With these two spirits, can't you get A LOT of stuff done. Need to repair something? Summon a task spirit. Need to fire that rocket launcher? A Guardian spirit swill do that for you.

And even at Force 5, they'll do a really good job of it too.

Is a tradition with both these spirits overpowered?

This has been discussed before, and while some people don't like it, it completely complies with RAW. I wouldn't consider a tradition with both of those spirits overpowered, because the main use would be for downtime.

The best mileage of those spirits will come from binding them, and if used in normal combat situations, the enemy's anti-magic things should take care of them (in a perfect 6th world...).

No more overpowered than the rest of a magician's abilities.

So like the entire rest of the mage rules: they are "balanced" if the GM is persecuting the mage and designing encounters to make the mage fail, and overpowered otherwise.

I really do disagree with this on so many levels... it does not require persecution or designing things to make a mage fail... all it requires is a challenge and you are cool... everything works out...

But hey...

Keep the Faith

I kind of agree with him, but not to the same degree. One of the things I do not like about 4e is shit isn't inherently balanced, its balanced once the DM throws in the right mods. Have a Mage, where is the background count in every room, strobing lights, loud noises in every hallway. Modifiers should be there to add an extra challenge to an encounter not as a method to push the balancing chore off fully onto the GM with the system picking up virtually none of the slack. Its not a mage only issue though the persecute this character thing is for everyone, mages just get the persecution without being built cheesy.

Though IIRC you have an interesting rule where all spirits above force 3 use edge to resist the summoning. Isn't that a form of mage persecution, where you are designing a house rule to make a mage fail??

After seeing way too many Spirits stomp over the landscape I see it as an awesome house rule, but I recognize it for what it is. A leash to try to bring the mages back into balance because by the rules they blow it out of the water.

For my part I find the game runs a lot smoother if you pretend neither of these spirit types exist, but your milleage may vary.

We do use that rule, which is in the book by the way, Spirits may resist with Edge... says so in black and white, there are just many people who do not agree with that, thinking it somehow reduces the effectiveness of the mage... I disagree...

But, this is not always used... if a mage takes the time to placate the spirits (handled on non-run time, which may include favors, offerings, etc. based upon the Mage's tradition) then the mage gets a break on this... but in general, yes... this keeps some of the craziness under control... however, it was not done to hose the player of the mage... it was done as it fits the GM's view of how the world actually works in SR (There are traditions of magic for a reason, and we use the flavor of those traditions, it is mandatory, and a player does not get a break on this)... if you are willing to go through the motions, you may get your uber spirits (but then again, I have seen a Force 5 Spirit deal out 20 boxes of damage before as well)... it is a roleplaying constraint rather than a club upside the head (as well it should be)...

Some people may call it a house rule... but it really isn't... a lot of people claim that NPC's spending edge permanently is also a house rule, but again, it isn't... a GM is there to make the game interesting... if the character's win all the time, it is no longer interesting, as the challenge is no longer there... a lot of times, I learn more from a losing battle where we had to disengae and run our asses off, rather than fight and die...

But, I have seen players that refuse to do such things thinking that the GM will save them somehow as they do not believe that the GM would kill their characters... Big mistake at our table... PC Death is an ever present dilemma and it keeps us on our toes...

Rambling over... Sorry...

keep the Faith

street samurai would be incredibly broken if they never encountered anything to prevent physical security breaches. faces would be incredibly broken if they never encountered anything to prevent social engineering-based security breaches. deckers would be incredibly broken if nobody ever bothered putting any defenses against matrix intrusion.

why would anyone expect that magicians will be balanced if you don't include any magical defenses? wards, visibility modifiers, security paracritters, spirits, wagemages, etc, are all very reasonable. (at least, within reason; obviously the stuffer shack shouldn't have a force 20 ward and a great form fire spirit protecting it)

i've never heard anyone object to high security sites having IC and security spiders, security guards and physical detection devices, or limiting who within the corporation has access to what knowledge and which parts of the facility... why is it so unreasonable that corporations would include defenses against magic when they include defenses against every other form of possible attack in their security planning?

