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irinoxx
Am I right in understanding that rating 12 Sprites are like rating 12 Agents, which are rating 12 programs, which do operate at a reduced rating of 3 (System rating) on my wristwatch?

Meaning that high-end Sprites (rating 7+) are kinda pointless, since practically no node can have a System above 6?
NightHaunter
I'm still rusty on this myself, but isn't it your resonance? Since thats what creates and feeds them.
System is for the system running it's own programs.
Ranneko
No they are not like agents set to run on whatever system they are active in.

So if you have the misfortune of running into a R12 sprite, it will have rating 12 programs and matrix stats of at least 12.

Were I to encounter a rating 12 sprite, especially a r12 fault sprite, I would be off the trix faster than you could think "Dumpshock" buddy.
Jaid
QUOTE (Ranneko)
No they are not like agents set to run on whatever system they are active in.

So if you have the misfortune of running into a R12 sprite, it will have rating 12 programs and matrix stats of at least 12.

Were I to encounter a rating 12 sprite, especially a r12 fault sprite, I would be off the trix faster than you could think "Dumpshock" buddy.

yeah, and sever all your gear's connection from the matrix as fast you can, too.

mind you, good luck seeing that sprite if it has a rating 12 stealth CF.
Divine Virus
rating twelve sprits make everything cry. You have rateing twelve complex forms. You have crack sprites that delay alarms by 6 combat turns.

you have fault sprites with a 12 DV attack that damages you every round (and gives you a -2 on all actions) untill you can beat it in a responsex2 opposed test. Did I mention its response is 14? meaning that your up agienst 28 dice? and to make things worse, the fault sprite at that rateing would have Black IC complex forms (at well as a medic rating 12).
UndeadPoet
Did I miss something or is every resonance-6-technomancer able to summon such a monster? I mean, use edge and you are very likely to enslave this guy for at least one service.
The Jopp
QUOTE (UndeadPoet @ May 29 2006, 08:00 AM)
Did I miss something or is every resonance-6-technomancer able to summon such a monster? I mean, use edge and you are very likely to enslave this guy for at least one service.


Well, if you really want something insane you could make sure that you get a registered sprite that work 24/7 as your personal node defense…Analyze at rating 12 anyone?

You just have to survive an opposed test against 24D6
UndeadPoet
QUOTE (The Jopp @ May 29 2006, 04:04 AM)
You just have to survive an opposed test against 24D6

Uh, yeah... Still, with edge a good technomancer should be able to reach 12 dice for his registrating test. He just has to try for a good amount of time and then possibly can control such a mighty spirit.

"Go into this node!"
"You want me to infiltrate it, master?"
"No, I want you to destroy every single byte of it!"
"Yes, master."
The Jopp
QUOTE (UndeadPoet)
QUOTE (The Jopp @ May 29 2006, 04:04 AM)
You just have to survive an opposed test against 24D6

Uh, yeah... Still, with edge a good technomancer should be able to reach 12 dice for his registrating test. He just has to try for a good amount of time and then possibly can control such a mighty spirit.

"Go into this node!"
"You want me to infiltrate it, master?"
"No, I want you to destroy every single byte of it!"
"Yes, master."

The scary thing is that it is correct. Even if they reboot the node/system it would just go in until it finishes it's mission, i can take weeks, months but unless they take out the sprite (good luck) or switch hardware completely it will continue until its time is up or if it is a permanent sprite it will just go on.
irinoxx
QUOTE (UndeadPoet)
Did I miss something or is every resonance-6-technomancer able to summon such a monster? I mean, use edge and you are very likely to enslave this guy for at least one service.

You are right, level 12 Sprites are within reach of a starting level Technomancer with enough Edge. Said character must still find a way to recover from the physical Fading damage though. Maybe good First Aid skill and rating 6 medikit, along with a Bear Shaman contact/friend for the occasional SNAFU.

