I was talking with a new player today and he was asking if it were possible to sit at home and remotely control drones / vehicles. Now I was sure that there was a reason that you can't (or at least not as effectively as on site), but looking through the rules again, I can't seem to find why. The only real issue I see is if you are in a deadzone. But couldn't you just equip a vehicle with a satellite link and then use it's signal to broadcast out to all of your drones? I thought there was a penalty involved with using a satellite link, but I can't seem to find it. Am I just looking in the wrong places?

It is viable. The remote player could have communications with his team and communications with his drones/vehicles.

There are sat link rules, some sort of delay, I think. They are either in core, arsenal or unwired...I'm sure someone will post some page references soon.

The downsides that I can see are:

1) Other players may be resentful that you are not risking being on site for the run.
2) A successful trace would result in your home being located...and many bad things can happen after that.
3) Connectivity...dead zones, jammers, wi-fi inhibitors at secure locations...any of those could be used to block your connection.

If the players are cool with it and the GM isn't going to focus on screwing your over all the time, then I think you are fine creating a remote character. I could see a GM occaisionally mess with your connectivity or throw you a run to a secure facility that you'd have to leave your house from time to time, but as long as you are cool with that, then I don't see any major problems.

The problem with this is simple. You CAN completely phone in a hack by staying home and letting your friends go in and do the dirty work backed up by your drones and you in VR hopping system to system. The problem is that you are completely dependent on maintaining a clean wireless link and there are a ton of ways that opposition can and will interfere with that. This becomes a serious issue when you are caught at home when you loose connection and are unable to bring your skills to bear on the situation.

As a rule of thumb I consider the overwatch cut of a run to be much less than that of someone who risked their lives to be on site. Works well for games where no one wants to play a hacker so they hire an NPC. Not so great for players, but they usually come around when the rest of the party starts badgering them for being a coward.

I'm playing a technomancer right now who has no business being in a firefight. However I follow the team on site and back them up with a drone or two and a hack here and there. If a situation arises I am there to handle it. Even if the party is completely confined in a wifi inhibiting area, they still have a hacker.

Just don't ask me to return fire without my drones. If I have to draw my pistol, something went seriously wrong. Again.

one of the hand full of things i like about 4th ed is it gets the rigger/decker out in the streets. in 3rd the; hospital confined, quadriplegic, def, mute worked great. It's not like you wanted them actually present in the run anyway. they were always complaining about not being able to find a jack point, and getting shot at.

4th gets the matrix users in the runs. The wireless nature of everything also means there will be times you need to get close to something to affect it, or rather make sure someone else doesn't have a better signal strength. Most riggers will get nervous with there precious (VERY EXPENSIVE) drones too far away from them. just too easy to take over someone's drone if there operating it somewhere where it signal is only 2 or 3. you need you own broadcasting equepment, it's just too scary to rely on other peoples bandwidth when the pressure's on.

Half the fun of the new decker/hacker/technomancer is walking down the street and having the traffic stop for as you walk across the street. the new flexibility of the decker also means the he really needs to be on the ground with the rest of the team, most of the time. Other wist it turns into a bad tech-support role.

runners-"ring that guards comlink and talk to him for a distraction, so we can sneak by"
tech support-"who? what's his com number?"
runners-"it's not listed, search his network or something"
tech support-"ok, i need you to open you DIN log and edit the file listed under the....."
runners-"never mind we'll just shoot him"

# 1 aside, the other two aren't issues when using Sat links. You only get a response speed decrease for using geosynchronous sats, but you can use low orbit ones with no drawback. It's much harder to trace you while using a sat uplink than it is using any other means of connectivity, and as far as wi-fi inhibitors and such, they affect you just as much if you are sitting in your vehicle as they do if you are sitting at home, ie you lose connection to your drones. The character is question is not going to be a hacker, just a rigger, so no need to go along and hack the doors and such on the fly.

I'm thinking a van with a sat uplink, max signal upgrade so you basically have a roaming wireless access point, and thus aren't dependent on piggybacking at all, as long as you upgrade the sensors on your drones. As far as affecting other things, fly a drone up next to it and suddenly you can access it from any distance.

I agree that 4th edition made it more required for riggers / hackers to tag along, but I don't know if it actually did or not.

The problem with this scenario is that apparently the tech support guy is an idiot. It should be more like this:

runners-"ring that guards comlink and talk to him for a distraction, so we can sneak by"
tech support uses his microdrone that is clipped onto the runners necktie to scan for the guards wireless signal, calls him, distracts
tech support - "Done"

And personally I'd say that the various wireless blocking technologies are so common that Bunker Deckers really aren't viable anymore, not to mention, do you really want to be bleeding boosted wireless signals all over the place while on a run?

