and I told at least once that its not important how it works. its the Speed of the Item that is important


No, not at all, because it does not make any sense at all !
The WiFi makes the Laser more effective (adds a +1 Bonus ) so it makes somthing that works at the Speed of Light better


none of Your explanations are backed up by RAW

all You do is inventing Stuff so that your explanation makes sense to You but are NOT in the Description of neither the Item nor the Bonus (and by-the-Way do you know which explanation makes sense to me ? Answer: The WiFi Bonus is only there so that Chars switch their Weapons/Items on WiFi so that they can be bricked by NSC Deckers)


or use explanations from Smartlink


what are the weather conditions inside a Building at a Target that is 5 Yards away and how big is that influens to a Bullet ?
but these are Questions for the Smartlink and why the WiFi makes the Smartlink better.one Bonus-that-makes-no-sense at a Time (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)
Right now the question is:
When the WiFi gives a Bonus to a Laserpointer and the WiFi gives a Bonus to a thrown Knife why shouldn't it give a Bonus to Items which speed is in between those two extremes ???

with a dance between extremes
Medicineman

The Wifi penalties are so horrifically bad that it should just be hauled out back, shot out of its misery, buried, and then pour the proverbial concrete over it. Nobody is going to fully implement this in any practical game session and they need to get real about it.

Then they need to review their archetypes and decide what roles they all perform and make sure "everything has a price" isn't penalizing them from having their proper niche. Cyber seems to pay a very heavy price compared to its magical equivalents that one often just wonders, "why do they bother"? Cyber should be distinct not just for its disadvantages, but the advantages too.

What do you mean by "Speed of the Item", with regards to a laser sight? You think it is c? Would you say the same about any item that sends out EM waves?


The book tells us:
"Because nearly every piece of gear and ’ware is wireless capable, it means nearly every piece of gear and cyber- ware benefits dramatically from being “meshed” into your wireless personal area network and the Matrix as a whole."

They give two examples of how this might work:
"Your Ares Alpha can’t auto-adjust for the wind direction and speed if it can’t download local up- to-the-second weather conditions, and your Eurocar Westwind 3000 doesn’t know the status of the next three traffic lights if it’s not connected to GridGuide..."

If you look at the description of the Wireless bonus for a smartgun system, it says:
"Wireless: A wireless smartlink provides a dice pool bonus to all attacks with the weapon: +1 if you’re using gear with a smart link..."

They don't say anything about wind, they just tell you how many dice you get. In general, they don't give us complete descriptions of the systems and functionality of all pieces of gear. You can interpret the stuff they do tell us how you like. My position is that there are reasonable interpretations for most Wireless bonuses, that's all.

(Legitimately bad Wireless bonuses are, by my count: Tiffani Needler color change, Air Tank, the stuff that's essentially Switching Device Modes that confuses Wireless with DNI)

All the wireless bonuses are bad... More so because the guy who wrote them did not understand how the system worked in the first place, and chose to implement things that HE preferred based upon his definition of Rule of Cool (BY HIS OWN ADMISSION). Sorry, but his choices are decidedly NOT Cool in my book, and are downright ludicrous in many, many ways.

Wind is an environmental modifier to ranged attack that is compensated by smartlink, per page 174-175, with no regards to whether wireless is enabled or not.

well I mean the Speed of the Item
the Speed of a Throwing Knive or Shuriken , the Speed of an Arrow, of a Bullet, of Light....
(wifi already gives a Bonus to the first and to the last Item....
and since WiFi bonuses can not be explained within real World Logic or physical laws so they have to be adressed to with purely RAW Logic)

with a speedy Dance
Medicineman

The problem is (again) that the decisive factor solely is whether the device's Wifi is on or off. If you turn off the wireless on your Alpha but connect it to your commlink via cable there is no bonus from auto-adjusting to wind, because it's not wireless. And this isn't some unintended side effect, it is an example of the rules doing exactly what they were built to do -- forcing players to open up their gear so hackers can pull Neo tricks like bricking the enemy's rifle.

I agree that some of the wireless bonuses would make sense as "online bonuses", but that is neither what they are nor what they were inteded to be.

