This part of the sentance self-contradicts.

He does not even have to be a mage. All you need is a reliable paraphernalia provider.

Not really. He has a lot of possibilities without being overpowered. One doesn´t negates the other.

Actually yes, yes it does. There is a clear effort int he books to not have a "gotta catch em all" magic tradition, it's one of the reasons I detest sprite link. Custom designing a tradition that lets you cherry pick four and then have a random "Be anything" slot is pretty much the definition of min max overpowered.

How is it more overpowered than having the 4 SM spirits + man?

How is it more overpowered than having the 4 SM spirits + man?

I don´t see the point. Just because you have "theoretically" access to all kinds of spirits, it means nothing. the 5th spirit comes random, so it leaves a LOT of handwaving and fun for the GM. You need a strong spirit, and get an air-ghost. You need a specific power and get the wrong spirit type.Russian roulette while facing serious drain "just for fun" is nothing i would specify as powergaming/min-maxing or something else.

Or you just keep summoning until and you find a spirit you like and bind it. Out of curisiosity: what are the four base spirits? Just wandering if Task, Man and Guardian are in there...

True. This one crossed my mind as well. I'm sorely tempted to use an AI with Arcana and Negotiations to try and build something that allows an AI to spellcast... So close, yet so far away...

I've toyed around with this idea before, an AI that evolved from a large retail talismonger's inventory database.

And i've come to a rather neat conclusion. Such an AI would not have a tradition due to not being awakened or a mage at all. In fact, it would not be limited by a tradition either - sometimes its hard for a hermetic to learn a spell from a shaman, for example.

This AI would be able to design spells for -anyone-. Toxic, hermetic, shinto - doesn't matter. And due to having a rather large uptime because it doesn't need to sleep, can even help more than one customer at a time.

I think i'm going to include it in one of my games as a fixer, or at least a magical resource for the players to be surprised about.

No, not just crafting spell formulae - actually being able to spellcast in and of itself. It's easy to build a walking grimoire, but to have a robot spellcaster is something else.

If I were a gm in this case, I'd support the idea of chatting about it outside of group, listening to expressed concerns and probably handwavium the changes in. Its much easier to pull off in the out of character context and just ignore the in-character hassle.

Its like a variant on the old, 'decide to play a new character in middle of campaign'. Sometimes you just realize yknow what, this paladin character of mine isn't really a good fit for this campaign, and i'm going to swap it out. Now, unless the rest of your player group are complete dicks, the transition into gameplay isn't usually that big a deal, in some cases you can just pull a change inhistory motif and tada your character has actually been with the group the whole time and that paladin didn't exist at all.

Within the IC (in character) context, changing up traditions would be more difficult. Kinda like religion perhaps, jumping from one established religious belief to another can be a personally traumatic to liberating experience. You can adjust your rp accordingly. From a game standpoint, and hypothetical gm position, id say it'd be too much a hassle to make you spend sessions with variable magical stats as you change from one tradition to another, or make you have to reinvest karma to buy new initiation or focus binding or whatever.

Egads, memories. We had one particular player in my gaming circle that wanted to play a new character just about every session. We ended up using his name as referring to when someone wanted to change characters.

Heh, I've had that experience too. Sometimes you could see it coming through body language and 'why does he have 5 pages in front of him' stuff. The flipside being the guy that plays the same character regardless of setting, system, timeline, etc.

Yeah. I play every char. like my first shapeshifter streetsam....unfortunately i play a body 3 mage without regeneration at the moment.^^