Just a couple of quick questions about Free Spirit PC's

Healing:

It states that First Aid, Medicine and Medicine doesn't work for healing.

Was this meant to be First Aid, Medicine and Magic? And if this is so does that mean the Spirits are "immune" from the entire health school of magic, both positive and negative, due to a lack of a "body"

Services:

Can a PC free spirit still give "bound" services like aid spellcasting and what not like NPC ones.


Metaplanar Shortcut:

Tis a little over powered to bypass wards as such, I was going to ensure (as playing one of these) that a friend from the friendship pact is on the otherside to "lock on" even if I can clearly see physically the other side of the ward on the physical plane. Thoughts?

Aha! Something I can help with!


Er ... I can't help with this. There was some back-and-forth at the developer level, and I'm not privy to those conversations. The "Medicine and Medicine" part is probably a typo.

As far as magic is concerned, if I needed to make a call in the absence of an official ruling, I'd say that spells that are intended to affect a physical organic body don't work on the collection of forces that are a manifested spirit's "body."


I'm fairly certain the answer is no, what with the spirit by definition not being bound. Ally spirits can do that, though.


The original intent was that a free spirit could only metaplanarly shortcut to a place where it had previously been. Lemme check ... yeah, p. 91, Runner's Companion. The spirit has to have been inside the ward previously in order to shortcut there.

At 250BPs to play one, I'd be willing to settle letting PCs use the metaplanar shortcut to bypass wards. 150BPs to spend on attributes and skills at the very least isnt much no matter how you cut it.

Delete this post. It got put in the wrong section!

I definately felt that pain.

As one of the other players is going to be one of the targets of a friendship pact, and you can conventionally blow a service to get a spirit bypass a ward, or send the ally spirit home and back again, I thought it would be a good compromise.

The spirits have some good abilities, but they are extremely expensive. Still, Im interested in how it plays, and I have a habit of playing broad/flawed characters for the fun factor.


I am fairly confident in magic, that it mentions that a free spirit can give services at will as if it was a bound spirit.??

Free spirits seem extremely difficult to play. I was experimenting with a spreadsheet and its super tedious to make an effective character due to the stats no greater than force cap and powers being linked to edge, nor can you conjure. Its really hard to make something workable with those 150 BP left

On the flip side, you have all sorts of highly difficult to manage powers for GMs.

What was the intent? Did you guys play test some characters? Can we see how you're supposed to look as a playable 400BP character?

I'm not sure it is entirely possible to make a somewhat functional spirit character with the initial 400BP char, as such it IS somewhat a work in progress.

Due to our playstyle however, as well as a criminally indecisive player, we have a fairly established routine for inserting characters at a higher power level to mesh with pre-existing characters. As such I have an injection of karma of about 60 points, which takes away some of the pain. Contacts are also generally earned during play, which also keeps our rotating GM's (me included) on our toes.

Here's a basic layout, though some parts may be in error

Body 2
Agility 2
Reaction 2
Strength 2
Charisma 2
Intuition 5
Logic 2
Willpower 5
Force 6
Edge 5

Sorcery 4
Counterspelling 4
Perception 0
Assensing 2

Materilization 0
Banishment Resistance 0
Spirit Pact Friendship 0
Realistic Form 0.5
Mutable Form 1
Aura Masking 3
Guard 0.5

And that is what I could squeeze. No spells or gear, was going to purchase these with the injection of resources, though comparatively not much gear is usable or necessary.

LOL! That doesn't fit my definition of usable, sorry.

Don't you have to buy edge seperately too?

Whoops, the edge missed the copy and paste. Fixed that.

I believe at the top I also said, I don't think it was usable without the injection, but I knew I was getting it. But consider this.

I am immune to critical glitches
I have 12 hardened armour.
With injection I will have a manabolt/stunbolt at the very least.
With a single complex action I can escape most things, 2 at most to entirely disappear
I can appear as a human, elf, tree, chair, toaster....
I can fly.
Provided I'm not carrying anything, from a mundanes point of view, I can teleport.

To be even more amusing, most of the other player characters will be unaware that I am infact a spirit
Should be interesting.

Yeah fair point I guess, but what would you do to make that 250 BP? Its not obvious, loose 2 point of stats to get 5 spells, and some basic money to get a lifestyle and a few bits and bobs. That makes you crippleware, because that will come right out of where it hurts - drain stats, and you cannot do anything aside from cast spells.

Frustrating.

Precisely. It is a sticky situation I agree.

Though, I'm not a powergamer, seeking to extract the most out of the build points. A free spirit is the ultimate slow buildup character. Consider that Initiation raises the force cap, and that cap is the only maximum for stats. Hence, given infinite karma (just as a thought experiment), there is no limit on the base attributes.

