[PauloAM]

Hello guys,

I'm wondering how does a Commlink locates another and how is that displayed on its screen. I imagined the following situation:

The Shadowrunner is behind a door, and wants to know how many people are inside without entering the room. Can he check his Commlink to see how many other Commlinks are in range? If he can, can he also geographically locate these other Commlinks in relation to his position? It would be like using your Commlink as a "radar" to detect people who are carrying active Commlinks. Is this allowed?

Thanks!

[Michael Chandra]

I think you need a program for that, to see how many wireless entities are there. Scan?

[DeathStrobe]

Scan to see them. Trace to find them within 50 meters margin of error, IIRC. There is going to be a very large margin of error if you are trying to find someone in the other room. The good news, it also will make yourself harder to find too.

[MaxKojote]

Detecting Active or Passive is fine. But you only know there are a list of nodes within your Signal range. And only Active or Passive ones. Scan will find Hidden Nodes but takes time. Track is required to find a physical location, but will have a 50 meter margin of error if the node is wireless. Also from what I can tell, you have to trace an icon rather  than a node.

You can improvise a Data Search + Scan to find nodes of a certain type within range (as listed as an example under Data Search). But again, beyond that the only way to really find a physical location is with Track.

[PauloAM]

Scan to see them. Trace to find them within 50 meters margin of error, IIRC. There is going to be a very large margin of error if you are trying to find someone in the other room. The good news, it also will make yourself harder to find too.

Thanks for answering! But that gave me a couple more doubts...

1 - What's  "IIRC" ?

2 - Here's another hypothesis:  I am in the middle of a gunfight with 3 foes in the middle of the streets. I take a Free Action to detect all Active Commlinks in my Signal range (say, 400m). That would output too many other Commlinks (specially if said gunfight happens in a crowded place). How do I differentiate the three assailants Commlinks from the rest of the crowd, in order to Hack/Spoof them?

Thanks again!

[DeathStrobe]

Scan to see them. Trace to find them within 50 meters margin of error, IIRC. There is going to be a very large margin of error if you are trying to find someone in the other room. The good news, it also will make yourself harder to find too.

Thanks for answering! But that gave me a couple more doubts...

1 - What's  "IIRC" ?

2 - Here's another hypothesis:  I am in the middle of a gunfight with 3 foes in the middle of the streets. I take a Free Action to detect all Active Commlinks in my Signal range (say, 400m). That would output too many other Commlinks (specially if said gunfight happens in a crowded place). How do I differentiate the three assailants Commlinks from the rest of the crowd, in order to Hack/Spoof them?

Thanks again!

1. IIRC–if I recall correctly.

2. Handwavium. You just kind of know...somehow...magically... The rules are abstracted so you just have to assume it works somehow.

[PauloAM]

So there's nothing in the 4e20th rulebook or in Unwired that explains this? What if in the previous situation (the one where I am outside the room) and I want to hack a specific Commlink inside it? How would you as a GM resolve that?

I'm asking these questions because I never played Shadorun before and I want to be the GM

Thanks for the attention!

[DeathStrobe]

So there's nothing in the 4e20th rulebook or in Unwired that explains this? What if in the previous situation (the one where I am outside the room) and I want to hack a specific Commlink inside it? How would you as a GM resolve that?

I'm asking these questions because I never played Shadorun before and I want to be the GM

Thanks for the attention!

Well, the detect hidden note rules says that you have to know something about a commlink, like its physical location, in order to detect it if its hidden. If its out of line of sight and don't have a spotter, I don't think you'll be able to target it with certainty.

I guess they'd have to pick randomly from a list of available commlinks. Maybe houserule it so the hacker can lower their signal if they know what's on the other side of the wall is within 40 meters for signal 1 or 3 meters for signal 0. That might make sense.

[PauloAM]

It does make sense. Thanks again!

[acolyte99]

Basically it was never exactly described what the output of "Detect Active/Passive Node" was. Is it just a (huge) list of nodes or does show you where they are?
If you look at several descriptions and pictures it seems that AROs (Augmented Reality Objects) from active Commlinks appear at the places where the corresponding commlinks are.
But it has never been stated exactly ruleswise.

