I had a few minutes this afternoon to twink my munchkin mage. He's built with normal chargen rules and 35 karma and 50000 nuyen of no-availability-limit extra cash.

Any comments, advice, or hysterical rants?

High points:
Immunity to Normal Weapons 20
Initiative 33
4 IP
Body, Agi, and Str all 11 each
Chr 7
Irresistable mind control spells (watch out if he lights his cigar in front of you)
Great versatility from spells, voodoo spirits, and skillsofts

Low points:
His only real weakness is that if he has to walk into a Ward without setting off the alarm, he'll have to spend a couple turns reactivating his spells (and probably a few more IP to get the full 8 hits on his increase attribute spells without using Edge). The drain from overcasting his Summoning every dawn and dusk would get to be a real drag, but his Trauma Damper and First Aid+Medkit should cancel out the odd boxes that make it past his 18 drain resistance dice and he can burn an Edge point if the spirit scores a spectacular number of hits.

Leftovers:
I didn't spend all his cash, I'm sure I'd buy an armored jacket and maybe some Social skillsofts to take advantage of his high Chr. There's a karma point I have leftover that I guess I'll just give as a tip to my Ally Spirit.

Variants:
Cut the spirit's force to ensure an easy drain test.

I like this build much better than the one you posted in the other thread.

I'd just like to point out that for around 50,000 (51,200 to be exact) you can get an Ares Citymaster which has Immunity to All Weapons 20.

My favorite is "Incompetent: Pilot Anthroform" which gives you 5 bonus BP for being unable to pilot non-existent vehicles.

As a GM, I would probably have a problem with a so-called mystic adept with no points allocated to adept abilities. Plus, the concept depends on some rules interpretations that I disagree with (a spirit sustaining more than one spell at a time, "Be me for the day" as a valid service for a spirit), and a mage abusing spirits this way would eventually have his ally turn on him (to the best of its ability), and have those high Force possessing spirits start spending Edge to resist the summoning test. Like most munchkin builds, he depends on a lax or lenient GM.

I have read the description for the channelling metamagic. It creates more of a balance between the two minds, so that the mage has more control. It still doesn't affect how services are defined. Like the book, I wouldn't nickel and dime mages on every little thing, like tying your shoes or getting a bite to eat. But valid services would be things like "Help us get past these guards" or "Get this security door open", not "Stick around all day and buff me up."

And there is where a high-Force spirit would feel abused, especially a Loa. You might be in control, but the spirit is still there too. It will get bored and want to do something else, it will have things it wants to do itself, and if it is ignored so it can simply buff your stats all day, it won't be pleased.

Similarly, an ally spirit won't appreciate being used as a living sustaining focus all day. And all it says about ally services is that they don't expire. But the spell sustaining service consistently talks about single spells, so a strict reading of the rules wouldn't allow multiple spells to be sustained by the ally spirit.

Mystic adept, like the other awakened qualities, are meant to be taken by characters who are serious about developing them. So a GM would be well within reason to refuse the quality to someone basically looking to play a spellcaster for 5 points less. As an aspected mage, you would still need to pay the 15 points, so you would be over the 35 point limit and have to drop one of your other positive qualities.


And don't take any of this personally. It's not like this is a character submitted to an actual campaign of mine or anything, so I don't really care. You wanted comments and advice, so I'm saying how a GM might look at this character and have problems with it. That's the problem with rules exploit builds. They tend to get extra scrutiny, and the GM will use the most stringent interpretations of the rules to knock it down.

Meh. Keep a bound Task around with Pilot(Anthroform) as a bonus power.

Personally, I like the idea of Spirit Bane (Blood/Radiation/Toxic). If you ever meet one, they'll be trying to kill you first anyways, if they're smart enough to recognize you as the biggest threat. And yet, it's not entirely out of bounds, because it does give the GM ample room to make you earn the BP.

EDIT: As for the channeling abuse, during a "normal" day, you'd be able to get away with a single spirit; but, if you got into multiple combats, had to call on powers, or things like that, you'd burn through your tasks in a hurry and have to resummon at probably a bad moment.

Which is where a high-force Possession Ally with a smattering of skills and spells would be more useful. The only catch is, that's a lot more karma.

If I were in that position, there would be times I would want Movement and Concealment, at the very least. Each time you flick the switch on each one, that's a task...

So, normally, the spirit would be just for INW+stats (and note that possession buffs should stack with spell buffs, so go ahead and have your ally sustain physical stat buffs, too)?

The one downside to all of this is that you lose the magnificent flexibility of a Materializing spirit. But then, you could always grab an ally and twink it into a True Form Inhabitation merge, which is essentially the same thing. You just can't do it with non-allies.

Hmmm. Make that a decent-force (4+) ally, and I'd see your point... you could get by with the ally's powers, and would only use the summoned spirit's powers in extreme emergencies.

Of course, at some point, you just throw enough karma at the ally, and have it possess you itself semi-permanently. But then, any mage, given enough karma, eventually eats dragons for breakfast.

Personally I think Ally spirits using Inhabitation are much more hardcore. Remember in a flesh form you retain all the vessel's powers, skills and memories. So by having your ally inhabit a vampire you pick up Regeneration and Mist Form as well as any 'ware said vampire already had (not sure vamps can get 'ware but whatever, you get the idea).

Given enough karma, I'd pick one of each. For a Possession tradition, that actually means 3.

True Form Inhabitation(effectively Materialization) for its de facto teleportation and insanely fast movement.

Possession to turn you into Chuck Norris.

Inhabitation into a custom-built borg (vampire, jarhead, bioengineered clone with .01 essence left, "whatever gives you the most plusses") for the ebil.

You just need karma... lots and lots of karma. Fortunately, there are cheats to do that.

You have problems with your BP + karma build. Build the BP first, then add the karma. Not BP and karma together at the same time.

Now that I have the time, I'll go through your build.

First, your mentor spirit. You changed the bonuses it gives. Why should raven grant a bonus to guardian spirits instead of spirits of air? If you're going that far, just make up your own mentor spirit, call it Buster, and have it grant bonuses to all that you want. Make it +2 to drain and +2 to channeled spirits force. Why not?

As far as your cyberware goes, whats "upgrade to skillwires 4". You need to break down your chargen build, and then break down the spending of your post chargen nuyen and karma.

I can kind of figure out what he was doing with the skillwires. He got Level: 3 Skillwires at char-gen for 12,000, then spent 4,000 post-char-gen to upgrade them to 4. It is a bit confusing, I'll admit.


I know the boosted Attributes are mostly an interim thing before he gets possessed by the spirit he's channelling, but I see two problems. One is that he is assuming the maximum number of successes, 9 or 10, despite the fact that he is only rolling 13 dice for health spells. I would insist on seeing the rolls, and having him soak Drain, each time. Plus, they can only increase an Attribute up to the Force of the spell, which is probably a moot point, since with 13 dice he would be unlikely to even get that 8 or 9 successes. He could probably get a respectable set of Attributes from his buffing spells, but I doubt he could consistently max them out like that.

Uhh, its 16,000 for skillwires 4. You don't get to upgrade for the difference.

It's a GM call, although I would probably run 'ware upgrades that way too (you need to buy it at the new rating). Any page number to support that ruling?