Dragon challenge, Taking down a dragon, SR4 style Options

[Ravor]

Well assuming that I didn't mess up my equation, I come up with 949 DV, doubled to 1898 DV for the purposes of getting past Barriers, and -1/2 AP since the explosion will be in contact with the lair. Blast Value is -2 DV per meter or -1 DV per meter for a 60 degree arc.

So exactly how much hardening can 2 million :nuyen: buy? :cyber:


As for the NOVA-hot Deckers, well long they live afterwards all depends on how good of a job they do and the quality of their new faces, but hey, the dragon would be dead. 8)

[Crusher Bob]

Well, here's my rough team proposal:

Conjurer
The dragon can undoubtedly have a large pack of high force spirits on call, this spirit pack is probably powerful enough to force a TPK (due to the overpoweredness of high force spirits in SR4). So the team will need a specialist conjurer who can summon and bind his own high force spirit pack to force a stalemate.

Hacker Adept
Pornomancer Adept
The more info the team has going in, the safer they will be, there are plenty of ways that fixed defenses could result in a quick TPK, so finding out about them before hand is a must.

Anti-mage
Focus on things like mana-static, counterspelling, etc. His main job is to shut down the dragon's magic.

Drone rigger
The dragon will also have whatever karma manipulation powers they've given dragons in SR4. As SR4 has neither nethermancers or horror-stalkers, your best best is to attack the dragon with things that don't have karma to meddle with.

Weapons specialist/Demo expert
Getting into the lair may involve blowing big holes in things or defusing bombs, the demo expert is here for this.

So, the rough plan is to negate the dragon's spirit pack with the conjurer, shut down its magical abilities with the anti-mage, and then use drones to kill it and bypass its karma manipulation abilities.

Are there any quick ways to raise background counts beyond mass suicide/mass murder?

Are there any simple ways to give the dragon penalties?
Do dragons have any radar like senses?
Thermal smoke + ultrasound?
Timed light and sound attacks automatically filtered out by the team's helmets (who have the timing keys)?

Are dragons immune to poisons in this version of SR?

What drone based weapons will do the best job against the dragon? (No wallhacker bulldozers with mechanicals arms and spurs, please).

[kzt]

Hmm, my numbers are less, but I see that I blew numbers on the one-ton charges in bulldogs, as they do 96 point explosions, which will take out any RAW legal obstacle.

I get 60,000 kg, square root of which is ~245, x 3 per kg.

[Ravor]

Yeah, I get 735 DV for Commercial as well, I was running the numbers for ( Rating 15 ) Plastic/Foam.

1,500 :nuyen: per kilogram allow for 4,000 kilograms.

Square Root 63.245553 * 15 = 948.68329 rounded up to 949 DV before taking into account skill.

[Talia Invierno]

(You're really going to hate my first and primary defensive tactic :spin: )

[kzt]

Not being home?

[Talia Invierno]

[Ravor]

*Shrugs* With ~949 DV to blow I'm sure that I could skimp a little on the explosives to afford the surgery necessary to have one or two of the team outfited with the ware and natural genius necessary to give themselves Logic 10 and I'd ask them what glaring hole I need to plug in my plan. :cyber:

*Edit*

Because remember that Dragons may be smarter then I'll ever be on my own, but I don't have a problem with cutting open my brain to change that. :cyber:

[Talia Invierno]

Does that qualify as dry irony, or sarcasm?

[Jaid]

i'm just having a really hard time seeing how the dragon's magical abilities can be used to set up much in the way of traps.

i mean, the dragon is limited to what it can sustain, since we've been told it doesn't have access to any sort of focus (no karma to bond it) and that it doesn't have access to any metamagic (so no quickening, no anchoring).

of course, to keep things reasonable, the team shouldn't really know in advance that this particular dragon has no access to those things, but just as an example...

[Ravor]

How about dry irony with a sprinkling of sarcasm for flavor? ;)

Seriously though part of the problem with this little experiment is that Shadowrun is basically just a game of "Rock/Paper/Scissors" everything counters one thing only to be countered by somthing else, if you were to post the dragon's 2 million :nuyen: lair then everyone could bust it wide open, and the same applies with the plans that we post.

