^ This is something my brother and I hashed out when I explaned some of the bonuses to him. I think it comes down to the word wireless. Half of the bonuses make sense as matrix connections (smartgun, to me at least). Others, like WR/RE, feel more like they were ment to be more like Bluetooth. Like at some point they wanted to make a really big distinction between Matrix access and your PAN. A lot of the bonuses seem to hold this up to me. Like it was a huge project that kept having staff pulled from it. It sounded too cool to cancel, but no one understood it enough to really support it. (the periscope really screams half-finished project to me).

As for my reasoning about the seeming security hole that wireless bonuses cause, I could accept contrived. Complicated, not so much, but I did say it was my opinion. I feel like it is a fairly simple, and logical, conclusion from the perspective of the world space. But, again, I view the world space as something the players have to survive in, not as something built for them. I am also more inclined to classic cyberpunk, rather than post-cyberpunk.

SO much this...

But why does anyone care about this stuff? The reason: They don't.

If you put an alternative to them that wireless goes away and hackers can just hack devices anyway because of awesome future stuff so then the payoff becomes 'either have cyberware and be awesome, but vulnerable or don't' the same cohort of players drop the logical arguments and crank out other ones, like balance. All in aid of what they really care about:

"I don't want my samurai to be vulnerable to hackers"

Which many of us already did in previous editions. Minimization of exposure is a survival trait in the Shadows. SO yes, in 5th Edition, as it is written, My characters will NEVER make use of the wireless bonuses, not only because they are crap, but because they expose you needlessly to the opposition.

It's just a confluence of stupid factors.

Trading security for extra bonuses doesn't make sense if those bonuses aren't well worth the loss of security. It's like telling Melee Murray he can gain +1 DV on his melee attacks and +1 dice on his Dodge rolls if he stands in the middle of an open field without cover. Sure, the slight bonuses are nice, but if he only gets them by making himself a sitting duck for ranged opponents, he's simply not going to bother.

That said, even if the bonuses were amazing, they still need to make sense. Offering a bonus of +10 DV and +10 dice on his Dodge rolls might potentially be worth it to Murray, but it still doesn't make an ounce of goddamn sense that standing in an open field without cover would provide such a bonus. The concept is literally insane. It's like if chewing bubblegum made you bulletproof - it's completely divorced from anything resembling reality.

~Umi

Agreed... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)
It was a sad day when I read the comments of the Writer who created those wireless bonuses. He had absolutely no direction or guidance, and apparently no idea how the Matrix actually worked. And he chose Cool (not sure why he thought his bonuses were Cool, but that is exactly what he said) over Reasonable.

Being bulletproof when you chew bubblegum and having Dodge bonus when in the middle of an open field would be great for a 90s action movie game, though.

Want that? Play Feng Shui. It has what you crave.
A Feng Shui Shadowrun port would be (and totally is) freakin' awesome - GM'd one for a while. It was fun.

Now, if the bubblegum was a Contact Trigger for an Alchemical Preparation, that could work.

...asuming the Alchemy rules actually existed in a useable form, that is...

~Umi

"I'm here to kick ass and chew bubble gum and I'm all out of bubblegum." ?

Because bad publicity cuts into the bottom line. A scandal means that you won't sell the same projected number of units and make the same profit, and indeed, may cost you millions or billions of nuyen if it happens as just the wrong time and instead of everyone buying Aztechnology's New Product, they're buying the Ares Macrotechnology version which isn't associated with exploding chemical plants.

Will Aztechnology still be in the black? Yes. But most likely large amounts of mid-level executives and drones will have to answer to why they missed their target profit and let Ares scoop up the lion's share of the initial market. And knowing Aztechnology not a few of them may even be sacrificed on the nearest teocalli.

One need only look to the Excalibur Project from Ares. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/eek.gif)

Well, that of course was taken way too far - it should have stung, but not really done the absolutely massive damage we're supposed to believe it did.

~Umi

That also is true. Way Overblown, in my opinion. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Just found this thread, didn't expect most of the discussion to be about something other than Run & Gun (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) Apologies for responding to posts a few days old...



Using your analogy, "Support" types are more akin to Engineers than Supply Wagons. Sure, they do some boring bridge-building sometimes, but they're also expected to perform highly specialized and vital non-combat tasks under fire when the occasion demands.




