Here's the situation: The team is to penetrate a small corp that has typical security, including a threat response that'll be on the premises within 15 minutes (which is already good). By that time, the players have time to kill everyone, smoke cigars, laugh about it, and leave without traces.

You can basically have similar situations depending on interacted groups, like Lone Stars. So how do you GM handles these solutions where real-life time doesn't makes sense ?? Thanks in advance.

15 minutes isn't very good. 5 minutes is something else. Also, many missions require to gather/steal alot of material that can take 20 minutes or more to load (think bank heist), or it may just take time moving through a large facility, especially if the runners have to stop to disable maglocks or hack cameras along the way.

Also, in the magical world of 2070s corporate mages and/or their spirits can be on site in seconds after recieving an alarm. They literally don't have to get dressed! Then they can engage astral mages, scan auras of perpetrators for later Search powers and identificaton, or just materialize and create havoc with Powers such as Accident or just engage the runners.

It all depends on the importance of the facility of course, a main headquarters of an AAA will more much better protected than a minor office building. Alot of the security will be based on delaying and preventing escape until the HTR teams with chopper support etc. can get there, which can be suprisingly quick in some cases, as sometimes they come from the facility itself.

What FriendoftheDork said. Plus, even when your runners know the response time of the facility (and they should!), they don't allways know when the clock started ticking (silent alarms).
So they should hurry anyways...

-CJ

To highlight a point from the posts above, an important part of security response are the places and ways that events occur without the runners being aware of. The times when security isn't required to keep the site sealed or the item in the home team's custody at all costs. These are the times when silent alarms, silent responders, spirits, and security tags are the way to go (especially if you're hoping to encourage your players towards a more subtle running method). The Search power is a great thing to use, as FriendoftheDork points out, but security tags often get overlooked by GMs that see their players all buying tag erasers (as any smart runner should). But security tags are damned difficult to errase, and even more so if they're stealth to avoid detection. And a great way to spread them around on a nice corporate site with manicured lawn or security landscaping? Sprinklers. While a little splash wouldn't be enough to effectively tag someone or something, if they or their ride gets nicely washed, then there ya go. Hell, for places with a real security budget and a strong desire to track down anyone who dares cross their threshold, DMSO/carcerand mix containing nanotagants in the water.

For the runners out there, there is of course a way to partially protect yourself from this kind of tagging. Safehouses with a garage set up as a Faraday cage. Not exactly cheap (middle necessities minimum for the steady power supply to run the cage and room for it in the first place), but this is what an EM shielded smuggling compartment from Arsenal essentially is. You'd just need to use that pricing as a guideline and get one big enough to hold your vehicle's body with some extra room to move inside. And if you ward the cage, it becomes even more useful against things like, say, the Search power. It's not perfect by any stretch. Sure the tags are blocked inside the cage, but you've still got to stay clear while getting it there.

Faraday cage needs a power supply? Why? Is blocking tag signals any harder than blocking matrix signals? Some nice signal blocking paint makes securing your safe house against such things pretty easy; you can run a fiber optic cable to an antena on the roof for your own matrix hookups, passing the signal through a node loaded with a beefy analyze / firewall setups to stop RFIDS and such from piggy-backing.

As far as I know, Faraday Cages do not need power supply.
They do need to be grounded though.

Runner's Companion, in the advanced lifestyle section, more specifically the security section, has some guidelines for the response time of on-site security. I believe Luxury gets there in a minute, high in one or two. But, hey, even a minute is twenty turns worth of passes.

Both matrix and astral security can get somewhere, and start seeing what's wrong, assessing the situation, and calling in backup within seconds, though.

Yes, your players should be afraid of alarms. If not for the immediate consequences, then because it means someone is onto them, and may be trying to find them.

A good old fashioned Faraday cage needs to be thoroughly put together, but it does not indeed need a power source. We're talking (at the basics) aluminum foil over brass mesh.

I know how this works because I wear one as a hat so the Factors can't scan my brain.

Oh, wait. Wrong game. Silly me. @=)

Fifteen minutes is the MAXIMUM response time. Rarely will it be fifteen minutes on the dot. It's not like the bus where, if they're ahead of schedule, they'll pull over somewhere and idle for a bit.

Also, most security response people will combine it with a cheaper, on-site response unit and procedures. The one my runners hate is an on-site roto-drone waiting in its charging nest, which will slow them down and catch pictures. You can expect other things to happen to - facility lock-down, an audible alarm (alerting witnesses and more local security forces), more attentive camera-watching, immediate astral or magical response, wiping hard drives, "permanent" locks (such as on safe doors which, when locked, require about a week to open with all the right tools), gas dispersal methods, so on and so forth.

