Steve Jobs lived a life of anarchism and mischief? Hardly. He's as anti-establishment as Damien Knight (Who has more than passing similarity, on a side note, to Jobs) or Richard Villiers. Jobs worked exceedingly well within and with the system. His corporate success is testament to that.


"Some", int his case, means "no". And I wager it's not the greatest minds available.


It's the other way round. IC is used to slow them down until the spider deals with them. GOD is the nuclear option and, since corporations tend to like to keep their private systems private, probably not a core component of their system security architecture. That's where local GODs and Spiders come in.

I give up. Clearly none of my examples of real-world people who have taken real-world technical knowledge and broken the law with them aren't good enough to show that sometimes highly-skilled people break the law, and since my real-world example of someone bucking the system and succeeding by *literally* creating an entirely new industry despite the fact that he *obviously* should have just settled for a job at IBM or Atari isn't good enough to show that not every highly-skilled person chooses to go into the established industry to use their skills in the established manner, then I concede the point. It's no longer worth arguing what was a minor point of the entire conversation.

I'm stupid. You're smart. I was wrong. You were right. You're the best. I'm the worst. You're very good-looking. I'm not very attractive.

Unfortunately, he DID stay in the same industry (Computers, he just downscaled). He founded a Frigging Corporation that rules the modern computing world. *shrug*
Far cry from working the shady side of the Law, as a Shadowrunner would do. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Happy Gilmore?

SiliconRun™

Do you have what it takes to run the shadows of Silicon Valley in 1980?

Mr. Johnson: I need you to take the floppy discs containing the latest DOS Operating System, and all tape backups.

Shadowrunner Face: We'll do it like we always do. In pink blazers and a 200,000 nuyen sports car.

best power ever

This. There will be no hacking limbs coz folks wont have them wireless enabled, too dangerous for no real gain.

That's what I decided. If for no other reason than to feel the smug satisfaction of punching politicians for being, well, politicians.

I'm sobbing quietly in sympathy for the poor detective assigned to investigate the multiple assaults on politicians and finding SFA evidence.
He'll probably lose his job over this.
I hope you're happy.
You monster.

Nah, it'd be pretty obvious. Especially if it happens on TV (live, recorded, doesn't matter). It'd clearly capture the disembodied fist coming out of nowhere.

Optionally (and ideally) I'd be able to drop/leave behind a written statement which succinctly disproves the statement I had so rudely interrupted. If for no other reason that to teach people to actually THINK.

Hmmm... I wonder if you could use brass knuckles or a wrist-mounted cattle prod with your time punches?

Honestly, don't care. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif) It's more about being a dick and setting people on the path of Not Telling Lies than to actually hurt people.

- yes, professional rating 5. it's very simple. i open my book, start digging through until i find characters built with similar amounts of power, and that's when you've got roughly the same rating. the guy you've got patrolling the matrix is equivalent to an elite corporate security team that is given things like augmentations to their various attributes, and have skills above the level of chargen shadowrunners. which are professional rating 5, well above what you have checking your systems every second or so.

- who needs droves? there's something like 500 shadowrunners total in seattle, from what we've been told. some will be quite good at what they do, some not so much. some of them will be former corp employees, some of them will be naturally gifted and worked their way up from being in a gang, some will be anarchists, some will just not be suited for corporate employment for reasons other than skill. of those, only perhaps 1/5 (if that) will be hackers. do i seriously need to go through and list every possible reason someone could possibly be running the shadows for you? i kinda assumed that, given it's the central concept of the system that there are these extremely skilled people who are shadowrunners, you'd be able to figure out some reasons why highly talented and skilled individuals may become shadowrunners. in all likelihood, given that in your world being top of your class and being the guy that other *professionals* go to for advice gets you a job doing the equivalent of staring at a security monitor for hours on end, waiting for stuff to happen... there's a heck of a lot more potential for advancement, apparently.

- "standby to deploy to hotspots" = "randomly patrolling in a corporate facility so that maybe he'll randomly find some shadowrunners to kill for fun" in your world apparently. so why aren't there elite physical corporate security teams doing the same thing as your sample matrix corporate security guy? why aren't there squads of elite security that pick random hallways to set up in to just shoot any random intruders that might walk through, if that's what you've got your elite matrix security forces doing?

- the setting is built with security guards that are professional rating 2. because you don't take a highly trained, exceptionally intelligent, and experienced person, put them into a massively accelerated reality, and have them stare at a screen for what will feel like 24 hours a day. you put them to work making money for you. this guy is skilled enough to be doing research. it takes a freaking matrix perception pool of 3 to generally notice if there are nodes running silent in the area. a dicepool of 6 is even more beyond what is needed. 7-8 is just crazy, and given that you can pay these chumps minimum wage instead of what you would have to pay to bring in someone who is near the limit of human intelligence, and has very good skills and experience (skill rating 7 is a veteran who other professionals turn to for advice), would command. you really can hire those professional rating 2 guys by the dozen and still have it be less expensive than hiring a single person with the qualifications of your example (not to mention the cost of augmentation etc).

a team of 10 rating 2 deckers will have 10 times as many actions as the single professional rating 5 deckers. they can use teamwork tests to get some very impressive things done. they have an excellent chance of being able to hack anything that is online before it can be shut down (by acting first, and by being able to target things after the person has already used their free action).

- apparently i do have a different definition of useful than you, because having +2 reflex and +2d6 initiative dice is pretty damned useful to me whether or not i can get another +2 reflex on top of that. a smuggling compartment is not made viable by what kind of action it takes to open or close (even if that being dependant on matrix access is stupid), it's made viable by how hard it is to detect. there's tons of great gear that either doesn't have an online bonus, or doesn't have one that determines it's usefulness. not everything is smartlinks on already high-accuracy guns and perception enhancements.

regarding the possibility of cyberdecks with high firewall: sure. the best one you can buy at chargen is almost all of your starting money, and provides just as much firewall as a rating 7 commlink, which is a mere fraction of the cost and is not restricted at all, meaning it's quite easy to get your hands on as well.

but device rating also decides how many devices can be slaved to it. as i recall, a rating 4 cyberdeck (best you can get in chargen, again costing most of your starting resources) will protect a grant total of 12 devices. if your team uses a technomancer instead of a decker, you actually get none. so for your entire team, you can have 12 devices, and not a single one more, slaved to the best chargen cyberdeck... and a single matrix perception check will generally speaking still reveal that there is a hidden node where there wasn't one before, and you'll still be screwed over.

or, you can just turn off wireless, like any sane human being who doesn't want to be trivially easy to detect the presence (if not the location) of, and not have to worry that your opponent making a single threshold 1 test (likely with dicepools that make said threshold very reliably) won't ruin the entire thing.

Everyone: stop it.

Someone should have asked him if Lone Wolf has plans/ETA for a Hero Builder set for SR5.

should have asked him why he hates errata too . .

Think hard enough and you might find the answer. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

I saw an early draft of the Action Point rules, and I liked it a lot. But I was not playtesting, and once I got the proofreading documents it was changed.

I've been playing with Action Points for years, and much prefer it to the SR4 rules.

This time (SR5) however I'll stick to RAW, as it makes everything easyer when playing at conventions and with new players.