QUOTE (Irion @ Jan 18 2012, 09:22 AM)
Here again the magic rules, make you wrong. I have to grant access at the moment I build up the ward.
What does this means? If I want them to be able to help me, I have to grant them access or they will stay outside the ward, while the shadowrunners butcher my employees and rob me.
What does this mean? The security of the place has to be that high, that it operates as a stand alone. So you are running with "hot" data in a place with probably even higher security than the place you just robbed.
And now with this "so high" security, it is to hope that they do not have a mage on astral, which is putting one and one together.
I am not saying there are no possibilities to shake astral tails, even without going astral. But it gets much harder if you have several guys following you.
And it is not like they do not have any possibility to slow you down, for example summoning a spirit.
Yes, if you plan ahead and have one of your own wards in a chocking point... the best possibility would be an alarm ward, which will be holding the following mages.
(Or at least one of them an block the way for the rest)
But thats a lof of preparation and a lot can go wrong. (The "holding" ward, may lead you to kill some kiddy mage)
Yeah, if you do this as civilian. But I guess a civilian won't be hunting you. This will be probably guys from Lonestar, which have contracts with the bank, too.
So I guess they are able to comunicate their problem... (Worst, one mage has to report back to base...)
If I did understand Cheops correctly, he did not have a mage to take care of the fist step....
This is what I am saying the whole time. You need to get astral superiority, or you have a problem.
To everything there is a counter in SR. But magic can only be countered by "more magic".
While I agree that magic is best trumped with magic, I am definitely not on the side of the MagicRun proponents who say if you don't have magic, you're screwed. For game balance, mundanes need to have methods of shaking off astral pursuit, else every single runner team that has no mage is dead in the water. While it seems most if not all PC runner teams have at least one awakened member, SR canon and the 1% stat does imply the existance of runner teams without any awakened members, and for such teams to even exist it follows there must be ways for them to shake off astral pursuit. OK, back to the ducking into the warded bank to shake an astral tail example:
I was imagining CorpSec pursuit, but let's make it LoneStar as you suggest. And let us assume the bank is warded to protect customer privacy. Let's assume for arguement's sake that there is a patroling spirit with standing orders to politely detain anyone who comes through the ward, while it waits a few rounds for one of the wage mages from astral HQ to arrive and deal with the astral customer. (Remember, spirits have an imperfect understanding of the material world so their instructions cannot be too complicated.) Astral pursuer has 2 choices:
1) Force his way through the ward, setting off an alarm and getting accosted by the spirit. When wage mage appears, the astral cop can identify himself and get on with his pursuit. This will take some time (especially if the wage mage needs to verify astral cop's badge number or anything), by which time the runners have got away. Alternatively, the cop can fight the spirit, but unless he's a powerful mage or the bank has been stingy with a low-force spirit this is likely to take a few rounds and will also have legal ramifications for the poor cop.
2) Request permission to enter ward. This too will probably take time enough for the runners to make good their escape through another exit.
Obviously a non-astral cop would be wearing a uniform, and would probably just have to flash his badge to security as he enters the building, but one problem with astral entities is that they do not have uniforms or badges. Hence whichever way you look at it, an astral lone star cop would have some time-wasting explaining to do to get inside a warded area.
You lose me as to why the runners are going to rob the bank and murder employees, I thought they were just planning to slip an astral tail, but that's what the bank's mundane security is there for. Sure, if some astral entity materializes and says "Those guys are terrorists!", physical security will keep an eye on them, but they probably won't make a move to detain the runners if they look like and are acting like normal citizens until the security guards have verified the astral cop is who he says he is (again, takes time).
True, the astral pursuer can throw up spirits to slow down their quarry (although not in my game, because as I stated wa-ay back in this thread I house-rule that summoning takes 1 min/force, although previously bound spirits can be called up in 1 round).
Other ways to slip an astral tail are Infiltration, which by RAW works against astral onlookers, and shadowing. Melting away in a crowd should be possible: like in the movies, it can be hard to see the bad guy in a crowded mall.