Echos of the Past OOC

Anyone who plays online knows what these are for...

Yeah I decided to go with a dual personality. Usually nervous and jittery, but quickly cuts to military serious when it comes to the mission. Both personalities have their own name, Jack and Darkwolf, which are obvious. His Normal personality will most likely change during the game as he learns more and maybe remembers a few things.

eh, woops! I think I need to be clearer.

Anya only shows up in Jack's cybereyes. I'll be sure to post specifically when she appears over a holoprojector or in someone else's AR. Sorry about that!

Anya's going to hack Trevor's fly-spy and then trace his connection back to his commlink. I've got a ridiculously large Exploit pool, so I can just buy hits to hack into the fly, and the trace is just an extended test with no real danger or chance of failure.

So, my question is, should I be rolling for this or is doing it through roleplaying okay?


Oh and also she's got scan running looking for hidden nodes in the room so please let me know if anything shows up.


Also also, I love your writing Paradox! XD

I just love when my rp's are completely ignored.

Were you talking about

Quote :

"What the hell are you?" Starring down at the little... thing dancing on the table

?

Because Taur can't see Anya, which is why I said she only shows up in Jack's cybereyes above. I'm not ignoring you.


If you weren't talking about me then please ignore this.

Actually, i was, i was assumming we could see you, i missed the invisible only to Jack part. I just thought it wierd our gm responded to the 4 of you entering, but not me, and no one noticed the floor covered in ice or the guy twirling 3 orbs of ice in his hand at the table.

Then again, my character is fairly self sufficient, so what could i ask for, right?

Well.... if you'll note, he only responded when some input was required. Like the results of a scan, or what Trevor's drones see, or responding to someone talking to him. You had your guy walk right in with no post required, and had him sit down ignoring all the others. What exactly did you want him to post for you?

As for the others, I think we're all just focusing on how we got in there, not dealing with the consequences of everyone else independently finding ways in. Some people mentioned how it was easier to get in due to the troll being distracted, Paradox said he took a picture of everyone already there, which includes you. You're not being ignored, I'm just not sure what you're looking for...

Durandana wrote:

Anya's going to hack Trevor's fly-spy and then trace his connection back to his commlink. I've got a ridiculously large Exploit pool, so I can just buy hits to hack into the fly, and the trace is just an extended test with no real danger or chance of failure.

I've actually already recalled the drone and put it away since it was no longer needed, though maybe I didn't make that entirely clear.


I do have one question though in regards to back tracking drones, since I can't seem to figure out how backtracking them works exactly. I mean yeah you can trace the connection ultimately, but given that they are recon drones odds are it's running in hidden mode. That makes even noticing the drone's transmissions considerably more difficult as I understand things. The stealth and encryption programs only serves to make that even harder if I'm reading things right, so doing a trace on it would take a fair chunk of time.

By all means though correct me if I'm wrong somewhere since I'm still trying to wrap my head around the whole rigging/hacking system.

You're right that it is running in hidden mode and thus harder to find, but considering it was buzzing around the troll when I was searching him for hidden nodes and I got 4 on the test (which is the threshold) I kinda figured I noticed it. But you can't run Stealth on a node, unfortunately. Only constructs like personas, agents, IC, AIs, sprites, etc. So Stealth doesn't make a node harder to detect with Scan, weirdly enough. It's more of a software thing than a hardware thing.

Encryption can be used to encrypt the data exchange between your persona and the icon in the drone's node, so if I wanted to find out what was being transferred in order to snoop on what you were seeing from the drone, or to Edit in wrong info, I'd have to decrypt the transmission. I'm pretty sure Trace doesn't require decrypting though, since it's just following the datatrail, regardless of what format that data is in.

Stealth comes into play when trying to trace you back to your commlink, as a negative dice pool modifier. So like, I have 9 dice normally when tracking, you have Stealth 5, so I'd use only 4 dice to try and track you. It's an extended test with threshold 10 so yeah, it'd take a while.

Of course if you put it away (and turned it off!) that's another thing entirely. If it's off then all that's moot and it can't be hacked so I'll just change it.

