To be fair, what if it was a pizza delivery boy who's had the balls to deliver pizza successfully for years to the heart of the Barrens?

I can see the Shadowlands posts now: "Craziest rigger I've ever seen; the fragger worked for Domino's 3 years when the Spikes first thought they could mess with him..."

food fight anyone

This is well and good, and I do agree with you that this is a logical way to handle the situation, because you should have to guess, but by the rules even if I fail my perception test when you're hacking up my buddy, I roll Firearms+Intuition+Modifiers-6 dice for "target hidden." Invis says invisible targets that are being attacked use the 'target hidden' modifier on page 141. To quote:


Personally I think this is a bit silly, and handle it on a case by case basis much like you've suggested. But I was trying to give the OP a RAW way of handling the problem, and by RAW, this is what happens.
Silly, but true.

First of all, I'd rather you now call me "mr. dork" FotD is fine, or perhaps in the future, Friend.

Secondly, healing his own damage from drain is exactly what he can do with first aid, or better yet having a friend with good first aid skills that can do it (to avoid wound penalties).

Seems we're more agreed than I initially thought. However, nothing in the rules say that you can always attack invisible people, it only says that against an invisible target you suffer the dice pool penalty. RAW is simply to vague not to require the GM to decide when it is possible to target an invisible character or not.

If we reverse the positions, there is nothing that says a GM must tell the party of PCs than an invisible NPC is stalking them. He must per RAW give them intuituition+counterspelling (if any), but he can also roll that in secret and never tell the party about it unless one of them succeeds. They can see their party members being carved up though, so they could probably shoot near their fallen comrades and have a chance at hitting the invisible stalker. And really, do you need a perception test to see your buddy next to you being sliced up?

In any case, the spell does not give a modifier on perception tests, only on attackers combat tests.

I just hope this doesn't degenerate into a fight about whether or not you can target someone when you don't know where they are like the thread with Cain did for a little while. I'm pretty sure in a game that is supposed to be mediated by common sense, that we can mostly agree that you need to perceive the targets location in some way before shooting at them. This is one reason I use a battlemap for fights. It allows invisible enemies to be targeted, kind of. You pick the square you think most likely based on your last perceptions of where they might be. Hearing, secondary sight effects, etc.

Chris

Well considering the OT is "magic is broken", I hardly think this is a degeneration. I would think most arguments about whether you can target someone invisible or not could degenerate into a "magic is broken" fight though.

In any case, I agree with your take on it. And battlemaps are good in this situation, although it's alot harder to pinpoint people here than in D&D, as you can move during your action and not just either before or after it. So mr. invisible could run past a guard, sever his head, and continue movement in the same initative pass.

But that's another can of worms I suppose.

..i.nvisible mages are why you always have one or two of the team members with the following:

Radar Sense Headware
Grenades (any kind of Anti Personnel ones will do, though I prefer White Phosphorous...light 'em up baby )

apologies mr friend. no offense meant.
doesn't the clarification on drain healing specify you can only recover drain through rest? or medical care? first aide doesn't count as medical treatment since that's what the medicine skill covers.

on a perception test versus an invisible target, you wouldn't get the modifiers to your perception from vision enhancements, but the others would be fine. if you had smoke bombs you could see them moving through the smoke. so on that note simply making an appropriate perception test allows you to make the combat test (with hidden target modifiers). otherwise you'd take a longshot test to hit them and your team would then fire based upon the direction of the "ouch!" they hear. seems logical that way.

Ok so mage with 2 magic overcasts to force 4... Throws 6 dice for the spell casting test + 2 points for magic + 2 points for power focus = 10 dice (2.5 average successes)
Mage rolls against drain of 3. Will (4) + Char (6) (elf shaman) = 10 dice for on average 2.5 hits. So 0 -1 boxes of physical damage
vs 3 + 3 (averaging perception) -4 + 2 (for a smartlink?) = 4 dice = 1 success.

Who's going to win that consistently?

(not talking about concealment)
Visibility mods work both ways you know. If the spirit is so far away you have -x dp to spot it, it has the same -x dp to spot AND to use its abilities on you (as does the mage.)
(/not talking about concealment)

and about concealment: you can now get +9 or more to your perception dice pool from various cyber, bio, and tech enhancements that stack.