As for the casting spells things. That does somewhat suck, we somewhat ruled mana static out at our table, as we feel it is somewhat fundamentally flawed. Spells can do a lot, and if there is background count stopping me casting.... as a spirit I have much bigger problems

Not everything is intended for play at the 400 BP level. IMO, Free Spirits under the BP system are inteded for higher-powered games. Try building them with the Karma system and you should have a much better character, but even there Free Spirits are mentioned when they talk about 1,000 Karma characters.

even if that is true that theyre intended as a high-power option, perhaps we should endeavor to create a viable shadowrunner free spirit on 400BPs anyway just to show people what a good one will look like.

Well hut hut off you go

Mine will be predominately spell casting related, as that's the niche I need to fill in my group, with the street sam drunk dwarf, the MPD actor face, the paranoid exiled high family technomancer and finally *drum roll* the physical adept pixie, complete with critical strike, killing hands, elemental strike who's attitute to life is summed up by Nac Mac Feegle.

Interesting times.....

I have to pass on this one. It was 85 BP when I submitted the final draft. I imagine that either some last-minute playtest data came in, or an error was made somewhere along the line.

Eh, this is the sort of post I usually erase... meh...



Voodoo Mage. Spells are obvious.



So what? If I want to play a Free Spirit and they deliberately make it shit at 400BPs then all they have done is hurt the players who won't take it now and those who will still play them - just like how you still can't play a decent Technomancer out of the gates, yet it's never said that "your team will almost certainly suffer if you play one, so we advise it for much higher power levels".
Weak now, Almighty Zeus later is just bad design.

I don't think an option is where you need 50-100 extra BPs to make a viable starting character and then you still utterly suck at being a Spirit compared to the Mage's cohort Ally - extra super emphasis fun on the word "cohort".

I always thought a good part of Shadowrun was the "If it bleeds, we can kill it. If it don't - load APDS" attitude - .

This reminds me of the "joke" Dragon rules, which were actually playable IIRC - perhaps the ridiculous prices are due to the venom spewed back then.

The less said about the Wendigo being worth BPs, the better.

I fail to see how a voodoo mage can A teleport, B escape anything within 2 complex actions.

Everything else, yes. But perhaps people must remember that sometimes its the things that you don't always roll dice for that can make a difference.

Also I'm more interested in the dynamics of how a character will play, how a spirit will hide itself and actions accordingly.

From a sheer balance perspective, it does seem to top out as a little too expensive. The other thing that struck me is the complete inability to assist healing. You could be stuck out of commision for some time. Most of the other stuff is fairish to my eyes.

There is a bit factored in there

All stats start at 2 not one.
Extra Inititave Passes
Magician for Free, (But aspected)
Powers with no sustaining penalties or drain.

But negatively

No assisted healing
No foci
No "ware"
Extremely susceptable to background count.

Man, thats a huge change.

I do agree, it would be nice if someone could confirm that was intended and the basic reasoning behind it. You can make something much more reasonable at a cost of 150BP for instance.

I'd actually call them overpowered at 100BP! (At first glance, could be wrong)

I suspect the reasoning is availible in the other thread about metavariants. In it synner states that races are priced by rarity as well as power balance to justify the stupid pricing of orks and drakes, and free spirits are extremely rare, so he may have just gone crazy with the costs.

To be fair, the build above looks much like a min/maxxed mystic adept with a double-digit magic score. Only that it´s astral abilities are increased rather than hampered.

The first instance of Medicine is a typo and will be edited out in Errata.

Regarding whether or not spirits can be subjected to magical healing, this was the subject of much discussion during development and playtesting. Ultimately it was decided, very late in development, for simple consistence that spirits should be as subject to Health spells as they are to Combat and Manipulation spells. I had previously made my position known on the subject on DSF (should we ever move to an SR5 it is among the aspects of spirit rules that I would be addressing differently, but in the context of SR4 the rules need to be consistent), but when I went to retract my earlier statement the thread had vanished. Consider it retracted here. to wit:

Spirits can be targeted by Health spells.


No. Free spirits, PC or NPC alike, do not provide bound services.


Free Spirits can use Metaplanar shortcuts, but to arrive on target they should either be able to physically see or have previously physically visited the location they are shortcutting to (the friendship pact suggested above would work too).

