In any case, though, brain-hacking isn't really an extension of "tech is vulnerable, period" idea. In design terms, it's actually a reasonable idea - you can't simply opt out of the other two pillars of the game, so why should you be able to opt out of the third?

Could actually be possible to explain it based on quantum computing or some sort of direct manipulation of EMR to cause a localized effect. Of course, that would need to be coupled with something better than bricking for the system it works through.

Which is pretty much the entire reason I suggest the idea. I'm fine with tacnets, doors etc for the deckers combat hacking. Hackers are probably the biggest out of combat contributors in the game by a massive margin, having a limited range of in combat hacking works for me. But if they want to expand it(and a lot of people seem to want it) I'd rather they go full bore and let them hack everything due to fake science, and make it GiTS like and people would be loading up IC on their guns.

Like I said, the logical extreme.

AFAIK no one jumped at the idea and I think Frank is banned from Dumpshock at this point.

Either way, he didn't improve the system, he just made the downsides more terrible.

Part of what I'm saying is that I don't see it as being on the same spectrum. But regardless, that's not what anyone's suggesting.

Frank's idea is this:

A = Hacking is dangerous, therefore people will want to avoid it.
B = Avoiding hacking can be done by turning wireless off, or just going with tech.
A+B = People will turn wirless off or go without tech to avoid hacking.

There are three ways to deal with that:
1. Accept it: runners and people with security in mind won't go wireless. Only people oblivious to security problems will use wireless. The problem of this is that it prevents any kind of wireless banking (and other similar stuff), and makes the wireless hacker pretty useless in most cases.
2. Improve the gain of wireless. That's the "carrot" approach. People might want to avoid hacking, but they might also appreciate what the benefits of wireless. Just like people drive cars or use internet today.
3. Raise the cost of going offline. Taht's the "stick" approach. People who don't have a wireless communication are worse off than those with it, so they'd rather have wireless hacking risk than offline hacking risks.

The first solution isn't really interesting and leads to a lot of problems. The second is hard to pull off correctly. Frank is convinced that it's impossible, so he went for the third. (and is now convinced that the 5th edition hacking was only created to spite him and try to prove to him that a carrot approach is possible...).

As far as game system design go it's a logical decision: it fixes the issue without causing any new problems. As for the fluff and overall impact on the tone of the game... it's debatable.

I can at least agree with him on that. From a purely mechanical standpoint it's very well reasoned.

Yes and no. It solves the problem they wanted to solve, but it introduces some very, very large other problems to their worldbuilding.

A= Whatsapp is dangerous, therefore...?
B = There are plenty of alternatives
A+B = ...?

Moral of the story: Ease of use wins

Hence "purely mechanical standpoint." It plays hell with the flavor.

Not even the flavor. It messes with basic assumptions of the setting, which -is- a mechanical problem as the abstractions that make up the mechanics are based on the setting they're trying to simulate.

yeah, just to be clear i'm not saying that i'd like for shadowrun to have frank's brainhacking system.

rather, i'm saying that the current system annoys me more because it is telling me that paranoid people aren't paranoid, that people who care deeply about security are all happily purchasing equipment that is designed with gigantic unnecessary security holes in it, and that not a single corporation has stepped up to produce versions that are fully functional without the gigantic security holes even for their own special forces apparently (not that i think organizations based entirely around the objective of making money would hesitate to sell their dramatically superior product and dominate the market completely either, mind you).

In my opinion the carrot approach only works in a casual user scenario. The gang member does not care if the SMG fires from an open or closed bolt, but the Operator sure as hell does. I think this carries over to just about every aspect of technology and its use. Cutting edge is only as good as its next failure, and when your life depends on it you are not going to accept anything less than 99%+ reliability. So while Trollman certainly has a certain amount of vitriol, I would have to agree with him on this, or at least agree that I don't think the carrot approach works in the genre without undermining certain styles of play generally considered to be more "realistic".

Well yes, the CyberDesk was big enough to hack people's minds and reality, while the puny CyberDeck could only handle Virtual Reality.

Course it was piss poor to haul around except on a palletjack and that had it's own issues.

I have to wonder, did they design the game from the perspective of players (this is what we play as and how we play, so everything must make sense from where we stand) or from the perspective of the game world (this is the world, the players are a very small subsection of the world. None of the world environment is built with them in mind). Most of the discussion seems focused on the former.

