Well...I'm not sure where it says that you can't bannish spirits on remote services. It specificaly states that all other services, other than the one or ones its on are given up. It says it does not count towards the max number of spirits either. But neither in banishing or in remote services did i find anything that specificaly forbid the banishing of spirits on remote services.

As for being easier or harder to banish a force 3 or force 9. It realy depends on how many services and what services have been used. And actualy a better comparison is its no easier or harder to banish a spirit than it is to summon it. since its essentialy the summoning test in reverse.

It's already released, so Banishing doesn't do anything to it any more than it does to any other uncontrolled spirit.

-Frank

Services owed including the one its currently on. To me that says spirits on remote services still are carrying out a service, thus that service could still be dispelled. Which i would see as the downfall of the remote service. Its only realy one service, though it could be multiple ones.

It doesn't specificaly say remote service spirits can't be banished, so in my game unless it gets put in the errata you will be able to banish or atleast atempt to banish remote service spirits.

And its one complex action, that you could spend a edge to get to banish that spirit, while your teamates pour fire into the mage. Theres a reason why theres a phrase "Geek The Mage First".

Hmmm, i think i know why you think you are being insulted a lot. You probably think it an insult to you rather than an just an astute observation for someone to say "Frank, you are rules lawyering weenie, and an innept one at that."

Only if say you're a horrible GM.

Hell a team in sr4 that looses its hacker I think is worse off but hey thats me.

You don't need to send mages after teams that have mages...its simply not needed. There are far better ways. Brute force is a horrible tactic. Just because there is the phrase "If brute force is not working, you're not applying enough of it." it doesn't mean that its a good tactic as a GM.

Runners using spirits left and right? Astral signatures, watcher spirits, ect. Better tactics. Don't have your teams engage the runners directly. Herd the runners with better tactics. Attempt to take away the ability of them to function as a team. Jam wireless, lock doors. The runners will do something unpredictable that you don't think of.

Brute force is messy. Sending spirits to constantly do the dirty work is messy.

If the other mage has a clue, they will be 200 meters away and _way_ out of sight, watching the whole thing on trideo.

One spirit goes down, they send in another. Und so weiter.

They don't have to wait until the first spirit drops, they have have to wait until the first spirit moves out. A Magician with Synaptic Booster I or Increased Reflexes can summon a Force 4 Spirit every round and detail it to remote service destroy an enemy on the other side of a wall. Every time he sends one off on a remote service it no longer counts as a summoned spirit under his control and he can summon another one.

And another.

And another....

-Frank

Why's that? If the sec mage is smart he'll be astrall pegging the mage runner's astral sig. Or will have a watcher do it. And why would the first reaction be, send in a spirit to kill them?

Wait wait, abstract thought.

Of course the banishing removes it. Frank is just holding to form.

However there seems to be a way in the rules to keep the protective buffer of extra services when you send the spirit on a remote service. Ensure you convert all services to remote services when you send it out. Depending on the order in which your GM decides to banish services (LIFO or FIFO) you might want to make those extra task duplicates of the first in case it is the first one that gets banished first.

P.S. Your GM might choose to interpret the text under Remote Services to mean that sending out the spirit converts all the services to one remote service that can have multiple tasks under it, one task for each service that had been remaining. I wouldn't read it that way, but. *shrug*

You have to bargin with a Watcher until you first initiate? Er, that's more than a bit draconian.

I think there are ways to tone them back enough that stops short of that.

It takes 2 rounds to summon and command a spirit. One complex to summon simple action to command.

Furthermore, yes he could do that, abstract thought tells me that thats would be bad for the mage doing it. It would also be taxing to do. Spirits on remote tasks also cary things out single mindedly. "Engage them on the other side of the wall" Well thats nice that could mean the sec team down the hall, those innocent bystandards, ect ect ect.

Lets figure out why people don't do this in the sr story realms?

Well its taxing for one.

You're creating one hell of a beacon of a astral signature.

You're going to end up pissing off the spirits. And if they don't break free themselves, another one will probably come along and either corrupt the mage, or kill him. Spirits don't like being bound certainly. And I doubt they overly like the fact that they're being summoned constantly and forced to do things.

Oh no the mage on the other side of the wall is summoning spirits. Hacker turns the security systems around, and sends a patrol of guards after the mage with shoot on sight, telling the security patrol its one of the runners with a mask spell up. Send it from the mage even. Bam security patroll rolls in and guns down their own mage.

Theres a large variety of reasons why this is not a great tactic. And its not fun as well.

This whole tactic of just spirit summoning is just brute force.

Brute force is messy. Brute force is a tactic for those who know no better. Brute force gets runners killed.

Oh look i'm a spirit summoning mage. Summon summon summon...ect ect ect. Corp mage studdies the astral signature, tracks down the person, two shots in the head while he sleeps. Make yourself trackable, easily trackable at that. Make the spirits hate you.

Sure you'll get lucky for a few runs. Then corps will start putting two and two together. They'll set you up. Or they'll track you down. Or they won't even do that and instead ruin you as a runner from afar, spreading rumors, destroying your bank accounts, putting out warrents.

Its the same problems as if you went in and blew up every building you went into, or blew large chunks out of every building.

SSM's are far from unbeatable. Prehapse their even more beatable than your standard char simply because of of the one dimensional nature of the character.

Well conjurers are the new riggers, only cheaper to operate. So i understand the motivation for your zeal.

Frank mention something i had noticed to, that you as soon as you send an unbound spirit out it comes off your limit. I don't really see why that is needed, and it just adds the ability to create a Remote Services rush. You summon and send a spirit with 2 services and send them out to first wait a set time and then rush the target. Then you summon the next and tell it to go and wait with the first and attack when it does, an so on. The downside is that you need to know the target will stay put.

