The Shadowrun Situation

[Otakusensei]

If i understood correctly, you PAINT the target with the spell and tell the ammo you chose to hit it.
Be it your ammo, or the enemies.

That's the bit that throws me. The designator needs to talk to the weapon and paint the target. It paints the target and tells the weapon "That one". So either the spell is sending a communication to the weapon via wireless, or the weapon doesn't need a connection to the designator; which doesn't make sense.

If you hand waive it and say that the spell can talk to the weapon via wireless, I want to develop the Decrypt and Exploit spells right now. If you say that the spell somehow "fools" the weapon into thinking that the target is being designated, then you don't understand how illusion spells work. That's a big stretch from invisibility that works on cameras. One just needs to affect visible light to a passive sensor. They other needs to fool the mechanical "awareness" of a complex machine. That's called hacking and is covered in the next chapter.

[TheFlatline]

It's brilliant. If I was GM at your table, you'd get a Karma just for coming up with it, and maybe another one for pulling it off.

In other words, magic wins.

This is why I have no interest in SR anymore: I can get modern fantasy with Mage in WoD far better than in SR (even though the dice mechanics are better in SR), and if I play the technocracy, I even get the sci-fi fantasy vibe.

Frank's absolutely right about SR magic. It needs to be unreplicatable by tech, but not able to do the same shit that tech does, otherwise why bother with technology?

I dunno, magic strikes me as a lame cop out 99% of the time, because "it's magic, it doesn't have to follow logic" is just about the limits of most magic systems in games. SR magic has gone the way of D&D magic: it's become the ultimate excuse in lazy writing and plot devices. Want something done but don't want to figure out how it's done? Make a spell. Easy peasy.

It's not interesting in *any* system. That SR is going in that direction means that an old favorite is no longer relevant.

[crizh]

I don't even pretend to be any sort of expert on target designators but it strikes me as highly unlikely that the designator 'talks' to anything.

According to Wikipedia designators send out a 'coded' pulse but I cannot imagine that it is a particularly complex code. It surely requires a massive degree of noise tolerance and there is absolutely no suggestion that any sort of two way communication exists between designator and weapon.

To cause a target to emit a pulsed stream of laser light is surely no more complex than causing a bike to appear to be a completely convincing tank.

I might suggest that the coding is built into the spell formula and is not easily alterable but the amount of wiggle room built into other illusions is so spectacularly large I don't really see the need.

[Fuchs]

I don't even pretend to be any sort of expert on target designators but it strikes me as highly unlikely that the designator 'talks' to anything.

According to Wikipedia designators send out a 'coded' pulse but I cannot imagine that it is a particularly complex code. It surely requires a massive degree of noise tolerance and there is absolutely no suggestion that any sort of two way communication exists between designator and weapon.

To cause a target to emit a pulsed stream of laser light is surely no more complex than causing a bike to appear to be a completely convincing tank.

I might suggest that the coding is built into the spell formula and is not easily alterable but the amount of wiggle room built into other illusions is so spectacularly large I don't really see the need.

Uh... if it is easily duplicated... Hello fake target desigantion, let's shoot our own!

[crizh]

I imagine that this is already a possibility that exists today.

Nothing has really changed in two hundred years. Your military always looks invincible when you are fighting savages with sticks.

[Antumbra]

I don't even pretend to be any sort of expert on target designators but it strikes me as highly unlikely that the designator 'talks' to anything.

According to Wikipedia designators send out a 'coded' pulse but I cannot imagine that it is a particularly complex code. It surely requires a massive degree of noise tolerance and there is absolutely no suggestion that any sort of two way communication exists between designator and weapon.

To cause a target to emit a pulsed stream of laser light is surely no more complex than causing a bike to appear to be a completely convincing tank.

I might suggest that the coding is built into the spell formula and is not easily alterable but the amount of wiggle room built into other illusions is so spectacularly large I don't really see the need.

Yes, but how does the spell know what to say? It's really important as this isn't Trid Phantasm, which just has to make "A Fucking Scary Dragon" appear, it has to make "The code sequence that turns a land into ashes" float out into the world from nothingness.
The power to create information is vastly different from the power to create the right information, no matter how simple the code is - and in Shadowrun it's going to be far more complicated because hackers are just the kind of bastards to try it.