That seems logical, we are playing a game afterall; but it does seem illogical for the worldspace. Why would corps build things that are only really useful for shadow runners? I'm think of things like tag erasers specifically. They don't make as much sense with how the worldspace is presented.

If, instead, we approach it from the later perspective, we get the implication that things like the tag eraser were created with an approved (if not legal) reason, that probably was co-opted by the criminal element. I think that looking at everything from the second perspective (that there is a worldspace, and the players make do in it) helps make some of the crunch more logical.

I feel that wireless bonuses make the most sense this way. Corporate assests are moat likely going to be operating on corp property. They will likely have corp deckers running overwatch, corp spiders tending security, and corp guards for meatspace. The average wage slave isn't worth the effort, and anyone else has the support of the other corp staff. Off site, it gets riskier, but that's why they hire shadowrunners. For things like military or Desert Wars, the corps don't really care as much. 5e is attempting to go back to the more punk vibe of yesteryear, where governments were little more than puppets of corporations.

My two bits, probably won't impress or sway anyone, but it's my thoughts.

they still have to sell their products, and i for one have a hard time believing that they sell more wired reflexes to shadowrunners than they sell to actual military organizations.

furthermore, while they do have all sorts of defences, given that they are hiring people who have the capabilities to get through that kind of security to do jobs for them on the basis that they will succeed, i slightly suspect they are more than aware that there are people who will be able to exploit those weaknesses.

I call bullshit on this whole line of thought. If we're looking at it from the in-game corporate perspective, they've just come off of Crash 2.0. Technomancers are the big bogeyman everyone's talking about. What about this would make them think that making more things vulnerable to Matrix attack is a good idea as a matter of policy?

They just over hauled the Matrix, which I'm pretty sure was sold with it being safer and unhackable. Which we know is bulldrek, but to Joe Wageslave, he'd probably buy the propaganda. And Mega Corps, being Mega Corps, they probably put all kind of useless metric data to analyze people's use of their products so they can hit them with more targeted ads, so they have a vested interest in keeping everyone online.

And honestly, you shouldn't be able to opt out of the Matrix. Its annoying that an invasive all-seeing and all-knowing technological information network which is core to the setting can be completely ignored, that's thematically a problem.

meanwhile, the last 2 major threats to the world have come from the matrix.

hey, i've got a great idea! why don't we hook up everything to the matrix, including all the hardware to operate it remotely! i'm sure the next time something horrible comes out of the matrix (note: the last two times that happened, nobody was able to stop it) there won't be completely awful repercussions for everyone as machines go berserk. it's not like designing stuff specifically to be incapable of harming people from the matrix was a major selling point of a product a few years back in the setting (note: if you want to believe this is actually true instead of just being sarcasm, don't look up the old renraku manservant).

edit: oh, and it seems incredibly unlikely that:

a) nobody is going to figure out that technomancers can still hack things just fine
b) the megas would ever give up their scapegoat

i mean, if the matrix can't be hacked, you can't blame that horrible unfortunate chemical spill on those awful technomancers removing the safety limits that you had set on your storage tanks even though the actual cause of the spill was years of poor maintenance procedures, use of untrained labour paid under the table, and the company's decision that finding a scapegoat to handle the bad publicity was cheaper than keeping everything working.

Oh no, looks like they'll just have to go back to blaming regular old shafowrunners. Honestlybthough, most major player don't give a crap about the vast majority of people. CEOs are okay with the built in security risks, because they can exploit them too. They also have the kind of security that would stop almost any threat below their level. The average person isn't at any greater risk then they were before, simply due to their anonymity (provided by being nobodies). The governments will at least take some steps to handle any potential issues. I already mentioned my theory about corpsec and corpgrunts. Which leaves the people operating in the dark. Shadowrunners and Yakuza and what not. The governments don't care, and the corps actually want the security holes in that stuff. It's not a perfect explanation, but it is how I will handle some of the questions involved in my game world.

If you need a contrived, complicated explanation, and need to make it up yourself, to justify an illogically implemented game mechanic, then I consider that a major failing of the rules.

