This brings up something I've been curious about: Why is radar so capacity intensive? Ultrawideband radar seems more useful. Plain old vision seems more useful for details.

Cuz Radar is big? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) It's vehicular radar. The UWB is a personal sensor.

So, it's that signal 8 monster suggested by SR4A 222?

Truth be told I didn't know about the Mute option. Hell, I didn't have the resources or time to get beyond program rating 5 on anything until near the end of that game. Probably also why I didn't have access to mute. As to the node detections, I was under the impression that OTF hacking generated an automatic detection roll by the node each time I make a roll. So regardless of initiative passes, it will always try to detect each time I poke it. Am I wrong there?

Regarding stealth, I think I finally got that to 6 by the time the game had ended. Still, that's 2 rolls on average from the node to find me...

That said, our game's hacking rules never got very complicated. We never had multiple agents, IC, spiders and such all at once. It was usually me vs node, deal with ic or hacker and that's it....

Could be our minds are still stuck in the SR2/3 days when decking/hacking/matrix rules were so damned slow you simply didn't deal with them ever and just handwaved them. So we're likely not taking full advantage of the capabilities and intricacies of the current rules.

A commnt on Tymeaus's oft repeated house rule...

It's a lousy way to do things. (cerebral boosters + cyber mean it's very easy to pull in +5-6 dice). It makes the attribute + skill (where attribute/bonuses completely dominate skill) even worse.

Two the artificial cap on hits is pretty bad way to handle program ratings. There's no reason someone w/ a simple tool can't do great things with it. It's also at odds w/ the other optional rule to use skill rating to cap successes/net successes that is sometimes seen elsewhere. (the point of that rule was to make skill rating more important).

Also a master can do great things w/ a simple tool... someone sculpting wood w/ a chisel vs a chainsaw comes to mind.


Hotsim (2), Encephalon (1-2), pushed (1), Cerebral boosters (2). Math SPU(2).... those all add up to a lot of dice a lot cheaper than actually buying the skill/groups on top of classic base attribute + 1 rank in skill ploy. With all those bonuses it's really easy to get a hacker tossing ~15 dice on everything he does right out of chargen w/o much room for future improvement. To me the biggest problem w/ the system is there's so little room for future improvement coming out of chargen. Only ~4 dice or so more... it seems more that as play goes on the biggest advantage is access to more hardware running more things at once.


If the goal is to simply make the attribute matter then this has played out much better IMO w/ a little bit of playtesting.
Simply use (Logic + program rating)/2, then optionally use skill to cap net successes. It makes the logic relevant, as well as the quality of the tools. Without making either largely irrelevant and still making actual skill level very important. (this is anothr way of saying each point of program is worth half a die, and each point of logic is worth half a die). It also doesn't result in much larger dice pools straight out of chargen where you have someone w/ 7-10 logic straight out of chargen taking the place of response/system capped rating 4-5 programs out of chargen.

Yeah, we've had a few threads running up and down the issue. It's not half so simple as it sounds. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

You said it.

Something like that, but in a slightly smaller package, usually Signal Rating 3, 4 or 5, because it depends upon Device Rating.

Yes, for OTF Hacking the Node gets a role each time you roll.



Could be. Hacking is MUCH more useful now than it was then, in my opinion. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Not a House Rule there Falconer, it is one of the Optional Rules in the Books. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)



I disagre, it has worked out wonderfully well for our group, and Dice pools tend to be much less than the Normal Way in my experience.



Again, It works well for us. You can only go so far with a minimal tool after all. As for being at odds with Skill Rating Caps, it is not using that rule. it is using the equivalent Cap for Magic. Magic is Capped at Force. Hacking is capped at Program Rating. No difference here. And again, not a House Rule, but a book supported Optional Rule.



Which can ALL be used in the normal way of hacking to boost your pools above 20. The Optinal Rule makes Attribute and Skill more important than the Program Rating. And it makes Program Ratings of Low quality actually mean something. Otherwise there should never be any program ratings below rating 5. If I have a Hacking Pool of 9 Dice, WHY would I spend 6,000 Nuyen per program for Rating 6 Hacking Programs when I am only likely to ever get a consistent 3 Hits per roll? I will never be able to use the Program to its potential. It makes absolutely no sense. Instead, I am going to spend 1500 for that Rating 3 program. By the same token, IF I am throwing 18 Dice, Why would I buy A Rating 3 program? It limits me severely at that point, as my intellect now surpasses my tools. I am going to go for more powerful programs in that situation.

