IT at DocWagon, Your info has been hacked: 827 times Options

[Gelare]

DocWagon contracts appear to be standard issue for Shadowrunners - a bunch of the sample characters in the core book have them, and even though there's no possible way an ambulance could get to your bleeding gutter punk in the half a minute it takes him to bleed to death under the basic rules, that can be house ruled away. But when you sign up with DocWagon they take a huge amount of information about you, most of it personal, all of it dangerous, including bloody ritual samples!

Even if we assume DocWagon is benign (an AA corp that's looking out for you? Fat chance.) what is your account keyed to? I mean, it can't be keyed to your SIN, because those contracts are annual and Shadowrunners dump fake SINs way more often than that. If they were keyed to your SIN, every fake SIN would cost an extra 5000 :nuyen: unless of course you decide to opt out of the cost-doubling medical contract. But as a non-extraterritorial corp (as far as I know - correct me if I'm wrong) DocWagon still has to worry about those little things called laws, and I'm betting doing business with SINless is frowned upon.

So as a GM, what's the best way for me to explain/handwave this? Does the same stuff apply to CrashCart? Any stuff in the older books I should be aware of?

[Stahlseele]

as i understand, it's basically just DOING BUSINESS . . they might have to answer to the laws, but if their clients don't have a sin then what would the system do against that? there's no sin to which the contract is keyed, so there's nothing for the system to tell Doc Wagon:"you've been naughty" about . . if they go to doc-wagon about why someone with a fake sin has one of their contracts, dog waggong probably just tells them:"when we checked it seemed legit enough!" . . as to why they should do that? how many clients are they going to get if they rat them out whenever their clients actually NEED their assistance?
same would apply to crash cart and bumona i'd think O.o

[mfb]

why would you regularly drop your fake SIN several times per year? most illegal stuff, you can do with no SIN at all.

higher levels of service are probably keyed to your bracelet. as long as DocWagon receives payment for the account in their database that is linked to your bracelet, they'll come rescue whoever's wearing that bracelet whenever the bracelet indicates its wearer is in trouble.

i don't actually remember reading that DocWagon takes ritual samples of its clientel, or otherwise gathers lots of non-medical data. page ref?

[knasser]

For 4th Edition cannon material, the opening chapter of Augmentation is what you want. It has quite a lot of background on medical care in 2070 including armed emergency response teams such as Docwagon. For public and private health care, you need a SIN, unless you're talking a street doc. However, just because a runner may change her SIN frequently, it doesn't mean that she can't have a SIN she keeps for her medical contract. You can juggle as many SINs as you like so long as you can remember what name to answer to on any given phone.

Incidentally, according to that chapter in Augmentation, DocWagon does have extraterritoriality for their clinics and has been known to ignore extradition requests if your contract is platinum or better.

[HappyDaze]

[kzt]

If you have a docwagon contract you are carrying around a very effective and powerful tracking device. Do you really want to do this?

[mfb]

i suppose it depends on the circles your characters run in. i tend to view things the way an average runner would look at them--a guy with no training in intel/counterintel, who came up off the street or maybe out of a corp job where such things were handled by other departments. if you get higher in the game and start getting involved in shadow politics, yeah, it pays to do stuff like dumping your IDs regularly. but the average runner is generally protected by being just another fish in the sea. it doesn't really matter if he goes on runs with a pink mohawk, because there are thousands of guys with pink mohawks just in Seattle alone. likewise, using the same ID for years at a time presents a low risk for most runners, because they're just another gutterpunk using a fake ID in a city of gutterpunks using fake IDs.

[Jack Kain]

Keep in mind its not that hard to stabilize on your own.


Its also quite possible you an trip the bracelet on your own. A rather handy trick if your wounded with out a ride and in a hostile area.
Doc Wagon doesn't answer to any one government they are a wide branching private corporation.

You could even have a special fake sin just for Doc Wagon, then If you've got cash and give a tissue sample your all done. (the tissue sample requirement is mentioned under the doc wagon contracts).
After all the contract is linked to the bracelet not your SIN.

If you've got a doc wagon bracelet they know you must have a contract no matter your identity. The bracelet is linked to your tissue sample. So even if you go through 4 dozen sins between the time you get the contract and the time its actually used what difference does it make.

Doc Wagon's not going to check your SIN after you've already submitted a tissue sample and had
the bracelet snapped on.

