[X] My Assistant

[Shrike30]

Some guy parked on top of a building a few hundred meters away with a scoped Panther just has to wait for you to come out of your house. Don't like leaving your home? Paranoid as hell? They could just booby-trap your exits the same way you booby-trapped your entrances.

All the bad guys have to do is park a few of those Smart Weapon Mounts nearby in concealed positions with ruthenium "blinds" placed over them. Mount an LAW and a good camera on each. Set them up watching your doors, your windows, your various exits. Get down into the sewers below and cover the rest of the exits. Total cost for the drones and the weapons will be in the low tens of thousands, but if you're a runner who's got his whole Urban Fortress thing going on, you're high-enough profile that you may be worth it. And hey, most of them are going to be reusable when they're done. Get a couple of riggers monitoring everything on a hardwired or LOS connection, then call the guy's contacts up and say "Hey, I hear there's a bunch of AZT guys rolling on X's house... you might want to tell him to keep low."

If the runner bails out of the house, you thump him. If he stays inside, you starve him out (or wait till you catch movement and fire an AV rocket through the wall).

I don't care what you've made your little urban fortress out of, concentrated application of missiles or autocannon fire is going to put a hole in it. Shadowrunners survive by being able to get the fuck outta Dodge, not by being able to stay inside their castle and laugh at the silly corpers outside.

Honestly, you harden your house too much, you know what happens? The corp pays 5k :nuyen: for some ork-hating UCAS flyboy to have a "training accident" while he's on exercises over the Barrens involving a 500 kilo JDAM, with guaranteed protection in the form of a little hacking on the inventory computers. "No, see, you had a drop tank installed there. I ditched it over Lake Washington after the dogfight drill because it was rattling and I was worried about damage to the airframe." Your kill team on the ground gets a drone up in the air and parks a laser designator on the roof of your fortress, and boom... half a ton of Comp-OMG turns your home into a "gas main leak" on the evening news.

[PBTHHHHT]

Shrike, shush it, you'll shatter their fantasies.

[Nim]

Hmm. You know, that raises another question for me.

Obviously, the BEST defense when you've horked off a corp enough for them to send heavy-weapons teams to go all Trading Spaces ("You renovated our secure facility - now it's our turn!") on your hip, heavily-defended Low Lifestyle pad is...to let them think they've killed you. Merely escape, and they may just keep looking.

So, what're the obstacles to faking your own death, when the opposition has 2070 SOTA technology and some skilled magicians?

[PBTHHHHT]

Don't leave any traces of your dna for them to analyze. Oh, maybe have corpse you keep in your place (my, my remember to keep the smell to a minimum...) having your height and adjust their dental record/cyber/bioware to be the same as yours. So when they do the massive strike on your place (and hopefully you're not there and managed to escape), they'll find a crisp corpse that matches your features and flag it as mission accomplished.

[Nim]

Well, if you're going to leave a corpse, it may as well be YOUR corpse. Doesn't have to be intact, if you can guarantee the building will go up...say, because you rigged it yourself for if things got really hairy. At that point, just having an arm or something is enough if it matches your fingerprints, ware, and DNA. But what tests would they run on it if they were skeptical?

They could have a spirit Search for you. Legit cloning places would probably be required to include some sort of genetic tag so that a DNA test would reveal cloned material, but shadow clinics would just ignore that. Hmm.

[PBTHHHHT]

Heh, I was thinking about that too, ya beat me to it. I had forgotten about cloning technology in shadowrun. yeah, forget the corpse of another, use your own corpse. Hehe.

As for the spirit search. Well, I guess holing up in a warded area for a while till the heat passes might help. If you're a mage maybe it's time to initiate and change your astral signature.

[MikeTrevin]

Someone said weird and whacky ideas. So, here we go, weird and whacky.

-Paint the walls with ruthenium!

No, seriously. Hook them all up into a computer somewhere, and give it the ability to playback odd images. A shadow of someone who isn't there. Make it look like the house is upside down (with pictures of desks and chairs on the walls, but situated so that they're on the 'ceiling'.) Heck, even swirling psychodelic colors designed to give someone a vicious headache.

Before you laugh, some warships in history were painted in confusing patterns- still gray/black/etc., but made to make it difficult for an observer to tell their initial heading.

