THE SYSTEM CHANGED MECHANICALLY. You cannot argue that at all, becasue it did. I am amazed you do not get that. *shrug*

Well it couldn't be done if you refused to do it. As it's explicit in the rules that decking and normal actions go in the same initiative sequence in SR3, there's nothing preventing you from doing this but you.

But then you haven't addressed this notion that the system somehow became mechanically simpler, in direct contradiction to the giant mess of ad hoc rules that were introduced.

Yes. It did.

And I am asking what about those changes was the cause for hacking on-site to become more viable.

I am amazed that you do not understand my question.

The question is not what made Hacking on site more viable... it has always been the case for me and the tables I play at. The question is what do you think makes Remote Hacking more viable?

Maybe that is the disconnect. *shrug*

Door kicked in by HTR is not a good enough motivator to tag along? I mean atleast there you will have back up...

0) Not getting shot
1) Not getting hit with magic
2) Not getting hit with critter powers
3) Not getting shot
4) Not getting shot
5) Not getting shot

The "difficulties" of not being on-site are trivial to overcome. Wi-fi inhibiting paint? Meet my army of botnet flying insect-drones. Isolated systems? Meet my army of botnet flying insect-drones. Cold storage? Well, now we're not talking about hacking are we?*


*Cold storage data is just as difficult to acquire as a bar of gold as far as a hacker is concerned: someone has to pick it up. They can either plug it into their own comlink for the hacker to hack, or they can walk back out of the building with it and drop it on the hacker's desk to hack. Or the hacker can be on site. One way or another someone has to touch the object in question and that is a non-hackable problem solvable by non-hackers.

And I disagree with you. I am not saying that ALL hacks are on-site, just that when there is anything important, it is usually an on-site hack.
Good luck getting your botnet of flying insect drones into a hermetically sealed facility located underground with independant power supplies and filtration systems. Any place worth hacking is going to remove most, if not all, of the easy routes to the data. Saying that the corps would do anything to the contrary is short-sighted and ludicrous.

As for someone else running the hardweare so that hacker can get it, yes, that is an option that I have exploited a time or two, but it is not always a viable option. On-site hacking has a lot of advantages that you do not get with the off-site hacker (and yes, it does come with some downsides); In your poinion the hacker is better protected; in my experience, that is rarely the case, as a Lone Hacker is often a very dead hacker... Besides, Remote Hacking is BORING for Hackers at our table. BORING, BORING, BORING. If I wanted to be bored, I would play Mass Effect or something.

Indeed... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

TJ, you're ignoring the question. The fact is, there's no advantage to decking in remotely versus hacking in on site. You face the same security regardless of access point, according to RAW.

As far as offline storage goes, I don't have time to pour over the books, but I did run a search on both the 4.5 core book and Unwired pdf. I did not get a single hit on "offline storage" in either book. It's safe to say that if it is mentioned anywhere, it's buried, and definitely not well supported. Yes, there are ways to kludge together an approximation of it, but they're all second-best rules twists.

Which is what I have said. Remote Decking is dumb, as far as I am concerned. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)
Apparently, according to Draco18s, there is some sort of magical accessibility that Remote Hacking provides that On-Site Hacking does not. I say this because he continuously seems to be saying that I am doing it wrong. *shrug*

Remote hacking provides obvious safety benefits (you don't have to haul your sorry body through the security sensors, armed guards and whatnot). And yeah, so far this thread is devoid of any new mechanically supported reasons for hackers to hack on site that deckers did not have.

I never said that either.

At best remote hacking has the same accessibility.

No. Well, I don't want to put words in Draco's mouth, but I *am* saying that there's absolutely no net advantage to onsite decking versus remote. Since the whole point of the wireless matrix was to make it easier for the decker to participate, I'd consider this to be a failure.

Now, I do acknowledge that what they tried for was a good thing. Locking deckers down to a fixed jackpoint does impede their ability to play alongside the rest of the team. In fact, it's such a good idea I was doing wireless tricks way back in SR2. I'll also add that getting deckers to work alongside the team was actually easier in earlier editions for me, and I had no trouble running matrix, astral, and physical actions side by side in SR2-3. It's actually harder to do so in Sr4.5.

My experience is the exact opposite of yours. But that may be becasue we did not use any wireless access in previous editions. Too, the Decking systems in SR2/3 were needlessly complex, in my opinion, and I have seen a marked improvement in SR4A. That may be a taste thing, though. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) *shrug*

I don't know if they changed Unwired for 4A, but according to my first printing of Unwired (again, may have changed, dunno) look around pages 59 or the very first page of the Security chapter (page 62 for me, or search for "Wired Link" or "Cabling"). Unless you'd like to play semantics, a network with all of it's wireless turned off and connected by wired links would count as "offline storage" to me. Shrug.

