As an add on, to keep the OR mechanic in place, you can just add the OR to the Sensor + clearsoft roll for illusions.

Again, it's about altering reality. If the spell gets enough hits, as far as the drone is concerned the illusion is, without question, real. It's dog brain will now have to determine how to react to he REAL data it is receiving.

IF however, the spell doesn't get enough hits, the dog brain "sees" that there is a flaw in the data it is receiving and thus it ignores this 'garbage data', just as it would ignore static or noise on the line.



No, but the later analysis would not show any disrepencies if the mage got enough hits. As far as the camera/sensor/etc. is concerned the dog was real. Magic altered physical reality for the camera.

Because magic is intimately entwined with the living world. Every living thing in the Shadowrun world is, by its very nature, "magic." This is why a living target gets a chance to resist, but it is also why the present and living target may be more easily fooled. It's the same reason healing the cyberzombie with magic is pretty much impossible.

Another important point is that his twin in the other room is not a target of the spell. He is witnessing the magic from afar via an electronic device. As a result, that device serves as an intermediary as IT (the camera) is the target.

How?



Neither twin is the target of the spell! The target is the floor!

And this is massive problem if all sensors/cameras are OR 4 and automatically act as intermediaries for the viewer.

Really what's to stop a corp/lone star/insert criminal organization/joe average shadowrunner from arming security personnel with micro sensor packages to deal with mages?

The funny part is, I hadn't really given this a thought until this issue came up over the new OR table, but even in SR4 this problem effectively existed at OR 3.


The more I think about it, the more I dislike the OR mechanic when it comes to Physical Illusions, and the more I think it should be a Sensors+Clear Soft opposed test.

Otherwise, anyone smart enough to equip themselves with sensors is basically running around with 4 automatic successes vs. Physical Illusions.

Hackers. If you've got something on your camera that you don't see with your eyes, it's either something that is there but magically invisible or something that isn't but has been added by a hacker.

An "intelligent" system (which the Pilot program is) of any kind needs to have some way of filtering out what it considers "garbage" data. Otherwise the slightest glitch would down every airplane, crash every car, and stop every monorail.



No one is trying to fool the floor, although frankly if it were sentient, the floor will be fooled (OR 2). The true "target" of the spell are the observers. So the local twin IS the target. The area is "under the influence of magic" and thus, anyone LOS in the area (in the case of an AOE illusion) is "targeted." The remote twin is neither in the area nor LOS. He is not targeted.



If the meat body is there, the meat body/spirit of the sec guard is fooled. Even if his AR sensor package is not - HE is. So later, when he reviews the video feed from his headset, he can clearly see that it was an illusion BUT what he saw, at that time, was as real as anything.

Which suddenly makes a remote rigger/spider + a well trained team, hugely useful. The entire team gets metnally duped but the remote "overwatch" commander gets the feeds from their cameras which are NOT duped (not enough hits to top the OR) and can see through the illusion. He shouts out the command to "Shoot that chair!" and the well trained team responds without hesitation despite what their eyes tell them. BAM BAM BAM. The mage, disguised as a chair, goes down.

Well, if that's the intent...then what was with all the "we want the hacker/rigger to be with the team" stuff they fed us with at SR4's launch?

I wish they'd just state what they were actually trying to accomplish - odds are whatever they were trying to fix either wasn't a problem or was already houseruled out of existance for 90% of groups.

As it is, we're stuck looking at the end results: raised ORs requiring a >15dp to have a 50% chance of affecting a drone and a new drain mechanic that punishes you for using skill over raw power, and thinking "what was this supposed to solve?"

Pff. I'm simply gonna use a manipulation spell then.


Bend Light
(physical manipulation, area effect, sustained, restricted target (willing subject), environmantal, major)
F/2+2 Drain

The spell bends the light around a single willing target, making it practically invisible to the onlooker unless he beats the hits scored by the caster with an intuition+counterspelling test. Objects roll sensors+clearsight instead.
As a side effect the subject may add the spells hits as a positive dicepool modifier to dodge attempts versus light based attacks.

You are using the rules in a reverse way... there is no rule in RAW about the targeting needing to have LOS of a spell... LOS is a relationship between the caster and the point(s) of effect, since you can be hit by any spell, even if you can't see it. Even a illusion spell, like Chaos, can be used in against a blind man. Physical Mask can be used against a deaf and blind man (since it's alter you smell and even your physical form).

