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Capturing and interrogating

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Mon, 2020-03-02 20:24
#1
Fishmonger Fishmonger's picture
Capturing and interrogating
My players have been kidnapping people (or their stacks, at least) and doing interrogating lately and I'm interested in the forum's ideas and thoughts on how to do this or prevent it from happening to you. Here's what I have so far: Kidnapping Assuming that you can overpower your target, their muse is one major obstacle. The muse can cry for help over the Mesh even when the target is totally engaged in combat. Knocking the target out is one possibility but the muse only has a 25% chance of being taken out when a target's damage hits their Durability and only a 75% chance when the target is killed (2e p265). So one option is to kill the target but not so much that their stack is destroyed, possibly going for head shots to make sure that the Mesh inserts are destroyed (p265) -- stacks are pretty tough, so they should be able to survive many attacks that kill the morph. Other options:
  • attack when the target is isolated from the Mesh
  • use shock weapons (which are incredibly incapacitating to biomorphs anyway) which temporarily incapacitate implanted systems, so the muse can't call out (p251, though I can't find any details on this...)
  • jam the target's wireless communications, using jammer ammo (p211) or some other technique (p270, for instance)
  • use EMP grenades to fry the target's antennas (p212)
  • slip a prisoner mask over their head (p338)
  • all manner of hacking shenanigans
Other than calls for help and combat issues, though, it's no problem to just kill your target, take their head/stack, and go off somewhere to interrogate them. Interrogating Giving someone Blab (p334) and then just asking them questions is pretty standard with my players. If you have their stack you can upload the target's mind into whatever you want and ask away. Unless you have a dead switch (p320) everyone can kill you and take your stack; there is no other RAW way to just turn off backups to your stack or wipe it as far as I can tell. Other options:
  • psychosurgery (p296)
  • is that it?
It seems that as long as you can deal with your target physically you can pretty much always at least grab their stack and then you're off to the races. This makes it pretty hard to avoid being interrogated in general, since you don't have to worry much about killing your target. So is interrogation pretty much always going to happen, or am I missing something?
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Wed, 2020-03-25 19:01
BlckKnght BlckKnght's picture
The law
Don't forget outside factors that protect people from being attacked. First you have cameras. Almost every square inch of a most habitats is monitors, often redundantly from several angles. While there are methods to defeat such surveillance (and most cameras are not actively monitored, most of the time), it's not trivially easy either. Next you have the friends and associates of the person you're jumping. Do they always travel in a group? Were they about to meet somebody who will notice their absence and try to get in touch when they're late? If they're somebody important, there might be security protocols that automatically activate if they go off the mesh for too long. Last you have the "authorities", which I scare quote only because their form may vary quite a lot depending on the nature of the polity your characters are in:
  • If somebody goes missing in an Anarchist habitat, the response is likely to be a self-organizing community of sousveillance and forensics hobbiests scanning the camera recordings and physical evidence and collaborating on tracking down what happened.
  • In a polity with a central government, it might be the police (or secret police even) doing the investigation.
  • In a market-anarchist hab, it might be a backup insurance company hiring investigators on the victim's behalf (and seeking to sue the perpetrators for the morph damage and investigation costs to make themselves whole).
  • Even among criminals, you'll probably have the boss of whoever you bagged deploying their crew to search for them before they can blab, as there's a risk they got picked up by one of the [i]other[/i] sorts of authorities.
In any case, there's almost always going to be somebody working to track down egonappers, as that's behavior that's destructive in any kind of society. So individuals don't need perfect protection, they can get by with only basic personal security as long as they live in a society that makes egonapping extremely hard to get away with.
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Thu, 2020-03-26 15:03
ICU2 ICU2's picture
Physically overcoming the
Physically overcoming the shell and getting to the stack doesn't matter at all if it was just a sock being jammed.
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