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#26
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Running Target ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 1,003 Joined: 3-May 11 From: Brisbane Australia Member No.: 29,391 ![]() |
Upon further reflection, I think the OP's group just made themselves Public Enemies #1 through #X, X being the number of PCs. They have committed an act of terrorism (which is how it will doubtless be defined in the media and by law enforcement) comparable to the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings (202 deaths), the 1998 US Embassy bombings (224 deaths), and the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing (270 deaths), among others, and half again as deadly as the Oklahoma City bombing (168 deaths). This is the kind of crime that kindles massive public outrage and results in elite task forces being formed, and rewards offered in the millions of nuyen for information leading to the capture or termination of the guilty parties. To be fair at least one of the Shadowrun: Missions was just as bad (and the pay kinda sucked). |
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#27
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Moving Target ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 662 Joined: 25-May 11 Member No.: 30,406 ![]() |
Your campaign seems way too OTT for my taste, and on my table you wouldn't get away with that sort of thing (2 huge holes I can see; (1) the face negotiating with two separate megas as the other side [at that level they would be calling up/texting each others' corps all the time, and there would be a whole bunch of people from both sides involved, so the face's cover would eventually be blown], and (2) the data trail or lack thereof on the short-selling [each electronic new yen has its own serial no, so no matter how much you try you cannot wash the cash, it can be traced]). But it seems you guys are having fun, so more power to ya.
As to your question, the group I GM usually get jobs through the standard fixer-Johnson set-up, although I try to weave in the PCs contacts or hooks from their backstories as much as I am able to make things a bit more realistic. We don't game too often, so the PCs are currently at the stage where they have established a rep and are getting more high-pay high-risk AA (and twice to date AAA) runs. My PCs seem to be happy enough with the jobs I offer them, so haven't ever really done anything on their own initiative, although I do make them work their contacts and their contacts are sometimes asking them for favours as well as the other way around. Very different in flavour and substance to your campaign, I know ... |
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#28
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Prime Runner Ascendant ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 17,568 Joined: 26-March 09 From: Aurora, Colorado Member No.: 17,022 ![]() |
Our Technomancer does a resonance realm search to erase data about us every month and after the run. That is in addition to the data already being practically non existent, false trails being laid down, actively working to remove data, etc. Sure, an AAA mega might be able to find a Technomancer that can do the search and recover enough information to track us down but it would be easier to carry out Crash 3.0 or bring down Zurich Orbital. There is maybe one Technomancer on the planet with the skills to do it. To use Unwireds analogy for a RRS, it's like finding a single leaf on a single tree in an entire forest. And well, whoever had that kind of Technomancer is far more likely to be using him to, say, find out what Damien Knight has stored on his personal com link. Five Words for you... THE RESONANCE REALMS NEVER FORGET... You cannot simply Erase data from the resonance realms. Just Sayin' |
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#29
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Awakened Asset ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 4,464 Joined: 9-April 05 From: AGS, North German League Member No.: 7,309 ![]() |
True friendship? You want to leave no loose ends behind, you set up for blackmailing the guy from the start. If your mark is a really great person, you might hesitate pulling the plug. More so if he is doing stuff like deleting speeding tickets on the side. Then some day he learns about your dark secret, and starts to write reports on you. Should make for a fun story. QUOTE Oh, if anyone could find our team to target us then we would be dead. The laundry list of our crimes is enough that just serving a single day in jail for every capital offense that we have committed would see us in jail for the rest of our lives, even for the Elf. Hell, our list of warcrimes and acts of war runs something like 5 pages. There is a reason we burn identities and aliases pretty much constantly. How long is your campaign running? |
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#30
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Moving Target ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 418 Joined: 20-September 07 Member No.: 13,346 ![]() |
Five Words for you... THE RESONANCE REALMS NEVER FORGET... You cannot simply Erase data from the resonance realms. Just Sayin' It's actually one of the listed options, and it specifically makes a Resonance search to find that data far more difficult. There are seriously maybe 5 people on the planet who could pull off the RRS in that instance, and everyone that a corp had access to would be finding information that is worth billions or trillions of nuyen. You want to leave no loose ends behind, you set up for blackmailing the guy from the start. If your mark is a really great person, you might hesitate pulling the plug. More so if he is doing stuff like deleting speeding tickets on the side. Then some day he learns about your dark secret, and starts to write reports on you. Should make for a fun story. I suppose that it could happen, unlikely buy I suppose it's possible. QUOTE How long is your campaign running? A little over three years. Becoming a megacorp with a seat on the CC takes time, in story our current estimates put us at least a decade away from making our move. In RL we figure between another year to two years to finish. We already often pull in more money from our legitimate business activities than we do from our runs, but most all of that money gets reinvested in building up the corp. Our big project last year was setting up a cloning farm. Nothing like the 18 year lead time on building an army. This years big project is setting up a real, ZOG approved, bank. That would make laundering money much easier but it is quite a pain and is probably going to require multiple, difficult, runs. |
