This thread is about all those little tricks that you have found running the shadows. A few of my own.

1) Having your Technomancer perform a Erase Data Resonance Realm Search to erase the Firewall or Analyze programs from a node. Or that UV facilities account list. Timing this can be a pain but the enemy spiders being booted from the system and then having to hack their way back in is incredibly useful on a run. Erase Data should also be used on a fairly regular basis as a poor mans Erasure to totally get rid of those burned and used SIN's of yours or to make sure that nothing about your team that you don't want on the matrix is on the matrix. Another nasty trick with this is to erase a SINer that you want out of the way for whatever reason, or the transaction records of that certified cred stick being used so that you can go and use that forgery that you made as well.

2) Get a R2 Smart Jammer from Arsenal and tell it to not jam your tags but to jam all other tags. They equip yourself and your vehicle with reprogrammable tags slaved to your ID comlink that are set to automatically display the correct information for that ID.

3) Buy an RFID tag, they have a capacity of 1. Put a R1 camera on it (with all the options that are useful to you or that you can afford), put it on the back of your head/helmet. Congratulations, you now have cheap rear-view vision. Buy a couple dozen more and load each one down with different sensors; R6 Cyberware Scanner, get several and it's unlikely anyone will get lucky enough to beat all the tests. This let's you know when someone with Cyber get's within 15 meters of you, and finds a lot of hidden weapons. Basically look at the list of sensors and if it takes 1 capacity load it on a tag and carry it with you, get several if they are making any opposed rolls.

4) A continuation of 3, buy a few hundred RFID tags with Cameras on them (probably with the ultrasound enhancement to get around improved invisibility) and when you go on a run throw these things everywhere around you. Slip them under doors (to see what is on the other side), slap them on the walls so that you can watch your back, throw them around corners so that you don't run into an ambush. Basically sprinkle them out like candy; at only a hundred nuyen a tag these things are dirt cheap (and you can recover a lot of them on the way out if you aren't in a rush and are feeling cheap) and they will save your life.

5) Slap those nifty little RFID sensor tags on everything. That KE or LS patrol car? Slap a single stealth tag on the front of it and you can track it in real time (roads with GridGuide are part of the matrix mesh network). It's relatively easy to get these tags on pretty much every cop vehicle in the Sprawl (or at lest the areas you are running in) and it can be a god send. Throw a bunch up at every street corner, in the lobby of every business, etc. It's a dirt cheap way to make yourself an unnoticed surveillance network around the sprawl.

6) Find the places that you normally go to shop that check your SIN (pretty much everywhere that isn't sitting in the Barrens). Most places like your favorite restaurant are using an R1 or R2 SIN scanner. Hack it (or have your teams hacker hack it) and bury a little virus in there that says every time it receives a SIN to check "Does this match XXX-XXX-XXX?" If the answer is no then it runs the scan normally, if the answer is yes then it never runs the scan and just throws up that it's a valid SIN. This is a great way to extend the life of your SINs as they aren't actually being tested. Hacking something like Weapons Worlds R6 scanner will be more difficult but it's still within the characters grasp, basically do the same thing again but throw in the scanner saying that you have all those nifty licenses that you need for whatever you want to buy, and perhaps the Ares discount.

7) Are you a hacker? If you aren't on a run then spend your time hacking everything you can and burying hidden accounts, back doors, hidden access points, and legitimate accounts everywhere. The same if you are a technomancer. You never know what will come in useful on a run so it's best to have as many options as possible. This runs the list from hacking the local Stuffer Shack so that you can view their security camera feeds and get a list of who's shopping there to the local coffin motel to GridGuide and the Star. Apartment buildings, hotels, the bus systems passenger list, the shops at the mall to grab their security footage and customer lists, city hall so that you have easy access to building plans, the power company so that you can easily shut off power to your target when you hit it on a run, the water company, the local schools, the train system, local stores, the local MSP's (easy way to find access ID's). If you have GridGuide, the bus system, the trains, and the local cab companies then all you need is a single RFID tag, SIN, access ID, etc. to track most anyone in real time around the sprawl. Even if you have to rehack these once a month or so to maintain your access it is well worth it. The real fun occurs when you hack KE's feed on all the surveillance assets and can visually track someone in real time or run that data against a facial recognition system, etc.

