[Ravensoracle]

After reading that, I think John and Marcus should get along pretty well. John has some pretty in depth demolition skills and is basically a jack-of-all-trades technology-wise. He even has a Control Rig and an RCC though his drones are currently rather sparse. He primary used the control rig for handling explosives and remotely operating with his medical skills.

[Zweiblumen]

Yeah, I can see Marcus and Gunter *not* getting along.  But then, Gunter doesn't really get along with anyone.  So there's that.  We've got *lots* of skill overlaps going now which can be a good thing.  We'll probably want Marcus running the pi-tac... how does that work with a technomancer?  Normally those are integrated into a deck or comm unit.  Do they need to integrate into a persona or can they just run on the comm unit as a device that the living persona manipulates?

[Ryo]

Marcus would have to run the PI-TAC on his Commlink. Wouldn't work with his Living Persona.

[Koshnek]

Yo! I've been keeping an eye out but I haven't been vigilant. I'm sorry for the slow roll. Now that we're back on track I'll be more active. Unfortunately, I may not be able to make my actual post until Friday as tomorrow is my game and I'm getting in bed now.

If everything is acceptable, then Thorn can't resist playing a fiery crash prank on the unsuspecting Waffe. I'm rusty with the rules, so I'll use this time to roll fairly often to re-familiarize myself with the system. If that's not OK let me know, and I will stop.

Edit - Quick breakdown: Thorn remains conscious and notices Waffe succumbed to the G's. Thorn quickly swaps to astral and monitors Waffe's consciousness while readying a condensed ball of flame in front of Waffe. Once he's conscious, Thorn uses his comm to blast some explosion/crash sounds from his comm while simultaneously exploding the ball of flame near his face (at a safe but toasty distance). If anything goes awry, Thorn will split his counter spelling dice up to protect anyone who might panic and run through the flames.

I haven't decided if I give anyone a heads up.

Roll to remain conscious.
Bod + Wil (3): 8d6t5 3

Being Thorn remains conscious, here's perception roll to quickly notice anyone that might not have, mwehehe.
Perception to notice anyone succumbing to the G's [Visual spec no other mods]: 14d6t5 5
I found my book after I rolled and added the specifically looking modifier. +3 specifically looking for it mod: 3d6t5 1(6/limit 7)

Assuming Thorn notices Waffe, he immediately swaps to astral to wait for the moment when waffle begins gaining consciousness.
Astral Perception to notice Waffe regaining consciousness [Aura Reading spec]: 21d6t5 2 although an unimpressive roll, I believe a 1 should have been good enough for this? I think unconscious is one of the most general states of health.

If Thorn doesn't miss his chance, here's a couple of Spellcasting rolls for some poor natured humor. I Split the pool to use a single action to cast both spells without using Reckless Spellcasting. Modifiers were added after the split as per CRB:
Force 1 Fire Wall 4 die with +1 power focus, +2 manipulation spec, +2 raven bonus: Fire Wall F1 Spellcasting Split: 9d6t5 7
Force 4 Shape Fire 9 die with +5 as above: Shape Fire Spellcasting split: 14d6t5 5

(Edited) Rolls to resist drain.
Will + Int roll to resist 3S drain DV from F1 Fire Wall: Drain reroll for F1 Fire Wall (3 Drain): 11d6t5 2
Will + Int roll to resist 2S drain DV from f4 Shape Fire:Drain reroll for F4 Fire Wall Shape Fire (2 drain): 11d6t5 1
Thorn starts the mission with 2 boxes of stun damage. Horrible rolls, haha.

Here's my Performance test at -2 for being in astral. It will involve using my comm, but it's not complicated enough for a roll I don't think. (Playing specific sounds). Performance Roll against Waffe: 9d6t5 3. Waffe can give me a target roll if he wants to with Cha + Will roll, or however u do or don't want to play it out.

Lemme know what does and doesn't work and how well, and I'll get a post put up IC ASAP!

[Ryo]

Casting spells is always Spellcasting + Magic [Force], and you add all your bonuses before the split. So for both Fire Wall and Shape Fire, you would roll Spellcasting 6 + Magic 7 + Specialization 2 + Raven bonus 2 + Power Focus 1 for 18 dice. Splitting the dice pool would give you 9 dice for each spell. The Force of the spell becomes your limit, so at Force 1, you only keep 1 hit, and at Force 4, you only keep 4 hits.

Drain is not cumulative. You resist each spell separately. You have to roll again for Shape Fire.