And remember, that is the main problem a lot of us have with wireless hacking. Not its existence, but how it was implemented.

doesn't take much market research to find out that your target market for wired reflexes and reaction enhancers wants to not be broadcasting their location 24/7.

again, i'm *fine* with regular consumer products having wireless bonuses. especially where it makes sense. what bothers me is when it doesn't make sense. there is no market for combat cyberware that is designed to be vulnerable to being hacked. now, as players of a game, we certainly see a lot more stuff where wireless being required to get the full function of the equipment makes no sense, and i'm sure there are hundreds or thousands or perhaps even millions of examples of regular consumer products where matrix connectivity makes sense.

but wired reflexes is not a regular consumer product. if you're a manager or a clerk or even a dock worker, you have no legitimate need for wired reflexes, and even if you could afford it, they wouldn't be legal for you to have installed. the only people who have a need for this are people who expect to get into combat on a regular basis, and therefore have to worry about security loopholes.

and even for some devices where there is a bit of a grey area (corporate security probably has a legitimate reason to want to use smartguns and smartlinks, but far less need for secrecy and quite frankly isn't actually that likely to get into a firefight on a regular basis), there would be a demand for a version that is designed to work without wireless, too.

and if there is such a thing as versions that get full functionality without wireless, then it should bloody well be in the main book, because it should be the standard for shadowrunners (which is what the core book is about).

But there can be a market for wired reflexes that provide enhanced functionality, even if that functionality comes at the cost of some vulnerability. Some people would decide it's not worth it, but others would decide it is.

Additionally, you can just activate/deactivate the wireless on an as-needed basis - turn it off when discovery's a concern, especially if you can't get it behind a Sleaze rating, and have the wireless on when it's useful to you.

As an aside. Why do the corps care about bad publicity like that? I thought the setting had the big corps as essentially unassailable, governments as little threat to them and the vast majority of the populace ground under heel and unable to function without the constant influx of goods from the Megas.

Why does that company care much that a chemical plant blew up and killed 10,000 people? Beyond the obvious loss in sales as some of your customers died?

That's a clash between 80s cyberpunk and postcyberpunk.

In 80s cyberpunk, the corp wouldn't care. It would even make money by running a "guess how many people died and win as many nuyens!" game. Of course, you'd have sensationalist journalists who'll make a scandal out of the explosion, and the masses would be shocked at just how careless the corp is, but they'd all be participating to the game and hoping to get the prize, and the media overdose they're subjected to will help them forget it in a few days, when the next scandal arrives, or when one celebrity is pregnant.

In Postcyberpunk, corps would care. First because when your employees are your clients and vice-versa, you need to keep them alive and healthy. Second because you need to have a spotless image: consumers can, and some of them will (especially if another corp pushes them in that direction) prefer your competitor's products if you're too careless.

As has been said time and again, this would be fine if the enhanced functionality made sense.

Connecting your GPS to the Matrix for live road condition updates, including weather, construction, accidents, police and emergency vehicles, terrorist attacks, parade routes, protests, riots, flashmobs, and whatever the heck else makes sense. The presence of a Matrix connection provides you with useful information that you otherwise would not have, hence why a Wireless Bonus is reasonable.

In contrast, connecting your Forearm Snap-Blades to the Matrix for absolutely no reason doesn't make sense. The presence of a Matrix connection provides you with absolutely nothing. Now, the bonus for a Wireless Connection with this weapon is that you are able to activate the blades with a Free Action rather than a Simple Action - presumably because it's quicker to send a digital signal that to perform a manual button press or similar method of activation.

There are two problems with that, however. First, unless the device you send the wireless signal from is DNI enabled, you still have to press a button on your commlink or other device to send the signal, and it should take just as much time to press one button on one device as it does to press another button on a different device. Second, there's no need for the activation command to come from the Matrix, as opposed to just being sent via a fiberoptic cable or other form of digital connection.

Compare with the GPS from earlier- even if your GPS is wired up to your Datajack and you control it via DNI, making it so you don't even have to lift a finger to use and operate the system at the speed of thought, that doesn't somehow magically provide you with real-time road condition data. That information has to come from SOMEWHERE - it doesn't just magically come into existence. Hence why a Wireless Bonus makes sense - the Matrix Connection is completely necessary for providing the extra data, and without that data you can't have the enhanced functionality that depends on it.

