.... and pray the smuggler is not among your IE/GD enemy's spies.

SR4A sir. I've never played SR3. And sorry, I did mean metamagic, not spell.

I've seen the resonance realm quests.

I meant IRL. It's easy to say something happens, but reality checks often show that whoever's on offense has an overwhelming advantage.

It kind of is. I don't use the ITS Gonryu on any of my drones. Concealed weapon mount or otherwise.

Maybe. I'd argue that you could sense that you were in danger, but would learn nothing about me or my intentions without a material link or assensing me, because at that point the question is about me, not the dragon.

*shrug* There's numerous technological safeguards against that. First, including a random number generator into your plans screws divination to hell and random number generators are very easy to acquire in SR. As the easiest example, say I want to kill Hestaby on Saturday and 6:00 PM. At 5:59 PM I run a random number generator and if I roll a 1 on a d6, for example, I will abort the mission for no other reason. Such an event cannot be divined, it's impossible. Screw with the results until the odds are 1/1,000,000 and the principle still holds. Second, it does nothing to prevent assaults by a botnet or similar forces for two reasons: first, it's questionable whether divination could even correctly identify what a botnet is; and second, attacks from multiple shifting sources make divination worthless. If your botnet includes numerous vehicles, such as airplanes (and crashing an airplane into a dragon is fairly effective) then the divination is useless.

Airplane has 30 body I imagine. That's not even a test: 30 body X 3 for moving at over 200 meters per turn = 90 DV. You are a bad man.

Divining is magical. It does not care for mathematical impossibilities. Divining is - in fact - a mathematical impossibility in itself.

EDIT: Random numbers are calculated by some sort of algorithm. So they are not truly random. With the possible exception of random numbers calculated on the base of radioactive decay.

Casual violations of math, or physics for that matter, are magics stock-in-trade. Extreme violations, such as predicting inherently unknowable events, either shatters physics and reality or it shatter suspension of disbelief. Neither is good for a game.

Edit: Depends on how random you demand it. Suffice to say, given SR tech, you should be able to get sufficiently random numbers for your purpose.

GD Divination powers are several orders of magnitude above what the books list as available for PCs; the GDs are defined as having powers no-one else knows exist.

The normal rules are for normal (N)PCs. GDs and IEs don't play by those rules. If that feels unfair, tough luck.



It isn't just about Awakened.. this goes for AIs like Deus too. Some NPCs are simply meant to be above and beyond the playing field.




It isn't just a GD rolling that test; it's more like multiple intelligence agencies working to prevent your attack. A GD can hire hundreds of people with mental attributes in the 9+ to work out contingency plans against everything - and they do.

You don't get to have a fair fight with GDs, IEs or (old school) AIs.

Be a mage, and make your algorithm dependent on the result of the enemy mage's divination test (there are more ways to tell past than future). Your GM will run home crying.

How do you know the result of the enemy mage's divination test?

Meh, I don't feel that threatened by something that has no physical presence. I guess in the large scale he can take out a dragon, but his defense is only as strong as the armor rating of his home node. Assuming I get past the outer shell of hirelings in meatspace, he's much easier to take out.

If it was as easy as you think it is, don't you think it'd have been done already?


So? What does the dragon need ritual samples for to find out who is planning to hit him with a mortar in the coming month?


It also shows what will affect you. You could do that, but usualy that's pretty impractical. Also, your GM would probably houserule to limit it to once a session very soon if you abuse divination like this.


What about "you need to get the dragon to expose itself in the first place" is so hard to understand?


Nothing is random. Everything is a cause to some effect.


Uhm. That's assuming a lot.

There are two possibilities:

1. Randomness is something that regularly happens in the world. If so, your random number generator won't add much to the overall randomness of events.
2. There is no randomness at all. Everything is predetermined by natural laws, but complex enough to seem random. Chaos theory. So random numbers are not random.

Something in between is unlikely because in nature things happen regularly or they don't happen at all.

In both cases the random number generator shouldn't really help, because it does not add much to the complexity of the system.

He makes a note on his comm and you hack it.
You make a divination test to see if he will take countermeasures and what they will be.
Use clairaudience or clairvoyance to spy.
spell: Mind probe.
Interrogate a confidant.
Spy astrally.
spell: Borrow sense.
spell: Dream. To cause your subject to unintentionally divulge the information.
Shade slipped into some food. Suddenly the odds are a lot more even for any sort of direct confrontation.

