Because the spell does not require a gaping and obvious hole in the security of the device.

~J

Neither does the hack- that's why it's called hacking.

To be fair to SR4, the wireless isn't that insecure if you bother to spend a little bit of cash at character generation. A commlink running in hidden mode with a fair firewall and system rating and a good encryption program is slow and difficult to hack. It's certainly not something that I'd consider a valid course of action in combat.

Anyone in SR4 with anything wireless that's important should splurge for a rating 6 firewall (3000 ), a rating 6 analyze program (600 ) and a rating 6 encryption program (600 ). The encryption buys you, on average, 9 seconds prior to the hacking attempt. The attempt itself has the hacker rolling Hacking + Exploit vs a threshold of 12 while the system rolls back 12 dice vs. a threshold of the hacker's stealth. So, from chargen, you're talking 14 dice (12) vs. 12 dice (6). Even trading in dice for hits, the system is going to win out the vast majority of the time.

This is indeed the default assumption SR4 makes. It's actually stated on p.212 under "Linking and Subscribing".

The reason you're not told up front that this is the way to do things, is because even in 2070 nobody is obligated to have a commlink, forced to have a suped up SO/Firewall and for all its usefulness wi-fi functionality is the default setting that can be turned off at will.

In fact, I keep seeing a lot of people making the false assumption that wi-fi has replaced DNI in function. It hasn't and SR4 makes no such claim (feel free to prove me wrong).

Per the rules and examples in SR4 specific uses of wi-fi in cyber include saving files onto onboard memory storage or communicating with inbuilt devices/computers and diagnostics sensors. I have yet to find a reference to overriding motor controls or neural interfaces or anything that suggests its possible (the exception being potentially hacking a diagnostic system that allows you to turn something off for maintenance purposes). Just because people assume - in the face of examples given - that it is possible doesn't make it so.

Of course if a GM wants to allow GitS-style hacking, that's his call. SR4 doesn't state that this is the case.

This is explicitly correct.

So pretty much everything has wireless and DNI capacity. It's beneficial to have some items of cyberware (eyes, for instance) wireless enabled, but everything that doesn't serve a good purpose should be locked down.

In the Dragon Heart novels, Azzie technicians lock Burnout out of all of his cyberware in one scene, and out of his articulated arm for most of the books. Why can't a SR4 hacker do the same?

Maybe because Burnout's cyberware represented such a big investment that it was specifically built with that safeguard/backdoor access to keep him on a leash? Would you buy cyberware or have your street doc implant stuff which allowed a potential unfriendly that kind of access?

SR4 doesn't say it's not possible, it's just not assumed to be the default and hence isn't presented as such in the basic rules. I'm pretty sure some of the diagnostics systems could be hacked to shut down the relevant cyber, but the character just has to DNI signal it back on (which should take all of a Free Action). We'll be getting more details in Augmentation and Unwired , but to the best of my knowledge, SR4 RAW don't explicitly support it. Wireless and DNI functionalities are complementary not redundant.

Just because someone has the key to fort knox doesnt mean yours fits.

Burnout is a several million nuyen investment for the corp. And a damn unstable one. If there was even the slightest chance of anyone but them controlling him via his cyberware they wouldnt have build him in the first place. His cyberware controls each and every of his actions, if someone could just hack it it would make him a volatile investment for sure.

MMOG don't do this very well because they require a lot of customers to pay for the development and maintenance costs. The first one on that list is the part about the customer being able to tinker with the mechanics of the game. Which MMOGs also don't do very well at. There have been exceptions to these two though when systems designed to be more open by extended by incredibily bright and creative players.


@mfb

Sorry, that wasn't a full or well formed explaination of my train of thought. WarHammer was a poor example from that group of what I was thinking of. More the military history guys. I'm not going to go into it though. So either you'll have to on your own come to understand, or not, the small size of that market segment you are talking about and how you are effectively suggesting competing with income tax forms.

It doesn't even matter if it is a market segment that could support a product by itself, because with a extendable system the complexity and confusion can be added later. Trying to strip away complexity by adding extra products usually fails miserably. It certainly is braindead marketing.

