Shadowrun 4: Hacking & Rigging Options

[kigmatzomat]

Actually I think you roll Command Program + Hacking to "captain's chair" a drone or set of drones.

[mintcar]

@Blakkie: Well, at the very least it implies that the hacker´s contribution is very limited. Not counting your attribute at all when it is included in every other test in the game implies you´re not even participating in making decissions, you can just opperate the program more or less efficiently. Perhaps your analogy is accurate. In that case the program is doing everything that has to do with capacity for logic. The hacker just unleaches the program and control it with more or less skill. The program is making all the difficult choices that are not covered by pure skill. And this would have to be more complete than in any other situation. Basicly you can not make any real time choices yourself when hacking. You´re not allowed to use your logic. This can well be the case because everything goes so fast, you may not have the time... It may make sense that way because it does ring bells from the former editions, but it was strange and hard to swallow back then too. Why not just change it?

[Synner]

[mintcar]

I suppose in light of these insights it may be the closest approximation. But it still stings in the eye that your innate logical capacity does not figure into hacking. If hacking is anything like in SR3, the player will feel like he´s there making logical choices. It will be hard to explain that this is all just an illusion. (Not the being there, everybody knows that´s an illusion. But the actual real time choices of the player are also illusory because they are made on the account of the program and not the character.)

If there was nothing more to hacking than pressing "execute" in Shadowrun, it may not have been a problem. But there is. There is room for innovative suloutions when hacking (in SR3, making assumptions here) and that can not be covered by skill alone. So you have to go into an uncomfortable line of thought that says the program does most of the things the player does (eccept die rolls, wich are shared with the character), and just gives the character a nice show as a representation.

[Synner]

Note that SR4 is not as restrictive as real life (IIRC) since it allows you to roll your Hacking skill as your dice pool to accomplish stuff on the Matrix (in AR and VR) - also note that in SR3 you rolled your Computer skill not your Intelligence. The true change is in dropping the x-factor of a Hacking Pool.

I believe that anyone familiar with Decking in SR3 will find that in practice the Matrix 2.0 has much the same feel and things work mostly the same way even if the appearance and mechanics are different. The player is in just as much control, his options are simply different.

However I should note that after some thought I agreed with one of my players who noted that if it wasn't for the detailed Matrix runs and interactive iconography I've put together since VR2 (see the Idiots Guide to the Matrix thread), SR's Matrix system allowed for everything to be almost mechanical and automatic responses and you had very little freedom of choice (ie. System Operations were defined and in practice they represented all your available choices) - your control was more tactical than active.

[mintcar]

You have to agree there´s a difference now that dice pools are separated between skills and attributes. Before what attributes represented was baked into skills and the old dice pools. Taking attributes out of the equation for a test all together has to be of major concequence in SR4.

[mintcar]

I´ve already accepted that this may be the best approximation of what hacking is about. The issue is that one of my players may be doing some hacking and doing some intelligent maneuvering, thereby getting the feeling that hacking is a process that requires intelligence. All the same the system has taken intelligence out of the equation for that same activity.

Although, I´m not going to complain if it works well and is fun playing anyway. :)

[Clyde]

Right on. Intelligence one hackers!

[Synner]

Yep, just like you could in SR3 (where in practice you could even do without a high computer skill if you had enough cash to burn on high-Rating programs). Of course, I would note that a low Logic decker in SR4 is going to have a hard time using his other requisite Computer-related skills.

[blakkie]

[kigmatzomat]

[kigmatzomat]

[Link]

[TaiChara]

[Jürgen Hubert]

I have visions of a technomancer walking down the street, surrounded by floating drones controlled by the POWER OF HIS MIND!

Anyway, two questions:

- Are there "free sprites" similar to free spirits?

- Does anyone use standard fibre-optic channels for anything? Like, say, when you are somewhere where you don't want to draw attention to you being there by emitting radio waves? Or when you you want a secure line that can't be intercepted by anyone with a Commlink?

[Memo]

Actually, i'd say that hacking is now more realistic.
The major part of RL (cr)hacking involves wiriting and tweaking attack code,
doing testruns against a relevantly configured testbed system.

_running_ the program/script against a remote system doesn't involve any thinking, other than version detection, magic number buffer
memory retpoint calculation/guessing (in the case of buffer overflow/format string error bugs) and maybe a connection routing
scheme. (zombie nets, TOR)

You could say that the "thinking" part consists of the hackers programming skill.

[hahnsoo]

[kigmatzomat]

[blakkie]

[hahnsoo]

[kigmatzomat]

[Halabis]

[RunnerPaul]

I would have thought that would have been one of the very first impications of widespread wireless comm technology in a setting where we've already established that with the right implant, you can transcribe thoughts into digital format.

[Halabis]

I dont know if i like that. Instantly talking to anyone anywhere in the world just by thought only by knowing their comlink's ip address. Seems too, odd. Especialy for technomancers, might as well just give them telepathy.

[hahnsoo]

The transducer was an established piece of tech ever since the "Cybertechnology" sourcebook. In SR4, transducers are assumed to be part of the mind-machine interface, either with a datajack or a commlink. Besides, we communicate nearly instantaneously TODAY with the Internet. My gaming group uses Voice over IP to play our Shadowrun sessions, with one member all the way across the country. People can dial up their friends half-way across the world on cellphones. It's not too far of a stretch.