Yeah, but no reason to ruin that suspension by playing dumb when planning the security systems supposedly created by some of the best tech specialists in the Sixth World, is there?

Uh, I beg your pardon, where exactly does it say that? And if it does, why are there specific bypass methods listed for most sensor types?

Bah, dodging a grenade is not all that unimaginable, no worse than dodging a bullet. You just get out of the blast range just before it goes boom.


That's a fine abstract method, to be sure; but I feel that more detailed approach is what my players want (and what seems to be interesting to me myself).


Uh, if you read carefully through the beginning of the discussion, you'll notice that the whole "you can't hide from what you can't see" thing started with discussing whether a mundane character can use Infiltration against Astral observers. For mundane sensors, we already roll Perception to spot them, naturally; but astral entities you can't possibly perceive if you're mundane.

Right, for most stuff, at least some method to get past it is given (and none of those include rolling straight Infiltration, btw). For proximity wire, however, I can see none listed.

Basically, my problem is that it's ridiculously easy to make a hard (actually, almost unbeatable) spot. And if we presume the opposition is competent, they should be aware of the security designs in Core and more.
More than just that, frankly, it kinda troubles me that a single failed roll (okay, two failed rolls) may mean a whole infiltration attempt, which has taken us several RL hours already, fail instantly.

That's pretty much my problem right there. On one hand, the players want to penetrate ultra-secure corp compounds unseen. On the other hand, those are very hard to make both beatable and believable at the same time, as for me.


Again, we're talking secure compounds here. The Fourth Edition made a big point of the hackers not being coach potatoes any more since the secure hosts are only accessible on location.
Anyway, of course, there's quite a number of ways to do legwork, no arguing that, and yeah, the infiltrator can be going into some more or less familiar ground. But still, what good is that when a single wagemage could ruin your day before you even start the show?

If you handle it in such an abstract way, is it really any fun for any player interested in infiltration?
Besides, when designing my encounters, I try to be realistic, as weird as that may sound for Shadowrun. So yeah, if the runners are breaking into the Stuffer Shack, no prob. If it's a zero zone they're up against, there's someone no less competent than them who designed the security system - what, should I just handwave inadequacies like the crawl spaces not being monitored? The first question I'm getting from my group then would be "what kind of zero zone is this?"

You know, around these parts, wiring does not include secret crawl spaces or access panels. The wire channels between rooms are about head-sized, and mostly filled with cables at that. Air ducts running from the floor hub are about that large, as well. Most room-wide equipment is right above the hung ceiling in the room serviced, so you just remove a couple of tiles of the ceiling for repairs. Floor-wide equipment is in a separated service area, and building-wide either is as well, or is situated on a separate technical floor. Frankly, using those systems for infiltration is just a Hollywood trope, and requires pure GM fiat to work in Shadowrun (well, except for some weird adept builds).

God. You can't infiltrate through a toothing! Nor really hide in a niche several times less than you, which is already occupied by a turret.

Yes. All useless against Astral patrols or mages hundreds of meters away being able to tell who you are, precisely.

Blah-blah-blah believability blah-blah-blah in-depth exploration of the setting. Basically, just rolling dice pools against thresholds is pretty boring.

Yet I still can't see any viable solutions to the most obvious cases of magic-based security in this thread yet.

Well, yeah, apparently. It's just that fulfilling their ideas becomes my work, and so far they haven't been able to throw any really bright ideas my way on how to make the high-grade infiltrations both engaging and minimally believable at the same time.


Right. So, as said before, basically any infiltrator should come with a hacker and a mage on call. Preferably be all three, but it's really out there.

Uh, far as I remember, you can let others pass through your wards. Otherwise contract warding wouldn't work.

You know, it seems to be the problem with either our gaming style or the system itself. Lots of interesting archetypes, ones players love, tend to be either too weak or not really needed in a shadowrunner team.
Prime examples I've seen done numerous times being pilots and snipers, of course; but the more we talk about it, the more it seems the stealth-based infiltrators are in the list, as well.

I dunno what you're asking for, here. Magic is magic. It's unfair. Astral sentries can be (sometimes) beaten by Infiltration (Astral Visibility mods, cover, etc.), but it's true that the Detect spells are pretty badass. There are many cases in SR where you need combined arms, or at least having it makes the plans easier. Magic against magic, matrix against matrix, etc. Infiltration has plenty of excellent uses, but if the question you're asking is 'how does one mundane beat expert-class magic-and-technical security?'… why would you ask that question? You need a little of everything, or you need to take easier runs.