Changes in pen and paper RPGs are improvements. Improvements in organization. SR4 tried, and in many ways succeeded in doing that with SR. They could have gone farther for sure, but it is a good effort. Why do I call increasing organization an improvement and not just a style change? Because generally disorganized is viewed as poor quality.

Had. Inspite of. When customer expectations were lower, and you could readily sell a 1/2 pound cell phone.

Welcome to the future.


@The dice system bugaboo

First, and this is very important, fixed TN was already being used in SR3. It was not expanded on or employed or developed as it has been in SR4. But it is there.

This combined with some of the choices made with the new Matrix rules has that section in many ways as compatible, if not more compatible with SR3 than SR3's Matrix rules are! Though there are some minor adjustments to make, you could slide SR4 wireless matrix rules into a SR3 game.

A very important part of the reorganization for SR4, as it was at core of success in fixing up the mess AD&D was, was to reduce the huge number of different dice mechanics spread throughout the system. To do this you define a basic dice mechanic to use for the meat of dice tests that occur in the game. This basic mechanic should be simple as possible, and include as few variations as possible. The flexibility must come from it's inherent properties in standard form, not from numerous mutations of the mechanics.

Could the reorganization of SR4 have done as well using variable TN? I doubt it because SR3 manages to make variable TN work by employing a wide arrary of differing mechnics variations, including the fixed TN parts. Variable TN is simple weaker handling oppose test than fixed TN. You can examples of this SR3 of to the mind bending Opening Tests, and the use of fixed TN in some spells. Variable TN with opposed tests also relied on the variable level damage staging, exposing it's lack of fine steps of difference.

Fixed TN isn't quite as strong with non-opposed tasks, but for opposed tasks it is far superior to variable TN. Even if you addressed the 6-7 TN issue. Which is why I think that it was a good pick out of all that were already in the SR3 mechanics to center the entire system around.


But Your Wheel Is Round, Just Like That Other One

So here we have a system that has cleaned up unneeded complexity in the core of SR, and is suitable for extending the complexity of the game, for those that want it, that would allow them to add complexity with value instead of complexity for it's own sake. Instead apparently they have busied themselves with attempting to beat some of the complexity out of SR3?

Why do I think this happened? FanPro didn't really sell the new SR4 dice system. It barely sold the whole system itself. The myths that have popped up in this thread are a testimate to that. Such is the power of a small marketing budget. FanPro did manage to create some buzz though on the limited budget, including human resources, that they had. But they weren't working with some 200 million dollar Windows rollout budget after all. It was even dwarfed by the D&D 3e marketing budget.

D&D was designed around the marketing plan of selling the D20 system, and using D20 to sell D&D! No small irony that SR4's dice system is probably more universally usable than D20.

So now an emotional backlash, entirely understandable given their love of playing SR, has combined with the derth of explaination to create a misunderstanding of the power and benefits of the mechanics underpinning SR4. This backlash has come from, amoung others, some of the players that could be best motivated to use this new tool to take SR further that it has gone before.

I'm just staying with my .357 S&W revolver. No computerized stuff at all, nothing to hack. just solid workmanship.

Heavy is good, heavy is reliable. If it doesn't work you can always hit them with it. - Boris The Blade

improvements in organization != simple rulesets. quick resolution is a fine goal, but properly representing your game world is more important.

the first part of your statement is purely subjective. RPGs are 'good' or 'bad' not by any absolute measure, but by the opinions of the people who do or don't buy them. you like SR4 more than SR3; therefore, it's an improvement. to you.

I know you didn't just accuse SR4 of having improvements in organization. That's crazy talk.

I never said that it is the be all. But you need to get plaibility up to at least where the larger market will tolerate it, and the standard of that requirement is rising because it has been shown that you can have a fun, simple clean game that is also intreging and engaging and can be used to flesh out a large complex environment.

Well this is a start.

But maybe you could get to the point of: There are few enough that spending the money to rework and relaunch SR by keeping a base system with SR3's funked out mess would likely be enough to kill FanPro, and the in process also the future of SR?