P.S. Speaking of riggers, the relative cost increase for vehicles (their cost stayed nearly the same instead of dropping) kinda slowed down riggers a bit, but now that they can also deck keeps them near the top of the battlefield pecking order.

The entry says (see Hardened Armor above), which has the correct rule. If the modified DV of the attack does not exceed the Armor rating (modified by AP), then it bounces. Narmio is correct. Also, under default rules, an Assault Rifle does 8P/-3AP with EX explosive, which would penetrate Immunity of a Force 5 Spirit. Without the additional EX explosive AP, you'd be able to penetrate on two net hits.

So you're saying these tactics i just stated wouldn't work against non summoning magicians? Or that they wouldn't be incredbily usefull normaly against non SSM's included teams?

Do you listen to yourself. Trying to prove your theories right by claiming whats good against one situation isn't equaly good if not better in other situations.

Just because spirits don't go uncontrolled any other ways does not mean they'll apreciate being abused like what you suggest. Spirits aren't overly stupid you know. And free spirits will pick up on these things as well.

And these were tactics used in sr3, and sr2...never got to play sr1 though.

These are tactics that I've used in alternity, all of the WoD games.

Had them used against me in exalted.

Taking away your enemies advantages and resources is SOP for any spec ops or military in the world even now.

I just applied them to the summoner situation. I'm sorry you never used solid tactics before. Perception adepts from sr3 were far harder to contain than this spirt summoning crap.

How can you possibly make such criminally sweeping generalisations? What about - and this is just to name a paltry three of the many dozens of likely "primary tactical issues" - A troll with a White Knight? An elf dropping from the ceiling behind you with a monowhip? A combat mage hopped up on Nitro throwing Ball Lightnings?

Take your troll-worthy hyperbole and witless strawmanning elsewhere, please. Your childish boredom does not interest us.

What else is new? It's in Grimoire II "A team with a magician will clean up against a team without one." Probably not an exact quote, but close enough. This has always been the case in SR, since day one. The way to counter it is to keep the opposing magician too occupied (with another magician or whatever) to be effective. Simple.

Actualy combat is not about slinging your spirit in first. I guess you missed my posts about how bad brute force like that is. Thats absolutely ridiculouse that you'd even attempt to tell me that. How can you honestly sit there with a straight face, and tell me that now all the teams tactics, which have been in use for YEARS to contain physical threats, are now suddently spirit containing tactics? WTF? Honestly where do you pull this stuff from.

And frank your RPS idea is flawed. Sammies beat mages and hackers. Hackers beat mages and sammies. Mages beat sammies and hackers. They had to go about it different ways certainly but every character type could destroy, absolutely utterly destroy any other character type if they went about it the right way.

According to zen you can only beat spirits with tactics specificaly designed to fight them.

According to frank spirits are damn near unbeatable and are thus broken.

According to frank mages couldn't take care of the physical at all, that was only the street sammies job

According to Frank a spirit summoner is virtualy undefeatable

According to frank combat now revolves around who can pop a spirit out first.

I'm actualy still more worried about a big troll in good armor with a PAC than I am about a spirit summoner. There are far better tactics with spirits than to just send them into combat. Afterall the accident power hasn't gotten any less powerful. Then theres concealment, confusion, fear ect ect ect. Hell It says you're strongly encouraged to treat spirits just like npc's and roleplay out services and such. "strongly encouraged" prety much means, 'hey, we can't force you to roleplay if you don't want to but this is something you should do'. Its the things like that that seem to escape you.

Honestly I'm not sure how many more times I can say: "hey you know what, those tactics you've been using for years upon years now? Hey they work against spirits too. Hey you know what using brute force like you guys seem to prefer? yeah bad idea. Go ahead pop a astral signature all over the place so you can be tracked down and killed. Even if you don't get caught spirits are eventualy going to get pissed at you. Spirits don't like being abused. hell if you have a mentor spirit it might get pissed at you. And hey, theres this thing called roleplaying. Its a nifty little thing really, its what the game is about, you should try it sometime"

Yes, but a starting character could relatively easily have a Force 10 (or even 12) Spirit on hand.

Not exactly. They are generally about the same power as in SR3 in terms of actual numbers. Of course, everything else has lower numbers, so the relative power of spirits has gone up. In general, the SR4 mechanics are that everyone has numbers that are lower and then adds two numbers together to get dice pools. The SR4 Spirit has numbers that are across the board identical to the SR3 version, and that means that their dice pools just doubled and everyone else's dice pools did not.

Yes. But smart players were usually able to finagle summoning in domains that were contiguous to where they were going to be used anyway, so this is nowhere near as major of a powerup as it at first looks.

Again, no. But everyone else has attack powers that are lower. In SR3 a heavy pistol was power 9, now it's DV5, so the fact that a force 8 spirit is throwing a DV 8 has gone from them having a consolation prize to them being armed with a heavy weapon.

Yes, and the value of the Immunity to Normal Weapons hasn't changed. It's always been double force. But now a Panther Assault Cannon is DV 10 instead of Power 18. That makes the relative value of that Immunity much better. The Immunity is the same, the Normal Weapons just don't work as well against it.

-Frank

LMAO

Not quite a accurate comparison. A SR3 pistol had the ability base to do 3 boxes of damage. Now a sr4 pistol can do 5 boxes. Granted thats not quite a 100% acurate comparison due to a couple minor factors but thats certainly better than comparing the power to the DV.