Haha, ok, thinking of it like that...

+1 to Yerameyahu's post.
Asymmetric warfare could also work. Use the Face/Street Samurai to get the expert mage to not show up at work or forget reporting the intruder aftzer the hacker found out who he is.

Also the Spirit Power Concealment works wonders against Astral Observers as of SR4A.

And otherwise just let the mundanes roll infiltration against Astral observers as well. With the skill they should at least also know where an observer should/could be and try to avoid his potential LOS.

Cover works even better against astral observers than physical ones. There are no transparent objects on the astral plane.

This is how I see it.

Hacker and Face get some kind of job working in secure facility (in some low grade job). This gets them both inside the building. Face does his face thing, schmoozing, sleazing, and getting access to id cards, finding out which secretary has her boss's secureID tokens in her commlink.

Hacker does slow probing from inside, gets a lay out of the matrix topology. Finds said secretary's commlink and pwns it. Hacker also uses his time to figure out where cameras are, and how to access them. Maybe he's got 10 or so tapper-bugs and 3 dronekiller drones that he brought in with him in his lunchbox. They're set to tap into the fibre, and the dronekillers are there to protect them from the site's drone killers.

Face finds out daily work procedures, security procedures, etc, etc. They get their streetsam hired in the security department, or the facilities department. The mage does some astral recon, and figured out where the watchers and the wards are.

This is coordinated with the maps they aquire and build.

This is all legwork. They don't try to get the final piece. This allows them to form a plan FOR that final piece. On the night of the infiltration:
1) they know the guard routines, and possibly the guards, heck their streetsam might be one of the guards on duty.
2) they control the cameras, and biomonitor feeds
3) they have done matrix simulations of the entire run.
4) The hacker erases their employee records, or activates a virus that starts corrupting their employee records (or all employee records).

This works if your shadowrun team is.. normal. If your shadowrun team is an astral hazing minotaur, a banshee, and a naga with medusa hair.. you have issues.

Used this very technique (above) on Mitsuhama in our Hong Kong game. Worked wonders. Of course, it will nto always work. but the time I did go that route, whoo boy.

Actually, that plan has half a dozen of holes. It might work; but again I reiterate - it's not really what my players want from the game, far as I can tell.

Lets not forget they are also often the lowest bidder!



Something to note for setup of a security system is to keep in mind the cost to run that security system. Grunt guards are fairly cheap compared to a mage, let alone a mage expected to have spirits up or sustain a spell for their entire shift. For smaller facilities they likely have a "call center" setup where there is a pool of resources spread among the assets which may include a mage to cover each shift. If the mundane guards suspect something magical the call goes in and the astral mage arrives very quickly. Its more cost effective then having a mage present at all times. Larger corps have more funds to throw around so they may.

Security by its nature is "just enough" to make it difficult (or the illusion of difficult) to deter the desire to break in. For everything else there is insurance!

Now that is not saying there are facilities that dont have the security on red alert 24/7, but most places are in idle mode unless something raises suspicious for then to "look into it"

End of the day you are rolling dice. It's a simple test or an opposed test. You then decide if they succeed or fail and describe the results accordingly. There's a whole world of rich imagination you can use to describe the results for your game. I usually give players bonus to the roll for cool ideas regardless of the actual security, and negative modifiers for not so good ideas.

Or you can spend hours and days arguing about all the real and imagined scenarios you can think of and then decide whether they succeed or fail based on your personal understanding of the combined experience and skilled arguments you and your players bring to the table. Loudest or most articulate wins. Your choice.

As a GM, of course you can come up with a facility that is basically impenetrable. Whenever the players come up with some strategy you say "the security director is a genius, and he thought of that, and he did something against it" using his unlimited budget for protecting every asset of the entire company.

But isn't that overdoing it just a bit?

NPCs aren't infallible, and PCs know a lot more about their job than the player playing the PC, most of the time. That doesn't mean you can just waltz in there, flashing your dice pool and expecting things to work out Because You Have The Stat, but why is the GM declaring that the group's mission is impossible?

Rather a lot is being made of the magician's supposed ability to spot intruders. Spirits are said to basically not understand the physical world. Sure, you can show the Watcher spirit of the day all the employees it's not supposed to raise an alarm about, but the poor thing has only Logic 1, so it's going to make a LOT of mistakes. The Detect Life spell only detects the location of people, but nothing about who those people are.

