Anonymity as a lifestyle, Need help with rules tweak Options

[fctarbox3]

So anonymity is getting crampingly complicated for me. Buy a new SIN every few weeks, keep multiple SINs for different purposes -- casual lifestyle, meeting Johnsons, etc. etc, use nanopaste disguises and a throwaway commlink on meets/runs, blast all your RFID tags, except your street clothes, because not having tags draws attention otherwise. Thank God material links are gone, or you'd need a mage to cast sterilize every 20 feet. Other stuff I've forgotten, which is the point. I've forgotten. Shadowrunners probably keep notebooks (stored on their super secret heavily encrypted disguised to look like an emotitoy commlink that only works when it's within 30 feet of an RFID tag that you've stored in your safehouse just outside Seattle proper that can only be reached by swimming through an underground tunnel in a cave with a 2 foot wide entrance) to know what to do every week, but I'd rather not. It interrupts the flow of the game.

So I'm thinking of creating a personal rule that you can buy anonymity as a lifestyle mod. Maybe someone's had this idea already and you can point me to the thread.

It'd be split out like the categories in the Advanced Lifestyle rules in Runner's companion.

At street, you don't have a SIN. You live in the Barrens or something and simply cannot visit polite society.

At squatter, you're an average joe. You have a single SIN, real or fake, use it for everything, and suffer the total exposure of the modern world.

At Low, you replace your SIN every once in a while, maybe your commlink too, etc. etc.

What I need is a nice simple mechanic for "Anonymity tests." I'm not sure when or how often it would apply, what events would trigger it, etc. etc. I've never written a custom rule before and I'm looking for help/ideas.

Please?

[BlackHat]

I like the idea. It makes sense to abstract that stuff down, if you don't want to be a stickler about it. It seems similar to the security category - in that unless your GM is out to fuck you where you live, it is unlikely to ever come up, and can safely remain expensive role-playing fluff about how paranoid your character is.


All the things you mentioned having to do are great, but most GMs aren't going to suddenly announce that some character knows your real name because you bought a cheeseburger with your real SIN on accident one time. Using a "Anonymity Rating" similar to the "Security Rating" would give the GM a starting place for some make-believe rolls that he's going to pretend would prevent him from doing what he wants to do. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Maybe he rolls the security rating of hte area (or the professional rating of the person doing some digging) against your anonymity rating every once in a while - as he would if someone where going to rob your house.

Of course, then it ends up like SIN verification rolls, where neither device is likely to get more than 1 success. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) I would probably prefer to rule-of-thumb it, myself.


Now, for the part I don't like:

One thing you didn't mention one way or another, is how this would affect the chart. I think this new category should be added to the others, as it stands (as a "normal" person doesn't replace their SIN every so often, and so wouldn't have to pay this cost)

Thus, the "Street" level would actually be having no *fake* SIN (and no new free fake SINs either). If you want a real SIN, go ahead and take the SINner flaw, and if you only want 1 Fake SIN, you're better off buying a fake, once, and not having to repay every month. This lifestyle section should be reserved for the monthly costs of maintaining a shroud of fake SINs - which brings me to my next point.

Your examples seem extreme to me (At least, my characters don't make enough cash to pull off what you're suggesting with a Low), I think replacing your identiies often should be reserved for higher levels of the mod.

Thing is, if you have a character burning multiple SINs every few weeks... either those are some shitty SINs, or he's making a ton of money and spending it all on fake IDs.
Ballparking. Assuming you wanted "middle" lifestyle options for your SINs. We're talking about rating 3 sins and liceness (4000 nuyen) replaced every week (so now, 16,000) And that is ignoring all of the other stuff you mentioned (since SINs would be the most expensive and hardest to replace).

Unless the character's lifestyle is already in the "high" range, the math won't add up. A character with a cheap lifestyle will be burning through 10's of thousands of nuyen worth of IDs a month, and paying only a fraciton of that.

So, a good benchmark would be a character with "High" anonymity, (rating 4), who can afford either a new rating 4 SIN monthly, or a new rating 1 every week or so.

In fact, an easy rule of thumb would be that you get your Anonymity Rating in fake SINs each month - split up however you like. (Luxury Anonymity would provide a new rating 6 fake SIN every month, or several significantly worse ones if things get crazy and you need to change IDs a lot).