Other than that, looks fine. What exactly are you planning to do with a 1x1 meter worth of DV 1 fire?

[Ravensoracle]

Set off the aircraft's fire suppression system and singe everyone's eyebrows off? Just kidding

[Malevolence]

Marcus would have to run the PI-TAC on his Commlink. Wouldn't work with his Living Persona.

My understanding of PI-Tacs is that each member gets a dongle or something that they attach to the device the form their persona on. In our case, we have 9 such dongles. The dongle will add (again, in our case) 6 to the FW and DP rating of that device, which maintains its own PAN covering the gear for that particular individual. All devices in each of those PANs are then accessible in some fashion by any other persona formed on a device that has the dongle installed on it. For the other team members, this is pretty straight forward as they form their personas in a conventional way (using a commlink, deck, or RCC) and have basic devices slaved to them.


For me, I have an odd case. My LP cannot accept a physical dongle, so unless it is software only item, it's a no go for me.


As for my drones, they are slaved to a commlink that can take the device (funny enough, this makes Resonance Hub even more lackluster for a rigger), so they should be covered. But this opens an interesting question - do all my drones then count as a single team member since they are slaved to the commlink that is a member by virtue of having the dongle? It seems this would be the case since an RCC is specifically mentioned as an option. Can they take advantage of the PI-Tac resources and benefits, or are they in turn only a resource? Can they even participate if they are slaved to a device that does not have a persona formed on it?


In all cases, this makes them useless to Technos by RAW, since Resonance Program being able to run anything besides Common or Hacking programs is a house rule, and thus even if the PI-Tac was software only it would not be usable by a LP.


So, how will this work for our game? Can my drones take advantage of it or bonuses to sneak, perception , and combat? Or am I completely wrong in my interpretation and there is only one dongle and every team member somehow has to be a member of the PAN formed by the device hosting that dongle? Or something completely else?

[Koshnek]

Hmm, thats not what it says in the CRB. Do you want me to change my roll?

Casting Multiple Spells: ...You can attempt to cast multiple spells simultaneously in the same action, even at different targets. To do this, you have to split your Spellcasting + Magic dice pool between the spells you want to cast (see Step 4), with a minimum of 1 die per spell. Since the modifiers per spell may be different, they are applied after you split the dice pool. The number of spells you can cast simultaneously is limited to your magic attribute.)

The plan is to basically attempt to trick Waffe into thinking that the plane is goin down or under attack as he waking up. Hell cast the Fire Wall in front of Waffe at a safe but warm distance, and use the Shape Fire spell to manipulate the flame to look like the ship is under fire or going down, while using Audio from his comm and a little old fashioned acting thrown in for greater effect. No one should be at risk of getting burnt, but who knows how the team will react?

Edit: I did a quick search on the forums, and the concensus seems to be that you do split the pool as desired, and you do apply the modifiers to each cast after the split instead of before as is usually the case with multiple actions. However, the drain is resisted separately so I would need to redo my drain roll. If I understand the CRB correctly and the forum goers are correct, anyhow. You're the GM so your word is the law here, haha.

Here's a link to what I searched if you're interested.

Edit 2: I had a minute before my game, so I cleaned up my previous post and corrected my drain rolls. Let me know if I need to make any additional adjustments.

Edit 3: Singing everyone's eyebrows is an excellent fallback plan.

[Ryo]

I didn't have the book in front of me when I posted that, just going off my memory of how it used to work. But it does seem like you do actually add modifiers after the split, which makes multicasting much better than it used to be.

So Waffe gets to resist your trickery with a few rolls.

Intuition + Willpower (2) To determine its a prank.

Charisma + Willpower Composure test in response to waking up with fire in your face. Threshold 2 if you realize its a prank, 4 if you do not.

[Ravensoracle]

Does anyone else need to roll for the surprise? I didn't see what Scawire rolled for g-loc. got a snide comment for the faiures.

[Ryo]

PI-Tac:

My understanding of the PI-Tac is that it is a single unit, enhancing a single device, be it a commlink, cyberdeck or RCC. This device then acts as a master for a PAN, and grants benefits down the chain as appropriate. This is why there is a designated Team Leader who coordinates combat manuevers and transfers Initiative. Everybody doesn't get a dongle, just the Host Device that the PI-Tac is plugged into. So that device is the only one that's getting the Data Processing and Firewall bonus, although the devices down stream still get the Master's firewall as normal for a slaved device.