The fact that unlike Spirits, Matrix Sprites have no Edge makes them easier to catch. nyahnyah.gif And they're still monsters. biggrin.gif

*in a security camera node*
- Hey big ass. See that guy?
- YES MASTER
- Here's your remote task : Use any possible means to kill him.
*Sprite fades. Some people in the crowd get upset as a cleaning drone suddenly accelerates through the mall*
Cheops
It'll get even worse once they release Unwired and they introduce Power and Registering Foci for Technomancers. Then it'll be good and easy to summon those monsters.
emo samurai
Hackers need SO much help; they're basically obsolete.
Backgammon
QUOTE (emo samurai)
Hackers need SO much help; they're basically obsolete.

For an upcoming campaign, I wanted to play a hacker type, so either a Hacker or a Technomancer. When i made my characters, I found that Technomancers were ONLY good at hacking since I had to sink like all my points in there. With a Hacker, I could still be pretty good at hacking and still be able to diversify. In the end, I went for the hacker.

So no, there is NOTHING wrong with hackers. They aren't the cutting edge of hacking like technomancers are, but the ability to diversify a bit is also very powerful. I think that's reasonable and what the devs intended.
Jaid
QUOTE (emo samurai)
Hackers need SO much help; they're basically obsolete.

perhaps you should try not handing them out free BP/Karma like it's halloween candy then, and you'll see a difference.

(for the record, this assumes i remember right and you have given them complex forms bought for 3 BP or 5 Karma, which then have a rating equal to your resonance. if i'm thinking of someone else entirely, then i suppose i may have to take that back =D )
FanGirl
Yeah, that was him. I should know, I'm the one benefiting from it!
emo samurai
That also means that pretty much all the Matrix threats will be Resonant after your first submersion.
Dranem
QUOTE (Cheops @ May 29 2006, 12:45 PM)
It'll get even worse once they release Unwired and they introduce Power and Registering Foci for Technomancers.  Then it'll be good and easy to summon those monsters.

Where did you get the idea that Technomancers would have some sort of 'foci' for this sort of thing?

[edit]
Benefits that saves Hackers and plagues Technomancers:
- The TM shares his physical damage track with his living persona. (You kill a hackers comm, they go out and buy a new one, you kill a TM's icon, they're dead for real)
- A hacker can improve their commlink through various upgrades. A Technomancer can only 'upgrade' their persona by improving their stats or by Submersion.
- Hackers can buy as many programs as they have the nuyen.gif for. TM's have to spend BP/Karma to learn forms. Once in game play a TM can only learn new forms from another TM or from a registered Sprite.

So.... How is that Hackers need so much help?
Cheops
QUOTE (Dranem)
QUOTE (Cheops @ May 29 2006, 12:45 PM)
It'll get even worse once they release Unwired and they introduce Power and Registering Foci for Technomancers.  Then it'll be good and easy to summon those monsters.

Where did you get the idea that Technomancers would have some sort of 'foci' for this sort of thing?

The fact that in the gaming industry now you have to have all sorts of new toys and goodies for players to use when you release a book. For unwired this is going to mean a lot of new programs/cps, sprites, and gear for both hackers and technomancers. It is really easy to add in thanks to the streamlined rules and it is quite the juicy bit of gear for any players out there. It would sell a lot of books so it would make sense to throw it in there.
Hunga
Just a note, while a technomancer of resonance of 6 or higher can indeed compile a rating 12 sprite with enough luck on the dice roll, such a sprite will never be registered.

Registering a sprite take an hour per rating. An unregistered sprite disappears in 8 hours. In other words, the highest rating sprite that can be registered regardless of power of the technomancer is 8.
TBRMInsanity
This would be a good time to go into electronic silence, and then goto a helpdesk to get your wristwatch fixed (most likely a wipe of the OS and purchase of a new one).
irinoxx
QUOTE (Hunga @ May 30 2006, 12:53 PM)
Just a note, while a technomancer of resonance of 6 or higher can indeed compile a rating 12 sprite with enough luck on the dice roll, such a sprite will never be registered.

Registering a sprite take an hour per rating.  An unregistered sprite disappears in 8 hours.  In other words, the highest rating sprite that can be registered regardless of power of the technomancer is 8.

