I wont go into exact details, they are not needed. The issue I want to find a way around is Thermographic vision within a Thermal smoke grenade, kicker, no Cyber/bioware or magic (Other technology is acceptable but the person is to attached to there meat eyeballs.) The thought I had was would potentially Image linked Contact lenses(Glasses would have the issue of smoke creeping between eyes and lens) linked to a Camera that does not have Thermographic built in or on, be able to see without the Thermo penalty? Round about I know but that is the best choice, and if you were a GM would you allow it? The camera would not be built into the Contacts, but probably on something else like even just glasses (I know, silly to wear glasses over Contacts but sometimes you do what you got to do).

I feel bad for this poor guy I see who has been sucking up -6 multiple times in a row to his actions, which has reduced the characters combat effectiveness heavily. They are an adept, and the face of the group which is why they wish to avoid Cyber/bio and they are normally a 12 or 14 in there primary weapon skill. I don't know, have not been the greatest attention to other peoples dice pools unless I hear them say something absurdly low or high.

There's a few ways an adept can go about it. The bonuses from an image linked tacsoft will partially offset the penalties. Which is essentially what you are trying to do in your scenario. (Unwired 124 - 127). As an extra bonus, the tacsoft will benefit the other members of the crew.

When the adept gets his next power point, he can take Improved Sense (pick a sense) for .25 points. (SR4A 196) It explicitly allows you take any form of sensory cyberware enhancement as a power. To quote: "Any sense provided by cyberware can also be provided by this power (see Street Gear, p. 310, for more information*), unless an improvement involves radio or similar technological phenomena." Then lets flip to Augmentation (page 37) for Increased Sensitivity (Hearing) which allows the perception of ultrasound. Congrats the adept now has echolocation, assuming an ultrasound emitter is within range. But that's basic available equipment (SR4A 334, motion sensor). He'll probably also want to sink another .25 power points into Improved Sense (Sound Dampening) so he doesn't go deaf from random loud noises. (Like explosions.)

*That's the SR4 page number, the SR4A page numbers are pages 332 - 333 and 339 - 341.

But wait, there's more! For 1 full power point, the adept can take Heightened Concentration. With a complex action that can be combined with adept centering (see below), the adept can ignore one situational negative dice pool modifier up to his magic rating. So yes, if his magic is 6, he'd be able to ignore the entire penalty for the low, low cost of one complex action. (Digital Grimoire, pg 18)

Finally, if he's an initiate, adept centering is a metamagic that will allow the adept to reduce negative dice pool penalties to physical and combat skills by his initiate grade. (SR4A 198).

If you have access to Way of the Adept (page 14), and he has The Warrior's Way (10bp quality), his initiate grade is +1 higher for the purposes of adept centering.

Hope that helps!

Edit: There may be other ways to do it. I'm just a newbie here. I'll go back to lurking.

Sidenote: My last character was a gun adept. His pool wasn't high (Agi + Relevant Skill + Smartlink) for a total of 12 dice to fire his guns. (One at a time. No John Woo for me!) I almost never had to take penalties due to a combination of the above, other Improved Sense abilities, and by the book custom high recoil comp firearms. I didn't have a lot of dice to throw, but I almost never had a penalty to the shot.

-Temperance

if he's an adept, he can also go for astral perception.
it lowers the modifiers from 6 to 2 i think.
he would open himself up to attacks from the astral though.

Thermal smoke has a shadow on the astral as well, so he is actually worse off.

The camera option Sinistra listed wouldn't work anyway. Thermal smoke creates actual smoke that is also difficult for thermo vision to see through rather than smoke that only thermo has trouble seeing through. Smoke is smoke and all vision systems have issues to one degree or another with it.
Usually this stuff is used to escape or make it hard to spot an infiltration team. Why doesn't the adept just get ultrasound as an option on his glasses? Or pick up the Motion Sense adept power? Or, as has been already suggested, initiate a few times and get adept centering.
If thermo grenades are so common they are becoming an issue, the whole team will be having this issue, rather than just one character. If the guy caught in this smoke only has normal vision, then his penalty is actually -4 rather than -6 so he is better off than characters with thermo.
Does this character only have thermo vision available? If so, what is he exactly? I can't think of any of the meta types that only have thermo vision. Even trolls and dwarves have normal vision in addition to thermo vision.

for reals? O.o

Yep...

You can turn the Thermo off? They are a dwarf also. Our whole group is under the assumption that Thermo and Lowlight natural to races can't just be turned off, since it is part of your vision.

