So, I was giving Unwired a good readthrough, and came into the section where it talks about forging money and SINs. I can't help but notice that forging either is impossible, and absurdly not worth it.

Making a rating 2 forgery (almost guaranteed to be found out the first time it is used) of nuyen requires a 48, 1 day extended test. Even assuming a DP of 20, it would take about a week of solid work to copy 5k nuyen which will get found out right away, and a rating 3 isn't even possible (All it has to do is not get a hit on 2 dice to be found out, and even with a hit it might get found out anyway). Seems like a ton of effort for basically no benefit. Similarly, a fake SIN will take a month or two just to get a rating 1, 4 or so months to get a rating 2, and higher ratings impossible to manage.

Maybe it's just me, but the forgery rules seem to make the skill quite worthless. At least in this regard. I don't remember, but I think there are a handful of other things forgery can be used for, but them seemed to be fairly rare sorts of things.

So, does anyone bother to take forgery, and more importantly, has anyone ever had it really come up at all?

Trying to counterfeit digital money is difficult as hell, as it should be. Documents, paintings, books, etc. are much easier.

How do I buy all those fake sins then?

Fake money I can see making impossible, but if I can buy a rating 6 sin if I have the skills I should be able to make one similar to how you can make your own programs.

Edit to add:
If mechanically it is just for paintings etc. because everything else is basically impossible it should just be rolled into the artisan skill.

Side note: I have never taken it in SR, but in the battletech game I am in my character has a 10 in forgery(highest rating possible) has one of the key stats at +1, and is aptitude in the skill(roll 3d6 instead of 2d6 and take the highest 2 dice). But in BT they just say some stuff like Id's are hard so you are at a -6 to -8 to your roll. It means making a solid fake ID is hard due to all the computer records, dna samples etc you have to mess with but it is possible still and my character does it fairly regularly.

I haven't even looked in a long time. Forgery skill covers both artistic and hacking sides?

Nevermind, I took a look at page 96: first it's Forgery, then it's Hacking. That makes more sense. Hell, why bother with the Forgery half at all…

How many people use documents or books any more? And how often does forging a painting come up?

I don't really understand why digital money is so difficult to counterfeit to be honest. I mean if I have a credstick that says it has 5000 nuyen on it, how does anyone really know if that 5000 nuyen is 'real' or if I hacked the credstick and told it to set itself to 5000 nuyen? Does each individual nuyen have a serial number attached to it? Does that mean fractional nuyen can't exist? And if every nuyen does have a serial number attached to it, what's to stop me simply using the serial number multiple times? If I pay someone 30 'serial numbers' and then I pay someone else those same 30 'serial numbers' what causes anything to catch it? It'd be impossible to keep track of every single serial number and ensure there aren't duplicates floating around, especially since some could be on a credstick not attached to the matrix and thus impossible to tell if the duplicate serial numbers are really duplicates or simply those from the credstick popping up again.

I mean, for the most part it seems to me like nuyen doesn't actually exist. I mean if I buy something from someone, then I transfer nuyen from my bank account to theirs, but I'm not really transferring any nuyen, its just that my bank talks to his bank, and my bank marks off X nuyen from my account, their bank adds X nuyen to their account, and then my bank sends their bank X nuyen.

The fluff reason is that a hacker does it differently from the people you buy fake SINs from. Bought Fake SINs are the product of political favors, backdoors into systems, and other stuff, which still doesn't make alot of sense. A hacker is certainly capable of making those same backdoors (And in fact is required to do a bunch of hacking even after the forgery part).

Extensive discussions on why SINs are so hard to forge (re: fluff reasons) are discussed here with varying levels of detail; in short it's done because it would be too powerful for PC's to do and ingame it requires a sizeable network of contacts and hackers to insert information into the numerous databases required for it to pass muster.

Wow, I didn't know I bought my fake Sin from a lobbyist every time instead of my low rent 1/2 fixer. I should get around to reading unwired some day. Lame IMO why have the forgery skill if you can't really use it. Like I said for game balance I can see not allowing money, but virtually anything else should be fair game.

Sins are both cheap and somewhat readily available. I don't see a real balance issue in letting a player do this. Oh noes with his 30 karma spent on the forgery skill he saves 6,000 nuyen here and there. There are plenty of skills that save more money than that regularly. Heck enchanting probably saves more.

We're getting into the details of digital currencies here - which I covered a bit in Unwired and was going to cover more in Corp Guide - but let me try to address this.

