Are Free Spirits a viable PC option? I see the rules for it in RC...but are they actually viable from a point-cost perspective? They look very intersting, and the combinations of critter powers available + mage spells could be pretty sweet....but are they too costly? Even when using Karmagen?

Also, it states that their force attribute affects their minimum AND maximum...what exactly does that mean really? Increasing their Force attribute increases what they start at...AND modifies their maximum? So really, you should be investing in Force, Magic, and Edge then? Lol....am I reading it right?

I don't see anything about the force being the minimum for attributes, though I could be missing something. Your attributes start at 2, and are capped by your force, which stands to reason that you need to raise force than your attributes.

In any case, free spirits are viable, but they are kind of late bloomers. Even more so than a magician, spirits have unlimited natural power, but they start off a little weak. Being forced to be astral or duel natured also has problems(learn that masking quick if you ever want to get past wards).

The trick is, you have to focus on what a spirit can do, unlimited access to the metaplanes, including the metaplaner shortcut is very very powerful, and can be used in many situations. If a spirit loses suprise, they can simple turn astral, and manifest behind their target, and that is nasty. I'm not sure if your friendship pact allows you to use the shortcut to go to one of your friends locations, I think it's worth further investigation.

What is even more nasty is if you are a possession spirit and buy a powerful vessel to start. Those characters can just be broken.

I thought that free spirits can't earn karma that it has to be given freely from NPC's or pc's at a loss 1:3 ratio. Seems like a bad idea for the long run.

The runner's companion outlines how PC Free Spirits are played, and they have an option called a friendship pact that allows them to gain karma normally, in addition to spirit pacts.

Their Force is equal to their Magic. Their Force does in fact make the natural Maximum for their stats, however. Example: You have a Force 3 Free Spirit. Your attributes and Edge max out at 3.

This actually makes it all but mandatory to take the Lucky quality and pick up some Increase Attribute spells and Shapechange. That'll help immensely.

The Friendship Pact is also required to play a character normally, (IE: karma from runs), but I would like to suggest this worthy alternative: Power Pact. Grab a Power Pact, get a 16 BP group contact (Loyalty 6) of mages, get all the free spells you can think of, and charge 1 karma a week from the ~100 people in the group.

If you use Karmagen, Free Spirit PCs become broken. For example, build an amazing human spellcaster, but don't take any conjuring skills. Now reduce his Edge by 1 and he's a free spirit. Karmagen does not charge karma for the racial BPs, and that saves you effectively 500 karma (250 BP) to continue building a super-mage - not to mention the possibility of Initiation and Metamagics in karmagen.

Also, feel free to check the free spirit thread in my signature for some ideas.

There is that. Take a look at the drone selection with the Movement power in mind.

Materialisation spirits make for good Recon Specialists. They have the astral dodge, are spellcasters, and can use the concealment power for themselves. With the right Divination spells they can know any area they are in perfectly well, too. Build them for astral combat and astral penetration and nothing can stop them.

Not really. For 20 BP to get lucky you could just raise your force 2 more points, thus raising your max edge(And all other stats) by 2.

As for using karmagen, yes, spirits become minor gods if you use the RC rules. If however you use the SR4A rules which include a 5x cost for attributes as opposed to a 3x cost, and the fact that you have to pay karma equal to the BP cost of your race, they become somewhat more in line with other PCs, though are still very powerful because they are virtually immortal, and can pop out of any dangerous situation any time they want.

Friendship pact allows spirits to gain karma normally like other runners, and they also have the option of picking up other pacts and using those to get karma out of people (Haven't seen anything about that being at a 3:1 ratio though). The health pact for example is cool because you can give it to all your teammates, and they can pull 2 points of healing whenever they want in exchange for giving you a point of karma.

Unless you use the updated karmagen rules, which are only in German at the moment. Then racial BP cost is also used as a racial karma cost, and attributes cost 5xLevel.

The Free Spirit doesn't have access to certain godly things like sustaining foci. And why would you not take conjuring skills as a human? Conjuring is quite good.



Unless there's something in the German version (or unreleased errata), the OP is right. RC says that Force "determines a Free Spirit's natural minimums and maximums for all attributes."

