1. no, you can use the matrix as relay
2. thats actually working towards agent smith, as you are killing the node buy flooding it. and its a really stupid rule (what about matrix cafes? only 12 users there at max?)
3. no you can order a pack of agents
4. if enough agents are hacking in, enough will make it
5. true
6. true, but again, I am of the opinion that agents in multiple hords are only good for combat

don't forget they can just "pull the plug"
sever a repeater on the matrix between you and them, or even their own.

That's not a bad starting place. Indeed, when the final nerfage of Agent Smith comes down, I would hope that it starts from this point as well.

But the thing is, that's not enshrined in the rules anywhere. That's just your "gut feeling" about how the rules should work.

And I am with you. Throwing agents at problems should not give you a perceptable advantage. Computing is ubiquitous and available continuously all aorund you. Everything is wirelessly connected, everything you do should already be assumed to maximally utilize the available computational space.

Unfortunately, the way things are currently written, it appears that if you put two computers on a task such as Trace, you get two separate attempts. And since in Shadowrun there are so many computers around that we don't even specify how many are on your person at any given time... that sort of addition is impractical and game breaking.

Which is of course the core of the Agent Smith problem. You can't have arbitrarily large amounts of available computers and still try to keep a 1:1 correspondance with die rolls and the number of computers assigned to handle specific problems.

-Frank

Player 1: What do you mean my flat's security was compromised while I was out?
Player 2: What do you mean that my bank account is empty?
Player 3: Why does the Star have a shoot-to-kill warrant out on me?
Player 4: Why doesn't my cyberware work?

GM: Remember that punk 16-year-old your characters pissed off? He was FastJack's son and he had an army of Agent Smiths.

a teeter-totter with a 400-pound gorilla on either end is not balanced, it's broken.

The correct version of this under the rules is "you can order multiple agents at a time, if you give them the same order and they are subscribed to your commlink." (ie. Agents may not be subscribed as a group, hence your subscription list limits the number of agents you can use at any given time. If you want to give an order, unsubscribe some agents, add others, and then repeat the order, that's still viable option though).

Also, another limitation, is the fact that when hacking something with the "agent backup squad" they must either use your account to enter a node or hack their own way in. Either way they run the risk of setting off all sorts of system alert flags - and drawing attention to you even if you did everything right. Chokepoint system access now really works like a chokepoint.

And now back to editing, otherwise these books will never be out...

This is kind of what I've tried to do with them, actually. The only 'agents' in my Custom Hacking Rules are viruses (which I haven't written up yet), and the lowest wrung of viruses are "rats", which are minor agents used to perform various tasks for users in the Matrix. Rats are so abundant in the Matrix, that it's really hard for legitimate users to use public nodes anymore and so rats become the standard. Meanwhile, the Matrix and its associated nodes work hard to innoculate themselves against these rats once they've realized its a rat and not an actual person, so each rat has to be custom programmed and can only be released "into the wild" once and lasts about a day before the Matrix has adapted itself. Due to their inefficiency and their restriction to unprotected nodes, the rats take about a day to fulfill most tasks.

Basically, they're little "toys" for players. They're one-use agents that perform a function on their own as a sort of time-saving device. They take longer to work, but the character doesn't have to do it directly and can do other stuff.

Rats are easy to order online from a multitude of vendors. You can use the Software skill to make your own.

The problem is that drones can be batch commanded.
Which tells us that it is technically possible, and, once you know that, the rest is onply an implementation issue.

As Serbitar has already noted, you can issue batch commands to multiple agents too. In both cases such commands apply to agents/drones subscribed individually. Drones were intended to function just like Agents (though Pilots do indeed combine Agents with a specialized OS per the FAQ) in terms of issuing commands. As such the same limitations apply to both.

However, if I've missed some rule about issuing commands to non-subscribed agents or drones, subscribing groups of agents, or not having to individually subscribe agents/drones/whatever to command them on another system you have subscribed please feel free to point it out.

In all cases the subscription list limit (of the commlink you are using) on the number of systems/drones/agents/whatever is the cap on how many individual systems/drones/agents you can command (individually or collectively) at one time. Currently it's the cap on how many different links to autonomous systems your commlink can sustain.

