Forensics, Background Count, Astral Signatures, and Magic, some underexplored areas of the rules Options Track this topic Email this topic Print this topic Download this topic Subscribe to this forum Display Modes Outline Switch to: Standard Switch to: Linear+

[Kagetenshi]

So I got thinking about Background Count and how it's supposed to be more or less pervasive in Seattle and other cities (causes include "lack of or destruction of nature", "environmental pollution", "natural death or homicide", "mind-numbing monotony and banality", and other things you'd expect to be a constant part of daily life in the city. Furthermore, a simple gathering of the Awakened is also indicated as causing Background Count. This is well-known to be canon, but in my experience at least it's almost never actually played this way; my theory is that by tucking Background Count into a supplement rather than putting it in the core book, an expectation was created that no Background Count is the overwhelming default state. You can see this issue at play elsewhere where important rules that aren't unambiguously good for the players are tucked away in supplements; the base book creates the assumption that vehicles do not require upkeep, creating resentment when new costs suddenly appear. Likewise with Stress Points; they're a "gotcha", not part of what players figured on when they first read the core book.

Anyway, enough digression on the horrible organization of Shadowrun. I was posting on the SR3R forum about giving Background Count a more prominent place in the book when I realized that there was an opportunity to go further; previously, when I thought about "magical forensics", the things that came to mind were utility spells like Catalog, Detect (Object), maybe things like that, plus the whole Assensing-magical-signature thing. Temporary background count, however, brings a whole new dimension to this—you don't need to leave physical evidence behind, nor do you have to have cast a spell, simply the act of having killed someone will leave a temporary stain on the Astral. This stain leaks less information than an astral signature, but it can't be erased without either time or a metamagic (said metamagic, incidentally, becomes genuinely useful now instead of something to take so you can feel good about roleplaying your eco-shaman whose goal is the purification of the world).

This brings me to another issue, which is the fact that we lack detailed Forensics rules (I don't have the Lone Star Sourcebook, so that might help significantly). Note that this isn't just about playing cop campaigns or rolling dice to decide if the players get caught—it's also about figuring out what the players need to do to not get caught, and I think it enhances the feeling of the game if a character with the proper Knowledge Skill can give specific advice with confidence springing from actual knowledge of how the world works (that is, the rules).

Jumping back to Background Count again, I also feel that if it's going to be pervasive it should be more interesting. Right now, minimal tactics are involved—you simply take your TN and Drain penalty and shift your choice of spells. It might be more interesting if a caster were able to choose between the TN penalty or the Drain penalty (a caster who doesn't know they're in an area with Background Count automatically chooses TN penalty), allowing them to push themselves in exchange for greater risk—alternately, maybe a weak version of Filtering could be available, allowing a mage to use a skill and an extended casting time to counter either the Drain or TN penalty (the advantage of the metamagic would be that it could counter both—I haven't weighed that to see if it's enough of an edge, especially since Filtering requires Centering meaning you need at minimum two Initiations, and probably more like four to get Centering and Masking first).

I don't know how applicable these issues are to SR4, but I think some of these ideas could be profitably applied to a game running SR3 even if it doesn't adopt other SR3R alterations, so I'm posting these ideas here for feedback. If I get time and community assistance, I might try to flesh some of them out into real rules.

~J