Every nuyen does not have a serial number, every nuyen (or smallest permissible fraction of a nuyen) is a serial number, heavily encrypted with a specific scheme. Every time nuyen "moves" those numbers are recorded and the exchange registered. For most people, they never deal with an actual nuyen 'file' at all: the nuyen stays in the heavily-secured servers of their bank, and the registered ownership of that particular nuyen is changed. Introducing two nuyen with the exact same number will cause red flags to show up, because the different ownership/exchange registries won't match. So the only way to really falsify a nuyen is when that nuyen is offline - i.e. in a certified credstick.

Because this is part of what the idea of digital currency is and how it works. (Not the whole way of how it works, but you get the idea.) Try reading up on how people forge paper currency today and you'll get an idea of the relative difficulty, and why a digital currency would be harder to counterfeit (if you have good crypto).

As for forging books and stuff - consider reading Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Club Dumas.

That notion was covered in the relevant thread, and I have no interest in repeating myself.

Sounds like alot more trouble than it is worth if you're selling top grade fake SINs for only 6k.



This part is what doesn't make sense to me. I totally get the bank having all the 'real' nuyen and people simply spending ownership of that nuyen, but I don't get the 'nuyen is a serial number' thing. The only places you would likely find 'real' nuyen would be credsticks and bank 'vaults', everything else would simply be how we use credit cards and direct bank transfers and such in modern times, right?

I suppose that means the only real way to 'create' money would be to hack into a bank and make a fake account (or adjust a real account). It still wouldn't exactly create money as far as the world is concerned, but it would as far as you are concerned.

Still don't get what exactly a nuyen is, but I'm willing to accept that it is something that isn't easily copied and made to not look like a copy.

And yeah, I know modern currency is super hard to forge, but it would be very easy to forge in 2072 thanks to nanoforges (which is, I would imagine, why hard currency fell out of favor).

Trust me, if I'd been writing that part of SR4, it would have been more.


What makes a dollar bill? The paper, the ink, the specific pattern the ink is put in, the little magnetic strip, the serial number on it, and last and most importantly the value of the bill, the promise of what it is worth, when it was issue, who issued it, and who will redeem it. A nuyen is just data. No paper, no ink. All the rest is just data, one big number. Ultimately, that's all you need, so that's all you ave.


Mostly. Any actual nuyen transfer would also see the nuyen pass through different nodes, though you wouldn't see it - just part of the dataflow.


You could hack a bank and alter the registry so that a certain amount of nuyen now belonged to a new account. Still doesn't create money, just moves it around.


It's money. That's the long and the short of it.


No. Modern currency is hard to counterfeit well. You can do it really easy with a snazzy color printer or a coin mold. Hell, even with a nanoforge getting the right materials is tricky as hell, especially if anything is organic.

90% of the currency floating around today is not backed by anything real... it is a fabrication of the banking system that is allowed to magnify its real reserves by a factor of 10 and lend it to us rubes at interest. It seems to me electronic counterfeiting could tap into that magnification system and add a few serial numbers.

No, or at least not the way you're describing it. Partial reserve banking isn't a product of fiat currency, it's just a banking practice. It probably wouldn't actually create any new nuyen files, it would just create pointers to the appropriate institution, who would record the transactions.

Personally I'd like them if they were more expensive, but less likely to be found. As they stand, they actually fail very quickly if ever checked, but they can be replaced quite easily. *shrug*

Right, but a dollar bill is difficult to alter because it is a physical thing, and is easy to give to another person because it is a physical thing. With nuyen though, it is more complicated. If every nuyen chunk is just a serial number that is a reference to a value of how much it is worth, then that means there is one central database that contains all those references, and can make the necessary changes to say that nuyen chunk A335 is now worth 500 nuyen instead of 600 nuyen, and chunk A445 is now worth 1000 nuyen instead of 900 nuyen. If this was the case, it would be constantly under attack by hackers, and likely hit quite often by DOS attacks just to mess with people. And if this isn't the case, then nuyen cannot exist as you're putting it forth. I'm willing to believe that nuyen are like dollars and that we simple exchange the theoretical ownership of them by one bank account going down, and another going up, but I don't see how a nuyen can be an actual electronic thing that keeps track of who owns it, and how much it is worth, and that who owns it and how much it is worth can be easily changed, and yet impossible to change in a way that benefits you.


My understanding of a nuyen transfer to another person was that your bank deducted nuyen from your account (which is simply a number, it isn't 'real' nuyen) and was added to another account (once again, just a number) and if done between different banks, then those banks would transfer the 'real' nuyen.


