Unwired: Not Happy, Taking requests Options

[Larme]

"Trial by Frank" is a powerful way to iron out any kinks.

Maybe a little too powerful... Like using a sandblaster to clean yourself. You the dirt off, but what's left over at the end? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

[Rotbart van Dain...]

I would like to know why a normal character (or a Mage who is willing to take the Essence hit) who has a cyber commlink (plus had a Hacker make a Rating 1 Smartlink program) and cybereyes couldn't just run a program on his 'Link to get the benefits of a Smartgun without the Smartgun cyberware.

Technically, you can. You just need an AI with Emulate and Spawn.

That means it can thread like a Technomancer and hand out the results as Programs.

[Synner667]

Second, Frank was a freelancer for a short period of time. That doesn't get you editorial review of drafts. I've been a freelancer for Shadowrun for eight years--longer than most--and I don't get any special editorial review of drafts. Nor do I expect it. Sometimes I'll ask Peter (Synner) if I can read a draft and he'll send it to me, and then I'll offer my feedback and step aside, because it's not my project and I'm not the line designer.

How weird...
...My name is also Peter, and my nom de plume is also Synner !!

[FrankTrollman]

Maybe a little too powerful... Like using a sandblaster to clean yourself. You the dirt off, but what's left over at the end? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

What's the problem? If your material isn't rigorous enough to stand up to cross examination you should clear it and start over with something with a firmer foundation. Now, whoever you have working on your project should be strong enough in their subjects that they can do it themselves, so you shouldn't need to bring an outside eye in. But if you built your house of straw you should expect the wolf to blow it down.

In fact, the wolf is doing you a favor.

-Frank

[KCKitsune]

Technically, you can. You just need an AI with Emulate and Spawn.

That means it can thread like a Technomancer and hand out the results as Programs.

Nope, a Complex Form is just a program. If Unwired said that you need a Sprite to act as the Smartlink interpreter then I would be all for it, but Unwired said that a Technomancer only needs a Rating 1 Complex Form to use a smartlinked gun... something ANY idiot hacker can cobble together. Heck with Software 1 and Logic 5, my cybered Chaos Magician can code the program needed to use the Smartlink without too many problems*... my Chaos MAGE. That is crazy, pure and simple.


* = Since this is an "autosoft" (I think), I would need 2 hits and six months to code the Smartlink program.

[Synner]

Synner, it absolutely does not matter what Access ID an agent "has" because as p. 55 demonstrates an Agent that is loaded onto a Persona does not get its own subscription slot, and is thus not itself accessing anything. Even though it can act on the target node, it is not acting with its own account, so it does not use its own Access ID. Page 110 does not dispute this and the limitations you speak of kick in when and if you want the Agent to "act independently of its persona" - which you don't because the Matrix Topology chapter entitles us to more Personas than Agents. So having Agents load themselves onto hardware distant from their Persona is in almost all cases a complete waste of time. For one thing, it subjects you to the ravages of the Access ID limits, which nearly double the monetary cost of throwing an Agent Smith attack with 12 die pools at problems.

From your post, I'm going to assume that the reference you are calling on p.55 are the Subscription rules and the relevant table which says that an agent loaded onto a persona does not count towards the subscriptions (and that's all it doesn't count towards.) This would indeed allow an agent (or more) to operate out of your commlink/persona on the same account you possess linked to whatever access ID was provided. It also means that each agent and its program load counts towards your commlink's System and Response limitations. The rules on p.110 are indeed intended to only reflect agents acting autonomously of a persona (even if under a personas direct control).

The Matrix Topology chapter dictates that you can only ever run one persona per commlink, and that nexi can handle more that but they only allow one account per access ID (meaning one per persona/commlink) so I'm not entirely sure (not uncommon in your feedback) what you mean by your statement above. What I'mdeducing that the tactic you are suggesting is that a hacker buy a dozen commlinks (and OSes unless he wants to crack them) and load a dozen agents onto those persona he can use then without the access ID limitation since it'll be the commlink access ID associated with the persona that is logged and you could theoretically have a dozen identical agents behind that. By the rules this seems like a relatively a feasible scenario.

