Hrm. Might have something to do with, as several people before me have noted, older hardware not being vulnerable to this.

But there is only metagame handweaving. There is no logical, believable ingame explanation. Except of course if your googles can catch tiny info bits and thus make you see better or reaction enhancer does not have enough computer power so their firmware is running on dedicated servers somehwere in the world ..



Then you won´t get the boni.

SYL

That's the trick -- make older hardware vulnerable to this, and then you have all the justification you need for the new stuff having two modes:

1) Crappy but secure

2) Normal but hackable


People forget about some of the mind-affecting spells being pretty nasty. In a game I run, there's a mage that loves to use magic to force the guy in the back of the security team to open fire on the guy in front of him. He hasn't forced anyone to drive their car into the harbor yet, though.

You ignored the point.

Let's review. The starting point of the discussion was what if something was developed that allowed hackers to hack a DNI. So then people are encouraged to wirelessly enable everything so their gear gets the protection of their PAN. ie becoming wirelessly enabled makes you MORE secure, not LESS.

The response to this was "OMG BRAIN HACKING BAD"

So I asked why it's considered so bad given it already exists in the game for mages, and the technology for brainhacking isn't that infeasible from a realism perspective.


Anyway, coming back around from that to your question, older hardware would be vulnerable to this. If you had old hardware that was not matrix enabled, and instead set up to use a DNI, you are now very susceptible to a DNI hack that wasn't possible when it was made, but is now. So you now have a very real incentive to upgrade to the Matrix connectivity to get extra protection.



Note: To be clear this whole line of discussion has been based on a "What-if" scenario, and is in no way a justification for the writers' actual direction of "Let's just toss on a bonus that is mostly something you already got before, with no reason behind why it requires wireless connectivity for that bonus to work", because that is dumb.


Edit:

My group had a lot of fun with the Alter Memory spell when I made a mage with it.

I repeat myself: to force something to become online in this way is the same as "please wear a glowing pink suit to get +3 initiative. You know, pink makes you aggressive, more adrenaline in your blood etc." Is the same kind of effort as in "your reaction enhancer is now online because of the tacnet inside the reaction enhancer" or "the firmware of the reaction enhancer is not strong enough and needs dedicated server to work with wired reflexes".

SYL

Well that's not really acceptable.



lol, boni

So everyone should be a physical adept and cart around the highest-rated jammer they can find to keep mundanes down.

I would rather take the mystical adept ...

SYL

Might as well, now you can score a casting and an Adept power focus!



I didn't address your scenario because it is, was, and shall remain retarded.

Read what you're writing. 'Hacking a Direct Neural Interface.' You are, as is apparently the fashion since 4e's Technomancer idiocy, completely handwaving a whole boatload of issues. If you want to go the 'realism' route, let's start with the basic ones.

1. Obtaining a wireless connection to a device without any wireless hardware.
2. Obtaining remote access to a device with no capability for remote access.
3. Exerting remote control on a device without any software capable of processing remote commands.

You're trying to 'hack' a device that is a man/machine passthrough.

At that point, we don't have to worry about the 'but mages can do it!' question because you've literally waved a magic wand over the tech and said 'IT WORKS BECAUSE WIRELESS'.

First let me say I am sorry for opening this Pandora's box and initiating this threadjacking. I would like to ask those discussing the Matrix bonus issue to please leave it alone now, or start a new thread for it. Lets get back to the real purpose of this thread which is to inform us of rule content not the merits of that content. I hope there is enough respect for our fellow posters to honor this.

I would like to know how the adept gains power points after character creation?

Does the Mystical Adept have to pay a premium over the Phys Ad to gain more Power Points?

I for one do not have an issue with wireless bonuses for devices where it makes logical in game sense that a Matrix connection might be an advantage.

However, shoehorning wireless bonuses onto EVERYTHING simply to give hackers more to do just breaks my sense of immersion like crazy. I know it's a game, but I don't want it slapped in my face when I'm trying to get into the head of my characters.

Smartguns working better because they are getting weather, map, and other external data, great! It makes sense, is plausible, fits in universe.

A chemsuit sealing it's vents faster because someone hooked a Matrix feed to it, not so much.