But there is no way a bank could exist if all nuyen must be assigned ownership to someone and couldn't simply be an amount owed, because it would be impossible to loan people money or otherwise invest it to turn a profit. If for example I have 1000 nuyen in my account, and that is 'real' nuyen sitting on a server somewhere that is always actually there, then that means that the nuyen can't be loaned to another person, because the ownership couldn't be transferred.

I mean a real bank works because you deposit $100, and they write down that they owe you $100, and then they hand that $100 to someone else, and write down that they own the bank $110. You're saying that that doesn't happen though, because when you hand them the 100 nuyen, that nuyen is still registered as belonging to you, which means they can't loan it to someone else.

If they do it like a real bank, then the nuyen would be registered to the bank, and the bank would simply have a record that they owe you 100 nuyen. That means that if you hacked into a bank and set up an account, you could set it to say they owed you 200 nuyen, and you wouldn't have to adjust the ownership of any 'real' nuyen. It is exactly like it would work in modern days. If you hack into a real bank and create a fake account that says it has $100 in it, then the bank thinks it owes you $100. You don't have to go into the bank and write on the $100 bill "Property of Haxor".

And that is a fine way to not-counterfeit a money, provided you can hack the IC.

Okay, great. Just when you said
I thought you meant that nuyen didn't exist as something owed by a bank to a person, which would render banks instantly non-existent.

And back to my original question: Has anyone ever actually made use of forgery in game before?

Sure. Just, probably not nuyen.

I saw very little dealing with balance the entire thread was the fluff of what a sin was and what it covered. Balance wise it saves you a bit of money not much but you waste a lot of time instead, just like dozens of other skills.

Fluff-wise, SINs should be easier to fake than nuyen because people are easier to make and the Corporate Court cares more about money than people.

Balance-wise, SINs should be easier to fake than nuyen because people need them more and the gamemaster cares more about money than identities.

And if I were the cost would be the same and the fluff of forging one being impossible would have changed.

Thing is it is a game where you want people to have fake Ids and relatively good ones, so you game mechanic wise need them relatively cheap. Therefore you should write the fluff to support the game mechanic you want,(people having fake sins maybe multiples) you don't write the fluff to what someone thinks is cool and then have the mechanics piss all over it. Because at the end of the day its a game where people are supposed to be sneaking around and using fake sins.

Another option would be to make sins relatively easy to do with out, it is rare for them to be checked at all you don't need them to con your way past check points or when dealing with guards, and cops etc. Then you can make them stupidly expensive and write the fluff to back that up because they are a perk not a necessary tool of business.

Or you could have security check points only check on a surface level and cheap SINs do fine there, once people actually physically look into it and research you it will fall apart, but that level of research takes time and wont be done when walking past a guard or check point no matter how secure it is. An hour later they might find something, but not while walking through a gate.

It is a game where you want people conning there way into buildings and past check points impossible to forge and really expensive SINs do not support that game play. Easy to obtain fake SINs do support that game play. The fluff should support the game play you want to support.

Edit to add given your latest post I don't think we disagree too much on this though I may be misreading you.

I always imagined the people making the SINs did them in bulk, they either have a backdoor access to putting SINs in, have a corrupt hookup in the system, or are in the system themselves legitimately. The level of SIN represents the security (for backtracing) and level of information. For it to be worth their while they need to be able to put SINs in as a bulk operation, the reason its prohibitively expensive for runners to do is because they are doing it from scratch with no contacts or inside lines, they are also trying to insert one SIN outside the normal system.

ah, money, that elusive concept that civilization hinges on.

How much more?

Depends on what you mean by civilization.

By civilization, he means money. Duh!

humans sharing resources by negotiated agreement rather then the threat of bodily harm, for one thing.

AH, I have to disagree with you and your point "that electronic money are values in a giant database". Money transfers are done from one valid and authenticated account to another. Every "Bill" isn't stored in a massive pointer database. That is a complete waste of time, extremely inefficient and doesn't even make sense.

Each person will have an account with a balance. If you want to transfer money, that credstick has to correspond with a Bank, an account, and a balance. All of this will be authenticated, and handled similarly to how it is handled today. Virtually. It saves governments an extraordinary amount of money printing documents.

Certified credsticks would be essentially cashier's cheques made out to "cash" That credstick will trace back to a bank account somewhere. The account is just more transferable between owners.

