/srg/ Shadowrun General- Droning On Edition

What flying drones are there of a decent size? I'm looking for something (4e preferred) that's big enough to actually have a Pixie pilot it.

Rotodrones seems a bit small but there doesn't seem many much bigger until you hit 'Predator Drone' which is too big for indoors.

I feel like posing myself a bit of a challenge, as well as seeing if I can at least get anything salvageable out of 5e and its snowflakery.
I'm interested in seeing exactly how ridiculous a concept it's possible to write a black-trenchcoat character concept about, to see exactly where special character splats stop being niche and start being meaningless, nearly unplayable amalgamations of funkily balanced powers and fluff/crunch discrepancies, and for obvious reasons I'm not going to trust myself (since I'll end up strawmanning).
What I'm asking the thread is to heap the most ridiculous concepts they can think of on me (limited to crunch terms, for example metavariants, archetypes, cyberware and equipment, to avoid Frank-type runners who're simply relegated to the pinkest of mohawk games), and I'll take the most fucking ridiculously special-snowflaky one and write a character background on it, then post it here to be torn apart.
Please don't blame me, I'm bored and have nothing to do.

OK, 3e user. Dryad or Surge (the highest grade) for the base, Liminal Body (centaur or tank), multiple monowhip finger compartments.

Or an AI in a customized drone body with similar.

How useful and effective would a full-on adept face/social infiltrator be?

Meta C
Attr B
Magic C
Skills C
Cash B

Bod 3
Agi 5
Rea 4
Str 2
Cha 8
Int 5
Log 3
Wil 3
Edg 2
Mag 6

Too pretty to hit
Addiction, mild (Coffee)
Allergy (Deez nuts)
Creature of Comfort (Middle)

Assensing 3
Computer 2
Con 6 (Fast-talk)
Disguise 5
Escape Artist 1
Etiquette 4
First aid 2
Gymnastics 2
Impersonation 3
Intimidate 1
Leadership 1
Negotiation 6
Perception 4
Performance 1
Pilot ground 1
Pistols 2
Running 2
Sneaking 1
Swimming 2

Body sculpt
Facial sculpt 1
Keratin control
Commanding tone 1
Melanin control 1
Astral perception
Kinesics 1
Imp reflexes 1

(R4 day to day SIN, 2x R3 SINs for running (male and female), R2 bugout SIN)
2mo middle lifestyle
=15 500 left for necessities

Basically, this guy would a complete social chameleon; being able to pose up as anyone, and completely untrackable. When forced into combat, he'd be looking to escape, change his look, change into spare clothes and drift away.

We've had this topic come up a couple of times actually. Thus far we've had bioengineered dryad vampire catlolis with exceptional attribute. I think it's fairly hard to top that.

>Basically, this guy would a complete social chameleon; being able to pose up as anyone, and completely untrackable.
Until you get a few initiations under his belt, he's still vulnerable to astral security blowing his cover.

I'm aware. He'd be looking at initiating and picking up masking at earliest possibility, but there just isn't anything he can do about that at chargen.

What edition because i know in 4th you can't have stuff like caffeine alcohol or tobacco as you addiction.

5th. Soykaf is actually in the book, CRB 414.

The table

Even then, corporations have access to sensor software for different types of pattern analysis; if they want to figure out you are/were somewhere (or not), eventually they will.

It's still a silly choice, unless you buy into the 'industrial byproduct' description of soykaf, and want to accept that drinking it can result in an addiction spiral to death.

Tried to make Super Mario in SR5 using sumtoten. Not really sure how I did. I need an adult.

Not sure about spell selection, adept powers, where to put my meager nuyen, and taking suggestions on qualities.

He'll be careful about where he spends his time. Pattern analysis isn't magic, you know. He'll keep his day to day SIN separate from his running, so there should be very little danger of him getting caught. Ever.

I know it's a silly choice, I'm picking it because it's free karma.

>I know it's a silly choice, I'm picking it because it's free karma.

So you're intentionally being a minmaxing piece of shit, and not doing it accidentally? Good to know.

Why thanks!

I'd say you'd lack voice control. Recently I've tried building something similar, and another user posted his suggestions - here's my version...