But yes, spirits, used properly, are very, very nasty.
So is a swarm of drones with LMGs.
So is a troll with 30 or so soak dice and *shudders* a troll-bow (you did WHAT to the T-Bird?)
Hell, so is a pissed-off techno or hacker.

...defintely in agreement on the Matrix Specialist. I fear for the person who really torques Violet off someday. Permanent subscription to Dwarf Porn sites will be the least of their worries.

Well... I have to say that I notice a similar trend in the play style that Cryptoknight mentioned, to the play style of my first Shadowrun group early on in our games. Part of it was my fault... we were all new to the system, and were coming off playing a hack'n'slash fantasy game, and the players didn't really know much of the background of the world (because they never bothered reading the handouts I gave them...). So, in the first few sessions, their solution to any opposition they encountered in the game world was to simply kill it... often in spectacular ways. I began wondering why they were having such an easy time of plowing through the opposition... were the opponents just too weak for them? Around this time I started reading some of the Shadowrun novels, and noticed that, strangely, not many of the runs in the novels ended up with a river of blood flowing out of the building as the runners left after a run. So, I started wondering about the why behind this, and came up with a few realizations that were fairly important...

A) Security guards at (most) facilities are employed legally... meaning they are SINners. Their existance is recorded and tracked by a variety of things, like all validly SINned people's are. Everything else kind of stems from this, so it bears pointing out.

B) Unless it happens on AAA corp property, the murder of a SINner is probably still a crime (it may be that there are sections of the Shadowrun World where this is not true. But for the most part it is). That means there's probably a group, controlled by the government (or by one of the Triple-As) that is going to be charged with investigating the death.

C) Security guards are people (we as gamers often forget this fact...). They have (in the game world), a family (probably), friends (not always important. Many of their friends probably died with them, after all), an employer, and other coworkers (again, some of these may have died at the same time).

D) A particularly messy run is going to draw media attention (unless some group covers it up).

The problem, I was realizing, wasn't that the PCs were overpowered... nor was it that the opponents weren't up to snuff. The problem was that my players were too willing to use lethal force on their runs, and I was allowing them to get away with doing so. So, given these realizations, I started thinking of what they all translated into as far as what would happen after the death of an entire staff of security guards. For starters, theres the Investigative Authority... who are now trying to track down the runners. If your group of runners is as large scale in the violence they inflict as I'm guessing they are, they probably aren't all that good about cleaning up after themselves and avoiding leaving evidence (most groups of players never think about this... A runner gets shot while on a run, and the group patches up the runner and walks off... never thinking about doing anything to prevent the blood their team member just bled all over the floor from being picked up by someone else later on). Now remember that you're dealing with the world of Shadowrun... know all those stories about ways for people to see what the dead saw, just before they died? In Shadowrun, they're not just stories. If even one of your security guards has a cheap (500 nuyen) cybereyes system, he's got an eye recording unit in it... which the people looking into his death are going to be able to access the stored data of, and watch his death. Sure, the guy with the sword was invisible when he cut down the guard squad... were the rest of his team? Heck... do we even know for certain if an eyerecording unit shuts off when the person it is in dies? If the runners walked by the body a minute or two after the guards death, might not the eye have still be recording? Even if the eye did shut off, and none of the other runners were able to be seen by it... there's still gonna be some footage of people getting hacked apart by an unseen foe, most likely.

And if you assume that security guards are given uniforms when they are on duty, and that corps might want to review what happened during a security incident (which sounds more than reasonable to me), is it not likely that said uniforms, if they include a helmet or goggles or any other sort of accessory where it would make sense, would include a camera as well? Of course this doesn't even begin to consider the cameras that might be mounted in or around a building.

Now, not all investigative authorities are going to give a multiple murder case their full attention (maybe someone is paying them not to... maybe it gets covered up and they never find out about it). But chances are any that do give it a good amount of attention either employ a wagemage, or can hire an outside mage as a consultant... who can help them to figure out more about what the heck happened... and will be there to help control a dangerous magical threat when/if the authorities decide to go after the runners. And would anyone put it past an ambitious climber at Lone Star or Knight Errant to hire the runners to make a run, so they can pull off a sting operation?

