[Bewilderbeast]

I've recently had the good fortune of joining a game where it looks like I'll have a chance to develop my character mechanically a bit. I'm getting a steady supply of karma and a slightly less steady supply of nuyen at the moment. I'm actually going to get the opportunity to initiate soon. I'm excited but inexperienced at playing a character beyond initial generation.

I'm a playing a version of this character: http://forums.shadowruntabletop.com/index.php?topic=14951.0

A Black Magic Tradition Face/Aspected Conjurer. I know that from a character optimization perspective I've shot myself in the foot by playing an aspected magician, but this is the character I chose so it's the one I'm stuck with. My question is how to efficiently advance him?

He's about to Initiate for the first time, and I picked up Street Grimoire to get some more options. I was really disappointed to see that Invocations, creating Great Form spirits and stuff, was now a Ritual Spellcasting thing. Which sucks, because that's exactly what I wanted for the flavor of the character, but oh well. I'm trying to find something that's useful for him.

Centering: Resisting drain is always good, since summoning and especially binding is risky and drain-intensive. +1 to my drain pool isn't particularly amazing, but if I Initiate more than once (I'm hoping to Initiate twice? Maybe three times? Skills A and decent Attributes allows me to dump all my karma into magic stuff).

Channeling: This seems like the optimal metamagic choice. I understand some GMs consider it cheese, but mine gave a tentative yes. This seems a likely pick for me, but I want to make sure I understand all my choices.

Masking: As an aspected conjurer who relies on spirits, I think Johnny has a real chance to be pretty subtle about his Awakenedness. Unfortunately, that goes out the window when you swaggering around calling yourself Bad Johnny Juju, which he totally does. So while this is a good Metamagic, hiding his talent isn't Johnny's style. He's more about wielding it obviously in order to intimidate people. So maybe not the right pick for this character. Or is it a vital magic for a shadowrunner?

[Beta]

Centering: Resisting drain is always good, since summoning and especially binding is risky and drain-intensive. +1 to my drain pool isn't particularly amazing, but if I Initiate more than once (I'm hoping to Initiate twice? Maybe three times? Skills A and decent Attributes allows me to dump all my karma into magic stuff).

The centering metamagic also then allows you to get a centering focus, which could easily bump your drain up by a couple more dice.  You could also look at a summoning focus for your favorite spirit type, or even simply picking up a specialization on your summoning (7 karma).  Not to discourage initiation, but so many of the initiation abilities only come into real usefulness as you add initiation levels that you somewhat should decide on aggressively initiating, or focusing on improving via other routes.  If initiation doesn't off you enough, you may or may not want to start down that road just yet.

[Jack_Spade]

Go for Channeling.

Centering will be of interest on the next initiation. Likewise, Masking needs more initiations to be effective (and probably won't protect you from more than cursory glances in the Astral). Flexible Signature might also be worth a closer look.

[Bewilderbeast]

Thanks for the input guys. I ended up going Centering for RP purposes, but I'll get Channeling next. Not clear how flexible signature would help a conjurer, primarily because I'm not sure how signatures work vis-a-vis spirits. Does your signature stick around the place where you summoned or bound the spirit? Is it visible to people examining the spirit in astral space?

What are your thoughts on actually paying for the Magic attribute increase? Worth it? Being able to someday summon Force 9 spirits with 3 optional powers would be pretty sweet, but would also realistically require about 100% of his career karma.