OK, maybe I'm just having a really bad brain fart, but why are spirits broken up like such? Combat, Detection, Health, Illusion, Manipulation? Is that the preferred spirit for that type of action the magician's tradition uses? Are they the spirits summoned for information that you want in those areas of magic? Do you have to summon a specific one to tell you why the rum is gone?

For the Aid Sorcery or Aid Study services a spirit can only help with its associated type, e.g. a Hermetic Fire spirit can help your cast or learn combat spells.

It's pretty arbitrary, yeah. Just gives some flavor.

My aging brain seems to recall that it denotes the type of spirit required for spell sustaining. I could be completely wrong though...


EDIT: It appears of been Double-Ninja'd

OK, good to know, thanks!

Quoted for correctness.

CanRay. You've been here nearly four years and have made over 8600 posts. How can you not know this? My world is crumbling.

Four years, nearly 9000 posts, hunting for a game for TWENTY F***ING YEARS...

And I just made a character for what I hope is a campaign starting up soon. So, yeah, I thought I'd get my ducks in a row soon.

Norse Mythology Magician, BTW, with a Cyberwolf Companion.

'bout time. Good luck on your run as a PC

Well, if you lived anywhere near a real city.... [Jibes aside, I've had trouble finding players, too.]


Cool.

Thanks. Hasn't happened yet however. See if it does this time...

I live in the Crime Centre (Especially Violent Crime) of Canada. Real enough for you?

Me. Skype and/or Vent. And me. Me.

I don't get how it could be so hard... Winnipeg is six times bigger than Leyden, and yet I'm drowning in groups to play in.

Well, once you're in a group, odds are much better of finding another one, since you're on people's "maybe he's interested in joining our group too" list.

Leiden's one of our country's biggest university cities, after all. In contrast here in Rotterdam, I basically have one group. Of which one guy moved off to Nijmegen, and one moved off to the heartland of the Kempen. Assumedly in preparation for the sixth age to hit, stay away from all that nasty flooding, and be in our Awakened lands.

Kempen's pretty backwards yeah. Nijmegen has RPG groups that I know of.

But yeah, universities are a good thing for finding players. Winipeg seems to be the biggest town in a wide area, so that should work out..

Nijmgen is mad on the RPing front, I hear. Most every 'looking for gaming groups' website I've ever seen had zounds of people in that area.
I should contrast my previous statement with saying that's just talking SR groups. D&D and WoD I never seem to run out of groups/players for.

I live in a large University town (2 major universities, one major college, miscellaneous other), yet I've had a hell of a time trying to find people to game with. It seems to me that if you're not directly involved with The University Of Waterloo (or working at RIM) you can never find the gamer networks.

I've formed SR groups from D&D/WoD groups before. SR has enough going for it that you can easily make a good pitch to people who are already into RPGs. It's got the fighting badass appeal of D&D and it's "our world, but evil and magical" setting and dice system make it accessible for WoD players.

All of my current SR group is formed from people in separate D&D groups. The rest seems to take more from the utter pink mohawk high fantasy D&D offers, and the one WoD group whose playstyle I actually get along with is fully represented in my current SR group.

*Cough* Magic: The Gathering and D&D 4^th.

Anything else and good luck it seems.

I still play the occassional game of Magic, especially since it's had a bit of a resurgence among one or two friends of mine. Thankfully though, none of us ever made the step into D&D 4th. We looked at it and turned away in "let us have our precious", much like I did when 3.0 came out.

I'm actually enjoying Pathfinder. They made Paladins not suck.

Yeah, I'm getting a PF game started. I like the increased class flexibility (Paladins are a good example of it).

Paladins are about the only example of a class in PF that gained anything worthwhile. Other classes gained some new features, but lost as much from core mechanic changes (looking at you CMB, and already bad feats being split into 2-3 feat chains), that they're still bad. Wizards still rule the world, about the only high powered class that got taken down to any serious degree was the Druid, and even it is still stronger than any class without full casting.

PF is a prime example of adding some gilding to a rotten core and people lapping it up believing that gilding actually made any sort of difference.

Tell us how you really feel? I like that *all* the classes had their core abilities made more flexible.

But for every bit of flexibility they got, they lost something in turn. Paladin was about the only one to come out ahead overall. Consider Bard/Barbarian which both lost a lot of usage of their key abilities. Power Attack and most other decent feats got nerfed. The extra "flexibility" that the classes got in return were a bunch of minor features that are interesting but ultimately do nothing to close the gap between casters and noncasters, or make the noncasters more generally useful or mobile (both things they desperately needed).

I'm not going to go on about it in this thread after this post, but Power Attack was always stupid, and it's impossible to deal with 'the caster problem'. The one undeniable thing is that everyone's core abilities are more flexible (not 'flexible'); I like that.

Yes, but what kind of spirits do Non-Nerfed Paladin's summon?

Multiple flavors of Guardian spirits.

No, they only summon a Beast Spirit, and only once per day.

D&D 4e actually deals with it well. Because everyone (basically) gets the same number of powers, there's never a point where the wizard has more Cool Tricks than the fighter.

I despise 3.5 with a burning passion, but that's for reasons other than the system. I played 3.0 and had fun with it, and I play/tolerate PF because some very cool friends of mine are in the group and like it all right. I still don't understand CMB at *all*, and my strength-based cleric is nearing the point where his casting is better than his fighting. Which actually sucks, because we don't have a tank, so I usually fill that role. I wanted him to be a fighter primary with healing secondary, and the system just doesn't like that.

But, we're going off-topic. The mix of spirit type to tradition is also fluff; knowing what kind of spirit you want to summon for a fight means a lot to your tactics. For example, guardian spirits mean it's smart to carry a spare heavy weapon around, for when you need it; Fire spirits mean modify your armor first, and so on.

Plant Spirits means that the lawn can stand up and start beating on your house.

True story, I was there.

Hmmm.... a lawnmower as a Weapon Focus?

They were too late to build and bind one, the suburban house they were in was being pounded hard.

Teach them to slot with The Magic Kingdom!

Bwa-ha-hahahaha! I've heard that story.

Better watch out before they start attacking the Technomancer Lawnmower Man.

I live in NYC... finding an SR game took me around 20 years as well. In a city with a few BILLION people that covers all walks of life from blue-collar working class to high-class execs... trying to find a few people who knew & wanted to play SR was near impossible.

As for the spirits, just make sure they don't all get mixed up & turn into THIS GUY!!!

I always wondered what happened to Disneyland in the new 6th world of SR. Does Walt Disney actually get brought back to life?

No, but the deadline before an IP falls into public domain has been extended to 150 years after the author's death.

And if the "Author" is a Corporation...