Even if "Detect Active/Passive Node" and "Detect Hidden Nodes" would give you exact locations of all nodes, remember that nodes in a PAN have hidden as default mode (Unwired, page 59, PAN Sub-Nodes). And a lot of security minded people have their commlinks in hidden mode.
This means you will be looking at a lot of nodes, even if you detect the hidden nodes. I'm not sure how hidden and passive nodes are supposed to pass out information about what kind of node they are, but indeed there is this sentence in the description of DataSearch, that says, that a DataSearch + Scan can filter for "kinds" of node (show me all Smartguns is the example IIRC). I personally interpret that only Active nodes give you this kind of information without an Analyze and that for hidden and passive nodes you have to use Analyze to on each node to get this info (taking a lot of actions depending on the number of found nodes).

If these Detect actions give you the locations of nodes, what is Trace good for? The Detect actions only work within signal range (Detect Active/Passive is signal range, Detect Hidden is only Mutual Signal Range). I would guess that Trace is for all situations, when you have the AccessId of somebodys Persona or some Node, that is not in Signal range of your own commlink and you want to know where this persona or node is. And that would then have the 50m error range.

So if you interpret the word "find" in the description of Detect Active or the word "locate" in the description of Detect Hidden as "it gets put on a list", you will have no chance to locate the specific node you want to hack in your examples.

If you interpret these words as "I find them and see where they are", then it is possible, but you still don't know at once which node to hack, because you only see that there are several nodes, but not what they are. Depending on the number of nodes it will take some Combat Turns to Analyse those found nodes to see which one is a gun or which one is the commlink you want to target.

Basically if you are in an area with high security where people are very strongly encouraged to have their commlinks Active, then it is relatively easy to find the commlink of somebody who follows these laws. Detect Active Node, filter with DataSearch+Scan for Commlinks, hack the commlink whose icon is near your intended target. Normal, legal people are easy to hack, no surprise.

If the target is not following the laws and has his commlink in hidden mode, things get to be a lot slower. Detect Hidden Nodes in the environment (if you don't see your target, collect 15 hits in an extended roll) or on your target (if you see it, 4 hits in one roll necessary). With this you see all the hidden nodes in the environment or on the person, but since they are in hidden mode you can't identify what kind of devices they are. So you spend a lot of actions on Analyze to get the commlinks in the environment or on the person.
How many actions will this cost? Depending on the area there might be hundreds of hidden nodes in PANs of people and even one person will probably have a dozen nodes of personal electronics with him. It will be this number of simple actions spent on Analyzing the nodes for their type to find the commlink you want to target.

And if the guys behind the door have lowered their signal to 0 (3 meters), then you won't detect them at all, because they are not in mutual signal range (well at least if they are farther away than 3 meters from you).

I admit that giving the locations in the Detect actions is too powerful if you say that DataSearch+Scan works for all modes of nodes, but if one says that this works only for active nodes and that hidden and passive don't give this info until Analyzed, then it seems to be ok to me.

[TennyJaden]

@ acolyte99

With the last bits of your statement I have to agree for the most part, but I wanted to add one thing. If you are dealing with security-conscious people it is possible that they will have slaved there devices in their PAN to their Commlink for extra-security. This though would have the benefit that your attack will be rerouted to the master, no matter which icon you attack that you found on the target.

To fuck with hackers in our game (because the gm loved to throw matrix-threats at us) I had my real commlink in my head with no wireless activated and fiber-optic cable/skinlink to all my devices (mainly smart-guns and sensor-packages) and had a bunch of devices slaved to a fake commlink with low firewall but filled to no end with Black IC. Caught a hacker or two for sure .

[Blaq Bandit]

One important part of visualizing the matrix, is that icons which are physically closer to your matrix persona appear larger, so finding an icon once you have detected it, would be rather simple. I would rule as a gm, that through a combination of mapsofts and or legwork, or in spur of the moment situations, a sensor in the room,  you could more easily ascertain the physical real-world location of whatever is broadcasting the signal. things like local area knowledge or blueprints of a building layout could prove to be instrumental in ascertaining such a location. I would give a bonus reduction of 1meter per net hit past the threshold of the scan test, using mapsofts and or local area knowledge as a bonus modifer to meters reduced.