Regarding the BP cost of Free Spirits, several things were changed due to playtesting feedback and developer decisions that came in after the author delivered the final draft. The Health spells issue above is one (not so much for Healing itself but for the fact that it allows spirits to do some pretty scary boosting of their already formidable abilities with appropriate Health spells). Another very important factor was a rise in the Free Spirit's starting Force in the final draft that led to a raise in the BP cost (since all Force-linked Attributes start at rating 2). This last change was a result of playtest feedback simply disliking the idea of Force 1 Free Spirits wandering round (in fact most suggest Force 3 as a baseline).
Other factors that weighed in on final BP cost include:

• the ability to move in three dimensions unfettered and to fly.
• the ability to move back and forth between the physical and astral plane (including the ability to pass through unwarded walls).
• the innate ability to access the metaplanes and use metaplanar shortcuts.
• its dual nature (which also means that unlike a magician it can act on both planes without the divided attention modifier)
• the innate Magician quality and the ability to use most Magical Skills (to a lesser extent the fact that it does not need spell formulas to learn spells).
• 10 Attributes (Physical, Mental, Edge, Force/Magic) at a starting rating of 2.
• the innate extra Initiative Passes.
• the innate Immunity to Normal Weapons.
• the innate Immunity to Pathogens.
• the fact that free spirits can be Healed and boost their attributes with Health spells.
• the ability (for possession Free Spirits) to take over and abandon a vessel at will (barring successful resistance).
• the fact that they are characters that are near impossible to permanently destroy (temporarily disrupt yes, destroy no) and that for most purposes the character is ultimately immortal.
• the innate Spirit Powers and those they can buy—which have no Drain or associated downside.
• the Spirit Pact power.
• rarity.

Comparatively the downsides to playing a Free Spirit are minimal.

Note that Free spirits are intentionally short on points for other Skills and abilities. The rules and costs are for a recently Free Spirit and who is just starting out in metahuman society, not a spirit that's lived on Earth for an extensive period of time.

As for the example above, I'd definitely drop Force down one level, drop Edge down one or two levels, drop Aura Masking to begin with, and use those points elsewhere.

what tradition are those free spirits from?
inhabitation or possession? or something else entirely?
that would be one hell of a buff/tank to get the other player to possess your character if he's down so you get 12 hardened armor and can't be hurt further . .

One of the things I was looking at when initially pricing them was the fact that they must buy up Force in order to have any other attributes, since their Force is also their attribute cap (that's still in there, ne?). I was also factoring in the fact that they didn't need gear or lifestyle costs, and that they couldn't earn their own Karma.

EDIT: I see Synner gave his full reasoning, so never mind. =i)

So an ogre with an intuition based tradition and the magician quality spends.. 35 BP and gets pretty much all of these bonuses. Okay, he cannot fly, nor can he teleport, and those are pretty sweet powers, but seriously, you have 2s in every stats and I have - well,

4 Body
2 Agility
2 Reaction
3 Strength
5 Intuition
2 Logic
5 Willpower
3 Edge
6 Magic

And I'm a full possession tradition mage, OR I can just throw down a materalization spirit who is pretty much as good as you, while doing my own thing.

Incidently, Synners changes actually increase the total BP cost of that build by 5 making it actively worse without letting you buy any more skills.

He needs to then drop his drain statistics by 2 each which would free up 45 BP net from his changes, but seriously then you are a total cripple. Drain pool 8 and a spellcasting pool of 9 is hardly inspiring. My back of the envelope mage has a spell casting pool of 12 before considering mentors, specialization etc, and a drain pool of 10. I'd be seriously tempted to add a trauma dampner though because to keep pace with the spirits always on armour I'm going to want to throw down lots of my own spirits, and that means I'm going to want to deal with drain well.

And the disadvantages are totally massive. You cannot interact with the matrix, you cannot bind foci!!! (Health spell buffs ===== useless tastic without this) whereas I can do both giving me 2 dice from my sustaining focus and an awesome improvd reflexes 3 - which to get you have to take a -2 penalty to everything,

and I can squeeze in the skill linup

Binding 4
Assensing 4
Automatics 1
First Aid 1
Pilot Ground Craft 1
Spellcasting 4
Summoning 6
Counterspelling 4
Dodge 1

and still have 70k nuyen left after buying the foci.

Oh and I have a mentor spirit and 15 more BP then the spirit.

Lolz.

Yeah but until then you either have to borrow someone else's body or wait until one of the team gets wasted(or nearly so). So youre down 1 team member temporarily in either case.

Aside from that, here is a free spirit that I think can make it as a shadowrunner as long as there are a total of 6(5 plus the spirit) on the team for the friendship pact(unless the others of the group are willing to give up their karma).



