Hi,

Since CGL is making this out to be a big problem and I never say this happen in I-don't-know-how-many rounds on different Cons etc. I am interested:

Did you ever experience that the player was free to spend his Spirits Edge without the GM's consent?
So is exploiting the Spirits Edge really such a big problem or not? Does it even happen at the table?

cya
Tycho

It's not allowed for the summoner to use the spirit's Edge, so... no, not a problem.

Bye
Thanee

Does it say that anywhere in the rules of SR4?

I didn't allow it, but i had a lot of people who hadn't read street magic (or chose to ignore it) try. Even seperate from that I'm glad spirit edge is going away. It makes no sense for mooks/npc's to not have an edge rating and then have every spirit have one.

We just use the optional rule to give spirits and sprites edge equal to half force/rating rather than the full value. That seems to keep it pretty much in check for us.

there are generally two broad groups i will consider here:

1) those who tried to abuse the fact that a spirit has edge by claiming the spirit can be ordered to spend it: these people will be prevented from pulling cheesy stunts.

2) those who have not tried to abuse that same fact: these people will be completely unaffected by the rules change.

was it really an extremely necessary change? no, not really. i'm pretty sure most groups didn't have a problem with it. however, since the groups that didn't have any problems with it won't be negatively impacted in any way, and the rule is likely to have a positive impact for groups that did have a problem with it, it doesn't really matter how common of a problem it is.

as such, if it was ever a problem for anyone even once, it may as well get fixed. it does not matter whether it was a problem (or if someone attempted to make it a problem) in a group i was in. i really can't see any reason to not include the change.

That is not true. Every character has Edge it is just that mooks have an Edge pool. so a single mook will have an average of professional rating/number of mooks.
What makes no sense is that (if you use the mook rules) a Tir Ghost has only Group Edge but a dog get his own Edge pool.

For starters, I want to make something crystal clear to everyone, ever. I am not "CGL." I am an active member of this community who happens to also, sometimes, draw a miniscule amount of my household income by way of CGL for work I'm contracted to write. I understand that apparently that makes me, at times, either some sort of imagined authority figure or some masochistic lightning rod, but I am not "CGL." I'm only writing for me. I'm only sharing my opinions. I'm not paid to be here, what I say isn't official, and I've posted a whole lot more as just a random Dumpshocker than I have as any sort of company man.

Second, though? I just want to share why I -- not CGL, but Critias, the Dumpshocker -- posted what I did.

And that reason is all threads like these right here, which just happen to be the first half dozen or so that I found with a quick Google search, where people were discussing how spirits do (or don't) use edge. I'm sure I could find more if I felt like delving into the actual Dumpshock search engine more, and I'm sure I could find even more if I felt like repeating the exercise over at the Shadowrun4 forums. These are conversations that happened. These are, whether folks paid attention to the pertinent bits of Street Magic or not, words that were typed.

You can feel these conversations were mistakes. You can feel the rules were perfectly clear. You can feel like no one should have misunderstood them, like there never should have been any question when and how a spirit spends edge, and like their ability to spend edge didn't do anything to the already often-spiky power curve that spirits bring to the table. You can even feel, if you really want to, that arguments on an internet forum shouldn't be listened to by people writing the rulebook, and that me even suggesting, hinting, or personally assuming that such conversations shouldn't ever, in any way, have influenced any decisions that may or may not have been made in the crafting of SR5.

But do me a favor, and don't pretend like the conversations never took place, and the issue was never raised.

I'm not saying "you," any individual poster and Shadowrun expert, were ever unclear on how spirits used edge to resist summoning, or used edge to bolster every task their summoner sent them on, or anything in between those two extremes -- and, to clarify again, I'm not saying that this necessarily was the thought process behind removing their edge attribute in SR5 (hell, maybe it was just done to cut down on bookkeeping) -- but I'm saying that I, personally, remember these disagreements, and think it's a little unfortunate that everyone else seems to have magically forgotten them.

This thread was merely a reaction to the Magic Preview and the RPG.net Chat where this was mentioned as an Exploit that needed fixing, while I can't remember this ever being a problem at all.