Oh and my plan was to have the camera have low light which makes it only a -2

If that is true, than everyone that paid 1000 bugs for an Esprit Petite Brume Grenade was seriously ripped off.

If you actually read it, it impedes Astral MOVEMENT through the cloud (though it is admittedly pretty sad impediment, honestly, as you can go around it with ease in the astral, unless consttained by wards and such), while also causing A SMOKE CLOUD ON THE PHYSICAL (Since it does not get released in Astral Space at all). Smoke reflects into the Astral, just like a wall or pane of glass does. *shrug*

See entire text...

We are still waiting for a quote here, since that seems heavily counterintuitive. Air does't reflect to the astral plane and (lifeless) water doesn't reflect to the astral plane.
"Heavy Fog/Mist/Rain/Smoke" are way less dense than water, so why should it impede astral perception if water doesn't.
The Astral Visibility Table on Street Magic page 114 also doesn't list smoke.


I did read it before the post, and the impeding of astral movement is only an unimportant byproduct of the FAB in the grenade. With 100 meters per combat turn it still only take you a tenth of a combat turn, to fly though the whole cloud. It's really hard to come up with a situation were you could turn that into an advantage.


It's also really hard to read that first sentence without coming to the conclusion that a smoke grenade that impedes astral perception is something special.

Natural thermo? No, you can't turn that off but you get the balance of being able to see in full darkness at half penalty. Is thermo smoke really so common in your game that this is an issue? I mean, if I was in a squad going against trolls, sure I might lob this out there but if I was in a squad going against a mix of meta types, I'd go with regular smoke and make sure my guys had thermo vision. Picking the right tool for the job.
Speaking of right tool, give the dwarf some contacts with image link and lowlight vision. Problem solved. No need for a camera.
I think the game sees natural vision mods (low light, thermo) as being an overlay or enhancement of regular vision. You can still see via regular vision with a sort of glow/heat shimmer around things (thermo) or just better in low light (lowlight). When normal vision can't work (full dark), you get the full thermo effect. So adding lowlight contacts should work under this paradigm.
Somewhat off topic, why the hell does ultrasound have a penalty in darkness or lowlight? I get the smoke/mist/rain entries but the darkness one never made sense. Game balance I guess?

Not sure, but this is what I came here to point out. Ultrasound is absolutely the way around thermal smoke penalties - and most other vision impediments.


This I don't believe at all. Can you back it up? I'm rather curious, becuase it may heavily influence how I play my current free spirit.

It is becoming more common, for the first three months we played one one thermal smoke, in the past few sessions that had combat, it has been thermal smoke grenade after thermal smoke. It seems to have become a common tactic against our group. We have a Troll and Dwarf (Two Natural Thermos, Adept and Troll I am going to convince to replace them), the Human Street Sam who does not care(Cybereyes), a human Decker who's character seems to have an aversion to Cyberware (I don't even...don't ask.). And then myself....Not a problem with the character in this game I am playing. (Cybereyes, cause why not).

Though yeah, Ultrasound seems to be the best solution looking over the visibility modifier table.

Then all you need is a team that has a passive Ultrasound detector: "Shoot the source!"

Can natural vision enhancements not be turned off? Does that mean characters with thermovision can't see colors in the visible spectrum?

Natural Vision can not be switched off.
It's an overlay, meaning you see both at once.
Learning that jumping into blue water or that catching a red ball won't be bad for you can take some time.

Since you don't get any color and the resolutions is fairly poor, I'd think letting some penalties linger when your normal vision is screwed would be fair game.

Bcak on the initial topic, jsut like fog it takes a certain thickness of smoke to obscure your vision - the inch or so between the eyes and the glasses isn't in my opinion enough to prevent the wearer to see what's displayed on his googles (a smoke thick enough for that would inflict a penalty comaprable to absolute darkness, as in 'can't even see you hand in front of your face' dark)

So googles of one stripe or another (ultrasound, millimeter wave radar or the like) are fair game, no neeed to go for the lenses, which gives more room to play with - especially if the circustances let you hang something as bulky as 20th century vintage low-light goggles.

About as easily as you can stop seeing colours.

Unless you're colourblind, of course.

So, here is the quote...



Last I checked, SMOKE is a PHYSICAL manifestation. It impedes/blocks LOS. As such, just like a wall or carboard box, it will provide an impediment. Since it is not totally physical (it is not a solid, but a gas designed to obscure), it provides a penalty, rather than completely blocking LOS, as Glass would. So, as an Astral Shadow, it will provide from -1 to -4 worth of penalty. *shrug*

Uh.
That's not how that works.