One point strikes me as important in this scenario: a persona is simply a user interface for the OS. If there's no active user any loaded agents will be acting autonomously (ie. the commlink/persona may even be active and sitting in its home commlink node). So as soon as the agent loaded tries to log on to another node, it's the agent logging on and offering its access ID rather than the persona - the agent cannot initiate actions on behalf of the persona as the persona is a user interface. The only way around this is for the hacker to have multiple personas running simultaneously and effectively perform multiple separate hacks with the various personas to acquire separate accounts (possibly over various nodes if chokepoints are used) and then once inside let their agent loads loose. IIRC simultaneous use of multiple persona isn't forbidden by the rules, but at the very least the multitasking required should inflict modifiers similar to those for persona multi-presence or physically attacking multiple targets.

The Hackastack is at its core simply circumventing the limits of Matrix by giving yourself a large number of processors and imitating the benefits of being a large number of users. Unwired made that a reality the likes of which we never would have imagined out of the confusion that was the basic book. Seriously, the hackastack can now expand the number of programs you can run simultaneously without limit. The hackastack can log run around and do things on your behalf with the power of Agents, heck with the power of one Agent. The Hackastack drives Agent Smith. Agent Smith would not be possible without it.

Agent Smith is still very much possible, in fact it's the same core principle as a botnet. It was never our intent to erradicate it completely, just to introduce limitations and balance it when used by individuals. For instance regardless of Hackastack, Agent Smith is feasible by simply taking the time to patch dozens of agents.

These limitations come in the form of time, money, programming skills required by a hacker to pull it off and are balanced with the potential benefits. Because of the persona issue I've described above an Agent Smith strategy is at least partially dependent on using agents as autonomous programs, this in turn is limited by the software access ID limitation and program degradation rules. All in all its the difference between full blown ewarfare and a normal hack.

I have some more thoughts on this matter but right now I just don't have the time to get into them.

This is the heart of the matter; and why I don't believe that any amount of errata you can levy at this book will make it a non-broken product.

Errata would imply we think there's anything wrong with Drop Out. We don't.

[dionysus]

Could someone point me to a description of "Drop Out?" I'm not sure what that term refers to. I searched, but search terms <4 chars are verboten.

[Jaid]

Could someone point me to a description of "Drop Out?" I'm not sure what that term refers to. I searched, but search terms <4 chars are verboten.

basically, it means that if you don't want to be on the wireless matrix, you can choose not to be accessible from the wireless matrix.

[Crusher Bob]

One of the 'game' requirements of the matrix rules should be that the infiltration hacker is both a playable and required archetype. This means
1 The matrix rules should not devolve in to separate 4 hours hacker dungeon crawls
2 The hacker should not be replaceable by an agent or drone
3 The hacker should be required to walk along with the team, not be a guy in a wheelchair in Malaysia
4 There is a reason for the other side to be hackable at all

Right now, the rules seem to be failing on points 2, 3, and 4.
There's little need to have the hacker physically with the party.
A high level agent (that's quite cheap) is almost as capable as a 400 BP hacker for many tasks.
It usually considerably safer and simpler to design your security systems to be immune to hacking at all, so that actually having a hacker is mostly pointless.

The current drop out methods seem to rely on subscription lists, wired connections, wifi blocking paint, jammers, and similar tricks.

Compare to the rules for mages.

As long as there is not much stuff in astral space, there are not mage only dungeon crawls.
You can gain back some of the utility of a mage by having something like a hell-hound along, but the full utility of a mage is hard to replace.
The mage must infiltrate as part of the team.
People who ignore magical related security are screwed.

