From: Alex Ferguson (alex@dcs.gla.ac.uk)
Date: Sun 13 Nov 1994 - 22:20:22 EET
Colin W. laughs lightly at my Doomsday Scenario:
> > [...] you could bind
> > a suitably meaty spirit as a _combined_ Intellect/Power/Magic spirit,
> > which would be somewhat gross.
> Personally I wouldn't have a problem with this. It's no worse than having 3
> different spirits bound into the same object,
It would be, since you only need to track down one spirit, instead of three, and the result would be more powerful, in that you'd now have what was effectively a spell-casting extension of your own INT and mps, rather than three separate entities, each with only one of the three capabilities, and no access to that of the other two. This is in fact somewhat more powerful than having an ally, assuming similar INT and POW and simultaneous access to all three capabilities.
One could always insist that the abilities are "compartmentalised", so that, say, if you store one of your own spells in it as an INT spirit, it doesn't itself have access to it with its Magic Spirit hat on, but that seems a tad unrationalised.
> and I imagine the cost (in terms of POW) would (/should) be much the same.
Hopefully rather more.
> #1/ What it takes to bind a spirit (in terms of simply holding it captive).
> #2/ What you can do with the spirit when it's in a binding enchantment.
> I reckon #1 is dependent upon what the spirit *is* (its "species" or whatever;
> this might correspond to the entries in the Monster book, or it might use
> broader categories such as Man-spirit, Beast-spirit, Spirit-spirit etc).
But the existing taxonomy is essentially by what the "functionality" of the spirit is, not its origin. (Unless the two are indentical, for some unknown reason.) If an Intellect Spirit is just an undistinguished bag of INT and POW, then the name is a misleading, and the description in error, so I don't see much merit in the classification _unless_ it has this special "feature". Which is equally an argument for new nomenclature and descriptions on the one hand, or keeping the existing Binding Enchantment rules, according to personal taste.
> I reckon #2 is dependent on the added functionality of the enchantment.
> The current rules imply that the use of MP/INT/spells is a peculiar quirk of
> the spirit itself which only manifests when the spirit is bound. That's what I
> don't like. It's too contrived.
If the use of a spirit's INT isn't a "feature" of the spirit itself, though, why is it easier to use Intellect Spirits in this way? Perhaps the short answer is "because they have a low INT", but unless the cost progression is pretty steep, that wouldn't necessarily be much of a deterrent.
> Now, I don't think this necessarily calls for a rules re-write;
It would, in that you wish to allow things such as Binding Ghost as Intellect Enchantment (or Ghost Binding Enchantment, plus Enchant Intellect, say), even if it were contrived to be backwards compatible with the existing rules. I think I can see broadly how to tweak the rules to get roughly the effect Colin wants, but I'm not convinced it's a great idea.
Alex.
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