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#31
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Great Dragon ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 5,537 Joined: 27-August 06 From: Albuquerque NM Member No.: 9,234 ![]() |
It's actually one of the listed options, and it specifically makes a Resonance search to find that data far more difficult. There are seriously maybe 5 people on the planet who could pull off the RRS in that instance, and everyone that a corp had access to would be finding information that is worth billions or trillions of nuyen. The last time a mas murder was committed in the US that killed over 170 people in the US the government spent something around a trillion dollars dealing with the attackers, their organizers, supporters and funders. And 10 years later people shown to be actively involved with the organization responsible still get surprised when an anti-tank missile flies through their car windshield or kitchen window and detonates in their lap. |
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#32
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Running Target ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 1,018 Joined: 3-July 10 Member No.: 18,786 ![]() |
It's actually one of the listed options, and it specifically makes a Resonance search to find that data far more difficult. There are seriously maybe 5 people on the planet who could pull off the RRS in that instance, and everyone that a corp had access to would be finding information that is worth billions or trillions of nuyen. Runner's Companion has some fiction of Netcat doing a resonance realm search for 100k nuyen, taking 3 days. For research worth a billion, wouldn't a corporation be willing to spend a few millions, and a technomancer willing to spend a week to get that money? It's even fairly risk free for the technomancer, since there shouldn't be anything linking her/him to the incident. For added goodies, set it up so it's your own technomancer who does the job of retrieving the research (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) |
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#33
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Advocatus Diaboli ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 13,994 Joined: 20-November 07 From: USA Member No.: 14,282 ![]() |
Leaving everything else aside, the payoffs quoted seem way over the top. Clearly, this is a different game of Shadowrun.
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#34
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Moving Target ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 418 Joined: 20-September 07 Member No.: 13,346 ![]() |
The last time a mas murder was committed in the US that killed over 170 people in the US the government spent something around a trillion dollars dealing with the attackers, their organizers, supporters and funders. And 10 years later people shown to be actively involved with the organization responsible still get surprised when an anti-tank missile flies through their car windshield or kitchen window and detonates in their lap. That's the US government. It has a vested interest in dealing with such things. Lone Star? They have a vested interest in looking like they are dealing with such things. When it will cost a trillion nuyen and 10 years of effort to track down and eliminate those responsible and LS (or KE or any mega that hasn't been personally hacked off) can spend a few million to frame some random gangers for the crime and have them taken down within a month at the outside, what do you think happens? Corps, absent really special circumstances, only care about the bottom line. Being seen as ineffective could cost LE their contract, catching those responsible would take long enough that LS would already be branded a failure in the eyes of the public and cost a not insignificant amount of LS's budget, framing people will be done fast enough to make LS look like they are really on the ball and will cost a few million nuyen. Runner's Companion has some fiction of Netcat doing a resonance realm search for 100k nuyen, taking 3 days. For research worth a billion, wouldn't a corporation be willing to spend a few millions, and a technomancer willing to spend a week to get that money? It's even fairly risk free for the technomancer, since there shouldn't be anything linking her/him to the incident. For added goodies, set it up so it's your own technomancer who does the job of retrieving the research (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) Does it have the data she was after and how hard it is to find? Was she facing technomancer opposition? Did she know what piece of data she wanted specifically or was it just a more general trawling? Much like everything else in SR, you have to know what you are after to some extent. And again, it's far more efficient to hire her to recover that internal report on Ares black ops for last quarter that is sitting buried on a system in a deep vault that would take an entire army to penetrate; and that is honestly an easier search because you are after a single discrete piece of data that is sitting on a single server. --- At 300K per run it would take you 34 runs to buy a Luxury Lifestyle. At a run every 3 months that would be about 9 years of constant running. At this point in story though we aren't running for direct payments really. We are running to achieve objectives that help our long term plans. We do entire runs to get a spy program loaded onto a secure server so that we can then use the data to our corps benefit. Next weeks session is actually going to be a run on a law office that handles a fair amount of Seattle's more high end legal issues, and the whole mission will be to bug their offices without leaving a trace that we were there. |
