Using existing Shadowrun technology, a Hacker should be able to kill people through the Matrix regardless of whether those people are currently connected to the Matrix. The Sim Module is an external device, a datajack is not required to transmit data in and out of a human brain, and the Matrix itself is wireless. So if someone is walking down the street, minding their own business, without even having a commlink or a datajack, some Hacker should be able point a Sim Module at them and open them up to hotsim brain state alterations.

In short, a Hacker should be able to use Black Hammer on anyone, anywhere. And the defense against this is not "shutting off your Matrix connection", because a Hacker can just give you a Matrix connection. The defense is "having a Hacker provide Spell Defense Electronic Warfare coverage." Because the connection can be created from the outside, you can't stop these attacks by tuning out, only by tuning in.

Not only should the Matrix work more like Magic does from a strictly game mechanics standpoint, but the effects of Matrix cybercombat should be more like Magic in its effects from a fluff standpoint. The Matrix rules are written as if participation in the Matrix were somehow voluntary. But it's not. The Matrix is all around you, and if people want to affect you with it, they totally can whether you can see it or not. It really is just like Astral Space that way.

-Frank

I... I actually agree with this idea. I mean, why the hell not? In Shadowrun, you live in a world where your next door neighbor might be carrying around a quasi-legal handgun made entirely out of ceramic and plastic materials. Hell, that weapon might actually be implanted into her forearm. Or maybe she's got electric cybernetic spurs.

Or maybe she's an adept and can just poke you hard enough to explode your face, The Story Of Ricky style. Or maybe her son is a mage and all that death trog metal he listens to is going to finally make him snap and he Powerballs a bus full of kids, or conjure up a blood spirit after learning how to do it from an Evil Internet.

Heck, hackers can already kill you in all sorts of horrible-but-indirect ways. Why not just have them be one more thing to potentially ruin your day? It's not like hackers are somehow more prone to murder and snapping than every other archetype out there.

Not literally, Coolgrafix. At least, I don't think he's advocating some kind of Sim Module Death Ray.

There was a discussion a while back about subscribing someone to your own Hotsim to brainfry them.

Would definetly be limited by signal range, would seem like there would be a way to stop it from happening with legal cutouts, but illegal wireless black IC weapon interesting idea.

I honestly don't know, man. I think the end of the thread culminated with the concept that in order to actually do this to a remotely tech-savvy opponent, you'd have to get into a grapple with them to use their skinlink, do some hacking to /force/ them onto /your/ hotsim, and send the code through your commlink onto their brain.

I honestly don't know. But the idea is that it's possible to burn out somebody's brain, even if they're not using a hotsim module. It's just hard. To the point where you might as well just shoot the bastard.

Are we missing the fact that you need trodes connected to the sim module and the person? Even an implanted sim-module has to have the hardware modified to go "hot".

While deckers hacking someones brain until blood comes out his ears is fun and definetley something I want in my game, the way to reach this pretty straight forward effect is at the moment so involved, slow and saddled with side effects that its usually way faster and easier to just shoot you target in the face.

The biggest peeve is that by forcing someone into hot sim you usually have accomplished the goal of taking him out of the immediate action, due to the RAS cutout. Plus there's no easy way to model spell defense onto EW since one is a free action while the other eats all your actions for as long as you want to keep it up, while still not guaranteeing you to be even involved at the time of the attack.

i was with you up until you turned the sim module into a Buck Rogers raygun. i don't like it from a game balance perspective because there is no limiting factor. a mage can only cast so many spells before he collapses in exhaustion. a decker, however, could hijack a radio tower and transmit death rays across an entire city.

...and that person would need a datajack or trodes now wouldn't they?

Cheers,

Max

I think the thing you're missing is that a (Hot) Sim Module is a device that purposely allows the higher-grade signals to come through. They're like the opposite of a breaker switch.

You can take your Sim Module and throw it out the window and still use your Black Hammer for the same net effect. Sim Modules have zero impact on the signals you send out OR receive (and I don't give a fuck what loophole in the rules might say othwerwise, including it being an external device on a commlink). Those signals are constantly flying around. The Sim Module just allows them to zap into -your- brain, and -your- brain alone.

Any and all legal devices other than a Sim Module is automatically set to tone down those signals to legal levels. It doesn't even have to be said; that's the entire point of a Sim Module. *You* can tell your DNI to ignore those signals, but the actual devices used to transmit and receive the data from the Matrix (ie, Commlink) require a Sim Module to actually get the signals.

If all it took were boosted signals, you wouldn't need a Sim Module to use hot VR to begin with.

Something with Hot Sim shouldn't run in Hot Sim without a DNI being involved.

sorry, lotsa people posted before my elderly crippled fingers ended the post.
I wanted to point out that the person receiving frank's death ray should have some kind of receiving hardware, that is: trodes or a datajack and also those have to be wireless enabled and/or spoofed to comply. -but the latter is the easiest- why worrying hacking people's cybereyes if you can just brainfry them instead?

Complementarily: Does a person with a Vehicle control Rig qualify?

