What Do Souls Really Give You?

[Vent0]

Souls also seem to be what allows Demon's to interface with facets of a being's existence. They can't Soul Pact a trash can, gerbil, or Spirit, for instance.

Souls also seem important/tied to Sekhem... somehow.

They also may be able to store memories (see Reborn in Immortals). But don't usually, since a person doesn't lose or gain memories when exchanging souls. So that might be a special case.

[amechra]

It also gives you drive and individuality, a souless person eventually becomes a holllow husk uninterested in anything, not even their own survival. Great anaysis by the way.

The way I interpret it, your soul isn't the seat of your drive and individuality - losing your soul does nothing to your Aspirations, after all, and it's not like getting another person's soul changes your Vice or Virtue. Judging by the fact that you rapidly regain lost Integrity and Willpower dots when you regain a soul, I'm assuming that the role the soul takes is more of a cleaner than an engine.

Tying it back to my musings above, you could interpret the eventual loss of self-preservation instinct (funnily enough, people with the Thrall condition still have Aspirations, and they still receive Beats for completing or working towards them - they just can't spend them.) as a side effect of letting Vice run rampant. I am assuming a bit when I say that Vice is ultra-corrosive, but...

If you look at the stuff your Vice interfaces with, you get some... interesting connections. Pretty much everything that works with a target's Vice uses it to penetrate their defenses somewhat, whether by giving them a penalty to their roll, removing Doors while going through Social Maneuvering, or handing them a condition. Your Vice is pretty much defined as being how you run and hide from your problems.

So when you hit Enervated, you quickly realize that running from your problems is the only thing that lets you marshal your strength so you can run from your future problems. By the time you hit Thrall, that doesn't work anymore. You've run out of reserves - you're going to desperately avoid conflict because nothing helps. You break, because that's the only option left to you.

[Thorbes]

It also gives you drive and individuality, a souless person eventually becomes a holllow husk uninterested in anything, not even their own survival. Great anaysis by the way.

[Penta]

I really like this analysis. I never thought about it this way.

[amechra]

Looking at it from the opposite perspective of the Soulless condition, the following are the things having a soul gives you:

• A +2 bonus on rolls to resist possession, body jacking, and the like.
• The ability to use Abjuration, Binding, and Warding.
• The ability to recover Willpower from resting.
• The ability to recover Willpower from giving up and knuckling under.
• It inverts your Vice and Virtue - it makes your higher impulses something important, while dialling your lower impulses down to something more casual and mild.
• Most importantly, it heavily mitigates the corrosive effects of Vice on your identity - your Vice no longer provokes a Breaking Point on its own, and the penalty due to a Breaking Point coinciding with your Vice is reduced from -5 to -1.

In less mechanical terms, a soul does three things. Firstly, it grants you metaphysical weight - it repels possession, and lets you impose your will on the spiritual plane. Secondly, it heavily mitigates the steady corrosive influence of your lower nature. Your soul is what lets you catch a breather, and what prevents your base impulses from consuming you. Thirdly, it biases you towards your higher nature. Under the influence of a soul, you look past cut-throat desires to instead value your generosity, humility, or other, more communal "urge".

So...
1. Metaphysical heft.
2. Mitigates your lower nature.
3. Emphasizes your higher nature.