Hi there! I am a long time GM of RPGs in general, recently looked into Shadowrun and I am running a 4th edition game for some local friends, and its been a blast, however one of my players has this spell Camouflage (and the better version of it as well) and literally consistently gives anyone a -6 at least to be able to perceive him.

How do I go about getting around it for the bad guys? Now not every bad guy is going to be able to see through it, but so far as he described and as I read it, it seems pretty powerful. I will note that I have read and reread recently and noted that it affects "visual" perception based checks/tests, does this mean something like Ultrasound sensors will see him and allow the wearer to see a humanoid sound based shape where the PC is standing?

What are some other ways to see Invisibility and Camouflage and the Physical Camouflage spells?

Thermographics shouldn't give a toss about what color someone is. Other nonstandard wavelengths might work too - UV, for example, should be worth at least, oh ... halving the modifier for Camoflage.

Ultrasound doesn't give a toss even about invisibility - it's not VISUAL; it's a processor interpreting artificial echolocation into a visual output.

UWB (Ultra Wide-Band Radar) also does not give a squat about the Camoflauge spell (Or invisibility, for that matter).

Ultrasound and UWB radar sensors are cheap enough that basically every facility with pretensions toward security should have them. Invisibility and related spells shouldn't be useless, but neither should they be the be-all and end-all of infiltration.

IIRC, there are 'improved' variants to foil technological sensors.

Something that can astrally perceive will do the trick.

I feel like a broken record, but...
Wards! anyone want wards? got some fine wards here!
Wards tend to mess up sustained spells

Yep, astral perception should pick up the glaring aura of the spell and its target no problem.

Far easier, though, is just to use non-visual methods of detection. Simple things, even. A guard dog will be able to smell an intruder, visible or no. Pressure plates in the floor will register their weight. Laser tripwires will trigger when broken. Any sounds they make will be fully audible, and any objects they interact with will be fully visible. Something as simple as an unlocked door that they have to open and close again in the presence of an onlooker can give them away. And in a crowded area, other people can bump into them.

~Umi

Addendum: @Lionhearted Not every location can afford to pay mages the regular costs of wards. Also, all the ward does is require them to drop the spell and recast it on the other side.

Wards can work as long as the magician can't pretend to be the magician that erected it.

There was also a thread some time back that had evolved into a discussion about trying to tie sensors directly to vision wear as a real-time way to try and circumvent something like an Invisibility spell. Looking through a camera sensor certainly will work, since Invisibility and Camouflage are mind affecting only spells. For Improved Invisibility and Physical Camouflage, pretty much what was already said above (ultrasound, various radars, motion sensors, dual natured critters, astrally perceiving the area, etc.).

Even Improved Invisibility, works on visual sensors; it'd work fine on cameras, even thermographic ones. I might even let it extend to a laser trip-beam.

But an ultrasound scanner, or an infrasound trip-beam? Sorry no, those don't work by "sight", biological or technological. No invisibility, nor color-change, spell is going to work against those.

Non permanent wards are dirt cheap to have a mage come cast every few weeks, and three seconds is more then enough for the cameras to pick you up and ring the alarm, alternatively activate the sprinklers with non-toxic dye.
Sure you won't find it at Joe Schmoes bar but anything worth enough to have physical security around... For sure.

That's what Silence is for.

Creating a gaping void in the sensor return, which is just as much of a giveaway.

I would expect that's heavily dependent on how sophisticated the sensor actually is. Ultrasound isn't a particularly error-free or high-resolution thing. Depending on how you want to play it, an ultrasound sensor could easily interpolate a small dead area as bad data, especially if it doesn't stick around very long. Now, someone watching the associated image on a screen might be able to spot the target as a "shadow" on the display pretty easily. A silence spell engulfing the sensor itself would effectively render it useless (so if you target the guy with ultrasound goggles with Silence he won't see anything at all -- no ceiling, floor, walls, nothing, probably making it very disorienting.

Cheap $10 2013 motion detectors would light up like a christmas tree, if an "infinite hole" suddenly entered their field of view.

I can't imagine 2070's sensors are any less capable.



That's .... not actually how motion detectors work.

A motion detector, a.k.a. ultrasound sensor, works by constantly mapping and remapping the entire world within their range and field of view. Any change over a relatively small amount - 3% to 6%, say - triggers the alarm.

A silence spell engulfing the sensor would be a 100% change.

Think about that.

Would an improved invisible target break a laser trip beam?

if you're running Invis+Silence unless you happen to have some REALLY good Foci, you're at some pretty small dice to do much of anything.

To be fair, it could also look like a hardware failure when suddenly your sensor goes apeshit but isn't actually showing anything.

No, improved invisibility works by warping light rather than tricking a mind into not detecting it. So the laser would never trip but merely be re-directed around for a moment.

Would it crack the Twig that was stepped upon?

Twigs are not light beams TJ, what is sight if not light reflected off a surface?

Of course it would, TJ. You're talking about stepping on a physical object versus stepping through a beam of light. Apples to oranges really.

*shrug*

More to the point, the Silence spell description says that it's useful for jamming technological sensors: detection devices, sonar, etc. I suppose it depends on how you want to read "useful" and "jamming" but in general I'd say that to GM such a situation, it's probably better to let magic foil unattended devices and provide complications for attended devices, rather than go into the physics of exactly what the spell is doing and how that physically affects the sensors. Magic gets to be weird on occasion.

In terms of game balance, you're looking at layered spells cast at reasonably high Force (to beat the object resistance) and sustained just to defeat basic cheap security (camera + ultrasound sensor), so it seems fair -- you'd have to be a pretty spiffy mage and/or own some pretty serious gear to pull it off. In a contested environment, a silence spell might look like a hole in the visual field of someone viewing through an ultrasound device (or a sufficiently advanced piece of equipment, like a drone, with a Pilot program), which could be enough to prompt Blind Fire at the target if the operator is sufficiently trained to recognize it (if you see big void in your readout, don't ask questions, just shoot at the middle).

In other words, having a cheap piece of tech be the be-all/end-all of intrusion detection is kind of lame.

Or maybe you could have a hacker on your team to hack the tech? I know that Mages are used to being the best at everything ever, but hey...

~Umi

The operating word here is 'jamming" - jamming prevent identification and things like target lock-on, but is usualy a blatant giveaway that something is around (if your radar's screen gets blanketed with fuzz, it's blatant someone's around, but there's not much you can do to figure out what is going on or end a missile into the intruder's face). Same as comlink jamming - the loss of commnunication might be interpreted as 'sounds like hte guard's comlink is down again'but will usually raise the aler level.

The first sensor to return a blank may be interpreted as a bug (of the computer, not spirit, sort) but if two ro three i nrow do it, it will definitively raise the security's eyebrows. But it will ruin the day of anyone trying to shoot at the silenced target with ultrasound sight.

^^^ This. ^^^

And/or, the actual infiltration specialist can take a crack at it.

A slightly more unconventional way:

Thermosense Organs (AU p. 70)

It's a bit of bioware that is meant to specifically detect heat signatures, and it's non-visual, AND is specifically stated that it can detect mages using Silence or Invisibility.

While it doesn't specifically say anything about Camouflage, a quick peek at the spell's description, I would think that you could still be detected.

(and the only reason I know this is because one of my players has that aug right now...granted he forgot about it as of right now, but still)

Thanks for the clarifications guys, I talked it over with my roomate, who is playing the Mage in question, and he agrees with the findings.