I had a PC whose main pursuit when not on a run was B.A.S.E. jumping. It was awesome.

wrong thread?

Right thread. Saying that they used parachuting.

And yet, when you need the Parachuting Skill, You REALLY need the Parachuting Skill... I have used it at least 5 times over the campaign (302 Karma), and it has been absolutely necessary each and every time...

That, and you never *need* Forgery.

Depends upon the concept of the Character, But I will agree that it would be an outlier skill, though definitely useful when it does come up; Much like the Artisan: Dance Skill or something similar...

The amount of data associated with a new-yen is probably large. But I am curious how much memory it would take to keep track of all the serials for all the fractions of a newyen.

How much money is in the world?
http://money.howstuffworks.com/how-much-mo...n-the-world.htm
as of 2006 the amount of US dollars in existence both physically and in investments was around $10.3 trillion.
But this is only for US. Consider the total amount of money in the world for the sake of establishing scale 100 tillion, or for the sake of this speculation 1 quadrillion. In 2070 it could be more, or it could be less. With room to expand lets say, the serial number on a new-yen is built to expand to ten times that number. So 1 quadrillion, 10 quadrillion long numbers. But wait a new-yen is actually individual parts with individual serials down to the smallest part.


That is the money data type. Guess what it is used for. Well not detailed work. It only keeps track of 4 decimal places. But I guess we will go with that and say the smallest fraction of a new-yen is 1/1000 of a new-yen. Which means the two numbers up top need to be increased by a multiple of a thousand each. 1 quintillion numbers each with a serial number 10 quintillion digits long. Being that all the serials need to be stored somewhere. Maybe he numbers are in a super computer, maybe in a commlink or cred stick checker.
So how much memory does that take up?

The math is not straight forward a 100,000,000 digit long number does not take 100,000,000 bits.

Anyway it does not really matter. Since new-yen is not a world wide currency there probably is not more than. 20 tillion newyen, and probably there is a LOT less than that because of how many fairly rich people use corporate script and how many and how very poor the have-nots in shadowrun are. There might be only 10 tillion newyen. That means there would be 10 quadrillion parts of a new-yen with 100 quadrillion digit long serial numbers.

In regards to fake money, I think the idea is that it 'has to come from somewhere'. I think the premise is that you can't just add zeros to your credlimit, because that sends flags all over the place. The trick comes in making the bank believe a legal transfer came in from somewhere, but in a way, fake money is harder than stealing virtual money, cause it either comes from nothingness or both comes from fake nothingness AND has no logical transfer.

As for the difficulty setup in the rules for forgery, I don't mind it so much. To me it reflects the difficulty and time sink required of someone that doesn't have ways of mitigating those factors. Sure the ruleset doesn't include description of such factors, but we can probably come up with some.

The timesink and thresholds represent me, Mr. X SUPA Hacker deciding that from my home node I'm going to make a fake SIN, or cash, or whatever. I don't have the corporate, government, criminal or otherwise connections to mitigate stuff so I'm doing it all my own. Likewise I don't have access to the dedicated terminals usually required to make such changes, so I'll have to spoof my own, I don't have previous extensive experience and practice doing this thing so it'll slow me down more too, etc etc.

With my raw HACKA talent sure I can pull it off, but its nowhere near as streamlined a task as if it would/might be if I were a cartel/whatever that's been doing this for a long time.

Yeah my Sasha has a parachuting (base jumping) 2 and thats a fluff skill that might be of actual use during a campaing, unlike her other fluff skill riding (side saddle) 1.
Parachuting isn't somethink you ever want to have to default

EEEK, isn't Shadowrun a multi-trillion nuyen economy? If each nucent were to be running it's own serial number, there would be many fucktons of information. Too many I'd warrant at a guess.

What about digital bills? Breaking the first 3 digits in the serial number into a denomination unit. That way only a 100k serial number is needed until you break it, instead of 10mil individual serial numbers for each and every nucent that makes up total.

edit: and it looks like badmoodguy beat me to the punch

Actually I thought a little bit about this, and came to these conclusions.