~Umi

^ This is something my brother and I hashed out when I explaned some of the bonuses to him. I think it comes down to the word wireless. Half of the bonuses make sense as matrix connections (smartgun, to me at least). Others, like WR/RE, feel more like they were ment to be more like Bluetooth. Like at some point they wanted to make a really big distinction between Matrix access and your PAN. A lot of the bonuses seem to hold this up to me. Like it was a huge project that kept having staff pulled from it. It sounded too cool to cancel, but no one understood it enough to really support it. (the periscope really screams half-finished project to me).

As for my reasoning about the seeming security hole that wireless bonuses cause, I could accept contrived. Complicated, not so much, but I did say it was my opinion. I feel like it is a fairly simple, and logical, conclusion from the perspective of the world space. But, again, I view the world space as something the players have to survive in, not as something built for them. I am also more inclined to classic cyberpunk, rather than post-cyberpunk.

SO much this...

But why does anyone care about this stuff? The reason: They don't.

If you put an alternative to them that wireless goes away and hackers can just hack devices anyway because of awesome future stuff so then the payoff becomes 'either have cyberware and be awesome, but vulnerable or don't' the same cohort of players drop the logical arguments and crank out other ones, like balance. All in aid of what they really care about:

"I don't want my samurai to be vulnerable to hackers"

Which many of us already did in previous editions. Minimization of exposure is a survival trait in the Shadows. SO yes, in 5th Edition, as it is written, My characters will NEVER make use of the wireless bonuses, not only because they are crap, but because they expose you needlessly to the opposition.

It's just a confluence of stupid factors.

Trading security for extra bonuses doesn't make sense if those bonuses aren't well worth the loss of security. It's like telling Melee Murray he can gain +1 DV on his melee attacks and +1 dice on his Dodge rolls if he stands in the middle of an open field without cover. Sure, the slight bonuses are nice, but if he only gets them by making himself a sitting duck for ranged opponents, he's simply not going to bother.

That said, even if the bonuses were amazing, they still need to make sense. Offering a bonus of +10 DV and +10 dice on his Dodge rolls might potentially be worth it to Murray, but it still doesn't make an ounce of goddamn sense that standing in an open field without cover would provide such a bonus. The concept is literally insane. It's like if chewing bubblegum made you bulletproof - it's completely divorced from anything resembling reality.

~Umi

Agreed...
It was a sad day when I read the comments of the Writer who created those wireless bonuses. He had absolutely no direction or guidance, and apparently no idea how the Matrix actually worked. And he chose Cool (not sure why he thought his bonuses were Cool, but that is exactly what he said) over Reasonable.

Being bulletproof when you chew bubblegum and having Dodge bonus when in the middle of an open field would be great for a 90s action movie game, though.

Want that? Play Feng Shui. It has what you crave.
A Feng Shui Shadowrun port would be (and totally is) freakin' awesome - GM'd one for a while. It was fun.

Now, if the bubblegum was a Contact Trigger for an Alchemical Preparation, that could work.

...asuming the Alchemy rules actually existed in a useable form, that is...

~Umi

"I'm here to kick ass and chew bubble gum and I'm all out of bubblegum." ?

Because bad publicity cuts into the bottom line. A scandal means that you won't sell the same projected number of units and make the same profit, and indeed, may cost you millions or billions of nuyen if it happens as just the wrong time and instead of everyone buying Aztechnology's New Product, they're buying the Ares Macrotechnology version which isn't associated with exploding chemical plants.

Will Aztechnology still be in the black? Yes. But most likely large amounts of mid-level executives and drones will have to answer to why they missed their target profit and let Ares scoop up the lion's share of the initial market. And knowing Aztechnology not a few of them may even be sacrificed on the nearest teocalli.

One need only look to the Excalibur Project from Ares.

Well, that of course was taken way too far - it should have stung, but not really done the absolutely massive damage we're supposed to believe it did.

~Umi

That also is true. Way Overblown, in my opinion.

Just found this thread, didn't expect most of the discussion to be about something other than Run & Gun Apologies for responding to posts a few days old...



Using your analogy, "Support" types are more akin to Engineers than Supply Wagons. Sure, they do some boring bridge-building sometimes, but they're also expected to perform highly specialized and vital non-combat tasks under fire when the occasion demands.




Simulated violence is SR but simulated simulated violence (i.e. decking) is MLPR?

