That was the main point of using Bobby to carry over the connection: The spirits can't make out the cable from the astral, Jawsey can mask Bobby's spell aura and Bobby can get access to the inside of the car from below to one of the universal connectors. Minimal exposure for the whole team - especially if Bobby scurries quickly enough

10m are well within Jawseys ability for an area effect. Once Bobby is inside the car, his aura won't be noticeable anyway.

Direct connection to a Pilot 1 or 2 means you can basically do anything to it with impunity (including the bootstrap trick for all kinds of permanent hacks)

The spirits have a fairly commanding view of the parking lot, as they have an elevated position (about 2 stories up) and a top-down view.

The van in question is parked nose-in with the hood of the car pointed toward The Jackal's Lantern. The areas of the side of it are semi-exposed because there are motorcycles there, which don't provide as much cover as full-sized vehicles.

Approaching it from the rear would be the most stealthy. You could potentially pull the Americar up behind the van and then hop out, using the van itself for cover. That could work with a successful Stealth roll.

Jack's plan also works if Jawsey's spell generates enough hits to hide Bobby's aura.

And Jack is right: if you can get a direct connection on the van then it's basically game over in terms of hacking. We wouldn't even bother rolling.

There are dice involved no matter what; it just depends which rolls you prefer to make. Or, conversely, which dice pools you want resisting you:

1) Bobby the Cute Little Mouse hops out behind the van with the data cord (Stealth)
2) Bobby the Cute Little Mouse uses Jawsey's Manascape for cover (Sorcery)
3) AM just wireless hacks the van, screw all this direct connection bulldrek (Hacking)

Oh, the van is online? Well that makes things easier for sure (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

I posted IC before reading this discussion here. Given Jawsey's roll, on the spell, I'm going to suggest sticking with that plan (roll in the IC, copied over here as well)
manascape, pre-edged: 13d6h5 7
Drain resist: 13d6t5 3
No drain, 7 successes.

I'd specified force four before reading about the 10+ meter gap, so Jawsey will have to move the spell some to continue providing coverage.

≠=====================
Unrelated to the in game situation, I'm sitting in a coffee shop as I write this, the first time in about six weeks that it has been allowed. It wasn't until the fifth one I checked that I found an available seat (fortunately my neighborhood is infested with coffee shops). I guess everyone else wanted to get out of their homes too (plus our downtown has been shut down for nine days now by a trucker/antivaxx/antimask protest, so less places to go).

Which got me thinking, with the dangers of Redmond, how many people suffer badly from cabin fever? How much does that feeling of being trapped with nowhere to go other than the streets drive some of the violence? Maybe this could be a marketing angle for Cutty: the gym, a safe place to go when you just want to go somewhere.

Well I suppose that is a fair point for discussion, so I'll throw it back to the group.

I presume that cars stay online so that they can receive instructions from their owners, like coming to pick them up.

But if that's too much of a security liability, then I'm happy to have them wireless off by default when they're parked and not in active use

How do others play it?

My logic here is that if you are safe enough to use autopilot (that can be hacked), you are safe enough to leave the car online waiting for you when you are outside the car. If your car gets stolen you have insurance to cover for it (and who would steal from a senior criminal anyhow?).


That said, I'd assume criminals do chases, thrill-races, drive-by shootings, and things that can only be done while manually driving, and preferably while being offline. In Carn-evil's case, it depends on what they use the clown car for if it is used for chilling around and doing mostly legal stuff. It can be used as a regular car with strong gang affiliation, and a nasty reputation protecting it from the other criminals of Redmond. Otherwise, I'd assume it would be manually driven and offline.

If you have a good commlink and slave your car to that, it's less of a risk.

That said, I'd equate leaving your car online to leaving the car unlocked.
You do that for short time only when you are just dashing in and out or when you park it at a secure place like your home or a parking garage where you have to pay and verify ownership to check out.

Without grid guide, the regular dog brain R1 isn't really capable of doing more than slowly parallel park.

So finding cars online in the open is more a case of a forgetful or neglectful owners.

Having your car online while you drive is no problem - direct manual control overrides any commands from a hacker that isn't jumped in.

Interesting, and makes sense but do you imply that SR cars do not move without a driver? E.g., to pick up the kids from school or to pick you up when there is no accessible parking next to where you want to be? It seems very restrictive to me to still need a driver in the car even if it autonomously drive.

Oh, no they absolutely do that, but:

- within secure parts of the city and active grid guide
- secure parking spaces
- having your commlink track the progress and status of your car.

Since you can reboot your car and specify a delay when it gets online again, you can park your car, shut off online until you get off from work or if you are delayed tell it to snooze for another half an hour until you are ready.

Of course I'm not saying that everyone follows those rules (there are enough people in RL around who use Password1 as their password), but I'd imagine that this is the recommended behavior from experts.

I'm operating under the assumption that cars would be slaved to personal commlinks and/or hosts when parked.

But for our current understanding - important because it cuts both ways - we'll say that most parked cars are not online (unless due to negligence and/or a specific purpose).

Bobby should probably be Mindlinking with Jawsey (not AM) to coordinate the coverage of Manascape with Bobby's movements. Jawsey can relay comments between the two as necessary. But for the current situational I'm going to assume that Bobby exited the Americar right behind the Eurovan and thus is confident in the coverage.