-k

Adepts can take power points instead of metamagics at each initiation.

Adepts get their starting PP free equal to their Magic. MystAds pay for them with Karma.



-k

I will note in passing that not everyone was on-board for the wireless stuff. We lost. Time for me to fade back into the background until someone gets to Helps & Hindrances and starts noting some of what I did....

And EA the f****d up company killing sim city for me (i didn't want to believe them) and selling 1 Mio copies on day one and this http://www.vg247.com/2013/06/14/console-wa...uy-an-xbox-one/


apples and oranges - 5th Edition is not the next step of 4th its a different one. It is like the skillwire levels that changed from 3rd to 4th. IMO its not benchmarked 4th against 5th as I am not going to play both games at the exact same time.



As far as I know right now (havent seen the book yet!) it is about bonuses. So your gear still has an advantage, just if you want to stack a bonus on top of it you'd have to go online.



I get that you are not comfortable with this. I also think that the reasoning sucks for setting plausibility in game because it is no reason for in game. This reason has to be made up by the respective GMs and their players to make their game world consistent.
This shows what gets to me about the discussion: Is it about how JH or whoever explains the out of game reasoning tip of the iceberg of the game development discussion in a blurb or is it "How do I make this plausibly work in may game of SR(5th Edition)?"
btw I am totally backing you up on that "heartstopping swearword face martial art" (Dim Talk derived from Dim Mak comes to mind)



Every argument, especcially in a make believe game, has three possible outcomes:

1) It is circular - hen and egg
2) there is some domagitc "last rule" or premise ("Canon" the almighty book of the LAW)
3) Inifinite regress (Answers leading to new questions, as solutions tend to lead to new problems)

So if making sense is your thing, what is stopping you? But you want others to make sense for you, and thats the real problem here, neh?



Oh, you mean how in 4th Edition a Adept/Magician stepping into background count? As far as I know its the bonuses on top that go away, not the functionality, but I will know more when I hold the book in my hands.


This I can totally relate to!

love,
Sunshine

1) Mdepts can buy them for Karma (1:2 rating I think) - compared to the other Karma options is that a big "investment", or somewhat minor? What else can you get for the 10 Karma during character generation?

2) Can agents / mook agents still be minor hackers/deckers?

3) Are decks somewhat exclusive to deckers or are the accessible for everyone interested in a high end computer device?

4) Are decks/links still available as implants or cyberlimb accessoir?

5) What does a power focus do (dice or limits)?

6) Besides edge, what else has changed for spirits (armor, movement, spirit power and services etc)

7) Does drain works as in SR4? Are there big changes in drain values compared to SR4?

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/cool.gif) Are the essence costs of cyberware and bioware still added together after halving the lower value?

9) How is the price level? Still cheap cyberware, decks, and items, medium costs for bioware? Or are we back to the 100k ¥ cyberlimb as in SR3? What about the costs for alpha etc ware or cultured bioware? Can you still reduce the essence costs for your cerebral booster or synaptic booster?

10) How are the cyberlimb rules? Still the mess from SR234 or are they better now?

SYL

I would like to know more of the specific content of the wireless bonuses. So far, based on the wired reflexes + reaction enhancer thing alone, I am greatly disillusioned with SR5, and am considering not bothering to pick up the new edition. I tottered along with my basic SR4 book and the changes document, because the anniversary edition screwed up so many things. SR5 seems worse. The fact that everyone turned their wireless off and used DNI should have let the developers know that no one wanted that shit, not had them sit down to figure out a contrived, lameass way to jam it down everyone's throats.

Edit:
I guess two really relevant questions would be:

How easy (or difficult) is it for a hacker to do this cyberware/gear hacking stuff?

What kind of options are available for non-hackers, to protect themselves (how available/expensive/practical is encryption and/or IC, and can it be used to protect these newly vulnerable areas)?

For the record, the concept intrigues me. I'm going to reserve final judgement until I have the book. I see no point in complaining about something I've not read as a whole, to see how it integrates with other aspects of the game.

This is fictitious tech that I'm fairly certain is not the official rationale. That said, wireless technology and software exist today that can pinpoint locations, movement direction, and speed. It could quantify those factors into usable data in real time, and be far more precise that the natural coordination of the character.



