So, Runner's Companion introduces the advanced lifestyles. Nicely decomposed, and quite useful.
There is a note that if you use this, then spoofing a life must be done component by componet.
The phrasing is a little odd, but it is not to hard to realize that you are supposed to use the level label for each component to decide the threshold for each spoof.
The text then says that the the interval is dramatically reduced for each such spoof.
It better be, since there are 5 different spoofs you have to do.

So, my first problem is that Unwired said the Interval was a day. The "much shorter" interval in RC is 6 hours. Huh? Yes, technically, 6 hours is 1/4 of a day (so we have a 25% increase in total time. I could live with that.) But people can not work that much of a day. I had assumed that any intervals that were given in days were 8-10 hour work days. How long is a day supposed to be?
The obvious conclusion is that the interval needs to be a lot shorter than 6 hours? (To get a 4:1 ratio with a 12 hour work day, you would need a 3 hour interval.)

So how long is a day supposed to be for things which are expressed that way?

One way out of this did occur to me. If you assume that the hacker is using a mook, then a day is indeed 24 hours. (Mooks clearly work around the clock.) Then 6 hours is indeed 1/4. But Unwired repeatedly indicates that Mooks are prone to making mistakes when doing non-routine tasks. It would seem that spoofing a lifestyle is non-routine.

Would most GMs allow an agent to use the rule of 4 for an agent? (Heck, would you allow the player to use the rule of 4?)
Would most GMs penalize an agent being used for spoofing a lifestyle? (Assuming a rating 6 comlink, using upgrading after play starts, and a 6 agent with rating 6 relevant software, probably pirated, the cahnge of a glitch on each test is 0.75%, or across 5 tests per month and many months, less than a glitch every 27 months.)

Yours,
Joel M. Halpern

As far as I am concerned, in Shadowrun terminology, an interval of a 'day' has always meant '8 working hours'.

In which case, the interval for spoofing Advanced Lifestyles should be 2 hours.

However, this does bring up another question - where do Lifestyle Qualities come in with the spoofing? Are they handled separately? & if so, how do the negative ones work? Should you apply the qualities to specific areas of a lifestyle & include them in the 5 standard spoof tests?

A little math here.

A "Low lifestyle" is equivalent to 2 points each in each of the five lifestyles categories, and if done all-at-a-go would require 4 hits on the Hacking + Spoof Extended Test; assuming you're rolling four dice and trading it in, that means you could hack a Low lifestyle in an average of 4 days. If you instead decided to spoof each individual component, your interval is reduced to 6 hours instead of 1 day, but you have to make five tests; that works out to about 24 hours per component, or five days of work total - we'll assume you've got a pot of coffee going and manage some catnaps during non-peak hours.

However, the joy of the Advanced Lifestyle rules is that you don't have to have just the bare minimums. You could, for example, go in for Middle (3 points) on three categories and then take Squatter (1 point) on the fourth and fifth and still have the "equivalent" of a 10-point Low lifestyle upkeep wise - but the Spoofing Life situation changes. Squatter categories only have a threshold of 2, while Middle categories have a threshold of 12. So your Spoof tests for the Squatter categories would take an average of 12 hours each (1 day) and your Middle categories would take an average of 72 hours each; that's basically a full week of work for a month's lifestyle. We'll assume you're working your hacking schedule around the sleep schedule.

If all this seems difficult - and yes, I know I was using ludicrously low numbers of dice for the tests, in real games this would be much faster - then you're getting the basic drift. If you want to spoof an entire lifestyle, it is generally faster and easier to just rely on the regular Spoofing Life rules in Unwired. If you want to upgrade your current lifestyle by Spoofing Life a single category, use the rules in Runner's Companion.

So, let's take Jill Hacker. She's a very modest cracker-type that makes ends meet doing commissioned freelance work from the Seoulpa Ring-run warez place down the street, and maintains a Low lifestyle. However, the Desert Wars are coming up, and Jill decides to finally entice that handsome Sticks into apartment with the promise of a cold Kirin 2.0 and a direct trideo feed. She needs to Spoof Life her Entertainments category up to Medium for a month or two - this is the 2070s equivalent of stealing cable or unscrambling the satellite dish. A hacker with Hacking 4 (Spoofing Life +2) and Spoof 4 rolls 10 dice with a threshold of 12 - that's two automatic hits and rolling two dice; call it 4 rolls to get 12 if Jill's player gets lucky with the dice, or twenty-four hours of work. Jill can either take a personal day and pull an all-nighter, or she can break up the extended test over the course of a couple days as she fits it into her work schedule.


