I understood the 4e Matrix, I just could never get it to work decently. Hacking an opponents cyberware, while theoretically possible in 4e, was so impractical as to not exist. My best guess was that it would take 3 Extended tests; if you got them in one IP each, you still have the problem that the sam could have shot them in the face six times by the time you pull it off.

5e claims that it's now practical, but I don't understand the rules well enough to actually try. Granted, I haven't played a Decker yet, just an adept.

A gamesystem is not limited to wireless bonuses alone, neither is Matrix as its subsystem. 5e Matrix is beyond horrible.
Oh, and let me remind you if you remove wireless bonuses you now have a decker with his high-priority advances significantly reduced in usefulness.


Well, in 4e it isn't practical to do it when you're face to face with a sammy who's aware of what you're doing. You can still probe him silently from afar, if you so wish.
That said, I don't think hacking implants is all that crucial for a new group. Unlike hacking hosts, which is a much more intuitive and straightforward process (until you start getting into advanced details) in 4e.

It's practical, to a silly point if you're willing to burn edge on it, if you hit a situation where it's a better option than just shooting them. Given how the 5e Edge rules interact with hacking, it is literally impossible to have anything connected to the Matrix and be assured it is secure, no matter how good the thing you have it slaved to is. The only real workaround is to essentially have a bag full of a couple hundred Matrix-connected and silent running NERPS in your back pocket, so that the opposing hacker's random attempts to find the right silent running icon delay him enough that he gets bored of rolling.

do you feel that rules are necessary to allow a street samurai to con with the pistols skill or hack into a host using automatics?

if not, then why is it so important that a hacker be able to fight using hacking skills?

the only archetype that uses the same core skills and attributes for just about every situation (ie mages) are generally considered the most overpowered and unbalanced of all the archetypes in the system.

so far as i'm concerned, requiring different skills and attributes in different situations is far better for system design.

otherwise, the setting has far too much granularity with no real gain; you may as well just have couple of skills ("do stuff" and "resist stuff") and/or attributes ("offence" and "defence") and just use those to resolve every conflict. otherwise, anyone who isn't of the archetype(s) that gets to do everything with their narrow skill set is basically being punished for wanting to play an archetype that is not favoured by the system's mechanics.

The point is, in 4e most Decking tasks were Extended tests, which meant doing anything in the same timeframe as the rest of the party was problematical. Even simple hacking runs could take hours and hours, more than long enough for everyone else to get bored and decide to do something. Even on-the-fly hacking often took more than one roll, so decking in the middle of a firefight (a great old tool for building tension) was a serious problem.


Yeah, I remember the discussion here about a thousand active stealth tags. I actually came up with a non-cheesy version of that: my adept carries three external smartlink systems, active but not connected to a gun. If a decker goes after my gun, there's a very good chance that he'll hack the wrong smartlink.

Yeah, it's a cheesy workaround that shouldn't be necessary. The whole cyberware/weapon hacking in combat mechanic doesn't add any fun to the game. Heck, it didn't add anything in 4e either, unless you count making skinlink on the list of items everyone owned like FFBA.

Because the system is balanced to only allow him to use these skills effectively when he comes from character creation because it assumes that he will be able to use them as written in the core book. Or do you think a new GM should be rebalancing the gamesystem to account for its failures?


Decking during a firefight, given that on the fly hacking takes but a few turns, is perfectly possible, if not reasonable, to do in 4e. But anyhow I'm picking a system that I can understand to the point of being able to answer my players' questions over one I can't, even if the former features the dreaded Extended Tests.

and yet the general consensus is that you'd do better to just put a few points into a firearm skill and shoot people during a firefight, whether or not you have any sort of combat augmentation, than to spend your time trying to hack into anything at all.

if the system is balanced so that the hacker absolutely needs those abilities in order to be viable, then why is it that the general consensus of the more effective way to spend your actions is to not hack, even assuming your enemies are dumb enough to leave their gear online for you in the first place?

if hacking was supposed to replace shooting people in combat for the hacker characters, they failed miserably at that. the enemies not leaving their spinal cord and eyeballs connected to the matrix has no meaningful impact on how useful a hacker can be in combat the vast majority of the time, because the vast majority of the time your hacker should be pulling out a gun and shooting people. the only time it's a better action is if you can't shoot, which mostly means you're not there, and one of the explicitly mentioned goals of the edition was to avoid situations where the hacker is sitting in a van someplace far away.

