Three cheers for marriages between geeks! Congratulations man.

I was blessed myself to find my wife while she and I were still in high school (and really we only dated for about a month before we married), and she and I both enjoy gaming (myself more than she does, however). Our son turns six in a few months.

Man I feel old.

Once you know how the game works, you don't need to play-test a character to know that one with straight 6s on all attributes will be overpowered and one with straight 2s on (almost) all attributes will be underpowered.

Anyway, there's a free spirit in one of the games i'm running now and she was pretty underpowered until she got some karma.

.... /sigh.

Straight 6's means nothing when your skill of 2 comes into play. It's an 8 dicepool, which is terrible unless you're playing a street campaign.

An 8 in a spellcasting test means you can barely get 3 successes. You can succeed on the drain no problem, but your spells will almost always be resisted or dodged.

An 8 in melee combat means you miss. Every time.

An 8 in ranged combat means you miss, most of the time. Every time against PR 4+. Every time in less-than-ideal conditions.

I could go on, but all the stats in the world doesn't replace skills in the least.

Except he really wont be, 6 in all attributes does you jack-shit when it cost almost all your buildpoints, meaning you cant afford to buy skill to get any kind of dice pools. Defaulting to 5 dice isn't exactly god-mode
Every single other character will have most of their needed stats 6 or higher anyway and they can actually get skills to support that stat.

Depends on what you mean by "balanced." I mean, this is balanced, but then so is this. Most games balance, just not always in the middle. Whether something is balanced depends on your definition of "middle."

That said, I would love to see the math behind those conclusions.

Bah, in the long run a Friendship Pact becomes a most nasty Karma sink whenever one of your FP circle dies and your Force loses one notch, forcing the free spirit to fight a rearguard battle to protect their pact-mates from bodily harm and the ravages of old age, or invest the points to be able and bestow Formula Pact, Regeneration, and Hidden Life on them. IMNSHO a Dream Pact is far, far superior to a Friendship Pact as a steady and "natural" source of karma for Free Spirits PC. Just pick Dream Pact as your "free" Spirit Pact, and make it with a PC, or an NPC if no player is willing to make the pact. The Free Spirit PC gets to gain karma naturally whenever the other character sleeps or is unconscious, without risking any stat loss if the other character is killed or dies of old age, the other character gains increased protection for his or her body in otherwise vulnerable circumstances. A win-win situation, much better than the Friendship Pact. When the Free Spirit PC can afford to invest a Power Point into another Spirit Pact, it can buy Life Pact, and set it up with other PCs and NPCs, reaping some extra karma in exchange for handy instant emergency healing, again risking no stat loss if pact-mates die. Another win-win situation.

Sorry, mistaken the edit and quote buttons again.

It pretty much has to be an NPC unless the other players really want spirit pacts (other than friendship). When you hand out positive qualities to PCs, theyre supposed to be charged Karma for them according to RAW.

Wait wait wait....

Can you, as a Free Spirit, offer a SINless or down-on-their-luck person free medical care (FSPC paid for, of course) in return for placing that person into a permanent medical coma after entering a Dream Pact with them? Would that work? You get free, full use of their body until it dies?

EDIT: It seems to work, and it also makes a Materialization Spirit be able to use the Possession power, as Dream Pact automatically makes the spirit possess the Pacted person.

-critical glitch-

I say this as someone who designs games (although I do not get paid for it)...that is a RIDICULOUS change to make on a balance level unless it is accompanied by either:

A. A misunderstanding of the rules in question (i.e.) the editor thinks that increasing force auto-increases every attribute, because it is worded unclearly.
B. A change to the rules (i.e.) the editors (try to) change wording so that increasing force auto-increases every attribute, but fail to word it clearly.

85BP with individually increasing attributes seems balanced. (So would 100 BP or 120 BP for that matter.)

250 BP with individually increasing attributes seems HORRIBLY underpowered and totally untenable.



Wow. I haven't felt this embarrassed since I was in grammar school. : /

There is no real math or crunch behind my speculation, Aaron, it was just based on eyeballing. I just got the impression from what you said that the class as-written should have cost 85 BP and that the editors changed the cost without changing anything else about it to balance it. A class that was balanced with 85 BP in mind as a cost that now suddenly costs 250 BP with no other changes seems like something that would cause the cute elephant to fall off his rubber ball.