Slap patches with Leal and Leas on them. Do a run where you can't kill people or the like? Slap those on them and they won't remember a thing, even magic can't get the memory back. Although watch out for things like cybereyes. Slab is also a really good one to hit people with, you are guaranteed at least an hour of them appearing dead with no real side effects, it's probably the best way to knock out someone. Pretty cheap to at only 150 a dose.

9) A real easy way to get rid of bound spirits and watchers is to have your mage use Astral Projection and then trace the connection from the bound Spirit or Watcher to the mage, you then Assense them. That let's you create a Symbolic Link at a threshold of 4. When it's about time for the run you hit the mage with one of a number of kill rituals depending upon personal preference. I personally like using Control Thoughts, if you can beat them by enough for it too last a bit, and having them order their bound spirits to all attack the on sight hacker or mage before having the mage kill himself. If a site is using spirits from multiple mages, track them all and prepare simultaneous kills on them all. If you kill the Spirit first then the Mage will instantly know and will raise the alarm, however remove him and the spirits go away as well.

10) Demolishers (Augmentation) and Smart Demolishers are incredibly useful. Demolishers are about the best way to dispose of hot gear, corpses, and anything else you don't want cluttering up the living room; but they can get a bit expensive if your GM is stingy with the nuyen so go and steal a few hundred units from a local construction/demolition company. Where these can get real useful is when you are doing something like raiding that UV facility with a mage or two sitting deep in a buried vault and using the fiber optics wired throughout the entire base to attack you; well smart Demolishers can be set to eat only say, fiberoptic cable. A bit on the end and that entire system throughout the whole facility is eaten. 2.5 kilometers of fiberoptic cable weighs about 85 kg. Smart demolisher's can eat that much in 7 hours. You need to sneak the initial unit in before your run but that is far easier. There are lot's of nifty things you can do with this if you get creative.

So what have you seen or done that's a nifty little runner trick.

This came up in the other thread, and was discussed somewhat.

It is, of course, a good idea for a hacker to always be out, well, hacking. Building botnets, mapping systems, etc. But do realize hacked accounts/backdoors/legitimate accounts don't last forever. How long they last will of course depend on the sensitivity of the system (those Stuffer Shack accounts might very well last forever), but important ones (like admin accounts on Grid Guide?) might not even make it a month.

Unwired gives rules for backdoor/hacked account detection, but basically leaves the length of availability of created accounts up to GM fiat. For instance, we do a quarterly (i.e. 3 month check) on system access to all our systems, matching accounts to physical bodies. And our systems aren't exactly high-stakes.

Likewise, security upgrades, internal audits, security sweeps, and plain luck can all impact how long access lasts. On the flip side, the hacker can try to do things to extend the life of any hacked accounts (forge paperwork at HR, memo to the sec officer, etc.).

So yes, great and important point, but realize it could become a full time job in and of itself, for little gain.

It depends on your GM and how/what rules they are using. Hidden Accounts don't show up or even get looked for unless the systems spider or IC see someone using one by RAW. Making accounts look like your activities are legit is also relatively easy, at least for most of the systems I mentioned here. This is small fry, most of those systems I listed are pretty much rating 2, maybe rating 3 systems. GridGuide might push R6 depending upon how you are going about hacking it (for example, hack there pipe to KE or city hall that's basically just dumping the data it's collecting over to them and isn't the system that actually controls the cars; it's almost certainly a lower rating node) and the MSP is R4 or R5 according to Unwired.

And the gains are very often huge. Get a line into the police surveillance network around the sprawl and finding anyone is incredibly easy. Nothing like shadowing a mark from 10 miles away, or tracking that Johnson around the city in real time. Owning infrastructure is where hackers really shine.

Is a program 'data'? I never looked to closely at the technomancer stuff.

The rules for sensors tags aren't quite as totally munchin-able as that, but if they were… why would you exploit such an error? You can put micro-cameras (max Rating 1, minimal enhancements) in the things, sure, but you can't feel good about things like rating 6 cyberware scanners.

Indeed, the gains for controlling major matrix system are huge. That's why it's unreasonable that you'd be able to do so, especially on any extended basis.

Yes, hidden accounts don't show up on routine inspections, but are detectable via a thorough account audit. Which any sec ops person will do regularly (anywhere from weekly, monthly, quarterly, or possibly never or nightly for the truly paranoid).

But yes, you're correct, it's entirely up to the GM.

---

Many of your other suggestions are great, like the smart scanner for quickly spoofing your ID.

