(Blank for now)

Pura is inside the house, when he ran at the door she moved further into the house so Giles does not need a simple action to step around her.

At the moment the only person he can see is Dancer since Giles and Pura are invisible.

I was thinking the simple action was to open the door that got rammed shut. But it seems like one simple action was all that was needed.

Do you mind.

One at a time in initiative sequence?

His biomonitor feed shows he's taken just some muscle bruising.(13S, 2P)

Hahahahaha.

I read that as Adrenaline Pump!

Sorry, over-reacted slightly, will edit post.

Oh, no, he's got that -too-. It ran for...oh, 3 seconds?

(Did DD pick up any warning or alert?)

Less given that we didn't get out of the first IP in the first Combat turn, we have been inside for less than 3 seconds.

Nope, and with her looping the cameras, the people at Public Eye think he's still in the shower.

His commlink is on the inside of his right wrist, strapped on like a watch.

ahh... ok. well, I'm gonna amend that to mean "any other commlinks he may have here" instead.

I am trying to make a character for another game, and I could use some help. Sadly, I don't have the Runner's Companion, but I hear there are rules in there for having groups as contacts. Is it as easy as saying "This community is a loyalty 5, connection 3 contact," or is there more involved?

Hit me at infernalistgamer on Yahoo Messenger, and I'll help you get it worked out.

Remind me to buy some WiFI blocking bags for the next run.

Or a smart jammer, but I definitely agree with the sentiment.

I don't have yahoo messenger, and since I have Ubuntu, I can't seem to get it to work. Do you use any other IM service?

I don't have yahoo messenger, and since I have Ubuntu, I can't seem to get it to work. Do you use any other IM service?

do you have Pidgin?

It should work with all of them..

WiFi blocking bag doesn't have any moving parts, can't be hacked itself, and is probably much cheaper, and not as illegal.

A toolbox with a Faraday cage.

I do have pidgin, and I tried to make a yahoo account, but I could not get it to work.

Uh, about hacking, Gecko:

Unwired, p. 101:

Mass Attacks
A mass attack refers to a team of hackers pooling their resources
to hack a particular system. Functionally, a mass attack
is Probing the Target (see Probing the Target, p. 221, SR4) with a
Teamwork Test. Hackers and technomancers can work together
on mass attacks. If the test is successful, all of the participating
hackers gain access to the node.
Agents and sprites cannot participate directly in Teamwork
Tests, but add +1 die to the prime character’s dice pool for each
agent or sprite assisting (maximum +5).

(And, honestly, I don't really like the agent smith army tactic.)

I did ask earlier whether we were using the RAW teamwork rules or the ones Brent was using in Phoenix Rising.

Those rules allowed Teamwork on Hacking on the Fly as you'll recall.

From what I recall, we used the teamwork rules RAW there - I remember getting 2 Dice from "help".

Honestly, if people can have 18 dice on hacking on the fly tests with agents, then there is no need for PC hackers at all. Even with a specialisation in exploit, and maxed programs, and going full VR, and having an optimised commlink for exploit, I only reach 16 dice.
Of course, I could use an agent army as well, DD has enough money to buy a commlink for them to run on, but that's DP inflation at its worst.

As I recall you were getting 2 Dice per Assistant which amounted to 4 Dice at one point for Jake and an Agent.

I'm easy either way. I am however always in favour of playing the rules until they prove to be a problem rather than knee-jerk assuming that they are.

In particular I am vehemently opposed to one player asking for the goal-posts to be moved once we are in play and everybody's character has been created based on the assumption that we are playing by a common set of rules.

Bad experiences in PnP I'm afraid.

Non-technomancer hackers are basically obsolete anyways. I mean, consider what a TM can do. A 400 BP TM I built who specialized in spoof had a base 18 DP, bumpted up to 22 with average threading results (and on average no fading from threading). While I picked spoof, I could have done that with exploit easily. Or, Hell, consider a sprite. Tere is nothing a R6 sprite can't do better than a hacker, no matter how much skill or tech the hacker might have. And it is not hard for even a starting TM to be able to compile a R6 sprite.