Given the apparent weaknesses of PC free-spirits, the inspiration behind this is general combat and non-combat assistance to the team, rather than trying to actually fill one of the key roles shadowrunners can play.
I also tried to come from the standpoint of the free spirit being a former spirit of man, so I avoided powers posessed by the elemental spirits in lieu of spells.
And yes, SINner is in there. Considering its a 5 point flaw its not necessarily a weakness that is going to give you alot of trouble anyway. You could play it any number of ways(an actual corporate or national SIN that contains data that yes, youre actually a free spirit, or my own personal choice: its the SIN that belonged to the mage that bound you, and he was geeked or died for some other reason and you subsumed his identity with relative success).

You don't even past the basic test outlined the devs in one of the lame cain challenge threads of 10-15 dice in your specalisation. You cast spells with what.. 8 dice? Failure. Back to the drawing board with that. Also uneducated is a total kick in the nuts but as you can take like.. geas or something else no-one cares about instead thats not a problem.

Also you've caculated your stats costs wrong. Should be 75 because you've soft maxed willpower.

So you need to cut 15 points out too.

Finally you have no gear and no contacts which makes you utterly useless as a shadowrunner.

Simple. Very, very simple. Go for infiltration, not spellcasting. **** being recognised on the astral, you get to be masked when you learn the Masking metamagic.

Concealment, high stealth, "astral dodge", high agility, illusion and detection spells...

Having a look at what a free spirit can do, I would abstain from calling it useless... When judging their usefulness you have to take into account, that they are and work differently. Also that game is not all about stats. The immunity to normal weapons alone is a tough nut in multiple ways... I can imagine the morale of opponents drop, if their bullets just bounce of that...erm...guy...?

Playing a spirit has much to offer. Also it might be interesting to play the familiar of the teams mage - he might have willingly set it free. I guess Spirits come with many useful basics so the rest is about concept and not stats. They are viable somehow.

Oops youre right I did overlook the soft-maxing problem, and the easy fix is to take one from willpower and put it in logic.

Also, you apparently failed to read the design philosophy behind the free spirit character, because the friendship pact at force 5 means you need 5 other people as part of the pact or you cant gain your own karma, which sucks for a shadowrunner character you hope to improve.
That being said, the character is an auxilliary unit, not a member of one of the primary roles. I suggest you go back and look at it again with that in mind.
I also wonder why you think 8 dice is such a terrible amount for spellcasting. I am aware that you can min-max alot of spellcasting dice out of a character, but that is not a standard. Whoever you game with must treat you very very wrong.

I also just thought of something regarding the point costs of playing a free spirit.

1.) Any magician can summon a spirit more powerful than a PC free spirit for around 50BPs(magician quality, +2 magic rating, 3-4 summoning skill) out the gate as a starting character that would wipe the floor with a free-spirit PC.
2.) For a small cost, in either additional BPs at creation or nuyen during play, they can have multiple copies of said spirit in existance at any one time.
3.) No real drawbacks for having done-so. Shadowrunner Joe the Magician isnt going to care if his temporary spirit gets disrupted, and he's only out a few thousand nuyen if his bound spirit gets disrupted. On top of that, nothing bars him from simply conjuring another identical spirit immediately after his temporary spirit gets disrupted!

So, free spirits get a couple of additional powers beyond what a conjured spirit does, and are in the hands of the player instead of GM adjudication justifies a whopping 250bp cost to play?

It honestly seems like the 250BP cost was just thrown in there without any acid testing in play.

Shadowrun as a game system is designed with the intent that the ruleset encourages and supports Genre play. Therefore BP spent on different characters are not equivalent utility to each other. This is intentional.

If you want transitive utility value in BP, you will need to look at other game systems.

The choice of ruleset supporting or not supporting genre is a fundamental design decision. Neither choice is wrong. The SR4 designers have chosen to have the ruleset explicitly support the Genre.

Therefore, the issue with the Free Spirit character BP costs, would be if they correctly make Free Spirit PC characters less likely to occur? Given the response in this thread, I would expect yes. Just like I have noted one of the most common metarace chosen is an Orc.

If that were the case then the point value of the free-spirit would be somewhere around 150BPs. Playable, but damned difficult to manage in the BP shuffle. Right now I would deny any player the use of a free-spirit character on grounds that I feel he would be too weak to exist in the world of shadowrunners for more than one or two sessions (exactly until combat broke out and he got shot at).

Free-spirits were inflated an arbitrary value from 85BPs to 250BPs by Catalyst's internal team. As said before, even at 150BPs their rarity would be maintained, but their playability would also be present.

First things first: a build for my suggestion at 400 BP, going from your groundwork:



That build should be able to handle all stealth needs. Power expansion should be ultra-fast.