So a magician could be guarding the entry to the Inner Sanctum, and know that he should be called before people with clearance try to enter. This is an important security procedure, and with legwork, the PCs could find out about it. So they spoof a message to the mage about a surprise visit from Upper Management.

So there's a camera aimed at the door. And someone is monitoring that camera 24/7. The PCs could find out through legwork, and perhaps hack that camera, use Edit to show the absent-minded researcher coming in at night to finish a project.

Simply put, all these things can be defeated. With forewarning and legwork, it's likely that it'll be done well. But if the PCs go in without knowing how the security system is set up, then of course it'll be hard.

Opening a door marked Off Limits without knowing what's behind it should be scary. Better send a drone in first. Or use a Clairvoyance spell. Or peek in astrally. Or sneak a glassfiber cable under the door. Or... etc etc.

Basically, a few simple Infiltration checks cover going from Challenge Point to Challenge Point, and those Challenge Points require either a clever strategy, good preparation, or amazingly good dice rolls. (Amazingly good dice rolls basically indicate that the character found a solution the player didn't think of.)

The BBB tells us otherwise:

Ah, right. I just looked at the spell description, which only states "number and location".

Note, however, that Detect Life is an Active sense, so the mage has to concentrate on it to use it. Keeping up that kid of active watch - all lifeforms in an area - is pretty heavy duty. Also, it's a resisted test, so you'll get some false positives and some false negatives, it's not all that reliable.

And now we can argue ad nauseam which passage is wrong. Well done, game designers.

all true. I'm just thinking, instead of using useless watchers, using Spirits of Man with the Detect Life spell would be a good idea. The spirit can then even verify the positives himself.

Assuming, of course, you can both Summon a Spirit of Man, and that you have the spell yourself.

I think the stupidity of detect life has been well established.

Heh...

The problem here is that if we use the rules, when we roll the dice, the chance that the players fail is kinda too high for my liking, if they're going against competent opposition.


You don't even have to use feedback here. Sit down for an evening, open the core book - blam you have a setup which is incredibly hard to penetrate for an infiltrator, almost to the point of impossibility.

As you see, as a GM I'm doing my best not to. There's this pesky thing called "rules" though...

Watchers are said to be about as smart as dogs. And it's trivial to teach those who's friend and who's foe.
Besides, do your PCs with Logic 1 have trouble recognizing friendlies, too? :3
After all, you can always use actual spirits for patrols.

The problem is - for a decent secure facility, it's almost impossible to do quality legwork, as well, at least not without leaving a trace. A hacker needs to get in to hack into the offline system (so he's useless at least until the outer perimeter is breached). A mage could go on an astral recon trip, but that just means that he's asking to be spotted by patrolling spirits and/or resident wagemages (although, ok, this one is more likely to succeed, even if he'd have trouble discerning the details of the physical setup).

Right, you'll have to be sustaining it, and even get a negative dice penalty to anything else you do. Crippling, isn't it.
False positives? How comes?
False negatives - sure, if your infiltrator is brining a mage, or has his Willpower incredibly high. Or just happens to roll well. So basically, I wouldn't count on that.


Actually, the whole thread so far burns down to almost-impossibility of penetrating a secure facility for a mundane infiltrator, and high complexity of doing so even for a prepared group of specialists (which involves babysitting the support cast, which, as far as I can tell, is not what the ninja players want). It's not like it's universally bad, just means that the players won't be doing precisely what they want to be doing because of the limitations of the setting.

Not like that's ever been a valid result before.

I'm playing an Infiltration based character -- a cat burglar.

She has:
18d for Infiltration
11d for Knowledge of Security Procedures
12d for Knowledge of Security Design
13d for Knowledge of Architecture
11d for Knowledge of Physics

I figure she knows more about how to bypass security than everyone in this forum, combined, by a good margin. Combined with good legwork, she should be capable of breaking into anything short of an A level security by herself, and is qualified to take on even AA's with a team.

The BEST I can do, as the player, is to come up with a general idea of how to bypass the security. The character is much more aware of the limitations and capabilities of the various tools she possesses than I am, and has a much more vested interest in doing things correctly -- if she screws up, the best she can hope for is jail.