The illusion is a special case, since you need to "see" it to acknowledge it. But since RAW states that Improved Invis. ir a physical spell that really affect the light, a camera (since it's a device that capture light), should capture the light affected by the spell.

That is the way the spells work on the description... too bad is that the rules don't work in the same way.

I had forgotten to list Indirect Combat Spells as an exception. Nothing indicates that this 'may' is an exception to Manipulation spells.

Again, this does not show that some spells are not required to overcome OR. Levitate has a threshold - always. Shadow does not. That some specify they must overcome OR and others do not is not in any way proof that they are not subject to OR - all it shows is poor writing.

Once again, show me where it says Levitate is not subject to OR.

Yes. That'd be the Clearsoft software. This is a physical illusion, crafted from light, not a mental illusion. Those don't have to ever worry about OR since living things don't have it. The Clearsoft (the intelligent bit which analyses for anomalous data and says, "Ahar. Someone with cammo-gear, or possibly a low quality invisibility spell") analyses this and determines the nature of the glitch.

To take the simplest possible example, a mage creates a physical illusion of a red, featureless sphere levitating above his hand. The target is the sphere and it's an entirely illusionary construct. Does it appear on film if you use a 1950s camera? Yes, not because it beats the object resistance but because there is red light there. Does it look like a real red ball? No, because it's quite clearly a featureless red ball. Could it have been added later with photomanipulation software? Yes. Does this mean this is the sort of thing software should look for to determine what's going on, and if said image is magically created or, indeed, added by an Hacker after the fact? Yes.

A physical illusion of a painting covering a different painting. What would you see on camera?

To take another example, let's take the simplest possible drone - a turtle which follows a white line on the floor, beloved of school students everywhere since the BBC micro came out. A mage creates a physical illusion overlaying the floor, with the white lines now in different places. The sensor (in this case, a couple of photodiodes, and therefore pretty complex semiconductor stuff) sees ... the white lines the mage has put there, since those are the lines of light allowed. The more advanced example would be an SR drone and an illusionary floor covering a pit. The drone will not see the pit. The drone will see the floor the mage has created. Whether or not the drone recognises that the floor is an illusion depends on the drone's sensors, and the drones programming. A dumb drone will not see the illusion as anything unusual and fall. A smarter drone will note that the floor is odd, but still go across it because it can't see the pit. A very smart drone will have multiple sensors, know that the floor level is not the same as reported by its different sensor suites and realise that there is a reason not to cross the floor.

In none of these cases is the object resistance of the camera or drone an issue - they are never targetted by spells. If you try to wrap the drone in mana and make it look like a fish, or burn or fly apart in a cloud of sparks, then yes, the tech is the target. They're completely different situations.

Round and round in circles we go. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotate.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/spin.gif)

See my point yet Endroren?

No. We have text that says spells are sometimes subject to Object Resistance and sometimes not and we have spells that are explicitly stated to be so. You show me where it says Levitate is subject to OR. The part you quoted is general to spells and says they "may" need to overcome OR. Until you find something stating that this applies to Levitate needs to overcome it, you're playing a house rule saying that it does. And therefore you shouldn't be using it as an example of how the RAW doesn't make sense.

To back knasser up (because he's correct).

From pg. 201 under Illusion spells.

"Physical illusions are effective against technological systems, assuming the caster achieves enough hits to meet the Object Resistance threshold"

This is under a sub-heading for Physical Illusion spells, and covers all Physical Illusion spells, none of the individual spells actually mention this mechanic in their description.


Now, for Physical Manipulation Spells.

You'll notice there is no stipulation under Physical Manipulation spells similar to Physical Illusion spells.

The only mechanics mentioned are needing to hit a certain threshold, or the opposed test mechanics for Mental Manipulations.

Continuing with this, only Ignite specifies in it's description a need to beat the OR of the inanimate target. None of the other physical manipulations have that listed.

The same is true for all Physical Manipulation spells in Street Magic.

Certain spells have the need to beat the OR of the target, others have no such stipulation.

It seems that the strongest arguments against the illusion rules are based on the belief that magic is just technology with foci. In other words, an old school SR trid screen projecting a 3D image is doing the same thing as an illusion spell - only one uses magic and one uses technology.

If you go with this interpretation of magic, then yes - the illusion rules don't make sense. I mean, either you've bent light or you haven't. Period.