There can't be one universal "Bombs Here Plz" code and if magic could make that, then you could develop an Answer spell that skips the tricorder bullshit and kicks the GM in the nads.

If Designation Mages require the memorization and study of a particular system and the codes used in their branch of the military? That's actually sortof okay - it's a clever use of a weak [Laser] spell that one combat mage developed into a personal trick in his free time and might really screw/save a party in an encounter.

[kzt]

According to Wikipedia designators send out a 'coded' pulse but I cannot imagine that it is a particularly complex code. It surely requires a massive degree of noise tolerance and there is absolutely no suggestion that any sort of two way communication exists between designator and weapon.

IIRC, it used to be a 4 digit number. Well, USAF used 4, Army used 3. You dialed it into the top of the GLID after the guy with the weapons told you what code his weapons were set for. They was 20 years ago, I have no idea how it works now.

[mean_liar]

You're vastly underestimating the extent of how realistic a "fucking scary dragon" you can make, and not only that - you're underestimating how many other things besides a dragon you can make.

As it is, if you know Trid Phantasm at LOS then you can do everything that a laser designator does.

Regarding codes, they're very simplistic - crizh is correct that they have to be very noise-resistant. Currently they use a 3 digit pulsed code.

http://www.bits.de/NRANEU/others/jp-doc ... _1(99).pdf

Considering that magic needs line-of-effect, the caster basically isn't going to have LoE to both the receiver (on a jet or artillery piece) and target, as there's no way to have an AoE that makes that possible. However, if they know the target coding prefix (again, this is solely made of pulsed laser light and is not particularly difficult) then this spell is basically just a very narrow-use Trid Phantasm.

As a magical, "the target broadcasts to all receivers as if the perfect code prefix for each receiver has been received", that's just bullshit, ESPECIALLY SINCE IT MEANS EVERY TARGET RECEPTOR MODULE ON EVERY JET AND PIECE OF ARTILLERY IN RANGE WILL FIRE AT THE TARGET. It wouldn't be called "Designate", it would be called, "Obliterate".

Or "In-Air Collision".

[Fuchs]

I sincerly doubt they'll use somethign that simple in 2070.

[TheFlatline]

Considering that magic needs line-of-effect, the caster basically isn't going to have LoE to both the receiver (on a jet or artillery piece) and target, as there's no way to have an AoE that makes that possible. However, if they know the target coding prefix (again, this is solely made of pulsed laser light and is not particularly difficult) then this spell is basically just a very narrow-use Trid Phantasm.

And if we're simply broadcasting an Nth digit key, the spell is especially useless since we have in the setting cell phones that can display complete sensory replications in real time. It'd be trivial to broadcast Nth to the Nth sets of target designations (all identical except for the coding) unless N is some arbitrarily large number (larger than a military comlink with, say, rating 10 or higher could permutate, which I assume to be a frickin' *huge* number).

In fact, any kind of encryption between the designator and the weapon system would be trivial to spoof due to how SR treats data in 4th edition. Current encryption relies on the idea that you can perform complicated enough mathematical equations that brute force or reverse engineering is either too time consuming for time sensitive material or too impractical for other data. SR4's actual rulebook flat out states that such encryption methods no longer work and aren't limitations. So the 134 thousand digit prime number that you're multiplying by or whatever (because primes are time consuming to figure out, very large primes are appealing in cryptography) isn't a limiting factor any more at all. In fact, the above number N (being a number too big for a commlink to run permutations on in a reasonable time frame) probably approaches infinity because of the requisite massively parallel processing nature of commlinks.

SR4's handling of data and encryption are simply broken fundamentally. In the system, creating a magical spell to deliver terrestrial targeting data packages is like taking the space shuttle to the supermarket. As a magic user in SR, I'd be busy creating a spell-only targeting system that uses magical effects for communication.

The thing that I think offends most people about a spell that feeds targeting data to a weapon system is that it's generating information. If you know the precise coordinates and all the spell does is transmit the data magically, that's not a problem. If it actually generates coordinates, either the weapon system needs to be built from the ground up to accommodate the magical designators way of feeding coordinates, or it's silly to think that the spell automatically adapts to the weapon system's arbitrary coordinate system.