The other thing to remember about Free Spirits is that they have trouble with wards. Yes, they can often power through them. But doing so is NOT discreet or stealthy. It immediately alerts the casting mage.

My own take was that in RC as published, with the 0 cost for race, unless the GM was nasty about handling the friendship pact, they were overpowered.
With the SR4A cost for race, and the 5x cost for attributes, they probably are actually a bit weak. (I have a nice one crafted with racial cost in karma = BP, but 3x rather than 5x attribute cost. That is a house-rule setup, although we are trying to stick close to the rules in all other regards.)

Yours,
Joel

They can just deep astral travel to the other side of a ward. This only becomes a problem for possession spirits who have to leave their body behind.

Only if they've been there before.

Generally speaking unless the ward blocks visible light, that isn't much of a problem.

Could run their body at the ward, then unpossess it at the last moment and have momentum carry it past the ward, then repossess it on the other side (Provided you can do the deep astral thing or get around it some other way)

I actually didn't think about that.... ya that would work, as it would be a mundane object tumbling through the ward then.

That's pretty excellent.



I thought they had to have been there, and not just seen the location. At least, that's the impression I got from the little "Metaplanar Shortcut" section on page 94 of Street Magic.

Score 1 point for the laws of physics. A body in motion tends to stay in motion until the troll catches up with it.

Are you guys getting wards confused with the mana barrier spell?


Wards exist solely to prevent spirits from floating through the walls of a facility, they don't create random, invisible astral barriers in a radius around the ward anchor. So a possession spirit running headlong into a ward and unpossessing it at the last moment would just make its unpossessed body crash into a wall. A possession spirit, or any spirit for that matter, that wanted to walk into a facility would simply have to find an open door or window and walk in like a normal person. The mana barrier spell would be the thing you'd have to charge your body through to avoid detection and then teleport through yourself.

Free Spirits are cool because they give basically unlimited access to spirit powers and abilities. I, personally, want to create a possession spirit with regeneration that would become a super party healer, although it wouldn't be able to do much more than that.

Probably


Well yeah. Regeneration is expensive. It heals a lot, but it won't heal magical damage so aside from its sustainability, I don't really see much of an advantage over Heal spells.

The advantages of regeneration are a) it's faster, the heal spell takes (the damage healed-2)*2 combat rounds of the mage touching the target and concentrating to work, b) it heals everything all the time, heal only works once and then you have to use natural healing, c) it has no drain, with heal it's extremely hard to heal near death wounds, d) regen heals stun damage, heal is only good for physical, e) Regeneration can regrow limbs and other non-healable appendages, f) Regeneration has some interesting secondary effects, such as causing a corpse to undecay or causing a stick to bud and whatnot, g) A regenerating spirit can run the injured party-member out of danger as well as perform any other action such as casting a spell while healing, h) the healing party member gets protected by the spirits immunity ot normal weapons while healing

Regeneration is vastly superior to the heal spell. The main disadvantage of it is what happens to implants when regenerating, which, according to immortal flower rules, causes the regeneration to deal 2d6 points of unresisted damage to the regenerating character as the power attempts to heal the implants, so regeneration should only be used on implanted individuals in emergencies and the spirit should rpobably get the heal spell anyway for magic damage and cyber people

Don't know what immortal flower rules you're talking about, but yeah, it pushing out cyberware is a problem (Though nothing has ever stated just how quickly it manages this that I've seen), but come on, how many runners don't have cyber(This applies to bio as well I should point out)? Only the mage/adept types, which the spirit will likely be taking the place of one of.

Also, if I'm remembering my rules right, the mage casting heal doesn't need to continue touching the person for all that time, they simply need to touch to get the spell started, and then they just sustain without needing to maintain contact or even LoS.

Heck, if a mage wants, they can even touch for the heal spell, then get a focus to sustain it to heal the person while they focus on other things.

Also, is the DV in that the damage value healed or the damage value of the person being healed? The latter seems fairly silly, but the former is perhaps too low of a drain.

You may be right about the touch and leave thing for heal, but you'd still get the sustaining penalty unless you carried around an empty sustaining focus at all times for your heal spell. Drain on heal is damage attempted to be healed minus 2, so if a character has 7 damage and you're trying to heal for 5 and get 2 hits on the test, he heals for 2 and the drain is 3.