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#35
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Moving Target ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 821 Joined: 4-December 09 Member No.: 17,940 ![]() |
It's only a few hundred dead. That doesn't compare to their run to hack Tokyo's GridGuide system and cause massive accidents (that really looked like accidents and flaws in GridGuides code) so that a competitor would be hired to replace GridGuide in the city. That had a death toll of upwards of a hundred thousand. None of the characters in the group care. When I say that everyone of them (including the elf) could serve a day in jail for every capital crime they have committed and still die in jail of old age, I'm not lying. Just the list of acts of war would run about 5 pages. what sort of insane moron devised that plan ? Reaching that sort of death toll would involve getting juste about every car in Tokyo doing a high-speed frontal collision with each other - airbags and safety belts means city-speed car crashes result in very, very few fatalities. Even more so in a crowded metropolis like Tokyo wher the trafic usualy moves a very sedate pace. No way this would ever pas for an accident as it involves an almost complete rewrite of the GridGuide software and possibily the byopassing of safety ovverides from the cars. To add insult to injury, let's assume a generous one in ten death rate, that would leave tokyo's treets jammed closed by something like one million wrecks - weeks of cleanup and sorting out. If whoever was behind the job was a japanese corp or even had a siginficant presence in Tokyo, the losses from the disruption, loss of personnels (having a car hints at low to mid level mamagement personnels), insurance claims along with assets loss from the Tokyo stock market's hit will wipe out every shred of profit the corporation might gain from it's GridGuide substitute subsidiary for years, maybe even decades. Even worse, merely causing the grandmother of all gridlocks and maybe a few hundred fender-benders would have done the job just fine... As I said, what kind of pyschotic moron comes up with a business plan like that unless he's after genocide rather than money ? From what you say, the corporations (and the players) seems to be more interested in performing aggressive population control through excessive and pointless brutality than in making money. Which also raises the questions as to why the PC's rapidly expanding corp isn't the target of that sort of agressive actions. The PCs might be godly, but their underlings, researchers and whatnot aren't. If a megacorpo is willing to cause the death of one hundred thousand peoples from a first world country with a still strong government for merely snatching the GridGuide managment contract for the capital, they won't think twice before pulling the nukes out for a juicy prize like the PC's fast-expanding business. Note : and as a sidenote : the PCs seems damn good at pulling out Winternight-style atrocities, but how good are they at boring business stuff like management, finance and the like ? Or more esoteric skills such as money laundering, corporate court rulings, complex investment vehicles and similar things the AAA use very specialized and expensive peoples to deal with. |
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#36
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Prime Runner Ascendant ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 17,568 Joined: 26-March 09 From: Aurora, Colorado Member No.: 17,022 ![]() |
I have to aqree Manunancy.
It all smacks of PC's let loose with aboslutrely no controls or consequences on what they do. I, too, thought that the things you posted would have been painfully obviuous, but apparently it is not. *shrug* |
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#37
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Moving Target ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 664 Joined: 26-September 11 Member No.: 39,030 ![]() |
It's just a power fantasy rpg game where you run around kill things like a god and marvel at the brilliance of your ability to squash the insect NPC's and be the best there is. It's the same sort of thing you see in a lot of computer RPG's and escapist/pulp fiction. Sure there are many better ways to accomplish the various scenarios he's thrown out and if they were going for realism that would be an issue, but they're not. Don't beat up on him for playing a game that's cartoonishly violent, it's not what most people on here play, but some people enjoy it. More power to them. It's a system that can support both. Heck, I find gangers going down the freeway with rocket launchers fun sometimes and leveling a building as a back up plan is something my first character would have planned regularly.
Besides you're not going to convince him that they play wrong (and they don't, just different). I think Tippy's post style might also be a problem, since he tends to be a bit vague in his descriptions of these fantastic scenarios he lays out. So that when people point out the flaws it seems like he's just fabricating excuses, denials, and covers (at least that's the way it reads to me, but I don't think that's actually what he's doing) rather than explaining what he meant the first time. |
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#38
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Advocatus Diaboli ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 13,994 Joined: 20-November 07 From: USA Member No.: 14,282 ![]() |
They should definitely do whatever's fun for them. It's just very hard to *compare* anything from that to the very different SR variations that the rest of us play, and the thread is roughly about that comparison.
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#39
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Moving Target ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 821 Joined: 4-December 09 Member No.: 17,940 ![]() |
What I don't like is the 'look at how genius and badass me and my pals are for pulling out over-the-top-crap' feeling I get from the posts, when it seems the GM is had basically turned on the god mode for them.
