Tempo's bad for your health, omae.

Well, it makes sense that it's harder to Infiltrate if you can't see the people you're trying to sneak past. That would be spirits, for one. But it would also apply to mundane guards with so much Ruthenium that you fail to notice, an infrared laser tripwire, or a camera hidden so well that you don't spot it. These are all the same problem for the Infiltrator.

AFAIK, the rules don't say anything about it. A good ruling would of course apply to all those cases - a basic ruling on how to Infiltrate past spotters you can and spotters you can't see.

As Fatum said, aura surpasses your clothes, it is known.


Yes, that's a good way to do it.

Now, I think the biggest problem with being a mundane infiltrator trying to pass through astral observers is not so much the fact that they can be travelling extremely fast and pretty much from any angle, because, honestly, cover and concealment still help on the astral plane. No, the biggest problem is because you are trying to be as stealthy as if you were trying to pass mundane observers while carrying an omni-directional 750 watts spotlight. So, you either carry something with you to block this "light" or walk near other 750 watts spotlights.

Which leads to the question: how do you reasonably block the giant spot light while still remaining functional matrix and meat-side?

You can't, if you've stipulated 'no magic'. Concealment was mentioned (the ultimate, unexplained stealth power), and various applications of Masking might help (more for disguising than blocking). The cardboard box works, but I wouldn't call it 'functional'.

OOOOOHHHH, COME ON! If Solid Snake can do it, why can't I?

But yeah, basically, your best option is carpet-bomb the place you are invading with FAB so it can conceal where you are, but won't conceal the fact that the facility has been breached.

"I upgraded from a cardboard box to a oil drum!"

Oooooh. Additional "armour".

More difficult to affect with spells too.

Well, most spells. Indirect Combat spells will still treat the barrel like swiss cheese, but who takes indirect combat spells?

I'm still slightly confused with the infiltration against groups you can't see comments. If two groups are hunting each other and trying to stay hidden, what skill(s) do they use?

d.p.

Infiltration (to stay hidden) and possibly Tracking (To actually find them, assuming you have evidence that you can use to track) or Shadowing (to keep them in sight, once you have found them). Could also use a Hacker to tell you where they are, assuming that he has them on the security systems (should not be all that hard, actually).

EDIT: And of Course, Perception... Duh!

By RAW, for individuals it would be Infiltration vs Perception each way. I.e. if Perception wins twice they spot each other, if it wins once then one spots the other and if it doesn't win either then both stay hidden.

Now with groups, technically the Infiltration rolls should be done individually whilst the Perception rolls should be done once per Infiltration roll. This means one opposed test per person, which could get pretty tedious pretty quickly so you might want to make just one Perception roll per side and use the hits as a common threshold for the respective Infiltrators (kinda like an area effect spell). I would suggest simplifying it further by making only one Infiltration test per side as well (so you're back at just two opposed tests) but turn the group bonus into a penalty to reflect it being harder to keep 6 guys hidden than it is to keep 2 guys hidden. Alternatively you could use the weakest dice pool (the guy in the group most likely to blow it) and think of the group bonus as team mates helping him stay hidden - 'Psst, dude, get away from the window!'

Of course the problem with simplifying it to two opposed tests is that the result doesn't indicate exactly who spotted who, but if it's an uncomplicated set-up or you're employing a reasonably abstract approach this shouldn't matter.

There's more you can play around with if you want. For one thing you can allow Infiltration to replace Perception, as people who know how to hide will know where to seek (this is optional RAW).

You might consider successful hiding to impact on the ability to spot the other side. For example, have both sides roll their Infiltration first and then choose how many hits to keep. That number of hits is then a negative penalty to their Perception roll. I.e. a team focussed on spotting the other side is more likely to get spotted themselves than a team focussed on staying hidden.

Another option that comes to mind is Leadership. If one side has time to draw up a game plan I'd allow one of them a Leadership roll for bonus dice in the Perception or Infiltration test (but probably not both).