However, I'm not sure there's any point to this argument either way. In 3rd, so long as the server was on the Matrix, the decker could hook up from the depths of the barrens, or by satellite link on the back of a roving Thunderbird. Wireless just means the hacker can do his thing from his own bed, instead of a specific jackpoint- and he can still be traced back in any event.

The big split is more AR vs VR. To do anything in previous editions, the decker should be exclusively in VR and thus dead to the world. However with 4th's advent of AR, the hacker can now be more than a dead body and still function well in the matrix. This is the factor, more than anything else, that encourages the hackers to go along with the team- because it's interesting. If the hacker is off in VR (doesn't matter where, in his bed or in the facility), his presence is not with the rest of the team. This splits the GM's attention, and if the hacker's time in the spotlight takes a long time while he's also in VR, this will inevitably lead to "pizza time" no matter what rule set or setting you use.

AR on the other hand, allows the GM to avoid "splitting the party" and the hacker is allowed to be in, more-or-less, the same narrativistic scene as the rest for the runners, which hopefully eliminates "pizza time" and that is the encouragement to infiltrate with the rest of the group. If you're looking for in game reasons to support that... I'm not sure you're going to find a super compelling argument either way, but it won't be the first, last, or even close to the worst aspects of the setting that breaks under the scrutiny of "realism."

If it's wired to anything with a wireless antenna, then it's wireless.

I'm not sure if you're trolling, playing a game of semantics, or having trouble reading what I wrote.

No, I mean it. If a hardwired system is hardwired to a system that is accessible via wireless signal, then the hardwired system is accessible via remote hacking.

Hack the outer node, then access the inner one.

And because of how ubiquitous wireless is stated to be in 2070, pretty good chance that something along the chain is wireless-capable.


This is a good point and gives a (partial?) answer to the question of what mechanics make SR4 more on-site-hacking-friendly.

By a "network with all of its wireless turned off" I meant just that- nothing on that network has any wireless capability; it has all been turned off. Therefore there is no outer node in which to hack. This of course can be defeated by either physically turning on the wireless on any node in the network, or if every bit of wireless has been physically removed, a new node, with wireless, could be physically attached to the network to add a connection that the hacker could hack through.

But both options to allow a wireless connection to this network would require someone (or something) to actually infiltrate the facility. So yes, the runners could get in, throw a series of drone repeaters, and the hacker could hack from the safety of his bed. However it might be a lot simpler just to bring the hacker along in the first place.


Any megacorp worth it's name is going to make sure that there is nothing along that chain that is wireless-capable. Corporations already now, as in the modern day, enforce certain "clean" areas that employees are not allowed to bring in anything electronic at all. In order to make sure nothing gets out, there are no cell phones, watches, or car keys- nothing but the clothes on their back. Everything electronic that they would need for their jobs is already in the clean area and nothing from the clean area is ever allowed to go outside that area. So no, I don't believe that there is a pretty good chance of something being wireless within a clean area of a megacorp. Random government databases? Sure. The BTL collection of the dude down the street? Fair game. Even single A's or the telecommuters of AAA? Yeah, definitely hackable from bed.

But to assume that there are never offline networks, with no wireless connections, especially when talking AAA's? Ehh... you're on the far end of the leafy branch there.

Though, again, all it requires is one connection- but that requires physically adding a new wireless connection to that network, but at that point infiltrating the hacker can be just as simple as infiltrating that new node, but if the hacker's already with the team, it eliminates splitting the GM's attention and the accompanying "pizza time" when dealing with hacking.

I totally agree with you. But the point is that for some paydata that is offline and "wired" only, there is MORE of a chance that it can be wirelessly accessible in SR4 than in previous versions. More chances that somehow something connects the dots for a wireless hack. Inadvertently or through other means, such as the flying drones, social engineering, team infiltration, etc. So the wireless world has made it easier to be a stay-at-home-hacker, not harder.

I'm not sure I agree specifically on the wireless, but rather the rules of hacking themselves. I think, as I type out this post and delve deeper within the nuances, it might be more that the hurdles of the stay-at-home hacker to remote hack have been lowered because of the actual mechanics of hacking changed and not a specific quality of the wireless world itself. However the wireless change was the "face" of the new matrix, so therefore that's what people point at when they say they hate wireless, but I'm starting to think that it's more the system as designed that they hate and wireless is a convenient handle to grab on to.

Technically under the old rules, a AAA could hide the paydata behind so many nested networks and hordes of glacial IC, that it was effectively inaccessible but still attached to the Matrix. There existed stories of really great deckers that ghosted into the corp court but this is something that I think the transition to wireless left on the floor: the hacker doesn't need to go through node B to get to node C if both A (his node) and node C are both in range of node B. Furthermore, the response of nodes start deteriorating much quicker under the load of all that glacial IC so it's not not reasonable to expect the same level of over-the-top matrix defenses from SR3 to deter the hacker in his bed.

