The Ends of the Matrix v4.01, Alternate Matrix Rules Options

[WearzManySkins]

For the bolded powergame exploits listed as the reasons for this. Could you elaborate on them?

EDIT: Would this make more sense in the community projects page?

IF you wish you can search for "FrankTrollman" using the search function on the forums here. Limit it to the last 60-90 days you will find alot of the threads this was discussed in.

WMS

[kzt]

Look, regardless of what you've heard, shadowrunners aren't just people who shoot other people right in the face for money.

No, they steal their stuff and sell the body to organlegers too.

[Stahlseele]

ok, i honestly tried to read all that . . and even comprehending it @.@
i did not manage either of those two in the whole 8 hours while at work . .
so Frank, just one Question:
what the hell does someone like you do for a living with that kinda mental processing power? O.o

[FrankTrollman]

Any chance you could post this somewhere in .pdf form? I'd love to read it in more detail, but I'm an old fashioned tree killing kind of guy.

This will indeed go up in .pdf format. The version which will be the template for the .pdf will be the one at The Gaming Den. It has a lot better formatting text available (more sies of enlarged text, for example). Supposedly, someone may even give it some pictures or something, but that's all up to other people. I imagine it would come out at the end of August.

what the hell does someone like you do for a living with that kinda mental processing power? O.o

During most of the year I am in medical school. Since I finished up my year at the beginning of July, I've had a fair amount of time to work on this project.

-Frank

[kzt]

Hey, if you have time free you could post more cool weirdness on your blog....

[sunnyside]

Whew. Well it'll be a long time before I sit down to get through all of that but very nicely written so far.

Can I get some kind of review from somebody else?

Also, specifically, are the rules "better" all around or do they just patch up exploits.

If I don't like a specific rules abuse I retain the fact that as the GM if it comes down to a player being a dick mine is bigger, and argue RAW all they want by RAW I can say "rocks fall, everyone dies". (Or I guess in SR4 "rocks fall, lose a point of edge"). Now at face value that seems lousy, but introducing complex house rules to achieve the same thing is really the same deal except it's more of a pain for all involved and may introduce another breach.

[kzt]

The current rules are such a morass that any working set of rules IS a bunch of semi-complex house rules.

[Cthulhudreams]

Whew. Well it'll be a long time before I sit down to get through all of that but very nicely written so far.

Can I get some kind of review from somebody else?

Also, specifically, are the rules "better" all around or do they just patch up exploits.

If I don't like a specific rules abuse I retain the fact that as the GM if it comes down to a player being a dick mine is bigger, and argue RAW all they want by RAW I can say "rocks fall, everyone dies". (Or I guess in SR4 "rocks fall, lose a point of edge"). Now at face value that seems lousy, but introducing complex house rules to achieve the same thing is really the same deal except it's more of a pain for all involved and may introduce another breach.

Well, you only going to get fanboys, but from my use, mean time to resolve hacking actions decreases markedly from 6+ dice rolls for a task of simple complexity or a 'combat hack' to 1.

Dicerolls typically take a couple of minutes each (working out the next step, some player planning, etc, calculating modifiers, etc) so it reduces time taken from 12 minutes to 2 per 'outcome'. However there is a significant increase in the number of 'hack actions' undertaken, but they don't come in 'blocks' so its less disruptive to overall game flow while taking less time.

Overall I feel it has significant advantages for actual play over the core rules even ignoring the core rules problems due to a significantly simplifed resolution mechanic. indeed, the simplified resolution mechanics are the biggest advantage of the entire party peice. Even if it wasn't for the other tedious programs, I'd probably want to switch because of this alone.

The downside is that everyone has to actually read the rules otherwise there is incestant whining when they don't by a decent firewall and get hit by seize. If you're rolling it out to an established group, I recommend greating a 'matrix package' that has a decent firewall and some general purpose programs on a commlink with a DNI and making it mandatory.

[sunnyside]

While a well writen full set of rules would people say the tl;dr version would be:

1. Roll stat+skill not program+skill
2. you need a metahuman brain to really sling the matrix mojo

I'd be interested in an intermediate "while standing on one leg" version.

[Cthulhudreams]

In the Trollman Matrix the programs interact with you?

[Blade]

Can I get some kind of review from somebody else?

Also, specifically, are the rules "better" all around or do they just patch up exploits.

These rules (I won't talk about the fluff) are, as far as I can tell, consistent and should work as intended.
Are they "better"? That's up to you. It's not just a few collection of house rules, it's a totally different ruleset with big differences in the fluff, and in the role of the hacker. I know I don't like what it implies, but some people do. So I guess you just have to read them, and try them if you're interested.

