Most of a corporations paramilitary assets would be sold/leased to various governments, as they'd be to destructive and bad PR for guard duty and to expensive to sit around doing nothing.

If these numbers were complete and valid, then you could make a reasonably strong case that the return on investment for these extra security measures is insufficient to recommend their inclusion. However, the numbers given are neither complete nor valid. That's not to say you're not making a very good point: there is some expenditure on security which, even including externalities, is greater than the projected benefit of that expenditure. You have to be complete - catching bad guys saves you money in more ways than just getting back the drone! - and you have to be careful, but these are exactly the calculations corporations would be doing. As GMs, it's usually not necessary to be that detailed, but the principle is very important, nevertheless.


If deterrence worked completely, maybe. But no one expects deterrence to be 100 percent successful! Locks aren't 100 percent successful, but that doesn't mean we should throw out all the locks: the deterrence of a locked door is sufficient to prevent theft in enough cases to make locks worthwhile. Car alarms aren't 100 percent successful, and most do nothing but passively deter: they can't call the police or shut the car off, they can just beep. And yet, provided the cost of the system is low enough, they're perfectly rational.

Put another way: if deterrence didn't actually work, we'd have a lot more people in prison.


I think you're completely correct. The question now appears to be whether corporations would bother to take even inexpensive hidden anti-theft measures, since anti-theft measures aren't always effective. My view is that you had it exactly right: there will be a cost too great to spend on such devices, a point at which there is insufficient return on the investment. Security systems shouldn't cost more than they'll save. Conversely, if a security measure can save more than it costs, clearly corporations - unless there's some other extenuating circumstance - will pursue it. Many people make this calculation naively, but it's important to consider both the indirect costs and indirect benefits of anti-theft systems. If the anti-theft device aids you in recovering the drones and catching the people who infiltrated your corporate security, you've saved much more than simply the purchase price of a drone, for instance.

Some thoughts:

* You don't need 27 dice to get 9 successes on an Analyze Device spell; you just need to try often enough.

* Time-delay traps can also be studied when you put the drone in a controlled environment. Put some sensors of your own in the drone, and wait for it to do something funny; you'll be able to narrow down where and when it started.

* I'm sure megacorps study each others' drones; steal those files, and you might already be done (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

* Take a drone apart, and study which parts behave oddly after a while. Maybe only a few parts have bugs in them; all the clean parts can be sold on the black market.

Reverse engineering this kind of booby-trapping is perfectly within the reach of the mid-level tech-savvy criminal. One more issue:

* Every time the booby-trap goes off, another criminal learns that it exists. Criminal hackers swap stories and trade secrets; word gets out about the booby-trap. Secrecy or Scale: choose.



Booby-traps are good either for keeping down drone theft by street thieves (simple traps), or for special occasion attempts to catch particular riggers that have been a thorn in your side.

Depends on what you find it might depend a lot on how close you were standing and how good your docwagon contract is. And who investigates this.

We've been over this before;
* Explosives (quantities) that do serious damage cannot be concealed from good scans.
* This problem would be known; it's exceedingly unlikely that the PCs are the very first this has happened to. Research the drones you're poaching on the matrix beforehand.
* "Controlled environment" isn't the back of your car; it's a safe building, with solid walls that block both explosions (just to be sure) and signals.
* Drones that explode when they're jammed are a manager's execution waiting to happen; therefore they don't really exist. At worst they have a time delay the builders believed was reasonable.


How to do it even better though?
* Monitor the signals the drone normally receives; replicate them to see just which ones are important (Scan, Spoof) or:
* Use drone mechanics to dismember the drone, and put in-between boxes between all the separate components; now you can monitor what all the subsystems do. You can replace parts of the captured drone with virtual copies, to see how the parts behave and how they authenticate each other.
* Once the booby-trap triggers, run it in a virtual machine and observe it; learn how to deal with it.

If it consists of a dozen distributed parts, just zap/replace a few crucial parts, and you have a fine new drone (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Booby trapping a drone in such a way that it explodes and kills a thief would also constitute murder, especially if it does something nasty like start a fire and burn down a square block or to. Especially a problem if the trap goes off in someone territory of another entity.

Say your Ares and your security drone is stolen. Its booby trap goes off and sets fire to a district owned by Aztechology(where the runners had a hideout). Sure you killed one or two of the thieves but Aztech investigates the fire, traces it back to an Ares made drone and gets to sue for a few billion nuyen because the booby trap damaged their corporate property. Especially bad if the other corp knows about the bobby trap and decided to use it against you.

