Talking
"Runners are welcome to speak freely. The Programming Director would remind them that 'freely' is a description of the cost, not of the audience."
The one rule
A bubble over your head means the show can see it.
That is the whole rule, and it is worth learning before the first descent, because every other question about who hears you resolves out of it.
Some of the channels a runner can talk on come out of their mouth. Those ones put a little speech balloon over the runner's head, where anybody standing in the room can read it — and the Network's cameras are standing in every room. The rest are radio. Radio does not show up over anybody's head, and what never happens in the world can never end up in a clip.
So: if you can see the bubble, assume the audience can too. If there is no bubble, there is no footage.
The five channels
There are five, and the compose bar lists them in this order.
| Channel | What it is | Bubble over your head? |
|---|---|---|
| LOCAL | Everyone in the room you are standing in. | Yes |
| GAME | Everyone on the Stack. | Yes |
| GLOBAL | Everyone on the Stack, kept for looking for a party and calling for a revive. | Yes |
| PARTY | Your descent party, wherever they are standing. | No — radio |
| DM | One named person. | No — radio |
All five arrive in your own Transmission panel, whichever way they were sent. That panel is your screen, not a broadcast surface — a party line only reaches it because you are in that party, and reading it there does not put it on the show. Each channel has its own toggle in the feed filters, so a runner who finds GLOBAL tiresome can turn GLOBAL off and lose nothing else.
What this means in practice
- Calling for help is a public act. A revive plea on GLOBAL is a bubble, which makes it filmable, which means the audience may well watch somebody come and get you. The Network regards this as the single best argument for shouting.
- PARTY is the quiet channel, and it is quiet by construction — not by a promise. There is no bubble to film, so there is nothing for a clip to contain. Coordinate there.
- There is no half-public option. An earlier proposal had party lines bubble only for party members. It was rejected: a runner cannot tell a private-looking balloon from a public one at a glance, and a rule you cannot see is a rule you cannot use.
- Floor chatter is LOCAL. The NPCs and the house runners you meet on the way down talk on Local, which is why you only hear them in the room you are standing in — and why their conversations turn up in the broadcast.
A note from the Network
The Programming Director has declined several requests to make the bubbles optional. The stated position is that a contestant who wishes to be inaudible has an excellent and long-standing option available to them, which is silence.
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