[dionysus]

One of the 'game' requirements of the matrix rules should be that the infiltration hacker is both a playable and required archetype. This means
1 The matrix rules should not devolve in to separate 4 hours hacker dungeon crawls
2 The hacker should not be replaceable by an agent or drone
3 The hacker should be required to walk along with the team, not be a guy in a wheelchair in Malaysia
4 There is a reason for the other side to be hackable at all

Right now, the rules seem to be failing on points 2, 3, and 4.
There's little need to have the hacker physically with the party.
A high level agent (that's quite cheap) is almost as capable as a 400 BP hacker for many tasks.
It usually considerably safer and simpler to design your security systems to be immune to hacking at all, so that actually having a hacker is mostly pointless.

Couple of points in response:
2) Yes, agents are cheaper and roll some good dice, but they're *stupid.* The more complex a piece of software, the more subject to GIGO they are: they can't react quickly in stressful situations, nor can they interpret ambiguity. Agents are autonomous mostly because they can run on nodes apart from hackers, but if the node they're hacking into is suddenly not what they were instructed to deal with, they will completely lose it. If your hacker is only there to roll dice, great, yeah, replace him with an agent. But roleplaying is interesting (well, to me) because strange situations arise that nobody planned for. So you can't just say "Go here and get me the great paydata," the agent has no idea what paydata is. You'd have to say "get me all the information on the Yakuza stored on this node." And then what if its missing? What if they've replaced references to the Yakuza with references to the Company? That should pretty much ruin an Agent's day, no matter what they're rolling...there's no roll for "divine intention behind purposeful obfuscation." Well, ok, it's Pilot, but it should be against a really tough threshold.

3) Why? I think it depends on the shadowrun team and what they want. If they want a hacker who can infiltrate with them into the wifi-blocked black research lab, then they get someone who isn't a parapalegic. If they know the node is online and staying online, why not go with the Stephen Hawking of hackers? There's plenty of room for both in the world. If its an issue of what's fun to roleplay, then I agree, but there's hardly anything in the rules stopping someone from playing a mobile hacker. Can you as a GM build a world that is totally unhackable no matter what? Sure, and if your story needs an unhackable system, build one. But if the story needs a system that isn't hackable, i.e. they decide they want to hack the Ork with a Golden Tooth and steal the 1500 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) in the register, why should it be unhackable, just because the rules say it can be?

4) If I want my computer to be unhackable, I can cut power to it and sink it in the Potomac. But it doesn't do me much good as a computer, does it? If Renraku wants to have a lab where researchers can exchange data with each other and their gear wirelessly from anywhere in the building (which is a common expectation in today's RL business world), your system is hackable. Why doesn't everyone use perfect strong encryption? I dunno, probably for the same reason not all web pages are SSL access only. If something is usable, it's abusable. (forgive the malapropism).

Um, that sounds like a rant, sorry. I don't mean to be attacking anyone, but I felt like I needed to put in my 2 cents.

[Earlydawn]

Yeah, I completely agree. 4th Edition Matrix draws the most flak out of the various aspects of the game because it's the most interpretive player environment. Plus, whereas astral space is "loose" enough in description that it merely acts as the magical stage for a run, the Matrix pulls double duty because it must be a reasonable gameplay mechanism, deus ex machina, and at least partially recognizable real world analogue simultaneously.

[Sombranox]

One of the 'game' requirements of the matrix rules should be that the infiltration hacker is both a playable and required archetype. This means
1 The matrix rules should not devolve in to separate 4 hours hacker dungeon crawls
2 The hacker should not be replaceable by an agent or drone
3 The hacker should be required to walk along with the team, not be a guy in a wheelchair in Malaysia
4 There is a reason for the other side to be hackable at all

Right now, the rules seem to be failing on points 2, 3, and 4.
There's little need to have the hacker physically with the party.
A high level agent (that's quite cheap) is almost as capable as a 400 BP hacker for many tasks.
It usually considerably safer and simpler to design your security systems to be immune to hacking at all, so that actually having a hacker is mostly pointless.

The current drop out methods seem to rely on subscription lists, wired connections, wifi blocking paint, jammers, and similar tricks.

Compare to the rules for mages.

As long as there is not much stuff in astral space, there are not mage only dungeon crawls.
You can gain back some of the utility of a mage by having something like a hell-hound along, but the full utility of a mage is hard to replace.
The mage must infiltrate as part of the team.
People who ignore magical related security are screwed.