1: A significant portion of the world population is SINless, or effectively SINless
2: That many people being solely part of an underground, black market economy would be a hamper on ecomic growth and stability.
3: Corps would find themselves better served if they don't actively investigate SIN validity, except under special constraints.
4: SIN ratings are artificially high, in order to keep economies running, ie Corps have the resources to identify most of the fake SINs, but instead willfully turn a blind eye to them.

look at the world today, there are much more "money" in various accounts around the world, then there are bills and coins. So if everyone was to clear out their accounts at the same time, it would drain the pool of actual currency out there.

however, being digital, the nuyen may well be able to supply new bills almost at will. But they would only really need to do so with certified credsticks. The nuyen may not be that different from a digital certificate today. Only that its the orbital bank that issued it, rather then verisign or similar.

so each credstick holds one or more files containing a alphanumeric code. The user walks up to a terminal with it, waves it over the reader or plugs it in, the reader grabs the codes, checks with the bank if they are valid (i suspect every major corp bank have some up to date list of in circulation codes), the bank says ok, the required number of files are erased (and new ones written to cover change) and the bank increases the shops account with the amount payed.

heck, there may even be some creative way those codes are generated, so that one can slice off or alter one end of it to change the total amount it covers (kinda like how american express mail payments where done by ripping away all sums above the one being sent).

A good point, for sure. When you need it, you can hire it. I think it would be more of a "I just want my character to be able to do this" skill.

hi hi

There really isn't any singular skill that a character needs to have. Characters need a few skills at least, but it is really up to the player what they want their character to do, and there are some tasks that nobody can do on their own very easily.

Also, storing 128 trillion ¥, each with a 128 bit ID (which some might consider overkill) would take up about 14,552 terabytes of disk space. At todays prices, you could buy storage space for that much data for a measly sum of $873,120. That may seem like a lot of money to the average Joe, but it is probably enough to hold all the money in the world. That storage space is not going to be all in one place and will probably be owned by more than one entity, so you might have to double or triple the figure. However, storage space in SR4 is at such a low premium that they don't even bother counting it anymore, and even ignoring that it would still be a drop in the bucket to be spread across a network of global banks.

Yes, but Forgery is one that you need much less than others. I'm not saying that matters if you *want* to have it on your character, but it is kind of an outlier. It doesn't really bear on the discussion, except that we're enjoying considering Forgery from many angles.

Forgery is a wonderful skill to have when you're digitizing signatures for documents...

I'll hire someone, but I understand that it's conceivable to want to invest your precious points in that ability. I'm pretty confident you could do almost anything with Hacking and Edit instead, unless you're dealing with Amish terrorists or something, but again, that's just me.

Well yes, I'd hire someone as well unless I was in the habit of intercepting shipments at the point of delivery.

Muahaha..

Yeah, this is mostly what I was looking for, was other ways to use forgery.

hi hi back.

Just remember, AH mentioned fractions of nuyen as well, which I kinda implied to mean a nucent or equivalent. Although even increasing the total wealth to ~13 quadrillion should be fine with a 128 bit ID. The problem isn't storage thoug, it's working with, sorting through and moving that kinda data. Imagine having to do a data search to verify that one particular ID in a storagemedia of 14 petabytes. Now imagine doing that 1 million times, the number of nucent IDs in a 10k cred stick.

Too much data. It works better when you can break it up some way, give a denomination marker, so moving that 10k is a single transaction, instead of a million little ttransactions.

A $100 bill only has one serial number, not a hundred.

Don't forget fractional amounts created by bank interest and such.

Exactly my point. If every nuyen or fraction thereof had its own serial number, then you run into a massive amount of data to work through.

Right. The serial number in question is the method the funds are transferred. The certified credstick. The account of origin. The check number. These are the things that give the electronic number a record, aye?