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#40
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Advocatus Diaboli ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 13,994 Joined: 20-November 07 From: USA Member No.: 14,282 ![]() |
Of course, but it won't help to say anything. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) I remember this time when someone was saying how powerful their D&D character was because he'd beaten a dragon… by collapsing a building on it? I'm like: yeah, the *GM* did that. But it's not a competition between tables or PCs in the first place.
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#41
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Neophyte Runner ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 2,001 Joined: 26-February 02 From: Michigan Member No.: 1,514 ![]() |
I haven't read many of the replies in this thread, but I'll try to answer the topic's title, and what I feel is at least some of the idea behind asking it:
Most of our games start as ideas I propose to my players In Game, In Character. They discuss this both In Game, In Character and Out of Game, Out of Character. Often the OoG/OoC discussions revolve around what they think their characters rationale behind accepting or denying a job is. My players won't take a suicide mission if they're not playing a suicidal character. I can dangle a lot of carrot and that may change their minds, but if a character has a solid core value, he or she won't violate that easily. (A pacifist just doesn't take an out and out murder for hire gig. A hard core Humanis member is unlikely to take a job whacking David Duke at the Idaho mountain resort of death; drekcetera.... As for the ideas I take the inspiration for them from any number of sources-TV, Movies, Comics, Books, Ideas inspired by reading various Shadowrun books and materials, media headlines, real life scenarios, ideas my players express that they would like to explore, etc.... |
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#42
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Moving Target ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 418 Joined: 20-September 07 Member No.: 13,346 ![]() |
what sort of insane moron devised that plan ? Reaching that sort of death toll would involve getting juste about every car in Tokyo doing a high-speed frontal collision with each other - airbags and safety belts means city-speed car crashes result in very, very few fatalities. Even more so in a crowded metropolis like Tokyo wher the trafic usualy moves a very sedate pace. No way this would ever pas for an accident as it involves an almost complete rewrite of the GridGuide software and possibily the byopassing of safety ovverides from the cars. To add insult to injury, let's assume a generous one in ten death rate, that would leave tokyo's treets jammed closed by something like one million wrecks - weeks of cleanup and sorting out. It was a relatively simple change actually, the hard part was making it look like it was actually an accident. Half of the cars were simply told that they were the only car on the road at the time, which caused all their idiotic rating 1-3 dog brained pilots to start moving full speed while the other half were told that they needed to stop moving. What do you know, every car on the road at the time ended up crashing into one another. And the point was to make it a spectacular failure. QUOTE If whoever was behind the job was a japanese corp or even had a siginficant presence in Tokyo, the losses from the disruption, loss of personnels (having a car hints at low to mid level mamagement personnels), insurance claims along with assets loss from the Tokyo stock market's hit will wipe out every shred of profit the corporation might gain from it's GridGuide substitute subsidiary for years, maybe even decades. The corp doing the paying didn't have any real presence in Japan at the time, that was why they wanted the run; so that they could break into the market. QUOTE Even worse, merely causing the grandmother of all gridlocks and maybe a few hundred fender-benders would have done the job just fine... As I said, what kind of pyschotic moron comes up with a business plan like that unless he's after genocide rather than money? The A that displaced GridGuide for the Toyko sprawl in a trillion nuyen per year contract and managed to break their strangle hold on Japan while also making several trillion nuyen from all the disruption caused and saw them win every contract they competed with GridGuide for in the next 2 years. Fender benders are forgotten after a year or two, a hundred thousand dead because of what 3 AAA corps and the Japanese Government claim was bad code is a black mark that sticks around a whole lot longer. GridGuide is tanking in that game and will probably be bought out by Absol (the A that paid for the job) within the next 2 years in game. QUOTE From what you say, the corporations (and the players) seems to be more interested in performing aggressive population control through excessive and pointless brutality than in making money. Nah, all the corps care about is money. Unless something is a personal inconvenience or affront to a major player in one of the Mega's or the corp it's self then money is all that matters. Thousands dead doesn't bother any of them. QUOTE Which also raises the questions as to why the PC's rapidly expanding corp isn't the target of that sort of agressive actions. The PCs might be godly, but their underlings, researchers and whatnot aren't. If a megacorpo is willing to cause the death of one hundred thousand peoples from a first world country with a still strong government for merely snatching the GridGuide managment contract for the capital, they won't think twice before pulling the nukes out for a juicy prize like the PC's fast-expanding business. Who said the PC's are a rapidly expanding corp? They are dozens of relatively small corps in multiple nations that all appear to be owned by different