Okay, sounds like playing a Free Spirit could DEFINATELY be interesting I think I've got the hang of the whole Force thing too. Pg. 92 of RC, first paragraph, second sentence states: This attribute determines a free spirit's natural minimums and maximums for all attributes. It also acts as the spirits's Magic attribute.

So essentially, by increasing my Force, I increase the min/max of all stats as well, including Magic. So it sounds like, and correct me if I'm wrong, or missing something....that if I purchase Force to 6, then all my stats are 6 as well, since it affects ALL stats MINIMUMS. Correct?

If you have the regenerate power, and the power pact ability, you could charge people in high risk occupations cash and karma to gain access to it too.

Yeah, you kind of are I'm sorry to say. When it says that force determines minimums and maximums, it means that base force determines minimums and whatever you raise your force to determines maximums. So a spirit with force 5 has all of his stats at force 2 with a natural maximum of 5. That's how I interpret that section. I thought that was how it was too until I read the rest of that paragraph and realized how broken that would make spirits.

I don't see anywhere in that paragraph that differentiates(sp?) between BASE Force, and the Force attribute. It specifically states its minimums are based on the Force attribute, and that you can pay to increase your Force attribute. Yes, it talks about the stats starting at two, and references the Force attribute, but that's because the Force STARTS at two. I don't see how this can be interpreted your way honestly.

Could see why Free Spirits cost 250 BP's this way. Going by your interpretation, they're not playable without twinking them out, or abusing certain aspects.

Having all attributes based on force makes pc free spirits like free spirts in the rest of the game, and I'm good with that. But it means force should cost substantially more then R*5 to increase

I feel like making one with an astral signature of a skeleton with a cloak, a slay type spell, and probably not bother with a physical form. oh and buy a white horse.

If you base it off of a 400 BP to start, you're already giving 250 BP's for just the "metatype." Make Force susbstantially more than R*5 to increase, and you're left with nothing at all really.

Would be much good at interacting with the material world without some physical form however.

If going a possession route....how would you determine the vessel available at chargen?

just use one of these

http://site.unbeatablesale.com/img2004/buys0092.jpg

pg. 87 of street magic has sample vessels and their costs

Not quite. It says it says minimum is based on force, but it never says that minimum is equal to force. It does however state that maximum is equal to force. Also, spirits don't have a magic attribute, force replaces it.

I'm going to guess that the devs didn't intend that line to be read as 'all stats are equal to force' because honestly, then spirits are actually too cheap at 250BP. I would pay 250BP for the ability to raise all my stats by 1 for 10BP alone, before even taking into consideration the free magician quality and laundry list of other bonuses a spirit gets.

I think instead that it intends you to follow the normal mix/max gap of 5 (Edit: Or the line is a typo, wouldn't be surprising). So if you raise your force to 8, your minimums would be 3, and if you still had any stats at 2 they would get raised for free. That I could maybe envision, but not 'all stats are equal to force', especially not when that means it would also increase edge which would increase power points.

The problem still comes along that you're paying 250 BP for the Metatype, and THEN still having to pay to increase your Force, and THEN your stats. You're right, 250 BP, plus say, 50BP's to get all stats to 5 except Edge does seem like a bargain, especially w/ the laundry list of OTHER stuff you get, but if you don't go that route, and seemingly the way it is written, then you're looking at 250 BP, plus 50 BP to get Force to 5, and THEN even 50 BP's just to get stats to 3.....so 350 BP's for stats alone, and you're only at Stats 3, Force 5.....with no skills, contacts, gear, or anything? THAT doesn't sound right either.

As Mordinvan noted, the other Free Spirits in the game can raise all of their other attributes by raising their force. According to Street Magic, it costs them the new Force rating x 10, though. I think that might be manageable for PC Free Spirits, though it wouldn't be RAW, obviously.



A gap of 5 would make sense, in a way, but there's nothing in the text to indicate that.