Damn, you're right. frown.gif
Ranneko
Indeed, I do remember running a few rolls though, assuming that the registration process would keep the sprite around somehow.

Once I got lucky and the sprite rolled badly so I registered it.

I then tried to reregister it, and had to soak something like 20P.

Remember, if the sprite rolls well on the registration test you can't actually reduce those successes and you will take twice its successes in physical damage, not net successes, but gross successes.

And as it is rolling 24 dice, it has a good chance of doing enough to instakill you.

If it rolls the average it will do 16P, which is enough to instakill any character 5 body who fails to get any successes, on average anyone with a body of less than 5 will not only die, but will die before anyone has a chance at healing them.

Yes, you could get lucky, you could burn edge live, but it only takes being unlucky once. And in this case bring unlucky is really just not being lucky.
Samaels Ghost
Resisting Fading would be a problem except that you resist with Resonance and Will.

The real problem lies in that Threaded Forms are limited by Resonace, an attribute that never really caps. Technos aren't only a little bit better than hackers, they're infinitely so. A Techno with a Threaded Stealth program will never be caught once he's in. Once you're in the test are opposed tests not extended test like when you're Exploiting. Using BP/Karma for complex forms is silly for all but one: Stealth. Fading for for threading is equal to how much the CF is improved by, not the new rating like the Imp Attribute Spell. this means you can easily up RES, Initiate, and put a few Karma into Stealth and you can one-up Fast Jack himself
Tarantula
Until you critical glitch your oppossed test. That will always screw you.
Cain
QUOTE
For an upcoming campaign, I wanted to play a hacker type, so either a Hacker or a Technomancer. When i made my characters, I found that Technomancers were ONLY good at hacking since I had to sink like all my points in there. With a Hacker, I could still be pretty good at hacking and still be able to diversify. In the end, I went for the hacker.

With the broadening of computer skills in SR4, it's harder to diversify a decker out. But they do diversify a lot more readily than an otaku. Also, a decker can afford more and better programs right out of the gate, along with better gear-equivalents (a starting otaku is limited to a Signal of 3, for example). So, deckers can start out much more powerful right out of character generation, kind of like the samurai/adept split.

Frank Trollman posted a set of numbers showing that otaku are never going to earn enough karma to realistically become matrix gods; IIRC it'd take over 1000 karma for an otaku to have all complex forms at 10. So, otaku start off weaker, and don't become dramatically more powerful as the game progresses-- they might be uncapped in some areas, but they'll never reach those points over the course of a normal campaign.

After doing some fiddling around with numbers, I've come to the conclusion that the dedicated summoner otaku is the biggest bang-for-your-buck combination. Sprites can do so much more than the summoning otaku, it's not even funny. I'll have to do some more crunching, but it looks like a specialist summoner with midrange decking skills is the most efficient otaku build.

QUOTE
Remember, if the sprite rolls well on the registration test you can't actually reduce those successes and you will take twice its successes in physical damage, not net successes, but gross successes.

And as it is rolling 24 dice, it has a good chance of doing enough to instakill you.

This is where a weak spot in the burning Edge rules can help you out. So long as you can afford to blow 9 karma, it won't hurt you at all, presuming you only have an edge of 2.

It works like this: when you burn Edge, you can opt for an instant critical success; and critical successes are defined as scoring four or more *net* successes over your opponent. So, regardless of what the spirit rolls, you're going to net *at least* four services out of it. (Granted, if a player tried for more, I'd tell him that the orbital cow launchers are coming online biggrin.gif.)What's more, the critical success rules state that you can add whatever flourish you want when describing the action; so you didn't just summon that force-12 sprite, you slapped it down like a red-headed stepchild, dressed it in drag, forced it into a dikoted AVS, and started calling yourself "Da Pimp" and it "Da Ho". cool.gif

You then burn another edge to soak the drain. Again, you will score four successes above whatever it rolled, so you're completely safe. You won't take the slightest bit of drain at all, since you've scored four above whatever you might have needed.