Simulated violence is SR but simulated simulated violence (i.e. decking) is MLPR? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

The "image problem" of decking is partly, IMO, because nobody knows what decking is like. Everyone can imagine what's going on in a gunfight to a certain extent even if the GM runs it dully and mechanically. Decking has no such shared imagery that everyone can fill in on their own, the GM has to provide it, and most don't (myself included - something I need to work on).




Entirely agree here. It was a problem in 4th: If the hacker wants to start hacking the opposition when combat starts, they've got to first spend time searching for hidden nodes, and then sniffing/hacking, before they could actually do anything that had any useful impact. 5th has similar problems, spotting the right icons and having to accumulate enough marks to do what you want. This is a major reason (but not the only one, there's a bunch) why I've been trying to come up with better system myself.

To paraphrase Chris Rock, "The people that buy and play Shadowrun can't win an argument about the rules or other game ideas with CGL because they are handicapped by a need to make sense..."

That's fair. Except Engineers are very "hands-on", and get to play with explosives and stuff.

Still, building a bridge while being shot at isn't glamorous. Neither is hacking a door or a camera while being shot at.

~Umi

See this seems to imply a great deal more open market competition than I thought there was. The grunts on the ground actually have a choice in what they buy? I thought it was more a case of 'This is Ares corp land, buy Ares' and 'The government is bought out by Ares, only Ares products make it to market here' and selling to other corps well...why do they care about a leak at a chemical plant leading to the deaths of thousands?

Are there really that many people in independant nations who 1. want to buy the products in a new competitive market 2. have the cash to do so and 3. have the freedom to choose to do that?

But it is Necessary, and is oftentimes the difference between getting Dead/Caught and escaping.
As for explosives..... I am all about the Explosives... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

You're posting on Dumpshock. No thread stays on topic for more than a page, at best. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/sarcastic.gif)

Depends on the area. Not everyone works directly for the Head office Corps. So if you work in the Aztechnology pyramid, you have your set lifestyle and shop from Azzie shops primarily as most of you pay is in Azzie corp scrip.

Offsite you have a lot of various business who may be part of the Corp umbrella, but in a bit looser fashion.

So you might work for Seattle Wholefoods, a subsidiary of Aztechnology that carries the local range of eats as the distributor to other chains of supermarkets.

While the company is owned by the AZ, you are as likely to be paid in AZ scrip redeemable in the Azzie pyramid as being paid regular nuyen.

Likewise your outlets probably honor AZ scrip or nuyen used for any purchases, but might not honor Renraku or other corpscrip, forcing them to use nuyen for purchases.

Plus if you are eating/wearing/using another corp's items that tends to reflect poorly on yourself, especially in that middle part of the ladder.

Do the corps have a lot of fingers in a lot of pies? sure, but there are few areas where one corp pretty much has any particular sector sewn up.

You see that as a bad thing? Weird. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

~Umi

Hence the problem.
The job needs to be done, but nobody enjoys playing it.

It's kind of like if there was a game system where you could play as a Soldier, a Police Officer, a Firefighter, or a Garbage Man.

All necessary in different ways, but one of those isn't terribly attractive.

~Umi

the fact that horizon exists points strongly towards the fact that marketing is important. if people don't have choices, then marketing wouldn't be important, therefore, people must have choices.

certainly, as noted above, there are places where you don't have a choice (or at least, not a meaningful one - you can buy from corp brand A or corp brand B, but you're still buying from the same overall corporation). but there are also lots of places where you *do* have a choice. there are even large corporations that are not megacorporations, which also could not happen if there was no way for consumers to buy products that aren't from a mega.



really? what market is there for wired reflexes where you can say with any degree of certainty that you don't have to worry about being targeted in a fight?

and for the kinds of situations where wired reflexes are needed, discovery is pretty much always a concern, unless you've already been discovered in which case the fact that it is vulnerable is a concern.

sure, wired reflexes may let you faceroll uncoordinated gangs with poor equipment more easily, but you don't need wired reflexes for that. some decent armour, superior weapons, a couple vehicles, and appropriate tactics and actually being trained in the use of your equipment are more than enough for that. meanwhile, if you've got wired reflexes active and the gangers manage to notice it (which they can do using their completely bog-standard consumer-grade electronics that cost them 100 nuyen), you might actually blow your chance at catching them because it gives them time to run away in a crowded urban environment where 100 meters is significant. not to mention that nobody actually cares enough to do anything about the gangs anyways most of the time, so the situation where heavily cybered assets are assigned to the job is fairly unlikely in the first place.