What command/order would you give upon binding a free spirit so it doesn't try to gain its freedom by getting you killed? Like working against you, carrying out orders in a way that will harm you. Stuff like that. I started with the first law of robots about doing nothing to bring harm or through its actions or inactions, but what is to keep it from other plans?

What plans could a free spirit enact to gain its freedom? Just to see the sort of things to guard against.

The binding character intends to treat the spirit as well as he can and set up a program to feed it karma. He has said that he will free it after some length of time, but it's not yet stated. I think he wants to see how fast he can accumulate karma for it, then get a set time of help from a powerful spirit.

You seem to be going about this in an odd way, so am going to need some clarification.

What is the advantage you seek for specifically binding a free spirit over your normally summoned spirit?

If you seek to treat it well and feed it karma in trade for some spirit assistance of some duration, wouldn't it make more sense to approach said free spirit and seek a Pact of some sort with it that would be mutually beneficial?

With your first method, you might be able to do some fancy word wrangling so that it can't undermine/betray you, but it certainly won't go out of it's way to aid you either, following what orders you have set for it of course.
Plus consider that despite however you phrase it and maybe even treat them very well while wearing your shackles, binding is not something the spirit is likely to enjoy or forgive no matter how much you sugarcoat it. Unless it gets the magical equivalent of Stockholm syndrome I suppose.
Meanwhile a Pact may offer a more friendly alternative as it is a mutual agreement between both parties with benefits flowing both ways.

Maybe you missed the SR3 tag, or maybe you are applying later edition pacts to the situation as your solution, but I am not so happy with that scenario for the PC. He wants to decide how the spirit uses the early karma it gets, probably to tune it to his needs and very much to try to keep the conjuring ritual (for increasing the karma ratio of the giver) in a range he has a chance of completing.

SR3 knew spirit pacts only from Threats II with the very specific pact to Gaf and the Aleph society

Yeah, don't allow that. That's abusing the rules for his benefit.

MitS.115 clearly says such a character is asking for trouble. I'd suggest requiring the character to learn Knowledge: Psychology / Stockholm syndrome at a Rating that exceeds the spirit's Force + Spirit Energy and spend considerable time researching methods of torture / brainwashing in order to figure out how to make the FS want to be submissive / a slave in this relationship. Because essentially you're abducting a creature from its home (metaplane) and holding it hostage, making it do what you want, planning to feed it what you want, when you want, and how much you want if it wants to eat at all.

There are only two ways I can think of that's going to succeed:

1. give it an exquisitely carved psychological complex; or
2. restrain it through physical / technological means so it has no choice but to suffer through your abuse, much like a farm animal.

The easiest way to achieve the former is to create a Force 1 Ally with Inhabiting and set it Free. A low-Force FS will pretty much be a blank slate you can warp into becoming your protege.

MitS.46 suggests the way to achieve the latter is to artifice and bind a Focus specific to that individual Free Spirit like a genie's bottle.

I'd also note that even if they pull it off, any other free spirit they encounter should likely go apeshit on seeing/assensing what they've done.

Wow! This certainly went all kinds of sideways.

Assume a PC bound a free spirit. What command/standing order should he be giving to head off the spirit killing him or getting him killed at every turn?

I have no interest in how to screw the PC over or how his plans can go awry since those are too simple to invent

It all looks solidly on-topic to me. For reference:

• MitS.124 covers Pacts
• MitS.107 covers Allies starting as a blank slate
• MitS.108 covers Inhabitation making an Ally easier to control
• MitS.46 covers trapping a Free Spirit in a Focus
• MM.111 covers dikoting
• SSG.50 covers sex with Spirits and whether they can give informed consent
• SRC.80 covers The Amoral Campaign

The concept of "how do I coerce a spirit to ..." is older than this board.

The character was present when a foe's ally spirit went free. He was dual natured at the time so saw its aura, but the enemy magician also had several elementals on hand that went free at the same time, so although their true names should have been present at that time, it was not possible to determine which name matched which spirit.