And if there's no investigation yet, the families of the slain might be pushing for one... or hiring their own investigators. Even if the deaths are covered up by the people in charge of wherever the run took place, the family might get a feeling something was off... and then they talk to a journalist about it, even if they can't hire an investigator. There's a thousand ways for the press to come in on the topic, if the GM feels like bringing them.

So, the press come in. Some reporter somewhere gets a copy of the slaughter from the cameras. It gets played, and the media sensationalize the story. If there wasn't an investigation before now, there probably is now (the company the guards worked for will want to be able to say they're trying to find the perpetrators, the government the guards were citizens of are going to want to say they're working on it... no one wants to stare a camera in the face and say "Oh. No, we're not doing anything about the gruesome deaths you showed..." and while it may be that the GM knows the investigation is just for appearance's sake, how are the players to know that?)

Of course, all of that is more about the consequences of players going around inflicting massive amounts of collateral damage that they could have avoided.... it's not necessarily specific to mundanes vs magic. But the last comment about the press figures into mundanes vs magic quite well.

Consider: You are the head of a small company that is a potential target for runners (and what company isn't?), and you start seeing all these news vids about magic using murderers... you notice that it's a bunch of securit guards dead, and put two and two together... the murderers are runners, and they did that during a run. Well, when your security guards die, it hurts your bottom line (you have to pay death benefits, hire and train new people... and never mind the potentially damaging things a successful run could do to your company). Since this is all happening near you, you do a few things to beef up security and protect your company. You may not spend thousands or more on putting ultrasonic sensors or infrared sensors everywhere in your facility, but maybe you buy one or two for key spots. A little bit of computer work, and you can put in a program that alerts your guards whenever a door is opened after hours (and if there are cameras viewing the door, they may notice an invisible person because of that). Perhaps a dog or two (which, as someone else said, can use scent to get around the invisbility) might even seem a wise investment. While I know that the spell says it works against Thermo-graphic vision, I also remember it not working against dwarfs in some of the novels (the reason given was their thermo-graphic vision). Even if you rule out the spell does work perfectly against ThermVis, the description of the vision enhancement specifically mentions using it to track people by the heat of their footsteps, which invisibility wouldn't cover... So sticking a few dwarves on your security teams might make things tougher there.

And all of that is merely assuming you're dealing with a management group that isn't going to do underhanded things, and also doesn't have a lot of money available. One with more money can beef up security substantially through any number of legal means, such as-

a) Installing smartgun systems on the security guards' guns (400), and putting an ultrasound enhancement on them (1000). Each guard also gets a smartlink contact lens set (550). Total cost is 1950 nuyen per gun (okay, pretty expensive... you'd need a fair amount of cash to do it).

b) Building a microsensor package which includes a motion sensor into the guards uniforms, and once again giving them a receiver for it in their displays (Motion sensors are actually cheap, now that I look in the book... 50 nuyen each).

and of course all the other suggestions such as the glowmoss, etc.

And if you've got people who don't care about being legal... well, there's always the option of installing area effecting cranial bombs in each of your security guards, designed to trigger if the guard is killed. Expensive and messy, and it doesn't actually help locate the person... but it does make it so that anyone using a melee weapon on the guards while invisible is going to regret his actions.

As for dealing with the spirits appearing inside vehicles to kill people... *shrugs* Thats a tough one... spirits are supposed to require the awakened to be fought effectively.

Dwarf Porn? Bah that's tame, you should upload an uncontrolled SCAT personafix to his datajack and then spoof the bosses' data to also seem to like that sort of thing.

One other comment about knowing where mr. invisible is. If the guards are carrying weapons capable of full auto fire, and saw another guard getting cut up by Mr. Invisible, they could always just try and fill the area where they think he is with suppressive fire. While it's probably going to result in some friendly fire casualties, one has to wonder if there aren't some guards out there that would be willing to risk it.

But they don't - until you get to the fairly tough force 6-8 rating spirits. Any half-trained yahoo gets a free shot (two, if his gun is already in his hand) at a materializing spirit, and a heavy pistol is more than enough to penetrate a low-force spirit's immunity to normal weapons. Even before you get into the "does stick-and-shock count as a normal weapon?" argument.

