Just had this come up. What happens if a shaman channels a spirit and the successes would extend the channeling time past sunset/sunrise? For example, shaman Channels a spirit 5 minutes before sunset getting 3 successes. Does the channeling end in 30 minutes or when the spirit leaves in 5 minutes at sunset?

Normal Channeling rules state multiply the successes by 10 minutes, at the end of that time the spirit departs, even if it still owed services. Does this supercede the standard spirit leaving at sunrise sunset?

In my opinion (no quotes to back it up), the Sunrise/Sunset limits would override all other options.

I would advise the oppersite more in line with possession.

I am almost positive this was never addressed in SR3. I was hoping to get an idea of what others thought or if someone could point to a similar situation (exception) that could help make a decision.

Like if a magician has a time geas and is sustaining a spell past the time, what happens, if anything? Sort of a similar predicament.

well, yes, but the text for invoking specifically states which limits the metamagic allows you to overcome. as far as i'm aware, nothing in the text for possession says anything about being able to ignore the sunrise/sunset limitation. if it's two hours before sunset, and you tell your task spirit to fix your wrecked car, it doesn't stay past sunset just because the task will take eight hours to complete. i don't see why possession should work any differently.

I re-read the Channeling section and the next to last paragragh addresses when the channeling ends so that the Drain Test can be made.

I´m with Fortune. Spirits end any task and return to their home plane when the "sun visibility state" changes. Any change to that should be explicit.

And doesn´t this need an [SR3]-tag? Just noticed the "mages are unconcerned" bit on 2nd notice (writing this).

This not being the SR4 forum, why on earth would it need an [SR3] tag?

~J

Personal preference time.

As stated I would go with the path that the large number of karma to get the metamagic and a whacky load of drain at the end of the exercise, means the magical event that occurs in normal mystical circumstances is circumvented by the mystic change performed by the metamagic, hence creating a different set of mystic circumstances allowing the use of channeling to its normal time limit. (phew)

Of course the counter argument is equally valid in a different light.
So.
Personal preference time.

SR3

Still personal preference time.

What if you summon an air spirit, have it use Movement on your aircraft, and then keep flying west so that you stay ahead of the terminator? One service... for 100+ hours? If you have the spirit aid a flying drone with electric engine powered by solar panels on wings, then one service lasting for the rest of the Sixth World (or mechanical failure)?

That would be kinda unfair to the spirit, eh?

Mercifully, you can't also task a machine sprite to keep the drone Stabilized forever, because those run for only 8 hours, because techie sleep/wake cycles have little to do with daylight.

Mi-maxing mages do all their Summoning just after local sunset/sunrise. Does the spirit world dread "rush hour" when the sun rises over Seattle? What if all the spirits on the part of the Astral that's parallel to Seattle, go elsewhere at dawn to avoid getting summoned?

And it's also *not* sunrise or sunset in the rest of the world, so if a spirit moves a bit, its odds of getting summoned could drop dramatically, if summoning has anything to do with the location of summoner and spirit.

Yes, the kami of the freeway does indeed dislike rush hour. Or exults in it. One or the other.

Indeed. It does depend on whether Summon Spirit really means Create Spirit.

Have you ever summoned a spirit and asked it about its past? Or about previous times it's been Summoned? Hm, what if you summon it, have it kill all the witnesses, dismiss it... and now it's the only one (besides you) who knows where the bodies are buried, and goes on Oprah?

As evidenced by Riley37's mean example of the plane flying in perpetual daylight, (or worse, summoning a spirit up around the arctic circle where the day/night cycle dosen't change for months), the archaic "sunrise/sunset" system worked in a back-world hickish fourth world where nobody understood such things as astronomical physics.

Now, it would be simpler to just set a hard and fast "12 hours from summoning" limit, that can be extended with the appropriate Metamagics.

What makes the example "mean", though?

~J

'mean' in the sense of parsimonious or cruel. "Hah-hah, spirit, tricked you, you thought you agreed to a service that you could finish in 12 hours at worst, but now you're trapped into Moving this plane for a long, long time!"

I really don't see how the change in whether or not your position on the surface of the Earth, having line-of-sight to the sun or not, is a universal determining factor in the behavior of spirits. Yeah, it's magic. I like my RPG magic systems to have consistency and/or aesthetic appeal.

Rather harsh alternate rule: every hour past (10-Force) that the spirit spends waiting, it rolls Rating dice, and if it gets one or more hits, then it owes one less spirit. Or something like that.

I ran my computer at full CPU load for the last 48 hours for various reasons. Am I being mean? I didn't tell it I was going to recompile the Glascow Haskell Compiler, but then all of a sudden I did. Was that parsimonious or cruel?

~J

Proteans also have a WIL stat.

~J

Presumably a spirit leaves at sundown because something in the manasphere changes at sundown—it's obviously not the spirit's decision, as there's no precedent for the spirit, if it can make decisions in the first place, deciding to stick around instead of bugging out.

There are several possible consistent decisions for what happens when a spirit is at the center of the earth. If the spirit wasn't summoned there, the simplest is to have it disappear at sunup or sundown where it was summoned, but that breaks down as one moves into the earth. Nevertheless, there remain consistent ways to treat it.

~J

You think that's bad, try being an observant Muslim above the arctic circle (or below the antarctic circle).

~J

Why is this thread still going?

When Jews aren't sure which time zone they're in, they daven at every level.