For everyone on the board, please don't mistake Freelancers for CGL. We're Freelancers, beholden to nobody, and able to speak for only ourselves.

I mean, hell, who would hire ME to be a spokesman???

here, me, i would.
'caue your kind of crazy would work wonders doing PR for crazy stuff.

I'd be a nightmare for the lawyers.

no, you'd be a dream come true.
lawyers often get paid by the hour so the more work, the more money.

Freelancers present are not to be taken as CGL spokespersons, I don't think anyone doubts this. However, when it's said that "CGL is making this out to be a big problem" supposedly it is addressing the magic dev blog:
Is that devblog not CGL's official opinion, either? Or, minding that quote from Street Magic, does it show a deep understanding of the rules existing in 4e?

...

You can forget about a single line in a single book and still have a deep understanding, Fatum. Cases of eidetic recall aside, there is simply a limit to human memory.

It's a subchapter, not a line. And sure you can forget one exists when you're a single man saying things on the spot. When you're a gaming company with a team of professionals writing a new edition, with a PR department preparing your statements, you're kinda supposed to know your stuff.

And is your definition of "know your stuff" perfect knowledge?

And no, it's not a "subchapter". It's a single clause within a subchapter that is largely about OTHER issues of spirits and Edge

Awareness of the existence of the rules in the core books, at the very least, yes.

Let's not be pedantic. It's a quarter of a page with its own title, easy enough to find if you put your mind to it.

The rule is not a quarter of the page, is my point. Of that quarter of the page, one clause is devoted to this rule, while the rest is an entirely different subject. As such, it's a pretty easy thing to have slip several people's minds.

The problem with spirits is not Edge. It's that they have attributs and skills of about Force (more or less). Which means pools of Force*2.
His summoner will often have good summoning and drain pools. Let say he's got the same value in each stat, we'll call this his Rating. To summon a spirit, he will do an opposite roll of Rating*2 against Force and the hits of the spirit will be doubled for the drain.
Because of this, the summoner can wiithout too much risk ask for a spirit Force of 3/2 of his Ratio.

Which means that a summoner can, without too much risk, summon a creature that will be 3/2 more powerful than he is, without taking into account the spirit powers, some of which are a bit too powerful.

Because of this, a summoner's spirit will always be potentially better than his summoner. Who's more intelligent, more charismatic and a better spellcaster than Lofwyr? His spirits.

True, and Ghostwalker cranks that to a whole new level.

I guess his question is more about how it's played into different gaming groups, not how it's written. I think.

Most other rules take up even less. What else could they have missed, if they missed this?

if dozens of people playing the game managed to miss this, it's worth blocking off regardless. it's not as if this is something unique to the developers... based on the volume of threads where people come here and ask how to deal with the problem (and bearing in mind that dumpshock does not include everyone playing, the search that was done earlier doesn't cover the entire history of SR4, and doesn't even touch other websites for SR4), it isn't exactly something that everyone notices.

if the developers don't search through every single line of rules text ever published in SR4 before they talk to us, i for one prefer that to them not talking to us (which is likely what would happen if they had to do hours of research any time they post something). this is an RPG company that recently had a massive financial kick in the nuts. they most likely don't *have* a budget for PR, as such... it's something that the developers do when they can fit it in between everything else in their schedule. you can complain all you like that they don't fact check every single sentence before it goes out to the public, but simply put, it's ridiculous to expect them to spend the money and time on that in a business with the tiny profit margins they have.

there are more important things for them to spend money on than having someone do 5 hours of research before letting anyone publish a blog post. their priorities are elsewhere, and quite frankly in my opinion that's not a bad thing (not necessarily a good thing; we'll see when they release the final product if their attention was actually in the right place rather than just being in a different wrong place).

While I recognize your sentiment and agree that not every blog post needs to go through the (rules) legal department, this lack of fact checking, not in blog posts but in rules writing, leads to fixing stuff that is not broken and ignoring other stuff that actually is. Or writing a FAQ that breaks the rules.