I agree, that simple fix as Attributes being new Force rating x 10 would be reasonable, since it raises ALL attributes, but again, we're talking what's in the text atm, not what we'd houserule. In the text it clearly states that it costs the same as raising an attribute, which would be x 5. I was going over the "benefits" and such of being a Free Spirit, and all that, and was trying to come up with the comparable BP costs...and even with the benefits other than having "free" Magician, and a "free" pseudo Critter Adept (Critter Powers instead of Adept ones) its still overcosted unless you take into account the way the attributes are purchased. Yes, there's room for abuse....but most types have room for abuse (the Pornomancer comes to mind.)

Actually, reading the rest of the text on page 92 of Street Magic, it is quite clear that the writer did not intend that raising Force raised all attributes. It says "A free spirit's Force rating is the natural maximum for all Physical and Mental attributes, as well as its Edge attribute -- so the player must raise Force if he wishes to raise the remaining attributes." Only a very strained reading would lead one to conclude that raising Force raised the other attributes. Rather, raising Force permits the raising of other attributes, at the usual cost.

Also, the text then goes on to say that all attributes start at 2 (their starting Force) at the start of character generation. this would not need to be stated if the intention was that attributes were always equal to force.

As a minor matter, for non-player Free Spirits, the attribugtes are force based, but they are not actually equal to force. They are whatever the attribute was for the spirit, before it went free. For physical attributes, that can be more or less than Force. PCs use slightly different rules.

Yours,
Joel

Well, I don't know, let me see if I can create a rough list of benefits and costs and such.
15BP Free magician quality (And doesn't count towards max amount of qualities)
100BP All stats start at 2 (8 base stats, edge, and force)
So, that's 115 BP worth of highly quantifiable bonuses.

Then there are less quantifiable bonuses, including:
Infinite advancement. While expensive, spirits can advance all their stats infinitely by continuing to increase their force.
Teleportation. Free spirits can use astral projection to very nearly teleport, as well as have access to the metaplanes, and so can potentially teleport to places that are guarded, warded, or watched, as well as out of such places.
Immorality. Spirits do not age, and so live forever. Spirits are also nearly impossible to kill. They can be disrupted and forced to their metaplane for a while, but killing them outright is hard at best.
Immunity to Normal Weapons. Spirits get free armor equal to 2x force, and if the armor isn't penetrated, then damage bounces off them
Powers. Spirits get access to various critter and spirit powers, some of which can be exceptionally powerful. They gain these through the fairly natural improvement of their edge.
Pacts. Spirits have access to powerful pacts which can allow for impressive rates of improvement while benefiting their mortal allies.
Things I've forgotten. I'm sure there are other potential advantages to playing a spirit that I haven't thought of, but this list is fairly impressive.


Now, compare that to disadvantages:
Must raise force to raise other stats. Given that a spirit is a mage, and that a mage's highest stat is usually magic anyway, this seems like a mild inconvenience at worse.
Must use a pact to gain karma. When reaching a high force, the friendship pact can be hard to manage for gaining karma through normal means, but other pacts could potentially have karma rolling in.
Cannot summon/bind/banish. This is actually a reasonable disadvantage, as summoning spirits is a powerful tool in a mage's arsenal... but then again, you are a spirit.
Cannot bind Foci. This is another fairly strong disadvantage, as foci represent a strong road of advancement for mages, especially in the form of sustaining foci to keep boosts on themselves.
Cannot make (direct) use of computers/matrix/AR/VR. Well, how many mages really make much use of them anyway? Spirit could still set it up to read out things and operate via voice command if it really wanted access to computers.

Final verdict? 115 BP of advantages along with alot of cool things compared to 0 BP of disadvantage, and a list of things ranging from minor inconveniences to major blows.

I admit, 250BP may be a bit high, but if you include 'raise 10 stats at a time for the cost of 1' then 250 is too low. As I said earlier, I'd be happy to pay 250 purely for the ability to raise all 10 of my stats for the price of raising one of them. Heck, you only need to raise your stats by 3 to have the race cost completely pay for itself.

Besides, look through the other things in RC. Alot of them have higher cost than they really should. Dryads for example cost Elf + (more than the BP value of their benefits), and I'd imagine the other races are similar in that regard.