To tell the future you have one option. To find past events or current events, it's not even a question.

All of which assume you are either awakened, get close to your target, your target's stupid, or all of them.

You assume you just get past the really hard obstacles, and then plan how you will do the last step of your hard, complex task, taking the last step before the first (and the thousand that lead up to the last). It's like planning travel to a faraway place and only taking money to pay for the hotel, because you take flight and everything else, like learning the local language, as a given somehow.

We are still talking about a GD as the enemy mage, right?

I always ask myself that.
The only possibility I can think of is that sympathizers for extremist causes have largely been filtered out based on shallow reasoning which is frequently incorrect (color of skin, etc). More people are filtered out by the fact that this requires planning, and folks with that level of bloodlust can get caught pretty fast. Another thing that filters people out is that this is practically a suicide run. You'll most likely be successful, but you probably won't make it out.
This is a much more solid plan than shooting the president in the face, but nobody tried that until the 16 president (US president). Ok, they did try and fail on the seventh president, but apparently nobody learned from that.

He has no link to me, no knowledge of me, no sight of me, no anything of me, thus violating the principle rule of magic, which even divination wants you to hold to:
"To use Divining, the initiate must first be able to assense
the subject (be it an entity, a place, or an object), or possess a
viable material link (p. 28)."

And by using divination, cause and effect breaks down. If something would happen based on the results of your divination, then it is the result of cause and effect. If you try to avoid that happening, nothing is based on cause and effect any longer because the timeflow has been messed with.

I didn't really plan it out, but if telling the future is easier than finding out about the past or present, we have much bigger problems than Great Dragons here. I can always pay a mage to do divination metamagic on the dragon. He doesn't get any more defense than I do.

Except that mortars are large enough to be difficult to conceal and the ammo is pretty heavy, and once again your mortar will never hit the place. Like I said counter battery and phalanx are very likely. This means your slow moving projectile gets blown up in mid air.



And in this case he is assensing himself. His future he does not give a crap about your future, he has no need of a physical object since it is in reference to himself. I can automatically assense myself and have an automatic viable link. It at no point violates principals of magic.



Once again it is a magical effect it by its very nature breaks a mundanes understanding of reality, which might explain why some are scared shitless by it.

You could always pay a mage to do a divination on yourself and he might tell that Lofwyr eats you for breakfast, at which point he might give S-K a call and see if he can get some nuyen from giving a tip. To divine the dragon you would need a material focus. He is never divining you directly, he is divining his own future and at some point yours intersects his in a not so favorable way. This is what he is being drawn to take a closer look at. If he wanted to divine your future he would need a viable focus.

Thanks, I thought those were future tech. Actually, I still think they're future tech, but whatevs.

Eh~ maybe. I group this in the same category as "magic affecting me without any link".

Cause and effect is rather aptly named. If cause does not create effect, then it's not cause and effect any more.

#1 Random, truly random, events are unpredictable almost by definition. Divination is therefore pointless.
#2 If this is true, and the divination reveals that the GD will die, this is unalterable whatever actions the GD takes.

Some middle ground seems most reasonable for play purposes, where divination is helpful but not all powerful. This does make divination less useful against either multiple actors or actors who increase the uncertainty of their actions.


Also, there's still no real answer to whether divination even can affect Matrix events. Divination provides guidance through visions, yet the matrix..does not interact well with magic. It simply does not exist in a form which interacts with magic.

Also, Longbow, old school AIs were just as annoying as GDs. As I recall the old SR3 stuff (Target:Matrix maybe) flat out said that an AI was basically unbeatable in the Matrix.

EDIT:

Again, breaking something like cause and effect is well beyond the suspension of disbelief most players are willing to extend to magic. Either you need to completely reimagine, well, how time and fate work in your universe or divination is far more limited than is being presented here. And let's be honest, if any player started using divination the way it's being used here, the GM would beat him over the head with the rulebook. This isn't a RAW or RAI interpretation of divination because I can't imagine anyone actually playing that way (step up if you have), this is essentially a GM fiat argument that GDs have "Super Divination". And that's fine, play the game as you like. I don't think they have super-divination because it makes the game boring for the PCs. While the rules certainly give scope for GDs to have extra-special powers, and they should, this is not one that is included in the books.

Could be a good plan. If I get a good reading, rub out the diviner and continue. If I get a bad reading, give the mage some more detailed information on my original plan and set a counter-trap at the proposed time and location.

True random number generation has been achieved using Lava Lamps.