Jewish practice varies. Orthodox tend towards making sure, eg celebrating a holiday on multiple days to make sure they did so on the right one. Reform or Liberal more often settles for a best-guess solution, and perhaps trusts that the Most High will cut slack for good-faith efforts and intent. Jewish start-of-Shabat practice sometimes includes hair-splitting aspects: "...once the blessing is said, the woman has begun the Mitzvah of lighting the candles and thereby inaugurated the Shabbat day. It would now be inappropriate for her to light a candle—an act that desecrates the Shabbat. So she lights the candles before saying the blessing, while it’s still weekday. But, she still wants to fulfill the concept of saying the blessing before the act. How does she manage that? She does so by not completing the Mitzvah entirely until after saying the blessing: After lighting the candles, she immediately covers her eyes. She then says the blessing and only afterwards uncovers her eyes and enjoys the candlelight. This way, she has fulfilled the concept of saying the blessing before the act, since the act of lighting is not complete until she actually enjoys the light."

There was a famous rabbi who said "'The Sabbath was established for man. Man does not exist for the Sabbath." With all due respect to the Orthodox, I like his approach.

If spirits vanish *at sundown* exactly, due to some change in the manasphere, then Orthodox Jews with time-zone or underground or arctic-circle issues can summon a spirit, and when it vanishes, then they *know* that it's sundown. Why the manasphere responds to LOS between Sol and the surface of the Earth is beyond me. I thought the manasphere was an epiphenomenon of life energy (and thus absent at center of Earth, just as absent beyond the atmosphere). Sharp variations in the manasphere due to the shadows of mountains? (sun goes over horizon earlier at the lee-side base than at the peak)

Sure, one can create sunset-defining rulings, and make them consistent, just as pre-Galilean astronomers created ever more complex "cycles and epicycles" to explain the motions of stars and planets *without admitting that the Earth orbits the Sun*. One can also decide "hm, spirits vanish at sundown, that seems like a rule created towards a more general goal of nerfing the effectiveness of conjuring; it works well within a set of conditions, but not universally; is there a better way to nerf conjuring?"

Exactly.

A much simpler soloution is to just give it a 12 hour limit, and bam, that's that.

Plus, it lends the possibility of Extending metamagic to extend the duration of your summoned spirits' time in your world, without resorting to summoning at the arctic circle, underground, or ordering the spirit to use Movement to keep a plane constantly in sunlight.

I imagine that when spirits laid out their little ground rules. "yes, We'll do your bidding, but we clock off at dusk or dawn" they maybe just forgot to factor in cheeky alaskan magicians.

Also, I don't put much faith in Sprits understanding of time in our system anyway. The dawn and dusk specification fits. I don't imagine a monocled hearth spirit whipping out his pocket watch and saying "oh gee whillackers, sir. But it's 0500 and I simply must be popping off".

Disturbingly, actually I can.

Yes, but that is extremely impractical, especially if you need to summon a spirit, and it's five minutes till sunup/sundown. If you wait for five minutes plus one, you have a spirit for 11 hours, 55 minutes - if you summon it now, you only have one for a minute.

Makes. No. Sense.

Serious question—why does it make no sense? There are problems with the sunup/sundown rule, much as I like it, most notably places where sunup/sundown doesn't make sense (center of the earth, subterranean areas in general, theoretically in space), but I don't see the fact that the cutoff point actually ends up being a cutoff point as being one.

~J

I wonder more why it should make sense. I mean, if Shadowrun really needed to make sense, I'm sure the entire magic equation would be the first thing to go.

Personally that's why I like Shadowrun, the cyber-ware is almost believable, especially looking at the dumpshock headlines. The leaps and bounds of logic when it comes to the awakened is what makes it compelling, what sets Shadowrun apart from other cyber-punk. A magician can cast a spell inflicting Deadly damage, at the same time almost causing himself deadly damage. It's wierd, and sometimes rather stressful, but a lot more compelling and interesting than say, a mana pool of abstract points that you dip into. Fireball costs 10 MP!

So you could have a 12 hour summoning limit, but it's much less interesting, much less compelling, to me at least, than the dawn and dusk restriction. And while I can't argue it for balance as well as you can argue drain. But I simply demonstrate why I have no problem with it and will leave it unchanged.

I mean hey, if I'm playing a stealth campaign, I don't complain that my character is easier to spot in daylight. It's just the way it is, it's a tactical consideration. And I see no reason why shamans shouldn't have to make tactical considerations also.

Your stealth guy dosen't have a sudden switch from "easy to see" to "hard to see" at the technical time of sunup/sundown. Light moves in a gradient, after all, nad he'll probably be able to hide really well in the twilight.

As opposed to the shaman/mage, whose summoned spirit will wink out in precisely five minutes if he summons it now, or twelve hours if he summons it in six minutes, which is patently ridiculous.

But the stealth guy /does/ (or can) make that sudden switch based on things like whether the lights are on. Guns go from very long-ranged and reliable if taken good care of to short-ranged and prone to blowing up (or just not working at all) just by moving them from a place one foot above the surface of the water to one foot below the surface of the water. If I were just a foot behind where I am now, I'd no longer be able to see the posters on my wall—all I'd be able to see is the guy next door's wall.

Why does this transition make less sense?

~J

Nice strawman, Kagetenshi.

Moving a gun from above water to underwater is not some mystical terminious, you're throwing it into an environment it was not made for, putting a lot of water in a place water was not made to go - and this is funny, but as long as there's no air in the barrel, it'll fire just fine.

Making a transition from a foot behind where you are is simple movement, and may be readily un-done.

Turning the lights on or off is one thing, but the mystical 'terminator' between day and night is another. It's a gradual, ill-defined moment known mainly only to astronomers. And as has been said, you can summon a spirit up near the arctic circle and it'll never be nighttime, or you can summon it and order it to use Movement to keep itself constantly in the light. It's all bullsh, which is why a twelve-hour limit, possibly with some dice fuzzing so you don't know exactly how much time you have, is more appropriate for a spirit.