Re: Practice spirits have how many abilities?

From: flynnkd2 <flynnkd_at_...>
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 22:23:47 -0000

Although I do allow stacking I can understand your view, the potential for dramatic increases in power of a single character is staggering. For eg one of my storm bull players has 5 fetishes around power 20, most of them have a combat skill of some kind buried in one of their skills... he is storm bull after all... so even if only 3 of them had usable skills in combat that would be +60... which can ruin anyones balanced scenario very abruptly.

Im somewhat concerned about this potential power and have been thinking about how to handle it. Some people have said that you need to make the animist think about when he releases the spirits, is it the right moment, will there be more moments etc, but with time it seems to me that an animist will have plenty of spirits to call apon. Sure it costs 3HPs and then some more to setup a relation, but thats what an animist does. A theist spends 3 HPs for +1, an animist can get a usable fetish for about 8HP, and +20. A long played animist will be running around with maybe a dozen fetishes...!!! Not to mention when he becomes a shaman.

And just to mention it, animists get their cult secrets at 1/3rd the cost that a theist does!

Yes one answer is to design your scenarios to counter the threat, but as the players progress it becomes more difficult to do that, AND it makes single encounter spur of the moment type things really pointless... you encounter a rampaging giant chasing a child across the plains, I release 4 spirits and go and smack the giant back over the Zola Fel. (of course there are ways to get around anything, I merely use this as an illustration of my point).

My point being that my players and I are all coming to believe that a developed animist character is pretty damn tough.

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