It is possible that corporate script would be tracked by serial number when it is redeemed at a bank, but from my recollection it is seldomly used.

It's used enough to warrant an exchange market where corp scrip is traded like any other currency, but the nuyen seems to be the global backing for most of these other currencies.

There are some constraints on the system based on prior material; in this case it's been established the nuyen is actually located in the certified credstick, exactly as a file is located on an optical chip.

It's a specialty skill to be sure, but there are certainly times where having the Artisan and Forgery skill can get you places. Think about this only magically active can detect a forged focus easily, but plenty of Mundanes trade in Magical Artifacts. Antique and Art Dealers often contract Shjadowrunners to acquire difficult to obtain pieces, sure you won't fool the deal;er if he hires you to obtain the piece, but if you're hired to track down the dealer who hired some other runners to aq=cquire something from Mr. J then having a Forgery good enough to fool some street guys might get you in the door to meet the guy who actually can tell the difference (who may just be your target)

And don't get me started on Atrisan + Forgery + Demolitions for the crafting of highly attractive IED's

*Replica* attractive IEDs, you mean.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Bearer_bond

Of course, it's the required skill set to craft David from C-4

Now we know where Venus' arms went, too.

You're right. It is a lot of trouble and likely very expensive for a single measly rating 6 fake SIN. For -most- people isn't inefficient to do it. 6k makes sense if and only if fake SINs are governed by economies of scale.

We can rightly assume that it costs -way- more than 6,000 to produce a single rating 6 fake SIN. To say it would cost 200,000 would not be unreasonable. So the first SIN costs 200,000 while each additional SIN may be about 1/3 of the cost of the fake SIN (bribes to keep the wheels greased), so 2,000 or less is the manufacturing cost of each rating 6 fake SIN. Once the hacker sells about 300,000 worth of fake SINs, he'll have broken even and start making profit.

But that isn't forging a SIN. You aren't trying to make a SIN that looks like another one, you're trying to make a whole new SIN.

As for forgery? I can see it being used for SINs. A player's forged SIN won't pass any checks though. The goal is to make it believable. The question becomes when would a SIN be used and not checked against a system for validity? Perhaps in some criminal dealings where they don't want to check SIN databases to validate who you are. You kill some thugs that are going to a mafia meeting. You take their SINs and forge them to use your biometrics. At a cursory glance and without the database to validate the mafia guys may very well think you are one of them.

TL;DR - Forgery is for when you have a reasonable expectation that your forgery is not going to be digitally checked.

Forgery was worth it in the '50's, back when chrome was chrome and pixies existed only on the trideo.

There is an additional major difference between forging digital money and digital identification.

People actually care about the money.

The problem with actually creating money inside a bank's electronic records is that the discrepancy shows up very quickly. Any audit software will show that the previous day's balances plus credits and debits does NOT equal today's balances. In order to actually add the money, you need a deposit to balance the books. However, that's an issue too because deposit came in some form, i.e. there's an electronic transfer of money from one place to another. Audits there will indicate that the amounts recorded as deposited doesn't actually equal the amount of money transferred.

The issue here is that money isn't a single record in a database. It's a collection of balancing records in multiple databases. And many of these records are (in my experience anyway) totals and subtotals. Alas, I can't give you my personal experience, so I'll point to the most similar public example I know, Clifford Stoll's attempt to figure out a $0.75 accounting error: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_%28book%29

The bottom line is, banks take money seriously. I've spent a large amount of man hours tracking down discrepancies that wouldn't buy me a Snickers Bar.

ID's on the other hand, are more of a CYA sort of deal. No one cares if you're using a fake ID or not as long as they can claim they exercised "due diligence". A solid investigation will find all the holes in a fake ID but the whole purpose of the fake ID is to get past the wage slave standing on the border between two places the wage slave really doesn't care about. There really isn't anyone who cares about your ID enough to spend the time to deal with it.

An example of the security if IDs would be the security for the lock on your house or car. My assumption here is that you lock your doors (or know someone who does) and you trust that security to protect against thieves. That being said, if someone locked themselves out and called a locksmith they would expect that locksmith to by able to bypass the security (locks) in a matter of minutes. Thieves have access to the same tools and knowledge. The point here is that most locks don't provide security, they provide the illusion of security and therefore comfort.

A fake ID is easier to create than fake money because people actually audit money and watch over it carefully where the ID is basically a hassle, much like locked doors and the TSA. They add the illusion of security but since it's just an illusion, it's easy enough to bypass.