Using the intertubes I pulled up this response time information for San Francisco. And San Francisco is not known for there amazing police force.

http://www.sfcontroller.org/ftp/uploadedfi...esponsetime.htm

response time was around 10 minutes in 2001 and dropped to 6 minutes in 2003, this is for the financial district. so a higher security area in San Francisco is 6 minutes, in SR where the police have a lot more freedom to go wild and the technology and magic allow quicker response times I would expect a much quicker response in any similar level district. Sure men with guns might still take 5 minutes, but drones can be there in a minute or two, astral mages in 30 seconds etc.

Which kind of fits with what Udoshi points out from runners companion. And yes 20 combat turns is a long time, its not that long. Non-combat actions can take up a lot more time. Cleaning up a scene isn't done in 1 CT. While you can run fast especially with magic, getting to your getaway car still takes time. Time enough for a drone to pick up your trail and bring in manned support for a cool chase scene.

response depends a lot on who is responding. in seattle for example, you have lonestar who has good coverage as the city hires them. you also have knight errant- ares is gonna use KE not LS. if a company uses KE then the response may be a little slower for distance in some areas, as their bases may be further apart. and LS may respond depending on where a thing happens(A-zone is fast, C-zone slow, Z-zone never). but then if Aztech sends a HTR team, the only question is how long does it take their best to jump on a helicopter and fly over to the area in question. if they need the guns then the guns get there fast.

5 to 10 minutes from alarm seems like a good speed in a lot of cases. a false alarm has a cost, but is better for security than ignoring a real alarm. 15 is too bloody long without a good reason. I want my security force to be faster than the pizza delivery guy after all.

you probably have more than one set of alarms on a site with good security. these are the perimeter alarms (fence at property edge), the door/window alarms on the building, and the internal alarms on the really important stuff. you have the perimeter alarms alert your onsite security and possibly offsite in-house security (like a drone net). door/window stuff is where the silent alarm would trigger for lonestar or similar. the really important stuff though, thats where you turn on your security rigger's gun turrets, and send in the HTR team. this way, the deeper in you go the more attention you get, so the drunk idiot at the fence gets an appropriate response.

camera systems to record the runners should be a mix of matrix and non-matrix, some recording via wire to a secure place on site to deter hackers. and lets face it, this includes biometrics and cyberware scanners. if they get you in a sensitive area, they may get a GOOD picture of something, even if its not your face. if i can read the serial number off your wired reflexes, im going to have a few clues at tracking you down.

I believe Lone Stars only duties in Seattle at present, is to run the prisons ever since Knight Errand was given Lone Stars' former contract.

There are a lot of things that have an impact on response time. It won't be the same for the Stuffer Shack in the Barrens and the bank in Downtown. It won't be the same for a pickpocket and an armed terrorist group.
Some response can arrive quickly on scene: watcher spirits ready to assense the runners (and transmit their auras to mages for identification), roto-drones ready to get pictures of them (and if possible follow them or threaten/shoot them), hackers ready to get any data they transmit. These can take only a few minutes.
Then you could have some drones to secure the permiter (if required): stop the traffic, cordon the area and so on. This can be done quickly with AR and roto-drones.
Finally, the HTR team will arrive on scene. With a VTOL, a strike team can deploy quickly. If they don't have time to land it and you want to play it cinema-style, they can even slide down ropes from the VTOL and breach the ceiling/windows. But I think that most of the time, a strike team will just make sure all the exits are covered and wait for the intruders to surrender rather than risk their lives.

Now, how do you get the runners to stay inside the building for more than 5 minutes after the alarm?
Silent alarm are a good way to avoid having your runners leave the building before the htr team can arrive. And even if the alarm is screaming, runners can't always afford to go fast: they need to be careful in case there's a guard or a drone coming their way or waiting for them. Even if they decide to go fast, they can be stuck by closed doors, that could take a long time to open or by elevators that take a long time to get there and to go down to the exits (and stairs aren't any faster). Not to mention that their getaway vehicle might have trouble to get there if the area is getting cordoned off.

And what's the standard deviation? That's sort of important. I know the police respond to calls in my neighborhood within about 2 minutes(because we pay more in taxes), and very slowly in others - but the average is still 8 minutes.