people, companies, and organizations. And those small corps of ours do get run against, we just tend to make them all as secure as possible magically, in the matrix, and physically. There simply aren't that many teams world wide that could hit them successfully, and those that could are usually being used for more important jobs. We still do get hit though. QUOTE Note : and as a sidenote : the PCs seems damn good at pulling out Winternight-style atrocities, but how good are they at boring business stuff like management, finance and the like ? Or more esoteric skills such as money laundering, corporate court rulings, complex investment vehicles and similar things the AAA use very specialized and expensive peoples to deal with. Very. Besides having most of the relevant skills naturally across the group as a whole, rating 5 knowsofts and rating 6 datasofts are relatively cheap and we have pretty much everyone of them that is remotely useful. Give a R6 Agent a few relevant R6 datasofts and an R5 Knowsoft and well, it is a better accountant than most anyone you could hirer (for example). Or a better lawyer (at least in technical terms). ---- Violence isn't the point, the Tokyo operation was the most deadly by far and most of our runs involve no one (or very few people) dead. Yes, I'm being somewhat vague and incomplete. When a run can be 8 hours of real time play and involve 3 months or more of IC time with us going so far as doing things like breaking into an employees house and hacking his cyber eyes to upload a program that stores everything he sees and then using that information (along with the same information from everyone else in the facility with cyber eyes or similar ware that we can get access to) to create a Mapsoft of the entire facility before hacking and datamining to figure out who built the target, specifically, and getting records of what building materials (and how much of them) they used along with (if they exist) their construction plans before figuring out who they hired to construct their magical defenses and what exactly they put up (and who did it, kill a mage and those bound spirits of his are gone), and then getting the psych and employment records (along with running full background checks) on every employee at the sight, before using all that data (and dozens of other bits and pieces of data) to create a full VR model of the target complete with guards, magical defenses, matrix defenses, etc. to get a simulation as close to the target as possible before running the mission repeatedly until we get it perfect and fix any flaws that we find. Only then do we perform the real run. One time, for example, we were hitting a facility that gave all of it's guards Move-By-Wire systems and over a period of a month we managed to hack each of them when they were off sight and buried a little virus in the expert system controlling them that caused those experts to behave very badly at a specific time. When it came time to do the run every guard in the facility went into a full body seizure and died. The thing is that our GM will let us do whatever we want, he plays the world and we play ourselves. That facility might have 5 Force 15 wards, a dozen bound force 10 spirits, a nexus or two filled with IC as the first gateway system, a dozen hackers running 6/6 gear with bio and cyberenhancment, 50 cybered to the gills guards on sight, and a hundred or so drones of various types on sight. If we can figure out how to bring down, evade, or penetrate that security then we are free to do so. We are also free to die if we make a single mistake. We may be powerful, we may be rich, but we survive because we are all incredibly paranoid, incredibly detail oriented, plan very well, and are willing to invest in the infrastructure. Our hacker and technomancer, with physical and magical support from the rest of the team, spent well over a year in game penetrating and creating back doors in all of the various systems needed to create a Fake SIN (or to scrub a SIN). We hacked every LS vehicle in the city, along with their dispatch computer, so that we can keep an eye on where the Star is at all times. We have access to the public transport systems database so that we can track anyone using it in real time. We have access to GridGuide so that we can track cars in real time. Several in game years spent breaking into the infrastructure of the city and the world so that we can stand a chance at succeeding and surviving runs that would kill most teams easily. |
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#43
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Advocatus Diaboli ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 13,994 Joined: 20-November 07 From: USA Member No.: 14,282 ![]() |
QUOTE Our hacker and technomancer, with physical and magical support from the rest of the team, spent well over a year in game penetrating and creating back doors in all of the various systems needed to create a Fake SIN (or to scrub a SIN). We hacked every LS vehicle in the city, along with their dispatch computer, so that we can keep an eye on where the Star is at all times. We have access to the public transport systems database so that we can track anyone using it in real time. We have access to GridGuide so that we can track cars in real time. You can see how someone would call this godmode, though. In most games, even pulling this off would be an extremely temporary achievement, as everything got relatively quickly discovered and fixed. Your game is simply and definitely more on the cinematic side, the way Hardison always magically owns the security everywhere the Leverage gang happens to go. These things represent enormous long-term advantages, regardless of how much time you invested, and they're all things the GM had to invent and regulate (not in the rules). Personally, the thing that defies belief for me most is that this team of hyper-competent uber-runners have stayed cohesive for years and years, slowly enacting their master plan.
