Nash Equilibria and Matrices, Your targets are not stupid. Options

[mfb]

see my edited post, above. i can't find what Frank's talking about, in Augmentation.

unless maybe he's talking about smartskin and altskin? smartkin is nanocyberware, and uses DNI just like any other piece of 'ware. DNI != psychic brainwaves controlling your 'ware. altskin specifically connects to the user's PAN, not his brain.

[tyweise]

Why is LOS required? (Other than game balance.)

It seems like if you have to focus your BrainRay mojo at a target you can see, and you're not also going to BrainRay anyone else in the vicinity, then you are point-click-shoot firing a 'gun' of sorts at someone. Do targets get to dodge these focused CancerWave Oven beams of e-hate?

[mfb]

that's another problem. since you can't read the brain you're 'hacking', there's no skill involved in the hack. you just pump out a certain signal and people fall over dead. assuming that you're pumping it out on some sort of limited-range beam, there's really no reason not to slap it into a gun-shaped commlink and put a trigger on it. hackers are still useless.

[Moon-Hawk]

[Gelare]

[Ryu]

Logic + Cybercombat 15 dice. Proper spec. 17dice

Against Firewall 6 thats about 3 net hits. Using black hammer 6, soak about 9 boxes of damage with willpower alone. All have to be hackers, they do at least have do have Cybercombat down pat!

I do think we have larger problems than brainhacking.

[eidolon]

I'd just like to say that regardless of my opinion of using it in a game, the text:

I will Black Hammer your mom. For no reason.

still cracks me the hell up. :D

[Synner]

[FrankTrollman]

Note: as a good resident of Czech Republic I have consmed more than a liter of Beer tonight. Some parts of tirade may make less sense than others.

First off: Moon Hawk, I genuinely don't see what's so special about a brain as opposed to a computer chip. It just sits there and processes information. Neither one is designed to be read at a distance or interface with a wireless transmitter. So either you accept that late 21st century technology has figured ot a way to force an interface, or it has not.

Figured Out: People can do things to your computer or your brain. Firewalls and IC become a necessary part of life, and air gaps become meaningless. Hackers run into enemy componds to wirelessly interface with information storage units.

Still have not figured it out: Then every stage of the Matrix carries with it the implicit fact that the defender, and not the attacker, has to choose to play the game. That's a very difficult sell because being the defender in any situation totally sucks. You don't actually get anything for winning as the defender, you jst don't lose. So whatever entices characters (S-K included) to participate at each level of the Matrix (and thus play as the defender) has to exceed the bilt in penalty of having any chance at all of losing. The current SR4 rules don't do that - even a casual reading of character sheets in this very forum shows us that in actual play real characters simply operate with the wireless turned off.

[Spike]

All the stuff out there in the land of creative people (read:Literature) and this is the only viable way to read how near total connectivity and massive levels of processing power MUST work: Making magic hackers who throw 'brainhack' spells at people, just because of some weird metagame requirement to make hackers 'viable just like mages'?

This shit trips me out, I don't need no stinkin' drugs man, just a heap dose of Franktrollman and legion.


I say that knowing he'll take exception to it, but then refuse to explain to me what exactly I am not getting about his ideas... using small words 'cause I'm dumb that way. We've done that dance before.


There was a book I read quite a few years back, and I wish to bog that I had the name of it, or the author, but cest le vie or whatever.

Anyway, plot summation: Everyone is fully wired, alla time. PANS if you will, with interface headset/goggly thingies. Main Girl wakes up one day and her shit is broke. She can't ride the bus to work, can't get in any building, people don't even talk to her no more. She can't even get a replacement 'Commlink'... though later it turns out there is a resistance of 'invisibles' who aren't PANed to hell and back, and some other wierds shit. Sure, its missing wide spread hacking (something to do with AI's, as I recall....) and the like, but its a reasonable look at the choice you make to be 'unhackable' by going unwired. Its not shadowrun, but if my duck ain't on fire, it's relevant.

Giving hackers magic spell brainhacking is a step around the looney bin.



That said, Caveat Time: GitS has brain hacking, but Shirow postulates a certain ubiquity of brainwiring, and people that aren't wired are simply immune... in fact one guy is 'on the team' mostly for that reason. That doesn't mean its 'magic zappy powers for hackers', that seems to be the main idea here. Of course, also missing seems to be a reliance on dedicated hacker archetypes, just about anyone that does 'shadowrunny stuff' seems to be part hacker and part something else, and they do just fine. Not that GitS is my go-to source for Shadowrun...

