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[kj1225]

Yeah, but it's to small to have that a really big drawback for. Maybe mix together a problem and a little buff from bonding with it? Like, you become stronger, but you're also prone to beserking.

[Harry Baldman]

Yeah, but it's to small to have that a really big drawback for. Maybe mix together a problem and a little buff from bonding with it? Like, you become stronger, but you're also prone to beserking.

Bear in mind that the benefits of spirits have yet to be worked out, or even what they can do besides possess your body occasionally (are they ghosts? elemental aggregations? extensions of alien beings into our world?). Also bear in mind that many of my proposed drawbacks, including strangeness in children, infertility, risk of schizophrenia, increased apoptosis (mostly, of course, unless you severely burn out, in which case your body would presumably self-destruct and all of its cells would start wildly fragmenting), are mostly hooks for characters to latch onto rather than actual mechanical penalties. Even something like profound loss of appetite, inability to taste, impaired hearing, decreased color vision, night blindness, rapid atrophy of the ring finger and other such odds and ends would serve as jumping-off points for characters to roll with. And no two people would be affected the same by their spirit, either.

[kj1225]

Yeah, but it's to small to have that a really big drawback for. Maybe mix together a problem and a little buff from bonding with it? Like, you become stronger, but you're also prone to beserking.

Bear in mind that the benefits of spirits have yet to be worked out, or even what they can do besides possess your body occasionally (are they ghosts? elemental aggregations? extensions of alien beings into our world?). Also bear in mind that many of my proposed drawbacks, including strangeness in children, infertility, risk of schizophrenia, increased apoptosis (mostly, of course, unless you severely burn out, in which case your body would presumably self-destruct and all of its cells would start wildly fragmenting), are mostly hooks for characters to latch onto rather than actual mechanical penalties. Even something like profound loss of appetite, inability to taste, impaired hearing, decreased color vision, night blindness, rapid atrophy of the ring finger and other such odds and ends would serve as jumping-off points for characters to roll with. And no two people would be affected the same by their spirit, either.

Those smaller drawbacks actually sound like they would work nicely.

[GiglameshDespair]

Baldman speaks sense here. You want things hammered out. Spirits entering the world and being able to give people supernatural abilities is big. It's more important than fighting gang members or beating up muggers. With the rise of the internet, such a thing - if it happened in large quantities - would become globally aware. Not to say everyone would believe it. A world starting to believe - with plenty of people not yet believing or accepting the new reality - could be an interesting setting.

Yeah, but it's to small to have that a really big drawback for. Maybe mix together a problem and a little buff from bonding with it? Like, you become stronger, but you're also prone to beserking.

Losing control of your character is rarely fun. Also, that's questionably a drawback. If you're bonding, you're probably in danger. If you're berserking, you're more capable of beating such danger. Or you die through something you can't control, which isn't very fun.

The huge boost of strength a spirit gives it's possessee(?) could be explained by ordinary means. There's that questionably true legend about humans only using 30% of their muscle strength due to inbuilt limiters. A spirit wouldn't have those limiters, so it'd appear much stronger, but it'd cause a lot of damage to the body in doing so.

To me, it'd make more sense that possession would cause mental damage. But watching people try to play out multiple personality disorder is generally pretty painful, so it should be more subtle than that. I'm not sure how well that would come across in writing, though...

The real question that needs to be answered is what are the spirits? Ghosts? Aliens? Alien ghosts? Whichever it is might alter the aims of the spirits - they should have their own aims, and gain their own benefits from arrangements they make with humans. But also, how do they make those arrangements? Are they normally visible to humans? Invisible, but capable of telepathy? Do words hold any power over them, and you enter into contracts, effectively?

[kj1225]

I really don't get why you guys want to just have drawbacks to bonds.

And Gilg, I believe Hugo already answered most of those questions earlier in the thread.

[GiglameshDespair]

I really don't get why you guys want to just have drawbacks to bonds.

And Gilg, I believe Hugo already answered most of those questions earlier in the thread.

They're from a different plane is the only answer he's given.

Also Gigla, not gilga.

It needs to have a drawback, or it does smell of wish-fulfilment spirits. Because they do give you supernaturalk powers. That... probably isn't a drawback. Having a give-and-take relationship makes things more interesting - trying to balance losses with gains means you have to act more carefully.

[BlitzDungeoneer]

PTW for now.
I'll probably chip in when I can, but for now I think I'll just watch.

[Harry Baldman]

I really don't get why you guys want to just have drawbacks to bonds.

Because the upside is the spirit, as mentioned. Depending on what we decide a spirit actually is, it could be a fire elemental at your beck and call, an alien beast with heretofore unseen abilities, or some form of ghost-thing that can do ghost stuff to help you out of all kinds of jams. And if there wasn't a healthy set of drawbacks to the whole thing, any animosity between the regular populace and the spirit people would be entirely unfounded and have this sort of X-Men vibe, where the divide feels mostly artificial and the average citizen is arbitrarily a dick to all mutants for no reason.

