Shadowrun Play > Rules and such

A balance issue

(1/4) > >>

Sonarean:
When binding a spirit, a mage must spend 500 x Rating in nuyen.  Binding, then, becomes something to be done sparingly.

When registering a sprite, a technomancer has no such requirement.  So there's no real reason not to register a sprite.

This feels unbalanced to me.  Does it feel that way to anyone else?

Walks Through Walls:
Does a sprite have as much power as a spirit? Though it can affect anything that has electronics to some extent it cannot manifest and directly act in the physical world which might be part of the reasoning behind it.

Sonarean:
I agree, it's not as powerful as a spirit, but that doesn't mean registering it should be free.

inca1980:
It's also a common sense issue....I mean what would you be paying the money for?  Summoners need to buy the materials for the ritual, but I don't really see what the analogy for ritual materials would be for registering a sprite.  Any type of software or hardware serving as ritual materials wouldn't make sense because technomancer abilities operate on completely different principles than normal code and electronics.  I feel it would be quite a stretch to try and carry the analogy that far....it's already a bit of a stretch the way SR4e tries so hard to make technomancers analogous to mages.  

This would be hard conceptually because mages from the same tradition can share things like ritual materials, lodges, spell formulai, etc., so a mage can go to a talismonger from his same tradition and buy things.  But technomancers from the same stream mostly just share a world-view and philosophy.  Technomancy is much more of a very personalized activity whereas magic is much more communal.  Who would you be paying money to to get your "registering materials?"  

Implementing this would be sacrificing good story telling and concept for "balance"....and that's especially dumb to do in PnP rpg's because most of the balance is really up to the GM.  This type of balancing done by a GM is not even strong enough to really call it house-ruling, it's simply using the freedom that SR RAW explicitly gives to the GM.  In my games if I think spirits are getting too powerful in a given game, the more powerful a spirit that a mage summons, the more personality I give it...i.e. free-will.  Bringing an ultra-powerful being into this world should have it's consequences and ignoring this is just lazy GM'ing in my opinion.  

The_Gun_Nut:
I usually like to lull my summoners into complacency.  Then hit them with the nasty later.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page