[Fortune]

[Mercer]

I had a similar thought today when I was leaving my bank (no point there, just where I was when I thought it). It seems like a hacker can buy a few skills and a few choice bits of uberware, and encroach on the sammie's niche. Why aren't we protecting the sammie?

It seems to me that if a hacker ever wants to leave his basement, or if a rigger ever wants to leave his van, they're going to have to "encroach on the samurai's niche". That is, they're going to have to be at least decent at physical world stuff in order not to be splattered by the first hard look from a ganger. This isn't a weakness of the hacker so much as the way the system is (currently) designed.

That isn't to say a hacker who isn't competent at physical combat is a bad character; I see it as an interesting tactical and rp'ing challenge. As long as the other players aren't pulling their hair out too much because they keep having to bail you out of fistfights with angry 9-year olds. I mean, sometimes its fun to play hard-nosed, ice-water for blood, steely-eyed killers, and sometimes its fun to play screwballs who probably shouldn't be shadowrunning but are giving it their best shot (ala Mystery Men, The Specials, Bad News Bears, and so on). Sometimes its fun to do both (I think Sneakers and Serenity would qualify here).

But playstyles aside, it seems odd to me to write in brainhacking as a way to say, "I'm choosing to make a character who isn't particularly good at physical combat, but who is a god at hacking. Also, he should be able to use hacking to be a god at physical combat." --Edit: I know that's not exactly what you guys are arguing for, but balance-wise that's where it seems to point.--

Also, it would seem to me that if hackers could hack brains, and the "only" way to protect yourself was to get wired up with the stuff that the system is already designed around hackers hacking, wouldn't it make more sense for computer mundies to develop helmets, wifi nanopaste and tinfoil hats that blocked brainhacking?

Also (and this is my last "also" for today), it seems like "hacker" just means someone who hacks. If a "hacker" can brainhack to be competive in the system with a sammie, isn't a "sammie who hacks" going to be even nastier at it? (I mean, brainhacking or no, once a hacker caps out his skills, ware and tech, isn't that what he's going to be doing anyway, becoming a better sammie?)

[mfb]

[tyweise]

[siel]

This is my opinions at the topic. Maybe it doesn't go with the fluff or mechanic, but it is what I feel most comfortable with.

Brains can be hacked:
If a hacker can interact with a device, he can hack it. If a hacker can interact with a brain, he can hack it too.

HOWEVER

Brains do not send signals over large distance:
Brains do not transmit signals across the room. Devices like commlinks with wireless capabilities do.

Brains have their own and unique "OS":
Everyone grew up in their own special way. Just like there are Windows, Mac OS, Linux, there are as many different OS as there are people out there. Since a program that works on Mac will not always work on Windows, a 'hack' that worked on one brain will not always work on another.

Brains have built-in protection:
if it takes magic an opposed check to control someone, the same should happen with brains, with or without commlinks. Your mind should have natural defenses based on your mental stats.

Hacking requires interaction
You cannot simply send a signal and hack a system. This might happen if the system has been compromised before and you are just triggering a command. However, even the most talented hacker cannot hack without any sort of feedback. It's like trying to use your computer without the monitor on or with your eyes closed, or not even knowing whether your fingers have actually typed the proper keystrokes.

This leads to the conculsion that
*Every brain has a different OS, you must first have interaction with it before you can hack it.

*Once you have interaction, you can hack it as any device. However, the brain has its own System, Firewall, and whatever stat based on your mental attributes.

*You cannot have interaction across the room because brains cannot send signals back.

*If there's a device providing feedback like a commlink with hot sim mod, then you could be hacked. This means a commlink with hot sim mod make you more vulnerable to brain hacking from across the room.

*If your brain has been hacked before, it is possible to send signals to trigger certain pre-established commands.

*The same message to trigger a result in one brain will not work on another due to the difference in the nature of the OS.



I can see how hackers can put someone in restraints and put trode net over their head to probe and hack their brain. Hackers would still have to deal with the brain's natural defense mechanism like the subjects willpower to not give in and tell the truth and such.
It is also possible for hackers to hack people in the manner described above to create meat-drones. The runners could capture one of a security guard at a compound and compromise his mind to insert a certain code, then erasing his memory so he returns to work knowing nothing. Then the next day when the runners arrive, they could trigger that code and have that guard start shooting randomly or take out the safety for them.