Everything else (remembering to erase tags, keeping your money seperated, maintaining offshore accounts, black Matrix MSPs, etc) are all cheap enough that you could sprinkle them throughout the various levels of this new quality.

[DireRadiant]

Really I would look at it from the other end. That fake SIN getting "discovered" doesn't matter as much unless you have Notoriety and/or street cred that makes your "real" identity matter.

The high school kid using a fake id to get an underage drink having their fake discovered at the liquor barn gets a different response then the highly sought terrorist caught with a fake id at an international airport.

[Heath Robinson]

2x Security LPs + [Appropriate Paranoia-related Knowledge Skill] (Highest of Public Awareness and Notoriety) as a roll sound good?

Of course you're going to need some kind of P2.0 modifier in there.

[fctarbox3]

Everything else (remembering to erase tags, keeping your money seperated, maintaining offshore accounts, black Matrix MSPs, etc) are all cheap enough that you could sprinkle them throughout the various levels of this new quality.

Actually, the plan is to NOT sprinkle that stuff in. When I gave the descriptions, I was thinking of the ones in the advanced lifestyle guide: "You own some cheap furniture, purchased second hand or at a mass-market retailer. Still, your chairs probably match, and you have somewhere to sit while enjoying your AR...." I mean, the description is there, but people pay for their low lifestyle and what they have exactly usually doesn't come up.

So from a game perspective it's "You have level 4 anonymity. This means when I want to lower the banhammer, I will roll so many dice against so many other dice and this is what will happen." What are they doing to achieve that? Don't know, don't care, maybe I'll let the players write it up. Once. And then we will bury it at the bottom of their character sheet.

See, we're all starting to slack off here. We started out describing our paranoia in vivid detail, and then we got annoyed and just stopped doing it. I haven't actually rolled to test someone's SIN in... too long. It just gets in the way for our games. So why should they buy good ones? Nanopaste disguises to fool security cameras? Pshaw. I do want them to put effort into staying anonymous, and have to decide how much money they want to spend, but I want it FAST. IE, I could make a roll at the beginning of the month. If it fails, I have license to screw them at some time during the month. No more SIN checks every time they buy their Johnson a drink. But that's not quite right because months can go by pretty empty, so there's not much point then, and I have to take into account whether they're just sitting on their thumbs or breaking into Aztechnology. If it's exciting, we do it. Knowing security camera layouts and dodging around them? Sure. If it's not, we shouldn't have to. Did you remember to buy enough nanopaste for the disguises THIS run? Meh.

Maybe it should be a per-run charge instead of a per-month charge. And then, I dunno, I could run it like hacking a system. But THAT one stands to be too broad -- it'd be like rolling a single social skill roll to simulate negotiations with Johnson. Where's the roleplaying?

I dunno. I feel like I'm on to something. I'm not sure where to take it.

[child of insanit...]

or you could just set a price they have to pay after every run. you tell your fixer in advance that you need the usual order, it's a set rate and all done off camera so to speak.
changing identities that often seems kind of pointless to me. why not just have several really good ones? your civvy id, runner id(s), your 'i'm going under and never coming back up' id, and several throw away ones at rating 1 or 2.

[wind_in_the_ston...]

So anonymity is getting crampingly complicated for me. Buy a new SIN every few weeks, keep multiple SINs for different purposes -- casual lifestyle, meeting Johnsons, etc. etc, use nanopaste disguises and a throwaway commlink on meets/runs, blast all your RFID tags, except your street clothes, because not having tags draws attention otherwise. Thank God material links are gone, or you'd need a mage to cast sterilize every 20 feet.

If this is what you have to go through to maintain anonymity, you either

1. Have an extremely sadistic GM, who delights in not only presenting a challenging scenario, but in the minutiae of the game.

2. Your character is doing it not because someone is out to get him, but because he's insane.

3. Your character has an enemy with an incidence rating of 6. And a high connection too.

Nemesis: The enemy has dedicated his or her life to making the character’s life more difficult. Every waking thought and action focuses upon how to do harm to the character. The character’s other contacts all know about the enemy and will often mention this person in conversation.