RAW point cost vs actual value analysis please. I dont see mr free spirit PC using strength or agility for pretty much anything. Maybe even reaction too. Why dodge when chances are you'll take no damage from ItNW anyway?


Also, regular joe mage can conjure a spirit on the fly with attributes equal to force, and a host of powers and/or spells at their disposal.


tl;dr version: free spirits cost too much to play; cant hold their ground vs a summoned spirit at 1/2 their force, nor can they really be very competitive at anything in comparison to regular PCs. In return you get to play an oddball character that may be refreshing, near unlimited advancement(only valuable if your game lasts long), and near unkillability(so you get to be near useless for a long time!)

trick with that kind of char is to find a nicht. In sr3 BP system I've made adequate chars with only half the recommended points.

There have been some really specialized builds posted here for things like infiltration using the concealment power on themselves and such. But really, theyre pretty crazy specialized, without much room left for anything else.

Spirits have a couple other disadvantages, other than those Karoline listed:

Can't benefit from: first aid (hence spirits have no quick way of healing drain. They have to wait for natural healing), medicine, cyberware, bioware, nanoware, transgenics, and drugs.
Can't use any qualities from Arsenal, Augmentation, or Unwired. (no martial arts for spirits )
Can't take mentor spirits (very minor)
Finally, Free spirits have also spirit formulae. If some dumb slot of a mage gets their hands on the formula, they can bind the free spirit, and it doesn't even cause drain. Of course, the spirit will probably flay them as soon as they're unbound, but it's still rather inconvenient. At a minimum, the binding process takes the spirit's Force in hours, and it's only at the end of that period that the spirit has a chance to beat the summoner's rolls and break free.

I think I'm going to try and work-up a Free Spirit PC using the current Karmagen rules in RC, and have both variants of stat rules to see the comparison between both interpretations. I'll post it here on DS when I'm done for you guys to tear apart, and all that

Which 'current' rules? The ones printed in RC? Or the update that is apparently in the German RC (5x attrib costs, karma=bp racial cost)?

The ones that are in RC currently.

Under the "current" karmagen rules, spirits are broken even if you don't use the "raising Force automatically raises the other stats" interpretation. Because their race is free. All Attributes start out at 2, so getting the core Attributes at all 5's except for one 6, then getting Force and Edge at 6, costs 414 Karma points. So you have 336 Karma points to spend on everything else, which can give you a lavish assortment of skills and spells.

That's already insanely overpowered. If that same free spirit only had to buy up Force and Edge, getting them both at 6 and automatically getting all physical and mental stats at 6, then wow... only 108 Karma points, leaving 642 Karma points to spend.

Personally, I agree with JoelHalpern and Karoline, and think that reading the rest of the text shows that the disputed passage was merely incredibly poor wording.

Agreed. I've done this before as an exercise, and allowed myself to take initiations. Ended up with a possession spirit that had her own cult, about a dozen powers including health pact and regeneration, force and edge were both double digits I think. Had a huge force prepared plasteel golem to go around in. It was fairly insane.

And if you do the 'all go up at once' reading, you don't even have to buy up edge, as it would also go up automatically. You could get every stat to 6 for the low cost of 9 + 12 + 15 + 18 = 56 karma. Then you grab a group and start doing initiations and you end up force 10 with strait 10s for stats for maybe a couple hundred karma.

Shame free spirit PCs can't get their skills above six like real spirits can, then the above spirit could pick up a 10 in spellcasting and counterspelling, thus making it virtually immortal and unstopable

I not sure I'd say the list of disadvantages you list for spirits would qualify for 0 Bp worth if they were actually calculated. I'm sure if you played a mage who couldn't gain Karma normally, bind foci, use the entire summoning end of magic, or use computers efficiently, you'd likely feel that all those disadvantages would be worth a few BP.

Oh, yeah, I didn't mean to say that they wouldn't be worth any BP, I was just saying that there were no quantified disadvantages. Just like I didn't give the various advantages like ITNW actual BP figures. Was just saying there are 115BP worth of quantifiable advantages, and 0 worth of quantifiable disadvantages, and then a big list of advantages and disadvantages that you'd have to weigh for yourself.

pc free spirits cant get their skills above 6? ever or just at char gen?