[Zweiblumen]

Did we rule we could do nested device slaving?
I'd like people to be able to have wireless on so I can keep an eye on them from remotely but I can't come close to slaving everyones gear myself.  That said, being on matrix overwatch I can mitigate a lot of the danger to having wireless on unless we are swarmed by deckers.

Making a change to my matrix loadout:

Attack: 4 Sleaze: 5 Data Prcoessing: 6(7) Firewall: 7(8 )
Encryption, Toolbox, Configurator, Wrapper
Configurator:
Attack: 7 (8 ) Sleaze: 5(6) Data Processing: 4 Firewall: 6
Decryption, Stealth, Hammer, Agent


And then I'll be hiding as a just another satellite link out here in the wilderness.  Not running silently.

[Tecumseh]

Thank you, everyone, for the IC posts. I'll have Katsina do the same today.

@Zweiblumen I don't know what the rules say officially about nested device slaving, but I usually rule that it is possible. At least, that's what I would want as a player, so that's what I do as a GM.

@Malevolence Ohanzee shouldn't have any trouble timing the completion of the temporary lodge so that it begins just after sunset. Presumably he'll summon his beast spirit shortly thereafter. (Katsina would help but she doesn't have time, given the timing between sunrise-sunset, the hour she needs for enchanting, plus the hours she has allotted to rest off drain.) 

@rednblack Thank you for the Party Time Setups for Ace and Chino.
- Question 1: How far away is Ace setting up? It's tricky because Ace doesn't know where the opposition will be, but he can make an educated guess based on where Ohanzee/Katsina/Chino plan to stand. So, how far away is Ace trying to be, range-wise?
- Question 2: Ace/Chino set things to wireless off, but Doc is requesting wireless on. Would you like wireless on or off? The choice is ultimately up to the PC, so the default will be off until Ace/Chino decide otherwise.
- Question 3: If Ace/Chino do want their wireless off, is it for everything but the commlinks or everything including the commlinks? If the commlinks are wireless off then Ace and Chino won't be able to communicate via comm.
- Question 4: What type of ammo do you want in your weapons, specifically the shotgun?
- Question 5: Ace doesn't have a laser SMG. He has a laser pistol (which I'm not sure is public) and a laser rifle. Which did you mean? Where is his laser rifle?

@Poindexter I still need a loadout for Sam, if you please. It should include the grenades Sam has (see earlier in the thread, or grab them from the Team Inventory portion of Katsina's sheet on the first page of the thread) plus the preparations Katsina made for him.
- Question 1: Same as for Ace. How far is Sam trying to be, range-wise?

@All The team does have two commlinks available: a Fairlight Caliban (ooo, fancy, from the hunters the first night) and an Erika Elite (origin unknown, but possibly the hunters as well). These men have likely been reported missing by their families. Is there something you would like to do with the comms? If you want clean comms, you have plenty of money and time to buy burners or better. (They can be delivered with Doc's satellite links.)

@All We have three medkits, and you could buy more if you wanted. Who wants one? (One rating 6, one rating 5, one rating 4.)

Katsina's Party Time Loadout
Lined Coat w/ 12 throwing knives in the pockets (2 of which are preprations)
Ballistic Mask w/ Hermes Ikon (wireless on, slaved to Doc)
Highland Forge Claymore weapon focus
44 Reagents
1 stim patch (Rating 6)
1 trauma patch
Heal preparation @ F7, Potency 3
Physical Barrier preparation @ F4, Potency 6

Katsina's cooking for your last meal: Intuition 8 + Artisan 2: 10d6t5 4 hits, Winner, winner, chicken dinner. Katsina does an awesome job with the purloined chickens.

