Samurai to Script-Kiddie "You want to out-perform me and my mil-spec synapses with that 100¥-junk? I don´t think so. Sometimes it is what you have."

Well, yes, making VR worth it...
Which would you choose, the safe way where you cannot get hurt, or a +2 DP and now you can get hurt and maybe even die?
Also, I always thought VR was speed of thought, especially with the processing power you mentioned, so why does it have to abide by meat speeds?
Limiting AR brings the difference back...
But it is a matter of taste...

Script-Kiddie to Samurai: "By the time you said out-perform, I'd already commanded my twelve mooks to hack your link. Have fun with those new ware viruses! Hax0rz Rawk!!!"

Hacker to Samurai: "By the time you send a thought from that half-functional brain down your nice mil-spec artificial nerves, I've already snuck a micro-tapper bug up your pantleg to interface with your cyber-penis and get access to your PAN, exploited your pathetic firewall, and slipped a slave virus into your reflexes and smartlink. By the time you figure out the phrase to say to unlock them, I'll be long gone with your girlfriend and your bank account. I'll even give you a hint. It starts with "I'm a pretty, pretty little... blank." Seeya around, meatsack."


Okay, so I only wish I could have a hacker that was this slick and could manage all this before the Sammie blew his head off with a 22+ automatics DP or just cut it off with his equally scary spur DP all while smirking because he actually has a synaptic booster instead of wired reflexes and is immune to having them slave virused. *sniffles*

I'm not seeing the imbalance either. Movement is pretty vague in SR (or that might be in my games since I don't use a battle mat at all, YMMV) and I never personally divided movement over the maximum available passes but rather only over the available passes in any given combat. Which means that I could be dividing by anywhere between 2 and 5 now rather than 2 and 4 to figure out where people are. Plus, as I mentioned, I don't use a mat, so my measurements are usually pretty much judgment calls based on the group's perception of where people should be rather than exact measurements.

Most drones get whacked pretty quickly by spells and (directional) jammers in my games to help neutralize them so I don't foresee it as a problem. I'll reserve judgement on that one until I see it.

You know, I was kinda on the side of the hackers, until Sombranox spoke his Script-Kiddie and Hacker examples. Now, have to go with Ryu.

If your fast, your fast. A normal person is 1 IP. Legal Sim is twice as fast as a regular person. Illegal Sim is three times as fast. And so on and so forth.

Someone with IP boosters is... you guessed it. 2, 3, or 4 times as fast as a regular person!

You can assume that Matrix stuff is at the "speed of thought," but apparently SR4 disagrees. Maybe your brain doesn't respond as fast as you think it does. If you have a 4 IP Street Sam and a 4 IP Hacker, why do you think that one can think faster than the other? Why should the Sam's reflexes be responding slower than the Hacker's programs? You can say because "pure thought" or whatever is faster, but apparently that is not the case. (Well, until now, if you use the 5th IP.)

As someone who has problems where his brain is thinking faster than he can move his mouth and thus tripping over himself verbally I've always thought of IPs as more of a coordination thing. How fast can you gather information, process that into a desired course of action, and then actually do what you want to do. So if a Hacker has 3 IP and someone in their meat has 3 IP they are acting just as fast. The VR world has LOTS of info to assimilate compared to the real world so even if you do think faster you have to do MORE thinking to get the same conclusion.

As for anyone who is worried about drones I suggest you take a look again at Jamming on the Fly (105).

Damnit, that'll teach me to speak up.




I could point out varied examples of thought being faster than meat. Using things DNI being a free action versus a simple. Exploit probing taking longer in AR than VR, etc. What I truly wish they'd done rather than add a fifth IP is have cut various task intervals down as with these two examples. As it is though, I'm happy to have the fifth IP as at least one possible way of separating VR from meat, despite all the issues it may bring up.

In the end, to each his own though since we're all going to house rule the hell out of things to make them how we want anyways, so it doesn't matter all that much.

Here's how they could have made VR Hacking more beneficial than AR Hacking:

"AR Hacking limits the hacker to a 2 IP maximum. VR Hacking allows the Hacker to use all of the equipment to their full potential and can give more IP."