That leads to another angle: such things are not really made for 400 BP games. You can do it, but it is hard. If you build the same thing under the 750 karma system, you´ll have 250 karma for everything, plus a potential 70 karma from negative qualities. 10 stats at three for 90, agility+edge 3->4, magic 3->6 for 69 karma, spells for 30 karma, one connection for 10, would leave 121 karma for skills(max). Very doable, as that is equivalent to 6 skills at 3 (84 karma), plus three specialisations, and maybe a few physical possessions guarded by the friendly talismonger. A better build, because free spirits can take advantage of the rebate on low-rated attributes.

Maybe it helps if you consider that this a mystical adept with stealth +5, astral perception, astral projection, a drainless spell without sustaining penalty, effective magic 6, an invisible military scout armor, and a prospect to gain power points from increasing edge. And yeah, your infiltrator can walk through most walls (no foci, even passing a barrier is easy), or hide in astral space.

What do you gain from not being a possession-based mage? You are a spirit, you have no body to leave behind. You can attack passive defenses from the inside, and guards from behind. No cover penalties is about equal to +4 to spellcasting in our games. Let´s get dangerous!



Edited for correct karma costs, under the assumption that being a free spirit costs 500 karma.

And when he materializes, he looks like a ninja.

I should throw something in here, now that I've noticed something. The original 85 BP draft version had all attributes starting at 1, not 2 as it is in this version. With that change, the "original" value would have been 185 BP, not 85, and it didn't account for cultural norms or population ratios.

Not every stat is useful to everyone at all times. Depending on the desired role, the value of stats is not equal.

Having read, and reread that statement. I'm not sure if thats powergaming or an actual truism.

Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck... it would fit if the previous master wanted to create a stealthy ally. Instant connection to the shadowrunner scene.

Leads me to a question actually, Is it better to have the aura masking power? Or the two metamagic techniques..... 3 points of Spirit Power is a big thing...

Didn't mean to cause such a furor actually. But its good to get ideas out on the table. The capability of health spells is good, but as stated the lack of sustaining foci means that most buffs are destroyed by the sustaining penalty immediantly. But it does mean that the spirit can heal itself.

The concept that I was playing around with was a Spirit that is pretending... largely to be a metahuman, aura masking is part of that mindset.

I'm interested to see the continued discussion and pros and cons argued forth. It is likely however that at our table the BP cost will be reduced to 150BP or so. The ability for a mage with conjuring to instantly and for negligble cost summon something better then an entire character I believe is a bit of a problem. Was it in fact considered that most decent permantly bound guarding spirits, summonable by a 400BP character, would whip the ass of any free spirit.

Which means, as soon as there is a summoner on the table all you do is run, something which I must agree they are good at but still...

could the free spirit summon spirits of higher force than himself? O.o
that's be something REALLY funny . .
Player Ghost summons big fire elemental fire elemental appears, looks around, asks player ghost:"where's the metahuman that summoned us little one?"
as in that regard . . can another mage do metaplanar quest to get the free spirits true name and bind him? O.o

YES, thats one of the bigger weaknesses of the PC free spirit, and theyre very clear about that in the RC. Fortunately, the second it's created you know that it exists, and where it is.

Also, free spirits can never learn conjuring. Apparently they wont treat other spirits the way they have been.

what about grounding?
does that work through spirits?
probably not, but i thought i'd ask while we're at it . .

now to find some way to get instant karma hooked to this and i can have my own pun-pun free spirit

would a free spirit that somehow learns the sacrificing metamagic be considered a blood-spirit? O.o
or at least twisted/toxic?
can a free spirit character follow some mentor-spirit?
free spirit of (sha)[wo]man following (praying) mantis?
would that make the spirit an insect spirit?

It's a joke weakness. Seriously, what DM is ever going to punish his players like that? A total ass?

Its just not going to come up, unless its a major plotline driven entirely by DM fiat.

or the player is being a total ass first...

still, is it any worse then slapping a mage player with a shedim invasion?

hell, if done right i can see the player of the spirit getting the job of interpreting the orders given by the conjurer

(hint: be very very detailed and specific)

There is no karma cost for being a Free Spirit since it's effectively your 'metatype' - that means Karma creation is great for Free Spirits.

Spirit Bane:"that certain one free spirit there"

If the player is being a total ass you're probably better off like.. talking to him about it.

So its going to be a plot or a its exactly as fun as 'you get ambushed by a sniper with a railgun and die. New character plz'

Edit: lol at the no karma cost for metatype. What the hell is that?

the karma chargen system seems to be a bit confusing to me. there are added costs for race, from one of the dev's posts on how much it actually costs to be a nosferatu i think it was, but i'm not sure where they came from...