If I lack voice control it's because I forgot to type it in. I did pick it.

...aand here're the oter user's suggestions.

Although yeah, you'd need to initiate ASAP, grab masking and astral sight so that you could imitate other people's auras.

I already picked astral perception and dropped some skillpoints into assensing. I don't like the first suggestion, I'm seeing similar dicepools with my guy, and he's got a bit better optimised powers and attributes I think.

The second seems about the same, I don't really understand why people pick so high priority for skills when raising attributes gives better results. Also humans are gay as fuck.

I probably should consider skilling up palming though, it seems really useful all in all.

Hi Veeky Forums, quick question on the pain editor (corerulebook, cultivated bioware):
The combatbonuses are great and the flaws are hard but I think them fair. But the text says the ware has an "active status". I thought bioware is on all the time. How would you interpreat that? Can I willingly turn it off? How would I do that?
I think a free action would be possible but I'm not sure if that brings enough flaws.

What edition?

5th

I imagine it's some sort of a block on specific nervous system you can will on/off. Wouldn't be all that great if you never could feel any pain because of it. You'd be constantly harming yourself.

And you're wrong on bioware being always on, there's adrenaline pump which can also be activated with a free action.

If it's anything like other 'ware in 5e, it'd be a Free Action or Simple Action, depending on whether it's neurally triggered or manually triggered.

>high priority for skills when raising attributes gives better results

Arguable. For a (human) adept-face, you cap Charisma fast and don't need too many other high Attributes. If you want the highest dice pools for all those CHA skills, you need a high skill priority.

But yeah, elves will do it better (albeit with less Edge, which can be very important for faces).

>Pattern analysis isn't magic, you know.
It doesn't have to be. The nature of being a shadowrunner means that you do jobs, and that starts files. Eventually there will be runs where the corporation can pinpoint the actor, and that means they have data to work from. Speech patterns, psychological patterns, handedness, et cetera. The character is a decent conman and disguise artist, but a mediocre actor with particular habits and avoidances.

"Untrackable" is an exaggeration you're hoping a GM will humour.

Whoever plays humans? They're clumsy and lack grace. When you're at 8 cha instead of 6, you can drop all of your related skills to 4 instead of 6 and enjoy the same dice pool. As a bonus, your unskilled cha skills will be better and you get a higher maximum with those few you decide to skill up fully. Not to mention things like increased judge intentions pool. And the higher priority on attributes lets you pump a couple of extra points into intuition and logic, which help you fill other roles a bit better. And even if in the end you're looking at similar dice pools, it's considerably easier to raise skills past chargen compared to raising natural attributes.

And even though this is all arguable, I think we can all agree that humans are gay.

Sure, go ahead. I just hoped it may give you an idea what else could be done with such a character.

Don't sweat too much about the mages - you'll be better than any other kind of social infiltrator anyways, with an added bonus of being suddenly able to turn into someone completely different. Just keep in mind that you'll need the masking metamagic ASAP.

Also, consider grabbing a ceramic holdout loaded with DMSO/narcojet caps. You'll need to take someone down sooner or later, and this method will be both less messy and more efficient that beating them with a stun rod/ extendable baton.

> humans are gay

> implying you won't spend majority of your time in human form anyway

Who plays elves when you can play a dryad bio-adept face with prototype transhuman?

>It doesn't have to be. The nature of being a shadowrunner means that you do jobs, and that starts files.
Of course, that's a reality every shadowrunner faces. But he'll most likely be working through a proxy, so that isn't a huge issue.
>Eventually there will be runs where the corporation can pinpoint the actor, and that means they have data to work from.
Yes, they'll know that they're looking for a person who is either a male or a female, either human, ork or elf, and is of any skin colour from white to black, and sounds like someone. That's an extremely tight comb they got there.
>Speech patterns, psychological patterns, handedness, et cetera. The character is a decent conman and disguise artist, but a mediocre actor with particular habits and avoidances.
Speech patterns and psychological patterns is where kinesics and training steps in. Of course it won't be perfect, but even in case of a total failure it is extremely little for them to go on. What are they going to do, search for someone who uses 'fuck' a lot? Please. Handedness will rule out 10% or so of the population, so congratulations on that I suppose.
>"Untrackable" is an exaggeration you're hoping a GM will humour.
Oh I'm sure he'll have fun trying to come up with ways to track the untrackable.

