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> A clean run?, No witnesses, noise or evidence?
Dvalin
post Dec 19 2003, 06:31 AM
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Hey folks-

I've got a bit of an interest in clean runs -- namely the sort where, in the end, the runners pull it off so very cleanly that there's doubt that a run ever took place in the first case. The question is, though, how does one allow that sort of approach often without leaving some repetitive, glaring gap in security? Ideas are most welcome, obviously.
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Yum Donuts
post Dec 19 2003, 06:35 AM
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Runs where there's no evidence there ever was a run? Easy!

first you, being night manager of the corporation, have to restock the minigun ammunition on the security drones, feed the runners' bodies to the Ghouls-In-The-Basement™ mop up what's left of the runners and replace any guards they killed with vat-cloned duplicates.
no evidence the run ever took place.
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Tanka
post Dec 19 2003, 06:39 AM
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He meant where it was successful and wasn't noticed.

Step One: Convince Security you work there. Deck in, get a pass, etc.
Step Two: Don't kill anybody!
Step Three: Do what you were assigned to do. If it's geeking somebody, arrange an "understandable mishap" to occur (Spirit with Accident?) in the building.
Step Four: Don't kill anybody!
Step Five: Have the Decker or Security Rigger in your group wipe any records of them being there, and have your Shaman/Mage wipe minds. If anything is still there physically (Paper or something), get it edited.
Step Six: Don't kill anybody!
Step Seven: Get out. Find your J, give him the proof, be done.

Oh, and, don't kill anybody!

Kill somebody and the run is toasted.
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BumsofTacoma
post Dec 19 2003, 07:35 AM
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nice job tanka.

your forgot one thing.

dont kill anybody.
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Rice Bowl
post Dec 19 2003, 07:38 AM
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A clean run?

hehehehehehehhehehehehehhehehehehehehehhehehehehehehehehhehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehhehehhehehehehehehhehehehehehehhehehehehhehehehehehehehehehhehehehe :grinbig: :rotfl: :D hehehehehehehehhehehhehehehehehehehehehhehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe

why would you want clean runs?

Players always hose up something, so let them play the consequences.
Let NPCs make (and maybe fail) their investigations about the runners and come back with a vengeance/a deal/a dragon!! Much more fun, because players know they have it coming (from everywhere, from anyone) but never know where and when!!
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Diesel
post Dec 19 2003, 07:59 AM
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If you kill one person, you have to kill them all.
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Rice Bowl
post Dec 19 2003, 08:10 AM
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QUOTE
If you kill one person, you have to kill them all.


and don't forget the others! and the family, friends, neighbors, ennemies you deprived of their vengeance, etc!!
SO good, then the chips fall and the runners whine :D
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Callidus
post Dec 19 2003, 08:15 AM
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*8-> Black Op... No witnesses *8->
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Moonstone Spider
post Dec 19 2003, 08:34 AM
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With good planning it isn't hard to pull off, though it depends on how many runners and what skills you have.

Recently I and one other player were on a fairly typical datasteal run. My character was a rigger with a drone that hard arms, and we had plans for the building. So we bought electricians outfits and electronics kits to look the part (It helped that the rigger really had electronics), and sent a drone into the sewers to cut the power line to the building. Then five minutes later we drove up, told them the power company had sent us, and that our tools detected a short on the floor we expected to find the item on. If we'd had a decker we could have pulled it off completely but the phone call to the electrical company went through and the real electricians showed up before we could escape, but the fun part was two other runners tried to steal the data so I had a drone put about 12 rounds of gel ammo in their backs, put them in a dark corner, and framed them for our misdeeds. Since my character used a tazer and the other character used stunbolts we killed nobody. Not quite perfect but pretty close.

Generally a perfect run is nearly impossible, sooner or later somebody gets a bad roll on an etiquette or stealth test and then everything's hosed.
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Dvalin
post Dec 19 2003, 10:09 AM
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Agreed on that, Moonstone -- and with you, Tanka. The runners accomplished their first run -really- smoothly -- to the point of an industrial accident frying the section of the building where any evidence would've been found, spurring an investigation of the subsidiary for gross negligence and such. ;)

And on the no body-count point: also a given. The one time my runners had to kill someone, it was because the run was already pretty much hosed -- they ended up dropping 3 guards, scrambling and failing their objective to such a degree that the fiasco was splashed on the trid news and the Johnson for the run didn't even bother making contact for post-op assessment/payment. Not exactly a happy day for future employment on their part.

Oh -- and note that I'm the fellow being the vindictive GM. ;) So the question is more for situations or security setups that allow for cleanliness, not so much specific plans. ;)
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toturi
post Dec 19 2003, 12:19 PM
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Oh, I recently played that reminded me of SR. Raven Shield - one of the missions involve sneaking into a building and planting bugs and getting out undetected.