NP. Where is this clarification of drain, and where does it say First Aid doesen't count as medical attention? RAW says that magic cannot heal stun damage specifically, but I couldn't find out where it says it can't heal physical drain either (although I seem to remember from somewhere that it can't)

the "can't magic-heal drain" is in the errata and in street magic...I don't recall having seen anything about bed-rest only.

One of the reasons that any smart Mage is going to research Blood Magic and buy a knife to cut himself even if he's one of those stuck up moral wimps.

That was a very comprehensive summary DreamAtelier. Thanks.

I think the take home message here for the OP is that the checks and balances on powerful magic don't necessarily include more powerful magic or some piece of cyber that makes mundanes immune. A lot of the checks and balances are story elements that the GM needs to think about and follow up on.

...not the stuff she links them to, absolute XXX hardcore with simsense feedback to boot.

[/Derail]

Well if you are going to do that, why not go all the way and link them to Bubba (the Love Troll) does the seven Dwarves set to loop through the rape scene?

"This SIM supports PolyPoV. Would you like to choose a different perspective besides [victim]?"
"<muahahaha> Just kidding, sucker."
"*System warning. Intrusion detected. Illegal changes may be being made by intruder.*"
"*System warning. Simsense safety limits over-ridden. The sensations to follow may be more intense than reality.*"
"*System message: Successfully changed 'lube' to 'angry fire ants.'*"
"*System message: loop enabled. Warning: standard exit function calls damaged. Exiting VRinterface may be difficult.*"
"*Beginning play.*"

Also, if you don't have a very, very good face-to-face friendship with your street doc, never go in for an upgrade when you've got an angry decker on your tail. "Funny, I don't recal signing up for a sex change. Just dermal plating." "It was on your chart, sir."

Hmmm I never thought of Stick and Shock as anything but a normal weapon. I've always fealt that immunity to normal weapons = you need a weapon focus to hit the jerk (or a big big gun), curse me for my original AD&D upbringing where the equivalent was (you need a magical weapon to hurt it). But I can see the argument. Though, I'd not want to have to argue that point though in the middle of a game.

I was worried that the Mystical Adept would start summoning packs of force 4 beast spirits, but since he'd have to bind them I guess I can handle the look on his face as Assault Rifle armed security guards slaughter 6k investments like nobody's business. I almost look forward to it. The only real problems is that the spirits aren't banished by being killed... he gets them back in about a month.

Ok maybe my prior SR experience or something is kicking in, but if a guard has already acted in a round... how do they get the free shot?

I know that the very very very least part of my problem (in 4th ed) is my total inability to imagine AR... but I can see how it could be a benefit to the guard if a motion sensing or some other sort of sensor (air pressure) could put an estimated picture of some sort of humanoid shape out there in the guard's AR, and share it via the guard's PAN with the other guards.

I never thought about thermographic vision showing the heat of footsteps on a floor, but that also makes a hell of alot of sense. Till they thermoseal their armor... So... if the invisible mage was charging a guard with thermographic... they'd see footprints quickly appearing on the floor in a streak towards them right? So a wide burst into the path of the footprints would just be a -6 modifier because of the fact that they don't see him.

I phrased that badly:

it's really more of a does the stick-and-shock ap (-half) count or not...because if it does, then force 6 or less spirits effectively aren't immune to it - one net hit means they have to soak.

Well I dunno about that.. since immunity to normal weapons = hardened armor of vehicles...

Does Stick and shock get ap (-half) against vehicles?

Oh I guess perhaps it wouldn't matter because vehicles are immune to stun damage.

Just think permanent HUD for everyone! Or the see through computer screen in front of your face all the time giving you the relevant information you need all the time.

Mechanically just make sure all your NPCs get the AR assisting bonus all the time.

a very fitting AR example is the health and ammo indicators that you see in just about every FPS.

Well I get that... but all the other ambient AR is what bugs me (which is why I tend to avoid it)... I mean how much AR would a research facility have? Wouldn't it distract the scientists doing the research?

Heh I guess it doesn't help that I tend to ignore both of those when I play FPSs eh?