AMEN TO THAT... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cyber.gif)

The general consensus among whom, exactly, and how have you pinpointed it? Putting a few points into a firearm skill doesn't work at all simply for making you a 1 IP goon with an attack pool smaller than that for dodging on other goons.

The system is balanced taking these abilities into account (how well it is balanced is quite another question). It is not a sane idea to make a new GM to rebalance a system.

Oh, so implants without wireless bonuses? Just great!

The character I currently play in SR5 totally eschews Wireless bonuses completely, since they are a sure way to give yourself away. Nothing like transmitting your location in a highly secure facility. *shakes head*

And they (the way wireless bonuses were implemented) are stupid to boot... *shrugs*

It's not just consensus, it's fact.

Let's say the decker wants to hack a ganger's pistol and eject the clip in SR4.5, It takes three extended tests to do so. Even if he manages to do them all in one roll each, that's three IP he spent doing it. So, while he's busy trying to hack the guy's gun, the sam can walk up and shoot the ganger six times.

Quite simply, it's more efficient to shoot people than try and combat-hack their equipment. You can shoot twice per pass, as opposed to make one roll towards an Extended test. The action economy is better-- much better, if you assume it takes more than one roll to beat the test, sometimes Extended tests take a lot of riolls.

even in 5th, it's still better to just shoot. even if all you can do is lay down suppressing fire, if your objective is to attack an enemy and remove them from the fight, you want to use a gun. you still need to spend at least 1-2 actions to mark your target before you can even try to do anything at all. even if it takes you 2 actions to put someone down with shooting (although if you combine your shooting with someone else's, not so hard; note that hacking does not combine well with anyone else's actions at all), you're still ahead of the game by shooting because you reduced their dice pool on action 1, instead of reducing their dice pool 2-3 actions later.

(hacking still remains useful for, say, hacking a security door to make it open or close, however, which has absolutely zero reliance on whether someone's cybereyes run on the cloud or not).

and if the system is balanced on having the ability to hack cyberware, but is so poorly done that it's almost never a good idea (unless you're a corporate team of hackers launching an en masse cyberattack from a central location so that you can send your top talent to protect any of a number of possible locations), nothing is lost by preventing that hacking from occurring. if anything, by making it clear that such hacking will not work well, you remove a noob trap from the game. so far as I'm concerned, that's a beneficial effect on the system, not a problem that needs fixing.

Unless it's something that can be directly observed, it still requires proof.

First, the hacker does not need LoS to do his thing, and need not be seen doing it.
Second, please note we're discussing hacking in combat only in what pertains to 5e, which specifically makes it its goal to the point of making major changes to the Matrix and equipment to allow for it.


Ehm, are you seriously saying that your hacker stands a solid chance to hit anyone remotely combat-capable by Sixth World measures (that is, with the best IP- and thus Reaction-boosting implants available)?

Perhaps it's a better idea not to use such a poorly balanced system at all until you know what you're doing and are prepared to rebalance it to work the way you like? Why struggle through a broken system when you can get a working one out of the box?

The problem is, it still takes three actions to combat hack cyberware or equipment in SR5. If the idea was to give deckers something to do in combat, they failed, since shooting three times is better.

By the way, nice shifting of the goalposts. First you talked about shooting gangers, now you bring up prime runners. But even then, shooting is better: you can reduce their dodge pool, so the primary shooters have an easier target.

And yet, if you're playing a hacker in 5e, all your high-priority choices go into hacking.

How interesting, can I see where I mentioned gangers?
And no, it doesn't take a prime runner to have a dodge pool higher than a tertiary skill on a hacker, any goon will go.

You can also eat a long burst you're unable to dodge and die.

Excuse me, "goon".



And shooting them three times is *still* more effective than trying a combat hack.


That, too. Deckers don't need a lot of skill to do that, and if they suppress an area, the gun bunnies can finish off the rest.

Nameless corpsec HTR goons are goons still.

It just puts a hacker in clear and immediate danger of dying in a single IP when operating out of their element is all.
After all, the fifth tried to flush hackers from their vans not because of the excessive number of hackers participating in firefights.

see, that's the funny thing... with minimal investment, a decker can indeed hit most HTR goons.