Actually, they do provide some measure of security. While a dedicated and knowledgeable thief would still be able to easily bypass a lock, if you didn't have a lock, you'd get random people just wandering in and taking your things while you were out. Easier pickings means more thieves.

Fluff states that whole criminal enterprises are devoted to making fake id's. The important part is that you can purchase them and have several rating 4-5 fake Id's and licenses for your gear.

Locks only keep honest people honest. Know what a bump key is? Anyone can get access to your house in less than 15 seconds with one. The toughest locks in the world, with a 15 minute rating are opened in 18 seconds.

Forgery and fake id's seem to be broken if you are going to make one. But I guess the same exists for monowhips and dikoted combat axes.

Locks may not keep out people who want in, but they do keep you eligible for the insurance. An insurance company is way more likely to insure/pay someone who at least makes an attempt to keep the unwanted out.

That's basically the point.

Locks, despite being as easy to bypass as breaking a window, allow one to claim they exercised "due diligence". The lock doesn't have to be effective and it can be easy to bypass. Similar things explain the simplicity of the fake id. It doesn't actually have to be a good id. It doesn't have to stand up to inspection. The guy just needs to be able to say that you had an id and all the hassles are off him and on you for having a fake id.

Maybe it would make sense if people took security as seriously as they take accounting. But my gut feeling is that the guys behind the TSA booths don't have the same level of college degree as the guys at H&R Block.

hi hi

Some people might be bent out of shape because the forgery skill doesn't do what they thought it does, I understand. In the world of Shadowrun, breaking encryption is unrealistically easy, but thats ok since it makes hacking on the fly possible. And there are plenty of cases where forgery would be useful, including but not limited to:

• Places that sell alcohol, tobacco etc. routinely look the other way when someone comes in with a shoddy ID because they want to make money and are just covering their bases.

• A hacker cannot get himself into the security system, but he has inserted himself into the pipeline between the target and the reference point, and knowing the exact moment the security check is made sets up a spoof reference point so that when security checks the ID, the hacker's commlink pretends to be several official databases and returns a positive signal.

• Making a copy of a legitimate credstick. The credstick's owner doesn't know anything is amiss because he's got his credstick right there in his wallet, the discrepancy will eventually be noticed, but there's some leeway in there. Especially if the hacker left a backdoor in the guy's commlink to alter the said guy's account logs.

• The team has just committed a crime, they could just whitewash the scene clear, but they'd rather make it look like someone else did it instead.

Personally, I think forgery and disguise should be rolled into one skill... but thats just me.

Then they don't have a 15 minute rating, they have an 18 second rating.

Rating is based on how long it takes a professional to get past the lock. If the professional has access to a bump key that opens it in 18 seconds, then the rating on the lock becomes 18 seconds.

You can look at it another way, though. Remember, this is a game that's supposed to be fun for the players (and GM, of course). So if you have a player that wants his or her character to have Forgery, then it's your (or whoever is GMing's) job to make that skill useful.

Doesn't mean, of course, that Forgery has to be useful on every run. Not even if that's what their character is really, really good at. After all, sometimes the sammy doesn't get to shoot anybody (or at least, doesn't get to kill anybody). But it does mean that occasionally, the need to fake a document, a book, a painting, an ID card, and so on should come up, and should be fairly central to the run, a side plot, or whatever.

Sometimes, you have to fit the meta to the game rather than the other way around.

It's not actually a specific physical key (at least what I know of as a "bump key" is). Take a key that fits into a standard lock, doesn't have to unlock it, bump it with a hammer or something solid enough and the tumblers pop into position for a split second. If you turn the knob at the same time as it's being bumped the lock is unlocked. AFAIK this doesn't work for deadbolts.

Don't forget you can forge an item, and then sell it as a real one

forgery covers that to a point (as does artisan at times)

Most don't use real books anymore, but collectors will want a mint condition copy of say Neuromancer's first hardcover printing...

And there is still sports memorabilia, though chipped there is still a trade in them (the forger's tools are a lot bigger and better in SR)

Nuyen might be the ultimate reward of using the skill, but you'll have to pul a good con and negotiation test first.

The result is the same. If a professional can open the lock in X time, then the lock's rating is X time. If the lock can be unlocked in 18 seconds, then the rating is 18 seconds. I suppose it is possible that bump keys may not qualify for the rating, as I doubt a sledgehammer qualifies either.
edit:All very good examples. Suppose there is some usefulness in forgery, if only niche. Still, parachuting falls under a similar vein.