[Gelare]

[Karaden]

[kzt]

[Karaden]

It doesn't say that spesificly, but I'm infering it from the fact that it says '...can be activated to call for help and then act as a homing beacon for...' Which seems to indicate that it doesn't act as a beacon untill it needs to act as such.

Besides that infrance there is the fact that no runner in their right mind would ever own one otherwise because there would be insurgents that could find you easily and everything, and DocWagon would likely be willing to tip off people for the right sums, and could easily do it under the table so noone would ever figure it out.

This falls under that 'It really needs to be this way or SR quickly stops working.'

[kzt]

I always used it as an IQ test for stupid runners myself....

[Lindt]

Ones that want to stay alive.
Ill push any player with the money to get one. DW is a big enough player that what ever hardware they are using IS secure. And they have the balls to send some of their clients (aka a runner team) after anyone who decides they want to break into said hardware.

[Karaden]

Kind of pointless to have it presented in the book as something runners have and use (even giving some starting characters contracts) if that is all it is.

I understand that you (kzt) hate handwaving and seem to love having everything in SR make it impossable to play SR, but sometimes you just have to accept that SR isn't perfect.

I'd love to go off on a huge tangent here but I won't.

I'll just point out that the game is in fact a game at the end of the day, and I really doubt that they are going to put something like DocWagon in the game spesificly to try and trick players into buying tracking devices that everyone is going to use to find them.

I know I have a better point to make, but I'm too tired... for another day perhaps.

[Fortune]

I never bother with DocWagon™, because inevitably whenever you need them, you are in a location to which they will not respond.

[knasser]

I'll add three things here:

Firstly, I agree with Karaden that the Docwagon bracelet only starts transmitting when activated. The book describes the tag as

[kzt]

[Jaid]

[cx2]

As to why people don't steal docwagon bracelets there are a couple things I can imagine stopping this. I might be wrong, but I read the above quoted section of the BBB to be saying only the basic monitor is an actual bracelet with the others being implanted.

Also I seem to recall something about if the band is broken it triggers the bracelet, but even if not then removing the bracelet is comparable to flatlining really since the biomonitor suddenly ceases all feedback. Could present problems with showers but hey.

As to whether it's worth it, that is very much dependent on your game style. If you do a lot of work in the barrens where there is no extra territoriality then it might well be worth it.

[kzt]

[hyzmarca]

Docwagon is not a medical insurance company. It is an ambulance service. It makes money by transporting people who have been injured. If it doesn't transport people, it doesn't make money. The contract obliges them to pick you up and gives you a number of free transports, but after those free transports are used up they start charging you and they still come.

More importantly, Docwagon is a high-threat ambulance service with well-armed and armored personnel who are expected to extract clients from firefights. They make most of their money by extracting people from firefights. And once their clients are extracted they can extract enemy wounded and charge them for the service.

The more violent incidents a client is involved in and the larger the scale of the violence is, the more money Docwagon makes.

Lets say that a group of Shadowrunners get into a shootout with local law enforcement. One of the Shadowrunners is in injured and his Docwagon bracelet goes off. Docwagon comes in and is contractually obliged to suppress the cops using semi-lethal means and extract the runners. So, they shoot the police officers with a combination of regular ammo, gas grenades, and stick-and shock at the police officers. Many of the cops are poisoned, some are shot, and some are knocked out. The Shadowrunners get away in the ambulance. A second Dcowagon ambulance then arives to extract the wounded police officiers. For a single incident, Docwagon gets paid double, possibly more than double depending on the numerical advantage that the police have.

[Gelare]

[apollo124]

I have to disagree about the "runners aren't profitable clients for Docwagon" idea. Docwagon is not an insurance company, they are an emergency medical transport company.

Sure, Joe Sarariman who pays his premiums every year and doesn't have a bigger medical problem than a heart attack at age 35, he's just pure cash without much needed in customer service.

But Joe Runner on the other hand, maybe he got shot a couple of times last year and needed a med-evac. Mr. Runner gets charged for the ambulance ride, the EMT care while en-route, hospital care, HTR response if he needed it, death compensation if needed, etc... Sure it maybe costs Docwagon to keep the helo fired up and ready to roll, but they pass the costs on to the customer. Runners keep Docwagon in business, and business is good.

[DireRadiant]