[belaran]

Hi all,

AFAIU, in RAW, the following points are more/less:

• MARKs are personal, you can never share them ;
• but of course Host/Spider/IC shares them - because the bad guy always cheats

But what about a Sprite or an Agent ? Can a Technomancer ask a Sprite to put MARK on his behalf ? Can hacker put two MARKs on a device, and ask an Agent to roll Trace Location on a regular basis, and keep him updated ? Can an Agent reuses the MARKs of the cyderdeck owner ?

In my own games, I consider that both Agent and Sprite shares their MARKs with their "owner" - but I would like to see if this ruling is ... controversial or not.

[Gratuitous Boom]

My understanding is that each persona has its own mark. Since both agents and sprites are personas they don't share their marks. Sprites being able to share their marks would be especially useful but the consensus of what I've read is they don't.

[firebug]

I thought agents did share marks with the hacker, since they are using the same device (and share the same condition monitor).

However, sprites don't, and there's no way to read the rules and find something that says they would.  Houseruling it to be possible is probably not a big deal, but all it would do is make TMs even more motivated to rely entirely on sprites, to the point that they won't even need to take any matrix actions themselves ever if they do it right.  I personally think that's a hot pile of smelly, trash-strained piss, but that's because I have a real problem with how Catalyst has decided that only deckers are allowed to be good at the matrix.

[Triskavanski]

I thought agents did share marks with the hacker, since they are using the same device (and share the same condition monitor).

However, sprites don't, and there's no way to read the rules and find something that says they would.  Houseruling it to be possible is probably not a big deal, but all it would do is make TMs even more motivated to rely entirely on sprites, to the point that they won't even need to take any matrix actions themselves ever if they do it right.  I personally think that's a hot pile of smelly, trash-strained piss, but that's because I have a real problem with how Catalyst has decided that only deckers are allowed to be good at the matrix.

When I did play a Technomancer, that is how we ran it.Sprites and my Technomancer shared the same marks. Which does help a freeking lot for Technomancers so that way we could complete objectives and such. Though I did do a lot of Assistant tests, where I'd have the sprite do the test and I'd roll to give it assistance dice.

[Gratuitous Boom]

"Some personas are agents, performing tasks on behalf of their owners. Agents running alone on a device replace the device icon the same way a living user does. If you’re running an agent along with your persona, it appears with its own separate persona, even though you’re using the same device." (Core pg. 235)

"Your marks are specific and connected to your persona and whatever you’ve marked, so you can’t just give them out for others to place or transfer them to other people. You can give other personas permission to mark devices you own with the Invite Mark action." (Core pg. 236)

Different persona's have their own marks. The only entities explicitly mentioned as sharing marks are hosts and the IC/Spiders patrolling them.

[belaran]

Follow up question (from a friend of mine) - if a slaved device (slaved to a host) perform the action "invite mark" to invite a persona to mark it, would the persona also gain a MARK on the host ?

A bit of context to see where this is going : my friend's character is a technomancer, and he is often using the Puppeter (I think) complex form to have a device invite his person to mark (rather than hacking on the fly or brute forcing it).

RAW states (as far as I remember) that if you get a MARK on a slaved device (by direct access to it) you will also get one on the host. However, this was stated more in the context of hacking/brute force so he wonders (and me too)