I agree with Neraph that this has been discussed before, and if i remember correctly there were a lot of reasons more to the above, that proved that mages (no matter what faction) are everything but overpowered. Never forget that the basic dice-pool of magic users is ways smaller than that of our fighting section and with just a little help from modifiers (above posts) they can get close to uselessness. And because everything that hinders a mage also hinders his ghosts, it doesn´t really matter how many of them he has bound (this is also a subject to the mages financial resources) if they get blown away with ordinary guns.

After seeing what those two spirits could do to trivialize stuff that previously needed hunting for contacts with the apropriate skill or purchase of REALLY REALLY expensive skillwires (That go to rating 4 at maximum where force 8 task spirits easily roll 8+8 (16) dice on creating über explosives, instahealing wounded characters making the other mage with Heal spell look like a complete joke etc) I said that no more PCs with non-corebook traditions because the "new" spirits were simply too powerful.

However, when reading through the thread I think I much prefer the whole thing about spirits constantly using edge to resist summoning since a force 3-4 spirit won't completely outshine skillwires or swag but instead be more on PAR with them and only have the benefit of being accessable within 2 complex actions AND free (sans some drain).

the problem with spirits always spending edge to resist binding is that you no longer have a "if you mistreat spirits, something bad could happen" clause anymore...

Sure there is...

Edge to resist summoning...
Edge to resist Binding...
Interpret every command to the detriment of the summoning mage...
Find every loophole in commands issued...
Micormanage its services...

Lots of things that can get worse than just spending edge to resist summoning (or binding)...

In my opinion, it is not the spending of edge that is the issue here, it is the belief that just summoning up a force 8 SPirit is so commonplace that people just expect that that is the norm... Really?

Keep the Faith

Bastard Mage: "Spirit! Go materialize in the middle of those guards and kill them!"

Abused Spirit: "*sigh* OK..."

[Spirit Materializes]

Abused Spirit: "Boogity-Boo. I'm attacking you."

Guards: "Holy shitballs! A G-G-Ga-Ghost!"

Abused Spirit: "Rawr. Yeah.. I'm totally going to kill you guys so hard, so don't taze me or anything, bro. I couldn't possibly stand being sent back to my home plane. Uh-oh. Look out, for my mad attacks now."

Guards: "It's weak against electricity! Quick! Somebody taze it!"

Abused Spirit: "Oh no. I seem to have jumped on your tazer several times in my attempt to kill you. Curses. See you all in hell. L8rs."

Agreed. When SR4 came out, I liked the idea of having a limited set of spirits so that you could memorize them and never have to pull out your books to look up their stats and powers (as was the case in SR3). Then Street Magic came out with new spirits type that not only disrupted this, but also added unnecessary spirits: guidance and task could be specializations of existing spirits (for example an ancestor spirit would be a spirit of man with guidance powers), and made them "overpowerable" (in the sense that they can easily become overpowered).


You mean like Jack Vance's sandestins?
They're pretty much able to do anything they want. The problem is that they want to do nothing at all. When you play an archmage, you spent half the session negociating with your sandestin(s).

"You will enact all my commands given to you as I intend, even if I may phrase them inappropriately. Further you will henceforth act only in a manner beneficial to me."

Unless you want the mage to have Command Phrasing 6, I do not really see the point.

As I intend? Spirits aren't psychic as far as I remember...

The point is for a GM to prevent Spirit abuse through penalization. As stated.
One of those ways is to have the Spirit work against the Mage's control.

I think that having a mental link with their summoner qualifies them for being pyschic.

And one of those ways around those ways is to make sure the spirit cannot. Also using the spirit's ability is no abuse.

I see it as more of taking the least amount of effort to satisfy the command... lets see... kill the opposition...
Ok, so he materializes and atatcks the guards, taking a penalty to ignore the guards armor...reduced to a single dice, atwhich point the guard dodges and is not hit... the spirit is following the Letter of the Law, trying to kill the Guard, but not the Spirit of the law (so to speak) as he is trying to do so inefficiently...

Intent is followed, so that should satisfy even you Toturi...... Besides, who is to say what the Spirit considers beneficial to you... the command to protect you could mean actually getting you the hell away from what you are facing (even if that was not your intent), to the spirit, it was the easiest and most beneficial way to keep you from harm...

My point is that if you have an abusive summoner, there are definitel;y steps you can take to insure that such things do not continue...spending Edge is only one of those steps...

Keep the Faith