Of course I never said they were non-existant, I have said explicitly that they do indeed exist. Your saying I did is blatantly misleading. But enough of them for a market to support a commercial operation allocating at least the resources to a pen and paper in a genre remotely resembling SR that SR has had spent on it? Or that they will ever be some sort of majority? No, I don't believe there is, and that there won't be. Outside of maybe whereever magical fairies live.

How about patchwork mess != realism?

Perception of realism in a game is an extremely subjective thing, as you can witness on this board everyday here. More so when it is a fantasy world based directly on fiction where even the mundane isn't particularly realistic.

The source of the tangled mess in the SR3 magic system had little to do with realism. The worst parts of the SR3 vehicle system indeed had to do with failed and misguided attempts at modeling realism. There never was anything particularly realistic about the Matrix from the start. Many people that care deeply about weapon realism have long ago tossed the SR3 firearm system.

SR4 has cleaned a lot of the SR3 messes up. You now have tools for working towards whatever realism you can imagine up. How about using them instead of moaning that SR3 still needs to be replaced?

Changes in themselves are far from improvements. The right, required changes are. And even that is often far from improvements. Changes for changes sake are the worst idea in themselves and SR4 did quite some of those.

Actually that would be = there. I mean, just have a look at how things are. Politics for instance. Though, this isnt what you meant. Calling SR3 patchwork is taking it somewhat far however. The core of the system was the variable TN. The main thing that had gotten out of hand was the large amount of modifiers.

Im sorry but I have been playing MMOGs since 1996 or 97 (Cant recall really) and I have yet to see one that leaves room for real imagination. Sure you can walk around tell stories and the like, but 1. the average player wont give a shit and 2. you are and always will be ultimatly limited by the amount of customisation in the game. In most you cant even create the character you want and I havent seen one that gives a damn about a backstory.
Of all the MMOs I played Meridian59 was the only one where actual roleplaying took place on a regular basis (with the exception of special servers) and roleplayers in MMOs are about the rarest breed of all MMO players.
They provide an enviroment to escape reality into someone elses predefined imagination. That holds true. But not an option for your own imagination to roam free as PnP games do.
Heck, most MMO players dont even know what PnP is. When I said I was logging of to play ADnD now, I once had a guildy ask "what, your logging of to play Baldurs Gate?" It was not a joke.

SR3 was nowhere near the mess of AD&D. And AD&Ds problem was not the varing dice mechanics. They were few enough. It's problem was the overload of character options that contradicted the core rules to a point that you could build whatever you wanted as long as you bought enough books. What made SR3s complexity was the fact that
a.) The amount of TN modifiers had risen to often too high amounts
b.) They way in which rules were organized was rather bad, forcing players to search in several different places to clear up one situation.
Both are things a rewrite the way SR4 did it wont fix. TN modifiers are now called dice modifiers and will inevitably become more as new books are published, and rules always become scattered the more books there are.

Which would be magic by default. However, would you mind explaining me how SR magic was a tangled mess? I realize Fanpro openly stated this in their SR4 advertisments and others have said it too, but none ever bothered to give me an example. Maybe im too used to the system since it basically hasnt changed since 1st ED, but besides the different ways range are calculated I dont really know what was so much of a mess.

Further towards the trashcan maybe. Im sorry but that what Fanpro has called SR4 isnt shadowrun anymore at all. What made shadowrun was the merge of magic and technologie in a *near* and close to reality future. It was also made by the novels, the little stories told and the great characters within in the world. With SR4 they killed many of the most basic things that made shadowrun, Deckers beeing one prime example. It may seem little to some, but to me, for as long as I played shadowrun it was deckers and datajacks. Two ultimate truths that were important. Now the took away the decks and the datajacks, thats fine, cranial decks and subdermal jacks with satelite uplinks did that before, but they figured they might change the name along with it. So now we have corporate hackers working for network security. It was called decking before because decking =! hacking. It was a term for the usage of the matrix, *not* illegal use.
This is just one example of how one little thing can kill the flair of a gameworld. If the people who make the game decide that the details people care about are to be changed on a whim you know a game is going downhill.

Others may not care as much, but to me the flair is what makes Shadowrun. It always has, it always will.