Assuming you only had an edge of 2 to begin with, you spend 9 karma, and buy your Edge back up to 2. I'd consider that a fair price to get that many services out of a matrix godling. In fact, certain players might just think of it as a flat purchase, as opposed to a set of tests.

Now, James and his kind are going to go ballistic that I pointed out yet another hole in his favorite system. I'll follow this by mentioning that currently there are several legal and aboveboard ways of reducing the utility of this trick, without bending a single rule or resorting to the slightest bit of GM unfairness. The most obvious is that since you can't register a force 12 sprite, the player is going to be summoning it mid-game. That being the case, you're well within your bounds to restrict the player from buying back his Edge in the middle of the session.

Of course, the real issue is going to come up when the advanced rules show up. I'll wager that you'll be able to reduce the base time to register by spending additional successes; this will allow you to register that force-12 monstrosity via this trick. And I'll bet that Ally Sprites aren't that far away, so the burning Edge trick will allow you to summon all kinds of nastiness. (Presuming that you have to spend karma anyway to summon an ally, adding 9 karma to it probably won't be much of a problem.)
ornot
I'm not really convinced that burning edge in that way is possible withint the spirit of the rules.

I certainly wouldn't allow a player to automatically win a contest by 4 successes by burning edge when they were so utterly outmatched in dice to begin with.

Karma was never that powerful and I don't believe Edge is either. But if you want to run it that way, fair enough.

*edit* in fact I recall that burning karma gave you a free success, not as many successes as you need to get four more than your victim. I've not got my RAW on hand, so I can't check, but I can't believe that is what the Edge rules suggest.
-X-
I'm not even sure if it would be a house-rule or not as I don't have access to the book right now, but burning edge could be like essence. Once burned your total possible edge is lowered by one.

Still a lucky human with maxed edge could go a long way towards summoning some pretty hefty Sprites safely so that might only shift where the problem comes from and tone it down a bit.
Samaels Ghost
You can burn Edge to get a critical success. Cain is right in this instance. This is what I was expressly worried about when my PCs started burning Edge. If you don't need to be lucky to be successful or evade death (all you need is about 2 Edge to burn) than are you really lucky?I'd say saving you hoop in dire situations or excelling beyond all odds would be particularily lucky, yet you can do either of those with 1-3 Edge without a major Karma hit. It's infinite lives. blech, i hate it.
ShadowDragon8685
Consider it Hand of God for Dummies.

But it's certainly a major karma hit. If they burn themselves down to zero Edge, they're in deep kimchee, and you can't really spend Karma to improve an attribute in the middle of a run.

So the Downtime Ultimate Registration Act? That can work. But doing it in the middle of a game? That's a lot more of a problem.
Hunga
This is really interesting... I've never thought about burning edge for that.

Although, I'd point this out to the GMs against the would-be abusers. Just because someone loses a point of edge permanently, doesn't mean that he would be able to buy that point back for a lowered price. Assuming the character started off with 2 edge and burned them for getting the sprite and resisting fading, I'd say that the character would have to pay 9 karma just to increase his edge back to 1, the same cost as if he's trying to improve to 3 edge prior to burning his edge for that stunt.

Basically, I'll treat it the same as the losing magic attribute permanently due to cyberware. You're not getting a discount for improving your next point of magic.
Ranneko
QUOTE (Cain @ Jun 16 2006, 03:01 PM)
QUOTE
Remember, if the sprite rolls well on the registration test you can't actually reduce those successes and you will take twice its successes in physical damage, not net successes, but gross successes.

And as it is rolling 24 dice, it has a good chance of doing enough to instakill you.

This is where a weak spot in the burning Edge rules can help you out. So long as you can afford to blow 9 karma, it won't hurt you at all, presuming you only have an edge of 2.

It works like this: when you burn Edge, you can opt for an instant critical success; and critical successes are defined as scoring four or more *net* successes over your opponent. So, regardless of what the spirit rolls, you're going to net *at least* four services out of it.