Just like shooting a gun, throwing a punch or summoning a spirit involves levels of abstraction, so does infiltration. As the GM, your job is to make things fun and challenging; saying ANYTHING is impossible is not fun or challenging. Sure, the player may have a threshold of 30, but it's not impossible.

The mages will never learn until you sprint through their compound at 300 meters per turn with your astral hazing taking out watchers and other lesser spirits, then send one of the security mages home with three kinds of awakened diseases, and temporarily install wired reflexes 3 on all the other awakened folks in the area.

Or just use redundant manufacturing on one of your drones and do some nasty things. Maybe he'll try his favorite direct combat spells.

Rock on!

Yet dogs have INT3 not 1. Telling friend from Foe IMHO is more a thing of INT than LOG.

Though she is completely incapable of noticing the spirit that is doing his astral mime act of "I'm so very sneaky" behind her while he waits for an opportune moment for an Accident to happen to her. So I'd guess magical security is uncommon?

See "Legwork" -- there are ways to prepare for mages, even if it's just getting the guy drunk as hell the night before so he fails to summon a spirit the night of a run. There are drugs you can buy that can let even mundanes see in the astral. Binding spirits also gets to be pretty expensive; hiring one of the gangs that has a few mages to do the equivalent of a magical DDOS attack by sending spirits to mess with the targets spirits can work.

So, no while there isn't a lot she can do directly to astral entities, she isn't helpless.

EDIT: Oh, yes...per the fluff, magical security should be pretty uncommon, considering the ratio of magically active to mundane population. In practice, though, I've never played in an SR game where that was the case -- anything the players were likely to go against had magical security woven into the defense.

If the spirit managed to beat her 18 dice on it's Astral Perception.

Astral Perception is a perception check, and is opposed by an infiltrators Infiltration. It uses different modifiers than visual perception, or audio perception, etc. It is still opposed. There where a number of good posts earlier in this thread about how the infiltration test is abstracted to cover how well the character avoids methods of detection - including those she is not aware of. At best, unseen observers would get a bonus to their perception, not automatic success.

That seems like a pretty reasonable explanation to me.

@Fatum: so basically, your point is that you find it hard to imagine infiltrating a properly designed secure facility is even possible at all? Not so much because of the game system but simply because it's easier to secure places than to penetrate that security?

---

Regarding Detect Life: that spell has issues. You could get false positives: the spell description only says it does X, and then some example expands it to X, Y and Z. That's a real can of worms: do other spells also do more than their descriptions state? Why does Detect Life detect if lifeforms are carrying non-living weapons?

What I meant with False Positives: according to that example, if the magician/spirit doesn't win with at least 4 successes, he doesn't identify even familiar people. So if the Boss has good Willpower (likely, for an ambitious person), then there'll be a lot of false alarms. So if the ninja pretends to be the boss, then the mage might think "ah, just another false alarm", because false alarms happen a lot. A Cry Wolf situation - not good from a security design standpoint.

Also, since it's an active sense, it only works if you actively make the roll. So you'd be rolling a LOT, and that'll eventually start incurring glitches.

I am at 19 dice before spec and attribute boost. It looks like enough, although there are ways to get higher. There shouldn't be any security you can't circumvent with this, right? Everything else is either blindly stupid to sneak in, or railroading. I am currently investing my karma in pushing Exotic melee (Garrote), good idea for someone who can steak up everybody?

Use a real weapon. It is useful in other situations as well. If you are not very strong get the monofilament whip (if you need something exotic) or a stun baton. The garrote can only be used in an assassination and does STR/2P AP 0 damage. The monowhip does 8P AP-4 a stun baton 7S(e) AP -half. Both can be used in normal combat as well. All other weapons will be better as well since they all do STR/2+X P AP -Y With X, Y equal or greater than 0. You do the math.

What's especially weird about the garrote is that by RAW no one untrained can put a wire around an unsuspecting person and pull.

i am of course planing on getting a monofilament garrote. The problem is, I guess, that my mentor spirit won't allow me to engage in any fight anyways...

Which mentor spirit does that? The Care Bear?

Well he does not allow you to fight but murder is fine?

Rat. And I am pretty good at Pistols already. Enough to defend myself.

Rat can fight, as long as you make your Willpower + Charisma (3) Test. Or when you are cornered and have no other option.