Sorry about all the quoting. Its kinda early here and im not exactly at the peak of my mental abilities right now.

This certainly explains your puzzlement over SR magic. "Variable TN" in the case of SR3 was a collection of at least 7 or 8 different dicing mechanisms, depending on how you differentiate, that included using fixed TN.

The rest of your stuff I frankly can't justify the time right now pointing out the various and numerous flaws.

I will take the time though to agree that SR3 was nowhere near the mess of AD&D, although the stuff after that in that section kinda falls apart.

Now that one you'll have to explain. Either I'm to simple minded or it's just too obvious for me to see, but SR was always based on a number of d6 equal to your skills or attributes + dice pools vs TN x depending on the base situation +y for situational modifiers.

SR 4 is based on dicepools equal to attribute + skill + situational modifiers vs TN.

Beyond the amount of dice, the only dice mechanic I see behind SR3 is the rule of the 6. The rest is comparing successes. Care to enlighten me as to where exactly those other mechanics are? I mean this btw. I've been DM'ing SR for good 10 years, so it might well be too obvious for me.

Too bad, I really was interested what kinda market your talking about. Not to mention it's kinda... hrm.. "easy" to claim something has "various and numerous flaws" without pointing them out. Though, I never claimed to be perfect so there might be. *shrug*

Kinda expected more though.

Yes, that is a start.

Already considered. In a number of ways. Already stated and aknowledged. In a number of ways.

But this is about breaking down some of the myths and misconceptions that have grown up around SR4.

Yes, well I do require occational sleep and there are other things in my life I value more than cleaning up your mistakes. There are a lot of them in that post after all.

i never claimed it did. what i do claim is that SR3's ruleset offers more realistic play, despite the fact that parts of it are a patchwork mess.

In your subjective opinion. I find Combat Pool, for one thing, rather suspect.

When you cooked up that cock-eyed sniper senario, and were complaining about the realism of SR4, SR3 and SR4 were fairly close in their results. Which leads me to believe that you might be complaining about esthetics of the model, and clinging to the past, rather than looking at actual realism results. In short somewhere along the line SR3 started defining your view realism, not the other way around.

EDIT Not even the results of SR3 being viewed as realism, but just the mechanics of SR3 being how you think the world works.


If you don't like
What you got
Why don't you change it
If your world is all screwed up
Rearrange it - Ra McGuire

they were only close after the GM altered the threshold--which i find both unrealistic and cumbersome. and if SR3 defined my view of realism, i wouldn't have been pushing so hard for SR4, back when it was first announced.

This is about as weak as it gets Brahm. It's little kids jumping around you yellig "your wrong your wrong" weak.
I dont mind beeing wrong, but if you make a statement you should back it up.

When I said I expected more I meant more maturity and respect. Not more attitude and arrogance.
Have fun discussing. This is below me.

OK, you just went into Crazy Town. You said that you thought applying the entire SR4 resolution model to resolve an action was unrealistic. That's where things go from you having an opinion to you being objectively wrong.

You can feel that the SR4 resolution mechanic, where the gamemaster adjusts how many dice the character rolls and how many hits they need based on the difficulty of the task and the circumstances surrounding the action is cumbersome. That's fine. That's an opinion, and everyone is entitled to one. I find it pretty similar in cumbersomeness to the SR3 resolution system in which the gamemaster determined the Target Number and the Degree of Success required to complete an action, but I could see how someone might feel differently now that the emphasis is on the number of hits you need rather than the number of hits you get. But applying the resolution mechanic is never "realistic" or "unrealistic". It's all back-end, the results might be realistic (or not), but the process doesn't even exist in the game world.

You could be throwing darts or flipping coins or spinndle dredels. The process only matters in questions of realism in that it generates a resolution that is realistic or not.

Which means, mfb, that you're being unreasonable. Parts of your arguments are acceptable based on having different opinons, but now I can say that you're wrong as an absolute fact. Thanks for clearing that up.

-Frank

Then you have to stop claiming that SR4 is an objective step forward from SR3. As soon as even one person disagrees with that claim, it's rendered untrue. You're acting as if you think everyone will agree with you if only you can explain yourself clearly enough, that everyone will love SR4 if only you can remove the scales from their eyes. It won't happen.

