A matter of Decker evolution, Attack utilities that could be.... Options

[Pendaric]

I have noticed a gap in the attack utility market, we have straight icon damage, icon impairment and straight beating the frag out of the meat. Aside from tracking and IC specific attack utilities thats your lot.
So does anyone have any ideas for a deck targeting utility?
The ball is rolling when you consider Hog going after programes via the MPCP, now how about some canned Sparky or tinned Blaster, real hard ware melters. :love:

[BishopMcQ]

my color may be off, but IIRC, gray IC targets cyberdecks directly.

[Slump]

Yeah, it's Grey. Sparky is not your friend, unless you needed a new deck anyway.

[mfb]

well, there's Erosion and Hog, both on Matrix p73. Erosion is the offensive utility version of Crippler/Ripper (it doesn't specify if the degradation is permanent or not, so i assume it is). Hog just crashes programs in active memory; you can swap them out to get them working again.

[Pendaric]

Please re read the top post.:please:

Decker attack utilities that target the hardware of the cyberdeck, that means does damage to the cyber deck hard ware. Most likely the MPCP.

Fair comment on Erosion Mfb but that has a software repair in the Restoration utility and the persona chips do not have to be replaced.

The operation method of Hog is what interests me with the ability to target the MPCP of a deck to crash the active memory function. Such attacks could be intensified to produce effects similar to grey IC but wielded by a decker.
The question is how would this work and in game balance terms if it is a good idea. The latter depends mostly on the rules that are applied.... :wobble:

[mfb]

it's still not quite what you're looking for, but check out my thread for anti-host utilities that are similar to your idea.

[Pendaric]

Thanks mfb, just finished some nice ideas there.

[Fortune]

[Pendaric]

The hell I did. Spell check was the limit on that thing, so I have no idea why you think I changed it?

[Pendaric]

How about this?

Attack utility

Razor
Modifier: 10

When a decker successfully hits a persona icon it induces a sporadic series of electrical pulses designed to damage the cyberterminal/deck.
Roll MPCP against the power of the Razor utility reduced by hardening, any net successes by the Razor utility reduces the MPCP by one, on a one for one basis.

This is quite a powerful utility but the stats are in favour of the cyber terminal most of the time. It also has the drawback of only being effective against deckers and otaku, much like Killjoy and Blackhammer.

What do you all think?

[mfb]

hm. i'd make the multiplier 15 or 20, i think. more than Killjoy (nonlethal black utility), less than or equal to Black Hammer (lethal black utility).

[Kagetenshi]

12?

~J

[mfb]

i'd go higher simply because of what's involved. someone KOs you, you're up and running again one headache later. someone knocks your MPCP down a point or two, that hurts.

[Kagetenshi]

I hear you, but as IIRC Grey IC is more common than all three kinds of Black, it still feels weird.

~J

[mfb]

could chalk it up to SOTA factor--it's new, so it hasn't been optimized down by standardized shared libraries, etc.

[Pendaric]

Sparky has a multiplier of 12, while for example killjoy has a multiplier of 10 compared to non lethal black IC being a multiplier of 16.

However, that being said, it is the most fighting proggy in some aspects, deckers lose hundreds of thousands of :nuyen: while otaku face brain death and all the while the persona icon is being impaired too.
I think that puts it somewhere between Killjoy and Blackhammer so I'll go with your advice and raise it to a multiplier of 16.
O and change the name to Scorch.

Thanks for the input. :)

[mfb]

y'know what'd be really, really useful? a tar baby attack program. hit your opponent with it and they lose a random item from active memory. even more useful would be something that attacked storage memory, so corp deckers can wipe that juicy paydata.

[Ophis]

Or even a tar Baby utility that works just like the IC and crashed any utility used on the Decker.

[Pendaric]

Hog has got active memory covered and can take out utilities that don't need to be actively used.
A variant on a tape worm program might work or perhaps a scramble IC equivalent attack utility for data erasing?

[mfb]

haha, forgot about hog. im teh morron. hm, i had a Poison program somewhere. make an attack, and it injects the target with a worm.

[Pendaric]

Perhapes the attacking decker could also just hack the cyberdeck via system ops to locate and destroy the files on the storage memory.
Difficult in cyber combat but after suspending the icon via Killjoy, Rip or Blackhammer a possability

[mfb]

i like the idea of being able to hack an opposing decker's system, rather than just throw attack programs at him. that's one of the nice things about SR4.

[Kagetenshi]

Why would you be able to, though? What, reasonably speaking, would a cyberdeck be running a server process for?

~J

[mfb]

that's what's silly. you've got this great VR environment, but only on servers? the VR should be a client function.

[Kagetenshi]

That's irrelevant, though. What service would the cyberdeck be running that would accept outside connections?

~J