>Bio-adept face with 6 Magic and Rating 3 Tailored Pheremones
>mfw

Pornomaners, not even once.

Any cool cosmetic alternate for spurs? I want to be less wolverine.

I was considering that, but I decided it'd be too much snowflake for this character.

Superheated Wrist Blades?

Does that cute little loli have a gun on her tail?

There's the stingers from Chrome Flesh if you want something totally different. Otherwise, the basics are just 'big spike'; have it come out from your elbow to outdo the Rock, flip out horizontally from the wrist, or just come right out of the heel of your palm.

Also, I hate that there's no good art of cyberspurs.

Yeah, because she's a anthropomorphized Zoid.

Whatever this thing is?
>That thing was too big to be called a hand blade.
>Too big, too thick, too heavy, and too rough.

Pls no bad art. And I know you have worse shite on your folder, just don't post it.

Aww, what a nice kitty

Honestly every character I've played would be better mechanically as an elf (I play a lot of infiltrators and faces), but I never pick them because they don't mesh well with how I like to roleplay. I feel pigeonholed by the elvish stereotype of refined, graceful and privileged and I'd much rather play a scummy human lounge-lizard type, or an ork trying to scrape by in an anti-trog world.

If you don't want to play a stereotypical elf, then don't play one. If you can't, then it's only your failure as a roleplayer.

>bad art

I honestly don't think that last one is bad. Stylized, sure. Could also use a little work on facial perspective and the artist did the "eyebrow behind the hair is still clearly visible" thing. But other than that I don't see what the issue is. Especially when comparing it to some of the official SR art...

Is there any art of Cyberspurs? I have a hard time picturing them as anything but cowboy spurs.

It's less about playing a stereotypical elf than it is about playing in a world that's for the most part pro-elf. Unless I'm wandering around in the trog hoods in the barrens.

Obviously I don't have to play into the stereotype, but the world around me is going to trend towards the stereotype in how it deals with me, and I find humans and orks more interesting in that sense.

They're basically Wolverine spikes, though I think they're supposed to be more stabby while Wolverine uses them for slashing pretty regularly.

Relevant catgirl for good measure.

I got it now, thank you.

You sound really enamoured of how super awesome untrackable this guy is, and I'm just pointing out that a) we can read the sheet and see he's not that skilled, and b) there are people in the sixth world who are better at it & at better at countering it.

Try looking at modern day profiling, and realise the means and knowledge available to corporations has advanced beyond that.

>Yes, they'll know that they're looking for a person who
... usually has a soykaf (sorry; coffee - it actually says coffee) in hand, or smells like coffee. Is notably weak physically, exemplifies charisma, and whose aura shows a strong connection to magic. Someone whose DNA leavings are [whatever the specifics are], regardless of what they look like, because they don't have the geneware to prevent DNA evidence being used against them. Et cetera.

>getting specific on what pattern recognitions will be used
They're examples, mate. Remember, poor actor. We can draw a profile from the way someone writes letters today, so I think they can manage to do more than look for the swearing person.
>kinesics
Kinesics 1. It's something, but it's +1 dice in social defence, not super awesome sauce unreadable adept.

>Oh I'm sure he'll have fun trying to come up with ways to track the untrackable.
Ubiquitous (and not always online) camera presence is a decent start. Discrepancies always exist.
How long does it take for body sculpt to change, again?

>a) he's not that skilled,
What are you talking about, he's pretty skilled at what he needs to do.
>b) there are people in the sixth world who are better at it & at better at countering it.
Maybe, but those people are extremely rare, and even they are not miracle workers.
>coffee.
Yeah, I should have written that down as caffeine. Mild addiction is basically the "can't wake up without coffee" thing half of the current world can relate to. But I suppose you're right in the guy smelling like coffee. Like everyone else.
>Is notably weak physically,
That can be masked with body sculpting. Unless the guy ends up trying to lift heavy things while on the job, it is not an issue.
>exemplifies charisma,
Charisma is a mental stat, you can't just look at someone and figure that one out. And it covers things like lying, so he'd be able to fake being a less charismatic guy.
>and whose aura
Yes, the aura business is why he needs masking.
>DNA
That's why he wants to run away at first possible chance. Leaving your DNA at a gig is very bad mojo.