I'm AFB right now, but I'm almost sure that using stellite links, proxies, whatever to increase your range of control reduces your Response. I could be wrong though...

When the hacker in my game walked into the first meet, he immediately hacked all of the other runners phones and created backdoors for himself. Over the week IRL after the run, people emailed me stuff they were doing in their downtime. I immediatly forwarded emails to the hacker whenever they were something he couldve heard from their phones.

If a runner has a phone with decent programs and response, the hacker could use their comlink as an access point to hack anything in their vicinity. Hacking potential without even risking a drone.

Of course, the next time one of the players contacted one of their capable hacker contacts, they were immediately told, 'Your line isnt clean. I can trace the tap for a small price...'.

Because the best way to make friends (or at least, job partners) is to bug their phones...

Sat lnks half your response, but only if you use Geo synchronous ones. Low orbit ones don't have any negative effect.

One of the many reasons why people need to spend BP in order to have the skills and programs needed to protect themselves from Deckers as opposed to mooching off the Decker.

Low orbit satellites are just as traceable as anything else, which is the price you pay for getting reliable matrix access anywhere in the world. The geosynchronous satellites, which fly a lot higher, mean you can only be pinpointed to within a few hundred kilometers as the benefit you gain from putting up with the communications lag.

Edit:
So it occurs to me that since Nexuses can run a System rating higher than their Response rating, if you're reasonably confident that you won't be getting into cybercombat, running your persona on a nexus through a geosynchronous satellite is the way to go if you want to get some work done without any risk of being located.

Sure they do - they make you way easier to track. The advantage of a geosynchronous setup is that they can't pinpoint the location of the satlink any more precisely than roughly one half the globe or the other (i.e., LOS to the high-orbiting satellite is the only restriction). Low orbit sats have much smaller individual coverage areas, so using them for access means you're easier to find.

EDIT: Scooped by DWC.

Finding you through a Low Orbit satellite is the same as finding you through the normal matrix providers is all I meant. There is no drawback to using it compared to the normal means of connection. Geosynchronous orbit satellites have a benefit and a drawback. Low orbits have a benefit (I take my connection with me no matter where I go, even into deadzones), and no drawback compared to normal connection methods

Too bad the RAW doesn't actually support this. Damn hard encryption/slaving...

I dunno, Botnet / Mr. Smith setup and tell it five minutes ahead of time that you want to cross the street and you might be able to. You would throw up huge flags, and probably get gunned down by LS on the next block, but you would look pretty cool for a few minutes...

Depending on where you are, if you've got the right access to GridGuide, you just might be able to stop traffic with a thought when you want to cross the street.

Step 1: Break the encryption. Might take a few seconds.
Step 2: Peek at the controlling node and get its access ID.
Step 3: Spoof the traffic signals and cross the street at your leisure.

But that's the thing, the drawback is hacking from home or your vehicle once you are traced. While its no different to trace you from your commlink with the team or your remote location, there is a pretty big drawback with the results. You have now screwed your home and potentially lost the vehicle you purchased, due to physical security being sent...that is what I was trying to get at with my initial list of three issues.

Now, if you remotely hack from a different location each time, but just not with the team, or you feel comfortable moving that vehicle every so often during a hack, then its not as big a drawback.

Physical security, heck. If you're in a sufficiently secure system, they might forgo the physical security and send a cruise missile instead.

not to mention it doesn't negate stuff like wifi-inhibiting material, jammers, or faraday cages in your target's security setup. with relatively cheap gear, it's not that hard to knock out pretty much all wireless communications. if you're physically present, at least you can use voice commands (if you set up your drones for that of course). sure, it's not as good as VR, but at least it's something. not to mention if you have to boost a vehicle that isn't rigger adapted or even wireless adapted... you would need to be there to help out.

Think you missed the part about Hard Encryption. Pretty easy to justify GridGuide being able to keep their encryption at rating 3/1 day. Even 3/1 hour.

Of course if you routinely hack GridGuide every morning and just hang out in there all day while doing this then that works too. Can't remember the rules for a BotNet attack but seems like it would raise some flags on the GridGuide host if you get in that way.

I was talking about decrypting the signals going to the traffic lights. I don't think you can use strong encryption for signals.

"Strong encryption may not be used for signals encryption." (PG. 66 Unwired.)