So summoners shold like high five each other right now becaue before edge could not be used on a test, now it can. I don't care if its my own, if I need that spirit power to work I need it to work and now I can use my edge to mak it happen where as before I had to just suck up the failure. Woo-hoo summoner buff. Because they totally needed it. Seriosuly hopefully spirits were hard core nerfed in other ways as they were too good before and this rule made them even more powerful.

Spirits are NPC (SR4A p.188). No chance for PC to decide about Edge. End of story. Period.

exactly. AFAIK the preview of SR5 has not changed that. they jest went even further and did not give spirits an Edge attribute. Not only does that further prevent the summoner from using the spirit's Edge, but it also prevents the spirit from using its own Edghe (to prevent being summoned/bound for example)

So it IS a PUSH that helps out summoners? Great!

Only if the group had decided that spirits a) would use edge against the summoner and b) would not use edge to accomplish a service even if it were necessary. If both did not happen before it is a nerf.

When I acted as GM I ruled that spirits could use edge dice as many times up to half their force value, and I operated under the assumption that a spirit would use edge to keep it self from being dissipated/banished. If a summoner's spirit was forced to constantly be using its edge dice because the summoner was putting it in dangerous situations, I ruled that it could be considered abuse and spirits would be less willing to aid the summoner (i.e. use edge to resist a summoning test) or perhaps be outright hostile.

The actual written rules might still allow for Edging against summoning - it's not that those spirits don't have Edge, it's that unbound, summoned spirits don't make use of it; that may not be true prior to them losing the opposed Summoning test.

yeah, not sure where the rest of you are getting that spirits don't have edge... here's what i see:

"The fix was that spirits cannot use Edge when they are bound or carrying out services."

"cannot use edge" does not mean "do not have edge". in fact, the phrasing heavily implies they do have edge, to me at least. a spirit being conjured has neither been bound, nor is it carrying out a service, so if you've done something to make spirits hate you... yeah, they can edge their resistance test.

is there some other source of information about this that i'm not aware of?

The Dumpshock users can be newbies or just not overly attentive when reading the rules, and so it's normal for each of us to miss a rule or two (is there anyone who hasn't? I know I have). The developers, on the other hand, are a team of professionals, supposedly.
Look, that's like finding an arithmetic error in a physics article published by a large collaborative effort. When a "commoner" makes an error in his calculations, that's normal. When a collective of scientists does, that raises certain doubts as to the quality of the rest of their results.

As far as I know the only blog post on it says they do not have edge while bound or summoned which yes still leaves it open for use against being usmmoned. But someone has said that in a twittter or face book post that it was stated that the summoner can use thier own edge for the spirit, I never saw the original source though.

I'm blanking on the study that was recently shown to have had a serious mathematical error in it. As in, a dummy mistake, that caused the results to swing from "generally positive" to "generally negative."

(I think it had to do with economic growth..? Went from +8% to -8%. I'll see if I can find it Found it.)

Professional only means your get paid for your service. It does not mean you are infallible.

I think summoned or bound spirits should not have edge, but free spirits should. JMO

It implies as much. Otherwise, you're still an amateur or a dilettante, despite being paid for the job.

... Infallibility is not an element of competence. Things can get missed, and this can be an easy one to miss.

A bit late to the party here, but its wierd they're making such a big deal out of something that wasn't an issue before.

About the ONLY exploit I know of regarding this is with Sprites, not Spirits. By giving a sprite Defuse, you can almost guarantee it will succeed. Most databombs will instagib anything, sprites included - which means it will spend edge to succeed due to the self-preservation guidelines for edge use of NPCs.

I suspect that Sprites will come with the same restriction.

I rather suspect data bombs will work differently, as well.

yeah, most likely. i'm not sure what possessed them to make data bombs so much more damaging than every single other matrix attack of equivalent rating.

All in all, I'd be for spirits and sprites not having individual Edge at all. Edge is such a powerful resource, and the mage/techno spends no resources to gain it for free when they summon/compile.

Free spirits and free sprites should have Edge, of course.

As far as a mook Edge pool for spirits / sprites, that's a different story. I would say there should be some over-all mook Edge pool, maybe calculated from the PC notoriety or something and shared by all mooks "owned" by the PC.

Who says it's a big deal. It's one sentence, that just makes it much more clear how to play that part of the game.