GrrooOOovy man.

...and now you are starting to think a little bit like a GD. Add 50 levels of intrigue between you and it, and then fashion a real plan with a similar degree of separation, because the original is just a massive diversion, or is it? Like I said many posts ago, whole campaign not an end run, and both would still likely be suicidal.

I'm still amazed they found a practical use for Lava Lamps.

Then was even more amazed at the military applications of Silly String!

*Excited movements*
Tell us!
Tell us!

You can use it to see tripwires from a fairly safe distance. You can also use a spray bottle of water on mist, but that requires you to be closer.

Yep, spray the room with silly string, and it drapes lazily over the tripwires.

I saw some pics in early 2002 that showed an entire room just festooned with tripwires. I swear, it reminded me of when I got really hyper as a child with some fishing line (Note: Do not feed a hyperactive child chocolate cake with frosting that includes red dye!). Only these had explosives connected to it.

Re: Divination

I could mathematically justify how divination does not interfere with cause and effect if I were a brighter mind, or at least more focused and had more spare time. Fundamentally, think of reality as a somewhat buoyant object within a fluid body. Every action creates some degree of x-dimensional wave (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.) wave motion within the fluid body, and the intersections of those waves (regardless of their dimensional state) represents a given outcome (keep in mind, this is a gross over-simplification of explaining reality, alternate futures, and divination). Now, let's say that the somewhat buoyant object represents conventional, consensual reality. Each entity, depending on their actions, can steer this buoyant object to some degree, with the more powerful/important people creatures contributing more to the direction. A Great Dragon perceives the waves and calculates them, within a certain margin of error, to where the buoyant object will be at a given time. In seeing and predicting this harmonic outcome, and changing the position of the buoyant object, the Great Dragon prevents the original outcome, while not altering the extant motions and forces that granted the original calculation to begin with.

Similar mathematical theory has been generated to determine the velocity of a body in orbital motion, and the forces affecting it (direction of impetus being perpendicular to the force holding the object in orbit, etc., etc.). Also, as the one plotting against the Great Dragon, it will be your goal to steer the world to a position where that Great Dragon dies.

Re: Planning the death of a Great Dragon

Your best bet to survive would be arranging an outcome where the Great Dragon finds it in his/her best interest to sacrifice itself (ala Dunkelzhan), with the 2nd best choice being to arrange an outcome where OTHER Great Dragons find it in THEIR best interest in offing the poor sod; you might want to 'make nice nice' with Lofwyr.

I love the odd stuff the Army teaches like that. I will always remember how to fix a bullet wound to a lung with a pop-tart. Though I also like walked with a weighted fishing line hanging from my barrel to catch ankle height wires.

Re: Divination...could you help me out here Doctor?

Re: Planning the death of a Great Dragon
Never make a deal with a dragon.


The guy who plays a rigger in my game is a former marine(marine corp retired, if you prefer) and taught me the fishing line trick.
We game out in a pretty rural part of Mansfield where there are a ridiculous amount of spiders so that has been worth it's weight in gold on the long walks from the house to the car in the middle of the night.

Try to think less wibbly wobbly and more Cthulu, non-euclidean thought (Escher type stuff). Alternatively, bistromathics. If you do not get that second reference, then you fail as a geek, and are hereafter sentenced to a life of fulfilling mundanity and social acceptance.

I never SAID to make a deal with a dragon. I said to arrange for particular outcomes. I also said to 'make nice nice' with Lofwyr. Making a deal is not the exclusive method of achieving these goals.

You wanna kill a great dragon?

Get an unhinged street doc to implant you choc-full of C12 and sacs of toxins and cutter nanites, along with detonators tied to your biomonitor with a deadman's switch. Then, slather yourself with condiments, and get the great dragon to eat you.

Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey (Lesbian Spank Inferno) is a story telling tool. Rather than letting one's game devolve into competing views on M theory, you say 'This is my Timey Wimey spell. It goes 'ding' when there's stuff." The presumption being that the actual physics involved in the ability to see through the vortex of time and space are far more complex than can presently be understood, so metaphor is needed.
Some people hate this about Moffat. These people are silly.

Arrange for outcomes? Make nice with Lofwyr? Sounds like a making a deal to me.

