Are we still having this conversation? I mean really? It's a classless system, you want to contribute in a fight? Learn to fire a gun and hug some cover, or if you're the dedicated and focused Decker, stay in the van and do what Deckers have been doing since the 50's and that's deck the building's security system and get those auto turrets working for you. Even if the building security is Rigged that's not the problem it used to be. You can tap and monitor the sec teams communications and if you're good enough you can get ahold of their whole system if it's on a Host without ever needing to be anywhere NEAR the site.

Street Sams are meant to be Combat Monsters of the streets and Adept's wield real mystical Kung Fu (or Gun Fu) they should be owning most combat situations except against truly elite opposition. Everyone else will be relying on some basic or chopped in skills and maybe a few bio or cyber enhancements to give then an edge.

Hell, if you want to keep it in-theme for the Decker, get some damn skillwires and a chipjack, and run Rambo v 4.5 to get you that Automatics skill.

Would work in SR4A... Not so much in SR5.

Yeah, SR5 is woefully short on some of the bits and pieces of 'ware that are seriously iconic to the game.

So you mean 4th edition.

Cyberware is hackable in 4th. It's just that the rules around it are vague and unhelpful and generally boils down to "just shot the fragger in the face with a gun" because it was too complicated and required too many actions to hack cyberware to get any meaningful results. Unless the guy just burnt out his wireless antenna, which there was no reason not to, and thus was unhackable.

5th came along and tried to give incentive to NOT burn out the antenna. And tried to make it take fewer actions to hack cyber and give more meaningful results.

Which pissed off everyone else.

And thus the pendulum swings the other way.

(Tip: I've done the statistical analysis: there is no solution to the problem. I already consider 5th edition's hacking to still be generally less viable than just shooting the guy, as it still takes multiple actions and only disables ONE piece of gear. Yet it's easy enough for a hacker to mess up a runner that non-hackers are rather upset at the result. Ergo, there is no middle ground.)

I find it's much less the fact that Ware can be hacked and more the crowbarred method into which Ware has been made vulnerable to do what it's always been meant to do. If the Wireless Boni had been less blanket applied and with more logical thought into the continuity of the Sixth World the issue simply would exist. That's why so many people swap things around and in my game the Street Samurai use the Free action to switch modes on their SmartLinks to raise both Skill (my house standard) and Accuracy for the shot before switching back offline again.

No, I don't. I merely consider an obviously overpowered piece of RAW to be overpowered. 0.25 PP to tell an enemy "jump off that cliff", without drain and no modifiers accounting for the difference between "look over there" and "actively harm yourself"? Let me think about that for a second...

@Jaid:

Problem is, if you can do it in a single IP, failure means you can simply retry next IP. That puts a serious dent into supposedly hard to hack systems...

Really? Overpowered?

Commanding Voice has strict limitations. A victim has to be able to hear the speaker without technological augmentation. The victim has to be able to understand the language they speak in. The command has to be five words or less, which limits task complexity extremely. The victim always gets a resistance roll, unlike certain spells and Critter Powers where they only get to resist when a command is obviously harmful.

When a group is targetted, they resist as a team, using the highest dicepool and adding +1 for each additional group member. Even if the command succeeds, the GM has the fiat to simply make the target stand confused instead of what you wanted, with special emphasis to do so on particularly harmful commands (but with a greater chance of success with more and more net hits). Oh, and you suffer diminishing returns with negatives against subsequent uses on the same target within a 24 hour period.

Then there's the metagame concerns.

Is telling a group of guards to drop their guns somehow more powerful than other available options? In the same space of time (a Complex Action) you could just open fire on the enemy with bullets or grenades or any number of lethal devices. You could cast all sorts of spells, ranging from full blown lethal magic bombs to mere weapon-slagging specialty cantrips with completely negligable drain values. (Neither of these choices have diminishing returns, mind.)

There's also the question of character investment - the effective use of Commanding Voice requires you to 1) be an Adept, 2) have good Charisma, and 3) have good Leadership. The power is resisted with Willpower + Leadership, meaning to affect "that Wildcat team" you'd need to beat the Willpower + Leadership of the team commander, +X many team members. Assuming the Wildcats have about the same stats as Red Samurai or Tir Ghosts, that's a Willpower of 5, a Leadership of 3 or 4 for the commander, and let's say a +3 for team members (it's just a small team).