Um, okay, nevermind. Azo's post renders the whole thing moot anyway. I mean, I'm not jammed with a Signal 8 and ECM 3 but everything else is going to be cut off so no connecting with anything, hehe.

Techincally it's ECCM not ECM that helps with defeating jamming. Good on everything else though. And yeah wngd_phantom, was really only responding to things that clearly needed a response.

A quick aside on how I handled jamming (slightly differnt from core rules, but only slightly). Jamming reduced signal+eccm ratings in its area by the jammer rating. If reduced to a negative rating, the signal is entirely blocked. So, in Anya's case (for example), her rating is reduced by 10, giving an effective signal rating of 1 - she can still get a signal out, but her range is greatly cut back. You can actively try to punch through jamming as a Complex action by making a signal+eccm role vs the jammer's rating. Each net success increased your effective signal by 1, up to a max of your normal signal. Failing the test has no negative consiquences. It can be attempted as many times as you like, but the resuts are not cumulative - the net success on your most recent attempt are the only thing that matters.

Yeah, I meant ECCM. Oops.

I like that alternate rule a lot better, but I have a question. Should Electronic Warfare play a part in there? I mean, the skill is supposed to be used for jamming and breaking jamming. So why not use EW + ECCM for the dice pool?

... that would actually be worse for me because I have a lower EW than Signal, but I think it makes more sense.

I'm sorry, i don't have time to keep up with this run. Its moving way too fast for me, and its leaving me behind, good bye.

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Well, you gotta do, what you gotta do (though this is the second time you've done this on one of my runs, which is a little frustrating). That being said, keep in mind that the period after starting always seems to be the fastest paced of any online game - everyone is amped up and ready to go, so they post alot. I find they tend to slow down fairly quickly, though I hope to have things continue moving at a reasonable speed. Also keep in mind that fully half the posts and Durandana and Darkwolf going back and forth with each other. Most of these posts don't actually move the game forward (not knocking them, btw guys. Its good role-playing, keep it up. I'm enjoying the Anya/Jack/Darkwolf triange). Outside of those two, all the others are 1-3 posts, same range as you.

Anywho, wanna post an exit for Taur, a last swan-song as it were? Or shall I just write him out when the chance presents (probably never shows at the airport tomorrow)?

Umm, actually, that was my wife posting. I had called in sick to work today and my doctor said it was stress related, so she went and tried to ... eliminate the problem.

Ahh. Bad wife. No cookie for her. So Taur is going to stick with us then?

I'll try, i'm a big poster, so it might just take time, so i'll try to stick with the strong and silent type for now.

I hate saying this, but there is a lovely shadowchat for stuff like this. It's pretty lonely there and company would be nice.

I'm not trying to be mean or anything, but I am trying to get people to use shadowchat. usually it's just Me, Duranadana and Bear.

except i'm running a restaurant, shadowchat won't work for me.

Ah, that sucks.

I tend to bounce back and forth as well. I might be at the computer for 2-3 minutes, then gone for an hour, hour and a half. Makes getting into chat somewhat pointless - hello, one comment, goodbye, that sort of thing, ya'know? If you catch me on and with time (usually in the evenings, us central time) I'm always happy to pop onto it to discuss things, but on a regular bases its not real practical for me.

Azonalanthious wrote:

Also keep in mind that fully half the posts and Durandana and Darkwolf going back and forth with each other. Most of these posts don't actually move the game forward.

Now I feel bad.

Durandana wrote:

Azonalanthious wrote:

Also keep in mind that fully half the posts and Durandana and Darkwolf going back and forth with each other. Most of these posts don't actually move the game forward.

Now I feel bad.

Yeah, but you left out:

Azonalanthious wrote:

(not knocking them, btw guys. Its good role-playing, keep it up. I'm enjoying the Anya/Jack/Darkwolf triange)

Shadowrun is a role-playing game - so there is absolutely nothing wrong with role-playing in it. The whole point in the end is to have fun. The two of you are obviously enjoying writing it, and I'm enjoying reading it, so advancing the game or not, its very much a good thing.