But first, for my own interest: what are the other four or five roll mechanics in SR3?

FrankTrollman: That the sniper example required GM fiat to work realistically may be what mfb found cumbersome. It's what bothered me, at any rate.

yes, i said it's unrealistic. because if the target gets to dodge, the threshold (not counting dodge) stays at 1. but if the target doesn't get to dodge, the GM raises the threshold. that's how it works, right? that's why it's okay for a good unaugmented shooter to have a 50/50 chance of rolling a hit on a -9 dice test, isnt' it? because on an unopposed test that hard, there should be a threshold applied? that means you're raising the base level of difficulty for a shot because the target isn't moving.

hell, depending on how few dodge dice the moving target has, and how draconic the GM's imposed threshold is for the non-moving target, the non-moving target might actually be harder to hit--if you figure an average joe has 3 attribute dice and 3 dodge skill (i'm being generous, how many sararimen are going to have a dodge skill at all), a threshold of 2 will mean that a stand-up target is as hard to hit, on average, as an especially athletic businessman.

Wrong. If the target gets to dodge, it's a variable threshold check with the threshold being said by the opposing roll. If the target does not get to dodge, the threshold is set by the degree to which the shooter knows the location of the target. A 1 corresponds to the character knowing the exact relative location of the target. A target whose relative location is not known is simply an automatic miss (threshold = infinity).

So your example is equivalent to a legendary sniper character standing at a firing range where he knows precisely where the target is relative to himself. Then closing his eyes, drawing and firing. It's not a combat situation, it's a frickin training exercise. If the target's precise relative location is in any way in doubt, the threshold rises.

But I've explained that to you. In the old threads, and in this thread. Repeatedly. Do I need a chart? Maybe some shorter words?

-Frank

a) minor nitpick: that doesn't cover situations where the target can dodge and the shooter has a less-than-exact fix on the target's location; b) please give me chapter and verse for the rules you just listed.

no, my example is much more akin to a really good sniper (6 and 6) shooting at enemies whose location he determined from their muzzle flash. that's not a training exercise, that's about as realistic as it gets.

a> That's handled with giving moving and stealthy targets a bonus to their defense dice.

b> Go fuck yourself. Really, if you can't be bothered to read the book you're bashing, you can't be bothered to read excerpts from that book. I'm not going to throw my time down a well, read the book yourself.

Well, that might also be covered by the rules resolution you've been trotting out. Of course, legendary snipers really do get a high number of kills doing that, so I'm at a loss to explain how you think it's "unrealistic" for world class snipers to be able to pull that off. The character you are listing may in fact be a little bit better than Vassili Zaitsev or Major Konig. However, those are historical characters who were able to quickly fire upon (and kill) enemies whose position is given away by the glare off their scope, or a shifting of planks as if under the weight of a man.

Sure. Any time the target's exact location is given away for whatever reason, and you happen to be a world class super-sniper, you can blow someone's head off at extreme range right through a boiler plate or plywood wall. Why is this surprising or even interesting, let alone "unrealistic and world destroying."

And of course, any time their exact location is not given away, you don't have a shot.

-Frank

those guys had scopes. that's half the point of my goddamn example. scopes.

Which you followed up by continuing to, to use your expression, throw your time down a well.

If you're going to be pissed off and attempt to continue baiting someone, don't preface it by saying you're not. It takes a bit of the blow out of your storm.

~This argument tip brought to you by the letter A, and Samuel Adams. Always a good decision.

And so do SR4 characters. Your point?

So? It takes a simple action of aiming with image magnification to reduce the range to short (the rules even refer to it as "zooming in on the target"), and if you don't take it, you still have all the normal range penalties. What's the difference between having a scope and not using the magnification, and not having the scope at all?

In SR4, the Ranger-Arms does come with a scope. The Walther does not.

In SR3, the Ranger-Arms comes with a scope, while the Barret and Walther do not.

Also, remember that this example is constructed to show the absurdity of some portion of the rules. Even if the rifle does have a scope, the shooter isn't using it.

~J

you and your filthy 'facts' and your 'logic'.