I heard that Splinter Cell was like that too.

What I am saying is that getting in and out cleanly is a very difficult thing if the security designer has done a competent job and the guards aren't sleeping.

And sometimes killing everyone is part of the mission objective too. So in those runs you have to terminate with extreme prejudice.
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Shanshu Freeman
post Dec 19 2003, 01:25 PM
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wait wait wait - *Don't* kill anyone? Inconcievable!!
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nezumi
post Dec 19 2003, 01:39 PM
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I'd say that the 'perfect' clean run is impossible. Your presence there in any form will change SOMETHING, even if it's just the ambient heat in the room. The question isn't can you get in and out without leaving evidence, the question is can you do it without leaving evidence they can trace back to you. Fingerprints are fine if you know for a fact they won't dust the place. Convincing them you work there isn't fine if they actually keep and follow up on records of all temporary or permanent employees.

With a normal corp, I'd guess that it's impossible to pull a run without leaving any suggestion that you were there unless the run involves copying data. If you steal something, kill someone or sabotage something, you've just left a piece of evidence (something they're unlikely to pick up on, but still it IS evidence and the question is can you get away without doing that). Actually, even datasteals leave some sort of evidence. Logs, bits tweaked and what not. So maybe just photographing/copying physical documents (and planting bugs) through being sneaky.
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Tiralee
post Dec 19 2003, 02:09 PM
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QUOTE
wait wait wait - *Don't* kill anyone? Inconcievable!!


-I don't think that's what you think it means... :spin:

Clean run? Difficult, near impossible.

Depends on resources, preparation, having some friendly deckers to erase any data trail and of course, your DM screwing up the opposing forces dice rolls.

Funnily enough, the colsest thing I'd ever done was with a staritng decker character (Just threw one together to see how it went. She's a surprisingly effective character too. Must be the practise.)

She hit a lawyer's for tasty paydata, and was aided immesurably by:

1: Sweet "See me not" progs.
2: Some inspired dicing.
3: The worst series of rolls I have ever seen. I've got "rule of one" maybe 4 times (IC and Vs Character's) in a year. This night it was almost a constant.

(And before you invoke the usual "Strange dice, must burn!" superstition freakshow, these are part of my normal rollers. Figures, my totem is guiding me to a techno-pagan faith. About fragging time...)

So, may the rolls be with you.

L.
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Shadow
post Dec 19 2003, 04:54 PM
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A clean run is possible you just need my pattened SlopSuit™. Availible at Stumpshock and other fine stores.

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Jpwoo
post Dec 19 2003, 05:08 PM
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I'm going with the idea that the original poster was curious from a GM point of veiw as to how to give his players clean runs without being obvious about it. GMing a clean run can be lots of fun, bring the level of complexity of it up to the players level of planning. If they don't plan much, expect things to go haywire. The more sound planning they do the smoother things should go.

This is stage two of shadowrunning. When players start out they just want to get the job done, they kill a bunch of people and take what they want. Some bad things happen to them eventually and they decide to be sneakier. The GM at this point should give them a second set of "milk runs" jobs that are easy to get in and out cleanly, and give heaps of Karma rewards, normally I double the karma on a successfull run with no shots fired or people punched. Then make things hard again, having added a new avenue for the players to pursue. I find this makes the run a better mix of sneaking and fighting in the long run.
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Lilt
post Dec 19 2003, 05:36 PM
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I once gave my players a run that had to be done cleanly. It involved breaking in to a construction site and retreiving plans for a big corp facility that was going to be built there.

They determined that the only present awakened security were hellhounds being patrolled around the parimiter at intervals of around 5-10 minutes. The shaman managed to fly in, shapechanged as a bat, and get into the portacabin that had the plans in it through an air vent. Changed back, inserted data slug (which actually contained some form of smart frame the rival corp had whipped-up) waited a minute, removed the slug, changed back into a bat, and exited via the vent again.

That was one of my earliest runs, I think that nowadays I'd try not to give runs where only one person is capible of doing it, and only capible of doing it if noone else was present.
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Mr. Man
post Dec 19 2003, 08:28 PM
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QUOTE (Dvalin)
The question is, though, how does one allow that sort of approach often without leaving some repetitive, glaring gap in security?

Don't make being undetected a primary mission objective. At the very most make it cause for a bonus, but you may not even want to do that. This approach allows you to make the run initially look impossible to complete undetected without turning the runners away ("Sorry Mr. J, but this can't be done"). It also doesn't tip your hand to the players ("There HAVE to be security holes or the run is impossible!")

Once the runners have gotten inside the "front door" undetected (something which most runners want to do even if they're planning on raising hell) give them a subtle hint. If they follow up on this hint it will lead to the discovery of a way to go a little farther toward their goal without being detected. This "way" can be any number of things from socially engineering an NPC to causing a complete power failure. Take your characters' skills and tendencies into account when planning this and don't be afraid to improvise. Remember: The characters not only have to find the weakness, they have to properly exploit it. So if that power failure looks man-made there's a real good chance that the place will go to high alert.