Just a minor nitpick here. Why in a world where everyone is on line 24/7 would you have internet cafes? Why do I need to go somewhere to log on when I'm always logged on, all cafes are in effect Internet Cafes.

It has just occured to me that there must be some way of allowing more than 2*rating users to subscribe to a node. Otherwise how would Internet gaming like Dawn of Atlantis and other mmorpgs work?

No. What I'm talking about is this:

Technically you can have 100 Agents search the Matrix for Infos and only take up one subscription slot.

Thats why I think the agent smith problem is nto a problem when used by hackers.
Stealth is everything.

Ill think I will incoprorate my -2 dice rule for everything. being attacked, being traced, being percepted, being whatever atht he same time.

Yes, I totally Agree. thats Why I used a max of 12 agents in my calculation.
(well, that was before reading Rotbarts objection).

I also said that I dont consider it a real problem, because of the stealth issue. Im with you all the way. (Apart from my opinion that the subscription rule is totally nuts, see the matrix cafe example)

My only point left is agent smith on corps side. They dont have to care about stealth at all. Its their node.

So assume Aries has 12 major data centers and 6 heavy duty security hackers on duty at 3 am on New Years day. And suddenly 8 centers get hit by a huge deluge of well programed automated attacks, that don't look completely automated because the guy who programmed them was clever.

What do the security guys do? How much attention do they likely have for seemingly minor crap going on in the other 4 centers for the next few minutes? Would you like the ability to make the security guys go watch the shinny stuff while you go about your illegal business?

It's up, already. I made a post in this thread specifically covering nothing but rats. I don't know how to reference a particular post in a thread, but it's the 16th post in the thread.

Cetiah's Custom Hacking Rules

Eventually I'll have a PDF. Hopefully by the end of the month, but we'll see. Real life has really been distracting me from my Shadowrun life this week.

Thank you. I stand corrected. I had overlooked that exception for drones. The intent to parallel agents and drones does seem compromised, but I'll recheck with the author. His intent was for the subscription list to function as a limiter. Nonetheless, until something official specifically states otherwise I suggest you chalk the exception up to some uniqueness of the mixed agent/OS Pilot.

Is it unbalancing to send hundreds or thousands of zombie PCs after a corp you are targetting? Perhaps not. But it is completely impractical to resolve game mechanically.

This is a real weapon in the computer hacker's arsenal. But it's not practical to roll dice for every hijacked credstick, coffee pot, and desktop that is sending cascading spam bombs as part of a DoS attack on a tertiary node. In Shadowrun, Hackers should be pulling this sort of thing all the time, and yet there's no possibility of me actually resolving that even once. It involves the rolling of hundreds of dice, and the end result is always going to be the same:

• Node Compromised.
• Node Alert off - the - scale.
• Node shut down.

As written, the DoS attack always works, and actually generating it (to determine, for example, whether it takes one combat round or two) takes the entire evening and is about as much fun as generating Anti-Aliasing by hand.

----

So, what needs to be done?

First, the idea that you should keep track of individual streams of code running on individual processors around you is horse shit. We can't be expected to do that, because of the afore-mentioned "rolling dice hundres of times" problem. We can simulate that with a more abstract ruleset based on processes and influence.

Influence
In 2071, a Hacker compromises computers and makes them run as parallel processors to assist in compromising larger and more secure computers and so on. At any given time, you are going to be throwing down with perhaps hundreds or even thousands of separate service calls to computers all around you - assuming that they are available.

Your Influence is a flat bonus you get on Hacking based on how many computers you have compromised and how many your system can coordinate. Your Influence can never be higher than the System rating of your Commlink, because your processes have to be managed by a central unit or the parallel processors stop working on problems from different angles and just become a mess.

Your influence is otherwise capped by how many computers you can communicate with that are influenced by you. In practice, we assume that a Hacker is usually in communication with enough zombie computers to fill out their Influence pool. But if a Hacker is in prison, or in a dead zone, or in a remote facility where general matrix communication is reserved or blocked, then a Hacker will have to deal with just the devices on his person. Very roughly, Influence increases by 1 for every ten times as many compromised devices there are (after all, you're only using the spare CPU cycles on fairly modest machines like jacket music players).

So yes, when in his element, an elite Hacker with a system of 6 on his commlink really will have backdoors in one million devices. That's not even unreasonable, because a lot of those devices are just lights and toilets and such.