They're already rolling 11 dice to resist. If you have maxed natural Charisma and maxed Leadership with a specialization, you're rolling 14 dice, meaning you're likely to get just about a single net hit. Wow! All this, for the low, low price of 96 BP!

Of course, that's the maxed out version - let's instead try something a little more realistic. Let's say you only have 5 Charisma (saves you the Final Attribute Point cost), and your Leadership is part of your Influence grouping at Rating 4. Also, I forgot in the last example, you're an Adept, so let's say you tossed on two points of Improved Ability (Leadership), which is the maximum you can take without raising your Leadership skill some more. That drops the cost down to a mere 95 BP! And now you have only 11 dice to roll, meaning on average your Commanding Voice fails outright.

Commanding Voice is a niche power with limited applicability. It isn't a reliable combat tool. Sure, you can use it in combat, and yes, if you pull it off it can be amazing, but it's really only a one-shot trick effective against weaker targets with smaller dice pools, because your own dice pool is inherently limited.

How in the world is that overpowered?

~Umi

It isn't overpowered... if you assume your average target is always going to be a high-speed special ops squad.

Let's assume Average Joe.

Willpower 3, no Leadership training. Just some poor schlub on the street, possibly your run-of-the-mill Corpsec Guard.

A non-social-specialized Adept, let's say a Throwing Adept, can use their lackluster Charisma of 3 and their non-existant Leadership skill to roll a total of 3 dice, on average failing to beat out a random schmuck on the street. Since subsequent attempts cost -2 dice, that was his only real shot. This is kind of a waste of 0.25 Power Points, neh?

A hybrid half-face / half-something else Adept, with a respectable Charisma of 4 and a Leadership of 3 rolls 7 dice, on average getting the single net hit necessary to get Joe to do his bidding (so long as that bidding is five words or less). Since Joe has rubbish stats and no real gear, there's not much he can actually be made to do, but hey, at least you won the roll. You can even make him do something else, or try again if you fail, because you only drop to 5 dice, and that's almost enough to average out to 2 hits.

A fully specialized face Adept, with their dice pool of 10+, is of course going to handily bend Average Joe to his will, and can even do it two or three times if his luck holds.

But there's also the group factor to consider.

If you run up against a lone Corpsec Guard and are at least a half-face hybrid of some sort, then sure, Commanding Voice is useful. If that lone Corpsec Guard is a Lieutenant with actual Leadership training? Well... not so much, then.

If you try to Command a small group of Corpsec Guards without Leadership training, the flat +1 per additional group member is going to drop you back down to being unlikely to succeed. And if the group you try to Command happens to have a Lieutenant who does have Leadership training? Then you're facing even worse odds, as the you roll against their highest dicepool modified by group count.

So baseline grunts, your everyday Corpsec Guards, require a fully-specialized Face Adept with high Charisma and Leadership to be able to reliably Command, and even then you really only get one shot before your odds start going downhill fast.

But even so, there's the question of what do you choose to do with that Command?

Let's assume something really bad for the enemy, like "Shoot yourselves in the heads" or "Jump off that cliff" (if you happen to have a cliff handy inside a Corporate Facility, I guess). You managed to use your highly specialized 11 dice against the group of 4 Corpsec Guards (with 1 Lieutenant leading them), and they resist with 8 dice (base SR4A grunt numbers). You get 4 hits, they get 3 hits, you win the roll with 1 net hit.

The GM says "Mmm, no, sorry, not enough net hits to justify obvious suicide, they just stand confused instead".

Well, that's okay I guess? After all, you made 4 enemies lose an action, right? Your team can get off a few potshots while they're standing confused, and you can't get attacked back. Not too shabby.

Or you could have had the Magician (just as specialized as the Face Adept) drop an AoE spell on the enemies, dealing actual damage, possibly inflicting Elemental effects, possibly knocking them down. Or maybe they could just Control their Actions - without the GM being able to say "No, they just stand around confused instead" or being restricted by language or a word count - and throw them off the cliff without any trouble. Or they could cast Demolish Gun to disarm the enemies. Or they could cast a Utility spell on an ally, like giving Increased Reflexes to the Street Sam so he can get two extra IP to spend hurling lead downrange at a rate of two Simple Actions per IP.