First off, I wholeheartedly agree with the idea that hackers should be integral and required concepts for a strong team. I've bitched and moaned enough about my feelings that Hackers in SR4 became a hobby class picked up on the side by AR hacking sammies or script kiddies with a bunch of agents. Some things in Augmentation, Arsenal, and now in Unwired have renewed my faith in hackers a bit though, so I'm not quite sure I can agree on the failings you're pointing out.

1. You didn't list it as a failing, but still mentioning it. The whole addition of AR hacking lets hackers tag along with the groups doing their things while not zonked out, though with a lot less IPs than they can manage in VR usually. Even when they jump into VR, things have thankfully dropped to the point where most things a hacker does take place on a single 'network' and can be fairly quickly abstracted with a few rolls rather than the painful bygone days of dungeon crawls. There's still some bits that might take time. Slicing through chokepoints, handling cybercombat if they get jumped by IC or trigger an alert, etc. But since they're all concurrent with meat IP passes (as much as that bugs me), it can just be handled as part of combat potentially at the same time as the team's combat.

2. It may be a mostly fluff reason, but Unwired tried to make it fairly clear that Agent's are only as good as the agent script that they run on. They tend to freeze up with unknown situations or make stupid moves like continuing to attack ineffectively if their Attack program is hit with a Disarm. Now an agent being run by a hacker gets the benefit of the hacker's understanding of the code and how to set up the scripts, but an off the shelf 'hacker agent' or one set up by a script kiddie is probably going to run into situations where it just runs itself into a virtual wall over and over again, but that falls to the GM to come up with those sort of situations and make sure to emphasize them. As to being equivalent of a 400BP hacker. Debatable. A 400 BP hacker is probably going to have 4 IP and a DP of 13-20 (4-7 skill + Specialization 2 + PUSHed 1 + Encephelon 1 or 2 + VR 2 + Prog 5 + Optimize 1 for their most used program). A week out of chargen, they'll have response 6 and the progs go up by 1. I wouldn't call that equivalent necessarily to a DP of 12 (plus a few agent autosoft ratings potentially, though usually can't fit a lot for the payload). DP of 12 is enough to do a couple things well admittedly, but it's nothing compared to the 23 dice my adept hacker throws on exploits. So I don't really see them completely replacing hackers.

3. You mentioned the reasons they have to walk along with the group yourself. Wireless negating paints, faraday cages, wired-only access, scary as hell chokepoints, etc. Same reasons in the old days that they could sometimes drag deckers off their asses to make a physical run with the team. Admittedly, with arsenal is another nice option of a Transys Steed drone wheelchair with a rigger cocoon on it and now with the Covert Ops autosoft so it can even make infiltration rolls. Which leaves the VR hacker able to join up with the team safely while still working in his strongest environment. All in all, I don't really see the failing on this point. I thought they did a good job in SR4 making it so hackers needed to be part of the group not just distant paraplegics with VR skills.

4. This one I can get a bit. With all the options available, it makes it seem like any corp not using them all is wanting to be hacked, but if they were more realistic, nothing would _be_ hackable. Runs into the same problem again that was addressed in previous edition fluff concerning the fact that to make something completely unhackable is to make it completely useless. Something that never communicates with the outside matrix is missing out on all the power and information found there. Something that completely does away with all wireless connection is missing out on the ease of use and productivity improvements possible through that sort of thing. Something that is completely cut off even from wired access and is put in a deep dark room with three hundred irate guards protecting it forces the company to pay for those three hundred irate guards and all that security, not to mention the annoyance of the hour long process of anyone actually needing to get access to such a site. So in the end, most things are trix accessable and thus hackable. More secure still have local wireless that can be hacked. Still more secure probably have fiberoptic lines that can be tapped or they can be gotten to by a good team somehow. The most secure are the most secure for a reason, but even they probably have some way that they could get hacked. So again, I don't really see where the failing in this is if you take into account the grand scheme of things. Admittedly, the other big reason it all comes down to is "cause that's how the GM wants it and so the people can have fun and hackers have something to do."