Without going for cyberware to increase initiative passes, the big options are drugs (Cram, Jazz, Kamikaze, K-10, and maybe more all add initiative passes) or Edge (which you can spend to get an extra initiative pass or to go first in an intiative pass). It's a reasonable possiblity that to save money on the cyberware, a corp or organization might supply their forces with the drugs necessary to amp up their capabilities should they be threatened by a well armed force.



You don't really have to imagine it to use it. A general rule of thumb might be to provide +1 to +3 to people who are using AR based on the total networking capabilities of their group. If you've got a tightly network group of people integrated with building security and overwatch capabilities, then some extra dice to represent the information coming into their perceptions (via image and sound links at the least) is the best way to represent it. Consider that even if guard A doesn't see Mr. Invisible, you could argue that guard B (the officer) might have the necessary technology (ultrasound, radar, etc.) to do so. Give guard B a test to realize that he's detected Mr. Invisible and then a quick Computer + Edit test to put the location of Mr. Invisible on the network and suddenly everyone else can get a chance to shoot at Mr. Invisible. They still can't see him (-6 for Blind Fire) but now they have an AR assist so they know about here he is (+2 or +3) which starts to bring back a lot to their dice pools. Hell, I could see an argument for negating the Blind Fire modifier if they have an AR outline of Mr. Invisible, but that might gimp magic too much. It's all in the balance. This, however, might be a topic for another thread.

[/derail]



Not in my games. I take the first sentence of the Invisibility spell ...



... to mean that Mr. Invisible won't be picked up on natural (or 'ware based) Thermographic.

Now the real brain bender to consider might be the difference between cybereye enhancements and gear-based enhancements (i.e., glasses or goggles). Usually, cybereye capabilities don't force an Object Resistance test (since the cybereye, having eaten into a character's essence, is essentially a part of that character and, thus, resisted not with Object Resistance but with the character's Intuition attribute). But, I've worked with GM's who would provide people using glasses or goggles with enhancements the object resistance of the item. Thus, if the spell doesn't generate enough hits to beat the object resistance threshold, the person using the goggles/glasses wouldn't be effected by the spell at all. The object resistance threshold for such an item would probably be 2 or 3 depending on the amount of technology crammed into the glasses.

The AR bonus rules are pretty vague as it stands now, but one of the house rule writers had a pretty good section on some example bonuses you could give a networked team that owned a building's surveillance system. I want to say it was dnasser (sic?), but I'm not sure.

unless its spam, i would say its mostly like having desktop icons today.

if you want to interact with them, you have to activate them somehow.

a incoming call? a small icon and a sound (unless silenced) until you answer or dismiss it, same with mail/im and so on...

only downtown and similar would you get AR feeds continually blasting you with sounds and other sensory feeds. and even then the firewall would probably try and filter out most of it, unless you tell it not to.

so the AR interface for some research equipment in the corner would probably be just a static icon floating in the air, until the researcher activated it and it would then fold out to display the controls of said equipment.

read up on subscriber list

In sensitive areas there could be less AR or the scientists could just run in passive mode (to avoid general AR broadcasts) or they could unsubscribe from the nodes that are producing the distracting AR. Just because AR might be beneficial to guards and security, doesn't mean that everyone else has to be receiving the same AR or that they couldn't avoid the AR using other technology at their finger tips.

But, AR based plans or research materials might be helpful for scientists. Imagine if you could be working in the lab and run a quick query to see if you've got the appropriate amount of a chemical in the lab's storage locker. And, if not, the locker might be able to automatically requisition more from a central storage facility or order more automatically from the Matrix and ship it to the research lab. That type of AR might benefit the researcher. Glowing AR features around dangerous chemicals or the ability to list the others in the lab who've used this or that chemical. All this information, with probably comes to the researcher by AR, would be helpful, not distracting, but the guards won't care a whit about any of it.

Yah but I think the original argument that lead me to my path was that Invisibility prevents me from using thermographic to see you. Because you're invisible. But... you give off body heat and would leave heat impressions on the floor as you run towards me. I.e. I don't see you, but I see where you just stepped off of because I can see heat source footprints left by your body heat as you run at me.

are we talking "normal" or improved invisibility now?

only the latter will fool non-living observers...

oh and it dawned on me that arsenal do not seem to have any kind of battletac style programs or rules within it.
im guessing it will show up in unwired?