[Tecumseh]

Rough timeline for final day
8am to 6pm: people working on getting ready
3pm to 6pm: Katsina makes dinner
6pm: Ohanzee finishes his magical lodge, summons Bear
6pm: tell Cannon to drive to Rifle (he needs 3+ hours to get there from Denver, since has borders to deal with)
6pm: dinner is served
7pm: Katsina works on alchemical preparations
8pm to 10pm: Katsina rests off drain
8pm: Ace gets in position
8pm: Doc drives to Rifle? Grand Junction? Location is flexible.
9:45ish: Cannon arrives in Rifle and is told the final location of the meet
10pm: Ohanzee, Chino, Sam, and Katsina get into position
10:05pm: Cannon arrives

Please let me know if you have any additions or revisions.

[Zweiblumen]

Baring objection from others I'm gonna say Grand Junction as I don't want to overlap with Cannon if at all possible.

Let me know what/how many rolls you want for Matrix Overwatch checks.

Other than that, I'm pretty much ready!

[rednblack]

Chino is running silently, not wireless off, with the exception of the bug scanner. Ace and Sam probably shouldn't run anything wireless on, as it could compromise their position. We could probably run semi-regular boots where we check for messages and immediately power down. That would alert any matrix over watch to the existence of silent running icons but shouldn't give enough time to get a bead on the location.

As for burner comms, one or two could be placed at natural-looking vantage points and set to run silent. It could potentially set any any assailants in the wrong direction, at least for that crucial first turn. 

Once shooting starts, Ace will be booting his comm and have wireless on his smart gun.

I'm AFB today, but I will get ranges to you asap.

ETA: Ace's laser rifle is with him on its sling. I figure that while firing prone, the shotgun is the default, but he'll switch to his laser rifle once e starts moving. The Redline is in his skin pocket, if I have the name right.

[Zweiblumen]

It can only reveal your position if someone gets 2 marks on you and then runs trace icon.  It's *not* easy to find someones location wirelessly in SR (unlike in real life).
If you run silently and slave your 'links to Doc, he's running at a Firewall 8 with a Will of 5.  We're looking at 4-5 actions to find you, Doc *should* be able to find them before that happens.  I know it's a risk, but I think it's much more dangerous to have the two of you out of communication than having to rely on Doc to protect you.

[Tecumseh]

With respect to what Zweiblumen just said, the Trace Icon rules are murky. I don't have Data Trails so I don't know if they've been clarified at all, but I presume not.

Most of the fluff, including Virtual Visions on p. 217 of the core rule book, strongly suggests that AR icons are located on or next-to their real-life counterparts. To me, this means that icons within 100 meters do give away your position. Running silently can slow that down, and the icon might give your general location rather than your exact position, but in either case it's more information than a sniper would want to share. For me, the Trace Icon action is to find the physical location of remote (>100 meters) devices/personae.

I acknowledge that the book isn't clear on the matter, but it seems logical that a toaster would have a toaster icon next to it rather than floating randomly nowhere nearby, meaning that you either need to be the owner or hack it and get two marks to figure out where the real device is. That doesn't seem the rules as written, or as implied. As such, we'll go with the middle way. If Sam and/or Ace want to be greater than 100 meters away then that will help them remain hidden on the Matrix, but will make it much harder for them to intervene if they need to close the distance with the main group.

Ranges
Shotgun (flechette): 15 / 30 / 45 / 60
Shotgun (slug) and Laser Pistol: 10 / 40 / 80 / 150
Laser rifle: 25 / 150 / 350 / 550

[Zweiblumen]

That makes sense.  So running silent would hide your location until your Icon was found (presumably having to get through my FW+Int, or whatever it's slaved to) by someone inside of 100m.  Also presuming that line-of-sight would make precise locations difficult to find, but the general "over there somewhere" would be good enough in most situations like knowing generally where a sniper was.

Would using microtrancievers work for comms?  Guessing they can do micro-bursts so as not to need to be "wireless on" and still be able to communicate like RL versions of them would work?

Want to be able to have them be on the "TacNet" (not the actual game device, just our comms layer) without giving their position away.

[Tecumseh]

Yes, micro-tranceivers would work for vocal communication. It couldn't do text or add AROs, but it would enable vocal communication.

[Zweiblumen]

@Team: I'd still prefer to run wireless on but silent for all of the team except for Doc so that we can take advantage of tactical communications with Doc being in charge of keeping you guys secure.  That said, it wouldn't take much for him to have to reduce the protections and then we'd be vulnerable.