[mean_liar]

Doesn't matter, though - Arsenal lays out that they're still using infared, microwave or radar and that they're all basically what you'd expect them to be. Functionally it doesn't matter if the code is complex or not (unlikely, though, for reasons of practicality - its more likely they'd have something new and wonderful, not rehashed old tech). Hell, a holographic Trid Phantasm of multiple moving objects acting realistically across multiple species/senses (can I call them that?) is WAY fucking more complex than a coded pulse of coherent electromagnetism.

...and so I read the spell description. The spell is totally within the realm of SR. It creates a laser beam suitable for target designation. It's also kind of dumb for anything other than clandestine activity, since it literally does nothing that a real, physical designator does not do.

Now, I think Aaron believes that it transmits a code automatically. This is stupid. A known code transmission technique could be replicated, but it's not some fucking skeleton key. Or, if it is, then the text doesn't say that AND that's fucking stupid AND you'd need LoE to the receiver AND it would trigger every receiver in range (which is total bullshit).

[Ancient History]

Mike Wich showed up to talk about his contributions to War! (and The Laughing Man, who some of you might recall trolled this very thread dozens of pages ago). I responded with a condensed version of Frank's rant about the trees plot...

...Ghost I hate the trees plot. I don't drink, and it makes me want to drink. It is the single most retarded excuse for a war, and this is a game where Great Dragons hire shadowrunners to deliver a fruitcake to each other at Christmas. The only thing more retarded than the trees is the nonsense they have planned for Denver. Gah.

[name_here]

Wait, wait, wait, Amazonia is angry because Aztlan was planting maneating trees inside their own borders?

Not, like, inside Amazonia's borders?

Seriously?

[mean_liar]

In fact, any kind of encryption between the designator and the weapon system would be trivial to spoof due to how SR treats data in 4th edition.

...

The thing that I think offends most people about a spell that feeds targeting data to a weapon system is that it's generating information. If you know the precise coordinates and all the spell does is transmit the data magically, that's not a problem. If it actually generates coordinates, either the weapon system needs to be built from the ground up to accommodate the magical designators way of feeding coordinates, or it's silly to think that the spell automatically adapts to the weapon system's arbitrary coordinate system.

Laser designators do not work this way. At all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ2dZDU2mhc

It's not Encrypted with a WEP key or some shit. It's a beam of pulsed light. The "encryption" is about as complicated as an old-school pulse telephone. The light bounces from the target into the sky, where some pretty boss receivers pick it up since they're looking for those pulses.

The spell makes a laser light. The spell is in all ways I can tell shittier than a physical laser designator, most obviously because it takes Karma to use but also due to its limitation to the caster's visual light spectrum. It's shit for the same reason why most kaboom spells are shit, and why spells that turn screws are shit: why the fuck reinvent the technological wheel? The ONLY use I can see for the spell is for super-clandestine forward observers... but even then, it's crazy. A laser designator is already small and lightweight, so I can't imagine what crazy stupid mission requires that you operate without what amounts to a spare fanny pack yet still be close enough to the enemy for artillery and air strikes.

...

Now, to get back to War!

Seriously, an entire book about warfare that lacks crunchy details about combined arms operations in the magical 21st century? I want to know how Divination metamagic (and really, spirits using it since they're cheaper to come by) affects strategic operations. I want to hear about spirits Immune to Normal Weapons, strapped with Engulfed explosives. I want to hear about tactical nuclear devices and how often they're used and how force and communication structures have changed to accommodate them.

That's ten minutes of wonder right there. Where is that shit? I don't give a fuck about Bogota and magic carnivorous trees. I want War! to be about war.

[mean_liar]

Wait, wait, wait, Amazonia is angry because Aztlan was planting maneating trees inside their own borders?

Not, like, inside Amazonia's borders?

Seriously?

How can anyone tell without a map?

[TheFlatline]

Laser designators do not work this way. At all.

It's not Encrypted with a WEP key or some shit. It's a beam of pulsed light. The "encryption" is about as complicated as an old-school pulse telephone. The light bounces from the target into the sky, where some pretty boss receivers pick it up since they're looking for those pulses.

The spell makes a laser light. The spell is in all ways I can tell shittier than a physical laser designator, most obviously because it takes Karma to use but also due to its limitation to the caster's visual light spectrum. It's shit for the same reason why most kaboom spells are shit, and why spells that turn screws are shit: why the fuck reinvent the technological wheel? The ONLY use I can see for the spell is for super-clandestine forward observers... but even then, it's crazy. A laser designator is already small and lightweight, so I can't imagine what crazy stupid mission requires that you operate without what amounts to a spare fanny pack yet still be close enough to the enemy for artillery and air strikes.

