They can certainly Mark me through a device, but I don't think they can do anything else from where they are. There's no "unless they are within x meters of you physically, or you have a Mark on them." exception in the text that says that you can take no actions against a target in a Host from outside of it.
Can you (or anyone) put a page reference to the no actions cross a host?
I can't seem to find it in my book and want to read that section. It seems contradictory to the spotting rules, but maybe you can “see” and not "do".
so even assuming I can't take my device's icons along (which I'm not convinced of, since PANs are mentioned as being linked to your persona and anchored to them, and it'd also imply you couldn't share songs from your external storage device to friends on a social media host, since you couldn't access it) I can still order my Drones around.
I’m actually not sure that sounds right.
Assuming the drones don’t come into the host with you, and you can’t perform actions into or out of a host, then it would stand to reason that the drones can’t be commanded.
I don’t know that’s the case, since I have not yet found the section dealing with cross host actions.
That's if I can't bring my devices, and again, I doubt that. Hosts contain many devices, usually in a WAN, but the icon would have had to have been brought in before it was connected to a WAN in the first place.
From what I’ve read, a host consists of all the devices that it has slaved to it. And slaving is likely to require permission and ownership, so no one ‘from the outside’ can add a device to a node (i.e. slave a device to the node). If they could, that would create a serious security hole.
And hey, we're already taking Commlinks and Decks in, and there's no rule -against- device icons in a host anywhere, so the case is sounding flimsy.
No, no rule at all, just a difficulty in performing the action. A hacker gets a mark on the host, then takes the action to enter it with his persona icon, since he has the required mark. His smartgun (or drone)? It doesn’t have a mark on the host, hasn’t taken the matrix action to enter the host, and isn’t likely to ever GET a mark on the host or take the action required.
If I hop a grid I bring my devices, right? I'm not suddenly working across grids? But the devices didn't take "hop grid" actions themselves; ergo, they're connected to me. And since joining a Host is a Jump Grid action... yeah, I believe it works just fine.
I had not really considered this, and I can see where you’re coming from. It may indeed be what they intended for your devices to ‘enter the host with you’ or hop grids with you, but it’s not cut and dry to me from my reading.
What do you do when your PAN isn’t just your own devices, but other runners you are working with? Do their devices come in with you, or hop grids with you? What grid where they on, and did it change when they got slaved to your ‘link or ‘deck in the first place? (These are really just concept and questions that might help me understand the matrix more, rather than anything I really expect an answer to).
Aside from trying to confuse the host with having a bunch of hidden icons entering, I wouldn’t really WANT my devices suddenly entering the host – that exposes them to IC attacks.
And aside from drones that you command via matrix action, nothing else you have is something you really need to make a matrix command to or from, so working cross grids isn’t a big deal.
Be careful on a ruling on this. Any actions allowed on me from outside the Host should likewise be applicable the other way around, and attacking Spiders inside of Hosts by putting a Mark on one of their devices and then attacking them without having to go in range of the IC sounds very, very tasty indeed.
I’m not really seeing an issue with this against spiders. Spiders are going to be hidden and likely not within 100m of someone outside the host. Heck, they could be very far away in the real world, just relying on being connected to the host making their surveillance of the host noise-free. Trying to attack them based on their real-world position would encounter sever noise. But I’m ok with them getting attack if they ARE within a short distance of the hacker in the real world, since they can retaliate against it. It would be like if both the spider and hacker weren’t in a host at all.
It DOES however bring up an info based and an IC issue – if you MARK the host, you MARK their IC too, since they share. That means when you MARK the host, you can see all the IC that are active in the host at the time. And if you CAN work across hosts via MARKs, then you can attack or manipulate the IC without ever going in. That I can see as an issue. Even just automatically knowing about them seems potentially problematic.
Perhaps the best ruling (and I think this may be the RAW one, because it's what you do to hack a Host) is that devices stay vulnerable even when inside of hosts through physical proximity, but that personas and anything subsumed by it (like your Deck) don't.
Maybe that’s what they intended.
The rules for the matrix section seem simple, but their ramifications are really very complex.
Which means it’s not *really* a *simple* system…