Also please note that for most of the supporters of these rules, the canon rules (BBB+Unwired even if they may not have read it) are ultimately broken.

[kzt]

I don't really like where Frank took the game (the whole brain hacking bit), but they are coherent, internally consistent and playable. And they do work. We played with them a bit when Frank's online game was running.

As he said when he released the first version of these, there are at least 2 other approaches that someone could use to produce playable rules that are also coherent and internally consistent, plus at least one more if you are just using the game mechanics without the metaplot and "history". He just didn't want to do any of those. Feel free to do it yourself. I'd really like a decent set of rules that doesn't allow brain hacking.

[Stahlseele]

This will indeed go up in .pdf format. The version which will be the template for the .pdf will be the one at The Gaming Den. It has a lot better formatting text available (more sies of enlarged text, for example). Supposedly, someone may even give it some pictures or something, but that's all up to other people. I imagine it would come out at the end of August.



During most of the year I am in medical school. Since I finished up my year at the beginning of July, I've had a fair amount of time to work on this project.

-Frank

figures, thought it would be something scientific *g*

[sunnyside]

I don't really like where Frank took the game (the whole brain hacking bit), but they are coherent, internally consistent and playable. And they do work. We played with them a bit when Frank's online game was running.

As he said when he released the first version of these, there are at least 2 other approaches that someone could use to produce playable rules that are also coherent and internally consistent, plus at least one more if you are just using the game mechanics without the metaplot and "history". He just didn't want to do any of those. Feel free to do it yourself. I'd really like a decent set of rules that doesn't allow brain hacking.

For clarification do you feel the RAW rules aren't internally consistent? It seems they are it's just that they have some fundamental playability issues. The reason that's important is if you like the basic underlying stuff more houserulish stuff would suffice.

i.e. instead of making brains more special make the agents "pre-singularity" as Frank might put it. Say the best in the world are rating 4 or 5 and only rating 3 would be availible at chargen.

If you don't like AR hacking slap it with a penalty.

If you don't like smith give nodes some ability to automatically kick in some kind of flood control. Or have it always on for most nodes. i.e. if more than X connections are attempted simultaniusly it just doesn't accept the later ones until they're cleared and whitelisted. Small numbers of rating 4 agents aren't anything.

[Prime Mover]

As always a well written piece. I won't use the rule changes or brain hacking but liked the fluff, examples and additional programs/sprites and what not.

[sunnyside]

While saying nice things I liked the data density bit. Very convenient for mechanics and realistic.

[kzt]

For clarification do you feel the RAW rules aren't internally consistent? It seems they are it's just that they have some fundamental playability issues. The reason that's important is if you like the basic underlying stuff more houserulish stuff would suffice.

There was another discussion where Frank pointed out that two of the writers had used the same mechanic is two contradictory fashions. I think this is it...

The deal with the Matrix stuff currently published is that it is contradictory. It is an opinion-laden value judgement to say that any of the ideas presented are good or bad, but it is merely factual to state that they are incompatible. You seriously must ignore portions of the basic book simply to follow other portions of the basic book. To that extent, those who maintain that the system cannot be played without using handwaving technologies are completely correct.

However, asking it to come out quickly is honestly what got us into this mess in the first place. Even the basic mechanics of whether hacking into a node is performed by rolling Logic + Hacking (as stated on pages 124 and 223) or Exploit + Hacking (as stated on pages 221 and another part of 223) is completely up in the air. That's a really fundamental question and it's answered positively in incompatible ways in two different parts of the main book.


-Frank

In terms of the overall rules Frank said it better than me 6 months ago.

Yes it has. Setting the wayback machine to late two thousand and six for the moment, we'll see that I was at the time sort of working for FanPro. I say sort of because there was a work stoppage secondary to various management arguments that I wasn't privy to and wouldn't tell you about them if I was. Street Magic had been published and had gotten generally good reviews, and Augmentation drafts were in, but unedited. At the time my work was in one chapter (final draft put it in three).

And the writers, left adrift and unsure of the direction things were going were turning their eyes to Unwired. We had long discussions about how the Matrix worked, how it should work, how it didn't work, and so on and so forth. I mean seriously, what else was there to do at that point? Serbitar, AncientHistory, and myself just sending long emails back and forth complaining about each other's ideas.