I wasn't referring to a laser designator, I was contemplating something moreso along the lines of a spell that could call out coordinates for indirect fire (like artillery).

Yes, an entire spell that simply creates a laser that pulses is limp. I imagine the cost of creating a laser designator vs teaching the spell is going to be a no-brainer.

It sounds like even the author of the spell has no fucking clue what it can do.

[mean_liar]

Yes, an entire spell that simply creates a laser that pulses is limp. I imagine the cost of creating a laser designator vs teaching the spell is going to be a no-brainer.

It sounds like even the author of the spell has no fucking clue what it can do.

This is correct.

Or, rather, he believes that encryption is built-in for the spell but also receptor-dependent, meaning that, well... who the fuck knows. Assuming the author's intent:

1. you paint a target with this and every single munition with a laser guide on it targets the one point: paveways, hellfires, copperheads... everything. It's a stupid waste, especially since after the first impact that laser designation is going to be scattered throughout a cloud of debris.

2. a physical laser designator with its multiple codes calling for various munitions and what-not are still useful, since they actually work.

3. any operation using more than one designator, so long as it has a Designator spell active, is useless, since as soon as you mark two targets and one of those is a Designator target, a munition in the area gets really fucking confused and has a real hard time deciding which target it ought to be hitting. So fuck anything other than hitting one target at a time.


Of course, the author's intent is stupid; if true, the spell is clearly exhibiting "intelligent" behavior of the sort expressly limited by SR's extremely open spell-creation system.

If the spell just fires a pre-determined coded laser light pulse at something, its redundant and pointless when compared to a physical multimodal designator, but its at least not a net minus to your operations.

[TheFlatline]

Actually, looking at it in this light, it's *perfect* for a book on military resources in Shadowrun.

Every now and again you get a pet pork project that doesn't exactly do something anyone wants/needs, but someone got a fat R&D contract out of it.

So this designate spell must have cost tens of millions of nuyen to research, test, develop, push into use, train, ect ect. And yet it doesn't do anything better than a 5000 nuyen laser designator can't do. And then if said provocateur of the R&D deal managed to make the spell mandatory instead of target designators... well then that would be some great writing. It'd also be a poignant lesson: Yeah, sometimes magic can do it, but technology is better in some circumstances.

If the author had written about this spell as a lesson on defense spending and R&D, it'd be fucking ingenious.

[Otakusensei]

Mike Wich showed up to talk about his contributions to War! (and The Laughing Man, who some of you might recall trolled this very thread dozens of pages ago). I responded with a condensed version of Frank's rant about the trees plot...

...Ghost I hate the trees plot. I don't drink, and it makes me want to drink. It is the single most retarded excuse for a war, and this is a game where Great Dragons hire shadowrunners to deliver a fruitcake to each other at Christmas. The only thing more retarded than the trees is the nonsense they have planned for Denver. Gah.

Was Denver thing that you mentioned having someone seduce Ghostwalker (admittedly shut down at the time) or are you talking about something else I may have missed? It's hard to keep track of the bad ideas because they seem to be the only ones being had recently.

[Username17]

Mike Wich showed up to talk about his contributions to War! (and The Laughing Man, who some of you might recall trolled this very thread dozens of pages ago). I responded with a condensed version of Frank's rant about the trees plot...

...Ghost I hate the trees plot. I don't drink, and it makes me want to drink. It is the single most retarded excuse for a war, and this is a game where Great Dragons hire shadowrunners to deliver a fruitcake to each other at Christmas. The only thing more retarded than the trees is the nonsense they have planned for Denver. Gah.

Was Denver thing that you mentioned having someone seduce Ghostwalker (admittedly shut down at the time) or are you talking about something else I may have missed? It's hard to keep track of the bad ideas because they seem to be the only ones being had recently.

Yeah, the suggestion to seduce Ghostwalker was totally in there. And yes, that got shot down. It's been a while since I bothered reading Jason's deliberations, but last I checked the plan was to center Spy Games around Denver, and have the main plotline be about the looming No Confidence vote in the Pueblo Corporate Council and the maturation of the Ute shares.