A. Having the class cost 85 BP and increase Attributes normally is fine. B. Having the class cost 250 BP and be able to get most attributes to five for 40 additional BP is fine (to me). C. Having the class cost 85 BP and auto-increase all attributes with force seems much too good. D. And having the class cost 250 BP and increase attributes normally seems too weak.

A. Results in an interesting and balanced character and seems to be your intention.
B. Results in a boring and 'slightly' overpowered character.
C. Results in a stupidly broken and boring god-mode machine which is obviously not worth discussing.
D. Results in interesting but quite underpowered characters who have lots of neat tricks but most of their attributes at 2 dicepools at 5-7.

But I'm entirely open to the possibility that I'm just misunderstanding the situation.

Math:

We will assume that 85 BP, increase attributes individually is balanced because that is how you wrote it. That is our fundamental assumption. Do not pull that out from under us, or the comparison falls apart.

Making the assumption that everyone will make the logical choice to max-out or just about max-out their attributes, we can look at this two ways. Both of these assume the "all attributes increase with force" misunderstanding that has been discussed in this thread, obviously.

*Force 5 Free Spirit Race 'Costs' 290 BP and GRANTS 320 BP worth of Attribute Increases plus LOTS OF TRICKS. (And very conditional drawbacks.)
*Force 6 Free Spirit Race 'Costs' 315 BP and GRANTS 400 BP worth of Attribute Increases plus LOTS OF TRICKS. (And very conditional drawbacks.)

Looking at the first of those two, that seems to me to be obviously balanced:

*Troll Race 'Costs' 40 BP and GRANTS 80 BP worth of Attribute Increases plus some TRICKS. (And very conditional drawbacks.)

The troll is granting DOUBLE your return in attribute increases for your BP investment. On top of that, you're getting Thermographic vision, +1 Reach, and +1 Natural Armor. The drawback is that your caps for natural Agility, Charisma, Intuition, and Logic goes down.

Comparatively, the Force 5 Free Spirit costs 290 BP and does not give double returns or even close. It gives 30 free BP worth of attributes which is pretty sweet. It also gives: Astral Form, Materialization/Possession, Immunity to Normal Weapons, Magician Quality, essentially the Adept Quality (Power Points) on top of the Magician quality. The drawbacks are only that you become hideously vulnerable to background count (unless I missed something), have a true name that can be used to enslave you, and cannot take certain qualities. This is a pretty awesome bag of tricks. But then again this leaves you with 110 BP to do EVERYTHING ELSE YOU WANT TO DO WITH YOUR CHARACTER, from qualities to special attributes to skills to gear. Which is the biggest drawback of all.

To me, the 250 (290) BP spirit seems like a scaled up version of the troll. High cost, lots of attribute increases, lots of tricks, and some drawbacks. Just like I said, scaled up. The attribute increase you get is exactly four times that you get from being a troll, whereas the cost is much more than four times that of being a troll, largely because you get so many tricks.

Note that the comparison may fall apart when looking at the 'all 6s' spirit, so maybe the natural maximum of starting Force for a Free Spirit should be 5.

Except if im not going totally senile in the gripe old age of 24, his original write-up had spirits start at 1 in all attributes, which Synner raised to all 2:s in editing becouse he thought that force 1 free spirits doesn't make any sense.

Man. The plot thickens.

Then a Force 2 FSPC costing 165 BP should be balanced if the assumption is that a Force 1 FSPC costing 85 BP was balanced.

That still does not explain how it went from 85 BP to 250 BP. That's an increase of 85 BP over the 165 BP cost... what caused that?

Quote from Synner listing the reasons can be found in post 122 of this topic.

It's a very impressive bag of tricks that Synner is quoting, but IMHO it does not make up for being a '2 Monster' with only 150 BP to spend on all attributes and skills.

I suppose so, but I would not rule out the possibility that some player (and PC) may accept a dream pact. After all, it gives no drawbacks, adds "second wind" protection when the PC is sleeping or incapacitated (unless the FSPC is disrupted, too, at the moment), and since PCs typically share an agenda at least partially, it gives the PC an extra eight hours when a common agenda can be worked upon). If anything else, by the same reasoning finding a NPC to accept the Dream Pact should not be difficult at all, at least when the FSPC can add some cash bribe.