It's all a question of opportunity costs. Commanding Voice can be powerful, but if you're better off just shooting a guy in the face twice, why would you use it? The only people who really benefit from the power are specialized Faces - no one else has the dice to make use of it, because no one else typically takes Leadership or high Charisma. It also is pretty much a one- or two-shot deal, since it suffers diminishing returns. It's a versatile option with some decent situational usage, but it's by no means an overpowered one.

~Umi

Or you could simply order them to drop their weapons, and cuff them while they're disarmed/standing confused.

Not every power is meant to murder someone outright, and many of them are massively more useful for other things. Often not murdering them is significantly better and a more powerful game effect depending on your mission goals.

Also, you're being a bit flippant calling it a '96 karma trick' when those Chrasima and Leadership scores are very, very useful in other endeavors. Much like the skills and stats required to cast that AoE spell are useful for far more than just that single spell.

You! Shoot yourself/your leader now!

Your face effectively just cast a major combat spell. As a non-mystic adept, without drain, without any strings attached to spellcasting, simply as a side job for 0.25 PP. Yes, it does not work through technology, and taking down an entire squad of trained corpsec at once is hard -- that kinda applies to all magic. What does not happen across the board is that a social adept, standing in the middle of a mana warp, points his finger, says "boom", and the target dies.

This argument would work if everyone had to invest in Firearms/Close Combat skills to contribute in combat. The reverse, essentially, is true - the hacker is the only non-combat specialist that would be forced to pick up combat skills to contribute in combat. That is a problematic system.



Or, more likely in that case, the target just stands there confused.

there is a cumulative -2 penalty for each additional attempt to do the same action for just about anything. you'll be able to reliably get into systems that you outclass, and even systems that you are roughly equal to you will be hackable most of the time. anything a few dice above you is going to be very hard to crack unless you succeed on the first attempt.

In my ideal system, everyone would take some hacking, just like the non-covert ops characters take some infiltration, the non-street samurai take some pistols, and the non-faces take some etiquette. The average shadowrunner would be hooked up to the group's tacnet, and be able to do some basic hacking and data searching. The hacker would be, in the matrix, what the street samurai is in the meat world, the one who does the heavy lifting.

The hacker should need to get some firearms skills to contribute in a firefight, just like the medic or the amorer needs to do so. I don't think the solution is a ham-handed way to put hacking into a firefight, but having less of an entry barrier to being a hacker, so that hacker hybrids are as viable as they were in 4th edition.

I have to point out that you're going well outside of core archetypes here, but even so: Those two are probably riggers, and don't use Firearms but rather Gunnery, which is of course a rigger skill, in a fight. Alternatively, you might build them as deckers, or even mages. Something Logic-based, certainly.

The problem with this point of view is that it fails to recognise that people tend to not want to play Hackers. Umi pointed out the realities of that quite well. The solution of "Just learn to use guns" fails to fix this problem and makes the game very 1 dimensional.

5th Edition was aimed at fixing this pre-conception that Deckers are boing and gave them some extra things to do, things that the haters (of these new abilities) seem to thing are ineffectual and overpowered at the same time.

Why is it that the Decker can't be the 'Paper' to the sam's 'Rock'? Why do guns (or spells) have to be the answer to what makes a character fun? Why can't a decker be effective at ranged combat while not having to throw projectiles?

What your position does is it makes non-combat characters 2nd class citizens in your games. you're saying to them "You do all the important stuff while everyone else does the fun stuff and if you want to do the fun stuff you just need to do what they do, but just not as good". This form of class (or archetype) balance' doesn't really work. That's why in games like WoW, they eventually made every class more or less capable of every role because people were less inclined to play priests or druids. 4th Ed D&D did it too by making clerics into leaders and giving them the ability to heal while still being bad-asses (not that they pulled this off particularly well. What was important in those games was the developers recognised this issue and found that "Shut up and heal!" was not going to resolve said issues.