[fctarbox3]

If this is what you have to go through to maintain anonymity you ... Have an extremely sadistic GM

Can you back that up? That's my problem. The books never say how paranoid is paranoid. Every new book seems to add some new way that the runners can be tracked down. And it's not like the books are putting in more rules, they're just applying their creativity to security measures. And it's not like I can "let common sense" be my guide. I've never broken into a corporate research facility, nor do I hang with the underworld type, so I don't know these things. I can consider how often I want to play a "deep fade" session, but then it's not fair to the players because no matter what they do it doesn't make them safer. Or if it does make them safer, they have no idea how much safer, because they're living on my fiat. Am I being a sadistic GM if I send someone after them when they suddenly drop (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) 50k onto a SIN with an improper background that would probably immediately trigger the antifraud agents that monitor the accounts at the local bank? And that's not farfetched, the banks do stuff like that RIGHT NOW, especially (onoz, please let's not argue) after the dept of Homeland Security came up to speed. It's a dumb move and they should be punished but I don't want to have to track every actual dumb move and try to assign a fair penalty to it.

And you're exactly right, keeping up with that kind of minutiae is sadistic. But letting the players choose how many resources they want to put into being anonymous and having real consequences on stinting that don't boil down to "How grumpy am I today?" would, IMO, be really cool, which is why I want to abstract a lot of it away to something on the level of a lifestyle and put the decision onto the players.

[JFixer]

We've always sort of handled it by the book...

Characters have their commlinks set up on multiple numbers, and multiple ids, matching their multiple SINs. If you do something that jeapordizes your SIN, you ditch it, and grab a new one off the ShadowSEA or other appropriate SIN propping contact. They keep one they never do anything illegal with, or basically use on the same day they do anything illegal, and that's what they keep their apartment on. Their 'going out SIN' is always something disposable. Something they can ditch that their fake licenses are tied to. If they have to drop the SIN, they re-forge the identity on the license. Their clothing and gear RFIDs are editted with a simple command, and a single roll, from the decker's commlink, because they're allowed to temporarily subscribe those tags to his comm. The decker has a RFID wiper he keeps in the van, that he zips the tags with and reformats into a new code as soon as they buy basically anything.

If someone wants to follow them home, it's Intuition + Shadowing vs Intuition + Shadowing. End of story. Common Runner precautions boiled down to 'I switch to my other SIN'.

I don't know if you've ever tried to get new phone service, but it takes about eight minutes and you can call from a disabled phone or pay phone. Very common and even described in the Runners Havens source books. (Public terminals, the green golems?) I gave my roomates info over the phone and even had to stop and check documentation while applying, several times, and it took less than ten minutes to set up in our place we bought in Florida. I doubt MSPs are any more stringent on checking your ID in 2070... s'long as you pay them.

[Petrie_SMG]

I think that you have a good idea, depending on how the game is run (I haven't thrown the privacy at my players much, yet, one thing at a time).

One thing is that even the most careful runner probably doesn't need a new SIN each month. I think that you could come up with a sort of Anonymity Insurance and run it like programs and program options.

Maybe like this:

Anonymity (Lifestyle option)
Rating 1-3: 500NY x rating
Rating 4-6: 1000NY x rating
For licenses: +50NY x license rating x license, if desired

That would cover them taking care of having a vanilla SIN with nothing questionable and one to be used for business, plus appropriate disguising, RFID security, and Access ID/MSP changes. It's not like they need to change them that often, so it's not the cost of 2 new SINs. It assumes that they'll change it as needed, and keeps the accounting easy and cost reasonable. They would need at least 2 commlinks, as well.

It would only account for precautions so that regular living and running couldn't be tracked. It WOULDN'T account for doing something significantly compromising, though, so if they run through downtown Seattle broadcasting their real or private SIN knocking over liquor stores, they'll have to deal with the consequences (and pay for the new SINs outright).

[Hagga]

Material links weren't so bad. Just use yourself as a ritual link once in a while to everything that has fallen off.

[Larme]

IMO, anonymity is not a factor on the streets. In fact, it is a hindrance. When you go to people for favors, or try to get a job, they'll say "never heard of you, kid. Fuck off." The criminal underworld is based around trust, which is a paradox because you can't trust anyone. You have to build trust with people, without really leaving yourself open for them to screw you. But because there are no courts of law, all shadow biz happens on the basis of handshakes. Violating a deal, of course, has repercussions in terms of broken legs and death. But people don't want to make a deal that will be broken, forcing them to hunt down the deal-breaker. They want to know the folks they deal with, they want to know that the person has a rep for getting the job done, or not going back on promises, etc.