The character has no idea how much karma he will be able to feed it. Once the plan is put into action, he should be able to determine how much karma he can find/buy for it as well as the going rate to buy karma. The spirit did not pick up the wealth power, so that funding source is not yet available. And the character could never earn enough karma to pay for every little service he would like from the spirit - it acts as a power focus for most of his magic. But perhaps he could set up some of the pacts as given in newer editions for other characters as more sources of feeding it karma.

Well, that fancy word wrangling is what I asked for. If nobody feels like they can be fancy enough, ok. But then also quit trying to turn the discussion into something else.

I was hoping if no one felt awesome enough to come up with the fancy word wrangling on their own, then maybe someone would give it a shot and others could add to it while others pointed out inadequacies and the fancy phrasing could get amended into something usable. Hence my throwing out the law of robotics as a starting place if no one had any ideas. I thought I recalled an old thread about this, but my search fu is weak.

Ok, then how would you suggest a pact be offered where the spirit acts as the characters ally spirit/power focus? I don't think the character could afford it.

How is that abusing the rules? If the spirit keeps its force lower, isn't it going to benefit in the long run? Meanwhile, it actually hobbles the character because almost all the ways it can help him are based on Force and Spirit Energy. I see it as the character foregoing immediate gratification for future power, but when that future power is unleashed, the spirit is going to be much harder to control or keep appeased.

Thank you for responding and trying to point out the folly of the character and what the rules say about binding. However, I didn't see a contribution to the help I was seeking, which to me is the responses going sideways - they involve the topic, but on a tangent. I did not see anything resembling a command to give a spirit to keep it from undermining the character at every turn. It's just been pointed out that a bound spirit will try to do things to get its freedom or undermine the character, which was the point of asking for help to minimize this fact.

Maybe someone with strong search fu can find an old thread(s) where a command or set of commands was actually developed?

If the question were "What command would stop an Artificial Intelligence or Drone Robot Pilot from attacking?" then certainly an answer would be to track down the lengthiest software installation End User Licence Agreement you can find, adapt it to your purposes, add a bunch of software test cases, and hire a lawyer with programming skills to check it.

But a Spirit is not an AI or a Robot. By the time you start reading it the third line of your exhaustive all-encompassing Wish-tight contract to it, its astral eyes will glaze over and it'll cover its ears groaning, "are we nearly there yet?"

So to the question of how to exploit an enslaved living being to (not) do what you want for as long as you want, In some game systems, slavery, exploitation and abuse would shift one's Alignment toward Evil. In other game systems, it would cost some Sanity points. In SR, it might need to make use of the Shadowrun Companion's guidelines for amoral teams (or in this case, one amoral player) forcing them to buy their karma (after all, that's the only leverage they have with the Spirit) out of their Nuyen pay-cheques. Being Evil / Insane / Amoral isn't being prohibited, but it certainly has inevitable consequences. That's logical.

If the player is relying on "doing good" to earn the Karma needed to placate a slave imprisoned and exploited against its will, that's a paradox the player likely saw coming a long way off. If the character's Awakened with above average Intelligence, the character likely saw it coming a long way off too.

nm

Because lovingly hand-grognarding a spirit to min-max its abilities to help him while keeping it's ability to resist binding low enough to let him hold it by exploiting edge cases of the not-terribly-robust spirit design system is abusing the rules, and is fairly certain to cause player whinging on epic scale when someone banishes the thing and it doesn't have any real resistance because he designed it that way. SR3 already contains means of reliably binding spirits via astral quests anyway.

Am I hated on these forums? Maybe I am, because in very few threads have I seen so much written by a person translated into almost its polar opposite by every other poster. Thanks for not really helping, but trying to figure out the underlying problem that certainly must exist, then getting snarky when I point out there is no underlying problem. I'm pretty much done trying to explain the character's motives because it is ignored and the boilerplate worst case scenario inserted to explain what is surely the characters deviant, underhanded motives.

I gave up on this thread and continued my weak search fu and 11 years back found something along the lines of what I was hoping the present posters might have the creativity to produce.