>They're examples, mate. Remember, poor actor.
Why are you calling him a poor actor? That's very rude.
>We can draw a profile from the way someone writes letters today
Oh, you mean handwriting? Good thing that's very rare in the 6th world.
>so I think they can manage to do more
You think a lot, you do. They'll look for someone who swears a lot when wearing a specific persona, and drinks coffee.
>Kinesics 1. It's something,
Oh, that's just because I didn't count any of the Qi foci he'd be picking up. I'm pretty sure he'd end up with a higher score than just 1 on kinesics. Besides, the power is just representing things like being able to control his subconcious cues. You know, those you'd use to build a profile with.

>Ubiquitous (and not always online) camera presence is a decent start
What do you mean by that?

>How long does it take for body sculpt to change, again?
That would be "approximately one hour".

>Ubiquitous (and not always online) camera presence is a decent start
Here's the part from the SR4 Runners companion. Since we're talking about CGL "Copying Gamerules Liberally" here it's probably the same in 5e

And? What's your point? Because that's exactly why any illegal activity can work in the 6th world; even though everything is constantly monitored, you can't be tracked by any single entity, because the data is not shared between them all. And even if it was shared, it'd be hard to get a bead on someone since it takes time to gather all of it together to make a picture, and then the trail is already cold.

I posted it because the user I quoted seemed to say that collecting a lot of data was easy and I refuted that

Oh, I see. Disregard then.

You seem to forget that if someone has the trail go cold on them a few times, you become a serious security risk. If they know of your presence (and they will - they'll know that things have disappeared from their warehouses or their data has been compromised) but not of anything else about you, you become a serious chink in their armor, and they'll start wanting to take care of you just to make sure you don't start taking on bigger jobs and become a more dangerous threat (or simply because they want to hire you to be sure).
No matter what, some corp or agency will start wanting to get ID on you as you complete more and more runs, and the more investigators you evade, the more of a potential threat or asset you become.
If you do a few runs where you're completely untraceable against the same company, you're going to start getting skilled investigators or even prime runners sent after you - after all, they have to assume you're a threat if you can't be ID'd. If that corporation's data gets compromised, their rivals will start getting interested in you too - and you can't evade them, since you evading them is why they want you. If you can't be pinpointed, pinned down and found a solution for, even just a contract and a decisive ID on file just to be sure, you'll be raising the stakes over and over again as you prove yourself more and more dangerous.
In the end, you'll be spotted, because the more you hide, the more people will want to find you. If you manage to evade the prime runners, God knows who you'll get interested in you - and at some point, it'll move up to a dragon. If you could evade a dragon's immediate, handpicked subordinates, there's only one person to do the job better, and that's the dragon in person - because you've proven yourself risky enough.
That character's potential is their weakness, and they'll end up getting ID'd sometime no matter what - for the better, since they'll invalidate most of the themes behind a serious game.

And that's what makes it so interesting. I imagine the character would be only doing work in any given city for a limited amount of time, then he'd take his nuyen and move to a different country to start again.

Some patterns are bound to emerge if he spends a lot of time in a given location, so I'd imagine a time longer than 6 months is going to be out of the question.

>What are you talking about, he's pretty skilled at what he needs to do.
Impersonation 3 Sneaking 1, etc.

>Maybe, but those people are extremely rare, and even they are not miracle workers.
>miracle
You keep using this word, as though it wards off competent and well-funded opposition.

>I suppose you're right in the guy smelling like coffee. Like everyone else.
Most people smell like soykaf. Not coffee. Soy. A poor imitation so ubiquitous that regular drinkers have been known to complain about the flavour of real coffee.

>That can be masked with body sculpting
Can be, but "approximately one hour" between changes.

>Charisma is a mental stat, you can't just look at someone and figure that one out.
I disagree, and doubly so when the person in question has to keep up the facade constantly.

>Why are you calling him a poor actor?
Impersonation 3.