-Dual duty lights

Get some, buy some, make some- whatever. However, the set up is this; you have lights in your house. Nice, normal lights. Set them up so that you can trigger them to crank the brightness into the Staring at the Sun From Two Feet Away range, and -keep- it there. Or set them to strobe in a nice, nauseating unsteady pattern. While badguys are bewildered and flailing, make good your escape.

-Legitimate Security

Wait, what? Well, you've got a superwhamadyne fake SIN. Put it to use. Buy an actual, real, honest-to-goodness security contract for your house, complete with a Brinks (or whatever) build in security alarm system!

-Treehouse

Oh come -on-. Everyone knows a treehouse is the ultimate in home security, all by itself. Hell, -my- parents never wanted to climb up just to make me take out the trash after I'd pulled up the rope ladder and was pretending to be asleep.

Man, life as a little kid was awesome. More awesome than college is right now. Uh, back on topic.

-Sewer Life

Lifestyle is part where you live, part how you keep it up. What's stopping you from going Ninja Turtle style and setting up a sweet living area in some abandoned part of the sewers? Sure, nothing's going to get rid of that smell, I'll grant you that. But now someone has to travel through potentially confusing tunnels to get to you, and if you're smart, you yourself have mapped the place out so thoroughly that it'll take twenty-plus guys just to cover all the exits!

I'm inclined to believe the corps are not in the habit of sending out 20 man teams just because of you. If they are... might wanna choke back the profile on the kinds of jobs you take and the type of things you do, chummer.

-Vietnam style

Another take on the sewer life, living in tunnels. Sometimes the most effective traps are the unsophisticated ones. Sure, chummer down underground is looking all over for pressure plates, cameras- but is he looking for the monotripwire? Or even a normal tripwire, with a grenade on one end. Or how about that pit you dug several weeks ago and stuck spikes in, defecated over, and then covered with debris? Sure, it'll -stink- and there will be flies, but that's all over in the sewers. When he finds it with his (probably) unarmored foot and the spikes go through, not only is he hurt- now he's got a really high risk of infection!

Admittedly, if that doesn't earn you notoriety points or the ridicule of your friends, you might want to reconsider your position in life.

[nezumi]

[Geekkake]

[Kyoto Kid]

[nezumi]

I had thought of that :) The difference here is you're not given any background about what's going to happen (the house is going to get destroyed, preferably with you in it), where you are, who you're a clone of, who is trying to kill you, etc. Presumably eventually the clone catches up to the original, kills him and successfully plays the doppleganger.

[PBTHHHHT]

*insert ominous sound* dum dum duuuummm!

It sounds like an interesting twist. Next time a player chooses amnesia you can punish them with this. They have to find out who their 'original' is and they get to decide if they want to take over their originals life or vice versa, or whatever else you can put into the twist.

[hyzmarca]

Shutters for the windows. Armored Shutters that look like vertical blinds when open and art when closed. Grenade sumps. Never underestimate the usefulness of grenade sumps. Also, some air tight container for tear gas is very useful.

The best defense is to not make enemies. Don't attack Megacorps. Don't go insane with firepower. And only prey on those who will not be missed unless you can make it look like an accident.

Magicians have many useful options that mundanes do not have. Spirits make decent guards. If you can't get one then get a trained hellhound instead. Fire breath is elemental damage.

For ultimate safety the best home is a mobile home. Sure, living in an RV or a semi-trailor may not give you much space but you can't beat it for convience. A house boat works, as well, but they're more difficult to fit through the drive-in window. For the ultimate in mobility use an airship.

[Dender]

ok, currently i have an impenitrable defense for my character

step one: live in aurora, a wireless free lotek zone
step two: be a large troll known to decapitate people
step 3: ...
step 4: profit

[Shrike30]

See, the problem with that one is that you are now competing with the 2845 other large trolls known to decapitate people living on Aurora.

Aurora, by the way, is an arterial, not a neighborhood per se... you don't live in it, you live on it or near it. It runs north from the Battery Street Tunnel (downtown Seattle) to Shoreline (8 miles north), and beyond.

[stevebugge]

[Shrike30]

Ya know, I didn't even know that existed :P

[MikeTrevin]

Aurora's a wireless free lotek zone in 2070?

That's a bummer. This does not bode well for my Fort Collins ( No, I have -no clue- what the layout of Denver is like in 2070. I can tell you how to get to most of the tourist traps in 2006, tho. )