Sorry for the hellacious spam, but I just don't see things quite as broke as they're made out to be. Conceptually at least. In terms of system, there are still a lot of issues that need to be worked out.

[FrankTrollman]

Synner: People can and will carry multiple commlinks. They will turn all of them on with active personas accessed through AR. And they will load powerful Agents in them which are set to take orders from whatever Persona the character is actually using (this uses up a single subscription slot).

This means that your limits on Agents are not limits. It doesn't take time and money. It just takes money. And the money is less than 10 grand - the price of an additional link to run a persona and an Agent.

The rules for clustering and stacking commlinks together are so incredibly generous that there is no reason to not do it. You can "be" dozens or hundreds of users all with their own Personas and their own otherwise identical program sets. And you would be a damn fool to not do this. Unwired was clearly written with the vision of everyone running a single commlink and giving a damn about program limits. But the optimum play strategy is to not do that. For just a couple month's high lifestyle you can cover your body with commlinks and agents, performing tasks as if you were literally a small army of high end hackers rather than a single person. Heck, you can do this with no appreciable Matrix skill, and you will slam dunk someone who bothered to spend 400 BP on making a single 'link hacker be all he can be.

Sombranox:

It may be a mostly fluff reason, but Unwired tried to make it fairly clear that Agent's are only as good as the agent script that they run on. They tend to freeze up with unknown situations or make stupid moves like continuing to attack ineffectively if their Attack program is hit with a Disarm. Now an agent being run by a hacker gets the benefit of the hacker's understanding of the code and how to set up the scripts, but an off the shelf 'hacker agent' or one set up by a script kiddie is probably going to run into situations where it just runs itself into a virtual wall over and over again, but that falls to the GM to come up with those sort of situations and make sure to emphasize them.

This doesn't limit hackers in any meaningful way. The Agent Smith cloud is under the control of a person watching in AR, the fact that he gets to act dozens of times every combat round dwarfs any possible shrinkage from the rules which essentially just say "periodically the GM should be a dick to Agent users." There's no real consequence that could possibly have. After all, the only thing that gets any explicit screwing is unsupervised Agents. But that's not even what happens, because unsupervised Agents have a lot of restrictions placed on them. We're talking supervised Agents, each running on their own commlink loaded into their own Persona and under the constant watchful eye of a real person who tells them what to do.

It's just that the rules don't actually require any real hacking skills on the part of the real person minding the store. It can be your little sister, it's really not important.

-Frank

[Cthulhudreams]

Can you explictly define how AR works, expecially

A) What categories of tests does AR give a bonus too

B) How big is that bonus

None is an acceptable answer, but after the handwave in the books it would be nice to understand how that actually supports operations.

[RunnerPaul]

Synner: People can and will carry multiple commlinks. They will turn all of them on with active personas accessed through AR.

And Synner, before you try to rebut this with the "you only have one brain" discussion from p.91 of Unwired, I'd like to point out that particular argument against the Hackastack does nothing to deter someone who wants to try to use multiple unconnected commlinks with their Datagloves & Image Linked Glasses. Unless we assume that one of the technolgical advances lost in Crash 1.0 was the inner workings of the KVM Switch and how to upgrade it from working with a Keyboard, Video Output, and Mouse to working with more portable technology.

[Crank]

On Hackastack: Reading complaints about this has me wondering if certain GMs have any control over their games at all. "Well the rules still make it possible for me to <fill in the blank>!!!" WTF? Why do you need a rule to prevent every level of ridiculousness that your players can come up with. There's no rule in the book that says my players CAN't show up to a knife fight wielding panther cannons and wearing military armor, but somehow I manage to prevent it anyway.

Take a look at the link in my signature for an alternative view on all the bitching about what RAW does and doesn't do.