>Oh, you mean handwriting?
No. I mean their sentence composition and such.

>You think a lot, you do.
And you seem to avoid it.

>Oh, that's just because I didn't count any of the Qi foci he'd be picking up.
Add that to the list of tells ...

>I posted it because the user I quoted seemed to say that collecting a lot of data was easy and I refuted that
I didn't say it was easy, and you didn't refute that it can be done. The question is time and money.

You people should take a look at the "Erased" quality.

Pls halp. Or is it just a terrible idea?

That's not a bad idea.

Sorry for pitching in, but what you say boils down to "being good at something/ having unusual skills draws attention to you". Which is true, but being good at something/ having unusual skills while not being able to change your body and face at will will draw this attention far faster.

Anyways, shadowrunners, by definition, are people with unusual/ criminal skills and that's what makes them useful to corps and other big players. Adept with thousand faces will draw as much attention as novahot decker, combatmonster sammy or any other powerful individual, although it will be harder to definitively ID him. I honestly believe that it doesn't invalidate the concept.

Or do you believe that a concept of social infiltrator in general is silly?

Quick.

Spurs or Razors.

Arm blades.

Changing cities simply won't help, and if you think it will, you're not playing Shadowrun.
Megacorps are global, and that's that. It's not a matter of them not being able to find you, because they will always, always be able to find you if you do anything against them for a longer period of time, or even just once.
If they want to find you, they will. It's a matter of how much they're willing to spend on you, not if they can find you or not. You're a single specialist, and they're a massive. global corporation with thousands of employees on your tier or higher.
You're fucked.
That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that being unidentifiable gives the corp nothing to work with. It means that they can't predict your actions, get a grip on your personality, know who you're loyal to or even act against you if they need to. They know all this and more about any normal runner that they bother to look at for longer than a casual glance - and someone who they can't get down is a security risk, because they don't know how to deal with you if they end up needing to. Since they don't know this, they'll need to find out, and evading them just makes you more unreliable and dangerous to them.
Razors.

Spurs. If you go illegal, go all the way and take the biggest weapon.

Since you are playing Shadowrun, unlike anybody else in the thread, would you care to point where exactly it says that it's impossible to avoid attention if you are avoiding attention?

What kind of advice are you looking for?

General optimization, help with the theme...?

Looking over it, I see a few things I'd adjust.
>No skill Specializations
>Reaction is way higher than it needs to be (you have Increase Reflexes for a reason, move at least one point each to INT and WIL)
>More ranks in Improved Ability than is allowed (should only be 3)
>Dragonslayer would be a cool Mentor (gotta fight Bowser!)
>Armor vest is probably not enough armor
>Traceless Walk? It's good, but seems not on-theme.
>No Light Body for sweet Mario jumps

I've always preferred the razor aesthetic myself, but in-game spurs are a bit more effective.

>Impersonation 3 Sneaking 1, etc.
Sneaking is not directly related to his job as a social infiltrator, and impersonation is more about becoming a specific person and matching his or her mannerisms.

>You keep using this word, as though it wards off competent and well-funded opposition.
It would be a miracle if they managed to parse together a solid case with the strips of information they have. Not all of it is shared between corps, you know.

>Most people smell like soykaf. Not coffee. Soy. A poor imitation so ubiquitous that regular drinkers have been known to complain about the flavour of real coffee.
Yes, it should have been caffeine. Call a mod to edit the post or something if you seem so hung up on it.

>Can be, but "approximately one hour" between changes.
And? Are you saying it can't be done?

>I disagree, and doubly so when the person in question has to keep up the facade constantly.
You seem to disagree on a lot of things. But after a certain while his fake persona would become a second nature to him. Kind of like a bilingual person switching between languages at will.

>No. I mean their sentence composition and such.
Well good luck with that.

>And you seem to avoid it.
I didn't say your thoughts made a lot of sense.

>Add that to the list of tells ...
They can be covered with masking. If masking fails, then the aura is blown, and the foci won't make much of a difference. I was initially thinking of picking up a skin pocket to hide the foci in, but I think I can make something happen with body sculpting.