Not to tell you how to play but:
I neither see the need to go out of your hiding place to murder unsuspecting people necessary to survival nor do I see how fighting is strictly forbidden.
@Willpower + Charisma (3) Test: At least for a Shaman or practitioner of a CHA tradition this should not be that much of a problem. Still going around murdering people does not fit well with rat since you are always initiating the fight.

Definitely... Rat prefers not to fight (The assassination thing is a bit odd for a follower of Rat, but *shrug*), but when he has no other choice, he can be quite lethal, and often tends to try for the immediate kill, so as to end the fight quicker and get back to the shadows where he is most comfortable.

Hence the Stun baton or Monofilament Whip, good weapons for weak mages if they feel the need to get into melee. A Stun or Powerbolt should do the same trick. Better invest skills into getting out of melee range.

You as GM are setting the target numbers, setting the modifiers, and choosing to gimp your players characters because you have made that choice. They are not failing because of the skill level they made for their character. They are failing because you are not adjusting the target numbers to match the level of success you require. That's your choice, not theirs.

You need to think of that PC sheet and skill, that one word Infiltration (4) as that players character ability to circumvent all that other stuff.

Infiltration skill and the die roll, and it's relative success = PC ability to overcome security, no matter how many words are written in the rule books about all the cool security there is.

The weight of the words you as a GM are struggling with is not countered by a comparable weight of words by the players and the PCs. It's resolved with a die roll.

Here's a few scenarios for you to think about.

Player A knows absolutely nothing about Shadowrun, hasn't read the books, has no real world knowledge of security practices, yet has a character(Super Ninja Cat Burglar!) who has Infiltration(6). They say they want Super Ninja Cat Burglar to sneak into Stuffer Shack and steal that bag of Nuke It Burritos. Are you going to make them fail because they can't describe exactly what uber security avoiding techniques Super Ninja Cat Burglar is going to use? Are you going to make them fail because they can't describe a counter to every cool uber security technique described in each and every Shadowrun rule book? Or are you going to have them roll a simple success test versus a threshold of 1 or 2, and then describe the results to them in a cool dramatic fashion embellished by the thousands and thousands of words you know from all the books you've read and enjoyed?

Player B is a Super Ninja Cat Burglar in Real Life, they've read all the books, they know all the real world and shadowrun uber elite security techniques and ways to evade them(Don't worry, they will kill you after you GM the game to keep their true identity secret). They make a character(Fluffy Bunny) who has Infiltration (1). Fluffy Bunny wants to steal that bag of Nuke It Burritos from Stuffer Shack as well. (Fluffy got addicted to the ones Super Ninja Cat Burglar shared earlier!). Does Fluffy Bunny succeed because Fluffy Bunny Player can describe every security technique and how to over come it? Or are you going to roll a couple of dice and describe the utter failure of Fluffy Bunny to shoplift a bag of nuke It Burritos from the corner Stuff Shack in some amusing fashion?

The weight of the body of knowledge about Infiltration is completely irrelevant to the chances of relative success or failure of using that skill.

Let's flip it around. Imagine as a GM you know nothing about security protocols, there are certainly many shadowrun skills I know nothing about personally (I got Assensing down though....). You have Player A and Player B again, does your resolution of the success of Fluffy Bunny and Super Ninja Cat Burglar change? No, it shouldn't. But what does change is the richness of the experience. If both the GM and Player A don't know much about it it becomes a simple die roll lacking in any cool exposition.

The body of knowledge, all those nifty gadgets, equipment, techniques, the thousands and thousands of words you've read, they are all there to provide a rich background to support the outcome of the skill roll. Succeed or fail.

Your GM knowledge of the rules, and content is there for both sides of the resolution. Not just the GMs.

It's all in your hands as a GM, you have been deciding your knowledge of the game content is weighted in favor of PC failure, rather then supporting the outcome no matter which way it goes.

It's your game, you are choosing how you run it.

WOW... That is the best explanation that I have seen yet, DireRadiant. Well Done Indeed...

Agreed, guess we can close the discussion now right ...

But we should sticky DireRadiant's explanation for the next time someone asks about social skills.

heh... There is that...

You're making a lot of powerful enemies with that kind of approach. And making powerful enemies without making powerful friends most often means becoming very dead, very soon.


Sure enough you're not helpless, but without a mage close at hand you're not sneaking anywhere (for the reasons listed above), and you're not sneaking anywhere without leaving a trace even with magical support - at least with the plans listed.