That's up to you and your games. I don't know that I'd run it that way since I'm not sure I'm convinced that the heat left behind by someone as they walk across a surface (keep in mind that they're probably wearing shoes of some kind) would be enough to pick up on thermographic vision. Now, if they were walking through dust or some other type of substance than they might leave tracks which would be detectable ... unless they have hover feet or traceless walk, of course

the friction suface of whatever footwear they are wearing should be enough to agitate the surface they are walking on enough to produce a sufficent trace amout to view even if only for a moment.
skin contact is enough to have heat signature remain for several minutes. close proximity should be enough to give s few seconds.

Improved of course... otherwise a few gun mounts with cameras would be all that was necessary.

Yah what he said... if the invisible person holds still, you can't use thermo to see their feet because imp invis reflects light around them and they block the floor's heat differential. When they move they leave trace heat behind.

I wonder if you had glass floors (say in a mall concourse type of place) if people beneath you could see where you were by looking for the heat impact you would make on the glass floor. Granted they'd have to shoot through a barrier to hit you... but they could do it.

OOOH (I never thought of this before) but once they hit said mage... and he takes physical wounds... he starts bleeding... and while I don't plan ritual sorcery on the spot, the guards could track the blood.

yep as soon as he takes 3 points of physical damage he's got enough blood spilling out of him to make a good approximation of where he's been and where he's goin.

Is there a rule that says that? I just say because I personally took way less than that picking up a case of soda and getting a nasty paper cut in the process and I was pouring blood.

...now that is truly evil...I like it.

...note to self, Violet now has link for Bubba (the Love Troll) does the seven Dwarves.

only thing i could find was something about blood loss under optional damage rules in augmentation...

its not a rule its a formula, taking one box of damage would leave blood drops here and there depending, but 3 is assured of leaving a trail. and something you can't just put a bandaide on to make it stop.

Missed this bit earlier, sorry.



It takes a full pass to manifest so the spirit is reduced from 3 passes (astral) to 2 passes (physical) then spends one of those to manifest that turn, so as long as the guard:

a) hasn't acted yet this round (he's almost certainly slower than the spirit, so this mostly depends on whether the mage who gave the command is faster than him or not)

or

b) has more than one pass (which is what I was thinking of, since this is the only case that's popped up in games I've been involved in) whether by cyber, magic, bio, or drugs.

he can react before the spirit can act.


Basically the "go manifest and molest that guy" command has a similar flaw to timed grenades. (Though I note they've attempted to address the grenade problem in Arsenal.)

hmm, grenades. wifi link with instant trigger?

just toss it and then think "explode!" as needed...

And we're right back to "never, ever, piss off a talented hacker or techno"

Yah I used that rule to a good laugh this last saturday.

They wanted to get some guys in a Roadmaster. They managed to cap the driver with a great sniper shot, but the sniper couldn't punch through the back of the cabin to get at the guards in the cargo area. So they rolled in a drone with an LMG and drilled through the cabin wall. Then they threw in a Neurostun grenade (I know... sniper killing people, LMG punching through truck, followed by a Neurostun? but still)...

All the guards were expecting a rush or attack through the opening so they held actions... a slower player tossed in the grenade. The guards start scrambling for it. The first one picked it up and tried to throw it (0 hits on the throw test) so I ruled it hit the wall and bounced. Second guard threw it, but not very far and it bounced back in. third guard couldn't grab the bouncing football. Fourth guard picked it up and tossed it out.

Meanwhile the other player sitting in front of the vehicle saw it land in front of him and since he was holding an action, he picked it up and threw it BACK in. Where it went off... That's when they realized nobody had chemical protection so they couldn't drive the truck away... they had to wait for the sniper to trot up to them because he's the only one who the grenade wouldn't knock out.

About that time,a go-gang head all the commotion and came to investigate... which turned into a mad car chase where they had somebody open up the back of the truck and drive off trying to clear the neurostun. As soon as they did, they made a test to switch drivers and the sniper went back to pick off the go-gangers as they chased them...

hey, if your not planing to kill a person right then and there, dont piss that person off, plain and simple.
anything else will just come back to haunt you at some point in time.

Yeah, but the cha 1, uncouth monstrosities you see wandering around are rather unlikely to realize they may have offended someone.