Ancient History wrote:Even in "the rest of RPGs" it can get problematic, because usually if someone or something is deliberately hiding they want an opposed test - and sometimes one for each person or thing that is hiding!
But isn't that what you normally have for perception anyway?
3 people want to hide. They roll stealth. Boom. 5 hits, 3 hits, 6 hits. Or whatever. Someone wants to peek around and see if someone is hiding. He rolls 4 hits. Sees the guy with 3 hits, doesn't see the guys with 5 or 6.
With the matrix, outside of combat, given enough time, you'll eventually pick up on obfuscated icons. If time is no factor at all I wouldn't even force a roll. But that should be sort of rare- time usually is a factor. So you maybe have your passive analysis- your hardware, maybe your software, generates automatic hits that basically burn through obfuscation hits. So your deck/commlink/whatever gives you 2 auto-hits and maybe your Analyze software gives you another auto-hit. So anything that tries to obfuscate needs to roll (or rates) better than 3 hits to confound your passive systems. Active analysis lets you roll on top of those hits. But it's like active sonar- it sends out a broadcast/blast ping and you get more information back. In real world terms this is basically a port scan, saying "is port 1 through 65 thousand open?" and listening to which ports reply and deciding what functionality is based on the ports that are open and the reply that is received from a query of the port.
Much like a port scan though, active analysis is noisy. It sets off all kinds of alarms, or at least generates attention really, really fast.
I dunno, I'm spending way too much time reading on WW2 submarine warfare and I'm starting to think about the Matrix as a kind of cat & mouse game the way sub warfare & evasion was back in the day.
Edit: I see what you're saying. Some people want a separate perception test for each person in the room. That's kind of a chicken & egg thing though and I never really liked the idea so it wasn't apparent to me immediately.