What non-wireless sensors can you think of that can pinpoint a person's body parts' location in 3D space accurately and in real time? If you moved it, how would it know? Wireless transmitters are very trackable through space by wireless receivers.


In my imaginary, non-canon technology, the wireless aspect allows the two systems to work together and slightly better.

There is a specific topic for that ...

SYL

In Eclipse Phase 'brainhacking' is possible and it's still an amazing game tough I have to agree it wouldn't work that well in Shadowrun (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

"Wireless" technology doesn't do that. Accelerometers wirelessly reporting their output do that. Wireless pinpointing can work, but even in the 2070s, perhaps especially in the 2070s, it's not going to be good enough to pinpoint size, location, or motion, better than roughly an area the size of a small car at speed. I want rather greater precision for where my arm is and what it's doing than "somewhere in the room with me" and "doing something" or "not doing something" unless the arm is physically detached from my body.



To start off, accelerometers.
To continue, literally everything that somehow did exactly that from the 2030s up through 2075. They didn't use fucking "wireless" to feedback the kinesthetic sense the street samurai's arm required for him to do his shooting the 2050s, that's for goddamn certain.
Also, point of interest, LIDAR would do a much, much better job than "Wireless". Do you even have a clue what the word "wireless" means? It means literally nothing more or less than that a given object is equipped to transmit data through a non-hardwired means, most usually radio waves.




And in my imaginary, wholly-canon technology from, oh, I dunno, the 2050s, 2060s and 2070s up through Shadowrun 5, all of that worked just perfectly when it was directly linked into a character's goddamn nervous system and DNI headware, no goddamn "wireless" necessary.


Seriously! You're just using "wireless" as a vauge magical term to explain everything!

Whatever works for you. I was just throwing it out there. If you can't suspend disbelief enough to think that maybe in 60 years multiple receivers in close proximity will be able to locate a receiver well enough to allow two separate systems to work better together, then there's nothing I can say. In real life, I know something about this topic.

And to me, things don't need to be the same way that they were in previous editions.

Oh, I can suspend my disbelief roughly that much, if you have multiple transceivers in close proximity (like, three in the foot, two in each segment of leg.)

I cannot suspend my disbelief enough to imagine that that is remotely a superior way of doing things than the way cyberware was done in the past - IE, emulating the nervous impulses that an organic limb would send and sending them along the same channels.




This is Shadowrun. New editions are unique in that they explicitly build upon and expand what has come in the past editions. Therefor, what past editions have held to be true must remain historically true in the new edition. New editions don't get to introduce a new way of doing things that is both 100% retarded and obviously worse than the way things worked in the older editions, because then it leaves the logical question of "If a 2075 cyberlimb is so fucking stupid and opens me up to wireless hacks, why wouldn't I want the 2074 model?" Or, more importantly, "I got my cyberlimb in 2072, why on Baal's Blue Earth would I air-quotes "upgrade" end-air-quotes to a 2075 that opens me up to hacking?"

As I mentioned before, remember that SR5 does not mean "uses radio or other wireless tranmission technology to operate" when it's talking about wireless.

It means, "connected to the Matrix."


-k

So you're suggesting that the existence of a design reason means an in-game reason cannot exist?

As for older hardware: If we assume it doesn't get the bonus due to being, you know, older, it doesn't have to be part of this system at all. Wireless bonuses are an over-and-above normal functionality, after all.

Karma: Can you provide some examples of connection bonuses that you consider as not justified? Also, is it explicitly possible to turn off the wireless on a commlink?

But the one cut and dry example that started all of this doesn't reflect that. In SR4 (and probably before, I don't recall) Reaction Enhancers and Wired Reflexes stack. In SR5, they only stack if you enable wireless. People are saying "Why not just use old gear?" because they were very obviously able to have the benefits of the 'new and improved' matrix connected gear without matrix connectivity years ago. This is not a case of a bonus going above and beyond, it's a case of taking a functionality that used to be baseline, and making matrix required to get it.

A similar argument could be made for smartgun (which I believe was stated earlier in the thread to be +2 accuracy without wireless, and +2 dicepool with wireless. Before accuracy wasn't a thing, and +2 dicepool came without any need for connectivity.)