[Iron Serpent Prince]

Furthermore, Noise is funny in that you don't consider both ends of the communication; only the noise affecting the character's location matters*.  So, awkwardly, a drone isn't affected by local noise- only the noise and static the Rigger is in.  The only Noise that indirectly affects the Drone is distance based noise.

*=admittedly this isn't clear in SR5 and is a clarification made somewhere on the forums here.  I'll link it when I find it.

Still waiting on this.

I want to know if it amounts to basically a house rule to take pity on the poor Rigger player, or if it is a B.S. Official Clarification that further proves that no one deserves to spend money on 5th and how much we really need 6th edition right now.

I mean really.  A Rigger can sit in a Noise 0 space and fly a drone into a Noise "over 9000!?!?!???" without any issue?  Or into a Matrix dead zone?

That would be almost as silly as all Noise is dropped when a Decker enters a Host.  At least there you could make the argument that the Host hardware takes over the Tx/Rx and that reduces (but eliminates?) the Noise...

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

Sorry been away from the forum for a bit.

With regards to does situational noise apply to both sides turns out we don't have an official answer.  Best thing we do have is the nonofficial opinion of the errata lead in that it probably shouldn't.

With regards to a Rigger, I suppose one might reasonably infer the rules regarding noise and wireless functionality (SR5 pg 421) might be the way to allow one to use a Jammer to force a Rigger out of a drone.  If a Drone is in a high spam area, rather than imposing an incremental die pool penalty I'd say the way it probably works (or ought to work, depending on one's POV on the rules) is yes the drone's situational noise doesn't impart a die pool penalty on the rigger, but the binary "it works perfectly or it doesn't work at all" wireless function of a Drone could potentially be shut down by noise local to the drone.  But only spam/static/jamming and never distance.  There's no reasonable way you should be counting distance twice. (rigger to the drone is once, no reason to count drone to rigger on top of that)

[Sphinx]

Common sense rule: For any wireless connection between devices (e.g., a drone and an RCC), calculate the Noise level at each end and use whichever one is highest, plus modifiers for distance, minus Noise reduction.

[Mirikon]

See, this is why I liked the Signal rules in 4th. It was nice and simple that way. Are you in Signal range of the device? Then you can send to it. Device is in signal range of you? It can send to you. Mutual signal range? You've got two-way comms! Bunch of AR spam? -X penalty on actions while in AR. Same in VR? -X penalty while in VR on that node. Jammer? Reduce the Signal of devices inside the area, then see above. Linking a whole bunch of devices to daisy-chain connectivity for low-signal devices? Great, but each node you pass through is an additional chance for someone to sniff out what you're doing. Hacking an Aztechnology company? Get a small hack in on a Renraku building first so your traffic goes through there, and that way if things go bad then if the Azzies don't splatter your brains with Black IC, they at least have to hack Renraku to find you, which will cause all kinds of problems and give you a little extra time to wake up and get out.

I'm really hoping 6E fixes all this shit.

[Iron Serpent Prince]

Common sense rule: For any wireless connection between devices (e.g., a drone and an RCC), calculate the Noise level at each end and use whichever one is highest, plus modifiers for distance, minus Noise reduction.

Not bad for "Fast and Loose," although as Mirikon alluded to it doesn't work in some cases.

Such as Jammers.  If the controller is at Point A, and has 4 Noise there, and the target/drone/whatever is in a Noise 1 Point B - what happens when someone activates a Jammer and adds 2 Noise to the whatever at Point B?  Nothing, since it is only Noise 3?

I'll give you that it may very well be an edge, or corner case.  It still illustrates how bad the wireless rules mesh with the overall system.

Without scrapping the Wireless rules altogether (might not be the worst idea), the best I can come up with is to take a page out of D&D 3.5 / Pathfinder.  Each Noise modifier has a type.  Same type modifiers don't stack, you use the largest.  Spam, Distance, Static for Jammers and Dead Zones, etc.  Some special cases - such as the anti-wireless wall paper in the thread SSDR linked to - would be "Untyped," and those do stack.

Still not great.  Complicates it some more, maybe needlessly.  And it still doesn't resolve the issue of Distance playing any part of Matrix tasks, when Hosts (usually) don't have a physical location to judge Distance to.

It is messy.  I feel it is unnecessarily messy, and I don't have any real say over it.

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

Well imo the problem is more with the Jamming rules than the Noise rules.  Granted they're closely related, but I feel the jamming rules not allowing the Electronics Warfare skill to increase the jamming power nor the ability to buy a Jammer with a rating higher than 6 pretty well puts a hard ceiling on what you can do with jamming anyway... a ceiling located below many pieces of gear (to include the humble DR6 Transys Avalon commlink that every shadowrunner should probably own after their first run, if not right out of chargen...)

[Bamce]

But I also like a modicum of believability, and if I can't sell it to myself, I know I won't sell it to my players.

But trolls, magic, megacorps, people taking assault cannon rounds, that all is fine right.

[Reaver]

I'm seeong a lot of outliner cases here....

First off, lets talk about jammers,  their place, and their consequences.
Jammers jam. (No shit!!) And they do it to EVERY SINGLE signal in their range.
Every SINGLE signal from the print machine all the way up to traffic lights. From security cameras, all the way to pace makers.....

They are nasty, evil devices that in a wireless world can cause extreme havoc. As such there are going to be used with extreme descression and placement. Throwing out jammers left and right wouldn't be done by anyone as that jammer also messes with THEIR abilities as well.

You are more likely to find jammers used to define an area, such as a high security lab or building - in which case the security will have accounted for said jamming in their plans and deployment.