Say Aztech hires the runners to steal one security drone and some other material (the cover) from Ares. The runners deliver the drone to the determined location. Ares's booby trap goes off and damages Aztech property and personal. Ares must now pay for the damages and they suffer a stock hit when word gets out their booby trap ended up hurting innocent people.

These destructive booby traps some of you speak of could easily cost millions to billions of dollars in resulting lawsuits should the trap harm anyone not involved in the theft.

Probably not, as the stolen goods are probably with the Johnson that hired the team to obtain them...

Keep the Faith

I asked someone about this earlier, but I don't think it was ever clarified. Could you please explain how this works?


Stealing those files would make an excellent Shadowrun on its own! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) That's the kind of detail I really enjoy in games. The GM could tell me, "The drone has an Anti-Theft System, Rating 4. Roll your Electronics skill. 5 hits? The drone beeps, and is now yours." But I'd enjoy it more if the GM told me, "You've heard rumors that the facility you want to hit has recently upgraded to the new r.03 models. Word is, they have some kind of built-in hacking ghost, a hidden Agent.* Good news: that runner team you tangled with in Ceylon last year nabbed a couple r.03 drones from an Ares smart tire plant in Cleveland, so you could save yourself some grief taking the data from them if you want."


I think that's about exactly right. Any door can be unlocked by the right people with the right amount of resources. The trick isn't to make yourself perfectly secure, it's to achieve the optimum security for your level of resources.

*I thought this idea sounded familiar, and recently I remembered why, in the process exposing two possible ways an adventure with a device such as the Hidden Agent could work: they're both episodes of Stargate. SG-1's "Entity," [04x20] and Atlantis' "The Intruder," [02x02].

It's called 'luck.' Just because each die only has a 1-in-3 chance of scoring a hit doesn't mean it's only possible for one-in-three dice to roll a hit. Which, you know, is the entire point of using dice in a game like this.

Clearly I'm just being obtuse - I can tell from your tone - but I still don't understand how persistence helps in this case. Could you clarify, perhaps with an example?

I'm just agreeing that you don't need 27 dice to score 9 successes. Dumb luck can handle it, as can the use of Edge.

There's also nothing in the rules that I'm aware of that states that the magician cannot tell when he's failed to cast a Detection spell as opposed to getting erroneous information. A Success Test is taking place in this example, not an Opposed Test. Therefore the magician should be able to tell that his spell didn't work and could retry if he so desired.

Okay. Could you give me an example?

Dr. Funkenstein rolls 9 dice: 5 6 5 6 6 6 5 6 5.

Hey, look at that! Nine hits!

I appreciate all your help, Doc, but I think I'm going to go ahead and wait for someone else to answer the question. Thanks for all your efforts.

Maybe this will help a bit 3278...

The standard wisdom is that to guarantee an average of 9 hits, you would need to roll 27 dice... thoguh this may be standard wisdom, I do not subscribe to this theory much...

Take your standard mage with 14 dice to cast an Analyze Device spell and an edge of 3...
Now, it is possible thast he can roll the requisite 9 hits with just his 14 dice alone, though statistically not likely very often (though I have seen stranger things in the game)... he could also just use edge to reroll any failures to compensate for any non-hits that are generated in the test originally... this has a greater degre of succeeding, of course, but may not get you what you are looking for (Those requisite 9 hits)... if using those edge dice prior to the roll, you roll 17 dice and re-roll any 6's... the odds are greater that you will succeed, but still not guaranteed...

Now, try that series of rolls 3 seperate times (that 3 edged remember), with 3 seperate dice pools of the same magnitude and you will probably succeed... you have rolled the test multiple times because the previous rolls did not get you what you wanted...

However, if that fails, you may still need to roll the DP more times to actually make the success you need... rolling those 14 dice over and over again is a valid way to pursue that target Threshold, though it is often tedious and painstaking, but you may indeed get lucky eventually and roll those required successes on 14 dice... However, I would subscribe to the diminishing returns theory at that point and penalize your dice pools if you insisted on continuing to pursue something that you have continuously failed to accomplish with previous rolls... use whatever logic at that point you wish... diminishing attention span, fatigue, whatever... the reality of the situation is that you will eventually succeed at the test, but is that really reality?

