Seriously, if someone necroes a thread from half a month ago I'd expect he read at least the first page, where I already did a quick rundown of the numbers


He can still have that army of sprites, just won't be doing much else when having three or four R6 sprites do his work...


Two words: Matrix Signature.

For some reason people tend to forget that it does not take a Ghost Dance or Crash Worm to leave traces of the mojo involved. Even something cheap as a R3 Browse form leaves a signature for three hours unless you clean up after yourself, and if you push it up to rating 18 (which I wouldn't allow, IMO the Resonance * 2 threshold should apply to everything boosting a CF rating) and use some other highlevel resonance abilities it is going to be a big neon sign to everybody who can "read" it.
I also like to do some roleplaying with the whole "disturbance of the force" thing, powerful manipulations of mana or resonance may be felt by mages/TMs nearby, mundanes feel an odd chill, animals start acting funny, AIPS patients get seizures...there is no perfect crime unless you GM wants it

The point is not that you can use other 'mancers to counter mancers. The point is that there is nothing else that has a chance.

No, I read your post. I agree that failed attempts must be factored in considering the unlikelihood of getting each registered on the first attempt, but you also have to factor in luck, having someone with First Aid handy, or even some stim patches to keep the TM going even WITH failed Fading rolls.

The point I was trying to make is that it ISN'T impossible to accomplish. Just very difficult.

As for the sprite army, I have to disagree again. I did a similar tactic once and had the sprite army as SUPPORT and not really do the work for the TM. It's all based on how the player utilizes the them.

And YES having that Matrix sig is tricky....unless the TM cleans up after himself, has the Erased quality, shuts down the entire node for the duration that his sig would be there...there are so many options available for getting rid of the sig that it doesn't even matter if the player knows what they're doing.

However, I REALLY like your "disturbance in the force" thought. It makes sense that someone blowing through a system with THAT many dice would be felt by...someone. I'll have to use that.

Nowhere, since emotitoys don't actually exist. They were just a real dumb joke which someone made up to mess with people who actually like cyberpunk.

That's the beauty of optional rules. If the GM feels a player abuses something he can come down on him, if not he can just let the player do his thing


The harder you try to suppress something, the more obvious it becomes


What this whole discussion about TMs being overpowered boils down to is that they are actually no different from any other character concept: A good character played by somebody who knows the ins and outs of the rulebooks can do insane things in one particular area, and mop up everything the GM throws at him. At that point it is the GM's job to remind the player that all actions have consequences, and going completely over the top can have accordingly severe consequences (especially when playing a "deniable asset" who wants to blend in with the grey masses). A good player will get the hint and play his pornomancer/troll tank/manaball slinger/sprite master/bloodzilla/whatever more moderately.

I do like that idea, too, and I belive there's an Echo for that - Coenesthesia. Its mentioned in a few places that there may be undiscovered echoes, since the resonance is fairly new - so making an Advanced Echo based upon the same principle, except over a .... somewhat larger distance on the matrix, seems fairly cut-and-dried.

I consider this more of an innate sixth sense, in other words at the GM's whim.
Background counts, resonance wells and other phenomena where the local quality and quantity of Mana/Resonance differ significantly from the norm are said to produce various strange sensations among people susceptible for it, so I simply deduct that large-scale manipulations of these energies can produce the same effect for a few moments. And given the variety of awakened powers IMO it's perfectly reasonable to assume that somebody may be completely mundane, but still have enough connection to the astral world to perceive an odd chill in the presence of powerful magic. Dito for the emerged.


However a resonance version of the Magic Sense power also sounds reasonable, nothing wrong with making a sixth sense official.