"Spirit these are your new standing orders
You are not to act, speak, or conspire in any way to harm me.
You are to actively and immediately warn me of any plots to harm me that you discover.
You are to use all your abilities to oppose any attempt to free you.
You are to obey nobody except me.
You are to never speak of your true name."

Now if you want to continue to pick at straw men, please consider the situation where a person is binding a free spirit. They have spoken the spirits name thrice and it appears before them, he attempts to bind it and is successful. He has no ill will toward the spirit. In general, he is on great terms with the spirit world, but he knows he just enslaved a being that has no idea what this new master has in store for him. Maybe it is as evil and nefarious as all the posters suggested as far as the spirit knows. My question was what commands would one give to survive until the spirit can judge for itself?

That kind of ordering bound free spirits and ally spirits with unlimited services is what always struck me as a bad thing with SR. Anyways .. this is only fool proof up to the point where an opposing mage does a quest to find the spirit's true name and then banishes it ... and a GM making use of that is bound to piss off the player in question. So either way this has large portential of disrupting the gaming group on so many levels that I'm not sure that it's worth the trouble.

Hi there!

The rules have probably been covered already. One more point rgd. what has been said above - how were the "true names" visible? The spirit has to tel it to the player and usually it wouldnt do that. So someone must have written it down or smth?

Regarding the "command": A simple one is basically enough, but if the spirit feels itself mistreated or is unhappy for whatever reason, it WILL (and should) seek ways to gain freedom. Whenever a chance opens. But lets say, if I would be crazy enough to mistreat a spirit like that in SR3 I would....


You (spirit) are not allowed harm or plot against me (player) directly or indirectly with any way.
You (spirit) are not allowed to ask 3rd parties to harm or plot against me (player) directly or indirectly with any way.

If paranoid you could setup a white list of what the spirit could do

1. You are not allowed to do anyhthing except:
a.b.c......

But sooner or later the spirit would be pretty pissed

Well if I would be that spirit, I would start to work excellent on every occasion. One day, the mage will execute a risky command and then i just act as dumbfolded as possible. - By acting like an idiot (following a command very exact to the letter) which might get the mage killed --> free

Furthermore some of those rules contradict each other. "You are to use all your abilities to oppose any attempt to free you.", now would that allow the spirit to use a power that hurts the mage too? Since the the rules contradict each other in the current situation, it could lead to the situation explained above, the spirit hurts the mage by using a super strong power or acts dumb getting itself banished because it uses weaker powers to defend itself...

Also it could decide to priotize rule 2 to an extend that it distracts the mage to death. "the mage just cast a spell on you, oh wait that guy fired a bullet, let me look, there are 3 guys plotting against you" Eating up concentration of the mage who will likely give a stupid command e.g. "shut up" or "go away" and poof spirits gone until mage is dead

So I would definitively priotize orders and setup a rule in case something contradicts

I think even if some of the responses recorded here weren't helpful to you, it looks to me as if they were intended to be helpful to you.

I was trying to figure out a combination of using the Programmable ASIST Biofeedback from CC.68 (not related to the PABX of yesteryear) on a "conduit" metahuman who was sustaining "Control Thoughts" on the Free Spirit in order to relay all the PAB reprogramming into the spirit's mind. It could make a pretty interesting campaign arc: tracking down which megacorps have PABs; which might have been researching magitech crossovers; decking your way into their research files to find out one that had been successful... but it'd all be quite hypothetical since ASIST and Spirits can't talk to each other normally.

Someone once said:

They wouldn't have had time to write down the True Name. A Free Ally only gets its True Name the moment it goes Free (MitS.114 - it supplants the original Ally Formula, and is located at the Citadel of an Astral Quest on the home metaplane, which was chosen by its designer: MitS.108), and it tends to use its next action to snap back to its home metaplane before anyone can snare it. But in that moment between it checking for freedom and getting an action, a conjurer can wrest control of it (SR3.189). Besides, it is established that the PC has already bound the Spirit so the narrative fast-forwarded through all that. What was "smth"? It's not ItNW...