"Red" is only "hot" on artificial thermographic vision, because we as humans, need to translate the detected heat signature into a color in the visible spectrum. That does NOT mean that all red things look hot to natural thermographic vision.

So long as nobody can tell me what it looks like to natural thermo, i am going with what it looks like to what is known as thermo to us.

Really, there is no better way to resolve this issue, in my opinion. You can only compare to what you know.

And this exact example was actually used in one of the german shadowrun novels.
A Troll-Woman remembering this from her time growing up, while remembering why her natural eyes are better than cyber.
You know how it works instinctively, because you grew up with it. For example, a warm body hiding behind a thin wall will, over time, heat up an area on the wall a bit, telling you that there's somehing there.

The novel Changeling described Goblinization into a troll, and the fact that the world looked a lot more "red" now.

Thermo sees in the infrared spectrum, right? And if I tell the troll to cut the blue wire, he's going to wonder which one is the blue wire, right? Because visible color only exists in the visible spectrum, so the troll's concept of blue wouldn't exist because he can only see in the infrared.

And if elves and dwarves always have low light vision, does that mean they need glasses with flare comp to see in normal daylight?

Trolls and Dorfs can see Infradead TOO.
Not exclusively.
Their eyes see more of the electromagnetic spectrum, namely in addition to visible light the infradead light of heat.

... ... ... *Uses Stahlseele-To-English Dictionary* You're saying they can see the heat death of the universe?

that too.
Ultraviolent-Vision went away with the Zeiss-Cyber-Eyes it seems.

That's what I thought, but CanRay seemed to imply otherwise?

In the case of thermosmoke, do dwarves and trolls take the -6 for thermo or the -4 for normal vision for the smoke?

Doesn't it say:"apply lowest modifier" pretty clear somewhere in the rules?
And CanRay is probably thrown off a bit by my use of infradead instead of infrared.
Which makes me question his Hitchhiking Mastery.

It's a very bad day.

it happens to the best of us

But they can still tell the difference between Red and "Red" because they're different wavelengths. Just as we humans can tell the difference between light of 630nm and 740nm.

According to the Novel with Ferrum in it, they need to learn the difference.
And i am not sure wether or not i actually could tell the difference between 630 and 740nm wavelength of electromagnetic radiation . .

You mean like Red....and Orange?

(No really, that's the level of difference between 630 and 740nm, 740 is as far towards infrared as we can see, and 630 is as far towards yellow before we consider it to be "orange" which is classified as starting at 620mn)

http://kristaopettaa.files.wordpress.com/2...names.png?w=540
ok, that i might actually be able to tell apart . .

Infrared is 700 nm – 1 mm, so yeah. It's basically a whole nother color (or two) above red.

If you can find where that is in the 4th ed books it would be appreciated while I do my own search.

On the other hand, only applying the lowest would be kinda dumb, instead it would be logical to apply only the highest modifiers . .
for example, in full darkness, how would smoke make things worse for people with only normal vision?

as per the rules, it seems they all stack though . .
so, darkness stacks with smoke, stacks with thermal smoke . .

That is likely where a GM will just let common sense take over. Uh, GMs do have common sense don't they?

Depends on the GM.

Mine tends to, we tend to just go by the worst per person if they can not turn of there vision. Like the person with Low-Light and Thermal that are cyberbased can turn them on and off as needed, adjusting himself to be perfect for the condition. IN a Thermal smoke condition the Troll and Dwarf are going to have that issue of of not being able to turn off there natural thermal vision and suck up that -6.

I think my plan is to just see if I can find a wind spell, have our mage(The Troll) use it and clean up the mess. Or something to just simply remove smoke.

Belt-fed, fully automatic shotgun with armor-piercing tungsten buckshot. Who cares if you can't see?

Didn't you say the dwarf was an adept? He can just center those penalties away too, or at least lower them somewhat.

Great, now I feel stupid for how I described in a story a character's thermographic vision. For him, in situations where there's almost no light (he also has lowlight vision, both natural) he starts to see things in a grayscale from the heat, like a lot of the FLIRs you'll see from police chase helicopters. Couldn't think of any other way to try and describe it at the time.

To be fair, the kid just woke up from "Turning Troll", and was heavily confused and adjusting to how his new body worked.

I had a gun like that in another game once.

It used steel marbles that were stored in a backpack and fed into the gun via magnetic hose. It was the best goddamn gun ever. I think I ended up purchasing a cubic foot of ammo (then working out the math to figure out how much it cost).

Do cats or dogs need them?

A more important question: Does the sheep need them?

-Temperance