3-4 skillpoints plus a specialization gives them 6 dice. having an agility of only 3 (so we're not even assuming a cyberlimb of doom) makes for 9 dice.

for suppressive fire, this will be opposed by reaction + edge. for targeted fire, it will be opposed by reaction + intuition... minus any reductions due to burst rules, potentially up to -9. 9 dice vs either of those dice pools is frankly a pretty solid chance to hit.

for example, against a tir ghost (professional rating 6 elite special forces), you can expect them to have 14 dice on regular defense. which is really quite good give them -9 to that dice pool, and now they're only enjoying 5 dice vs your 9.

interestingly enough, it's actually slightly worse for suppressing fire to hit them, since they'll actually get their full reaction of 8 (but no edge). on the other hand, on an average roll you are inflicting -3 to all of their actions. if you manage to hit them as well (which you get a chance to do based on how many times they take actions that expose them to fire... such as trying to shoot back), potential for even more penalties.

now, again, this is with very minimal investment into it. for ~50k nuyen you can get a cyberlimb kitted out to give you an exceptionally good chance to hit with relative ease. even simply investing in a bit more agility or improving your skill by a few points is going to increase your chances fairly well.

what's more, if we drop even one point of professional rating, to those elite corporate security forces you mentioned, they have a reaction + int of only 12. so that's 9 dice vs 3, which again i would consider to be a very good chance of landing a hit (9 vs 7 for suppression, not quite as good but still good). and even with them, "their presence at a facility generally means the shadowrunners are not getting paid nearly enough" (in other words, they're rather rare, not at all standard fare for runners). professional rating 4 goons don't even get to roll *one* die to dodge a full auto burst.

full auto fire is definitely your friend against hard-to-hit targets.

of course, you may wish to argue that recoil prevents that from being a valid strategy (it does absolutely nothing against suppressive fire, mind you). so, every second action will need to be a simple action long burst of only 6 rounds, inflicting a -5 penalty to dodge. looking at the numbers above... why yes, i do still think there's a very realistic chance of hitting a target with 9 dice, so long as the target is at -5 to dodge. especially if you're finishing off targets the street sam already wounded and they're down a couple of dice.

Full Defense is a valid tactic against someone who has 1 IP, and spending 50k on a cyberlimb and/or a bunch on IP boosters makes you get this much less for your hacking, while you're not exactly floating in extra funds as it is.

Hacking is good for a lot of things, but screwing/taking down an opponent during combat by messing with their gear or 'ware, is typically not one of them. Keep the team up to speed on enemy movements in the area. Lock down or open doors into the area the team is in. Hack enemy comlinks for information. Plenty of options, all of which can contribute to the group's actions. But honestly, if you want to take down an enemy, have the hacker pick up a weapon and shoot at said enemy. And honestly, if you make a hacker character that is incapable of taking care of him-/her-/itself during a fight, I will call you foolish. Actually, that last part goes for any kind of character IMO.

One huge nerf bat besides the time and effort it takes to hack is the Overwatch Score.

So far in Missions play every decker I have run into has had an uncomfortably short operating time when hacking before they have to jack out, as the damn Overwatch accumulates way too fast.

Once when we were in the middle of a facility infiltration, which meant suddenly all their suppressed cameras and security systems came back online. Things got loud really fast. Fortunately I was playing Viktor. He does loud well.

The only decker I ran into that didn't have such issues was an odd technomancer/decker hybrid, but even then he took that much longer to do things because he was doing both Matrix and Resonance stuff.


-k

ok, so at this point you're suggesting that trading one action from the hacker for one action from essentially the best-of-the-best in the entire world is a *bad* trade?

if the team's hacker just forced an elite special forces enemy to sit on his butt and do nothing for a turn immediately, that is massively more effective than being somewhat annoying 3 turns from now could ever hope to accomplish.

alternately, as I've noted several times, suppressing fire is a thing. it lasts until you get another action, so for a person with 1 IP, that's until the next combat turn during which time you're inflicting penalties and potentially damaging the enemy (with a very reasonable chance of success) unless they just spend the whole CT in cover.

with a gun and nearly no investment whatsoever, I can inflict meaningful penalties in a single action. with hacking, I can spend 2-3 turns or more (what, you think tir ghosts have crap matrix security?) to eventually maybe cause some minor inconvenience.

it isn't even a close competition. pick up a freaking gun. if you want to hack and be useful, the gear on or in an enemy is not the right thing to target.

Sure... My Technomancer in SR5 can, and actually has, shot people in the course of a run, rather than hacking stuff. In combat, it is far superior to shoot a gun than it is to try and hack something. *shrug*

Once again we've run into my favorite pet peeve, the one where 'combat capable' is defined as 'can generate a dice pool approaching twenty'. Ignore it. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)