GITS-style hacking is fine in GITS, but it is a bit of a Frankenstein's monster if you try to port it into a game where hacking works completely differently. In play, the wireless "bonuses" are typically something most sane players will ignore (turning off their wireless), because when it comes to a +2 bonus for this or that, versus leaving yourself vulnerable to a potentially crippling attack from an undetectable vector, it isn't worth it.

All of this, so deckers could have an attack that they won't get to use that often. Most grunts won't have 'ware to hack, hacking guns and such really doesn't do much, and any enemies with 'ware will probably have their own matrix support protecting them. And like the mage protects the team with counterspelling, the decker gets to be the matrix babysitter, protecting the rest of the team from hostile hacking.

To start: quality control sucks. Whether its subject content(WAR!) or editing or proofreading or errata and adding it back in to books. Its been shown elsewhere. Then on top of that, the book is one of the MOST expensive books out there for a core book, with all that bad quality control. The books themselves are hard cover and color and look great. But the content and quality between covers is not. And on TOP OF THAT, that you flip over CGL to its Battletech side and the quality control and content are awesome in comparison and you have one frustrated and pissed off customer.

I cant talk about the rules, there are better qualified people in this thread that have done so already, but some of them are bad- wireless rules and such.

But I can talk about fluff. It sucks, to me. Its completely lost its roots of dystopia, chrome, matrix and coprorations. Too much large plots of elves and dragons machinactions not enough coprorations. Move to bioware and transhumanity and left behind chrome and cyberware. Unified magic that removes the fun and mystery from shamans and hermetics. The current plot of nanites......is a rehash of sorts of unviersal brotherhood(and a couple others like shedim and such).

It feels like it lost its roots. Take wireless internet.....yeah, you spend 20 years hammering corporate extraterratoriality to us and it feels just like that they ceeded control of the new internet to GOD. Ceed control over to someone else. Technology based on one of their rivals.......I'm sure there is more I'm missing but it doesnt feel like shadowrun much anymore. Too much global not enough local.

Year Cyberpunk,

[img]http://i.imgur.com/uzYiWMx.jpg[/img]

A genre grounded in reality and set in the near future. Unlike Sifi, where you can assume that today political and social problem are “solved somehow” and the technological is beyond our understanding. Cyberpunk is in the danger zone. And has the problem that most of the technology and mechanics are things we still understand. Even if in some cases we today don’t have the knowhow to actual replicate, produce or safely use this technology, we understand the basics, the theory. For most of the technology involved in shadowrun we already have completed the foundational research, and in some cases we already surpassed shadowrun.

Wireless-Bonus is good example why this genre is risky, and how you can fuck it up. In a distant SiFi setting you could just say: If y use the mod A you are vulnerable but you get X. But in SR and Wireless I have to leave my brain on the reception. Not that I have much of it.

And quoting some flufftext out of the books is not helping. I already assume the somehow solved the problem of limited bandwidth for wifi, wifi interference, health risk of too much wifi and wireless power theft. Some of the wireless mechanics still don’t work.


Let’s take smartgun.

Don’t let us use the “auto-adjusting to wind” mechanic, because that’s silly. Most of the time my characters, and player characters us a range too short to be affected by wind, there is no wind that could affect anything or there is no reliable local systems that could measure wind. And that’s the same with pretty much every other meteorological effect. If I now take a look on my watch and some of the function it has “offline”. I am sure that cyberpunk/sifi assault and sniper smartlink rifle can gather this kind of date alone and offline.

But there could be another mechanic involved to encourage a customer to go online. And for that I will just assume that in SR, you will always have ping of near 0. Something you must have in a world with enhanced reflexes, if you don’t want to have a Malus for using smart gun wireless.
Some guy in marketing, most likely, could have counseled his graphs and advised his higher ups, that it is profitable to just build wireless capable smart gun weapons instead of autonomy working ones. The corp gets additional revenue in service, the production is cheaper, they have an “always-on drm” for hardware and they can sell a weapon with build in thieve protection.

But even in this scenario, there will be people who don’t like always-on drm, and corps who sell devices without always-on drm. This one will be more expensive and the more advanced hardware will consume more space. But if I look into the mod rules, 4 or 5, comlink prices and todays aim assisted rifles I don’t think (“I don’t know”) it will be much.


But what is with the “Gits” factor?