Frank, I respect that you do have what I consider some to be some good, alternative ideas to how hacking is run. I also think you end up being a bit nit picky about some RAW issues that I would consider to be pretty minor. For example, thinking about a player attempting to unleash the Agent Smith scenario (or hackastack) that keeps getting bitched about reminds me of the solution a previous GM of mine had for such shenanigans.

GM (when asking about a starting SR2 character): Dave, how many dice do you roll when in melee combat?
Dave: 12
GM (Picks up a large handful of dice, rolls, but doesn't look at the results): Dave's dead. I expect your next guy to be built with a bit more common sense.

[tsuyoshikentsu]

GM (when asking about a starting SR2 character): Dave, how many dice do you roll when in melee combat?
Dave: 12
GM (Picks up a large handful of dice, rolls, but doesn't look at the results): Dave's dead. I expect your next guy to be built with a bit more common sense.

...Sorry, can you translate to SR4 for the noobs?

[Crusher Bob]

To be a credible melee combatant in SR4, you need at least 16-20 dice. The 12 dice guy is chewed up by devil rats long before Mr. Johnson lays eyes on him (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) .

[edit]
But I should probably stop crapping in Frank's thread.
One thing I'd like out of the matrix rules is for the team's hacker to not have to basically risk everything any time he tries something. So every time he tries to just hack a camera, or something simple, he risks of setting off all the alarms. Such systems basically are heavily in favour of being a gunfight generator, since the hacker can't be relied on the pass every hacking role required. So at some point, you can expect the alarms to get set off, and you'll have to kill everyone.

So only if you are trying for admin access over the whole system or something, risks setting off all the alarms, but doing something much more modest is much more failure tolerant. This way, the players have much more choice about what they want to get vs what they risk to get it. The problem with most hacking systems is that the hacker always risks everything, so he might as well try to win everything.
[/edit]

[FrankTrollman]

Congratulations Crank, I think you managed to combine the Oberoni Fallacy with an explicit endorsement of game destroying ass-hattery. I think that gives you the dubious honor of having just given the worst game advice in the history of mankind.

Anyway, yeah the discussion on page 91 of Hackastack (virtually by name and in-character) may have been intended to limit the procedure, but they don't really do that. All they really do is establish in-character that people can and do use the Hackastack strategy in the world. Slamm-O doesn't like people who hack this way, but that has no actual bearing on how effective it is, which is instead a function of the rules. The rules are that if you set the Hackastack up exactly in the daisy-chain format described, and then run an Agent in each and every link of the chain - then all disadvantages of both Agent Smith and Hackastack go away.

The one-brain-limit is completely meaningless as long as you don't actually need a brain's interaction to accomplish hacking. And with the rules in Unwired you very explicitly don't.

The ideal set-up is to chain together a series of comms that are themselves either Clusters of commlinks or wired to peripherals such that they can each simultaneously run an acceptably large number of programs without slowdown. On each of these chain links you will also put a single Persona and loaded into that Persona you will put a single Agent. And then you will rock out with your cock out.

And this isn't some sort of weird power interaction with poorly written character abilities, this is seriously the way the topology of the Matrix is described as working in and out of character, in flavor and rules text. That's just straight up how the Unwired book tells us that the Matrix is put together. It's the model of computational interaction that the NSA warns us about: everyone pretty much lines up parallel processors until they run out of money or feel like stopping, and the skill, power, and ingenuity of each individual computer or person is virtually meaningless in the face of the gestalt purchasing power of whoever is racking the machines.

And that's terrible news if the computer operator is supposed to be a meaningful and contributing member of the team.

-Frank

[Spoonfunk]

Instead of spending months on end working on alternate matrix rules or debating the rules to the point of frustration for both yourself and everyone else. You just say nope agent smith fails. When the twink that just attempted it asks why? Take out a slice of cheese and throw it at him or her.

There is no set of rules on the face of the planet rpg or non-rpg that cant be broken or loop-holed to death. At the end of the day if it is that frustrating and broken just say no...