Cheers,

Max

The trodes in the basic book are low dignal for security reasons (although this ironically means that you can jam trodes very easily). But they don't have to be. You could have a higher signal trode setup that would reach people's brains from farther away.

I'm a little confused... I can't find anything about a "wireless trode", so I assume your making the assumption that because trodes transmit through the skin without needing surgery, you can simply blast a person's head with the same signal, just much stronger, and replicate the exact effects of them wearing a trode?

That just seems a little unlikely to me. I can see grabbing BTL-watching Aunt May's commlink, forcing it hot, and then blasting her, but I'm just not grokking the ability to take an off-the-grid person, remotely throw them into an ASIST connection, and jack around with their brain chemistry. I may just need some time to get used to it, but going from "specially-designed headbands" that sit on your scalp and send low-powered transmissions a few milimeters to specific parts of the brain, to a death ray that sends medium-powered transmissions to the whole skull from a point source, and depends on the brain to "figure it out", just seems wrong.

But then, nanopaste trodes never made sense to me, either, unless you had to smear them in specific spots on your head, and they formed a skinlink first and configured themselves to know which parts would transmit signals in which way depending on their location on the head.

Forming an ASIST connection isn't easy. That's why for decades, the only serious option was to have a jack hardwired into your brain.

Now, that said, your death ray could just be THE answer for detecting or murdering TMs, who *do* have the equivalent of a commlink, hot sim, and trodes "implanted" inside their brains. Don't tell Clockwork.

EDIT: Waaaaaait... BWHAHAHHAHAHAH! This means that TMs can kill anybody, at any time, anywhere! Just hack a local repeater node, send out the Death Signal, and kill anybody within range! Clockwork was right!

And this is why I just don't buy it. There has to be some complicated reason (involving laws of physics, not laws of man or security measures) why you can't remotely induce ASIST, or there would have been "matrix bombings" as soon as the wireless matrix was rolled out across the planet and trodes technology was developed.

...just one more reason I prefer "old school" decking.

OK. Jane Wageslave has a standard Renraku Sensi comlink and Renraku Ichi OS . Janie is a good little office drone and lives totally "within the law", only has a standard cold sim module & does most of her "surfing" in AR. The link is in standby mode to receive messages to her voicemail. She also has no devices in her flat that have hotsim capability (such as a Simsense deck).

She is currently at the autocook warming up a soy kidney pie.

She has no trodes on or other wireless devices active save the telly (wait, that is on fibreoptic feed) which has the Arsenal - Crystal Palace football match on. (OK I lied about her being totally upstanding, she has a couple quid on Arsenal).

...tell me now, how is a "Matrix Specialist" going to scrozz poor Janie's noodle?

I think I've figured it out.

Everything has a device rating, and thus a Signal, Response, Firewall, ect...

Including trodenet.

Trode nets give a person electronic interaction without any sort of actual physical connection.

It sends signals to a brain, presumably you, to its 1 signal range. Woopdy.

But what if you Boost the signal? And if the trode is connected to a hotsim? Now everyone in the radius is troded and hotsimmed.

Godsmack to the dome.

I'm pretty sure I agree with Big D et al. on this one. Trode nets are delicate pieces of hardware that transmit to an even more sensitive brain. Soaking everyone around you with Trode Net rays would be useless - the signals wouldn't match up right to the right centers of the brain. However, if someone already has a wireless datajack, I can't really argue against pointing a hot-sim module at it and going to town.

Sure, its a precise object that points radio noise at the right place, and it has to be positioned at the right places...Yadda yadda.

But thats because its small. What if I wanted a room sized trode net? Saying it wouldn't work?

that actually doesn't mean much. if you've got a raygun that can induce signals in someone's brain at a distance, you don't need precision to kill them. just flip it on full power and they'll collapse in convulsions.

If you're close enough to slap a trodenet on someone, you're close enough to just tomahawk them, so there's no point, but Frank's right though, if someone is wearing a trodenet, they're fair game for blackhammer.

what Frank's talking about is the fact that you don't need to slap a trode net on them. a trode net is basically just a specialized radio transceiver that puts out a very weak signal. if you make the signal stronger, you can send it into peoples' brains even if they don't have a trode net on, from virtually any distance. you can't get precision--you wouldn't be able to make them see things, for instance. but you could slam enough noise into their brain to make their heart explode.

Well, not quite fair game. You hafta scan for the trodes' address, so that they will listen to your signal in the first place, and then you hafta spoof them into thinking you're the user's commlink, so that they'll obey you, and then you can start transmitting your hot sim signals to put them in VR, followed by blackhammer.

That seems a little questionable, but I can follow the logic, and don't see any hard showstoppers--if somebody was wired in to their commlink with a datajack, and you hacked the commlink (which can be done from Nepal), then mugged them with its own hotsim+your blackhammer, it wouldn't be much different, except that in this case you're bypassing their commlink so that you can provide the (dumb) trodes with hotsim VR signals.

But cutting trodes out of the equation, and doing the same thing with a remote radio signal to somebody who's using contacts, or is some kind of luddite, just seems wrong. Again, why haven't terrorists used this to kill everybody in a city? Why can't corps kill everybody in a hallway just by "magically" beaming blackhammer radio waves into the runners' skulls?