My point is that I can't design a compound that'd have security design which would make sense, and that'd not frag my players over.

*shrug* The whole magic system has issues, if you ask me. But the spell is explicitly said to work like that.
Even without going into the argument of whether you can willingly fail the test to resist a friendly's spell, detecting your boss crawling through an air duct at night is hardly inconspicuous.

It's active since it "actively analyzes or seeks out certain information" when you're sustaining it. And glitching on a roll of even 10 dice has a negligible probability.

I see my job as a GM as making everyone's time and effort invested in the game worthwhile, and the whole gaming experience enjoyable. For that, I try to limit my player's possibilities as little as possible, basically making my campaign as sandbox-like as possible. Now, obviously, any sandbox needs the whys and the hows of its internal workings covered, for it to be usable. The hows - just how do the players' actions affect the world around them, - are covered by the rule system (and that's why it's so important for the rule system to be consistent and working the same way for everyone). The whys, however, - just why the things are the way they are, and why they move in the directions they do, - is covered by pure logic. The only logic I can provide for that that'd not twist everyone's brains in a knot is simple RL logic, which forms the connections between the elements described in the fluff.

It works like this.
Player: "What happens when I let go of a gun I'm holding over my head?" GM: "It's not explicitly said in the rules, but it falls on your head, and when you touch the place it hit, there's a bump there".
Player: "Can I use that stolen copter to fly to the meeting with that drug cartel boss?" "GM: "Sure you can, but it's said in the fluff that the flights over Seattle are all monitored by Seattle Air Authority. Now, it's not in the books, but common logic tells me that you can either try to hack SAA's host to get a fake clearing, or try not to be spotted by its radars by flying really low, and of course your pilot PC knows all that". Etc.

Since simple day-to-day logic is generally the same for different people, it allows the players to make more or less the same predictions based on the same sets of facts as the GM does.
That is precisely why I can't just handwave incompetent security system designs for the secure facilities the players want to penetrate. It ruins verisimilitude, it removes the sense of accomplishment, after all, it just goes against aforementioned common sense.

tldr; I am not "gimping" the PCs any more than the laws of physics "gimp" them.

This, now, is a question of effort gratification.
When a player arrives with no in-game knowledge whatsoever, or without at least reading anything inspiring for his character archetype, in no way am I arguing that resolving in-game conflicts, even complex ones, with a single die roll may be appropriate, and make for a fun light-hearted game (let's leave the question of why exactly am I playing with that player, spending hours upon hours reading up on fluff, designing the adventure frameworks, drawing maps and player handouts etc out of the discussion for a moment).
However, most players seriously interested in the game are no less willing to munch on crunch and read the fluff than I am. Thorough depiction of the in-game universe makes a big difference for those players' immersion. This is exactly the kind of players who spend hours on their side making infiltration plans, calculating optimal loadouts or what have you. Rewarding them with a simple "roll Infiltration against the facility's Security Rating, good going, you've completed the run!" is hardly adequate, and I do not believe it makes for satisfying gaming experience.
And of course, it is their knowledge that makes their plans work, not the number near the word Infiltration on their character sheet. When we obviously don't share the same logic, or when they seem to operate on false premises, or when their knowledge is not enough - sure, that's where the character's skills and knowledge come to light. That is, their characters of course know more about the in-game universe, the way it works and its precise details, but the only way to transfer that knowledge to the players themselves is the GM (after a successful roll, of course).

Yes, that does mean that if your players A and B are both part of the same group, and player A tries to rob a Stuffer Shack at high noon, guns blazing, shouting "I'm a runner everyone down" - no amount of good rolls is saving him if he doesn't listen to the forewarnings (if the whole group is made up of As, okay, we might just roll with that).

I feel it to be my job as a GM to read on the fluff in the books thoroughly enough to provide satisfactory in-game descriptions for any of the players' actions. They are not playing to see the dice roll fives or sixes, are they? They're here to be cyberpunk heroes, to act out their ideas of cool, to breathe a full chest of the poisonous air of the 2070ies, after all. Saying that all those are just secondary additions to rolling dice is turning a roleplaying game into a boardgame, at best, a set of calculus problems, at worst.

Roleplaying is a shared storytelling experience by definition.
See the first part of my answer - I am not some kind of magical omnipowerful being behind the scenes to toss anything I want at the player characters without any reasoning visible behind that. I have to abide by the same logic the real world does for any hint of players' independent initiative to be possible.