I think the desire for anonymity is based on a mistaken notion that people are always out to get you. The thing is, as a Shadowrunner, you are a deniable asset. The key word being asset. Johnsons will dispose of you if they need to, but they'd rather have you around, if you're useful. And even when you hit a corp (except for particular corps who have a reputation for being vengeful) the other corp isn't mad at you, they're mad at the people who hired you. They're not likely to want you dead, you're an asset -- if you totally busted up their security, they want to buy you. That's what you do with assets.

As long as you do your job, and follow a basic code of street etiquette, nobody is likely to want you dead, so you have no reason at all to be anonymous. Anonymity only helps on the job itself -- you'd better not leave hair or show your face within a police-contract jurisdiction, because the police get paid to bring you in. But if nobody in the shadows knows what jobs you've pulled off, you're not going anywhere, you'll be stuck with low-pay milk runs until your dying day.

I think the anonymity idea is based off of a fundamental, movie-inspired misunderstanding of the criminal underworld. Everyone wants to be "The Jackal." "Nobody knows his face, or his name, and he's very hard to contact, but he's the best, oooOoooOo..." The thing is, The Jackal is not a real guy, he's completely fabricated. And he's by far the exception, not the rule. The fact that nobody knows anything about you is a very rare thing on the street, less than one in a hundred runners can operate that way because of the obvious difficulties inherent therein, as the OP recognizes. As such, I don't favor the idea, because it streamlines something that shouldn't be very common, probably making it incredibly common, which would create a bizarro world where nobody has a rep, yet everyone still finds work somehow.

[hobgoblin]

while not reading all the posts here, i would say that if you do not have the sinner "flaw" and use certified cred or cash to pay for stuff, your basically off the radar unless you do something that sends your notoriety thru the roof.

at best lone star and similar will have your biometrics on file as john doe #123456789 or something. but wear gloves and a mask during runs and your mostly covered.

oh, and park your ass out in the barrens when not on a job. grease the palm of the local gang(s) and lean back.

[fctarbox3]

Material links weren't so bad. Just use yourself as a ritual link once in a while to everything that has fallen off.

O.O That works? Is this what I get for not signing onto forums 10 years ago?

IMO, anonymity is not a factor on the streets. In fact, it is a hindrance.

You are very persuasive and I suddenly feel much relieved over the whole issue.

I may still cook something up, especially considering what I've read in this thread, though. S'hobby.

[Hagga]

I've seen it mentioned in a few splat and source books, and occasionally have a member of my initiate group (when playing a magician, anyway) use me as a link to zap everything for a bit of nuyen. The gm seems to like it, and takes it for granted that for the 5000 nuyen I pay that not only myself but the entire team has it done.

[hyzmarca]

Thank God material links are gone, or you'd need a mage to cast sterilize every 20 feet.

Look upon Street Magic p. 28, ye Mighty, and despair!

So I'm thinking of creating a personal rule that you can buy anonymity as a lifestyle mod. Maybe someone's had this idea already and you can point me to the thread.

It'd be split out like the categories in the Advanced Lifestyle rules in Runner's companion.

At street, you don't have a SIN. You live in the Barrens or something and simply cannot visit polite society.

At squatter, you're an average joe. You have a single SIN, real or fake, use it for everything, and suffer the total exposure of the modern world.

At Low, you replace your SIN every once in a while, maybe your commlink too, etc. etc.

What I need is a nice simple mechanic for "Anonymity tests." I'm not sure when or how often it would apply, what events would trigger it, etc. etc. I've never written a custom rule before and I'm looking for help/ideas.

Please?

What you're looking for the the Erased quality from Runner's Companion. Essentially, its a dude who cleans up your data trail for you for no apparent reason. I see no reason why you should not be able to hire someone to perform a similar service.

So instead of having each character buy anonymity, have the character accumulate a Data Trail as the game progresses, at the GM's discretion depending on the characters in-game actions or purported actions. One point per run + extra for outrageously insecure actions sounds about right.
At the end of the session (or the beginning), roll the character's Data Trail.
1 Success) Minor annoyance
2 Successes) Major annoyance
3 Successes) Huge problem
4 Successes) Totally fucked

Data Trail can be reduced by paying a cracker to remove it, the standard rate should vary depending on the game level, but $1000 per point isn't bad. Characters with 10BP of Erased, of course, never have to worry about this.