Processes: Monitored and Unmonitored
Hackers multitask like mad. Literally every single thing they are doing online could be automated, but they are totally hardcore and do it better hands on. And they get their hands on all of it, all the time.

A commlink can orchestrate a number of separate processes equal to the System rating before it experiences slowdown. But a Hacker can only monitor one process with a Simple Action (thus, two processes can be monitored per IP). During Cybercombat, for example, the monitored processes might be expected to be Attack and Defense. At other times, it might be something else. In any case, a monitored process uses the Hacker's own Attribute + Skill, and all the other processes being run just use the Hacker's Agent rating as their dice pool.

---

It's a start. A start on a system that does not expect me to roll four hundred fucking dice just because I'm smart enough to have figured out cutting edge 1992 hacking skillz like zombie PCs and Denial of Service attacks.

-Frank

the biggest problem is, it makes sense to allow it. using giant armies of hacker agents is one method actual hackers use to do their thang.

i like FrankTrollman's idea. two problems i have with it: first, it creates a difference between rigging and directing agents. no real getting around that, i guess. second, it counts only the number of devices infiltrated, with no regard to their power. what about corporate hackers, who can draw a lot of Influence from high-end security servers?

I'm going to talk about the second problem first, because I think it is easier to handwave. The world of computers is full of all kinds of things. Indeed, while many Hackers are going to be using thousands upon thousands of zombie wristwatches and portable freshness indicators, the security technician on the other side is running sevice calls to a massive server cluster in space. He really seriously does not have to worry about being in Matrix link with a car full of churro warmers - that shit is totally beneath him.

From a game mechanical standpoint, his influence bonus is the same. His commlink can and will orchestrate the same number of service calls before it slows down whether it's making those calls to one server cluster or to a physical cluster of ten thousand dancing lawn gnomes in a warehouse.

There is a degree to which it makes sense, and a degree to which it doesn't. But it's fairly game balanced, so I'm willing to handwave futuristic technology that much. Exchange rates for more powerful devices could be anything you wanted, but I have no problem with an account at ZO being literally a million times better than a backdoor into the MP3 player on the doorbell.

--

The first statement is harder to get around. It's an unfortunate reality that drones exist in reality and programs work only in virtual reality. The difference is that while it makes sense to keep track of drones in terms of real space, programs exist only in virtual space.

And that virtual space unfortunately does not have a 1:1 correspondance with real space, even though it would be really cool if it did and the existance of AR means that it almost does.

The primary difference is shared location. A drone can be expressed locatively with a set of cartesian coordinates. It has a single location, expressable with an X, a Y, and a Z. A computer program has only a Topological location. There are things that a program can interact with directly, there are things a program can interact with after first interfacing with another system, and so on. JUst because a program is running on the same hardware as another program does not mean that it is necessarily topologically close to that program, and so on and so forth.

While a drone can be thought of as playing chess, being in a specific space and moving in predictable patterns, the program is playing Chutes and Ladders - its relative closeness to other things is contingent on future events and often not at all obvious.

Certain concessions have to be made in the rules to that difference, or that difference will destroy the rules. It's unfortunate, but I think unavoidable.

-Frank

It is today. Different tactics will definitely prevail in a world where hacking will get you a bullet in the brainpan rather than a slap on the wrist.

While visits from the police are not as bad as visits from an Aztechnology hit team, the principles in avoiding the visit from the Azies are the same. You absolutely minimize the ties between the actual agents and your system, with multiple layers of cutouts.

Essentially every part of your agent network runs on someone else's compromised hardware and you control it via a series of hops through other people's networks. Your personal system just has a link to the master control unit, which ideally would be something that would have a huge amount of normal traffic from across the world running through it. So you don't have a million connections, you have one, to say a system run by media company that provides you and 3 million other people the current headlines.

This computer doesn't actually control the network, it controls command and control node(s) that do that, with subordinate C&C nodes as required when you network gets big, which it will (It takes a LOT of compromised computers to make money at 6 cents/day/PC, which I've been told is the going rate).

This soft of setup works fine as long as you are using you network as some sort of blunt instrument and have written/stolen/purchased some decent agents and know how to properly task them. Essentially you have an army of kiddie scripters, or spambots, or a huge DOS network or whatever you want to make it do today.