Sort of. AH was talking about each nuyen (or each fraction) having its own serial number. As I said, it doesn't make sense to do it like that, it would be too cumbersome, but if larger incremements could be bundled instead as a seperate unit, all would make more sense.

I don't know if there would be a need for account details or check numbers though, since all nuyen are certified against Zurich. A CC should just merely have the nuyen serial (or in this case, the serial numbers for smallest number of denominations needed to equal the amount on the credstick). If there's a problem, it'll be verified against when the comm runs a check on the numbers with Zurich, and flagged as a containign a dup'ed serial.

A CC is essentially a cashier's check or a Moneygram from Western Union. Nuyen from account X goes to 'Certified Credstick', and then from 'Certified Credstick' to account Y.

Mmmmmmake the serial the transfer itself, perhaps. The nuyen are all certified against ZOG, sure, but if you have records of the transactions (which all the banks do, and ostensibly share for reporting/lending purposes) then the transfer itself is ZOG's stamp of approval. They're saying the shiny is legit because they have a record of the transfer.

I don't think there's any amount of data that, in 2070, is a problem for processing.

a moderately safe assumption. I sometimes wonder if moores law will hold over that much time.

moores law is already broken in many ways.

most commercial grade cpus are not increasing very much over the 3Ghz CPU level. We're just adding more cores to the same die.

because current ways of making them runs into all kinds of issues when trying to go higher, long pipelines (meaning a longer reset times on errors, iirc), requiring a increase in voltage to stay stable (so you get more heat), that kind of stuff.

and for larger workloads, your better of stacking on the cores and finding ways to spread it out anyways (see weather forecasting, various kinds of simulations). Heck, even a desktop benefits from multi-core as things become more responsive (tho there internal bandwidth is much more constrained). Still, in SR they have cracked the optical cpu riddle, and so can pile em on high.

im thinking of running a cop themed shadowrun campaign, and i was thinking of bundling forgery with chemistry and a couple of other things yet to be decided into one skill group which i want to call forensics. Its more so that they are using forgery to detect things that arent quite right if you know what i mean.

See Arsenal p62, Forensics and Science Tools. I'm not sure how much crossover there is between the two, but the descriptions provide some ideas for you.

This is exactly how I think fake SINs are done, and why you have relatively cheap ones. SINs are the product not of political favors, imo, so much as having backdoors and/or working relationships with people with access to a variety of hard to discover databases combined with an understanding of the authority and trust chains for data migration for a particular SIN system. Making a fake SIN then is about startup cost, and to a lesser degree maintenance cost (maintaining your contacts and backdoors). Once you have paid those flat costs, the per SIN cost would seem to be relatively cheap, largely consisting of generating the required biometrics in the appropriate formats with a believable legend (which is where Forgery would come in, imo) and disseminating that data through your network of contacts and backdoors. Probably, again, as a batch operation. I think the intervals are silly unless you presume you are trying to one off that entire network of specialized knowledge, at which point it's probably too easy. The other side of the argument is to question how SINs are actually verified, which I think has been argued a lot in many places in threads I haven't read . Depending on your answer to that question, how a fake SIN might be built would naturally vary.

Forgery runs into exactly the same issue that crafting skills do in most game systems.

If you make such skills capable of creating decent stuff, then you immediately run into the "Why the heck am I risking my life adventuring/shadowrunning, when I can earn the same by selling doohickeys?" issue.

And if you don't, you run into the "These crafting rule are drek, no way it should be that hard to create X." player response problem.

Especially when combined with the bizarre economies that exist in most RPGs...

To both him and you, memory is a non-issue. A 128-bit (16 byte) serial number would allow serialization of every 1/1000th of a nuyen in existance with plenty of room to spare. And that amount of space is *nothing* at all in SR4 terms. The amount of information required to maintain 5 combat turns of rigged VR outstrips the amount data required to transfer every serial number of every nuyen in existance in raw form. Memory is a non-issue in SR4 tech.

And for amusement value, I leave you with this tidbit from Wikipedia.. which is always right, btw...