Intervals count the total time it takes you to do something - that doesn't always mean you're slaving away at it nonstop. Two hours and forty five minutes of looking at the ceiling, chewing your pencil, copying equations backwards, and surfing the Matrix for inspiration followed by a sudden epiphany, fifteen minutes of hellacious typing, and three hours of debugging and fine-tuning and testing your code counts as six hours of "work." Answering your e-mail as you stir the gold into the mercury while making orichalcum counts as "work."


A mook was given specifically as an agent that a character uses to hand-guide them around the Matrix because they're inept. There was a very important section in there about mooks or purchased agents being programmed not to do anything illegal, which Spoofing Life is. I know this because I wrote it in there.

That said, if you have an agent or mook you programmed yourself - or got it properly hacked so it can do illegal things - it could probably handle Spoofing Life. Though personally I'd make the player hand-guide it through the process at least once.


Depends on the GM. I'm generally in favor of the rule of 4 as big handfuls of dice on many repetitive tests gets unwieldy. Especially when the GM has to role them. That said, I always reserve the right to revoke it when I decide the player has a few more glitches coming their way - or if the player truly feels lucky and thinks they can do better. I knew one guy that could roll two fives or better on four dice eight times out of ten (it was hell on him in Yahtzee, though.)

How does an Agent desermine what is legal and what is not, given the sheer number of jurisdictions that the matrix crosses? Does it download the legal code of the jurisdiction it is currently operating in as well as all legal precidents and integrate them into its programing? Is it simply pre-programmed with a basic set of actions it will never perform, thus allowing a suave or subtle person to violate a non-standard or unusual local law using such an agent? Does the agent have any discretion in this, does it roll dice to determine if it is successfully able to discern the legality of a certain act? And if so can a person, without employing any hacking skill whatsoever, employ Captain Kirk's patented anti-robot logic to convince it that the illegal action is legal?

Well, if an action is illegal on a system, you know because you're using Cracking, not Computer. I assume that agents can understand the difference in the action they're supposed to do, and if the system is telling them that the action is forbidden, a legal agent would probably be programmed to refrain.

BTW, I found that if you take one r6 Agent Program (r3 Adaptability) with r6 Stealth, Browse, Spoof, and Edit programs, copy it (and its payload) two times, and set those three working in tandem (read: teamwork), you can attain a r6 Neccessities, Neighborhood, Security, with a r4 Entertrainment and Comfort in 5 days, 12 hours (buying the successes). What that translates into is 4 weeks (1 month) racking up the successes for 4 months of this lfestyle (durn good'un, too), and before those 4 months elapse, you're Trio of Mookage can hack you said lifestlye permanently.

I'm pretty sure the landlord, banks, utility companies etc. would notice if you hit them with a mass botnet attack.

I presume I am misreading something here. I have edited to try to focus on one of the questions.


I have kept those two pieces because I think I am misunderstanding something about "interval". I understand, and think I agree with, the idea that a 1 day interval is 1 day, with time for eating, sleeping, using the bathroom, and other similar things. Whther that is 8 hours of work or 14 is unclear, but ought usually not be important. It does mean something like ~a day where your primary focus is the activity.~
Unfortunately, I can not see how that applies to the hour baswed intervals, in the calculation above. In particular, you say "24 horus per component, or five days of work total..." (I understand how you get the 24 hours, and why you multiplied by 5. That part is fine.) But to describe 120 hours of actual work as 5 days is VERY strange. particular when comparing the amount of work with something with intervals defined in "days." At the very least, if I can really do 120 hours works in 5 days, then I can do 4 days work (the amount for spoofing the same lifestyle in the simple way) in 2 days of 24-hour-a-day work with coffee and cat-naps. (I'll even buy the notion of cat-naps in thsi task, since presumably the itnerval is because you have to wait for real-world events periodically.)

The point being that switching from simple spoofing to advanced spoofing multiplies the time by somewhere between 2 and 3.
Now, if that was intentional then you have the right to do so.
But the text as written seems to ber saying "it should work out about the same." 25% is indeed about the same. A factor of 2.5 is NOT about the same.