But yeah, that's my take on it. I think it might actually create some interesting situation and allow hackers to do a bit more than what they are currently allowed to do.

If technology really advanced far enough in 2070 for people to hack brains from afar for whatever reason, one would think that Deus would have taken over the world already..

[Cthulhudreams]

[Red]

One of the key problems here is that as a cynical audience with a finite attention span, it is difficult for people to accept the idea that a massively parallel, analog organ like the brain with billions of cells, and trillions of connections that on the cell to cell level possess a randomized configuration that only conform at the macro level... is just handwaved into a wireless enabled computer.

All the headware technology in Shadowrun is based on I/O interaction with the brain. Input is supplied to existing regions of the brain like visual, audio, tactile, taste, smell, etc... cyberlimbs using parts of the lower brain that are already made to control limbs. And things like DNIs just allow the brain to learn new outputs. Even skillwires is simple copying an existing neurological pathway.

At no point in the core rule books has cyberware ever been implied to take the brain, and rework the whole organ as the axon level. First, it isn't necessary. Second, that is Singularity level technology. Was that level of technology is achieved, civilization as we understand it will disappear in short order. The most successful set of memes transmitted by a virus that exploits this technology will simply wipe out all of mankind's memetic history as it dominates the fusion of human brains and the net. Firewalls will not stop this because they only need to fail once before something like this gains enough critical mass to overwhelm all of cyberhumanity. The only reason a single meme set doesn't dominate all mankind right now is the "airgap" called the human skull and the fact that we have to actually talk to each other.

Reworking the collective axons, trillions of them, requires massive coordinated physical interference in an irregular fashion. Regions of the brain have consistant order. But axon to axon, each brain is unique like the formation of blood vessels in the face, fingerprints, or crystals in a snowflake. Intervention at that level requires, demands, physical interference. The only way to do that in a precise fashion is with nanites.

It may be possible that Deus infected all the world with a nanite cloud that built a DNI into every metahuman brain on Earth. That could make brain hacking possible. But it hasn't been mentioned. Nothing of that level has been mentioned at all.

I really don't care what has been written in the novels. They are fluff. Story. Cool stuff. I can buy magic for magic because that is what it is. But technology requires logical rigor, and precedence. And I don't see the foundation necessary for handwaving the "brain" as just another computer. In fact I think that doing so is a gross insult to the complexity of the organ in question. I find there is less cognitive dissonance in saying that the writers just fucked up. Wouldn't be the first time. After all, where are all the ork spawn overlords that should be populous in the billions range? I don't see why we should rewrite biology for that piece of lore.

As my final note: Yes, if people disconnect from the Matrix they become immune to direct attack. So what? Big deal. If your hacker has a problem with that, then invest a few meager build points into a weapon skill. There is no need to re-write the system just so that people aren't punished for overspecializing. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Or you try to make it into a nail. But sometimes you just have to recognize this, get over it, and expand your toolbox.

This post has been edited by Red: Nov 10 2007, 05:32 AM

[FrankTrollman]

[mfb]

so, wait. your problem with the Matrix as written is that it doesn't make sense. so you come up with this brainhacking scheme. and when someone points out that it doesn't make sense, you throw up your hands and say "well, it's science fiction! it doesn't have to make sense!"

this isn't "math or methodology", this is basic shit. signal propagation is not some kind of advanced super-science. ignoring it is exactly the kind of thing you'd shit down Synner's throat over.

[FrankTrollman]

We are obviously not communicating. I don't care where Magic comes from, I don't care what nanites are made out of. And I don't care how computers "work" in 2071. Those are all abstract, because they reresent things which in 2007 we don't have.

But I do care what magic can do. Shadowrun doesn't have timestop. I care what nanites can do. Shadowrun nanites require an external power source last I checked. And I care what computers can do.

I do not care how they do it. A computer can wirelessly submit "stuff" to another computer that will hack into it. A computer can wirelessly send "stuff" that puts simsense data into another human being that will hurt or kill them. What is it sending wirelessly? How is it generating targeted impulses? I don't even pretend to care!

There are parts of the game, such as how many "megabytes" your phone has, which do not improve the game to "know". For one thing, any numbers you plug in there will almost certainly be obsolete in a few years.

