Is a sprite limited by the Response and System of the Living Persona of the TM?
How about of the node they are in?

Everyone I know has always run it that since the official FAQ says the CF's of TM's are not limited that Sprites aren't either which is intuitive.
Recently a GM asked to see where it said that and I couldn't. By RAW are sprites limited by the Response and System of the Living Persona and/or their node?

My understanding is Programs are limited by a node's System. Sprites are not Programs, so unless specifically stated otherwise, they do not follow any rules or limitations of Programs.

As I do not believe there is any text in RAW about Sprites being limited by System/Response, they are not.

Mus has it right. By RAW they aren't specified as being limited by the system/response, so they aren't.

K, thanks fellas!

I think this is the thread I came on here to find... if so, to elaborate, we had an interesting situation, and I was called on to adjudicate it.

Basically, in a Device Rating 3 node, a technomancer (with admin rights) and an Agent, just entering the node, detect each other. As a first move, the techno bogs the tiny node's Response right down into the gutter, leaving the Agent swimming in pure spam. It's defending, at this point, at such a slow speed that it's programs are at 1, probably even it's core Agent rating as well, leaving it with, at best, 2 dice. However, as far as we can see...the techno's avatar is running at full speed and making short work of a godlike Agent 9 with Armor 6.

Clearly this represents a pretty massive inbalance, and as a GM, shocked me, as I don't play with alot of technos. Can someone give me some clear, readable references to situations like this?

Coldhand Jake, technos are nasty like that. Sorry if you don't think its fair.

There's a huge difference between entering a node and running on a node. If the Agent was running on a different node and merely accessing the TM's node it would have been immune to such a tactic. Your Ratings are limited by the Stats of the node you are running on.

Basically, you can just think of sprites as running on themselves. Like a moebius strip with feet.

Or running on a Cluster that consists of the entire Matrix.

Or as Technomancers like to call it 'The Resonance'.

So I'm reading you using the word "sprite" to mean both sprites and a technomancers avatar, his actual Matrix VR presence? As this wasn't a machine sprite versus an agent, this was the techno himself.

Yes, both sprites and technomancer avatars ignore the system/response limits.

I think Eryk was replying to the original topic rather than your scenario.

Yes, the node in question is not the one the Agent was running on. She runs out of a nexus that was within one wireless connection of the node in question, the processor for a Kanmushi drone, which was being ridden by the techno in our example. It crawled into her Signal range, so she located it, and began to access it, planning to gain admin, and absorb pretty much all the stored data on it, including the address of whatever rigger owned/controlled it. Easily entering this off-the-shelf toy, she basically found herself ambushed.

I was of course surprised by the idea of dropping the Response to null, and engaging in basically violating the agent by exploiting, as the player explained it, his immunity to the lag in the drone's node, that should be reducing the agent to a staggering crawl(reducing her program ratings). Can someone give me some insight as to how to run this next time?

Response is a hardware attribute, and you can't just declare you're turning it down.

I hadn't really bothered to question that, as I basically assumed he was shorthanding for activating multiple programs of dubious use for the purposes of lagging it out, an easy feat for an admin. After all, I could do that now with one user command...(Open all Favorites links in new windows, for example, or opening every PDF in my RPG folder at once.) I basically handwaved that and kept moving.

You can Nuke it or just pile programs onto it until lag kills it.

Assuming the node has programs on it to overload with. If it was a brand new just opened thing, it might not have had any programs. And he certainly can't use his complex forms to overload it.

My real question, I guess, is, whether at a Response/System of 1 or 3, the two powerhouses are slugging it out in digital neck-deep (Waist-deep at 3?) mud. How much of that should be brought into play as I adjudicate it as an GM?

IC should run on a different remote node.

The attacked node should have had a much higher Firewall and Analyze. Admin access requires a threshold of Firewall + 6.

Any Node can run Firewall at 6 and Analyse should be run with the Optimzation 3, which is a very cheap option, giving the target node 12 dice to hit a threshold of the TM's Stealth.

Every time the TM rolls Exploit to get in the Node gets to roll Firewall and Analyze again to spot him.

Basically, even a TM can't just breeze into a node with admin access. Sprite Services and Threading will change that but the TM has to expend resources or make some sort of effort.

Additionally, if the Agent running on the drone was doing security it should have raised an alert against the TM which would have removed his admin rights.

If neither entity is running on the lagged hardware then it is purely cosmetic. Two helicopters dog-fighting over a swamp.

If one is running on the lagged node then it gets to be a jeep driving through the swamp. Likely to get maimed by a helicopter.

The drone, a Pilot 3 (from where I derive it's value as a Device 3 node) Kanmushi, belonged to the technomancer, so should I still be watching this hard for gaining him admin on it?

The Agent was from a nexus server the target (a old-school decker Prime Runner) uses for Matrix access. The drone was being sent in, carrying the TM's presence, for mysterious reasons I have to assume involved getting close enough to wirelessly interface with the base so the TM could move in and start hitting them. Once the drone crawled into overlapping Signal, the Agent made a move to enter and basically hijack the drone.

Does that help?

So, while the TM's player was right on his end, I was underestimating my agent. She should have stayed at full power, making it the epic struggle I hoped it would be, instead of a surprising bending-over.

Sorry, stick, end, wrong.

Did the Agent load itself onto the Drone?

Everything I said about security still holds. Agent should never have gotten into the drone. Stupid TM.

Assuming the Agent did load itself into the drone then the TM did exactly right. Stupid Agent.

If the Agent was just accessing the Drone the TM still should have had the upper hand as the security spider for the node.

Raise an Active Alert, bring in a Sprite or an Agent or two of your own and whoop some ass....

Well, lesson learned. Thanks for the help, folks. Crizh, especially.

I corrected myself to say System but thinking back on it, unloading the OS would probably require the device to crash or reboot. What I should have done is loaded a rating 6 agent or IC directly on the node with 5 programs carried on it so the response would be penalized to 1.

As to perceptions, it WAS an ambush. The GM said I detected someone trying to breach my firewall to which I responded "I let them in". I then spent an edge to go first before the intruding Agent could wreak havoc and spoofed a command to the agent to have it go into its originating node and wreak havoc. Mental note: Combat Passes are a handy thing for keeping this stuff sorted. Another lesson learned.

Regardless of confusion on both our parts it seriously rocked to see a counter to a TM that wasn't antiwireless paint and for that KUDOS!

Would bullets get kudos also?

Smartassery aside I thought it clever.

Thanks. Network-inhibiting paint and network jammers are fun and all, but Black IC/Snowman is NUTS. Multiple datajacks trunked into the base nexus like something out of the Matrix movies, he's convinced that he (and/or Belladonna, the Agent you beat, or Jenny Noquar, the [entirely illegal] physical adept/proto-technomancer) could whoop just about anything trying to hack him. So, he kept a strong Signal rating and relays all over the base, so he could dual-overlap even a Signal 1 if it got near the outer walls, much less within. He -wants- you to come in, so he can get a stranglehold on your icon and pump a bunch of rabid snowmen into your brainpan.

Since Belladonna was programmed to follow Snowman around sometimes, and take orders, spoofing a command to go home and do something was a entirely viable move. Just wish I'd have been able to make it more dramatic, with some cybercombat, or at least a challenging dice-roll or two...