Please don’t call it gits factor. Give Shiro Masamune some credit. Whenever a hacker in gits hacked someone else, he was going over the other ones datajack, their communication network or the other one were stupid amateurs. Leaving his car running, with money on the dashboard and wondering why it got stolen, stupid.
If you want a Gits factor why not implement tac-net advantages and make it available and affordable for runners. Give the hacker a Command and Control roll, and the option of range combat team tests. Make the tac net a host. A host the hacker can rule and defend.

Meh, I'm fine with this personally. If you have Wireless on your gun turned off, you run a cable from your gun to your commlink, and Wireless on your commlink is turned on:
1. Sure, why not get your Wireless bonus? You can use your commlink to talk to the Matrix for your gun, seems reasonable.
2. Of course, now your gun can be hacked, they just have to go through your commlink to get to it. Game-mechanics-wise, just treat it the same as having your gun slaved to your commlink.

Is there anything wrong with handling things this way? Since it's no better than just running the gun itself on Wireless, there isn't really any reason to do it, so I don't imagine anyone will, so I'm not too upset that they didn't include specific rules for it.


Well, they almost all work if you think of them this way, and it's what I assumed when I was reading it, so I'm not too concerned about what the writer was thinking or what they intended. They were obviously confused about some things (Wireless vs. DNI, mostly), despite that, the system generally works.


Off-topic, but just FYI, radio waves and microwaves (the kinds of things you'd use for wireless networking) are non-ionizing radiation and don't present any kind of health risk. Well, unless they're powerful enough to literally cook you.


Compensating for wind is only one thing that a smartgun system does, part of a host of small benefits that are all lumped together, as a matter of game mechanics, into a bonus of 1 or 2 dice. (Plus, weirdly, a small separate boost to compensation for wind alone.)


Yep, this suggests to me that the Wireless bonuses presented in the books aren't a matter of DRM, but are instead a matter of technical necessity. My interpretation is that in 2075, they can't make a smartgun system good enough to give you +2 Limit and +2 Dice without serious on-demand processing power, the kind of processing power it's just not feasible to walk around with.

Fixed that for you. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

By the way: the +2 dice pool bonus needing the wireless: no one's disputing that. Everyone agrees that that is a Reasonable Thing. It's the extending baton, the laser sight not working for a bow and arrow (but does for a throwing knife), the internal air tank's ludicrously pointless bonus, and the other crap.

Plenty of people seem upset about the idea of Wireless bonuses in general. Some in this thread have said, "All the wireless bonuses are bad…"

I don't disagree that there are bad wireless bonuses. I think the air tank is bad, I think color changing on the Tiffany Needler is bad, and I think, in general, all the Wireless bonuses that try to re-explain or override the distinction between 'Change Linked Device Mode' and 'Change Device Mode' just serve to confuse what could have been a nice neat mechanic. (DNI=Free, otherwise=Simple) The baton falls into this last category.


That's a very confused reading of the argument about laser sights and thrown knives, though, to be fair, that has been a very confusing argument.

Thrown knives don't benefit from a laser sight. They benefit from the user having a smartlink. Presumably, they have onboard sensors that report back on their trajectory, wind, etc. and the information they send to the user can help improve later throws.

Medicineman asks, essentially: If there are sensors to do this on a thrown knife, why not include them on an arrow as well? My response is that there are potential technical reasons why things that would work with a thrown knife might not be practical with a (much faster) arrow.

Medicineman argues: But, you can get Wireless bonuses with a laser sight, so, the fact that an arrow moves faster than a thrown knife is irrelevant. My response to that is to throw my hands up and despair, basically.

Don't count ME in the everyone category Draco18s... The fact that on Dec 31, 2074 you did not need such garbage and on January 1st, 2075 you do [need such garbage] shows me that the people responsible for world verisimilitude are smoking some really good stuff, and they are not willing to share it. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Uh. In-setting none of that happened at all. I think you're confusing the meta with the fluff. As far as the characters inside the setting are concerned, nothing changed. That was stated, by Catalyst, when 5th came out. It was a retcon that "the wireless bonuses were always there, we just changed the way rules work."

I think a smartgun system with Wireless turned off is just as good as an old smartgun system. Now they represent it's boost as giving you +2 Limit, when it used to give dice, but that's just a change in the game mechanics.