[Kagetenshi]

On Hackastack: Reading complaints about this has me wondering if certain GMs have any control over their games at all. "Well the rules still make it possible for me to <fill in the blank>!!!" WTF? Why do you need a rule to prevent every level of ridiculousness that your players can come up with. There's no rule in the book that says my players CAN't show up to a knife fight wielding panther cannons and wearing military armor, but somehow I manage to prevent it anyway.

Repeat after me: GM fiat is not a substitute for solid rules.

To expand, every time you "take control", you introduce another rule into your game. It is a rule that is unwritten, and consequently not available for examination. If you sit down and write it, and spend the time to make it consistent and correct and ensure that it doesn't introduce further issues, good on you—but you've just spent valuable time fixing something that was sold broken. If you don't, your rule is unpredictable (will you remember it next time? And also apply it in precisely the same way?), which has deep consequences even if you never actually have to apply it again, as your players then have to work around it—without even knowing precisely what it is.

Insert a few paragraphs about how people's ideas of "reasonable" varies wildly, and double them if not everyone is on precisely the same page about the tone of game you're in. Note that the problem doesn't get fixed if people are on the same page, it's just not as bad.

~J

[Synner667]

To be a credible melee combatant in SR4, you need at least 16-20 dice. The 12 dice guy is chewed up by devil rats long before Mr. Johnson lays eyes on him (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) .

And, unfortunately, that is a ridiculous number of d6 to be using - per person.

I thought Vampire, et al was bad enough with 10d10


But then, I made my choice and moved onto something else.

[Heath Robinson]

Instead of spending months on end working on alternate matrix rules or debating the rules to the point of frustration for both yourself and everyone else. You just say nope agent smith fails. When the twink that just attempted it asks why? Take out a slice of cheese and throw it at him or her.

There is no set of rules on the face of the planet rpg or non-rpg that cant be broken or loop-holed to death. At the end of the day if it is that frustrating and broken just say no...

That's as much of an asshole move as the guy running Agent Smith. More so because the GM could have told the guy that it wouldn't stand beforehand.

The rules exist to regulate play, if the GM gets to say "nuh-uh, it doesn't work because I say so" then the players should get the right to say "nuh-uh, I'm not dead because I say so!" The game becomes a childish squabble, or else the game is not a meeting of equals and the GM gets to force the players to do whatever the GM wants. Even if the players then walk in protest of what the GM has started to do, a possible source of enjoyment and an investment of time and energy have been lost - which is an obvious failure of the game. So we accept that rulesets matter and work towards crafting rulesets that emphasize our desired style of play. Nobody can complain about a rule that they knew about beforehand, because they accepted that the rule was fair by choosing to play with those rules.

[Blade]

What's the problem? If your material isn't rigorous enough to stand up to cross examination you should clear it and start over with something with a firmer foundation. Now, whoever you have working on your project should be strong enough in their subjects that they can do it themselves, so you shouldn't need to bring an outside eye in. But if you built your house of straw you should expect the wolf to blow it down.

In fact, the wolf is doing you a favor.

Yes but what if what you want is really a house of straw and don't want to live in a house of bricks? I'd rather build a solid house of straw (using some kind of mortar to make it wolf-breath proof) than switch to a brick house I don't like.

What I'm saying is that even though your house rules fix a lot of issues, they change the whole feeling of the game. Brain hacking is not a main part of Shadowrun 4's matrix system. It is in your rules. That has a huge impact on the fluff, and completely change the way the game is played.

[FrankTrollman]

And, unfortunately, that is a ridiculous number of d6 to be using - per person.

I thought Vampire, et al was bad enough with 10d10

Seriously?

First of all, a Vampire weapon character can get up to 5 dice from attributes, up to 5 dice from skill, up to 5 dice from the weapon, up to 5 dice from discipline and any of a number of dice from specializations, circumstantial bonuses, and backgrounds. You're lucky if a Vampire swordsman is "only" rolling 20d10.