And I had an epiphany: on close examination it didn't work. What we were dealing with was a case of balance by obfuscation. That the rules were unclear enough that you could make any particular thing work by ruling on one of the grey areas in one way or another. But solving any particular problem in that way actually created more problems down the line. No matter how many faces of the rubix cube you made mono color there was always at least one that was jumbled.

And that meant that you could keep it going in an individual campaign. All you had to do was have the game master stay ahead of the players and use the grey areas to rule against any specific problems that came up. In a game of limited scope it could work. It did work for a lot of games. For a while. But if you clarified things, they stopped working. The act of telling people how things actually worked made some problems go away but made other problems explicit.

That took a lot of thinking, a lot of analyzing, and a lot of soul searching. This isn't an example of someone who had their own pet ideas on how things had to work and through a temper tantrum. I throw temper tantrums for entirel different reasons. No, this is a case of me honestly having exhaustively tested the system until it broke and then determined that the Matrix subsystem is and always will be broken. I presented my findings, FanPro (now Catalyst) said that they were holding to their explicit design goals of not contradicting core material, and I walked.

I actually find the concept of not contradicting rules to be quite admirable. I was a huge proponent of it in Street Magic, and was in favor of it in everything in Augmentation except Cyberlimbs (after long, long arguments on the subject we compromised and made alternate "advanced" cyberlimbs that were independently useful - but the ones in the core book still blow). But I genuinely do not believe that it is a good plan in the case of the Matrix chapter. The flaws are... pernicious.

-Frank

[FrankTrollman]

Consistency Problems with the Basic Rules

The basic rules were written as a weird hodgepodge between modern computer technology, Hollywood hacking, and old Shadowrun tropes (that are mostly based on cyberpunk novels from the 80s). This means that a lot of the Matrix descriptions sound really cool or really plausible, but almost none of it actually works together. Here's a small sampling:

The "Voluntary" Matrix

Unwired treats "you" differently from "not you" in a way which bungholes all consistency. Taking a page from modern computers, you are only vulnerable to the matrix if "you" open yourself up to the matrix. However, what you are doing is no longer sitting safe in your house and plugging your iMac into the DSL - you're turning on a wireless trode net to create a direct neural interface wirelessly with your own brain! And yet, this is treated mechanically as if people other than "you" could never do it. In the case of the iMac, it is because the virus makers are in Belarus and it requires someone on-site to physically plug the wire into the actual machine. But with the 2070s tech, the matrix connection is made wirelessly directly into the user's brain - and the security spider is right there in the room with you!

If a man with no technical skills at all can spend a complex action to press a button to transport himself into virtual reality at any time with no wired connection to anything and 50¥ worth of equipment. So why can't a person 3 meters away (well within the signal range of the devices the first guy was using) who happens to have legendary technical skills put our hero into Virtual Reality with thousands of ¥ worth of equipment? The iMac vs. Virus makers in Belarus model doesn't apply or make any sense, because the "iMac" in this case is a normal unmodified human brain, the "DSL cable" is in fact a wireless transmitter that never makes any direct connection with any brain, and the "Blackhats" are in the same room with you rather than in Eastern Europe. The whole thing where people "stupidly allow the matrix into their brain without protection" doesn't wash with the rest of the technology, because the thing you do to let the matrix in is something anyone could do to put the matrix in.

The Hole in the Sky

The Basic book was written without a good handle on how spatial orbits work. Not a super big problem inherently, but them's the facts. The basic book defines "space" as being 70 kilometers up in the sky, and gives you a sat link that lets you communicate with things in "space" that are within 100 kilometers. No problem, right? Wrong. Unwired redefined where satellites are such that they fit into the regular orbital belts that are currently used - where the "low" ones are over a thousand kilometers away. But they didn't go back and change the satellite link ranges to fit the new distance. And now there's nothing in the book that can actually communicate with satellites.

We are even spared justification about how maybe space is free of clutter enough that maybe signal ranges go farther there, because Unwired helpfully defined the signal range as the distance things go with no terrain involved. The net result is that signals go even less far using the unwired rules, because crap like trees and buildings cut signal ranges even more. And they already didn't go far enough to actually get to the matrix hubs in the sky. Oops!