Fair enough

And that is why you are not on the same level as a Great Dragon. In Disney's Aladdin, the title character gets a wish for free, why? Because he never actually wished for the outcome from the genie. Metal Gear Solid's mid-game twist, the initial impetus in Bioshock that you don't discover until halfway through the game... countless examples already exist of secret domination, shaping another's desires, of Xanatos and Batman gambits. Dealing with Great Dragons will, by nature, necessitate Xanatos Speed Chess, even if THAT is just a distraction from the direct approach.

DON'T make a deal, because deals will be twisted and broken. Make somebody want something, and make them certain that the outcome means nothing to you compared to what it means to them. And when everything is finally in motion, it'll be going like Tokyo Drift: if you're not out of control, you're not IN control.

Wow. Just wow. That is just far too many video game and Disney cartoon references for one paragraph. And Tokyo Drift?!?! Really? Is that a film people saw much less remembered? We need to have a firm basis of communication so I'm going to do this... Aladdin = Faustus, Metal Gear = Merchant of Venice, Bioshock = Old Boy, Xanatos = Mrs. Havisham and Tokyo Drift = ... well I never saw it so I'm just going to say Hamlet because it's so nebulous it's applicable to anything.
Now I think I know about which you are speaking.

I'm going to throw another literary reference back at you, Gatsby. You can think you have everything lined up perfectly, and you can even do everything right, but the game is rigged. Those of immense power have set up a system in which you cannot win. All your well laid plans and strategies and well thought out ideas, even when executed perfectly, topple to the ground like stones thrown upon a barricade of wealth, privilege and power.

Since we are referencing media I'll throw in my two cents and assume that dragons think about meta-humanity along the lines of a Michael Weston quote, "Dealing with a trained operative is like playing chess with a master. Dealing with criminals, on the other hand, is like playing checkers with a three year-old: they like to change the rules". The dragon(s) can think and plan and scheme, but they are creatures usually set in their ways while the rest of us are so mind-numbingly chaotic that it's hard to predict a rigger launching himself in a Bust-A-Move with a satellite link from a rail gun straight at ya.

This is how it works:

Great Dragons are smarter than you. They're smarter than the GM. If you somehow manage to outwit your GM and kill a Great Dragon, your GM should rule that, in fact, your cunning plan didn't work for some new reason that neither of you had thought up beforehand.

If your runner is in the business of living, he'll leave the dragons alone.

I disagree.



I think that GDs do have Super Divination, and more stuff like it. I don't think it makes the game boring, because trying to kill GDs was never supposed to be what the game is about, that's just Longbowrocks' insane plan.

GDs aren't intended for direct confrontation, they're meant to stay back in the shadows, to be the secret mover behind a dozen layers of intrigue that eventually causes whatever your current mission is about.

Complaining that GDs aren't fair game is like complaining that Antediluvians in oWoD aren't fair game - the point of the game was never to confront them.



Yes!

In my opinion going after a great dragon with any hope of sucess requires two things :
* getting enough firepower for the job. That usually means military grade, vehicle-scale weaponry
* getting enough information on the dragon' abilities and schedule to be able to actually bring the hardware close enough to do the deed

You're not sitting alone in the middle of an abandonned trash dump thinking and building stuff out of the trash - you're actively poking your nose around to get things and information the lizards knows can be detrimental to his health. Which brings you straight into the sort of areas he will keep an eye upon - he or his servants. That's going to jump the odds for showing up on his radar by an order of magnitude.

The hardware part is also likely to bring you to the attention of more intelligence services than is healthy, because the sort of hardware you'll need to take down a Great Dragon is the sort of hardware the power-that-be isn't eager to see dropping under the radar.

Note : even if you're playing tricks with random numbers and whatnots, there's still a constant in the whole deal that will probably emerge : there's someone - even if he can't dvine the specifics of who, when and how - who's out for his blood and far more seirous about it than his usual ennemies.

I never saw Tokyo Drift, myself, but that line WAS in the commercials. Also, I understand about the Gatsby thing. "No plan survives an encounter with the enemy." And yes, those of immense power have set up a system in which you cannot win. That's not the point. The point is NOT to win. The point is to make THEM lose! Once the target has lost, any amount of winning is just gravy.


It might be hard to predict, but it can be easy to defend against, give or take. The best way to surprise your quarry is to remove the given assumptions from the field of play (i.e. personal survival, conventional warfare, that you even WANT it dead). Go zen, and realize that you shouldn't think inside the box, nor outside, but rather that the box is merely an illusion distracting you from the great splendor that is being a sneaky bastard.

Actually, given his warp fate type power, I wouldn't be so sure the dragon doesn't have any power to defend against divining. Just, you don't.