We're not even taking about making them as effective, but just making them effective at one particular type of combat manouvre that fills a slightly different niche to 'shoot your pistol meekly at the bad guys'. Not only that, but in 5th Ed they put so much emphisis on making deckers more interesting in combat that they can't really be quasi-samurais anyway because a Deck that doesn't totally suck costs about 1/2 of the maximum amount of money you can possible have at character creation.

In hindsight I would have approached this edition differently, I would have made hacking a new technology that could just control electronic devices, wireless be damned. No-one would have the option of just switching their wireless off, they would just have to make the decision: "If I want the benefits of cyber I have to accept the risks of hackers". Defensive measures would still be applicable in some way. Those to scared to have wired reflexes would roll 1d6 for initiative, those that accept it roll 2-5d6. That would seem like a decent risk/reward scenario to me.

You just described 4th ed, where everyone with a comlink could do it. However, people still didn't do it and the rules were so impossibly complex it was generally just handwaved anyway. 5th Ed wanted to bring back the feel of decking and the feel of exclusivity that hacking had.

Everyone should at least have Computer, though - Data Searches are a handy thing.

Well since no one had active wireless in 4e, it couldn't work. But my point was more wireless on or off it was hackable, and that would be what made a deck a deck the unobtanium drive that let you hack non-wireless devices. With this it would be pretty damn useful, it would be 2 passes in 5e kind of like mind control spells one action to attack, a 2nd action to issue the command. With this you could hack people behind cover screwing with their eyes, ears comms, targetting, cyber limbs etc. I see that as just a usseful as shooting people.

Except that, no, actually you can't just cuff people who lose their actions.

Sure, they'll spend their next available action carrying out your Command or "standing confused", but in the meantime they still get to roll to Defend and whatnot. If you wanted to cuff them, you'd need to fully incapacitate them first (read as "knock them out"), or maybe take a Called Shot on a special melee attack to "hit" them with a pair of cuffs on their wrists.


You! I shoot you now, twice!

Your sammie effectively just cast two major combat spells. As a mundane, without drain, without any strings attached to spellcasting. And he can do it again next IP, and the next, and the next, until he runs out of ammunition and has to reload. Then he can do it some more.

Did it cost him a greater investment than 0.25 power points? Perhaps. Is its higher cost proportional to it's higher level of power? Yes, yes it is.

Lots of archetypes have utility crossover. If you're a highly skilled marksman, your Agility also helps you with your Sneaking and Gymnastics. If you're a skilled Hacker, your Logic also helps with First Aid and Technical Skills. If you're a brutishly strong melee fighter, your Strength also improves your Climbing, Swimming, and Running tests. And if you're an ultra sauve face, your Charisma helps you... uh... wait... hang on...

...um... resist drain, I guess? (If you belong to one of certain rare and exotic magical traditions - usually Possession traditions.)

Commanding Voice gives you a one-shot trick that only works because it has synergy with your Charisma (which is essentially only used for Social checks) and your Leadership (which is often ignored outright by many Faces because it has so little practical application). I honestly don't see the problem.

~Umi

That's why "Fuck his ass" remains one of the more viable commands with Commanding Voice.

That's gonna take way more than a single IP to accomplish.

Also, eww.

~Umi

Which is exactly the wrong approach to take, especially if you are inspired by Ghost in the Shell, where everyone was a hacker and a street samurai. Wireless bonuses and hacking attacks could have been done well if they had implemented it in conjunction with extended rules for tactical communication networks, remote-controlled drones, and other areas where wireless makes sense.

Instead, they made street samurai vulnerable to two attack vectors they are virtually defenseless against (magic and hacking), and the rules for bricking (your super-expensive cyberware can get permanently damaged) are as illogical and incoherent as the wireless rules.

Hackers and street samurai both got screwed. Hackers, because they have to act as babysitters protecting the rest of the team, and because apparently this type of hacking is still difficult to pull off. Street samurai, because if an enemy hacker gets lucky just once, they are basically maimed or even ruined until they can see a cyberdoc. It is frustrating and unfun for both archetypes.

Why does everyone have a hardon for Tac-nets? They would have to be so much more different to previous iterations to be interesting and/or fun.