Changes to skills, Limits, Edge; lots of things change how many dice people are throwing around and what those dice mean. Changes to the game system don't necessarily represent any kind of change to the underlying setting.

Which was the edition shift where they changed the way Wired Reflexes worked, so that street sams no longer got to act 3-4 times before ordinary people were able to act once? Did you also interpret that as Wired Reflexes technology actually getting worse in-setting?

Which was stupid... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I disagree... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) Mainly because I think Limits (the way they were implemented) suck and highly despise them. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)
Of course, we never threw so many dice that Limits were a necessity to control stupid-high Dice pools either, so...

I always considered Wired Reflexes in 2nd edition to be stupid to start with, and was glad it was changed. I think multiple passes are also generally stupid. I always liked the cyberpunk conceit that those who were wired acted faster than those who were not, but adding multiple passes just clouds a lot of things. In my opinion, Cyberpunk 2020 got it right in that those who were wired had the high probability that they went first. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I do and because the party has a full time decker and the bad-guys generally don't, it tends to work in the party's favor.

Thinks I liked in 5th:
The initiative system
The change to drain codes over 4E

THings I hated in 5th:
The limits on everything
Bricking
Wireless Bonuses
The dropping of the difference between impact/ballitic armor

Everything else:MEH!

I'm in the 4th ed camp as the things I like are easily house ruled over to 4th ed.

And her we are in the "Danger zone".

If you look what todays aim assist system can do, and how advanced the computer technology in SR is, than there is no problem to just build this stuff without online-demand.
Or don’t. Let’s ignore what we can today and take a look on the price, size and capability for drones, commlinks or cyberware. Sure it is not feasible to put this kind of technology in a 200 bucks pistol, but assault rifles up wards or weapons like urban combat HP is another thing. And at this point professional criminals will just ignore the cheap online-demand weapons. Big Data and stuff is not healthy for a criminal.





Until a GM just thinks that job was hot enough that someone start to analyze the traffic. The corporation(s) use their Bigddata to identifying, marking and finding the runners.

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotfl.gif)
well in 2074 they could.....


Sorry, thats wrong (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) You like to interprete things (and sometimes You interpret wrong. You'd better stick to the ...RAW )
what I wrote:
If an Item that moves with the Speed of a throwing Knife gets a Bonus and an Item that moves at the Speed of Light, than all Items that move with a speed inbetween those two should get the Bonus too
and I'm not asking it. I'm extrapolating this
(and it's purely from the ingame logic .this is not from a common sense point of View, but sinse all Wireless Bonuses are NOT from a common sense point of view it makes kinda sense


no they don't have anything like that. theyre just a pece of Metal ,aerodynamic and with a edge and a point, just lthey've been for 100's of Years.
there is no electronic inside, no mechanical parts, no boosterjets, or Gyroscope, they're just a fucki plain peace of Metal


he who likes to dance with common sense
Medicineman

only with cybereyes ;9
most of the time its a mere +1 (just like a Laserpointer )


that was the third edition.
and the wired streetsam still had 3 IPs when joe normalo had only 1, its just the sequence that got changed (and it was accepted by the players because it was A) a good change) and B) not a real change at all !!)


it .did.not.change. at. all !!

with still the same Dance
Medicineman

And there in lies the real question, why haven't we added boosterjets to our knives yet?!?

ROCKET POWER BABY!!! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

*starts submitting to the R&D dept*

I have no idea what "today's aim assist" systems can do. Could you describe the kinds of systems you're talking about? Would you say they give the equivalent of +2 Limit, or +2 Dice, or what?

I suppose I could see an argument that smartgun systems in Shadowrun just aren't good enough, and never have been, if that's what you're saying?

But, if that's not what you're saying, arguing about how much processing power they'll require in 2075, and how easy that processing power will be carry around with you, that seems like a much more uncertain proposition.


Going from being able to act 3-4 times before the opposition can respond, to only being able to act once before they respond, that's a huge nerf. Way bigger than going from dice adders to limit boosters.

I mean, if you think it made the game better as a game, that's totally fine, but I think you have to agree that it's nonsensical to argue that every change to the game mechanics has to reflect some kind of in-setting change as well.


(I'm gonna leave off the throwing knife stuff for now, I think my existing posts explain my position about as well as I can hope to. I'm sorry if I misstated your position.)