Or maybe those more perimeter security structures - patrols, cameras, ElInt, plainscloths agents looking for suspicious people - are a lot more competent than you give them credit for. And since I imagine it hard to just buy a mortar and ammunition even in the States, maybe that's enough to foil that cunning plan?


Of course it still is caue and effect. It just adds another variable. Time travel would be messy there, divination, not so much. And time travel is a no-go in SR. It's the same with certain real world experiments that acelerate particles past light speed (which disintegrates the particle into radiation, but has the disintegrated radiation apear before the particle is launched b a few nanoseconds; and yet the universe hasn't exploded). To paraphrase Douglas Adams: The universe is built on the principle of cause and effect, though those don't always happen in chronological order.


Haven't been since the 90s. Current systems are very effective against slow moving projectiles, and medium effectiver against fast things like missiles. Supposedly, the Israeli Iron Dome system can reliably intercept RPGs and short-range missiles, too.


That's good for you. The rules don't.


Assuming you have the same level of ressources the dragon has (and a totally reliable mage who will do everything for you and never betray you), that's a much more decent plan than your previous ones.


What? If anything, it is Lear II.

There have been plenty of smart people in the past, but that's never saved anyone from an idiot with a gun who didn't like what they said. How many billions of people does a dragon need to keep track of if he wants to be certain that no one will try to kill him?

You really overestimate the influence and comeptence of assassins, especially the disgruntled citizen type.


That's projecting your own irrational hate of "anything that's bigger than your character" onto everyone. I doubt any given GD is hated (personally or for hat he stands for) than the US president. And curiously, most presidents don't seem to be assassinated by some Mr. Smith with no plan and a rusty shotgun.

You're gonna have to explain how that justifies this,
"The initiate enters a mild trance state that reveals glimpses and flashes of what the future may hold—almost always couched in enigmatic symbolism and metaphor appropriate to the diviner’s magical paradigm and cosmology."
giving the GD complete foreknowledge of complex future events, such as the fact that on August 21st, at a randomly determined time which may or may not occur depending on a random number generator are going to hack local aircraft and military units, with orders to both directly attack/crash into the GD and cause a critical meltdown in a local nuclear plant.
There's a shorter answer though. You wouldn't let a player do this with Divination, even though a PC could easily get 20+ dice on this test. It would ruin the game, they'd make a fortune on the stock market on the first run. The dragon isn't using divination, it's using "super-divination". That's fine for some games but it's not RAW and it's not going to be true for GDs in many games.


GDs have been outsmarted by humans before. Celadyr was outsmarted twice before TranSys joined NeoNet. Ryumo didn't predict the comet's effects and got blindsided by the new emperor. The Azzies regularly compete against multiple GDs and regular dragons without any apparent loss of power or position. Yes, GDs should generally be smarter and more powerful than PCs, that shouldn't equal Schrödinger's Armor, especially not if your PCs with 6 ranks in Devious Machinations.


Yeah, GDs aren't really meant for direct confrontation. However, if it's something the PCs want to do, and LongBow seems to, then the PCs should have a shot. If you want GDs to have "super-divination", that's fine for your game. I don't, I like the principle in SR that everything can be killed, everyone is vulnerable. I don't think, per RAW, GDs have "super-divination".

And while I like oWoD, it's so different from SR that comparisons aren't any more applicable than D&D, where you can kill everything (yes, they even stated Cthulu).

I believe strongly in chaos theory, which is an extreme application of cause and effect. It was determined from the beginning of the universe that I would be here today, and eat frosted mini wheats for breakfast (a very sugary wheat cereal). This was born of the progression of cause and effect. Then again, I guess the dragon performing the divination is part of cause and effect, and so its actions based on the result would already be accounted for. Alright, nevermind then.

Actually, this part of the plan fails if he doesn't betray me. I was counting on him betraying me, and intending to exploit the resulting trap that I imagine would be laid.

The trap you know nothing about. Right.


If his GM agrees. If it's something a player wants to do and the GM doesn't, it won't happen.

Well, there's that, but how many of Einstein's thoughts were ever dedicated to "How can I survive today without any these people killing me?"
In addition to minds that are preoccupied (with managing a corporation or what have you) there's also the fact that there are too many possible threats to do more than a background check of your immediate vicinity when you're famous, or especially controversial.

I don't think any U.S. president has ever personally razed a city with his fiery breath and deadly magic. That nets you a couple grudges.