If you define being vulnerable to mean 'Not awesome against' then yeah, I guess. although I don't know why a street samurai is vulnerable to magic, except that maybe they are a bit harder to heal with it maybe? The don't have to have crap will power and they're pretty likely to have reasonable intuition and the cyberware is awesome against indirect combat spells, which everyone will be using now as direct spells apparently suck now (nah, they really don't).



Baby-sitting your crew is something extra that is useful, not in itself necessarily fun but useful, and it doesn't require any intervention on behalf of the hacker UNLESS they are actually attacked by a decker, which should probably be reasonably rare. Then you actually have deckery stuff to do in combat situations! YAYY!!!! In this scenario, everyone wins. The hacker can attack cyberware and other deckers and the Samurai can still be super awesome with their cyberware while recieving some protection from the decker, instead of just being stink old essence 6 sloth ex-cops

I guess everyone brings up tacnets because it is a way that they could have had logical wireless hacking in combat, instead of neural hardware that is magically vulnerable to outside signals despite a self-contained system such as wired reflexes having no need for a connection to the internet to function.

I define "vulnerable" to mean the street samurai has to rely on others to protect him against magic or matrix attacks, because his personal defenses are limited to such that it is a lopsided contest. Although magic has been hit by the nerf bat too - direct combat spells are not nearly as much of a threat, but spirits remain virtually untouchable by non-magical attacks at higher Force.

I don't see a forced interdependence or forced vulnerabilities as "everyone wins". It is more like "everyone loses". Instead of hackers and street samurai getting to be awesome in their individual niches, they have to huddle together, the street samurai fearful of crippling matrix attacks and the hacker fearful because with the higher bar to be a hacker in the first place, he can't participate as meaningfully in a firefight as before. It boils down to the SR5 mantra of "everything has a price", which as I have said before, is an atrocious philosophy for designing a game. It is saying "Hey, this option looks effective. How can we make it unfun?" Hackers, mages, and samurai are basically rock, paper, and scissors against each other.

And warlocks faces are mushrooms.

And that's what we call balance.

No they aren't.

The Street Sam doesn't need to turn the Wireless on their gear on when facing the Hacker becase the Hacker has comprmised dice pools in combat.

The example of the hacker bricking the thugs gun in the alley in the core book? Yeah. The Attacker just draws another gun/knife and puts the bullet/blade between the stupid Decker's eyes.

The Decker would have done better running for it and bricking at range, or finding a security drone or something rather than staring down the barrel of a gun and doing some finger twiddling in the hope of getting enough hits to brick the device. Especially as if that gun were slaved to a decent commlink the chance of dealing enough matrix damage to brick it in one turn is not that high.

I forget, do Laser Sights give the bonus dice by default or do they have to be wirelessly on for that too?

It is quite obvious, then, that SR5 is not your Ideal System (as opposed to SR4A, where that was the assumption to start with). .

More of a response to Smash than anyone.

My standpoint was an entirely simple one and not to do with concepts of "Fun" being limited to combat. It was very simple in fact. If you want to have an effect in Combat then get a Combat Skill.

Elsewhere there is a continuing discussion on Specialist vs Generalist, MinMaxing chargen systems and so forth. Well, one plugs into the other here. Shadowrun (and many other games) often feature Specialists, or people who are often better at one task or another. You want to invest your resources in Decking the Matrix? Awesome but that will take focus off of being good somewhere else. Want to burn nuyen and essence in getting that all important lethal edge on the mean streets of the 'plex? That's Sub-Zero cool, but odds are you won't be much if you jack into an Arctic Host. Do both? Well to be killer each way will take time and cred, more than you have to start with, to be not so killer each way, it's doable but you really shine (although you can be competent).

People who play Deckers normally play them for Decker type reasons. They want to Deck the Matrix, go up against other Deckers, Hosts, IC and slip like a stiletto razor through the toughest of security computer systems (y'know like it says, or said, on the blurb). Mages and Shaman want to channel otherworldly force, explore the boundaries of the MetaPlanes and do other cool magical stuff. Adepts are normally the ninja KungFu crowd and those who love a bit of Equilibrium in their cyberpunk. Street Sams and RazorGirls are walking predators in chrome and wired interfaces, chip fast and solidly deadly.