Ah, the difficult task of making Leadership useful. I agree with it, but in the end it's just a tacked on skill no one actually seems to use.

I find it works well to think of it as Persuasion.

Or if yer commanding a group of npc's. I'd give bonuses to keep them under control by using leadership.

Also, if your gm likes the commanding voice adept power. Leadership is used to attack with it and defend against it. It sucks when an adept with 13 dice in leadership tells you to drop your gun, and you're defending with 5 willpower dice.

I hope nobody gets the impression from this that ferrets are rodents. They're mustelidae, exclusively carnivorous, with very different teeth to rodents...

Nice pedantry. +1 Karma.

I wouldn't really call it pedantry unless you'd also call objections to "Just release a sack full of stray cats near the guard outpost. When the guard sees the canines..." pedantic.

Cats and dogs are roughly the same size and have up to four legs and one tail but anyone who owns a cat or a dog will assure you in no uncertain terms they are very different indeed. The same is true for ferrets and rodents. I happen to have 2 ferrets and when they catch sight of a rat it's like dogs catching sight of a cat (but generally more terminal). They're really totally different.

Well say what you will but war finally fixed that, and in a pretty reasonable manner.

Way I read the astral perception modifiers in street magic, seems to me you could try and use mundane stealth against a spirit or mage. Not a great chance I guess in most cases, but maybe if you mix yourself in with a group of workers, you could apply -2 to the watcher. That plus a distraction might be enough to get you by if your hiding stats are good enough (esp with Edge?). Certainly not impossible. In any case seems to me it should be hard to beat magic without magic.

Actually i don't know what about a watcher would even make it able to distinguish a non worker from a worker. Where magical watchers are theoreticly a problem is in places where no one should be.

You see, thats where I have the theoretical disconnect. that it should be hard to beat magic without magic. per fluff, people fear magic. They are afraid of magic. They don't understand it. Several major, highly militant, organizations don't have much in the way of magic. And there's a substantial sample size to test against.

This has been the case for over half a decade. Traditionally, humanity has done some things very well: one of them is find a way to utterly thrash, kill, or supplant the power of things that scare them and they consider different, whether they deserve it or not. It seems that by now, there should be a wide variety of ways to not only beat magic, but be better than magic.

You know the moment the great ghost dance happened, someone in the halls of government said two things. 1) Lets get us some of that, and 2) how do we make sure that we can kill the living shit out of anybody who can do that.

That's so 2050.

We've had dual natured light for years now. (just run a modified current through orichalcum-laced filament). People get convicted though forensic thaumaturgy. For 1000Y you can get some Shade and visit the other side. Heck, you can even get a license for that stuff.

Magic is normal. That's why we have watchers all over the place. Sure, they were scary back before we even knew what a technomancer was, but nowadays even an AI can get a SIN. Hiring a mage is just something corps, governments, and, if you have the cash, people do.

Cameras too.

And let's not forget "Karl the Kombat Mage"

So, for the first 40 years no one trie dit out? I'll concede 2072 is much more magic friendly. Of course it still doesn't answer why several organizations who benefit greatly from being, well, stealthy, haven't invested in any way to beat the mages. The price point would be pretty good.

1% population magically active.

If its a 50% split between adepts and mages, 0.5% of the population is really considered the threat. Its implied that among those, the even semi decent can make a fat, comfy living due to this rarity. Call it medium life style, maybe trending to high. 60-120k a year.

So, rather than hire your own mage at 120k a year, the company that can make "haha, made your mage obsolescent" implants or gear could still be selling it at a very reasonable price point. Considering bleeding edge cyber is in that range, its apparent that the industrial base can support it, even for a small market

I imagine, for instance, the Ares sales pitch to the UCAS would be pretty good. "Tired of having your infantry platoon hump eight hours the long way around, only to have one dipshit 13 year old from a third world country compromise it all because he can summon a watcher spirit? Alert the guerrillas? Can't afford to put a mage with every 30 men? Just buy Item X, and pronto, you even out that freak of nature."