[Tarantula]

Hows this, drone rigger sends in fleet of spider bots, who scout the whole place out. Being that the dragons lair is wireless ignorant, this should work out quite well to give an exact layout of the entire place.

[Talia Invierno]

Ravor: you know that posting the entire lair and plans would completely take the challenge out of it.

If it helps at all, I'll tell you a RL story of my own gaming group -- who was getting utterly frustrated with my ability to neutralise their plans within a single turn or two. Okay, I told them, I'll go for a nice, hour-long walk while you plan. That way I can't possibly know what you're going to do. (I already knew what tactics I planned to use then, like I do now.)

They actually shooed me away from the planning twice, and an hour-long checking of miscellaneous used bookstores turned into two hours.

Finally I was allowed to come back. They'd worked everything out. Much mutual laughter and shushing and hush hush.

They'd marked their positions on a dry-erase board in the store's gameroom. I didn't look at the details on the board, only at the #s and distribution of people. Then I cast the barrier spell across the corner I'd planned all along, blocking off the person in the corner.

When they started cursing, I discovered just who it was I had trapped -- and that all the rest of their plans had depended on that person being free to act, on the other side of that barrier.

... and now I've given you some strong insight into the way I think. :) (It's more than you would get from the dragon.)

[Tarantula]

Fine, make the node that controls thor shots, I'll give my technomancer 200 karma worth, and we'll see if he can make it thor the lair. Then he'll retire with his millions.

[Talia Invierno]

That one I'm going to shop out, maybe to another thread. I know my limitations, and in any case the dragon wouldn't have designed it and won't be able to interfere, assuming it's a cold run without having been researched out in advance.

(That means, to whoever's designing it, that money probably is no object in building it. It doesn't have the dragon's limitations in this scenario. It should probably have several active anti-hackers active in it as well.)

If that's the route you want to go, then we need someone to develop something worthy of what's being guarded. Any volunteers?

[Ravor]

Yeah, that's basically my point, if you post the lair then anyone could crack it, just as anyone could counter whatever plans we come up with on the forum. However I seriously doubt that you are going to get any takers to actually go through and build six 400 BP 200 Karma 1 Million :nuyen: runners for what amounts to a throw-away thought experiment. And even if you did the result wouldn't even remotely resemble a runner team that was organicly grown so in the end it would really be meaningless anyways.

Still with that said I have a very hard time believing that 2 million :nuyen: worth of hardening could defend against a -1/2 AP 1,898 (Against Barriers) DV bomb, which although completely unrealistic is well within the bounds of your wargame rules. (Personally I still like the idea of using NOVA-hot Deckers to hack a couple of missiles into the lair and spending some of that 6 million :nuyen: on new faces and SINs.)

Then the challenge becomes getting the 4,000 kilograms to the lair and protecting it from premature detonation from whatever spirits the dragon summons as well as whatever booby traps it has set up as a defense. Not a trival task by any means, so I'd have to settle for a slightly smaller bomb, but even so with the raw destructive power we are talking about if I get my bomb to the lair then I don't see how the dragon lives with a measly 2 million :nuyen: worth of defenses (After all, not all of that 2 million :nuyen: can really be spent on hardening if you want to cover your other bases.) and a small lair as you've stated.

[Crusher Bob]

Well, the first step will be determining how far out the lair's security perimeter extends and what the standard reactions are to incursions on that perimeter.

Probes would be both drone based and magical in nature. The first probes would basically be made with throw-away mini-blimps flying by in a 'just passing through' flight profile. Ground based astral perception will keep and eye on the drones to see if they are approached by spirits, hit by spells etc. If the throw away drones drones aren't bothered (fly enough throw-away flights to establish an apparent pattern) then drones with actual (expensive) surveillance equipment then fly the same flight plan. Looking for things like: are there any hot or cold spots (tunnels, air vents, generators, etc)? Are there any animals in the area (packs of hell hounds, similar beasties)? Additional EW scans look for things like active jammers, radar emissions, etc. Are there regular deliveries? (food? magazines? sacrificial victims? ;) )

