[Leevizer]

Once again, I came to realize how Shadowrun falls over it's own impossibility due to the high techonology level. After playing some video games such as Payday 2 I did some googling around, realizing that even nowadays pagers or similar devices can have accelerometers (or however you write that) or similar, meaning that even if you knock a guard out, tase him or even push him over, control will be notified. Same thing if you use a jammer to block the signal from going out, as the pagers are usually connected 24/7 to the control center. Hell, you could rule that a Docwagon wristband has these same features added into it. Save for the jamming thing. But then you'd need to keep it constantly jammed until you can turn it off.

Should I just ignore their existence and hope my players won't notice it either, or should I try to add them into the game? And if I did, how would one go around fooling them? It'd be a good job for a face to impersonate the guards into the radio, along the lines of "oh, my pager just dropped and it... seems to have broken. Sorry.". I believe that there could also be work for a hacker, hacking into the pager and then having it constantly send out an "all clear", though I'm not sure if you can do that according to the rules.

Any suggestions, ideas, or discussion?

[Sterling]

It is important to remember that Shadowrun is not simply set 61 years in our future.  The Shadowrun timeline diverges in the late 1990s with wars, famines, plagues, and the Awakening.  After such things inventing pagers with accelerometers simply aren't a priority.  Add in two Matrix crashes changing the way that wireless technology works, and the accepted existence of people who can interfere with pagers and commlinks with their minds and it's unlikely any security company would rely on purely mechanical contrivances.

Besides that, having managed over 120 security officers during my time with an international security company I can tell you that security officers are very adept at disabling any device that allows a central location to monitor them. 

Just because in our timeline we have a piece technology now doesn't mean that it is part of the Shadowrun timeline in the 2070s.

[Herr Brackhaus]

I think you're overthinking it. Take your every day CSI episode; how many leaps of logic are made in a single episode so the good guys can catch the killer? Or almost any blockbuster action movie ever; how often does the villain make some obvious mistake allowing the good guys to take him out?

This is a staple of storytelling; sometimes the setting doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you think about it for even a second, but we let it go in most cases because otherwise the heroes would be dead in a ditch somewhere.

My advice; don't overthink it, and just go with the notion that there are flaws in Shadowrun security that can be exploited, because otherwise Shadowrunners wouldn't exist.

You can also try to explain it with simple cost effectiveness. Imagine a vast, complex system like that of DocWagon Seattle. They must have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of subscribers. Let's say that on average they get 100 calls a day, ranging from panic attacks to heart attacks in terms of severity. Now imagine if just 1% of those calls were false positives due to equipment malfunction (equivalent of a critical glitch for some reason) or wannabe hackers goofing around; that's 1 call they have to send a team to respond to every day, 365 days a year. The amount of resources they would have to devote to following up on dead ends (no pun intended) could quickly escalate beyond profitability.

Now add in the concept of noise; if a DocWagon contract holder finds himself in downtown Seattle or, god forbid, in the Redmond Barrens, on a particularly busy day, his wristband could easily be knocked out by a mere 3 noise. This is a situation I would expect to be nearly everpresent in a large sprawl, adding to the complexity of having to respond to a last known location if a wristband went offline. Similarly, if DocWagon were to respond every time symptoms like tachycardia (heart beating at more than 100 beats per minute) were to present itself, they would find themselves responding to a whole lot of training studios or gyms.

In short, I choose to think of DocWagon bands more as an active alarm system than a passive. DocWagon doesn't respond if the wristband shows normal readings associated with sleeping (or being knocked out by Narcoject), nor do they respond if the wristband goes offline because that likely happens to almost every subscriber at least once a day. Instead, they respond if the subject presses the button that specifically implies "Help! I'm in distress!". To my mind, this puts the DocWagon contracts more in line with the PANICBUTTON (TM) of old, which I personally think is fitting.

[BetaCAV]

Biomonitors.

[Herr Brackhaus]

Biomonitors.

How do they work!?

[Sterling]

Biomonitors.

How do they work!?

Unobtainium sensors and Handwavium batteries.

[farothel]

DocWagon will respond if the biomonitor indicates you are flatlining.

So I assume that on guards in a facility there can be a similar system, which is yet another reason to knock them out and don't kill them.  And it's as Herr Brackhaus said with DocWagon, if they had to sent the high treat team every time a guard falls asleep, they will be doing nothing else.

[Herr Brackhaus]

Fortunately, the new Chrome Flesh book definitively deals with this issue. Ref. page 32.

Note that this only applies at the Super-Platinum level, where subscribers given a complimentary "biometric algorithm" that "allows any DocWagon clinic immediate access to a patient’s current condition as well as their health history". Additionally, even if a "subscriber’s body parameters go beyond the normal levels" an HTR team isn't dispatched automatically (at least not instantly). Instead, "a message is sent via commlink to the subscribers asking them if they are in need of assistance. If the subscriber doesn’t send a reply within sixty seconds, the emergency recovery alarm is triggered. If the biometrics indicate the subscriber is at risk of dying, a High Threat Response team is immediately dispatched to recover the Super-Platinum subscriber."

So no, having a biomonitor and/or DocWagon subscription and being incapacitated will not instantly call down HTR or set of all the alarms, and that's directly according to the book.

[Kincaid]

Having a HTR show up the moment a guard is incapacitated sounds like a really unfun game.

[Herr Brackhaus]

I wholly agree, Kincaid, and I very much appreciate that this was spelled out in Chrome Flesh so there is no longer any reasonable doubt that this isn't the case. Not that I've ever played it that way...

[Belker]

That's why you have a decker or technomancer on your team, to intercept those pesky signals and either jam or alter them. Or you pack appropriate directional or area jammers.

Hey, there's an idea, jammers on arrows that stick to the target and interfere with their signals... *scurries off to the lab*

[Kincaid]

That's why you have a decker or technomancer on your team, to intercept those pesky signals and either jam or alter them. Or you pack appropriate directional or area jammers.

Hey, there's an idea, jammers on arrows that stick to the target and interfere with their signals... *scurries off to the lab*

As things currently stand, jammers block wireless bonuses, not wireless signals, so there are multiple hurdles to overcome.  A decker could GI/GO the signal, but teams without a decker would still be swimming upstream.

[Reaver]

In the 2070s, any team missing an element (physical, matrix, magical) is swimming upstream!

[I_AM_ZHOUL!!!]

In the 2070s, any team missing an element (physical, matrix, magical) is swimming upstream!

THIS^^^^^ a bunch!

[brasso]

Am I missing something, or can the decker not hack the pager, and spoof the signal back to base, showing a "safe" signal? Then just blow his head off.