In my tests there, I had +2 for help, not +4: Link.

And I'd say agent smith tactics are a problem. I certainly did not assume that hackers could be replaced by a few agent smiths, or I'd have made another character to start with.

You are correct, I apologize.

It was however a flat +2 for the single assistant rather than a normal Teamwork test.

On checking the orc's aura out, 3 success on 8 dice for the assensing the target (checking for any unusual cyberware and any magical traces.)

I thought that was for Jake and DD's agent.

Nope, just Jake.

I tend personally to re-mechanic actions to account for player tactics. If you have three Monkey agents, One can be spoofing access, one can be scanning for IC, and one can be diddling himself till they get in. Once inside, they can do simultaneous different tasks...I'm not worried about the mechanics so tightly, he's unleashed agents in a commlink no one's hooked to, they either get fried by IC or set off data bombs, or figure stuff out eventually.

They're scripted to Break in, Disarm the Nodes Analyse program and then Hack legitimate Admin accounts before deleting every other legitimate account. Then they can change the alert script, dump every other user and clean up the Access log after making certain they aren't Databombs.

I suppose it would be reasonable to split up to perform those tasks while in the Node.

Main problem I have is I feel my character is rather obsolete if she has to risk her neck by going VR, and still is worse off for hacking a node or commlink than a couple agents.

And, I wonder what happens if I buy a bunch of such agents - or rather, crack one - and then simply have them add to DD's test. Where is the line drawn in additional Dice? Can I run 2 commlinks, with 8 agents in total? 4 and 16?

I mean, am I the only one who thinks this kind of DP inflation is wrong? Or can I assume with a bit of time, and a number of commlinks, I can agent smith every node?

You might need a few more comm-links than that for so many agents.

This has nothing to do with 'Agent Smith' it is something common to any circumstance where Teamwork is allowed.

Either it is or it isn't allowed, I'm easy either way but I'm not sure this is the place for having such a debate.

Where else then? The ooc thread is for ooc issues, IMO.

Let me be clear here, and then we move on, because we're not even -in- the plot yet...10 Agents do not equal one hacker. Even if it's a factor of mechanics supporting it, screw that. You guys don't have an AI with you, you have talking batch files. No agent is going to intelligently loop video, or intelligently address half the crap I throw at hackers. The main reason I'm not even bothering looking at the rolls here, is because Vasily's commlink is a damn dinosaur with giant exploit holes that look less like swiss cheese and more like Goatse.cx. If there were any resistance, he'd find his monkeys fragged, and having to do things personally. We clear?

And yes, you put enough processing power and you can do a fuckload to a node, that's what Cray computers are for nowadays. But there's still a ton of processes they can't do. 1 million agents on 1 million nexii won't understand that to get through a node connection, you have to hand the Babe Ruth icon a baseball bat icon. That's what the difference is.

Clear.

Hope everyone got out and voted today.

If only.

I imagine more folks here would turn out for your elections than for our own....

I am glad elections don't matter that much here - we get to vote on almost all important things directly (taxes, new laws, additions to the constitution, expenses of a town, etc.)

I always wonder, now that W. is GTFO, what sci-fi will say about him? Think about it. Shadowrun has to look back at our world now, so...what would Jackpoint say about these last 8 years?

Looking at that now...

I love that there's an entry for Charles being crowned king of England.

Heading out to do so after lunch

There are already reports of voting issues, sigh. When will we get with the program and do what all the other advanced nations do and use paper ballots marked with pencils and pens? Scantron works (even with pens), and you can go back and rescan it as many times as you need to plus do manual counts. We need a paper trail to keep the fuckers honest.

The Alabama Ballots -are- paper and black marker. Basically, Scantron.

same with Illinois, although I'd put it more along the lines of cardstock than paper...

Well, Canada uses paper and pen, but that didn't stop a few whole boxes of ballets to go missing and never be found