Bobby will find his way into the Eurovan.

With Bobby in the van, Jawsey doesn't have to worry about covering him, so he can bring the spell back to their car to then cover AM. Spirits (that don't have other sense) only see in the astral, so making AM's aura that of a rat should work again -- although she may not be as experienced at acting like a rat. So if there is a door away from the spirits that Bobby can open, that would work to reduce suspicions. And if the car is offline presumably it can't sent an alert that its door opened. Just look out for any tags keeping an eye on things.

@Beta
Okay, that understanding works.

I'll note that there's no rain today, so the fire spirits won't have the same reservations about materializing that they did last time. But, for now, they're just on the astral and are thus limited to assensing.

The rear van doors are pointing away from the spirits, so that would be the most covert way for AM to enter the van without the spirits noticing her. However, those rear doors would be more exposed to the other folks in the parking lot, namely the homeless warming themselves around the barrel fires. A distraction would be prudent.

Yes, if the car is offline the it won't trigger an alert that its door opened. However, if the car is offline there's no way to make it online without permission of some sort, whether that's a key or a fob or a commlink.

I just tested this on my Toyota, which needs a key fob to turn on so it seems like a reasonable parallel. Without the key fob in the car, the windows won't roll down and the radio won't turn on.

AM should pop the vent cover back in place before she leaves the van.

Anything else you want to do here or should we fast-forward?

What time interval is AM putting on the van to report to the burner commlink? More frequent = more granular, but also increases the odds of being detected. Less frequent = less useful, but decreases the odds of being detected. Not that the odds of being detected are high, but they're above 0%.

In light of our previous conversation around "not in use, not online", this reporting will primarily take place when the van is in use. I'll presume that AM coded a clause for "report on startup and report when shutting down" to give you the starting and endpoints.

I liked your interpretation of concealment.

About the comlink, anytime the car starts and stops would be fine. If we really want to know where it is we can always use the burner to call it.


Thanks for remainding about the vent, she'll close that.

Yeah, we can jump forward to the next day.

I'll skip forward to SIS HQ first.

summon F4+1=5 spirit of man: 11d6t5 3
spirit resist: 5d6t5 0 critical glitch for the spirit
drain resist vs 2: 13d6t5 3
no drain, 3 services, and whatever the spirit's crit glitch might mean

In those cases I usually granted an extra service to the summoner

For a regular glitch, I usually make the spirit especially subservient or willing to do things above and beyond what it would normally tolerate.

For a critical glitch, it will basically do anything for the summoner. It may even voluntarily hang out after its services have ended.

@All
Meeting Big Stank inside or outside? It could affect how things play out.

We have nothing to tell, that would make him happy - I vote for outside.

AM would prefer inside for a more private conversation but the way I view her she'll go with Bobby's intuition on that thing (and Jawsey's?)

Beta, what's Jawsey's vote?

Sorry, going to break into some 'table talk' here, because I feel that we are getting nowhere.

@Tecumseh I feel like all of the NPC are speaking in a consistent voice telling us that we are going about things the wrong way. What I'm not sure of is whether this is simply "nobody likes you or how you do things so of course they are not cooperating" or if this is "GM hint that we are going about this is a bull-headed and difficult manner, and that we are missing a better approach." If I knew you as a GM better, or if we were around a table-top where I could pick up on body-language and voice tone it would be a lot easier to tell. But we aren't, and I'm worried that we are trying to sail straight into the wind without realizing it, and ignoring all of your hints on the matter.

@Gilga, @Jack_Spade I probably just let my frustration colour my approach to Big Stank, sorry. I think I've reached the point of feeling that we'd be better off focusing our energy on moving the business out of Redmond*. However as I'm still planning on retiring Jawsey (possibly even ahead of schedule if Big Stank gets angry enough (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif) ) and as I can adapt the new character to whatever happens in this chapter, I'm saying that only as opinion, not a vote. I'll go with whatever you two decide on.

*character and player energy; there would be a substantial OOC effort in defining a new place on top of the IC part.

You're not missing anything.

I said it before but now's as good of a time for a reminder as any: there's "job" this chapter. There's no mission. It's purely sandbox.

A bomb goes off, KOing Mato and damaging the building. What do you do about it? Nothing? All-out war? Targeted vengeance? Sell out to Urubia? Move away? All options are available, but there are consequences to each.

The open-ended nature is a bit of an experiment, especially in a PbP format, but I figured it was worth trying after 3.5 years together. Your characters are established enough that the events are happening to real personalities, not in a vacuum.

You're not missing anything because there's nothing to miss. The chapter's basically over when you decide it's over. Tomorrow, next week, next month, whenever you've taken the action as far as you want it to go. Or, OOCly, when it's not fun anymore.

I'll do a bit of wrap-up on Mato's fate when the time is right, but that will be at the end of the chapter.

I admit that part of AM's reservations about leaving Redmond reflect my own sorrow that we spent the last years populating Redmond with colorful and interesting characters and moving downtown or to some fancy office building would mean that many of the colorful characters we interact with would be lost. For example, Carn-evil and Big Stank, Cutty, and even Urubia are all beautiful characters that I'd like to keep interacting with.