As I see it, this is the crucial point, really. AFAIK, there is no rule to determine how quickly your Background Count fades away. Does BC for something like this take days to fade? Hours? Minutes? Weeks?

Does the BC fade faster than the spell signature? I think that you are looking for a bombmaker's signature in the mountain of debris that the bomb creates and you can't cart all that debris away and carefully sort it out and you've got until the spell signature fades to find it.

The counterarguments here bring up an interesting point. If it's extremely difficult to find an arbitrary point in space in the astral, how do spirits arrive at specific locations after directed by their controllers? How do mages running astral reconnaissance find their targets? How do mages who have to come help their chummers find them when all they know is their location from a phone call? One, mind you, that they can no longer interact with now that they've left their meat behind. Using your counter argument, spirit backup doesn't work. Astral backup and reconnaissance doesn't work. Not unless you have hours and hours of time to search and find the location you're needing to get at. So unless the entity has been to this astral location before, the chances of them arriving successfully in anything less than hours drops to nil.

Or is that not what you intended to imply?

I'd like to quote the SR4 rules for Astral Movement. Particularly important sections, both for and against my preferred interpretation, are bolded and underlined.


So let's dissect this issue in sequence.

From a fluff standpoint, all you need to do is think about where you want to go and you go there. If you want to fly from the bar you're in back to your apartment to check if you turned off the gas on your astral stove or whatever, you do so effortlessly. You don't have to manually navigate along the street route you normally take in the physical world, all you have to do is imagine yourself being home and you automatically travel to that spot.

However, if you're moving quickly you have no time to perceive your environment. Normally, this isn't an issue. If you're just flying back home, you already know where you want to be, so you aren't trying to find anything, and being able to discern detail isn't important. But let's say you're going somewhere you don't know the exact location of - now you have to find that spot. You can't simply imagine yourself in an unknown location, thus you have to seek it out manually - at least in part. If you had to fly from Seattle to a random spot in London, you could imagine yourself over the River Thames in front of Big Ben and that'd be enough to get you to that general vicinity. From that point you could then manually search out the specific spot within London you're looking for at a slower speed.

From a mechanics standpoint, traveling at 6,000 km/hour merely imparts a moderate negative modifer to various tests you make while traveling. If you want to engage in Astral Combat with a spirit that you're chasing at super speeds, you lose at least two dice. Likewise, if you want to make a Navigation test to find your way to an unknown location at Mach 4.9, all you suffer is the same negative modifer of at least two dice.

~Umi

A spirit can travel to any point it has been to previously, instantaneously. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Except that you KNOW where your Apartment is. You do not KNOW a GPS Coordinate. A coordinate that may not even be accurate in a Crash/Destruction scenario. If they were, we would never be missing any vehicle (boat or plane) that suddenly goes off grid. We would know EXACTLY where to look. Searches would be instantaneous, rather than taking days and sometimes weeks.

As for what pena;lty you would suffer at Mach 4.9... I can guarantee you I would assess more than a -2... Probbaly closer to -20 or so (Your quote says -2 OR MORE)... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Really? Do you truly, intrinsically, immutably KNOW where your home is? If I plop you down at some random destination 100 miles away that you haven't been to before, could you find your way back without consulting a map or at the very least getting your bearings via a landmark or such?

I mean, sure, we all "know" where we live, but that's a highly relative value. You don't really know exactly where you live, but rather you know where you live in relation to other places. And even then, much of our frame of reference is surprising fragile. You can lose your way home due to things like heavy fog, or due to a landmark that you unconsciously navigate by changing or disappearing. You must have turned down that road a thousand times, but ever since they cut down that old sycamore tree and built that shopping plaza, half the time you miss your turn because you don't recognize it.

But none of that matters. It isn't so much about "knowing" the location you want to fly to astrally, but rather that the location is one you can identify or pick out. The only time you have trouble, according to RAW, is when you have to find a location - like finding a set of lost car keys. You aren't trying to "know" the place the keys are in - at least not in the sense of being familiar with the location on a personal or fundamental level. You're merely trying to ascertain their location at all. If you do not know the location of the keys, you cannot fly to them astrally without slowing down to search. But if someone told you they were at the top of the Eiffel Tower, you could fly to the top of the Eiffel Tower and find them there.

The problem isn't that you do or don't "know" the spot you're going to, but rather if you can identify it. If you want to talk to Joe, and he's at home, you can fly to his house and talk to him. But if you want to talk to Dave, and he's checked into an unknown room at the Hotel California, you could fly to the hotel no problem, but then you'd have to take the time to find Dave where ever he actually is in the hotel. If you're trying to search through the hotel at 6,000 km/h, you're gonna have a hard time making anything out. But you could easily fly through the walls of all the hotel's rooms at a rate of 33 m/sec and spot him no problem.

As for crash sites and coordinates, we're talking about a plane exploding in midair, not crashing in a normal fashion due to a mechanical failure. Chances are the last reported position was accurate to the point when the plane, ya know, exploded. And when you get there, you'll find a big ol' astral disturbance from the trauma of a couple hundred people dying horrible deaths, readily visible on the astral.