They did that as an optional rule tweak, but limited AR to 1 IP (or whatever the GM wants really).

Given the whole "we won't contradict corebook rules" policy, they couldn't make any official improvement to VR that would have limited AR.

Which, now that I think of it, is the same reason they couldn't make any kind of nice thing that VR hacking have certain actions that take less time. Instead, they just created the 5th IP, which gives one definite advantage to VR that can't be duplicated by AR.

By the time you have moved at the speed of thought a real fighter has taken your head off. shoved it up your rear entry, and spit down your throat without a thought. It just happened. Speed of thought is a ridiculous term, it occurs as quickly as physical action. They are not independent of each other. To suggest that you can think faster than you can act is to admit a lack of conviction.

Sorry, but the mental image of the street sam flinging a few commands at his computer, and then twiddling his thumbs for the other two passes that he has doesn't strike me as a compelling vision of the future... it more just conjures the idea of a huge "Loading... Please Wait" bar on his AR screen. I think we can at least agree that 2070 computer tech has progressed to the point where the user never has to wait for their OS to catch up unless they've managed to drag their system's Response down to 0 (where some people argue that it simply crashes, but that's a different debate entirely).

You haven't explained how a 2070 computer supposedly can't operate faster than an Ares Predator can pump out rounds on semi-automatic, you've just explained that full VR is too slow in your opinion. That just means that full VR should get more passes than anything happening in the meat... which would be exactly what the rules in Unwired do. Yes, making actions take less time might be a more accurate way of representing this, but it also involves hellish levels of book keeping and fact checking during play, which I doubt is anyone's cup of tea.

Like I said, it's mostly from the "I don't like AR hacking" bit of things. Which is pure preference.

I just can't seem to accept that pushing invisible AR buttons in the air, even _really_ fast button pressing, is going to work as fast as working at the level of the data being pumped straight into your brain and reacting instantly to commands without the steps in between of thinking of a proper motion, sending the signal through your body to enact that motion, enacting that motion on the interface, then waiting for it to recognize what motion was made. Which is what I've always understood AR hacking to be, which is why meat initiative enhancements help it since you can press commands faster and wave about in a blur at the air.

Which is all represented just fine as the +2 DP and +2 IP from hot sim VR, with the additional potential advantages of boosters and accelerators to crank the IPs to something beyond what is even possible in meat. I'm just protective of hackers having a chance to stay as hackers and not have to be hacker-sammies to use AR and run properly with the group. In other words, I don't think meat initiative enhancers (one of the core things that define sammies really through the years) should affect matrix things past a certain point.

Before Unwired, I had long ago just given up on SR4 hackers somewhat. In the SR4 groups I'd played in or ran, the hackers were all either hacker/sammies who never touched VR except to probe targets, or they were VR uber-hackers who never touched AR because it was too slow and got angry whenever they shared the group with one of the hacker/sammies when they did what they did in VR more safely than they could ever hope to.

For some reason, it never occurred to me before Unwired's tweak rule section to even consider the idea of limiting AR IP's. I don't remember seeing it suggestion anywhere on dumpshock and so I just always assumed that AR would inevitably overshadow VR hacking.

Adding a fifth IP was just a happy bonus, though this whole thread is about the problems that fifth IP can potentially cause and I agree that it could have issues that will come up once it's fully out there in play, but I like there being that distinction of allowing that speed in VR only.

Even with that fifth IP, I like the idea of limiting meat speeds to 1 to 3 IP (probably 2, but haven't decided) to continue broadening that gap. Furthermore, on another thread, someone suggested another house rule I liked of counting simsense accelerator and booster IPs for AR as well as VR and I'm probably going to steal that to represent boosted DNI and simsense overlay so hackers can hack in AR still with a modicum of speed and without full immersion. When it comes to it,if someone wants to make a hacker sammie, they'll be able to use their meat IP's partially, but damn well not for 4 IP's a round and probably not even for 3.

Again though, this is all personal preference for my games and my players are in the process of debating the merits of it all before coming to a consensus on what they want. If they want meat AR hacking, I'll leave things as are and just be content with the fifth IP for VR hackers as the speed gap.