Hmm, as much as I would otherwise expect that a Free Spirit can easily persuade a SINless or down-on-their-luck NPC to accept a dream pact with some cash bribe, I would expect no sane NPC to accept the deal you describe, unless they are suicidally desperate to raise some cash to provide for their families or somesuch, since what you describe effectively amounts to suicide for the character, the NPC would never regain consciousness and control of their body until it dies. On second thoughts, the trick would not work by normal medical technology, unless the body is implanted with some ware that maintains the permanent medical coma. Otherwise, the drugs that maintain the coma would eventually wear off, and the NPC would regain control of the body. By its nature, the Dream Pact only allows the spirit to possess the Pacted person when it is sleeping or is incapacitated by its own causes.

That idea would actually work quite well, since Shadowrun is supposed to be very dystopic. That's a fairly dystopic thing.

Also, you don't have to use just medicine for the coma - you could medically induce permanent brain damage that would keep someone unconscious for the rest of their natural life.

Sure. Anyone deperate enough to contemplate suiccide might consider this as a way of doing something good for their family through 'death', if not in life.

Oh, sure, me too acknowledge that would be a quite plausible justification for this kind of deal, if nothing less extreme than that.



Why to use such a messy way to induce coma, which might cause all kinds of troublesome health side effects ? A fairly simple piece of custom 'ware (a kind of reverse sleep regulator) could keep the body locked in eternal sleep.

Hmmm... or a standard sleep regulator with the built-in, secret governor turned off. As it could be with a simple radio signal at any time. Any time the manufacturer or anyone else with the proper code wanted to. *tented fingers drum together mysteriously*

Exactly my thought. Try looking for a troll.

Rather than cross post everything, I am providing links here to another thread I have going in which I have generated a Free Spirit PC using Karmagen who will actually be playing in a home game. "Live fire" testing of a Free Spirit PC. I will report there any interesting results from play.

The PC's stats are in THIS post. I have some questions regarding creative use of this PC's abilities, starting in THIS post.

Well, it's been a long time coming, but here it is.

The force two thing alone is worth 100BP.
So there would be 150 BP left.
The spellcasting, Astral perception stuff is worth another 10 BP.
Beeing immortal: About 20 BP to 30 BP.
Having, as a matter of fact ,extreamly high max. aug. values. Another 5-10 BP.
Ability to teleport: 20BP (15 on earth and an other 5 BP for the metaplane thing)
Having Hardend Armor: 20 BP.
Getting Powers for Edge: 20BPs
Thats easy an other 100 BPs.
Sorry to say that, but 250 BP are just fine.


Well, there is a work around this one. Spirits are allowed to cancel every pact, whenever they feel like it.
Since you have a telecinetic bond, you know if something happens to this person.
(Well, as long as you are in a range of Force*10 Meters. )
Just cancel the pact and you would have a day to finde a new "friend".

I agree with 250 points totally fine. Free Spirit NPC's have an incredible potential. Just a terrible start *g*

Friendship Pact... eugh... if one could have more friends "saved up" it wouldn't be so bad. But binding yourself as an immortal being to non-immortals... not nice. I think the best thing you could do is finding young children. Best in luxery and high-up corp-families and bind to them. Not EVER to your contacts and fellow runners. Mortality rate is insane *g*.

Ah hell, i think i would play a spirit with that pact and ask the GM for a karma drain ability (pretty please, won't misuse it BWAHAAHAHA, umm i mean.) Or just trying to have people pay me in Karma.

@Summerstorm
Well, the insanity is allready RAW.
Consider this. Every SC Free Spirit is able to get any pact in the book.
So there is nothing stopping you from having a pact with 300 mortals earning 300 Karma a month or even more.
Karma drain sucks, because you have to work for your Karma. (And it is not a pact and it will be probably cost around 2-3 power points)
Why rob people if you can be payed for existing?
Healing pact: Pay one Karma and you get to siphon away 2 boxes of damage. Usable multible times.

Ever wondered how a group of corp secs shooting at runners sounds for a free spirit on astral?
"chshing, chsching, chshing"
And here it is the other way round:
"chshing, chsching, chshing."

And this is even a good offer for other PCs! Burning Edge or paying Karma to the spirit.