Threaded stealth and spiders Options

[sunnyside]

Alright I was poking around the old threads here on technomancers.

Generally people seemed to think that they started off weak. This doesn't make sense to me. While they are short on starting progs and may have to thread some from scratch, some programs are "lynchpins" ,if you will, to hacking. Specifically stealth.

A starting hacker is limited to rating 5 stealth. So if an opposing system can throw 12+ dice they have to start sweating even if they're taking their time and probing. And getting admin access on the fly gets risky really fast. You can't even spend edge to mess up the systems roll. You just have to wait while your GM relishes taking out die after die to throw at you all the while glancing at their notes for the IC in the system.

However a starting technomancer should be able to thread their stealth up to 8-10 and quite possibly not take any damage for 8's or 9's. And if they really want to pull something off they can spend edge to get that 10.

Anyway the point is if they've got solid hacking and exploit, and a high stealth they can break into systems undetected that would be highly likely to catch a hacker. (for example if they're trying to probe into a system with everthing at rating 9 a hacker will get caught ~80% of the time, while the technomancer will only get caught ~4% of the time)

Anyway so the flip side of that is wondering how a technomancer could be stopped. And hence the spider question. How do you use them in your games? Would it be reasonable that in a high security system there would be multiple spiders(or always active IC I guess) just checking out anything and everything all the time. So as soon as you get inside you start having to roll opposed tests. Even with a larger die pool someone will run out of luck after enough opposed tests.