The only caveat I can see with the camera fixed to the back of your helmet would be the disorientation, i.e. the rules for the single cybereye from Augmentation. And monitoring all of those cameras in a facility could be distracting, nevermind something/someone detecting their wifi signals. But again, situationally can provide a huge situational tactical bonus.

The rules are explicit for RFID sensor tags : quoted from SR4A : Sensor Tags: These tags are equipped with single rating 1 sensor (Visual Sensors & Imaging Devices, p. 332; Audio Sensors, p. 333; and Sensors, p. 333) and are programmed to monitor a certain object person/environment and respond to certain conditions. Sensor tags are used for diagnostic purposes in various devices, vehicle components, and cyberware, as well as to monitor temperature in food shipments, and many similar purposes.

With a rating 1 camera you can add only one single optical option, which won't get you very far. And I'd probably count the ultrasound sensor as a separate rating 1 sensor that replaces the camera. I also strongly doubt that the crappy rating 1 cyberscanner you can cram into one would have the same range as the handlheld or door frame versions. Personnaly I'd use the 3m range from their signal. And the fullf seems to hint they're directional, in which case unles someone steps over the scanner (or in front of it if stuck to wall), it will stay blisffuly unaware.

And if you start spreading the things like confettis, at something like 200 nuyens a pop, that's going to add up quickly. Not much of a concern when you're raking 100K, but for the normal runner it can really eat into the profit margin. It will also bump up the odds that they will be detected as each extra tag is one more chance for detection. Even if the odds are low, that's going to add up.

About the 'yes in the back of thead trick', what I would do would be to give a penalty to the forward visual perception equivalent to the bonus added to detect trouble from behind - the better you're looking backward, the more it will inpair your normal vision with a window or an overlay.

Right. Critically, they're not capable of being used as sensor packages (constant, controlled, interactive use). That's what sensor packages are for. You can do many of the same tricks, they're just (quite reasonably) bigger.

- Holographic projectors are the illusion spell of the mundanes.
- Put some gloweed/glowstick in/on your armored clothing and link it to your commlink so that every time it glows a message "you're possibly the target of a spell" is sent to you. This might give you another spell resistance roll when subjected to a mind manipulation spell.

ECM Drones

Get several drones with a 10K rating 10 Jammer each. A HK drone with Ruthenium Polymer Coating will cost you 13500Y

With Signal 6 and an ECCM of 6 you will still be able to control your drones while they cover the immediate area (Antennas and communication areas) and they will also be able to block most signal sensitive sensors of rating 6 within 20 meters (rating drops by 1 for every 5 meters) Regular devices (commlinks mostly) of rating 3 will be blocked within a 40 meters of the drone.

Also carry a personal jammer.

Its a fat investment but very useful as it will stop most regular guards calling for backup.

I'd think that if the security see whole section of their wireless com dropping dead it won't take them very long to figure out something's fishy. And if the guards are using a dead man's witch style of constant communication with the control post (say biomonitor reports or maybe even a vid chanel), droping that link will be about as good a giveaway as letting them scream for help. thouhg it will make it harder for the security to figure out exactly what's going on (beyond 'we're under atack and the bad guys are someplace around here') and coordinate their teams.

Additionally, Sensor RFIDs are their very own category of sensor packages, all with a Signal of 0. The way I read that is that it limits their maximum range to 3 meters. Still useful, but not so very powerful. A rating 1 Cyberscanner is unlikely tpo find anything with it's tow dice, though. Micro sensor packages, about the size of a coin, are much more useful and contribute to that idea nicely. Carry a few of them and you're golden.
Timing multiple ritual spells via symbolic links is pretty hard as ritual sorcery takes a lot of time... But it's a great reminder of doing legwork up front, a lot of it. Makes things so much easier
It's not too difficult to make a decent hacker into a lot of characters. Skillwires and high rating programs will do, attributes are not needed Just don't expect anything fancy, the big hacker bonus dice come from all kinds of 'ware.
You don't really need smart jammers, classic jammers from the core rulebook have this smart feature as well (see SR4A, p. 231, "Jam Signals", it is well hidden...). No idea why the more expensive smart jammers still exist, even their maximum rating is lower.

Further tips:
In an urban environment, flying drones should be common all throughout the city with maybe the exception of Z-zones. Having aerial surveillance always comes in neat. Buy some.
You can always play the Matrix illiterate, telling the group hacker do "do your thing and keep our things safe!". Still, a minimum effort is always useful. You don't want to be the reason your team communication got intercepted, do you? This, of course, depends heavily on group and GM and on how they implement the Matrix.