Yours,
Joel Halpern

PS: Thank you for the feedback about the use of the rule of 4. and about the suitability of mooks for these tasks. (I realize both are opinions, but I wanted to be clear that I understood and appreciated your including them.)

I am not doing a mass botnet; there are 3 programs, working in tandem, covering their tracks as well as any other trained hacker. With 9 dice (12 with teamwork) to work out the best soulution for any problem that may arise, they should do just fine on their own, and with r6 Stealth programs and Browse/Edit, they'll be able to erase their tracks (if any).

Besides, it would just seem to the landlord that the mansion for sale finally found a buyer. You're not stealing a house from someone, you're stealing a house from the open market.

PS: The game doesn't search for how something happens, they just want the successes to see if something happens.

Okay, let's step back and look at this for a sec, just so we're all on the same page. The Spoofing Life rules given in Advanced Lifestyles are a codified example of breaking a single Extended Test into a series of specific tasks - see the second paragraph under Extended Tests (p.58, SR4). Part of your confusion stems from the fact that the Advanced Lifestyles Spoofing Life interval (6 hours) is highly irregular. You'll note that standard intervals are sufficiently spaced to try and avoid this problem (1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, etc.), but in this case the desire was to retain the specific Threshold values given for Spoofing Life.

Now, because the Advanced Lifestyles Spoofing Life tasks can all be seen as component tasks of a single Spoofing Life test - and because the interval is so long - it makes sense to combine the individual six-hour work periods into a certain number of "work days," when possible. Its a fairly straightforward and easy way to do it, and it doesn't involve working for a 120 hours straight unless you really want to.

Math only takes you so far before common sense rears its ugly head, and since we're on Spoofing Life I'll use that as an example. Using the Advanced Lifestyles rules, lifestyles are broken down into five components; each component is seen as a separate task when Spoofing Life - but not all of these tasks are guaranteed to take the same amount of time! The fact that each lifestyle component is given the same interval is for convenience' sake only - everyone knows from personal experience that some steps in a task take more or less time than others. A bit of good luck can see you secure your Necessities in six hours, while poor rolling can have you use your maximum number of rolls without securing the Space you desire.

Part of the problem with longer intervals is that people try to do the math you're attempting. "How long do I actually work during the day?" leads naturally to the question "If I work twice as long during the day, does that mean I finish the job twice as fast?" (The infamous PCs Work Harder axiom.) This is where I'm going to direct you to the Rushing the Job rules (p.59, SR4) - if you want to accomplish more in less time, use this rule.


Depends on many factors, but not always. You could argue that when doing a single Spoofing Life test, the character combines many steps that have to be repeated when doing the individual Spoofing Life tests for each lifestyle component. From a more metagame perspective, the reason it takes longer is that as you go for higher lifestyles - anything over Low - your chances of getting the number of hits you need in a comparable period on each component decreases. This can be easily seen by the fact that you have five components and the interval is only one fourth of the test for the "complete" lifestyle.

Let's take the previous example, the Low lifestyle. With a straight Spoofing Life Test, you have a Threshold of 4 and an Interval of 1 day. If you're a spiffy spoofer, you can role Hacking 7 (Spoofing Life +2) + Spoof 6, or 15 dice - that's three guaranteed hits and a reasonably good chance of succeeding the entire lifestyle with 1 day of work; 2 days max. Now, let's look at spoofing the individual components: five Extended Tests, each with a Threshold of 4 and an Interval of 6 hours. Using the same dice pool, you're looking at six-to-twelve hours of work per component. If you run these periods together consecutively, that's somewhere between 30-60 hours of straight work - on the low-to-mid end (30, 36, 42, 48), comparable to the straight Spoofing Life Test, but on the high end (54, 60) a worse deal - and let's not forget the increased chances of glitches for all those extra tests!

The results are a little brighter if you consider a lifestyle that has some components higher than others - depending on how you work the numbers, of course! Let's look at a character that wants four of his components at Low and one at Middle. Common sense should tell you that comparing the five component Spoofing Life Tests to a single Low Lifestyle Spoofing Life test would be unfavorable, so let's compare it to a Middle lifestyle.