---

The only thing which is important to know is how the devices interact with the world and the actions of the players. That's important to know, because we are telling a cooperative storytelling game and everyone has to be on the same page as to what the black boxes actually do. But we don't need to actually do the advanced particle physics that makes these computers work - we don't even know the advanced particle physics, that's how advanced it is.

Yes, it's comforting to look at conservation of energy restrictions and see that what we are askig of commlinks is actually well within theoretical limits. I like that, it makes me feel happy because it means that I don't also have to handwave away an energy source that would be better spent shooting X-Ray lasers at people.

But that's as far as I want or need to go. Everything else I should be able to extrapolate from the end results that are being generated by the game mechanics. If the game mechanics tell us that leaving the Matrix on gives you an extra front to defend yourself on and provides no discernable mechanical advantages in most instances - I can tell you exactly what will happen. If the game mechanics tell us that the Matrix is an extra front that you aren't protected on unles you do something about it - well I can tell you what will happen there too.

So seriously mfb, what do you want? I have a sneaking suspicion that you're one of those people who won't let D&D Fighters have nice things on the grounds that Magic can do whatever it wants, but "not magic" has to be constrained by Physics regardless of character level. In short, that you are perhaps demanding a different level of abstraction for computers than you are for Sorcery. Different levels of abstraction leads to different levels of game simulation which in almost all cases involves one or more players going off into another room to play something out while everyone else goes and plays Soul Caliber.

-Frank

[mfb]

no, i'm actually demanding the same level of abstraction for hacking as for magic. we know pretty much all we need to know about how magic works. it has its own internal logic. the Matrix, somewhat less so. attempting to fix that is fine. attempting to fix that by introducing more illogical craziness? that doesn't fix anything!

this is the same deal as the running rules. you decide you want things to work in manner X, and you throw up all these reasons why they should work like that. and then someone comes along and knocks all your reasons down, and you get all huffy and say "well, this is FrankRun, and that's how i want it" with no regard for anything anybody else has written or said on the subject. which, okay, that's fine and all--but what's the point of throwing it up here for dissection in the first place, if you don't care what anybody else says?

if you want brainhacking, just say "hey guys, brainhacking!" and have done with it. throwing up justifications for it, and then falling back on "it's science fiction, who cares" when someone tries to argue the point is just flamebait.

[FrankTrollman]

In that cse, I'm pretty sure I answered your questions about a dozen times already. You may not like it, which is fine. I don't think my ideas for everyone, I don't think that any conceptualization of the Matrix is for everyone.

Hacking requires a massive, but arbitrary, amount of computer processing. People in the Shadowrun world get that massive but arbitrary amount by hooking a number of computer devices together and orchestrating the whole network into a big problem solving machine with a human brain.

Human brains are integral to the working of computers in the Shadowrun future, and computers are all built with the idea of being integrated with human brains.

The Signal Ranges in the basic book are so incredibly short because they represent the range of "high density signal" - the limit of a device's ability to remotely image, alter, and reconcile with Simsense, other devices. The actual range that devices can make a phone call or do other early 21st century crap are, of course, much farther just as they are in 2007.

Reactive signal modulation is much easier than pro-active signal modulation. A firewall program can adjust a toaster or a human in order to limit the effects of a hacking attack even if it is not able to draw upon a vast network of computers and neural tissue to do it. A databomb can sit there and "explode" when someone connects to it without needing a human-powered network to project it into the target.

I don't care how "high density signal" is produced. But I can take those axioms and create interactions in the world with them which match the majority of the flavor text in Shadowrun. In fact, virtually all of it excepting the idea of "jacking out" (though even then it works if you're specifically being harassed by Black IC as removing your own jack chord would terminate the connection that the IC was reactively attacking you through).

So seriously, other than the fact that you don't like it, what is the problem?

-Frank

[mfb]

ugh. never mind.

[FrankTrollman]

[mfb]

you don't hack a naked brain! there's no hacking involved! you simply send data to it! you can't "hack" it because it can't send data to you! why, for the love of god, can you not grasp that!?

all you need to generate "high density signal" is more processing power! congrats, you've staved off doomsday--instead of taking a day, it will take a month!

argh, screw it. Frank wants brainhacking, Frank gets brainhacking. no actual brains need be involved! wooo!