The astral probes will be done by a hired mage (since I'm not sure if the dragon is supposed to know who the runners are or not. Are they motivated by some sort of grudge? Is the dragon aware of this? Or are the runners just faceless guys hired to whack the dragon for a big pile of money?) The hired mage can be fed some line about 'learning from the magic of dragons' so that if he gets mind probed, it's not obviously a plan to whack the dragon. Ground based astral guys keep watch on the guy in the air, so that if he is hit with mind control, alter memory, or something like that the guys on the ground will spot it. So the astral mages files around at X miles from the lair watching, the ground based guys are roughly 2X miles away from the lair, watching the mage in the air.

Are there wards? active AOE spells? Patrolling spirits? Mind controlled spy squirrels? Power sites? Background counts?

The next step might be using some of the worm-like drones (see the pdf I posed above) to plant microphones and other sensors in the area. Will take some experimentation first... Can patrolling spirits spot the worms? Stuff like that.

[Crusher Bob]

The 'lair carved out of rock' I posed above can easily be strong enough to resist such a device detonated on the surface. Assuming your bomb is only around 4 tons of explosives. The ground penetrating munitions work because they penetrate deep into the earth before blowing up (or use several explosions to dig the hole, or whatever other neat things DARPA has though of in the past 70 years).

Of course, getting a truck full of explosives inside the lair might do the job, but a really good design might be resistant to even that. Especially since the dragon probably has enough magic not to need to breathe for a long time.

[Ravor]

Sure, but with 400 BP and 200 Karma it's not all that hard for a mage to have learned Arcana and researched "Shape Anything" to use as a poor man's bunker buster. :cyber:

[Talia Invierno]

Edit: to add the link to the Creating a THOR node thread.

[Crusher Bob]

Yes, but the mage can only effect a 6? meter (is that radius or diameter) sphere at the time, so you'd need a couple of castings to get a deep enough hole. Then you'd have to get all the explosives down the hole. Then, for maximum effect, you'd have to re-shape the rock back over the hole. So the whole operations is likely to take several minutes, at least.

Of course, 4 tons of explosives going off buried deep underground is going to be pretty impressive.

[Magus]

Just get a Super Face adept initiate with maxed out Kinsethics to Negotiate the dragon to come out. I mean hell how much initiation for 200 KP can you get with group bonus? Max out his magic/PP with max improved skill Negotiations and Max Kinsethics. Hell with that alone with the Social Skill RAW you can convince the dragon to step outside and go to sleep for christ's sake. Then have it lay down on the bunker buster bomb that is buried right outside, detonate bomb. No more dragon. No out of the box dragon is going to out talk an adept elven face with First Impression, Imp Neg/Con Kinsethics (sp?).

[Crusher Bob]

We are avoiding 'reasonable' gimmicks like hijacked planes, bunker busting bombs, and so on. This means we are avoiding unreasonable gimmicks such as wallhackers and pornomancy as well. :)

[Magus]

My Social Adept IS reasonable and completely RAW. Can I help it if I can drop some 30+ dice on negotiation/con tests vs. Dragons Willpower or Chrarisma only? Plus or minus 3-5 dice for social mods? This is reasonable. All of the hypothesis put forth are reasonable. Hell This SA could bribe anyone for anything with 12M and get away with it scott free. SO it is totally reasonale Bob. :) I love the social adept elven face. I can just about break any RAW Missions/Game I put it in.

[Tarantula]

As to the 'reasonable' gimmicks, why don't we get them if the dragon gets a reasonable gimmic of a bunkered lair.

You can initiate with groups and ordeals: 5 times for initiations and magic both, for a total cost of 182 karma. To go to 12 takes 229.
Initiations:
1: 13 * .6 = 7.8 = 8
2: 14 * .6 = 8.4 = 9
3: 15 * .6 = 9 = 9
4: 16 * .6 = 9.6 = 10
5: 17 * .6 = 10.2 = 11
Karma: 47
6: 18 * .6 = 10.8 = 11
Karma: 58
Magic:
7: 21
8: 24
9: 27
10: 30
11: 33
Karma: 135
12: 36
Karma: 171