Last session our group was confronted with a shaman accompanied by his pet spirit. The spirit used his critter power "Fear" (Core Book pg. 397) on us, a pretty common power judging from the published adventures.
The critter makes an Opposed Test using its Willpower + Magic against the target’s Willpower + Logic. The terror lasts for 1 Combat Turn per net hit scored by the critter.
Now my character has pretty good WIL/LOG attributes for a guy using guns (9 dice total) but even using a point of Edge for rerolling the misses, I "only" scored 5 successes. I put "only" in quotes because I think 5 successes on a combined WIL/LOG roll is pretty good. I have played valid characters that would not even had 5 dice to roll.
The spirit scored 7 successes. So my character is out for 2 rounds. In Shadowrun with my group, that's about 5-8 actions per character. That's a lot of real time with me sitting around twiddling my thumbs doing nothing. There is no agency left, the powers description is pretty clear. For the character: Run and hide. For the player: Go watch TV or something.
Obviously this is no fun. I got an IPad and played a computer game for about 30 minutes.
How to prevent this?
As far as I know, there is no defense other than the one given. Anti-Magic does not work (because it's not magic) there is no skill to raise or device to buy. Did I miss a defense? Should my character have been better prepared with something I don't realize?
If it cannot be prevented, how to mitigate this?
How to mitigate the agency loss? As far as houserules go, in D&D we always had fun when being charmed by basically treating what the GM said as kind of a "Wish" spell… the player would sit back and find out how to best "lawyer" this. For example if the suggestion was "attack your closest ally with your strongest weapon", the mage might actually draw his dagger. The GM had said "weapon". Or the fighter might use his old rusty two-hander instead of his fancy magic longsword-of-insta-death, after all the two-hander gets the most strength bonus. The player was still engaged, finding a clever way to play his character. But there is no way doing something like this here. Run & Hide is nothing you can do in a smart, tongue in cheek way.
Assuming that disengaging from the game and doing something else is not the preferred way to play Shadowrun, what do you do in this situations?
Preferred are solutions where I can play my character. "Just play an NPC for the time" is not what I came for, to me that's in the same league as the IPad game.
Best Answer
You prevent this by either killing or banishing the spirit before they can act. Killing is usually the prefered method used by most shadowrunners, but is by far the least efficient, unless the entire team can act before the conjurer does, which could happen. The conjurer has to command his spirit and spend one service so they can force/ask the spirit to use a certain power, unlike telling the spirit "Fight them!".
This means that removing services from a spirit, exactly what the Banishing skill does, is the fastest method of getting rid of spirits. It's a contested roll of Banishing + Magic [Astral] against the spirit's Force (normally around 6 dice), and each net hit means one less service for the conjurer to use. You would be surprised at how good this works.
A lot of people will not recommend the Banishing skill (preferring to Stunbolt them), especially if you treat it as secondary to your other skills (and most do), resulting in checks that only net one or two successes, not enough to fully banish the spirit and leading to frustration. But a good (and possibly Edge-fueled) Banishing check can remove the spirit from the game completely in a single action.
If you know what is coming your way and you realize it's a nasty effect (like Fear, Confusion or Compulsion), it's generally a good idea to use your Edge before you make the roll, so you can take advantage of the exploding 6's. Re-rolling should only be done when odds are in your favor, but the dice are not.