Need a mage dead? Astral signature seeking missile. A nicely converted heimdahl with a 500 lb HE warhead. Load up the signature in question, and for a mere 15k you can erase that big expensive asset the enemy has. As seen on desert wars!

Whats that intelligence services around the world? The budget has been cut again? Highly trained professionals being mentally raped because they ran into a mage and you can't have yours everywhere at once? Your safe from mind control and astral observation with item Y, and you can equip an entire field team for less than the 3 year salary of a single mage!

In short, it would be very lucrative to neutralize mages. Every armed force, security service, intelligence service, mercenary, shadowrunner, and tin pot dictator in the world would pay for it. Even domestically, it'd sell to the rich and the paranoid.

So freaking invent it! Because magic isn't magic after 60 years. Its just a technology to be beaten. And in this case, there's a lot of money in beating it. Stop treating it as something special and mysterious. Start treating it as something to be exploited and crushed in the opposition, for less. Because from the board room to the war room, for 60 years people have been pondering how to.

But if we figure out a way to beat it, it wouldn't be MagicRun anymore.

Wait...

Even the newest 2070 manatech is expensive, limited, fragile stuff.

And for 60 Years have not figured out how to do it... Why is that a problem? Stuff IS coming out, it is just taking time, and Billions upon Billions (Trillions by this point?) of research just to get where we are now. Just give it time (realistic amounts of time at that)...

Isn't there also a lot of threats to mages in Astral? So having a whole bunch of spells sustained/anchored to you all the time as you fly around slinging AOE Manaballs and such is asking for something to come get you?

OK, let's look at this logically for a minute.
Q: How does the astrally perceiving infiltrator know there is a watcher or whatever spirit there?
A: He astrally perceives it.
Q: And when he astrally perceives it, doesn't it also get a roll to astrally perceive the mage?
A: Yes, but ... wait a minute!

If you really can't hide from something you can't see, the Infiltration skill is dead. Sneaking through an alley into the gang headquarters but didn't know there was a sniper on overwatch? Game over. Sneaking into the corporate facility? Those invisible microscopic cameras you can't see pick you up as will security drones the spider has sent in 10 ... 9 ... 8 ...

I treat Infiltration as more of an abstract skill, and with the exception of specially designed very secure rooms/vaults infiltration is possible, even if the in-game explanation is that the spider/guard/watcher spirit happened to be looking at something else in that split-second the infiltrator rushes from one piece of cover to the next. Legwork on security systems in a given facility will give the infiltrator a bonus (he knows what to expect, and hopefully has the thermal dampening/ruthenium/McGuffin to counteract the security measure and give him more bonus dice). Similarly, I will give a penalty to the infiltrator and/or bonus on defenders perception for security measures the infiltrator is unaware of and unprepared for.

As for astral guards, I am not sure if this is RAW, RAI or my house rule, but although astral travel is superfast, I would not allow astral perception to provide more than a blur unless said spirit/astral projector moved at "normal" walking speeds. Otherwise you could get one astral watcher covering every inch of a corp facility in one round, in which case why would a corp bother investing in other countermeasures? So, at least in my game, said spirits patrol their said routes at walking speed using "observe in detail".

Also, bear in mind that watcher/other spirits are not necessarily difficult to fool. A spirit looking for an intruder "not wearing a corp badge" could be fooled by the moving box/oil drum/wearing grass camo scenario ("That is a box/oil drum/plant, not an intruder." in spirit understanding). Also, with the right legwork the infiltrator might know to take out a guard/off-duty employee and steal his badge, in which case the spirit would see the badge it has been instructed to look for and even a chromed up heavily armed sammie will get past in its full view. The GM must decide what specific set of rules spirits acting as astral guards are given, and whether the PC's have a chance to discover this through legwork.

To answer the OP's question, as per RAW the Infiltration skill is fine for getting by astral security. Countermeasures such as foliage camo/cardboard box/oil drum to confuse the spirit can help, as can info on astral security routes/procedures through legwork and astral overwatch from a magical teammate. Safe sneaking!

