The Gaming Den

So recently my group has discovered the Watcher spirit's search power. And I was wondering, how strong is this thing? Given that summoning these things is basically free, it seems like they'd be nasty thwarts for a Shadowrunner. Once they have a picture of you, it seems like you're screwed.

Can a Lone Star mage basically grab a photo of a character and have the watcher find him wherever he happens to be (so long as its not warded)? How much information do you get about his real world location? Is the watcher smart enough to associate the astral location with a real world location? What about an astrally projecting mage, can the watcher find his physical body?

Besides always staying in a warded area, what means do you have to thwart a watcher spirit that someone summons against you?

Search is strong, but generally only strong enough to find the general area where its mark before it runs into a ward or gets offed because it is a weak ass watcher spirit.

The crux of the matter is that warded areas might be as common as Stuffer Shacks. Any average place of buisness needs a ward as part of their security, or some shady street mage is is going to knock it over faster than a bully at a sand castle convention. Minor wards, nothing crazy, to keep out the riff raff and lower force Fire Spirits.

Any 'Corp facility is going to be oozing with wards, and likewise any wise 'runner will only sleep in a warded area.

The other counter to water spirits is either a magician who has the Astral Perception Skill who, well, kills intruding watcher spirits, or a spirit floating nearby in the astral to ambush them.

Hicks wrote:Search is strong, but generally only strong enough to find the general area where its mark before it runs into a ward or gets offed because it is a weak ass watcher spirit.

Oh yeah, your watcher spirit is going to get totally jacked up, but from what it sounds, it will already have reported your position. So some Lone Star mage will already be phoning in your position to the strike team, at least as I understand it. Or can you off the watcher before it relays any information?

It depends. As far as I recall, physical objects still block Line of Sight on the Astral Plane, so as long as you can kill the watcher outside of Line of Sight from you, and anything that attacks a watcher will kill it, you're "semi-safe", as in they can't pinpoint your exact location*; then again, if you couldn't stomach that state of safety you wouldn't be playing Shadowrun.

If I remember correctly, the Concealment power works against the Watcher's Search power.

*called area saturation artillary barrages, cruise missiles, or nuclear detonations might still catch you in their blast radius.

A good thing to remember about Shadowrun (fluff wise) is that the world is simply too busy to really care about you. Sure, a mage could do that. However, that means he has less time to do other stuff.

In a completely profit driven world, the longer you have been away from the scene of the crime the less likely the corp is going to try to kill
you. Why? Because they know a shadowrunner doesn't typically have the initiative to rob them of their own free will but is following someone else's orders. Not to mention, you have passed off the goods in short order. Once you pass off the goods, the incentive to kill you and take back their stuff basically evaporates. A) You don't have the stuff and B) they NEED deniable assets to get back at those who actually hired you to steal it in the first place. Killing you just reduces the pool of deniable assets.

That said, it wouldn't be Shadowrun if at least a few of the Johnsons didn't try to kill you - just because.

Also, remember, watcher spirits are stupid and temporary. Not the best choice for setting up an ambush.

The math pans out well enough, to forego watcher spam as a superior option of finding people.
The Seattle sprawl is about 110km x 50km a so its fair to assume that there will be a decent amount of distance between the mage attempting to find the players and the mage trying to ascertain their position.
E.g. a mage rolling average hits needs a summoning dicepool of 12 to find someone within 10 klicks, if that person happens to be 20 km away we're talking a pool of 18. It will still about 4-6 hours until the watcher pings the player. I'd expect a decker or face to accomplish much of the same in a similar timespan.

After all these are player equivalent poolsizes and I want my player to be able to find the target of todays run, which in turn does mean that equivalent opposition will accomplish the same.

So yes it's entirely reasonable that a strong mage will find you in a few hours if you happen to be close and not taking any precautions.

I'd be happier if the search power weren't written as if could only apply to unmoving targets and at least gave a hint on what's supposed to happen if the target moves through a background count of one, during hour two of the search, which would seem to be a reasonable move to throw off the pixies following you, but this is not the case and thus completely up to interpretation. I'd allow it at my table since it would help with the suspension of disbelief and might curb the element of feeling helpless just because you happen to have Notmagic as a power source.