But second of all, we aren't talking about rolling d10s or adding dice together, we're talking about rolling a handful of cubes and counting hits. You can use very small dice without damaging anything because the dice are cubes and both roll and land very nicely at any size. Since you're counting 5s and 6s rather than adding up the totals on the dice, determination of result is very fast. Indeed, since TNs are static in SR4, resolution speed is actually very fast for each individual test. Rolling 16 SR4 dice is much faster than for example rolling 8d6 and adding the results of each die, and it can be much smaller in your hand than even rolling 8d10s. You can get a block of 36 d6s for less than 8 dollars, so the whole thing ends up as one of the easiest engines to deal with logistically on the planet.

Yes but what if what you want is really a house of straw and don't want to live in a house of bricks? I'd rather build a solid house of straw (using some kind of mortar to make it wolf-breath proof) than switch to a brick house I don't like.

What I'm saying is that even though your house rules fix a lot of issues, they change the whole feeling of the game. Brain hacking is not a main part of Shadowrun 4's matrix system. It is in your rules. That has a huge impact on the fluff, and completely change the way the game is played.

That is a very good point. The direction I am intent upon going with this is not the direction that everyone wants to go. The Brainhacking thing, while I view it as a clear and obvious extension of how hacking works in Shadowrun, is not to everyone's liking. If that's not the way you want to go, you have several options. But one of those options really isn't just shellacking the house of straw and then living a wolf free existence. Honestly, at that point you will be living in a house of shellac, and the fact that there may be straw embedded in the material somewhere is pretty much meaningless.

The foundational difficulty is that a Matrix run is not like an Astral Quest. It's supposedly designed in the world by someone whose actual job it is to make you fail. So while an astral quest is quite likely created in the world to challenge your abilities and your assumptions, Matrix Security is designed by the Big Bad Wolf to blow your house down and eat your piggies. Because the game world posits billions of yen being sunk into pushing the limits of the rules, it is unreasonable to expect that any exploit in the rules won't be taken advantage of. That being said, there are several options that are distinct from the direction I'm going:

• Abandon Pretenses of Realism: Doctor Octopus, the Black Knight, Heat Wave; these are super villains who have no super powers at all. They are literally just dudes who happen to have cool gadgets. Nothing is stopping them from making copies of their gadgets and selling them to corporations or outfitting small armies or whatever. But they don't. They dress up in costumes and rob banks. For, and this is important: No Reason. And that's fine because they live in the world of Superhero Logic. And f you just embrace that, you can have any Matrix architecture you want, and still have players and antagonist security do anything you want them to. As soon as you just move to superheroic logic and the hand-waving principles of epic storytelling, no one's actions have to be justified against the backdrop of what they are nominally capable of doing - whatever it is that people do is just what they do and that's the end of it. You don't have to justify why computer systems are hackable or why people don't use hackastacks - it just happens because people are wearing red spandex and that's the story you want to tell.
  
  And that's a very real possibility, but the cost is that you have to acknowledge that your Matrix system is explicitly less realism driven than for example the Magic System. And if you're trying to play with realistic responses and actions and countermoves for the face, ninja, and magician, the fact that you specifically scrapped all that for the Hacker might ruffle some feathers.
  .
• The Voluntary, Mandatory Brain: Imagine that trodes didn't even exist, and to get yourself a DNI required a fair amount of effort and invasiveness of your part. Also imagine that accomplishing much of anything of note without a DNI is out the window crazy talk. So basically we dump trodes and AR Hacking altogether and we get a system kind of like SR1, where in order to accomplish anything on the internets you need a data jack, but that doing that opens you up to the ravages of Black IC. That's certainly a start, and it clips the Hackastack off without issuing people momhammers. But you'll note that while we haven't made a house of bricks, we certainly haven't made a house of straw - the created landscape is to my mind even less recognizable as the Wireless World described in Unwired than what I'm talking about.

Basically, if you want to live in a world where hackers can't hack into techless people, you have to eliminate the availability of technology that allows techless people to hack. Or you have to accept a world in which Hackers can voluntarily choose to hack in a manner where they cannot be hacked in return, and then you have to come up with a really good reason why corporations and other hacking targets don't do the same.

You can do it. You just can't do it without changing core assumptions. The current core assumptions being contradictory, all things are possible.

-Frank