And even if you somehow don't have exact coordinates, you can search the immediate area around the last known location a lot faster astrally than search and rescue teams can search for survivors or debris. Remember, you're not looking for wreckage or corpses in the ocean or on a mountainside, you're looking for bright glowing magical auras, signatures, and negatively aspected mana streams. If you're searching the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, there's not gonna be much else out there that would even register astrally, so it'll be pretty easy to spot.

As for your suggestion of a -20 dice pool penalty, considering the RAW baseline of -2 dice, your 900% larger penalty is patently absurd. Absolutely nothing incurs modifiers that bad anywhere else in the rules. The worst that comes immediately to mind is -6 for Blind Fire. I don't see how you can possibly justify such nonsense.

~Umi

as a point to the specific discussion of planes exploding, very few planes actually come apart in mid-air; it's more like there's an explosion, and then a terrifying decompression and uncontrolled dive towards the surface, followed by the really large explosion of everything cooking off. this may vary depending on the exact scenario.

in terms of generally finding things in the astral, i have come to the interpretation that a spirit would need to use search to find anything that wasn't specifically pointed out to them by the summoner (either in physical or astral space), meaning that the summoner would have had to have assensed the place or person beforehand. as far as magicians finding things in the astral, i suppose that depends somewhat on landmarks. i assume the space needle still kind of looks like the space needle in astral space, so in our running example, if the plane blew up a click above the needle you might be able to orient yourself. over ohio or the open ocean? you might be screwed. similarly, a security mage showing up astrally on site is probably not a problem, but finding your shadowrunner buddy without having been to the bar he's in before might actually require you to travel at the 100 meters per second speed and make navigation rolls to find your way through the astral version of the streets. a summoned spirit could probably search him out and give you the exact coordinates if you summoned one and had assensed him previously. this means it's a good idea to astrally case a place before things go south. if that's possible.

moving vehicles? fuck. unless there are some large physical or astral signs that differentiate one particular americar from another you're in trouble. a tank in the middle of a traffic jam or a parking lot probably stands out quite a bit though.

Very few planes are bombed, though, magically or otherwise. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

~Umi

Depending on the type of manabombing, though, it's going to make a difference.

If you use a Blast element spell then yes, it will very likely rip the plane in two. A Fireball, not so much, but it is going to set everything on fire and result in the plane taking a screeching dive sooner or later.

Wreck the plane and you'll intrinsically damage a shitload of its components, so like, a turbine will shred itself and the hydraulic control lines burst and such.

even a bomb or sam/aam impact isn't "instant cloud of debris, everyone dead" in most cases, though. it's very likely the massive death and astral pollution doesn't actually occur till the impact of the fuselage on the ground. which makes it easier to pick the spell signature out from astral space but much harder to find said spell signature in the first place. not always the case, but sometimes.

Really? I do not think so. If you are only going to assess a -2 penalty to notice things at 6000kph, then that is equally absurd. The quote is -2 OR MORE. Personally, if you are trying to do things at a velocity that you cannot possibly even concentrate upon, well, you will not notice ANYTHING of consequence. And the Fluff backs that up (A mere -2 is NOT ENOUGH in those circumstances). You want to look at something, move at your astral walking speed.


As for your rant on KNOWING where sometjhing is. It Supports my argument a LOT better than it does yours. Good Luck Finding those coordinates in Astral Space anytime soon. It is hard enough IRL to pinpoint events like that (even given GPS), let alone in an environment that has no equivalent point of reference.

heh, do NPCS have Edge? Id say the edge pool of a passenger plane simultaneously burning edge to try and save their own lives is a pretty hefty pool that requires dedicated effort to foil.

Yes, but then they burn an edge to survive the exploding plane.... then you have to burn an Edge to survive the fall.. possibly needing to burn a third edge depending on where you landed.

Figure most folk won't have that. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

Naah, just wait unitl the actual event has concluded and THEN Burn your point of Edge. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Heck with enough edge you can pull a 'refrigerator to survive atomic blast' (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Heh... Crazy... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)

Yes, but they don't build fridges like that anymore. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

They were made to friggin last back then. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Ain't that the Truth... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif)

Summon SPirit
Search
Go to spirit

Yes...
Yes, but likely to take a very long time. If the target zone is 6000km away Again, jetliner over the ocean scenario at 35,000 Feet altitude), that is a +5999 to the Search Target... It is a Place, so another +5. Minimum Target Number fort the Extended Roll is 6009. Should take them a few days Minumum for that one. Lets see... Assume a Force 5 Spirit with Search. That is 10 Base Dice, I do not think that they get the +3 for Actively looking, but we will give it to them anyways, and we will NOT reduce their DP's per roll, because it is the Search Power... We will also assume that they obtain Maximum Hits on the roll, so 13 Hits. That results in 462.23 Time Increments (10 Minutes Each Increment). So, that equates to 4622.31 Minutes; That is 77.039 Hours to find the Event sight (assumming it is even possible to locate the point of the Event, and not the actual crash). So 3.21 Days of Searching (for a Maximized 100% success rate on Hits for the Spirit. For averages of 13 hits, you would need a Force 39 Spirit to pull that off), for a Bound Spirit. Signatures are LONG gone.

And some people are saying that they are BETTER than the Spirit in this regard, which I call BS on.

And lets just remember, that the mage only needs to see the plane... Well...

The problem with magic in general is, that it ain't restrictive enough.
The stuff which has clear rules works totally fine, for example healing.
But as soon as a broader approach is taken...