Surely the game balance is that the mage gets geeked first? Even a Bound spirit just scoots off back to their home plane at that point, neh?


So what defines "appropriate"? Anything less than your Magic rating? Or your Summon, or your Bind? or is it an arbitrary "6"? or do F7s use their edge half the time? For my money, "appropriate" means "as the rules lay down, until the spirits start to feel put out", so it'd be based on roleplaying. The dangers in summoning even a F5 spirit that gets lucky with the resistance rolls when the summoner/binder get *unlucky* are enough - even if the Spirit doesn't get medieval on the summoner, burning thousands of nuyen for no result smarts somewhat...

If people are spending Edge on their Summons and Binds, and that's making the problem, they'll have less Edge to get out of tricky situations where Spirit use would be inappropriate. One might even achieve a house limitation on use of Edge for Binding by preventing the Edge used for the Bind from refreshing until that Bind's services have been expended: it's tied up in the "contract" with the Spirit until that point...

I can see there might be a problem with high force spirits; they are powerful force multipliers for the already potent mage, and require a mage to counter them, but if your PC mages are rocking with the Titans, the opposition they face should probably be in that league too. Certainly it'll be a rare 9-force spirit whistled up and bound by your Barrens gang-rat wiz-kid on 5k a job.

"Appropiate" is defined by group consensus, mostly based on the power level of the rest of the group. As you said you appreciate, we don´t fancy superhard spirits ruling the roost. The mage gets geeked first only if your campaign does not have balanced mages. YMMV.