One thing to keep in mind with the mono-garrote is that the thing is often really messy - even if you hide the corpse, there will probably be a rather large pool of blood from the severed carotids.

Fatum...

In the end, a real design (your goal) will work out fine. Design it as you would if you were the security consultant. However, there are several things that you have to remember. The first is that people have to actually work there. Security is only going to be as invasive as workload allows. If the employees are going to be moving through security for half their day, it is too tight. There have to be tradeoffs for work vs. security. Most, if not all, companies err on the side of workload. Even in the Military, the Security is not so invasive as to impair work at the facility. Secondly, most places do not have unlimited budgets. Each and every department has to show profit. If the Corporation is showing a loss due to the security division, the corporation will move to correct that.

Keeping those things in mind, you will find that a natural security scheme develops. One that makes complete sense, and is cost effective and workable for the employees on site.

Tymeaus Jalynsfein, as you can see in the thread above, the whole problem is that even a non-obstructive security system like a single mage with a single sustained spell makes infiltration a hell. Adding wireless-inhibiting paint and some decent sensor suites makes it almost impossible, to the point of complete failure after a single failed roll in a couple dozens of those, even after careful planning.
And realistically, sure it's all rather expensive, but as an AAA, wouldn't you prefer spending a couple hundred thousand nuyen on tech, paying three wagemages extra and buying them binding materials to losing your latest multimillion nuyen R&D toy?

@Fatum: At this point, I'm thinking you are being obtuse, or trolling.

You've seen several descriptions of how to run stealth in a fun and effective manner, yet are unable to accept the arguments. If you are really looking for a better way to run this, step back from the keyboard, stop thinking about this topic for a couple days, then come back and re-read the entire thread with a fresh perspective. It might help.

One last comment on rules elements: Astral Patrolling is an Assensing + Intuition vs. Infiltration test. A force 6 spirit in a small facility will have 14 dice for detection, opposed by the runners infiltration skill, at maybe -2 to -4 dice...without magical backup. With magical backup (say...concealment) the Infiltrator gets substantially better. Hardly impossible.

Minding that the arguments so far are either basically "use GM fiat to make things easy, even if that ruins internal consistency", "use GM fiat to give the opposition the penalties you don't give to runners" or "replace Stealth with Influence for infiltrations", eh, I admit it's hard for me to accept them. Oh, right, let's not forget the all-powerful "use more abstract conflict resolution, with the bare minimum of dice rolled", that one's sure to make stealth fun and effective. Especially fun.

Okay, even if we go and allow Infiltration against observers a character can't detect, don't forget that his infiltration equipment is useless against Assensing, and his skill spec is most likely not "Astral", too. So that leaves a runner with his Attribute+Skill vs a spirit with his Attribute+Skill, and the spirit has both his Attribute and Skill well in the top margin of character-attainable values.
Sure, success is not impossible per se (just as a runner might just win that Willpower(+Counterspelling) vs Magic+Spellcasting for Detect spells), but failure is highly likely.

Agility 9, Skill 4 (Doable at Character Creation) is more dice than a Rating 6 Spirit, which is likely rare at most facilities. Remember, the average Magic Rating in Shadowrun is a 3. I think that you are putting the cart before the horse. It seems like you are trying to set ultra high levels of security, using ultra highly qualified participants, that may not actually be as skilled as you think they are. If you remember that Proferssionals probably have somewhere between 8-12 Dice, you should do okay. Use Common Sense. What do you think of for Security Measures? Remember that each piece of security must serve a function, and not impede the normal functioning of the facility to any heavy degree. If it seems unreasonable, then it probably is. You can go absolutely crazy designing a security procedure, but it has to be workable. There are many things that make such procedures unworkable. I think that you are giving the Security Procedures you are looking at too much credit.

There are always ways around every obstacle... And any Intrusion expert knows them. They should have an equal opportunity to recognize any potential security issues, just as the security expert who designed the system used those same potential issues in his security plan.

I do not think that a single failed roll spells immediate failure for the Intrusion. All it does is alert security to a possible "something". They will likely investigate to verify. Rarely will a facility go to immediate lockdown with a possible alert. Most places investigate first, because there is a high probability for false positives. Systems are not infallible. If you lock down a facility each time you get a ping, you get absolutely no work done, and the facility gets a new security director in short order.