Speaking of, I'm kind of liking the idea that the spirits are non-sapient lifeforms from some ethereal plane, with only slight resemblance to Earth fauna. And now they're migrating to the land of the humans due to changing conditions in their home plane, anchoring themselves to whoever is willing to accept them as bond-mates. You could be a dude infested by a colony of giant obsidian bees, for instance.

[BlitzDungeoneer]

Hmm...
An idea for the drawbacks could be that they're directly proportional to a) how long the spirit possessed you, b)how much you used it's powers and how powerful they were and c) what type of spirit they were.
For example, using super strength for a very short time may give you mild muscle cramps, or something similar.
Of course, the problem here is that it heaps more work on the GM, which leads to less frequent updates, so that's not necessarily even a good solution...

[WillowLuman]

Many ninjas!

I already said that they aren't ghosts. They're otherworldly beings from another plane. As stated in the OP, the main reasons for teaming up would be personal connection and mutual self-interest. The spirit and human would form an emotional bond, have goals that could be aided by working together, or more likely both.

Possession probably isn't the right word because humans don't lose control of their bodies when hosting. The boost for hosting should be more supernatural that "30% muscle increase because removal of inhibitions," since if we're going to have spirit stuff then we shouldn't limit it to stuff that can be done by drugs. I also don't think trading lifespan for power should be a gameplay mechanic, because most RPs aren't going to go on long enough for that to be relevant (unless someone made their characters a long-running pair from the beginning).

The pathway between worlds should be natural (or at least inexplicable/undirected/unintentional), jury's still out on whether it formed (relatively) recently or has been there for a long time. There'd be one spirit plane/facet, for simplicity's sake. The most likely divide is that humans are more physical, spirits are more magical, and so each can do important things that the other can't.

I really need some examples of spirits people are thinking of/want to play as. I'm thinking the spirits should be very diverse.

[Harry Baldman]

[...] colony of giant obsidian bees, for instance. [...]

I'm thinking alien animals would be cool, alien insects especially. A human has intelligence, a spirit has magic. Spirits gravitate toward humans because they can help them survive and find nourishment in a new world. Whether that nourishment is something a human finds or the human themselves, difficult to say.

[GiglameshDespair]

But what kind of goal can the spirits have? They need some kind of motivation. Give an example of a goal. Why are the spirits coming through from their world in the first place?

I feel they should be very alien, though. Not generic animal spirits. A intelligent spider would have a way of viewing the world very alien to human thought processes, and that could be cool.

[Harry Baldman]

But what kind of goal can the spirits have? They need some kind of motivation. Give an example of a goal. Why are the spirits coming through from their world in the first place?

I feel they should be very alien, though. Not generic animal spirits. A intelligent spider would have a way of viewing the world very alien to human thought processes, and that could be cool.

Certainly not generic animal spirits. Let's say only ones inspired by invertebrates. Imagine the psyche of the spirit equivalent of a pollinating insect. Imagine an emotionless squid spirit, or a filter-feeding rotifer spirit, or even the classic predatory starfish spirit, inexorable and ever-moving.

Their motivation could be as simple as moving into a new ecological niche, taking advantage of new resources, with no real intent behind it, just incidence. That's a way to establish alienness, no?

Could try to come up with something more original and alien, but the likely way that'll end up is "let's mash together animal parts", "let's mash together animal stereotypes", "let's go into the nadir of imagination that is eldritch abominations", "let's make a platonic solid and call it a day", "let's make talking furniture".

[kj1225]

But they can't be to alien. Personally I was thinking of making a character who is like, lawful evil with an imp that's trying to gain power so they won't be lowest on the food chain of spirits anymore.

[WillowLuman]

In general, the spirits and humans should be alien enough to each other that distrust exists from that alone, and early interactions (possessions, attempts to bind to servitude) might have made things worse. Spirits being stranded on this plane and needing a guide sounds like a good motive, though. Bear in mind that the players can supply the motives for their characters, within reason.

One possible model I had in mind was the spirit plane was originally unstructured, but as spirits started falling through into the physical plane, structure started leeching into the spirit plane. So they'd come in as unfeeling globs of spiritiness, resembling meteors, then gradually acquire a distinct form and personality from interactions with the material world. Then sometimes a few of them would return, bringing distinctness and structure with them. This is just one possible model, though.

As for forms of spirits, they should be diverse: from flame-like/swirly energy things, to animal/insect-like, to really bizarre things with lots of wavy bits, and anything in between. Possibly demonic-looking ones too, but I'm a tad leery of that aesthetic here (I'm not going to veto it yet, though). But I'm not going to say "All spirits must follow X aesthetic," aside from the proviso that they seem insubstantial in some way. I want to let people be creative.