You're right though that there are contradictions. "You are to use all your abilities to oppose any attempt to free you." could have the Spirit paralyse the master so that he never gets out of bed in the morning. After, it's very dangerous getting out of bed - he could choke on his synthflakes or be run over by an autotaxi while crossing the road. Safest place is to just stay where you are where nobody can hurt you and your pocket prisoner can care for you!

Still, it's a lot better than an End User Licence Agreement!

Does this indicate that in this game, there are scenarios where slavery is quite OK? In the real world, I think slavery is one of the few conditions under which breaching extraterritoriality is endorsed. We suggested ways of making the slave want to be on the bottom while the character wears the pants, but without something like that it's going to resent being locked up. A Free Spirit can provide Services to anyone it chooses; if it were free it could travel the world all day and all night at Fast Astral Movement rates earning karma far more efficiently than the player character can feed it (even with a sleep regulator). Think of the spirit like any other living being with its own hopes and plans; if you were abducted from your workplace by a stranger and were set to work in his basement for an unspecified duration in exchange for food, would you think that sounds like a great deal? Even after six months of regular gourmet meals delivered to your dungeon by such a caring friendly considerate captor, what's the probability you would still want to stay?

And with NPCs there's which need exactly to define such a command set in order to dictate the spirits development?

Wouldn't Asimov's Laws help the intrepid mage here?

You know:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

I (we) never played around with spirits, but I'd think that a careful rephrasing of those three would be a good place to start.

However... in MY Shadowrun (old-school SR3-based cyperpunk), the characters are very much opposed to the concept of slavery (the situation in which 90% or more of metahumanity finds itself - knowingly or not, poor sheeple!), so the notion itself is inherently 'evil' to me - i.e., something the Azzie mage would do, but not the upright (if morally shady and with more than one recurring nightmare about innocent civilians getting caught in the crossfire. Although that Alamos babe should have chosen better company...) runners, who try to make a living by taking the fight to The Man without harming the innocent.

In one of the older novels, a spirit goes free (I think the novel and maybe another dealt with stopping the spirit) and it is stated the free spirits name is visible at the place where it went free. At the time, I thought this was literary license, but since then I thought I read it somewhere in a rulebook. Supposedly the name only remains for a limited time, iirc from a few hours to a few days Even though it is visible, it isn't obvious it is the spirit's true name, nothing so obvious as: TRUE NAME for new Free Fire Elemental is !@#$%^Figglewignersho.

The character in question was present when it went free, but did not catch the true name, but did assense the spirit at that time, learning its native plane. He then completed a level 7 astral quest to learn its true name.

I guess the answer is there are degrees of slavery that are institutionalized and the majority of humanity must submit to the slavery or be an outcast. Yes, I'm referring to wage slaves. Some wage slaves have golden shackles and hardly realize they are enslaved, but the majority are kept treading water, barely able to keep their head above water. You point to an example I assume you find despicable about being abducted from the workplace and put in a basement to work etc.. Isn't that what some extractions amount to, given that the person isn't killed in the process? What do you think happens to the person if the extraction fails? I am guessing many wind up in the basement of the original employer doing similar work, but now "more secure".

Every time it has been suggested a free spirit could travel the world on its own providing services to anyone and earning karma in any way thought to be efficient, could never survive. Someone would quickly enslave it as soon as they realize what it is. Or so I have seen posted here many times with many scenarios.

Yes, stated in the first post:

Only the first line seemed applicable, perhaps the third, but I assumed that was inherent in the will to survive.

Nice to see someone else views that the vast majority of humanity are slaves to some extent. So does the degree of slavery or the treatment by the masters have any bearing on their damnation?

Considering that a very large number of Asimov's stories revolve around how (and to a limited degree why) those laws fail on a quite regular basis (and quite spectectular in some cases) I'd say: a re-phrased version for spirits will only be as good as the originasl and subsequently entice a larger number of laws (as evidenced in tisoz's example) which in turn will open up further points of conflict / contradiction within these rules/laws from a logical standpoint.