I would tend to agree that sneaking past astral observers is quite possible, no, let me rephrase that, SHOULD BE quite possible.

Let's look at the modifiers:

Perception mods that don't get replaced by astral visibility:

Perceiver is distracted –2, for instance because the observer is travelling around at full astral walking speed, or because a small animal has its attention
Perceiver is actively looking/listening for it +3, possibly, but without an action, and not without having a hint that something might be there
Object/sound not in immediate vicinity –2, this counts on the astral as well
Object/sound far away –3, same
Object/sound stands out in some way +2, this one should apply for all auras of living things, and that's the full extent of the rules
Interfering sight/odor/sound –2, this one should be replaced by astral visibility
Perceiver has active enhancements +rating, not applicable
Perceiver using virtual reality –6, not applicable

Now astral visibility mods:

Sterile (clean room, hospital) +2, that should hardly apply in lots of places
Barren (city streets) +1, quite likely this one applies
Developed (suburban area, desert) 0, or this one
Cultivated (park, light forest) –1, in large compounds outside of cities, obviously
Teeming (jungle, forest) –2, more rare, but still...

Aura Noise
Devoid (no living traffic) +2, likely, but not definite
Sparse (scattered, occasional bystanders) +1, this might apply quite regularly
Moderate (frequent presence of living creatures) 0, I would say that's a rare facility to sneak into
Steady (regular movement of living creatures) –1, rare
Crowded (packed with living creatures) –2, again, in a jungle

Other Factors,
Shadow Clutter –1 to –4, this might apply quite often, for instance when crossing areas where stuff is loaded, stored, etc.
Background Count Inverse of Rating*, this one also: I would expect most industrial facilities to have at least a +1 BC.
Aerosol FAB cloud (p. 126) –2, well, if you put them there.


So, and finally, there are no listed mods for sneaking, so I would simply let an infiltrator roll his Infiltration, and apply the appropriate mods to perception.

A watcher with 2 regular assensing dice now gets, for an exemplary case, while sitting around only watching:
+0 because even while observing in detail, it doesn't know where to observe
- 2 if its watching a larger area
+2 because auras are obvious, (and I would apply another +2 for every spell or focus the infiltrator is sustaining)
+1 because it's probably a sparsely populated area, or else mundane stealth will get too hard
+1 because occasionally mundane security walks past
-1 to -2 because the infiltrator doesn't likely cross the empty causeway
-1 because there is a BC of +1. Oh, wait, now the watcher has force 0. Damn.

So let's take a Force 2 spirit, instead, and just use 2 dice as remaining from the force:

The resulting assensing dice are: 2 to 1. And Tadaa, the force 2 spirit is likely as not not going to beat the trained infiltrator at all, because he actually got 3-5 hits, statistically.

Now if I were lazy I would just forget all those mods, now that I've determined that for many normal cases in fact no modifiers apply to the assensing test. So... generally astral security will just roll their normal assensing dice, vs. the normal infiltration dice of the infilitrator. While this is still much worse than against mundane perception, it's also quite fair.

If you believe that most corporate locations have a BC of 1+ (which I don't agree with), then there won't be Watchers at all.

Yes, which is what I added, and replaced watchers with F2 spirits, which are then F1. Perhaps there shouldn't be a BC, well, in my experience as a player, and often as the Mage player, there often was. As a GM... it depends on what kind of facility it is.

I agree. The nature of sterilizing the environment would create a negative background count, if anything. But still, most areas would have no BC, unless they are particularily well kept (I may give a lab room with tons of filters and strict allowances on what comes in and out a BC of negative 1-3, dependant on how stringent it is.)

Even if you ignore the background count, your total takes a watcher (2 dice) to having.... 2 to 3 dice.

Soo....net 0 gain?

The overall point is that IMHO hiding from astral observers isn't actually harder than hiding from normal orbservers, you just don't get all the toys and darkness to work in your favour.

Can anyone provide actual rules to contradict me?

While true, the observer also has far fewer dice (on average).