The "image problem" of decking is partly, IMO, because nobody knows what decking is like. Everyone can imagine what's going on in a gunfight to a certain extent even if the GM runs it dully and mechanically. Decking has no such shared imagery that everyone can fill in on their own, the GM has to provide it, and most don't (myself included - something I need to work on).




Entirely agree here. It was a problem in 4th: If the hacker wants to start hacking the opposition when combat starts, they've got to first spend time searching for hidden nodes, and then sniffing/hacking, before they could actually do anything that had any useful impact. 5th has similar problems, spotting the right icons and having to accumulate enough marks to do what you want. This is a major reason (but not the only one, there's a bunch) why I've been trying to come up with better system myself.

To paraphrase Chris Rock, "The people that buy and play Shadowrun can't win an argument about the rules or other game ideas with CGL because they are handicapped by a need to make sense..."

That's fair. Except Engineers are very "hands-on", and get to play with explosives and stuff.

Still, building a bridge while being shot at isn't glamorous. Neither is hacking a door or a camera while being shot at.

~Umi

See this seems to imply a great deal more open market competition than I thought there was. The grunts on the ground actually have a choice in what they buy? I thought it was more a case of 'This is Ares corp land, buy Ares' and 'The government is bought out by Ares, only Ares products make it to market here' and selling to other corps well...why do they care about a leak at a chemical plant leading to the deaths of thousands?

Are there really that many people in independant nations who 1. want to buy the products in a new competitive market 2. have the cash to do so and 3. have the freedom to choose to do that?

But it is Necessary, and is oftentimes the difference between getting Dead/Caught and escaping.
As for explosives..... I am all about the Explosives...

You're posting on Dumpshock. No thread stays on topic for more than a page, at best.

Depends on the area. Not everyone works directly for the Head office Corps. So if you work in the Aztechnology pyramid, you have your set lifestyle and shop from Azzie shops primarily as most of you pay is in Azzie corp scrip.

Offsite you have a lot of various business who may be part of the Corp umbrella, but in a bit looser fashion.

So you might work for Seattle Wholefoods, a subsidiary of Aztechnology that carries the local range of eats as the distributor to other chains of supermarkets.

While the company is owned by the AZ, you are as likely to be paid in AZ scrip redeemable in the Azzie pyramid as being paid regular nuyen.

Likewise your outlets probably honor AZ scrip or nuyen used for any purchases, but might not honor Renraku or other corpscrip, forcing them to use nuyen for purchases.

Plus if you are eating/wearing/using another corp's items that tends to reflect poorly on yourself, especially in that middle part of the ladder.

Do the corps have a lot of fingers in a lot of pies? sure, but there are few areas where one corp pretty much has any particular sector sewn up.

You see that as a bad thing? Weird.

~Umi

Hence the problem.
The job needs to be done, but nobody enjoys playing it.

It's kind of like if there was a game system where you could play as a Soldier, a Police Officer, a Firefighter, or a Garbage Man.

All necessary in different ways, but one of those isn't terribly attractive.

~Umi

the fact that horizon exists points strongly towards the fact that marketing is important. if people don't have choices, then marketing wouldn't be important, therefore, people must have choices.

certainly, as noted above, there are places where you don't have a choice (or at least, not a meaningful one - you can buy from corp brand A or corp brand B, but you're still buying from the same overall corporation). but there are also lots of places where you *do* have a choice. there are even large corporations that are not megacorporations, which also could not happen if there was no way for consumers to buy products that aren't from a mega.



really? what market is there for wired reflexes where you can say with any degree of certainty that you don't have to worry about being targeted in a fight?

and for the kinds of situations where wired reflexes are needed, discovery is pretty much always a concern, unless you've already been discovered in which case the fact that it is vulnerable is a concern.

sure, wired reflexes may let you faceroll uncoordinated gangs with poor equipment more easily, but you don't need wired reflexes for that. some decent armour, superior weapons, a couple vehicles, and appropriate tactics and actually being trained in the use of your equipment are more than enough for that. meanwhile, if you've got wired reflexes active and the gangers manage to notice it (which they can do using their completely bog-standard consumer-grade electronics that cost them 100 nuyen), you might actually blow your chance at catching them because it gives them time to run away in a crowded urban environment where 100 meters is significant. not to mention that nobody actually cares enough to do anything about the gangs anyways most of the time, so the situation where heavily cybered assets are assigned to the job is fairly unlikely in the first place.