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#44
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Great Dragon ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 5,537 Joined: 27-August 06 From: Albuquerque NM Member No.: 9,234 ![]() |
I have to aqree Manunancy. It all smacks of PC's let loose with aboslutrely no controls or consequences on what they do. I, too, thought that the things you posted would have been painfully obviuous, but apparently it is not. *shrug* I'm thinking of a name. Monty something. ... |
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#45
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Moving Target ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 821 Joined: 4-December 09 Member No.: 17,940 ![]() |
It was a relatively simple change actually, the hard part was making it look like it was actually an accident. Half of the cars were simply told that they were the only car on the road at the time, which caused all their idiotic rating 1-3 dog brained pilots to start moving full speed while the other half were told that they needed to stop moving. What do you know, every car on the road at the time ended up crashing into one another. It would probably work on a highway, but definitively not in a city center. Especially one as busy and crowded as Tokyo. With cars moving at maybe 20 mph in town and a few meters at best between them, there's simply no way for the moving cars to get enough speed to generate casualties beyond the odd pedestrian. Even without that you would have to alter the speed limits - with in-city speed limited to something like 30 mph, not much potential for multiple death. And any car with even a modicum of onboard sensor is likely to have it's autopilot to give the finger to GridGuide and stop if it dectect an obstacle rather than blindly follow the directions. If the car starts behaving weirdly, the organic backup sensor and piloting system (aka driver) is also likely to hit the brakes and cut the ignition. When starting at 30 mph, he's got some time before reaching a fatal crash speed - supposing there's enough launch space for that. And finally I don't think the Gridguide contract would be a 'trillion nuyen' affair - like most infrastructure projects, it's likely to be the sort of high-capital, low-margin, long duration and low liquidity business that is a slow and steady cash flow but a far cry from a fast returns-high profit affair. Especially with both the japanese government, Tokyo's mayor and three AAA japanese corps willing to bitch if the rates gets too high. I also wonder how the altered code would match with Gridguide's changelogs, development reports and the software in the other cities under their management - things I'd expect them to display in a hurry to clear their name and prove someone messed up their code. I'd also expect them (and the competition) to start adding some extras features like hardwired software, WORM-backed logs and similar unhackable features after a disaster of that scale. Both to protect themselves and with pressure from the states to keep a repeat performance from happening. Also a comment about the security level of your corporations : that level of security costs a bundle and tends to get noticeable - which is likely to raise quite a few eyebrows. Having two-bits, noname, not even A, corps sporting security 'proof against all but a few runners' will probably attract a lot of attention to determine who or what they're fronting for, since there's no way they could afford that sort of security on their own and keep in the market. |
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#46
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Runner ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 2,656 Joined: 29-October 06 Member No.: 9,731 ![]() |
We are Shadowrunners, we are all already terrorists. I take issue with this statement. While I don't expect my players to be lily-white champions of justice and puppies (and in fact, if they start to display that kind of naivete, I will make sure it comes back to bite them), I don't buy for a second that the default assumption of the setting is that all runners are omnicidal maniacs. |
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#47
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Moving Target ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 418 Joined: 20-September 07 Member No.: 13,346 ![]() |
You can see how someone would call this godmode, though. In most games, even pulling this off would be an extremely temporary achievement, as everything got relatively quickly discovered and fixed. Your game is simply and definitely more on the cinematic side, the way Hardison always magically owns the security everywhere the Leverage gang happens to go. These things represent enormous long-term advantages, regardless of how much time you invested, and they're all things the GM had to invent and regulate (not in the rules). Personally, the thing that defies belief for me most is that this team of hyper-competent uber-runners have stayed cohesive for years and years, slowly enacting their master plan. No, they are in the rules. Rules exist to create an Admin account on a system that appears fully legitimate. Rules exist to hack Cyberware. Rules exist to hack comlinks. Rules exist to hack vehicles. Rules exist to hack the bus lines computers. Our GM doesn't just alter the world to screw with the PC's or make them weaker. He knows the security of the nodes involved, he has written out the procedures used, and he plays them straight; do everything right and he won't just screw you because it's "too big an advantage". Especially not when it's a game like this one. It might be different in a low level street game with the explicit goal of always having the PC's a week from starvation with the world kicking them every 30 seconds and every Johnson screwing their runners left and right; but that is a game that is more GM fiat then this kind of game. Anyone who limits hacking to hacking on the fly and short term hacks is drastically underusing the system. A hacker who is willing to invest the time, effort, and money can be just as powerful (and overpowered) as the best spirit binding mages, the best pornomancer faces, etc. A hacker isn't particularly useful in combat, in point of fact that's about the least useful place for a hacker to be. He is useful before combat, when he has already hacked that enemies smartgun system so that it won't fire on the runners, when he has already hacked the guards contacts so that they will black out (and stay blacked out) exactly 2 minutes after the alarm goes off, when he has already hacked the alarm system at the corps facility on the other side of the sprawl so that the high threat response team is on their way to that facility instead. Burying backdoors and hidden accounts in systems is the hackers bread and butter. It might be "cinematic" in the sense that the characters are doing all this leg work and planning runs down to the second, but that's also how it's done in real life. Look at the SEALS who got Bin Laden, they built an entire facility identical to his own (as accurately as they could make it) and then ran through that missions day after day, dozens of times, for upwards of a month until they were perfect. Do anything less and you will fail if the GM is running your enemies competently and to their abilities. A facility with research worth billions of nuyen in it will have hundreds of million in protection, very in depth protection. To get through that protection it's something that someone can pull off in a day, it's months of careful research and planning and then multiple assaults that can be continents apart and timed down to the second after several preparatory runs on other targets. As for staying cohesive, that was part of the original premise of the campaign. The mage invented a spell that could only be used on willing individuals and soul bound an oath or contract between multiple parties. Betrayal would result in your soul being shredded and you being dead. That was admittedly a bit of an ass pull but when we started the game and knew what our end goal was (become an AAA corp) we needed a way IC to ensure that inter team fighting and betrayal didn't happen. It would probably work on a highway, but definitively not in a city center. Especially one as busy and crowded as Tokyo. With cars moving at maybe 20 mph in town and a few meters at best between them, there's simply no way for the moving cars to get enough speed to generate casualties beyond the odd pedestrian. Even without that you would have to alter the speed limits - with in-city speed limited to something like 30 mph, not much potential for multiple death. And any car with even a modicum of onboard sensor is likely to have it's autopilot to give the finger to GridGuide and stop if it dectect an obstacle rather than blindly follow the directions. If the car starts behaving weirdly, the organic backup sensor and piloting system (aka driver) is also likely to hit the brakes and cut the ignition. When starting at 30 mph, he's got some time before reaching a fatal crash speed - supposing there's enough launch space for that. And finally I don't think the Gridguide contract would be a 'trillion nuyen' affair - like most infrastructure projects, it's likely to be the sort of high-capital, low-margin, long duration and low liquidity business that is a slow and steady cash flow but a far cry from a fast returns-high profit affair. Especially with both the japanese government, Tokyo's mayor and three AAA japanese corps willing to bitch if the rates gets too high. *shrug* QUOTE I also wonder how the altered code would match with Gridguide's changelogs, development reports and the software in the other cities under their management - things I'd expect them to display in a hurry to clear their name and prove someone messed up their code. I'd also expect them (and the competition) to start adding some extras features like hardwired software, WORM-backed logs and similar unhackable features after a disaster of that scale. Both to protect themselves and with pressure from the states to keep a repeat performance from happening. That's why it was an entire major run. We had to go through and alter all of that. It's not like our hacker sat down one day and decided to do this in an afternoon, it was an all hands operation that took months and hits on multiple targets. Along with our technomancer doing multiple Resonance Realm Searches to Erase bits and pieces of data. QUOTE Also a comment about the security level of your corporations : that level of security costs a bundle and tends to get noticeable - which is likely to raise quite a few eyebrows. Having two-bits, noname, not even A, corps sporting security 'proof against all but a few runners' will probably attract a lot of attention to determine who or what they're fronting for, since there's no way they could afford that sort of security on their own and keep in the market. Your corp worth a few billion nuyen? Can you locate most of your R&D and critical infrastructure at a single location? If yes then not dropping a few hundred million on security is idiotic. Your competition will hirer runners to hit you if they think you are an easy target. Especially if the security can largely be sunk costs. Hire KE or one of the other big security corps to put up your Wards and buy a dozen bound spirits. Invest 10 million in upgrades for your security staff, with the right ware and skillsofts you don't need anyone particularly exceptional as your starting stock. Spend a couple million to get SOTA IC and computer support along with hiring a couple of really good on-sight hackers and contracting with one of the big firms for back up hacker support. Most companies don't have anything like this level of security, but then most companies are small and worth a few million at most. The thing is that those small companies aren't going to hirer runners who's average expense bill can run a million nuyen and who won't even meet with you without a 10K down payment. Those companies hirer street level or a bit better runners and put out runs on one another. The companies that are willing and able to drop millions on a run don't care about the small fry; they hirer prime runners to hit the targets that