outset. If the player is very conscientious and doesn't get abusive with it, then there is not much to worry about. However, if the player is into "power playing" (which can be done with non combat oriented mages), it can really mess a scenario up and ruin things for the other players.

Regarding using Channeling with possession spirits: be sure to house rule that the character can't use the spirit's Force for his Magic tests. There was a long sub-thread in the Dragon Challenge thread regarding an evil infinite loop with that. Best to tell him up front before he spends too many points in that direction.

For just combat power, possession and summoning are very close. Possession makes a slightly beefierr combatant, but it requires higher force spirits (and hence more drain) and requires more actions to do.

Possession via task spirits is sometimes touted as a problem, but I haven't seen it in play yet.

...sounds like there should be little issue then. Possession can be a very powerful tradition even for a mage that is not maxed out as I have found out. In the hands of a good team player it can be a very useful tool as well as a terrifying weapon for those times when you really need to dish out some hurt.

Keep in mind, if the mage has himself possessed, the spirit pretty much controls him and uses only its skills & powers. It can only cast spells that it knows.

Possession of a living individual is also noticeable to others, even mundanes.

One thing that never came up in the runs I GM'd but would be kind of a interesting use would be if say one of the team goes down unconscious and the mage has a spirit possess that character basically to get her out of harm's way.

Thanks for the tips, the casting using the Spirit's Force was something that I had actually overlooked up until this point.

In-so-far as immunity to normal weapons, how lenient (in favor to the players) are most of you? Do you consider explosive ammunition /normal/? Or, do you have to have a Weapon Foci or the equivilent to do damage?

I was thinking to only supply an automatic armor rating equal to the spirits force, and remove the immunity. Would this be swinging things too far to the weak side?

Umm, considering that Immunity to Normal Weapons is basically Hardened Armor that can be bypassed with magic, all you really need to do damage is get a big enough gun to have a DV over whatever the Immunity Rating is.

I play a Voodoo mage who routinely walks around possessed. Honestly, it hasn't come up yet, I generally stand back in a support role and am very intelligent when it comes to exposing myself to harm so the immunity to normal weapons and increased stats hasn't really come into play much. However, my mage himself feels much better knowing he's protected like that. Only time it came into effect was I ran into a building to slap Combat Sense on my buddy the Street Sam because he was under heavy fire, and the increased Reflex helped me avoid damage from a Lightning Ball, however if you took away the dice it's incredibly unlikely I would have been harmed much anyway and the opposing mage critically glitched his Drain Test on the second(larger) Lightning Ball and knocked himself out. Thanks to Nonconductive, Combat Sense, Counterspelling, and both me and the SS having high reflex we both completely avoided damage and infuriated the mage so he threw a bigger one at us and almost killed himself due to bad dice rolls. Heh, our hacker for hire woke up from full VR and ran in to see what was going on and took the Lightning Ball in the face and we almost didn't have to pay him.

Chris