Also, I think the relative power between starting (optimized) hackers and the high end servers/nodes changed. A hacker out of the gate, properly tweaked, just has more dice to roll than the SOTA Rating 6 nodes. This combined with the almost binary results of either achieve Admin access (so the hacker can now do anything) or get punted/have the node shutdown (and thus can't do anything), leads to a change in paradigm: it's easy to connect directly to the node in question if it's connected to the Matrix, and it's relatively easy to crack the hardest nodes in the base book.

If in 4th, the matrix allowed direct connections between the jackpoint and the destination server over wires, allowed properly optimized starting hackers the advantage over servers, and instituted the relatively binary outcomes, I think we'd be in a similar design space regarding the stay-at-home hacker.

I think a way to short circuit that would be to allow authorized communication from matrix IDs as it currently stands... but to circumvent that with unauthorized commands (i.e. hacking) would require mutual signal range between the hacker and the targeted node- or the hacker has to hack a node within MSR, or hack the node that's within the MSR of the MSR of the MSR... and turtles all the way down. Or have his face do some social engineering and get him an authorized account. It'd play well with wireless fluff, reinstitute the legends of the epic deckers, and encourage hackers to get their lazy butts out of bed- how "realistic" it is... ehh, don't care. Still need to do something about the binary nature of success in hacking.

I would also mechanically encourage AR over VR in some manner- it's a break from some of the tropes of cyberpunk, but if it plays better if all the players are in the same "scene" rather than separate headspaces, I'm all for sacrificing it on the altar of fun. YMMV.

WAR! lets nodes go up to Rating 10, and a R6 node with analyze 6 locates a "hacking on the fly" hacker pretty fast (+ i give hot-sim bous to agents/ic/nodes). Also, it is possible to have a wireless external access point to a facility, and wired connections within, with multiple gateways and so forth. Also, nexi (when using the unwired rules) can have a program limit up to 50, thus the corp can stuff a ton of IC into the gateway nodes.

This wasn't quite the case, since you could shut off the RAS override in earlier editions, and going full VR conveys serious benefits in SR4.5. Even though I've done my best to get the decker to go in physically with the team, they always drop and go full VR when there's serious decking to be done. Unless I deliberately fail to tell the player all of his options, they will choose to use full VR if they have a lot of matrix work to do, and only use AR for less serious things or when they don't have much time to switch.

My biggest "pizza problem", however, is Legwork. Frequently, the team will come up with a list of questions for zillions of things, hand it to the decker, then leave for food while he rolls a crapton of Data Search tests. Most of those leads will never pan out, or will go toward plans that will never see the light of day. I do my best to make sure the leads that do pan out require in-person interaction to fully chase down, but the decker pretty much dominates the legwork section. Since most of these searches pretty much amount to advanced Googling, I can't fairly demand that the team chase down all of these in person.

For example: tonight, I sent the team to infiltrate a DocWagon facility. They asked a bundle of questions before they even formulated a plan. Some I had anticipated, some I had not. The key thing here is that it was important enough to require a roll, but not enough that I needed to take it to a face to face meet or other fix. For example, getting the shift schedule is something the decker should be able to do purely on the matrix, as is floorplans, names of key personnel, and so on. Like any smart team, they asked a lot of questions; and since many of them were dead ends, there's no point in doing anything more than a web search for most of it. Based on that data, they formulated their plan.

The problem was, before they could make a plan or decide which leads to chase down, the decker spent an hour doing Google searches. That's pretty damn time consuming. The decker pretty much dominates the legwork, and who can blame them? By having the decker eliminate a lot of the dead ends, they can focus their questions to contacts and others to the important issues, instead of wasting time. Unfortunately, this leads directly to the Pizza Problem.

Here are some things I would do:

Ditch the program limit on fixed nodes. Fixed node / matrix backbone / corporate server type machines should be fundamentally different from mobile commlinks in terms of sheer capabilities.

Return ACIFS (Access Control Index File Slave) or something like it to the system in some modified way -- I would introduce it as basic success thresholds for tasks. Think about it, it'd be dirt simple: "I look up the research file." "Okay, roll a Browse+Computer action.. the Index threshold is 3."

Introduce the idea that fixed nodes then don't have wireless access at all -- a wireless access point can only be attached. Hacking a system wirelessly involves hacking the access point (E-War), cracking its security, and then breaching the fixed node behind it. A common security response is shutting down the wireless access point to unceremoniously dump all connected users (instead of rebooting the whole damn system just unplug the router for a few seconds).