And my main problem with such attempts of "logic based" enslavenment still remains unsolved: As long as we're dealing with players attempting something like that, the player's general expectance is that his "master plan" works out ... particualrly since hefty resources like karma are involved. As soon as "I" as the GM start to go against that "master plan" - be it for the sake of strong narration or just because "I" deem it a necessary part of creating "conflict" for characters - the gaming group is very likely going to face serious trouble on the meta-levels of interaction rather than "in-game". I've seen groups implode over far more trivial issues ...

(Emphasis is all mine.)

That tends to happen when you deliberately set up a "me versus them" scenario...

EDITed to add: More of the quote, since I was falsely accused of quoting out of context.

So I take it you are unaware of the concept of malicious compliance, then?

Nice way to quote out of context. But no, in none of the situations where I saw groups implode was there such a "me vs. them" scenario involved ... particularly none where the "me" was the GM (actual me or somebody else).

Fine.

I put the quote in context, just for you sweetheart.

Not so fine



Is there a reason for such impoliteness?
But thanks for your attempt of creating "context" ... which only shows that you interpret things into words that aren't actually there. I guess we're done here.

So add something like, "There shall be no malicious compliance to see harm come to me"?

I will not debate whether or not Cochise's post could be read as you read it, but I think I can see what he was getting at by confronting characters with aspects of the game world that are not aligning themselves with the character's plan. It doesn't need to get into a me vs them scenario, unless you characterize any obstacle the GM decides to add to the mix is somehow a me vs them situation.

Your going back and highlighting the many personal pronouns seems an attempt at displaying a he vs the player scenario, but please see above and how should one phrase a post to avoid being called, essentially, a "bad" GM? Is it worth the effort in replying to a RPG forum? Maybe a quick reply can be taken out of context, but if we pick apart every post, no one will ever post anything helpful and it will all devolve into flaming posts.

I do intend to throw what I see as likely developments in the character's path. It has nothing to do with a me vs them scenario, but it has to do with me as a GM not glossing over reality to give the player a free ride, if he in any way thinks this is going to be easy. I don't think the player see's this as being easy and will likely feel disappointed and cheated if I don't throw likely events/consequences his way.

Me asking for likely or good commands and how to get them to backfire is me trying to anticipate and prepare for a smart player. So far he gave a general command along the line of Asimov's Robot Laws. I liked the discussion when it finally addressed what I asked. If someone throws out something that might work, I like that people try to show how it won't work. As well as pointing out what won't work, improving it to eliminate the non-working parts, then trying to figure out how the new command can go wrong.

I really don't need the attempts to show why this is a bad idea overall or other off topic criticisms. I'm not even saying I disagree with some of the points. I'm saying I do not need them.

Impoliteness? You mean like that has existed in this thread since nearly the beginning that prompted the OP (tisoz) to post the following?





Sure, sure. I get it. It must be hard to fake righteous indignation when you are wrong.








What I was pointing out was Cochise enforcing a personal bias about the game, and how the game needs to be played. A personal bias that your player(s) may not share. Of course, it can be debated if your player(s) are wrong, but that isn't the point. The point is the GM has to work with the players (like you appear to be doing) because it is, after all, a cooperative game, not a GM vs the Players competition. It isn't a GM enforcing a personal vision on the rest of the players - especially when that personal vision differs from what the players might envision. If the GM isn't willing to adapt their personal vision to include the players' vision in a manner that creates an entertaining environment... The GM isn't competent for the job.

~sigh~ After three strikes with the holy trinity of fallacies in your first comment we now have two other strikes with one of the fallacies in that holy trinity. There's no "righteous indignation" from my side involved here. Just your repeated attempts of attacking me over something that I didn't say as you try to portray it - be it in your edited post, its initial version or in the later part of your most recent comment. Since tisoz even asked you to stop such non-helpful attacks we're not just done here but you now have the questionable honor of being the first person on this board to ever end up on my personal ignore list due to personal attacks.

I dunno. Is that supposed to make me feel sad? Disappointed? Maybe ashamed?

Whatever.

But hold on... If you were trying to evoke emotion in me... Would that make your post flaming? Maybe a personal attack? Hah!