Compromise of running wireless off until some visual signal then going wireless on and slaved to Doc?

[Tecumseh]

I need Perception checks from everyone. If you have bonuses for audio and/or visual, please roll those additional dice separately. We'll add the hits to the base roll.

Katsina base: Intuition 8 + Perception 3: 11d6t5 3 hits
Katsina hearing: Hearing 2: 2d6t5 1 hit
Katsina visual: Vision 3: 3d6t5 1 hit

So 4 hits for Katsina, both visual and hearing.

@Zweiblumen Matrix Perception, please.

[Zweiblumen]

Matrix Perception  (Comp 5 + Int 4 + Quali 1 + Spec 2 +VR = 14): 14d6t5 4

*sigh* here's hoping that's enough.
I didn't use any noise modifiers, if there's a noise complication I'll update my configs to offset as much of it as I can.

[Malevolence]

Okay, Ohanzee will slave to Doc then. Also, it's probably a good idea to have micro-transceivers to fall back on in case Doc has to bug out or worse.


I'm fine with your interpretation of the locate device rules. I've always envisioned it as sharing GPS location is an optional thing and that you can even choose to broadcast false locations. So if your refrigerator is in the kitchen IRL (like most tend to be), but you want it to appear in your bedroom in VR because you want your VR bedroom to be a kick ass man-cave, you can do that. In this case, the icon location does not match up with the real world location. You could also choose to put your fridge in orbit in VR (well, as high up as the matrix lets you) if you choose.


The last option there causes some issues. You could rule that the icon has to be within 100 meters of the real object but that isn't really necessary. Icons are somewhat nebulous - the 100m range applies to the physical world, not the virtual. And since personas are somewhat like icons+, you have to solve the issue of icons being in placed different from their real world devices just like you do with a persona. So, what do you see when a person is sitting next to you in the meat world, but their persona is on the other side of the planet? This is basically exactly what happens when any other icon broadcasts a different location than the device it represents.


The way I envision it is that you don't see the icon of the device (or persona) in the physical location of the device, but as part of your matrix perception, you have a virtual window that pops up and provides a textual list (or icon grid, or whatever) similar to a file list on modern day operating systems. You don't see a VR representation of it, but you do have a "link" to it that you can manipulate just as if the actual icon was present. This, incidentally, is also how I envision remotely interacting with icons in the matrix - your personal can be hanging out in your house and still interact with your drone icon even though the drone and its icon are miles away because you create a "shortcut" to the device. It can be as mundane as an interface in a 2D VR window or as spectacular as a ghostly 3D copy of the icon.


Now, if you have 2 marks, you can trace icon to get its actual location in the physical world. As the owner, you can have it match its icon location with its physical location and share that with the world - most public items will likely do this, so the icon for the streetlight you are walking by in VR actually corresponds with the physical location of that streetlight - I suspect this is the default setting as most devices have no need to be deceptive in this regard. But much like today, most people likely value their privacy and don't want their ex knowing where they are with a quick matrix search, thus the option to dissociate the two.


The odd upshot of this is that all of these mismatched icons have to go somewhere, so I half imagine a jumbled cluster of "hidden" icons swirling around at the north pole, or LEO, or the middle of the pacific or wherever on the planet is coordinate 0,0,0. So I also imagine that there is the option to simply not display an icon in AR/VR. Thus doesn't change the difficulty of interacting with the icon, it just doesn't clutter up the virtual environment.