Second, noise is mostly there so you don't end up with 'split party' syndrome, which can get very toxic in games as lethal as SR. Heck, back in 2e most people refused to play with people who insisted on playing riggers due to the feeling thst the rigger could always cut and run if things got bad, stranding the other players...

Noise is an atrempt to fix this.... but yes it does need refining.

[Xenon]

Noise = slight latency which make some time sensitive actions (such as remote controlling and hacking) much harder to perform. Playing a competitive FPS game with a 300ms ping would be terrible (but you could probably send text through Messenger without any issues at all).

SR5 p. 230 Noise
It may seem as if traffic in the Matrix is instantaneous, but ask anyone who has played an online game with someone a few continents away—there is a noticeable delay compared to playing someone next door. When decisions are being made in the blink of an eye, every speed difference matters. The farther you are away from an icon in real life, the harder it is to communicate with it, whether your intentions are harmful or benign.


A decker running signal scrub and a wireless data jack is walking around in the middle of a carnival while AR hacking a camera located in the city downtown, 5km away, would suffer a negative dice pool modifier of 4 dice to his hack on the fly attempt due to noise (3 points from distance and 3 points from spam zones minus 3 points from noise reduction).

A rigger and his RCC running 3 points of noise reduction + satellite link on the north pole (where you normally can't get a signal at all) remote controlling one of his drones located in the rural outskirts of Paris (4580km away) would suffer a negative dice pool modifier of 7 dice on his gunnery or piloting test due to noise (5 points from static zone plus 5 points due to distance while using low orbit satellite communication minus 3 points from noise reduction).

A street samurai with his wireless data jack standing outside in heavy rain trying to take a sensor test with a drone he sent into an office building running rating 3 wireless negating wallpaper 800m away would suffer a negative dice pool modifier of 6 dice due to noise (3 points of static zone plus 3 points from wallpaper plus 1 point from distance minus 1 points of noise reduction).

[Mirikon]

Reaver, Jammers are only a problem to people that rely on their devices. Gangers wouldn't have much to lose from them, and it would delay the cops coming. High end teams have the skills that they don't need the wireless bonus. Jammers only inconvenience the techies, the civies, and those runners who don't have the skill to compensate.

But you are correct that they jam everything in their radius, which means unless it is contained then you've sent up a signal flare that something's going down. Unless you're in the kinds of area where interference isn't uncommon.

As Xenon pointed out Noise... just doesn't do what you need with a jammer. Frankly, they should go back to the 4e Matrix. It wasn't perfect, but it was a shit ton better than this.

[Iron Serpent Prince]

Jammers jam. (No shit!!) And they do it to EVERY SINGLE signal in their range.

Not the truth...

Jammer: This device floods the airwaves with electromagnetic jamming signals to block out wireless and radio communication. The jammer generates noise equal to its Device Rating. The area jammer affects a spherical area - its rating is reduced by 1 for every 5 meters from the center (similar to the blast rules for grenades). The directional jammer affects a conical area with a 30-degree spread - its rating is reduced by 1 for every 20 meters from the center. The jammer only affects devices (and personas on those devices) that are within the jamming area, but it affects all of them. Walls and other obstacles may  prevent the jamming signal from spreading or reduce its effect (gamemaster’s discretion).

Wireless: You can set your jammer to not interfere with devices and personas you designate.

So Jammers aren't a grenade.  That doesn't make them entirely surgical, but they aren't as chaotic as you are trying to make them out to be.

If a team wanted to drop a Jammer in a night club so their target couldn't call for back up, the team could "whitelist" the lights, the sound system, the payment system, and whatever else they wanted to in order to keep it from being IMMEDIATELY noticed.

Jammers should be in every teams arsenal, because sometimes they are the right tool for the job.

[Iron Serpent Prince]

So Jammers aren't a grenade.  That doesn't make them entirely surgical, but they aren't as chaotic as you are trying to make them out to be.

Thinking on this further, it is very possible to make Jammers almost surgical.  It requires the GM to be fairly tech savvy, in that they need some experience in CLI scripting to understand how simple it would be to write a script (wouldn't even count as an App in SR5 terminology) that would allow you to select an Icon - or several - and send them to this script.
The script would compile all the icons in a 100 meter radius into a list, then delete the selected icons from that list.  Then it would upload the list to the Jammer and then activate the Jammer.

Instant (nearly) surgical Jamming of only a few selected devices.

The only reason it isn't completely surgical is that any device outside the 100 meter radius that then enters the range of the Jammer would not be "whitelisted."

As long as the GM can wrap their head around the methodology, nearly perfect selective Jamming.

[Spooky]

So Jammers aren't a grenade.  That doesn't make them entirely surgical, but they aren't as chaotic as you are trying to make them out to be.

Thinking on this further, it is very possible to make Jammers almost surgical.  It requires the GM to be fairly tech savvy, in that they need some experience in CLI scripting to understand how simple it would be to write a script (wouldn't even count as an App in SR5 terminology) that would allow you to select an Icon - or several - and send them to this script.
The script would compile all the icons in a 100 meter radius into a list, then delete the selected icons from that list.  Then it would upload the list to the Jammer and then activate the Jammer.

Instant (nearly) surgical Jamming of only a few selected devices.

The only reason it isn't completely surgical is that any device outside the 100 meter radius that then enters the range of the Jammer would not be "whitelisted."

As long as the GM can wrap their head around the methodology, nearly perfect selective Jamming.

This sounds like mil-spec jamming to me. Good way to apply rules. "yoink"