Firstly, for gods sake, use the same terminology as everyone else man. EDIT: Just to clarify this is regarding Cain using otaku to refer to technomancers, the name has changed, lets use the same terms for the same things to avoid confusion.

Secondly, in order to burn edge for a critical success, you have to be capable of achieving success in the first place. (same paragraph where the burn edge for a critical success rule is)

If the sprite rolled more successes than you could possibly soak, then you cannot burn edge for a critical success, you could Hand of God, but you could not walk away unscathed through achieving a critical success.
Cain
QUOTE

Basically, I'll treat it the same as the losing magic attribute permanently due to cyberware. You're not getting a discount for improving your next point of magic.

Actually, according to the RAW, that's *exactly* how it works. It doesn't matter how many times the stat has been reduced, you spend the same amount of karma to bring it back up. So, regardless of how much cyber you've implanted, you only need to spend 6 karma to go from Magic 1 to 2.

Technically, this isn't a discount, it's only a buyback. So if you factor in the cost of originially buying up the stat in the first place, it doesn't seem quite as bad.

QUOTE
*edit* in fact I recall that burning karma gave you a free success, not as many successes as you need to get four more than your victim. I've not got my RAW on hand, so I can't check, but I can't believe that is what the Edge rules suggest.

1 burned karma pool = 1 free success was a SR3 rule, with the caveat that you needed to have scored at least one success on your own. 1 burned Edge = 1 *critical* success (pg 68), which is defined as scoring four or more /net/ successes (pg 59). The rules prevent you from trying to pull off the impossible; but a Force 12 sprite isn't impossible if you have a Resonance of 6. It *is* impossible if you only have a Resonance of 5, because there's a cap of 2x Resonance. Since that's such a solid dividing line, we can say that the force 12 sprite is only improbably, not impossible.

QUOTE
But it's certainly a major karma hit. If they burn themselves down to zero Edge, they're in deep kimchee, and you can't really spend Karma to improve an attribute in the middle of a run.

So the Downtime Ultimate Registration Act? That can work. But doing it in the middle of a game? That's a lot more of a problem.

That's the first thing that comes to mind as a completely fair, by-the-book, penalty for this trick. There's a few others that come to mind. Since you can't really get said ubersprite for more than 8 hours at the moment, I don't see this as being too serious of a problem-- it's 9 karma for a temporary power boost, nothing more. Once the Downtime Registration rules come into play, I'll have to think of something else.

Of course, there is one more little detail.... When you burn Edge, you're burning the stat, not the pool. So, technically you can do this trick when you've already spent all your Edge pool. The rules go into a fair amount of detail separating the two, and it's pretty clear that you're burning the stat; the current amount of Edge in the pool doesn't really matter too much. With that in mind, there's really no reason to not blow your entire Edge pool on the summoning and drain rolls first, before burning Edge.

Edit:
QUOTE
If the sprite rolled more successes than you could possibly soak, then you cannot burn edge for a critical success, you could Hand of God, but you could not walk away unscathed through achieving a critical success.

Since we're discussing using Edge anyway, there's no theoretical cap on the number of successes you can roll. With the Rule of 6 in mind, you could concieveably keep rolling ad infinitum. There are certain hard restrictions that you can bring into play, like the resonance/force limits, but this isn't the same thing.

And assuming that the player isn't totally stupid, the chances of the sprite rolling enough successes to make survival impossible is remote. A force 12 sprite can score, at most, 12 successes on the opposed roll, leading to a whopping 24P wound. Assuming that the player had a willpower of 7 (and would require a Resonance of 6 to ever attempt summoning such a monstrosity) then he'd have 13 dice to soak with, and 12 boxes in his condition monitor. Sure, it's unlikely that he'll walk away unscathed, but he'll point out that it was equally unlikely that the sprite would have rolled 12 successes. Since you would have done what essentially amounts to a *less* probable roll, we can't deny him this use on the "impossible" grounds.
iron_ic
@Cain: Good post.

I'd personally handle it like this: Let the sprite roll, see how many successes it achieves, check whether the TM can walk away unscathed, and then decide according to this if he's allowed to burn edge to do so.
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