no one else can, the targets that the rank and file runners would take one look at and say can't be hit. Sure, the players can and do run against those lower level companies anyways. Either because they are doing someone a favor, because an individual or the company has something they want, because they need to frame a fall guy, whatever the reason (they might just feel like a break from those high stress jobs). That doesn't mean that they are anything special or up to the runners level. Running against an average corp's security (3/3 matrix security, maybe half a dozen guards with minimal ware and normal gear, a few watchers, a lower force bound spirit or two from the local mage, a low force ward, a single average hacker on sight) is stuff that a team can pull off with less than 3 hours notice and with no real risk. The sniper offs the local mage to disperse the watchers and spirit. The mage sends a spirit to spot the hacker for him and pulls off a ritual to Control Thoughts the Hacker and have him shutdown security before killing himself. The Adept and Street Sam go in under improved invisibility and gank the guards. An entire facility taken with no warning, no alarms, and on a few hours notice. I take issue with this statement. While I don't expect my players to be lily-white champions of justice and puppies (and in fact, if they start to display that kind of naivete, I will make sure it comes back to bite them), I don't buy for a second that the default assumption of the setting is that all runners are omnicidal maniacs. It's the definition of Lone Star, Knight Errant, UCAS, and every other important entity in the Sixth World. Running is terrorism and runners are terrorists, even in the real world that is what almost all runs would count as; terrorist attacks. Merely existing has most runners committing at least 4 felonies. Picked up by the Star when you aren't doing a run? Odds are that you are looking at at least 20 years. Fake SIN, multiple counts of illegal weaponry, multiple counts of illegal 'ware, multiple counts of illegal bullets, illegal jammer (if you have a tag jammer on you), illegal tag eraser, probably multiple counts of illegal programs on your link, probably a dozen counts of fake licenses, illegal possession of smartlink capability on your contacts. |
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#48
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Advocatus Diaboli ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 13,994 Joined: 20-November 07 From: USA Member No.: 14,282 ![]() |
The GM has to invent all those systems. Only the general hacking rules exist. It's not altering the world to screw the PCs—that *is* the world. It's GM fiat to allow these things to work and stay in place (in a world full of more competent individuals with better budgets). It's fine if that's fun for you.
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#49
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Moving Target ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 418 Joined: 20-September 07 Member No.: 13,346 ![]() |
The GM has to invent all those systems. Only the general hacking rules exist. It's not altering the world to screw the PCs—that *is* the world. It's GM fiat to allow these things to work and stay in place (in a world full of more competent individuals with better budgets). It's fine if that's fun for you. No, it's GM fiat to remove them. If you create a legitimate backdoor and a legitimate admin account they stay around. The people you are running against also aren't more competent. When you are talking about a hacker on par with ours or our technomancer, think "Could FastJack do this?" if your answer is yes then you should be ok with it. Because that is the level that the character is playing at. |
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#50
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Runner ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 2,656 Joined: 29-October 06 Member No.: 9,731 ![]() |
It's the definition of Lone Star, Knight Errant, UCAS, and every other important entity in the Sixth World. Running is terrorism and runners are terrorists, even in the real world that is what almost all runs would count as; terrorist attacks. Merely existing has most runners committing at least 4 felonies. Picked up by the Star when you aren't doing a run? Odds are that you are looking at at least 20 years. Fake SIN, multiple counts of illegal weaponry, multiple counts of illegal 'ware, multiple counts of illegal bullets, illegal jammer (if you have a tag jammer on you), illegal tag eraser, probably multiple counts of illegal programs on your link, probably a dozen counts of fake licenses, illegal possession of smartlink capability on your contacts. Just because someone calls you a terrorist doesn't make it true. You and your friends are choosing to play monsters; not just ordinary monsters, either, but monsters on the level of the nineteen men who murdered three thousand people one autumn morning not that long ago. If you're having fun with that, then by all means carry on, but don't delude yourselves into thinking that the game is "forcing" you to play that way or that it is the only option. If you create a legitimate backdoor and a legitimate admin account they stay around. No, they don't. They really, really don't. You talk a lot about realism and what security would realistically do. Any IT security guy worth his paycheck is going to check the legitimacy of any newly created account, especially a security or admin account. He's going to call up the person whose name is on the account and say, "Hey, Bob? Did you create a new admin account last night? No? OK, thanks." Then he's going to delete the account, close the backdoor used to create it, and go through the whole system with a micrometer-toothed comb to find what you changed or broke. Backdoors and hacked accounts are good for a limited time; if the security team are doing their jobs, a severely limited time. |
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Lo-Fi Version | Time is now: 20th July 2025 - 05:34 PM |
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