I see it as a great big waste of time... think of real life... you try to detect something and you fail, so you do it again, and again, and again, and again, etcetera, etcetra, etcetra... At what point do you just stop? At what point do you decide that there is actually nothing to find? Unfortunately, the gaming mechanics don't fit with common sense in a lot of these cases, and there are Players that will tend to metagame this scenario, because THEY KNOW that there must be something there, and so will continue to test until they succeed...

Allowing them to do so is a disservice to the table in my opinion... Maybe that is just me though...

Not sure If I even answered your question thoguh...

Keep the Faith

Uhm, okay. I don't know how it can get much more plain than that...

Well, you're definitely right. There is no doubt about it: if we're talking about dice math, all you need to roll nine 5s or 6s is nine dice! The question here is what circumstances are required, at minimum, to achieve 9 hits on a Detection Spellcasting Test, which is something a little more complicated than simple dice math, of course. [The broader question is what sort of mage - and by corollary, how common the criminal - has the raw ability to detect a hidden circuit inside a drone, using Analyze Device, presuming that Analyze Device can be used in such a way and that no penalties for the concealment of the circuit apply.]


Can we break down those 14 dice? Heck, let's limit the dice to 9 - the absolute minimum required - and try it that way. What makes up the die pool in this case?

...

9 dice and a lot of luck. Broken down that's Magic 5 + Spellcasting 4, or whatever other combo you want to use. Seriously, what are you having trouble grasping here?

Your base dice pool will be Magic + Spellcasting, + Specialization + POssible Mentor Bonus + Foci Bonus... as you can believe, that pool could become quite large...

The spell test must beat the OR of the object to successfully analyze... however, the only Mechanical benefit that you receive from this spell (Analyze Device) is additional bonus dice (Net Hits over OR) to apply to operating the device itself, and it removes the penalty for defaulting... it does not actually MECHANICALLY allow you to actually find anything hidden within the device itself, it only tells you how to operate it (which may allow one to bypass the securtity as if you are an original operator, sure)... Anything else would be fluff (the Analysis Part of the Spell in my opinion)...

You could definitely design such a spell, and then it would allow you to detect such things... and I might even allow it to do so with the minimum success of Object Resistance...

Hope that this helps a bit...

Keep the Faith

Basically, you have a binomial distribution (also known as Bernoulli distribution) where you have 1/3 chance of sucess (p) and 2/3 (q) of failure. Here is how you calculate the probability function: nCx * p^x * q^(n-x) where 'n' is the amount of dice and 'x' the number of sucess you want to calculate.

For a DP of 9 dice, the probability is: 0,0046411484401953%
For a DP of 14 dice, the probability is: 1,16419595475614484701618784%

That seems like a pretty comprehensive list to me. At least one of those qualities will be fixed, though, correct? In order to get the requisite minimum 9 hits, the Force of the spell will need to be 9 also, if I remember correctly. At minimum, this means an overcasting mage with a Magic of 5. Am I missing anything?


Yeah, I think the whole thing's a bit of a stretch, personally, but I'd probably allow it at my table and it works for the sake of conversation, anyway. The conversation has been really useful in changing how I think I'd respond to this, in-game, mechanically. I think I'd probably allow it, with modifiers to the required Threshold appropriate to the degree of concealment. A really good mage ought to be able, in my opinion, to do really astonishing things, and it'd be pretty lame to let them blow up cars but not be able to find hidden devices.

Yes, you would indeed need to cast the spell at a minimum of Force 9 to acquire your 9 Hits... not missing anything there...

As for the spell really needing 9 hits, I would in the end disagree... after anaylzing the effect of the spell, it is not necessary, you would just need to beat the OR of the Device...at that point, you would know exactly how to operate that machine as a native operator... therefore you would know how to avoid causing any security measures to initiate... which in the end is all you are really needing to know isn't it?

Now, going the mundane route, well then you will need an unspecified number of hits (It would be an Extended Roll, most likely, to analyze the device and then another extended roll to disarm any traps/security measure that are found by your original analysis, and you may not have actually found all of the security measures... thems the risks you take I guess...

Keep the Faith

My chief conceptual difficulties aren't statistical - I've been known to crunch a number or two - but bonus points to you for use of Bernoulli distribution, still.


That's a lot of Edge.

Indeed it is...

Keep the Faith

After a few hours of vigorous discussion perhaps they might feel like conveying this and other pertinent information to the humorless armed men? Another reason to not take everything that is not nailed down....