Really, you should try it out and see how the Hacking Dynamic changes. I actually like the change, as does our table.



First, Why do you assume that we did not playtest the Optional Rule? Secondly, Why add a different Mechanic to the game? The goal of SR4 was to use a single mechanic (or a few Simple Mechanics, as opposed to the 15 Different Subsystems of SR3) to produce a Dice Pool. Now you want to construct a Pool, and then Half it for the Roll? No, I am against the SR3 methjod of subsytems. You do not need a different subsystem for everything. We have just a few Subsystems currently. Why add another completely different one? I choose to use the Magic Subsystem instead. It works great, and is very easy.

It works great for you. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Those sidebars are suggestions for house rules. That's how I've always read them.

My issue with it comes down to this... It's trivial to obtain larger dice pools than if you were doing it the normal way. For those large dice pools... the program limit doesn't work well. For low rating programs you might as well just 4:1 and call it a day... and even higher rating 4-5 programs are almost always going to cap out except when you're unlucky on the roll and the nature of the cap is to stop pretty much. If I'm a mage, I can always dial up my force to get more successes if I'm willing to pay the price... a decker though... that isn't an option, you have the equipment you have. So drawing that analogy is a bit strained.

It's very hard to get rating 8 or 9 programs and get the hardware to run them on, it's very easy to boost your logic up that high though.

That same sidebar also had the suggestion to use attribute to cap... which IMO works better as the dice pools are lower. But I'm still not a fan of capping successes based on anything besides player skill. There's too many ways in game to get along w/ bare skill investment and coast along on attributes + gear alone.

What about averaging the rating+attribute+skill to get the die pool or something? More hassle, but kind of averages out the three components. Or maybe cap based on the average.

There are a few concerns in this whole question. There're certainly balance issues, and power curves. It's also important to try to minimize complexity, as well as avoid novel mechanics (like averaging for a DP). To me, that might be too out of step with the existing DP paradigms. :/

Of Course... Me and the Table I play with. But if you have not actually played with the option, then you really can't bash it any, can you? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

That's nonsensical. It's easily conceivable that you can examine something and come to the conclusion that it's not a good idea, without actually implementing or trying it. Black tar heroin, for example.

Or Army Surplus Morphine. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

Sorry, just finished LA Noire and...

Just as Epicedion says. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) You can hardly accuse me of not raising many detailed, analytical objections. Playtesting is for discovering loopholes you forgot, not for testing the basic statistics.

Honestly, if some mechanic allowed hackers to spontaneously increase their program rating (assuming the optional rule in place here, not the RAW hacking rules), with the risk of that program failing or losing rating points due to the code falling apart from being used in ways it wasn't meant to, then that would be awesome. Redlining for programs, for lack of a better term.

Oh, and any sidebar that presents a rule that says "Optional Rule" is exactly that. It's not a house rule, because it's not manufactured by the group at the table. It's an official alternative presented by the company. That's the difference between "Optional" and "house" rules.

But they could just make copies and restore from backup. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif)

So make it burn out hardware in the 'link instead. People will be less likely to run their gear extra hard if their response chip burns out on occasion.

Point taken... But most of the complaints I hear about it are not real complaints. I understand if you do not like it, but to complain that the rules suck, without an actual playtest, using the rules, makes no sense to me. How do you know that you do not like it if you have never actually used the rule?

No worries though... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

We have been using the program rating cap optional rule for years at our table as well and we like it. Everyone once in a while, someone wants to go past the cap and they use edge to ignore it. It doesn't happen all that often, though. I mean, when the best hackers (at our table) are rolling 14-16 dice, a Rating 6 program rarely caps hits. And even when it does, we are talking about 6 hits, which is more than enough to do almost anything.

Exactly my point. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)

Highlighting, of course, the fundamental flaw in that system. If you rarely (if ever) pass the hit cap, why bother about program rating at all? If you implemented some active memory limit on the summed rating of all active programs, I could see a hacker having to make important decisions about what programs to run at 3 and what to run at 6, forcing them to choose where to risk the hit cap.

Implementing a hit cap that's rarely an issue just makes program rating a useless feature.