Or to put it in small words: Aztlan is going to be performing complicated spy games to influence the votes of some Mormons in Pueblo, to try to get them to force the entire country to... make an entirely symbolic protest about Ghostwalker's continuing illegal occupation of Denver.

So regardless of who wins or loses, absolutely nothing will happen, because what is at stake is whether some third party issues an official condemnation of Godzilla attacks or not.

-Username17

[mean_liar]

...regardless of who wins or loses, absolutely nothing will happen, because what is at stake is whether some third party issues an official condemnation of Godzilla attacks or not.

At first I thought it was...



...but then I realized it was:



So its at least a coup excuse.[/td][/tr][/table]

[Fuchs]

Oh, Junta... that brings back memories.

[TheFlatline]

Yeah, I laughed when I saw the Junta reference.

Actually, as tongue-in-cheek as Junta is, it'd make a better transplanted SR game theme than what's currently coming out of CGL.

[Semerkhet]

Yeah, the suggestion to seduce Ghostwalker was totally in there. And yes, that got shot down. It's been a while since I bothered reading Jason's deliberations, but last I checked the plan was to center Spy Games around Denver, and have the main plotline be about the looming No Confidence vote in the Pueblo Corporate Council and the maturation of the Ute shares.

Or to put it in small words: Aztlan is going to be performing complicated spy games to influence the votes of some Mormons in Pueblo, to try to get them to force the entire country to... make an entirely symbolic protest about Ghostwalker's continuing illegal occupation of Denver.

So regardless of who wins or loses, absolutely nothing will happen, because what is at stake is whether some third party issues an official condemnation of Godzilla attacks or not.

-Username17

I've been busy in the "Renegotiation of the Treaty of Denver" topic over in the official forums denouncing the Ghostwalker plot. I excised GW from my own version of the setting but I wonder what Frank, AH, et al thought about the plausibility of Ghostwalker hanging on to Denver for any length of time. My own position, obviously, is that it's bullshit.

[Username17]

I've been busy in the "Renegotiation of the Treaty of Denver" topic over in the official forums denouncing the Ghostwalker plot. I excised GW from my own version of the setting but I wonder what Frank, AH, et al thought about the plausibility of Ghostwalker hanging on to Denver for any length of time. My own position, obviously, is that it's bullshit.

It is, as you say, bullshit. Great Dragons are powerful, but for fuck's sake they are just a flying tank. The idea of any dragon, even a great dragon, taking over a major city that is divided between two or three security council seats is fucking absurd. Dragons are a tactical asset, but if they want to be a major international player they have to use their wanted intellect and magical power to become rich and powerful, and then influence proceedings in the normal way. The idea of one of them going Godzilla on Aztlan in full view of the international news is completely ricockulous. Elissa Carey's writeup in Dragons of the Sixth World remains one of the stupidest pieces of crap ever written for Shadowrun. Both because of the comical absurdity of the event, and because it took a giant dump on one of the most popular settings in the game and replaced it with nothing that could be plausibly used in a campaign. There is a giant untouchable NPC who doesn't follow the rules and can't lose and decides what goes down, who lives, and who dies. That's not a Shadowrun character, that's the Lady of Pain!

Technically the Treaty of Denver put a stop to the threat of the various North American powers nuking each other - both with the real thing and with various magical knockoffs. It being unconditionally abrogated by a big penis NPC who doesn't follow the rules is very stupid, and puts incredible strain on the believability of the entire setting. You know Aztlan is contractually obligated to nuke Atlanta, right? And has been ever since that nonsense went down.

Really, the only way to rectify the situation is to kill Ghostwalker and post hoc invent a reason why Aztlan wanted that shit to play out the way it did the whole time. Anything less requires Aztlan to have been holding their penises staring at actual weapons of mass destruction and a specific mandate to use them while being unable to take their grips off their johnsons long enough to press the fucking Go button.

But yeah, spy games to wrangle about whether to send non-binding resolutions condemning Godzilla is a waste of an entire book. If anything is to be done with Denver, it has to be done in a book called "Ghosthunters". Anything less is not going to solve the problem that is the permanent blemish on the setting that is the Ghostwalker storyline. And if you don't solve that, then you can't really advance the plot with regards to the area at all.

-Username17