The "Me" and the "Us"

The rules are written assuming that you will be a user and run your programs. But there is also nothing in the entire game that actually requires anything from "you" to run those programs. For just slightly more ¥ "you" can be a second user. And a third. And an eleventh. And so on. You can be online as many times as you want. Each piece of hardware is, according to Unwired, explicitly entitled to one Persona, and each Persona is explicitly allowed to have an Agent that uses real hacking and real actions in real time without getting any real-time input from "you." And doing this is explicitly and impressively fundamentally far more effective and safe than having "you" do anything at all. And it's cheaper to get a half dozen high quality "yous" on the 'trix than it is to propel yourself to even halfway marginal competence. So logically speaking, the uber-leet hacker they keep throwing around in fiction has no reason to exist. Anything he can do, my credstick can do better. By a huge amount. And in a game where individual street scum take jobs facing off against powerful rich corporations, you can see how it might be problematic if ¥ > Skill in even local conflicts.

---

Brainhacking is not only a fundamental part of the cyberpunk genre (Snow Crash, Neuromancer, Synners, etc.), it's complete nonsense for it to not exist if people are able to make DNIs without drilling a hole in their heads.

-Frank

[Blade]

The whole thing where people "stupidly allow the matrix into their brain without protection" doesn't wash with the rest of the technology, because the thing you do to let the matrix in is something anyone could do to put the matrix in.

I take it you consider there is brain hacking in Shadowrun since "people allow the matrix into their brain" and should need a protection.

Brainhacking is not only a fundamental part of the cyberpunk genre (Snow Crash, Neuromancer, Synners, etc.), it's complete nonsense for it to not exist if people are able to make DNIs without drilling a hole in their heads.

So you consider that brain hacking isn't in Shadowrun's rules?

I really don't get what you're trying to say. I also don't understand how you can say at the same time that there is a dropout issue and that people run around with brain-hackable commlinks and no protection.

As for the "Me" and "Us", I don't see any difference with runners/corps sending drones and/or spirits to do the job for them, since they can often do better and just cost nuyens.

[kzt]

So you consider that brain hacking isn't in Shadowrun's rules?

I really don't get what you're trying to say. I also don't understand how you can say at the same time that there is a dropout issue and that people run around with brain-hackable commlinks and no protection.

As for the "Me" and "Us", I don't see any difference with runners/corps sending drones and/or spirits to do the job for them, since they can often do better and just cost nuyens.

I think you are being deliberately obtuse here, but on the chance that you are not:

What Frank is saying is that you have all the pieces of brain hacking in the game history and the game genre. And it's actually happened in the game history, but SR players can't do it and it's not allowed by the rules. Except that this occurring is a critical point of multiple plots in SR.

The second is perfectly reasonable, but it makes a kind of boring game. Try running an SR game where everyone gets to watch two NPCs silently play chess, and nothing else happens. That's an exciting version of a botnet grinding away against a corp defense network.

[Blade]

In that case, I don't really see how/why it's possible but not feasible. The only brain-hackings I know of in Shadowrun are done by using BTL and, to a lesser extent, Simsense. Both are open to players, though not too easy to use commonly. The first one can be very dangerous to the victim but only affects people with an illegal modification to their SimModule. The second one can be a little problematic but not enough to force people to stay away from everything else Simsense has to offer.

I agree that using agents/drones/spirits to work for you is boring, but it's not my point. My point is: why would agents be different from drones/spirits since they are all the same thing (potentially powerful allies (even better than you) you can get for a few nuyens)?

[The Monk]

I've been thinking of using these rules with one change: That DNI hardware (trode nets etc) needs time to synchronize with a brain before it is usable. Basically the user must keep the hardware on and "train" it. This could be done in two ways: the fast way where the user must go through a number of mental exercises. And a slow way where the user just wears it every day until the synchronization is done.

This solves the problem with brain hacking. You either have to steal the victim's stuff to do it, kidnap the victim and force him to synchronize with a device, or follow the victim around for a few weeks with a device pointed at him that will do it.

[kzt]

Maybe. You can take over their synchronized trodenet by hacking their comlink, or put an itsy bitsy device where they will be near it for hours and hours. Like their pillow.

[Aaron]

Even the basic mechanics of whether hacking into a node is performed by rolling Logic + Hacking (as stated on pages 124 and 223) or Exploit + Hacking (as stated on pages 221 and another part of 223) is completely up in the air.

The argument purportedly supported by this sentence is fallacious. This statement seems to have been made by someone who either didn't read the sections referenced, doesn't understand the sections referenced, or is purposely misrepresenting the sections referenced in order to support his or her own argument.

[The Monk]

Maybe. You can take over their synchronized trodenet by hacking their comlink, or put an itsy bitsy device where they will be near it for hours and hours. Like their pillow.

Yeah, whatever at the very least it makes it harder. And harder yet for virgin brains.