It's the same reason that I may choose to play an Ahroun in WTA, a Rogue in DND an Apostate with no combat skills (well, very poor ones) in Black Crusade. I go in expecting certain things with each character and work accordingly as does almost everyone else I've ever met. I know some folks who will not ever play elves in any system. I know people who've managed to create subpar Exalted characters because they wanted to play a certain way.

If you want to look at an "Even Playing Field" between "Archetypes" look at Mage the Ascension or Deliria. In the first you can have identical stats and yet no be able to do the same things at all. In the second even words can kill if used right meaning you need never touch a weapon to lay waste to armies. Both do their respective things very well and in a contextually consistent manner for their game settings.

Laser sights are a good example of a device with a wireless bonus that requires more than a little justification, which is of course lacking in SR5 right now.

"Laser sight: This device uses a laser beam to project a visible dot (in your choice of colors) on the target. This increases the weapon’s Accuracy by 1, which is not cumulative with smartlink modifiers. The laser sight can be attached to either the underbarrel mount or top mount. Activating or deactivating a laser sight is a Simple Action.
Wireless: The wireless laser sight provides a +1 dice pool bonus on attack tests, not cumulative with smartlink modifiers. Activating and deactivating the laser sight is a Free Action."

Yep - And I prefer a Red-Dot Sight to even the Laser Sight. Which would likely work identically to the Laser Sight (since they were functionally identical in SR4A, don't se why that would change)

Being a good shooter is a major investment. Being good with Commanding Voice is merely a side effect of being good in telling the guard that you indeed are the chief sanitation officer and therefore need immediate access and a full map


Granted, Agility is the solution to everything. But hackers with high LOG? Strength as a broadly useful stat? Naahh


Start a mutual assistance group of ten or so people, or just run a bunch of agents. Preventing such shenanigans is (probably) not an insurmountable problem, but it's something that needs to be kept in mind.

*Face palm* You know, it's easy-to-research stuff like this that really tears me up about how the SR writers do their thing. I mean, it would be a crying bloody shame if the writers had picked up a gun rag in the last...oh...DECADE and realized that modern laser sights activate by switch when you first grasp the pistol in a shooting grip and deactivate when you *Gasp!* let the grip go. And all this uber-tech without a wireless connection! *Oooo...ahhh...ooohhh!*

Indeed... Amazing isn't it. But then, the writer already said he did it to sound cool, rather than to sound authentic. *shrug*

I guess it's true. Ignorant really *is* the new cool...

Am I the only one who thinks that what the wireless is actually doing is making calculations about windspeed, etc like a smartlink (but not as well for some reason, maybe there is more disconnect between the user and the aiming device?) and the dot is actually leading the shot a bit. Hence +1 for wireless?

funny thing, i would actually be happier if everything was vulnerable to hacking at a range because of some crazy technological advance that lets cyberdecks target things that aren't wireless enabled within a certain range.

i mean, it would obviously be complete drivel scientifically speaking, but at least it would then make sense within the setting.

my main problem is that it doesn't make sense within the setting for some things to be designed to *require* the matrix to function at their full level. if vulnerability to being hacked was just a fact of life, whether or not the device was wireless, i would think it was complete nonsense... but i could accept that as something i just need to ignore the science behind, and at least the setting would be internally consistent.

in contrast, it's hard to accept that people who spend their entire existence trying to figure out how things can go horribly wrong (partly to protect against it, partly because they may need to make things go horribly wrong) are totally okay with having gear specially built for their use with completely unnecessary vulnerabilities.

So a wireless-connected laser sight replaces a smartlink with a +2 dice total bonus?

Wireless laser sight is +1 Acc, +1 die.

So +1 Acc is like an auto-success or something?

Four? *Sigh*

Triple post...damn tablet...

Double-post.

Accuracy is your limit for firing a gun.

You should go talk to Frank Trollman.
His "ideal" Shadowrun allows cyberdesk to hack people's brains at range because he took that idea to the logical extreme.

I'm not sure what the value of "logical" is here, but I'm pretty sure it's different from what it is everywhere else.

Basically Frank decided that the only reason to have a comlink that was vulnerable to 18-second hacks was because not-having one meant you were vulnerable to 3 second hacks.

Which is why everyone had one.

Or illogical extreme, as it were. *shrug*

As has been said previously... Frank was smoking some really good stuff...