Routinely breaking into a system like GridLink is probably still not a good idea. I imagine it has the same kind of defenses as the Power Grid, after all someone who gains access to it can cause massive loss of life. Not something you do for something as trivial as stopping some traffic. Even if you only do it every so often and leave lots of Backdoors sooner or later someone will perform a security audit and fix them, maybe leave a little trap for you when you next try it.

But if you are sneaky enough (And you get an accepted Access Code, say through Social Engineering) you could spoof individual traffic lights with some ease.

Unless the folks in charge of GridGuide are changing the AccessID of the nexuses that send the commands to the lights, it doesn't matter what they put into the system when all you want to do is send spoofed commands to stoplights.

For a hacker with minimal material risk, this might be reasonable. For a rigger that's putting numerous expensive drones on the line, it's just not reasonable. Consider too that drones tend to take abuse FAR out of proportion to their toughness - GMs will pop a PC's without a second thought but often shy away from killing PCs arbitrarily. Metagame, but that's the way it is.

Plus I put my brain on the line every time I step into VR (Which I do a fair bit). All you have to worry about is maybe getting shot at a little bit. I have to worry about legions of Black IC falling down on my head if I make a wrong move.

I'd argue that the hacker faces the most risk, actually. The long list of things psychotropic IC can do to is quite horriffic.

Thanks CodeBreaker for grabbing that quote for me. Aaron, sorry for my mistake -- you were correct.

Looking at SR4A they have vastly improved Decryption. I like that it is clear that you don't have to monitor the decryption anymore. That makes it a little less rough.

From the way I understand it. You could run a low orbit satellite link and have your vehicle parked in a corp zone (with the proper IDs I would imagine). That way when they trace your signal they won't be shooting a missile or sending the authorities to you. The book seemed to mention that usually security doesn't cross those zone lines, especially for competing corps.

sure, but that doesn't mean you don't have to worry.

1) you do have to leave eventually. if not then you run into problems 2 and 3 anyways
2) extradition. if they know where you are, and find out who you are, they can extradite you. once the run (and the damage) is done, the corp who's territory you're in no longer benefits from your actions. unless of course you want to become a corporate asset, that is. seems like a poor tradeoff for not being physically present that you might have to spend the rest of your life in a cubicle with several armed guards at all times.
3) pretend you're an extraterritorial corporation. there is a known criminal parked in a van outside your territory, matrix capable, he's a hacker or rigger (honestly the line gets a little blurry)... do you really want him parked on your doorstep? i mean sure, if you're making lone star look bad, ares might take their time... but once the run is done, they will be *more* than happy to step in with KE and show how they caught the criminal while LS comes out looking like a bunch of incompetent buffoons.
4) i don't think corporate extraterritorial areas are as common as you think. sure, Aztechnology owns stuffer shack, but that doesn't mean stuffer shack is extraterritorial. most corp zones are going to be secured areas. after all, why bother having the ability to use whatever force you want if you're not gonna use it? in seattle, the only exception i can think of offhand is the old renraku archology. of course, now the archology is no longer renraku property, so that no longer applies. but basically, unless you jumped the fence into a secure facility or something, you probably aren't in extraterritorial territory. a S-K warehouse might be, but the extraterritorial area has to be clearly marked, and separate somehow iirc.

so yeah, i wouldn't really recommend hanging out on corporate property. assuming it won't just get you shot for being there, it likely won't offer all that much protection.

Okay, so assuming you don't have artificial papers to be in the corp territory for the duration of a run. If you have a low earth orbit satellite ( signal rating 8 ) and are working in Seattle then you could, in theory, be in Salish-Shidhe Council territory. I'm not claiming to know anything about that 'country', but maybe that is a way to stay out of harms way from being hunted down. Park a van outside UCAS territory (well hidden from onlookers I would assume) and hope no one is willing to break international territorial laws to find you. Again, also assuming you have paperwork to get into Salish-Shidhe Council territory or know how to smuggle yourself into the territory.

In order to be extraterritorial, the corp has to own the location and more importantly be willing to mark it as being extraterritorial. Of course, there's nothing stopping them from shooting you first and than painting a big sign over your body afterwards provided that no-one that cares is looking.

Hmm, I would say:
Step 1: Run Exploit on GridGuide, to break in
Step 2: Find the persona sending signals to the traffic lights, run an Analyze on it for Matrix Perception, ask for the access ID
Step 3: Log off
Step 4: Go to traffic light, run a Sniffer to Intercept the Wireless Signal
Step 5: Break the encryption
Step 6: Spoof your command and cross the street.

Don't know how leisurely that is though.