Edit to add: P.S. This is all dependent also on my belief that physical IP's and AR hacking only involve physical motions as interface. Rules-wise, and even conceptually I suppose, initiative enhancers don't only speed up nerve conduction through the body, but also in the brain, allowing them to think DNI commands just as fast as they could have punched buttons, which blows this whole argument out of the water and would likely result in me getting berated for it. In that context, there's no rational reason why I think AR IPs should be limited. It's purely a preference thing at that point.

See, this is the thing. A samurai pointing his gun and firing is an action that with training becomes almost a reflex. The addition of wired reflexes, skillwires, smartlinks et al, push this to the level where it can happen without any real conscious analysis at all. And then you have to compare it with operating a bundle of computer programs. It's a little hard to imagine selecting options and sending commands being on the same level of reflex. It seems more natural to imagine it as conscious decisions. And for those of us that imagine it like this, it seems natural for hacking to take longer. Now the whole point of full VR in the original game, was that it lets one carry out complex operations like this intuitively and closer to the level of reflex. You don't select a set of files, select a target folder and hit copy; you grab their icon and throw it at the target system.

The problem with the part that I quoted above, is not that it's wrong, but that the Shadowrun rules don't represent what Sombranox is saying. What Sombranox is saying is that it's hard to imagine the AR interface being as fast as full VR and I agree. However, the accurate translation of that into Shadowrun rules would be for the AR actions to take longer (longer intervals, complex actions instead of simple actions, etc). There's a bit of that in some areas, but basically what the rules say when you cap IPs is that it takes you just as long to do something in AR as it does in VR, yet you can do fewer of them.

I think a lot of the arguing has to do with missing this fundamental issue with the IP capping rules - they don't actually represent what I assume they are intended to represent. AR is not slower by the rules. It just has an arbitrary limit built into it. Hence some people are arguing that the the cap should exist to represent AR's slowness and some are defending that the cap doesn't show that. The resolution would be to find a different way to represent the limits of AR.

At least that's my take on it,

K.

There is nothing magical about the speed of thought. Thoughts travel down nerves at a speed relative to the thickness of the axon and the myelination or lack thereof. Speeds range from about 1 m/s to about 100m/s. Yes, there are a substantial number of nerve impulses moving through your brain which you can physically walk faster than, and there isn't a thought in your head that you couldn't leave in the dust while riding on a motorcycle.

Here's a fun experiment: put a lighter to your friend's hand. They'll jerk their hand away and get super pissed. But the fun part is that they will jerk their hand away before they get pissed off. That's because pain comprehension only travels at about 2 meters per second, while motor innervation travels at about 25 meters per second. The reflex to move your hand away is actually located in your spinal cord, not your brain. So by the time your brain even receives the news that your hand is on fire, your arm is already in motion - the remaining distance from spinal cord to brain takes more time to travel at the slow c-fiber speeds than the return distance down the arm takes at the relatively fast motor neuron speeds.

Experiment 2: put your hand in front of your face and snap your fingers. See your thumb blur? That's because your central nervous system "only" takes pictures with your eye several dozen times a second. And while that's pretty good, it's not actually fast enough to keep up with the speed at which you can move your fingers.

Sorry dudes: the human brain just isn't that magical, and it isn't that fast. It's powerful, but it isn't particularly fast.

-Frank

It's just the usual feature creep - just feature creep that breaks a main rule.
Gamebreaking? Not really.
Bad style? Sure.

I had an interesting discussion with some people recently, roughly around the subject of martial arts, about what level of sophistication learned responses could reach, i.e. how out of the loop you could take conscious decision making. I did some reading up on what I could find on the subject but it wasn't much. I know the difference between how fast (not just technique) I could block and punch and especially the ability to roll with a punch changed dramatically with practice and I found that the amount of conscious decision making I felt had become substantially quieter (the best way I could describe it). What I managed to find on the subject did suggest you could learn some quite sophisticated movements as reflexes (I'm not sure if reflex is the technically correct word, here). And in Shadowrun, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere in the fluff stories of samurai with wired reflexes accidentally shooting someone almost before they realised they had done it, which was why those things had an off-switch. I imagine a wired samurai can shoot someone as quickly as a hacker can think some files to transfer etc. Presumably that's why Hot Sim is useful as it actually amps the brain signals up in some science-fictiony way, yes?

