hey all. Trying to figure out the rules regarding maintaining defensive spells.

I know you can keep an elemental in astral space to maintain your armor spell, can you also sink a couple grand into 3 other elementals and have 'em maintain armor spells on your teammates?

Is there any reason not to have 1 force elementals maintaining spells on your team at all times?

But other than that, you can have a team of 4 with 16 force 1 elementals driving across town and they can't easily be spotted because the spotter would have to be:
1. awakened
2. perceiving at that moment
3. projecting into the van which has tinted windows (or no windows. yay rigger sensors)

So other than the cost, it's all gravy?

I doubt you can fit 16 elementals into a van, even if they're force 1. Especially if there's the rest of a runner team inside. Astral forms can't share space.

And, of course, if you've read Threats, this whole thing seems right up Tutor's alley...

Well I've always said that force 1 elementals are reasonably small. I was considering saying that a character's body is indicative of its size, but that would make the astral forms of dwarves (astral boldy = willpower) larger than those of humans or elves.

Essentially: without other factors I'd say that a force 1 elemental is about the same size as a small child or animal like a house-cat or small dog so it wouldn't be that hard to fit 16 in a van.

There are also two conflicting sets of rules in that paragraph. One says that elementals can maintain the spell for a number of days equal to force, and the other says that each day, or part thereof, reduces the spirit's force by 1, and when it reaches 0 it disappears. If you thing about what happens to a force 1 spirit under the second set; it starts to sustain the spell then a fraction of a second later its force is reduced by 1 and it dissapears. I'd just take the first reading as it's less stupid.

Sadly, you cant summon 16 elementals of any force unless you have a charisma of 16.

And Req: are you sure astral forms cant share space? You can astrally project through a person's aura, move through the ground (which is astrally solid) and the possession technique specifically allows you occupy the same astral space as a dual-natured creature. I'm looking for a rule that says astrally-active creatures can not share space except with possession, but I'm not finding one.

The elementals cannot be astral. To use any power in the read world a spirit has to be in the real world. The spell has to be in the real world. Ergo, the elemental has to be in the real world to sustain the spell. Remember, in 3rd edition spells are not dual natured.

BitBasher:

Of course they can be astral while sustaining spells. The Materialization requirement only applies to physical services (such as burning down a door). Spell sustaining is not a physical service, it is its own category of service. In order to adequately explain this I would have to quote huge chunks of material, so I instead suggest you reread the section on binding elementals and elemental services.

Elemental summoning materials cost 1000 per force point. If a character wants to pay 1000 bucks for a spell per day then I see no problems. Save for wards of course. And don't get knocked out, one of six is likely to go free.

If you go up against another mage, the only benefit to having a large number of force 1 elementals you'll have is if they all crash-tackle your opponent in Astral (That meele combat rule for having a number of buddies with you). Otherwise, the other mage should be able to quickly pick off the elementals via dispelling/astral combat without really breaking into a sweat.

Oops... I forgot to add astral barriers. A GM could easily force your group through a ward to stuff up the sustained spells and elementals.

Hmm... I'm an enchanter, let me check the numbers...

15 days and 10 hours for me to produce the materials to summon an elemental to sustain a spell for a day! Sounds like an effective use of time to me!

I could get the average time down to just under 12 days by doing three in parallel... but that's kind of like saying that nine women can produce a baby in a month. It'd actually be 35+ days, I'd just have three units of conjuring materials when I was done.

And given 35 days to work, I could produce a sustaining focus from scratch...

(And I can't conjure, anyway.)

And eww, because I just figured out what they feed the women.

If you're thinking what I think you're thinking, I think that entropy makes it impractical.

At least as a sole food source.

I'm thinking the leftovers from organlegging. The one thing we have no use for: fat. Which I guess makes it atrophic.

Thanks Lilt. I didn't think it was anything like the time frame that John posted, but don't have my books to check.

Try starting with the beginning of the process instead of the middle.

Yes, the process technically starts as the materials are gathered, but as you can buy raw and refined enchanting materials (the costs are on P170, MitS) what city-mage would? You could get the resources for "free" by gathering them from the wilderness but that would probably still cost you as you'd need a gathering lisence and passage to somewhere unpolluted.

I should also mention that the costs I mentioned are for buying them refined already. If you can afford to wait another week (per 3 units) for the Mr. Fix It to refine raw materials (or the 2-3 days it takes to do 6 units yourself) then the cost halves. Also: Does anyone know exactly how the S&R bot on P178 of R3 manages a rating 6 autosoft from a rating 3 pilot rating?

There are two conflicting versions, one says that it can sustain it for its force in days and the other says it can do it for its force-1 in days. It's GM's perogative to say which one is right, IMHO they just didn't think it through when they wrote the "part thereof" thing (out by 1 errors are some of the most common programming errors, it's an easy mistake to make) thus a force 1 elemental can sustain a spell for a day.

I figure they just accounted for midnight.

The ol "if I cast it at 12:01 I get the maximum usage of it" thing.

But apparently if they cast a force one elemental at 11:59 it's gone in 60 seconds (cue Angelina Jolie)

So it is based on calendar days not 24 hour durations.

And I'm back to my runners having [edit] charisma x elementals maintaining defensive spells turning an already powerful team into a powerful team on steroids for the price of ¥1000 per spell.

Magically improved stats are considered normal stats too, yes? So the mage could conceivably increase his own [edit] charisma to increase the number of elementals he could cast.

Only disad I can see is that elementals require 1xhours per force rating. So the conjurer would have to spend the whole day making those elementals before an evening run.

... charisma is the attribute for conjuring!

Some flaws (some of them I am basing on assumptions) I can see with your logic

You can bind your Charisma in elementals not Willpower in elementals.

The elementals, once conjured, will stay bound for a long time on their home plane. You only need to bind them to the spell after you cast the spell.

No elementals can sustain health spells unless your GM house-rules it otherwise (which I have no problem with, just noteing that you can't use an elemental to sustain an increase Will/Cha/Int spell, a sustaining focus or another character would be fine though)

The disadvantage is having so many *blanking* elemental doing nothing productive. For NPC's this is a much better tactic, but trying to sneak anywhere with magical defense will be all but impossible.

And when the sec mage sees this crew coming (and he or she will) they'll call for a fraggin' Death Squad and pull everyone else on retreat.

Or, a single manaball in anstral space and every single one dies.

One of my favorite elemental tricks from 2nd ed was to have a host of elementals of force 1-3 that I would use to temporally "hold" sustained spells for a turn or two so I could cast unhindered. That way I could keep the rest of it's services, of which I had plenty of. That and the focused concentration edge mad it much easier to sustain multiple spells. I wonder if this still works in SR3.

-The Eggman