IMO, anonymity is not a factor on the streets. In fact, it is a hindrance. When you go to people for favors, or try to get a job, they'll say "never heard of you, kid. Fuck off." The criminal underworld is based around trust, which is a paradox because you can't trust anyone. You have to build trust with people, without really leaving yourself open for them to screw you. But because there are no courts of law, all shadow biz happens on the basis of handshakes. Violating a deal, of course, has repercussions in terms of broken legs and death. But people don't want to make a deal that will be broken, forcing them to hunt down the deal-breaker. They want to know the folks they deal with, they want to know that the person has a rep for getting the job done, or not going back on promises, etc.

I think the desire for anonymity is based on a mistaken notion that people are always out to get you. The thing is, as a Shadowrunner, you are a deniable asset. The key word being asset. Johnsons will dispose of you if they need to, but they'd rather have you around, if you're useful. And even when you hit a corp (except for particular corps who have a reputation for being vengeful) the other corp isn't mad at you, they're mad at the people who hired you. They're not likely to want you dead, you're an asset -- if you totally busted up their security, they want to buy you. That's what you do with assets.

As long as you do your job, and follow a basic code of street etiquette, nobody is likely to want you dead, so you have no reason at all to be anonymous. Anonymity only helps on the job itself -- you'd better not leave hair or show your face within a police-contract jurisdiction, because the police get paid to bring you in. But if nobody in the shadows knows what jobs you've pulled off, you're not going anywhere, you'll be stuck with low-pay milk runs until your dying day.

I think the anonymity idea is based off of a fundamental, movie-inspired misunderstanding of the criminal underworld. Everyone wants to be "The Jackal." "Nobody knows his face, or his name, and he's very hard to contact, but he's the best, oooOoooOo..." The thing is, The Jackal is not a real guy, he's completely fabricated. And he's by far the exception, not the rule. The fact that nobody knows anything about you is a very rare thing on the street, less than one in a hundred runners can operate that way because of the obvious difficulties inherent therein, as the OP recognizes. As such, I don't favor the idea, because it streamlines something that shouldn't be very common, probably making it incredibly common, which would create a bizarro world where nobody has a rep, yet everyone still finds work somehow.

The key to being secretly notorious is pseudonymity, rather than anonymity. The two are very similar beasts, however, and generally serve a similar purpose. This is one of the reasons why runners have street names. Heck, just look at these forums, for example. I like to think that I have some sort of reputation here, but I'm pretty sure that no one even suspects that hyzmarca is really Clark Kent, mild mannered reporter for the Daily Planet.
And that is how you build trust and gaining reputation while still remaining sufficiently unknown. You build a wall between your worlds, between your personas, so that while you're probably living a very full life the people in one half of it are totally unaware of the other half, and vica versa. This is how Miley can go to school without being accosted by throngs of screaming Hannah Montanna fans and why no one knew that Verbal Kint was really Keyser Soze.

Such pseudonymity also has the advantage that you can burn one identity while still maintaining the other. The Batman can continue to fight crime without Bruce Wayne, though perhaps without as many gadgets, while Bruce could simply choose a different costume if the Batman identity was even rendered useless.

The key is that you don't want your identities to link to each other, and if you leave a sufficient data trail they will, eventually. It would be fairly easy for someone to notice that Peter Parker and Spider Man both shop at the same store, for example. And it could be something as simply as buying a hotdog with your civilian SIN near one too many of your crimes.

[fctarbox3]

Look upon Street Magic p. 28, ye Mighty, and despair!

And a little part of me dies inside. Oh well, unlike other security measures, I'm perfectly willing to guarantee my players they will not be materially linked unless they lose actual functional body parts or have something ritually removed. (A lock of hair clipped off by your captors just in case you escape, for example. No fancy mumbo jumbo, just knowing you intend to use it as a link is "ritual" enough.)

[Larme]

I don't see how material links should matter as long as you take precautions. Scrub off all your dead skin, brush out all your dead hairs... Then, cover up. All done. No material link. The GM who says that you leave behind a link even when you take these precautions is a douche, and should be deposed. After all, if that were the case you'd expect a rule about it -- if you could never go anywhere without living your hair and skin flakes behind, the rulebook would say that, cuz it's kind of a big deal. Or it would provide some kind of chart that determines the chances of that happening, except SR4 is really not into that level of micromanaging yet. So thankfully, it's easy enough to say that taking precautions should be enough. At least, as long as nothing special happens, like you're attacked with a pair of hair clippers, or you leave your blood everywhere.

