Hi there!

I have a few rules question, I hope some of you have advice. Some of the players in my group are rather… inventive and have found ways to create very efficient characters. I would be grateful for two things. To begin with, I would like to know if any of these characters is not legal because of a rule I have failed to consider.
I don’t want to punish them too severely for being creative, so secondly, it would be great if you could give me feedback if the house rules I thought of will be sufficient, or if I should take more drastic measures.

1. A player created a troll who is very, very good at shooting his bow: he ended up with Aptitude Archery, Archery (Bow) 7(+2), Strength 10(12) and Agility 3(5). Using an adrenaline pump, that’s Strength 14 and Agility 7 for 2 to 12 Combat rounds. Of course, he bought a bow with Strength Rating 14, so he pumps out arrows with deadly precision (16 dice for attacks) and even deadlier force: 16+net hits. Why fire an anti-vehicle rocket, if you have a friendly troll at hand? I thought about giving bows a damage cap of 10, but adding 1 point of Armor Penetration per 2 points of Strength over 8 – making sure he’s still pretty dangerous, but not overly so.
2. The mage doesn’t have the same offensive power, but said troll couldn’t hit him with his arrows… she’s an elf who has chosen Gryphon as a mentor spirit and specialized in binding spirits of man – of course, having an aptitude for binding. This even makes sense from a roleplaying perspective – being a leader, she leads spirits of man. Sure, she doesn’t have had a lot of BP to put in Spellcraft, but her player kindly informed me that’s not even necessary: continous use of a bound spirit’s power counts as 1 service. He showed me that Critter Powers are not sustained in the same way as spells – and innate spell is a Critter power. He got Exceptional Attribute (Charisma), raised it to 7 and bought 6 Spirits from his BP, each with one Service. You can probably guess what he wants from them… If I allow it, I have to deal with a mage who is continuously invisible, has improved reflexes, improved reaction, improved charisma and improved agility, as well as armor. I thought about using the rule that active bound spirits imposing -2 dice pool modifiers, but I think that’s a bit too harsh. After all, he is not being abusive towards his spirits, putting them at risk or forcing them to undertake a task like Spell Binding, and he is not that much more powerful than the rest of the team – he neither has many offensive spells, nor is he very skilled at mundane combat.
3. When he showed me his character concept, I also wondered about a game world element: Energy would probably be really cheap, wouldn’t it? To build a magic perpetuum mobile, the intelligent megacorporation needs one skilled conjurer and a turbine: Summon Spirit of Fire, give him the continous task to engulf a large container made from a material with a high melting point, thus heating the water it contains, use the vapour to power the turbine. Voilà, limitless electric power!
I thought about limiting the maximum duration of continous tasks to 12 hours and raising the cost for binding materials to 4500* Force. The conjurer could still shine from time to time, but after a while, it would become darn expensive for him. The perpetuum mobile is still possible, but probably more expensive than conventional energy.
4. Another question that came up when he presented his idea to me: Is it possible for a spirit to materialize, use their innate spell power, sustain the spell and return to astral form? He wanted to convince me that he really, really isn’t abusing his spirits, even allowing them to leave the plane of existence they abhor – and I didn’t find any rule on this topic. In Street Magic, there’s only the rule that you can’t cast a spell on the Astral Plane that affects the Physical Plane, but casting isn’t the same as sustaining, is it? The question isn’t even limited to spirits, it also applies to a mage – what if I want to sustain a spell I cast before I began astrally projecting? Can it be done?
5. Far from being as powerful in combat as the mage and the troll, there is still the adept… who handles negotiation for their little team. And he handles it exceedingly well: He got Exceptional Attribute Charisma, as the mage, raised his Magic and Charisma to 6, raised the skill group Influence to 4, and got Kinesics level 6, using an awful lot of BP on contacts… Making him the face of the team and an inhumanly effective negotiator and conman, and ensuring that if the team ever is in a situation they can’t get out of using power, he can almost surely talk them out of it. I don’t have any idea how to deal with this guy yet. The power of the other two characters is very easy to quantify, as it is mainly combat-related, which isn’t the case here.

Thanks for coping with my ramblings,
Best Regards,
Benedict

1. Troll Bows have been covered rather extensively lately, a search should give you a wide range of opinions, but they are rules legal.

2. While using spirits to sustain spells on you is allowed by the rules the SR FAQ proposes charging a service for every day of continuous use of a power. Also Wards break sustained spells, so this boost temporary at best.

3. This has been tried in the SR world, and people found out that magical background count growing due to continual use of magic makes spirit motors unsuited for long term use.

4. Once a spell or Power has been cast, the targeting requirements do not have to be met to sustain it. So returing to the astral is a possibility, as is letting go of people you hit with a sustained touch spell.

5. Search for pornomancer on this board. While rules allow for this, I generally ask my players not to pull stupid shit in the interest of everyone having fun at the table.

Sigh, here's why the play testers should have been a group like your players and not the math impaired fluffy bunnies they apparently did get.

1: Yes bows are borken since they are based on STR, not STR/2 like every other strength powered weapon.
House ruling bows to STR/2 +2 or Str/2+3 mostly fixes them.

2: For such services with no fixed end point, consider limiting the service to last until the next sunrise or sunset.
Raising the cost of binding materials shafts 'normal' mages way too much, note that binding drain is based on twice the spirits hits, so a force 6 spirit rolls 12 dice to resist binding, and inflicts drain equal to twice the number of hits.
If you don't want to go that route, note that spells over force 2 are technically illegal, so the cops will be interested in this guy if he is walking anywhere with taxpayers.
Also, take a look at wards (p185). A powerful ward would mean that we will have to drop the sustained spell, walk through, and then have the spells recast.

3: :whistles: do not look at the man behind the curtain

4: Yes you can cross from astral and back while sustaining a spell. This was not true in previous versions of SR, but SR4 has removed the 'exclusive' tag from certain magical actions.

5: Welcome to the world of the pornomancer. A fully min maxed pornomancer with an evil pokemon on his shoulder giving him advice can roll something like 40 dice in convincing you to give him all your money. If you miraculously resist this urge, he will offer you a compromise: give him half your money.

Fixes for this one are a bit harder:
1 Consider house ruling the attribute max to normal max +3 rather than normal max x 1.5.
2 Nerf all pool bonuses, like kinesics and tailored pheremones down to a max of plus 1.
2.5 Increase price of kinesics to 1 PP, in addition to limiting it to one level.

1) your troll bowman won't be that much trouble as he needs to use his adrenaline pump in order to use the bow without penalties. The stun damage that one generates has a good chance to render him unconscious afterwards or at least give him some hefty pool modifiers. So just make sure he doesn't get a str 12 bow
Generally lowering bow damage is reasonable tho.

2) use one service every 24 hours or every sunset or sunrise (unless you play in the antarctic) and the sustained spells won't help her that much. I'd be rather worried about the spirits themselves tho as they are pretty mean and unstopable at higher force levels. Also make use of background counts to lower their strengths.

5) imo there's always a limit of what people will tell you or do for you, no matter how good you are with your silver tongue. Just keep things people do reasonable and a pornomancer shouldn't be much of a problem.