BUT if you drop the idea that magic is just mana technology, and go with the idea that magic is non-physics based, twisting the rules of the physical world (usually on a local level), you end up with something supported very well with the rules as written. From this perspective, if you aren't in the AOE, you aren't affected. Some folks see the effect. Some folks see through it. Machines are hard to fool. People are easier. A man looking through a video recorder might be fooled, even though the video recorder is recording an image that, if he watches it later, is clearly false. All of this makes sense if you treat magic as something that falls outside the normal physical laws.

If you take this interpretation, the biggest challenge I see is that while the rules seem based on an non-physics interpretation of magic, the descriptions sometimes wander into a "physics based" concept of magic which creates some confusion.

NOTE: I absolutely agree with the logic of the arguments people are making - I just think that isn't how the rules were meant to be understood, and that part of the confusion is that "someone got physics in my magic!" in the rules.

I have no problem with magic allowing weird stuff which breaks physics provided its self contained. It's once it's outside that then the problem starts. If the spell bends light then light is bent. If the spell creates fire then things burn. If the spell moves things then we need to know how fast. We don't need to know how the light is bent, where the fuel required for incandescent flames comes from or anything about the motive force.

Mind you, I also break at "machines are hard to fool". Machines are easy to fool, unless they've got AI. ::shrugs:: The rules and fluff do not mesh. The fluff is more fun than the rules.

Even then they're easy to fool if you give them the right data which to a human is clearly bullshit. The reason the AI doesn't know its bullshit is because the human is unable to methodically quantify WHY its bullshit.

But that's the opposite of self contained. In the case of illusions, that's a semi-permanent, very real alteration based on physical laws that impact anything anywhere that comes into contact with it. My argument is that illusions aren't physical light being bent (despite some unfortunate lines in the text), but rather the temporary alteration of reality for targeted individuals/objects. If they WERE light being bent, then the entire illusion system has to go. It fails.

As for fire, the fire created by magic is "real" but limited in how it can interact with the world. Now the change to the physical world it creates (like the burned skin on my face OH GAWD THE PAIN) is VERY real and on-going process of burning that it begins IS real. The fire from the spell is just a temporary alteration of local physics.



Again, you're coming at this from physics rather than magic. It is hard to "break" reality for a machine because they are SO founded in reality. It is easy to break reality for a living creature (a magical being by nature in SR). "Fooling" a machine is just a side effect of the succesful alteration of what is real.



Human: A dog smoking a cigarette? What the hell? Send a team down there!
Computer: Logging dog smoking cigarette in C:\Logs\Security\Archives\Log.sgh

Spells table on Street Magic, Pag. 189.
It states Levitate as a Success Test spell, but don't mention (OR), that would mean Object Resistence.



...and, ignore the spell description.

If I have a machine that senses the world around it with touch sensors and stick it in a maze it can and will eventually find the way out (given successful maze solving software).

But if I start poking it with a stick I'm fooling its sensors into thinking that there is a wall somewhere where there is NOT a wall and in so doing I can actually make the program fail to find an exit. Now. If a spell were used to simulate the stick, how real does that stick have to be? Not very, all you need to do is cause an electrical impulse in the touch sensor long enough to get the bot to turn around. There are in fact, several spells in ShadowRun (not all of which are illusions!) that could cause this effect, some require OR and some do not (fling for example could be used to fling a small rock at the sensor, which if not properly calibrated to ignore pressures that last very short durations, say 1/10th of a second then the flung rock will trigger the program's incorrect behavior).

Expanding this to an optic sensor is no more complex than expanding a maze from 2 dimensions to 3, but requires a sustained output of illusionary visuals capable of being detected (e.g. Improved Invisibility not just Invisibility, as Invis isn't light-altering, but mind-altering).

In pre-SR4 times, few people took on the role of Decker or Rigger because of complex rules, so the SR4 developers lumped the two roles together, irrespective of their compatibility.

That not only didn't answer the question, but the rules are still terribly complex such that no one wants to play them.

Making the number of hits now needed to reliably fool a good camera now what exactly?
Somewhere around 8...

Use the old OR, not the new (and Clearsight is rolled). Or you can oppose the casting with a Sensor Rating + Clearsight roll.

Which makes far more sense, and anyone who argues OR thresholds in this case is only proving my point.