What this means for Skynet is that he cannot participate in a PI-Tac Tac-net, since his Living Persona cannot serve as a Slave, and he can't plug a PI-Tac into his ear or anything silly like that to be the Master.

Your drones are all separate individuals in the tac-net, something that is spelled out explicitly in the book. If you plugged the PI-Tac into your commlink, you'd be able to use the Tac-net bonuses on each of your drones, and anyone else who slaves themselves to your commlink. If Stix instead acts as the master of the PI-Tac, your drones would likely be excluded, since you'd have to slave them to his deck to have them part of the network. Your commlink and your drones would be separate entities.

Overall, I kind of hate PI-Tacs, and very much prefer the way Tac-Nets worked in 4th edition where you had to meet a minimum number of sensor channels and such. It made it a lot clearer who gained the bonus and how the bonus worked. PI-Tacs feel very arbitrary, and the mechanics don't match the flavor for me at all.

TL;DR: No Tac-nets for Technomancers.

Does anyone else need to roll for the surprise? I didn't see what Scawire rolled for g-loc. got a snide comment for the faiures.

I don't think he rolled at all. Koshnek's casting should be obvious to anyone who didn't pass out, and especially Detective, since last I checked you guys still had an Active Link going, so no surprise roll necessary.

[Koshnek]

Yeah, the active link should still be open. I mentioned that we could shut it down, but neither of us has done so in IC, so the Detective would be highly likely to be aware of what I'm doing.

[Ravensoracle]

Knowledege Trids - Looking for the perfect scene to broadcast with the trid projector (9d6.hits(5)=1)

Rolled knowledge to come up with a easier way than to light a fire in a pressurized cabin.

[Malevolence]

The problem I have with the PI-Tac being one dongle and everything having to slave to one device is that the maximum number of devices that can slave to a device is DR*3. I have the best commlink you can get at DR 7. Cyberdecks and RCCs top out a 6. That means 21 devices total on the PAN. A PI-Tac III can have up to 9 team members (Rating of 6 times 1.5). Considering that each team member has to at least have their communication device in the PAN in order to form a persona and receive the benefits, that means that there are only 12 devices left. The fluff for the PI-Tac indicates that it provides feeds from audio and video devices from each team member, biomonitor feeds, and weapon status. That is at least three devices per team member in addition to their commlink, for a total of 36 devices in order for the PI-Tac to operate as explained. Spirits forbid any given member of the type of high end military units likely to deploy a PI-Tac should have a secondary weapon like a sidearm.


This all excludes the fact that Personas cannot be slaves in a PAN, so their commlinks can't be a member of the PI-Tac network if they are used to form their Persona. This is why I have envisioned it as operating more as a network of PANs than as a single enhanced PAN. In my envisioned scenario, each team member is really a PAN that is subscribed to the PI-Tac, with no real "master" member aside from the temporary and changeable "team leader". It mentions that they "form a shared PAN/WAN", so it implies that it can work with a Host, though it specifically mentions that it is designed to work with a "commlink, cyberdeck, or rigger command console".


Your assessment that PI-Tacs feel very arbitrary follows what the actual designer of the section supposedly mentioned in some interview on the Critical Glitch podcast. Apparently they weren't meant to be used by PCs and so the rules (and costs) were all hand wavy. We could just go with the 4e version adapted to 5e if you like those better, or run it with your interpretation from your post and just pick our slaved devices very carefully.


We have 4 team members that can benefit from it and I have 6 drones, so we have 9 team members and one odd-drone-out, but only the four metahuman members would have additional devices to join (I'm assuming that the weapons mounted on the drones do not count as separate devices in the way that hand held weapons are for the purposes of joining PANs). So, the additional 12 slots (11 after keeping my non-team member drone on the PAN) can be split among their gear, giving almost three additional devices per team member. That also leaves the rest of our gear unprotected since their phones can't be masters while slaved to another device in a traditional PAN, so they will have to pick their 3 devices carefully and probably leave the rest wireless off, as I will have to do with all of my gear.

[Ryo]

There's little reason to connect anything to the PI-Tac except whatever device is running the user's PAN, since the benefits are strictly dice pool bonuses to the character, not their gear. Each player and drone is about all that is needed.

But yes, I am most likely going to do away with PI-Tacs entirely in the long run, but for now I'll just run with it. It is a poorly designed piece of gear and completely fails to walk the fine line between 'too good' and 'completely useless.' It does a lot of things that are meh or alright, and then it gives +6 Data and Firewall, which is completely fucking insane.