This topic has come up before. This is a previous thread. Not all tips are really valid or really useful, but some I really liked (e.g. "know somebody crazy". Gotta do that soon

Yeah, they really wrecked the jamming rules in the newest stuff. Might as well declare that all guns fire Zorg's replay bullets.

True, but you can also use these tactics to lure them out and Jam areas where you are not and give indications that you are striking OVER THERE when you in reality is striking at the compound over somewhere else.

Make them look at the right and so that they have no idea what the left one is doing.

That's what the fly spy and the other micro drones are for. Those drones are also moveable and hence more recoverable, but they aren't as cheap. Fully decked out, you're looking at least a good 6000 nuyen.

Also true. And given the power of info, it seems appropriate.

This is very true. And more universally, when your options are either sound the alarm or do communications blackout...go with the blackout. If your moving against a large compound, they may know they are under attack, but unless your letting out loud gunfire, they won't know where your attacking and they may have several floors or acres of ground to try to find you. And if someone does find you they won't be able to radio it in. As long as all your encounters are hard, fast, and quiet, you'll only ever have to deal with guard patrols rather than a concerted defense. Like shooting blind fish in a barrel.

For a shadowrunner, Intel is the greatest weapon, and limiting your opponents intel is often just as good.

The post I reacted first seemed to imply going for jamming from the get-go, treating it as an almost mandatory precaution to be used every time. Which in my opinion is a wrong move as it gives away the fact there's an attack even before the runners themselves are noticed.

I would do things like a commando strike : do your utmost to go unnoticed, but as soon as you get spotted, switch to speed and cause a maximum of confusion (like using jamming all over the place if you can) to keep the security in the dark as to where you really are.

My ShadowRun motto:

"Stealth is Health"

I do something similar. Scapel, then sledgehammer. Start off with finesse, but be prepared to swing to the other extreme and use brute force. It also helps to know or attempt to find out when stealth or other attempts at finesse is going to be unlikely to succeed.

Go in with rutherium, but carry the PAC.

Jamming, like opening fire with the panther cannon is just not a good idea as an initially plan. Primary reason is that it means the HTR team is on its way, and that also means Mages in the astral, matrix security is elevated, drones are on their way, and you sure as hell better finnish up in the next 5 minutes or you're going to be toast.

1) Watch your back
2) Shoot straight
3) conserve ammo
4) never deal with a dragon


5) I'm a fan of someone on the team having a few shaped charges (suitably sealed off from wireless activation, plus some hermetic sealing for chem detectors) and everyone having at least minimal knowledge in applying those; sometimes when the drek hits the fan and you need a quick escape route, or a distraction, or simply a "You'll never take us alive, coppers!" option... having the ability to blow a hole in something quickly and (relatively) neatly can be really nice.

What you'd need is a breaching charge - a shaped charge is usually designed to focus the blast and usually result in a small hole. Fine if you want to shoot throuhg a wall or make a hole to set a post in, but not exactly usefull to make an exit.

The breaching charge is a derivative of the shaped charge designed to cut along a line (detcord writ large), cutting a piece of the wall to make an opening big enough to move through.

Figure out multiple routes of escape, but make at least some of them through maintenance systems. Show up early as staff, and put in some "extra pipes", no one will notice.

If you have to use those exits, the Bangalores you placed earlier will cause a lot of confusion just after you run past the "Minimum Safe Distance Zone". Make sure there are no Natural Gas Lines in the area, however...

Stealthed fly-spies can be relatively cheap, and a half dozen of them can be very useful to maintain laser or microwave tight-beam communications links across your team. Even indoors, if positioned strategically they can serve as relay nodes to daisy-chain between folks in different rooms.

Minimizing radio emissions is a nice thing to achieve.

The surveillance functions of the fly-spies are kinda nice too.



-k

Legwork. Legwork legwork legwork. The weakest part of any security system is the human one. And with magic, along with alcohol to weaken willpower, it's even easier to get passcodes, username/passwords, and so on from people than before magic came back.

Sodium Pentathol works, but not as well as a rum and coke, and the target is more likely to have a drink of his own free will.

(FYI: Nas' boyfriend Chava, from my stories, does Legwork of this variety now.).