@knasser: Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. I certainly agree with the general point that "speed of thought" should not be magically fast.
For that matter, I have no issue with the idea that a skilled hacker with wired could hack a system with almost no conscious decision making aspects... certainly not with the way that hacking is described SR4, which is "apply program to problem". There doesn't really seem to be much more decision making going on than a soldier choosing which target to attack.

The number of passes in a turn is governed by the character with the most passes. It's not that every turn has four passes. If two character with two passes each are acting against each other, then the turn has two passes in it. If one character has two passes and one character has three, then the turn has three passes in it.

Dividing movement by any number of passes, whether it be four automatically or by the number of passes possessed by the character, doesn't work, and isn't in the canon. It makes a character with one pass arrive at a finish line ten meters away at the end of the first pass, while a character with four passes arrives at the finish line at the end of the fourth pass. A better approach is to take the movement rate, for example, 10m, and subtract movement from it as the character expends it. So a character with three passes could go ten meters in his first pass, but not be permitted to travel any further in passes 2 and 3. Or he could move three meters in pass one, four in pass two, and three in pass three.

Two points:

One: I always considered the 4th IP cap to be fluff anyhow. It as a gerneral limit on how much technology could chop up a certain amount of time. That no matter how chromed, or fax-similie there of, you are, tech at that point can only allow you movement some much a turn. That to me is a statement on tech and that is fluff. With new tech arriving, the ability to slice "think and act" time will increase, making the actor quicker, and time for him slow more-so. This may also be the limit the flesh may exibit, as moving any quicker may create phisiological problems, tendons and muscle tears and so-on. Although, this opens cyberware to create "muscle stabilizers" to handle more than four IPs, or a positive quality "Resiliant biomass" which gives you an increase of IP max as if it were an attribute, and lets give trolls a max 5 IPs, cause there just so beefy.

Two: Having a single IP person with top initiative going before a person with additional IPs seemed abit awry, in consideration to previous system if nothing else. Movement shouldn't resolve until the final pass; which in play mean you must act before you move, or hold till the last pass to make your action(possible 5th?). And everyone should act at their initiative for the first pass, then activate peoples fouth, third,second in descending order to show reaction from the top of the round. This may only occur at the first round of combat and then the first is placed after the second in the previously mentioned descending order.

I'm in favor of a rediculous number of IPs as I am a fan of comic book fare. The more IP's the more the characters will blur in front of the other characters.

To me, the 5th VR IP represents those instances in the novels where the Decker/Hacker ripped high end IC apart faster then it could rect, and, as far as I know, Black IC always has 4 IP. This means that now, your hacker CAN be faster then IC. I thought Drones were flat out limited to 3 IP, unless they had a brain-in-a-box in them, anyway? And, running a Drone is NOT a VR action, anyway. It also means that the TM can now hack that door faster, which does not change much in actual combat to me..

But virtually rigging the drone via a Command program can be a VR. In which case I always thought the drone acted on the Command-users initiative. I could be totally wrong though. Riggers are still my weakest area of SR.

You are 100% correct. You can Hot VR Command a Drone. You would then have 5 IP if you maxed out.

However, I will point out again that all a sam needs to spend is 9000 nuyen (EW soft 3)+ 500 nuyen (sat link) per drone he needs to defeat.

or some nuyen for a grenade or something like that?

One way to incorporate an extra VP IP without messing up meatworld timing is to put the extra IP before the first IP, so the order goes 51234 instead of 12345. This means, for example, a cahracter wouldn't be able to hold actions into the fifth IP and you wouldn't need to bother with how it alters meatworld movement, except in relation to drones. Unfortunately, this also makes drones that much more powerful.

Personally, I fix tis in the easiest way possible. I don't allow PCs to defer action til later. They get to act each pass until they run out, thus those with more passes always get the extra passes at the end. This requires some strategy on the part of the team if their enemy has more IP... but that is all good.

Splitting it up more just makes things more complicated, something I don't particularly want.