Now, tracing an icon has some odd behavior - even as the owner, you still have to perform a trace icon action to locate a device that you can simply spot in the matrix. Now, you always have 4 marks on devices/icons you own, and if you are always logged in - at least in AR - then you should always know where all of your devices are since trace icon states that once you are successful, you always know the location as long as you have at least one mark. I'd also go one further and say that if you happen to know the physical location of the device, Trace Icon automatically succeeds. This allows the computer illiterate to succeed in locating their own devices when they first take ownership of them, and so long as they never log out (and normal people hardly ever would) they would always have the ability to find their stuff. What happens when the device reboots? The owner still has four marks when it comes back up, but does he have marks on it while it is offline? Marks are a matrix thing and should go away once a device leaves the matrix, but going wireless off doesn't clear marks acquired by a hacker, so I posit that the marks are actually maintained by the persona, and so even if the device is rebooted or switched to wireless off, so long as the persona remains on the matrix, it will immediately know the exact location of the target of a previous TI action once it comes back online.


This all makes things tough for Shadowrunners and thieves, but it's something I've obviously given plenty of thought and what I settled on as my interpretation. But, as I said, I'm fine with what you have chosen - it's simpler and would be less likely to disagree with how things have already been handled as we have previously operated stolen devices.


Perception [INT 4 + Perception 3]: 7d6t5 3
Perception Spec: 2d6t5 1
Wow, we're all getting 4 hits.
Spirit perception in case you want that too (He's starting off materialized):
Spirit Perception [Fx2]: 14d6t5 5
Yay, 5 hits!


Do we want to make some arrangements to bug the false meet area so we can assess their initial response? And how should we deploy the drones? Should we have them patroll the immediate surroundings of the camp, or do we want one near where our dirt road meets the highway? Do we keep them grounded until the last minute (I think so for fuel concerns) or do we keep them up all the time, rotating them out as they charge?

[rednblack]

Ace will post up 20 M out from where he believes the opposition will be.

Running Wireless Off

Shotgun loaded with slugs.

In the early afternoon, he will have planted 1 commlink, running Silent, on a small bluff overlooking the campsite, about 75 M out, and another, also running Silent, in a copse of trees on the opposite side of the road, another 40 M or so from the meeting site.  He will have told the team about this plan, but I'm just making a call since no one weighed in.  Both comms are buried.

Base Perception: Perception Base: 8d6t5 3
Visual Spec: Visual Spec: 2d6t5 0

Chino is still running Silent, slaved to Doc.
Base Perception: Base Perception: 8d6t5 2
Vision Enhancement: Vision Enhancement: 2d6t5 0

Really hope I shouldn't be Edging Ace's Perception, but hopefully the home team has it covered.

[Tecumseh]

@rednblack Are you using burners (that you buy) or the commlinks from the hunters that you already have? Burying them will severely impact their noise to the point where they might not even be detectable. Snow, earth, and trees all inhibit wireless signal.

@Zweiblumen Let's go with a default Noise rating of -5 from operating via satellite link. You can reduce that with your Noise modifiers. By the book, it looks like I should be taking into account both distance and the fact that it's a static zone, but I'm guessing a -10 modifier would largely eliminate the possibility of the hackers accomplishing anything. That doesn't sound like much fun, so we'll use -5.

I'm going to say the group has purchased six micro-transceivers for a total of ¥600. The team has ¥3,000 remaining in cash for last-minute requests, plus an assload of precious metals.

I was going to include a line about your drones launching when you gave the final coordinates to Cannon. I figure they have at least an hour of operating time, which should be more than enough to get us through the encounter. They will be slaved to Doc and will send their feeds to the group. Doc will have default control of them, but he's limited to sending instructions to their Pilot programs since he doesn't have Pilot Aircraft.

@Malevolence Thanks for the perspective. The fluff in the upper-left corner of p. 218 of the core rulebook suggests that someone commuting home would drop into VR and "fly home" to boss around their various drones and appliances. That's informing a lot of my interpretation, which isn't to say that hackers could do some tricky stuff and put their devices somewhere in low Earth orbit, but that's fancier than we need to get at the moment.

@Poindexter To do: Perception roll(s), equipment loadout, plus what range Sam wants to be at.

I'm hoping to post the meet today. It's going to take me a long time to write it up - at least an hour - so I might tackle that this afternoon. I doubt it will be up before 5pm PDT / 8pm EDT, so that gives you at least six hours to make your final adjustments. I'll also try to do a crude map of the layout, but that might take longer.