>I didn't say it was easy, and you didn't refute that it can be done. The question is time and money.
Time also works against them, love. You don't seem to understand the scope of the undertaking; they'd be going by bits and pieces in what is likely a city of millions of people. You can't track everyone, and you can't keep buying all records of all known entities in a city. Think about that for a moment.

>The question is time and money.
Sure, but there are two things you have to consider
>Data balkanization
Sure they can gather a lot of information about him, but only in areas in which they control the cameras. If e.g. Ares wants to find him they can only gather data on Ares ground, on ares related firms and (potentially) on public ground
>Data flood
basically they will have to sift through a lot of data to get it. With a normal person this might be easier, but in this case they can change a lot of stuff so the markers get less. This means that they need far more time and work to collect all of it

Basically it is possible to find him, but it is INCREDIBLY hard to do so.

Oh, ok.

I still feel it mostly boils down to "people with unusual powers are dangerous", but I kinda get what are you coming at. Still, I don't believe that any corp collects full dossiers of all the 'runners before/ after hiring them (even more so dossiers of every 'runner operating worldwide), but I may not be trenchcoat enough.

>Changing cities simply won't help, and if you think it will, you're not playing Shadowrun.
Oh dear silly me, I though we were playing dungeons and dragons all this time!

>Megacorps are global, and that's that. It's not a matter of them not being able to find you, because they will always, always be able to find you if you do anything against them for a longer period of time, or even just once.
Megacorps are global, but the thing is that they work against each other. There will be a point where keeping records from a given company will be more important than any monetary compensation they can provide, and they'd have to repeat that innumerously to get a really solid pattern on any given individual. And that's when they know what to look for in the records, and we're talking about a chameleon here.

>If they want to find you, they will. It's a matter of how much they're willing to spend on you, not if they can find you or not. You're a single specialist, and they're a massive. global corporation with thousands of employees on your tier or higher.
And they are directly opposed by other massive, global corporations. It's very unlikely that all corps will agree to join arms to get rid of a single annoying shadowrunner, especially when at that point some of the corps would be interested in hiring his skills.

Christ, you're missing the point so hard it's not even fun. The point of cyberpunk is that the Man is everywhere, and that the only way to avoid the Man is to not piss them off. If you really think that you can game the system just because it doesn't say "Rule 0: The megacorps will always find you", you really aren't getting much out of the game that you couldn't get from D&D.
And good job invoking everyone else in this thread to your defense when everyone else is also busy tearing apart the gaping holes in your fetish fantasy. I saw you ask if the character concept was realmy, which you'd never have thought if it wasn't your realm - characters like that have occurred in myth and legend from the dawn of time, and it takes one to know one, after all - it's your realm, and I can read it from miles away.
You're even engaging in the stereotypical behavior of the buttmad realmer - making spurious accusations and long, nitpicky, defensive posts about exactly how your character is the best because they get your rocks off.
I'm out of this, because I know from long years of GMing experience exactly what people you can't discuss anything with. You're constantly missing the point intentionally to nitpick small details, refusing to move on before people have caved to your carefully set-up charged questions, and refuse to listen to anyone telling you that your concept won't work and will kill the themes of the game on top of that.

The high unarmed is good, the low social stats are whatever, but I can't help on spells. I don't know them well enough. Might wanna look into addiction and find shrooms, though I may have missed that.

>The point of cyberpunk is that the Man is everywhere
The Man is in Shadowrun's case The Men. Who work against each other. Any corp is not going to get all of the data to sift through, read this OTHER user's post here: . Speaking of, you seem to be making the mistake of assuming that you're arguing with a single person. So much for that text patterning then, I guess.

Except the whole point of Shadowrun is that the Man is not everywhere. There's 10 AAA Men, even more AA ones, little "Men" in the form of local governments and smaller corporations, and there is backstabbing and one-upping one another everywhere, even within corporations. Information is not central, and you can pay your way out of anything. A corp can destroy their own knowledge about a certain runner if it means it will hurt somebody else more than it does them.

And it's literally my first response to you, you sperg, unless you've been going on these retarded rants in the past threads as well.

Bro you obviously don't know people in law enforcement. Even between groups that share info, it's NOTORIOUSLY hard to actually get what you need in a timely fashion. And how long would it take for a mega to realize that you're not in the search area you we're in before?