If the runners figure out the stealth route, good for them. If not, allow the run to proceed as planned and (assuming they complete it) maybe events can conspire to show them what they missed. Perhaps the Johnson had another team inside the place for the purpose of observing your runners and will berate them at the meet for not being too sharp. Or maybe your runners find a data pad with a security audit of the place on it at the tail end of the run with the things they missed highlighted and underlined. These security flaws don't always have to be broken locks and lousy passwords. It can be personnel files with psych evaluations and loyalty tests showing why its obvious that Joe Shmoe is a weak link and should have been reassigned to siberia a long time ago.

Basically, make a stealthy option but don't make it obvious and reveal it slowly.
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Wish
post Dec 19 2003, 09:13 PM
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Best one we had was a run to listen in on a particular meeting. We knew it was going to take place in a high class restaurant and that the bad guys would have bug scanners and astral security. We were able to reserve the next room over, but that was only part of the job, because the place has built in white noise generators in all the walls. Makes eavesdropping nearly impossible. Well, we broke in late one night. A good electronics roll bypassed the burglar alarm at the top of the elevator shaft. Levitating let us avoid the pressure sensors and moving very, very slowly avoided the motion detectors (it's a restaurant 5 minutes from a Lone Star station, not a military facility, the security was good, but passive). We made it to the meeting room, removed some wall hangings, and drilled into the walls to get to the white noise generators. Once we had those, we jiggered them to emit only on certain frequencies, so that they appeared to be working normally, put them back in, repaired the holes in the wall, cleaned up after ourselves, and left. Many tense moments and several hours of work to get this set up. When we left, we had to sneak past the bakers who were already in preparing the next day's bread.

Using select sound filters to screen out certain pre-selected frequencies from the 'white noise' generators, our guy in the next room was able to listen to the entire conversation. Very enlightening stuff, and probably the slickest op we've pulled yet. Not the most useful thing we've done, but the smoothest.
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snowRaven
post Dec 20 2003, 12:06 AM
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All you need for a clean run is a decker to shut off cameras and dit records, and lots of Laes in your dart guns :grinbig:
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Cheops
post Dec 20 2003, 04:03 AM
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One thing that really does encourage the players to be stealthy is a longer run time. If the J doesn't need the job done that night or in the next week things go a lot smoother.

In our last run we had an open ended timetable, as long as we finished sooner than later. We had to insert a file onto the firm's matrix and a hardcopy into their archives. Two of our teammates applied for jobs (it was a private investigations firm) and the ex-security guard got the job. The decker made a trial run on the matrix to test security a week later, then actually inserted the file a couple of days after that using the employee's boss' authentication. A day or two after that the employee filed the report and when the supervisor filed it he checked the matrix and saw that he'd already approved so the secs filed it away.

The supervisor was fired later when Brackhaven took over so the only one who knew that anything suspicious was going on was fired.

The ex-security guard is still working there as an investigator while he does runs with us on the side.
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Dvalin
post Dec 20 2003, 06:29 AM
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SnowRaven: there's a difference between quiet and clean. ;)

An example of the one clean run my group pulled off: it was a pretty basic run, a Johnson testing out the new kids on the block -- sent them into a Big 10 subsidiary's foundry facility (with materials labs) to do a datasteal. The idea was that this facility itself was insignificant, but it might have something interesting on related projects at larger or more important facilities. The runners penetrated the security in the usual methods (maglock sequencer and passkey, evasion of cameras and guard patrols, levitating over the fences -- in reverse order), made a physical retrieval of the harddrive -- obviously a bit of evidence there, though, if the harddrive is missing, right? Excepting that this facility had a functional industrial foundry, with smelters -- molten metal on the factory floor and the place lit nicely, destroying the labs and the hardware. The subsidiary subsequently underwent an embarrassing, very public investigation for failing to perform up to expectations on site safety and endangering the lives of workers.
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Kagetenshi
post Dec 20 2003, 08:05 AM
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There are two clean-required runs I can think of in the published adventures: the first two runs of Brainscan. One is against a very low-security, utterly unmanned power station where the biggest risk of detection is a local little-league game and the local cop driving past every half-hour or so, the other is a decently-secluded bungalow in the woods with a raving madman inside who doesn't really count for purposes of being noticed unless he starts shooting.
In other words, both are insanely easy, but made decently challenging by the fact that no one can know the run happened. In other words, don't take a normal run and try to make it "clean"; unless your runners are nigh unto gods, it won't happen. If they can regularly pull it off, hit a bank IRL and retire and then send me some of the earnings.

~J
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