With a straight Spoofing Life Test, you have a threshold of 12 and an Interval of 1 day; rolling 8 dice you should hit your threshold in 6 days. Now, with the four Low lifestyle components, your threshold is 4 and your Interval is 6 hours; again rolling 8 dice you should achieve each component after 12 hours of work (subtotal: 48 hours of work). Then you have the Middle component, which has a threshold of 12 and an Interval of 6 hours; rolling 8 dice you should achieve that final component in six rolls, or 36 hours (total: 84 hours, or 3.5 days conflated). While the two resultant lifestyles aren't completely comparable, you can see that lowering some of the components means that the total time you spend spoofing is less - which is as it should be when you think about it.

Of course, compare this to just spoofing a Low Lifestyle (threshold 4, with 8 dice, that's about two days) and then spoofing one component up to Medium (threshold 12, with 8 dice, that's about 36 hours) - it ends up taking 3.5 days! Of course, that worked out nicely because of the numbers I picked for the examples, but its a good example of spoofing a "minimum" or "baseline" lifestyle and then upgrading specific components individually - and has the benefit of not requiring as many tests as spoofing each component individually, reducing the chance of glitches.

Okay, so at this point I hope I've hammered home that yes, trying to spoof every individual component of a lifestyle will almost always take longer than doing a simple lifestyle test - the numbers were picked this way in part to encourage less rolling - but I hope I've also gotten across that spoofing individual lifestyle components is a viable tactic, and that as individual tasks it is reasonable to combine the interval periods for the ease of player and gamemaster.

I believe that the book states that if you want to spoof a lifestly in components, if all the components have the same rating, you use Unwired timetables, not those given in Runner's Companion.

That all makes good sense, and matches what I understood the effect to be.
And I appreciate the effort you took to spell it out very carefully.
It seems that there are two problems that cause difficulty.
Firstly,as you say, the 6 hour interval creates awkwardness in interpretation that the normal intervals (1 hour, 1 day etc.) simply avoid.
The second problem is that the sidebar that introduces this partitioning of the test uses the phrase "significantly reduced" to describe the interval change. A sensible way to look at it, from your careful description above, is that the interval has been reduced by a factor of 2, the number of tests has been multiplied by 5, and that this is intentional. That works for me.

There was one mention of a secondary question up above that strikes me as reasonable. If spoofing a lifestyle, do you have to do anything about the qualities? In many ways, the qualities reflect (quite nicely when not dealing with spoofing) things that will modify the costs of the five basic component. So they can't be spoofed separately. Does spoofing a lifestyle really make the qualities free?

Thanks,
Joel

Lifestyle qualities are, in general, beyond the scope of Spoofing Life. Aside from any Negative Lifestyle Qualities garnered from glitches, I wouldn't allow them in Spoofing Life. If you as a gamemaster choose to allow qualities, I would suggest modifying the threshold levels for all components of the lifestyle by the lifestyle quality's LP modifier - that is, a character who wants the Astral Repellent quality (LP +5) would add 5 to the threshold of all lifestyle components - Low lifestyle components would be threshold 9, Middle lifestyle components would be threshold 17, etc.

Why not just use that handy chart that shows what your point total is compared to a particular lifestyle and roll for the compared lifestyle. For example if you have a bunch of stuff at squatter and one or two things at luxury and you end up equaling a middle lifestyle, just spoof for middle. If it is off by one or two points, give a small adjustment to the threshold.

Seems like this would simplify things greatly, as it is how they did the payment, as opposed for setting up some specific nuyen cost for each individual part of the lifestyle.

Basically to keep people from taking, say, Luxury on one component and Squatter for the other four and classifying it as a "Low lifestyle."

They can do that by the rules and pay for it, so why should it be any more difficult to spoof? Obviously spoofing should have all the same requirements as when your paying for it all. Generally Luxury in any department has high/luxury requirements in other categories.

Basic balance issue. Paying for lifestyles gets exponentially more expensive as you go up the scale, Spoofing Life gets exponentially more difficult as you try to get more stuff for free. Advanced Lifestyle options adds a linear track onto that for ease of swapping options in and out, but that's not a good measure of the difficulty of hacking the individual components - it was basically taken wholesale from Sprawl Survival Guide and the Spoofing Life rules weren't written with those in mind. So while you can say "10 LP is a Low lifestyle" that would be technically correct but not absolutely correct, because "Low lifestyle" on the table is just a rough indicator that covers a range of values, see?