It's a question of staying ahead of the ball. Moving faster than they communicate information and faster than they realize you're somewhere new. The idea isn't to be unnooced, but that by the time they motoce, you're moving on.

Think of the volume of people in Shadowrun cities, and the number of people who are actually behind desks scanning through security footage for Bob Jones the runner. Too fucking few on their end. It's not as easy as you'd think.

>Sorry for pitching in
Why even ... ?
>what you say boils down to "being good at something/ having unusual skills draws attention to you". Which is true, but being good at something/ having unusual skills while not being able to change your body and face at will will draw this attention far faster.
The guy started by saying their character is untrackable. The conversation has snowballed and strawmanned it's way beyond that, but I doubt anyone really believes it draws attention faster.

> The point of cyberpunk is that the Man is everywhere, and that the only way to avoid the Man is to not piss them off.
Could someone explain this to me, cause as far as I remember cyberpunk is about fighting the man.
>"Rule 0: The megacorps will always find you"
Well Rule -1 is "The megacorps will not search after you unless you REALLY piss them off"
>fetish fantasy
>fetish
>realmy
wut
>long years of GMing experience
doubt.jpg
>You're constantly missing the point intentionally to nitpick small details
pot meet kettle. He's a nigger

>It's a question of staying ahead of the ball. Moving faster than they communicate information and faster than they realize you're somewhere new. The idea isn't to be unnooced, but that by the time they motoce, you're moving on.

Exactly, but in this case, you'd also have someone who is trying to be unnoticed. And can look and sound exactly like anyone else.

>Think of the volume of people in Shadowrun cities, and the number of people who are actually behind desks scanning through security footage for Bob Jones the runner.
Open up Arsenal and/or Spy Games, and go through all the ways they use software to replace people in the equation.

>Could someone explain this to me, cause as far as I remember cyberpunk is about fighting the man
A lot of cyberpunk works are set in a dystopian setting where a single corporation controls and monitors the entire world and there is no dealing with it or going around it. user assumes that it must apply to every single cyberpunk setting, and anything that doesn't follow the trope is fake cyberpunk.

>Could someone explain this to me, cause as far as I remember cyberpunk is about fighting the man.
That was the pink mohawk thing. Shadowrun has drifted over to black trenchcoat.

The point is that even with algorithms specifically tailored to track one person would have a hard time generating hits in a data feed when the subject has so many unknowns associated to him. None of the most obvious factors such as gender, metatype, weight, height, skin colour, facial hair, or voice are constant.

The algorithms would generate so many false positives that it would be extremely difficult to get leads, and when you finally manage to narrow down the search to a specific location, the person is long gone.

If there's fewer people involved it just makes it easier to go in and erase your profile to lower the heat on yourself. No one will bat an eye that a piece of data disappeared or was altered if they never had to work with it.

The first run, sure. The guy doesn't have Erased, though, and Corporations don't really care about things on the scale of a single run. Words like monolithic come to mind.

Erased can be done manually, you know.

Is it impossible to run more than one mission in a black trenchcoat setting? You can't hide your astral signature in Shadowrun. As soon as you are spotted by anything that astrally perceives, especially a spirit, you should be done - your data is referenced with matching auras, and then tracking you becomes trivial. You do one mission, and then you die, because a AAA corporation immediately sends HTR teams on every single thing they can identify until the target is confirmed dead.

>You can't hide your astral signature in Shadowrun

Things like Astral Bluff, Masking + Extended Masking, Astral Chameleon, Flexible Signature and the like say otherwise.

Of course, you need to be really magic and have multiple initiate grades under your belt before it's all there and reliable, but a true physical/astral chameleon is possible.

>Is it impossible to run more than one mission in a black trenchcoat setting?

No. In the blackest of trenchcoat settings an awakened character will have to rely on licenses until he gets enough karma to initiate.

>your data is referenced with matching auras

Is there actually a database of auras? My understanding what they are indescribable in mundane ways; a magician can make a check to see if he remembers an aura he's seen before, but there's not some vast catalogue of what everyone's soul objectively looks like.