And anyway, even if you did leave a link, who cares? Corps know when they're hit by shadowrunners, and they also know that the runners have no idea, and have no way to find out who hired them. That's what they really want to know -- a corp taking revenge on runners who hit them is like an elephant pausing to attack a fly. Not going to happen, except with those specific corps who do that (I'm not sure which ones those are -- renraku and aztech maybe?). Now, cops obviously would be willing to use a ritual to track you down, but they don't have unlimited resources. If you don't commit any major crimes (i.e. use nonlethal methods on those poor security guards) they won't use their expensive magical investigators to find you, they'll just put the case in the "under investigation" bin.

IMO, there must be a pretty large degree of leeway in terms of revenge and law enforcement in Shadowrun. By nature, it is a game of the weak attacking the strong, the powerless attacking the powerful at the behest of the powerful. It's a war between titans, and your characters are just the ammo. When you get shot, you don't blame the bullet, you blame the man with the gun. Law enforcement and corporate revenge should only occur for two reasons: a) the PCs were total morons and did something so boneheaded that the powers that be can't help but respond, or b) it's part of the plot. If neither of those conditions are met, but the bad guys come after you anyway, it's no longer a fun, fast-paced game of crime. It becomes a needling, annoying affair where everyone is afraid to say a single word without a voice modulator, and they can't go outside without a nanopaste disguise and three backup disguises. They only bring Fichetti Security light pistols, because those are disposable and hard to track because they're common. And they spend most of their time cleaning, like Monk, afraid that they've left a skin cell somewhere where someone could find it. That's not a fun game, and it doesn't make a lot of sense -- if failing to observe that level of paranoia got you killed, there wouldn't be a thriving Shadowrun industry, but there clearly is, so that level of paranoia can't be what's called for.

[hobgoblin]

they will potentially track and attack if the runners grabbed something from them, and they have not yet gotten any intel to say that the property (living or not) have shown up in the hands of some other corp.

but for random "terrorism" it will be mostly useless, except if it gets out of hand, and they want to send a message that enough is enough...

[Larme]

Oh yeah, good point. They'll try to get back the macguffin if there's any chance the runners still have it. But really, unless you leave, like, your arm, they're probably not going to find the material link and perform a ritual in time. By the time they find your skin flakes, you'll have long since made the delivery...

[hobgoblin]

shit can, and often will, happen...

[Larme]

Well, you know what they say, shit happening is the spice of life... >.>

Obviously, the GM can make all kinds of unexpected and unlikely stuff happen as a plot twist. Part of the anonymity craze, though, is players who feel that, to 'win' Shadowrun, they must not let the GM do anything bad to their character. It's like they want to seize control from the GM by taking insane precuations, and then if the GM tries to spice things up with some bad guys coming after them, they'll argue and point to the fact that they've covered up all their traces, and the GM is cheating if he decides to make things interesting. Of course, the people who play this way have probably been burned by bad GM's who only want to "get" the players, the GMs who believe that killing the PCs is what makes the game fun. But I think the right way to play Shadowrun is cooperatively -- the players, within reason, move the GM's plot forwards, and the GM, within reason, creates difficult situations for them to overcome, thereby giving them a chance to earn karma and cash, and also tries to tie things together into an interesting story with a beginning, middle, and end. If it's a fight between the players and the GM, I think the campaign is already starting off as a train wreck.

To sum up, if super anonymity is necessary, in the first place, the GM is either a) misunderstanding the nature of the SR world, or b) a douche.

[Rotbart van Dain...]

Your character is doing it not because someone is out to get him, but because he's insane.

To sum up, if super anonymity is necessary, in the first place, the GM is either a) misunderstanding the nature of the SR world, or b) a douche.

You didn't read the chapter in Runner's Companion, did you?

[AllTheNothing]

Thank God material links are gone, or you'd need a mage to cast sterilize every 20 feet.

Not to brust your bouble but Material Link is still in, it's in Street Magic.

Material links weren't so bad. Just use yourself as a ritual link once in a while to everything that has fallen off.

The material Link is destroyed in the proces of spelcasting; what you propose is a bit suicidical.



EDIT: Ops, It was already answered.

[Muspellsheimr]

You didn't read the chapter in Runner's Companion, did you?

Yes. If they cannot locate you within a few hours, they generally assume you no longer have "the package" & will leave you alone, unless you slaughtered their entire security force.