EDIT: mfb, I'm countering that trodes ain't just about signal strength, it's about a delicate set of finely balanced transmitters that work in concert to deliver the proper results. You can't replicate that from a point source 50m away. You can jam their other signals, but you can't insert specific code into their brain properly.

By that asinine logic, people should be able to use their cellphones to destroy people on a whim, too. Or to transmit their conversations, music, and everything else directly into their brains. So what if it's just a communication device that has to be used in specific ways? Fuck that. It's ubertech. You can receive phone calls on it, so everyone the world over can be forced to listen to your conversations no matter where they are in the world.

This is the epitome of a stupid argument. "Oh, they don't go into the exact science and details of how these completely imaginary trode nets in a fantasy setting work, so let's just assume it can do anything we want!" If we're doing that, then this electric toothbrush I'm giving my character can destroy the entire planet with one flip of the switch. Afterall, the book never goes into the details about what my toothbrush can or cannot do, so let's just make that leap. Afterall, it vibrates and makes sound, so I can obviously hack into your brain with it!

this from the guy who invented third eyes to get around blindfolds.

Even if the rules could, logically, be extended to do this death-ray thing with Black Hammer, I think some common sense is in order.

See, if you can do it with Black Hammer...A random fluctuation could probably do it, too.

And you thought Chinese toy safety caused an uproar.

Call me a filthy rules-lawyer, but I feel the little fact that the ruels, neither in this nor in any other edition + supplements do not cover or even mention the "invisible, uncounterable death-ray from the matrix" just may be telling us something here.

As an idea, to be used under certain conditions, yeah, getting killed via your SimSense-player sounds like a fun oncept.
As something that EVERYONE can bring down on EVERYBODY, like ALL THE TIME, no matter whether they are even connected to any piece of tech whatsoever... well, I'd like to veto that, please.

see, that's the biggest problem with trying to discuss anything with you, Funk: you put words in peoples' mouths, and then disagree with the words you put in their mouths. and then you insult them for it, and then you ignore their replies. i think i'm gonna go ahead and be done with you for a while.

Admittedly, the rules don't say anything against (and in fact appear to directly allow) things like Ally abuse (broken record here) that we don't actually see in 2070. But it's a heck of a lot easier to sweep those under the rug than something like this--if an average hacker (much less a TM) could zap every brain in range of a given node, I think it would have happened early on in the deployment of the new matrix, causing it to be shut down in favor of a new wired version.

if "that" refers to induction at a distance, it's impossible to say. the rules certainly don't allow it (and therefore provide no reference for what would be possible), and now that i'm paying attention, i don't think the tech allows it either.

The level of 'bad idea' present in the OP of this thread is staggeringly high.

I must admit my reading of the sim module suggests that it would need a direct link to the trodes/dni provider. It's just my interpretation but it easily stops Frank's stupid idea.

Honestly, I can't see this kind of thing being really useful. Not advocating the Krypton Death Ray apparatus that'll let you automagically fry somebody's brain out the back of their head or anything.

I'm seeing the Matrix Hammer on Cold Sim being a pretty damn involved process that involves multiple hackings that are damn near handshake range, or at the very most, line-of-sight range and then basically sending someone an e-baseball bat to the face. Which if it doesn't kill them in one hit, they'll be able to just turn the freaking commlink /off/ or something equally silly.

It's a little flavorful bit of fun that adds just one more horror aspect to the world. One thing that would make technomancers actually /scary/ to other people. A highly convoluted technique to ruin somebody's day that's staggeringly harder to do than casting a powerbolt, in exchange for having, I don't know, three percent of the population being able to do it properly opposed to the sub-one percent of the population.

Let me live in a fantasy world in which you can hack that annoying douchebag who won't stop talking on his cellphone on the subway and make him go boom. At the very least, let me have my fantasy world where you can punch somebody over the internet. It's the fuckin' future, man!

It's called a microwave gun powered by a generator that you could fit in the back of a van maybe with SR tech (but the fumes from the emissions would kill anyone in the van). It's not available in the gear section because there are these devices called "guns" that do the same thing, but minus the van and incredible waste of power (biggest limiting factor is unavailability of batteries which can provide sufficient power).

The important part of trodes/datajacks is the placement of a specific part of the signal at a specific point of the brain so that it can be decoded into a message (i.e. the visual signal goes to the visual cortex, not the auditory). That's why when you walk by telephone lines you hear a buzz rather than a phone conversation, it's not being decoded. Without that decoding, it's a microwave (or ultrasonic wave, or sound wave, etc.) gun.

Now, if the person had trodes on, etc. then ya, you can kill them with Black Hammer because they're receiving matrix signals. Easiest way to get access to those trodes? Hack their commlink. But if you want to bypass their commlink to introduce a hot signal that their commlink has breakers to prevent, then that's electronic warfare to jam their commlink's signal and introduce yours (without eliminating their native signal the 2 signals will conflict with each other resulting in unintelligible static, like trying to get a radio station and having it mixed with mariachi music so that you can't hear either clearly, which might be incapacitating by annoyance when piped directly into the brain but not fatal).