Have any of you even tried it? The brain hacking rules on the naked brain? It's nothing special. It's not really a stretch even. My two hackers haven't run into one yet, nor have they tried to go around and nuke the world. They dont feel the need to. But you know what did happen? They got to shoot some bad guys in that oh special hacker way. Well, one of them did. The other got fried by IC.

So far, two games after the rules have come out, it's been easier to have hackers in the game, and when the hacker had to split off? He was at least able to handle himself.

let me clarify what i mean by a "pure" hacker or decker. to me, a guy with SMGs 4, Unarmed 3, and the rest of his skill points in computer stuff (with maybe a few left over for a social skill or two)--that's a pure hacker. no, he's not helpless in combat; his job involves dangerous situations, so he's prepared for them. he's spent as many BP as he needs to really excel at hacking, and he's rounded out his sheet with some combat stuff. a street sam who puts a few points into his Software or Hacking skill is, to me, a 'pure' street sam--he kicks ass, takes names, and has a hobby.

except that such a mage or street sam is ignoring huge portions of their specialties (magic and combat, respectively), while a decker who focuses solely on decking is not.

besides which, you guys keep changing the issue. the problem isn't that hackers need combat skills to survive, the problem is that a street sam with a minimal investment of skill and a reasonable investment in equipment can, for the most part, take care of his team's hacking needs.

And why is that a problem?

Do you not realize what that actually means? It means that if you want to play a hacker you have the freedom to be more than just that. Because it doesn't take much to do it. Just like it doesn't take much to kill people. Just like it doesn't take much to be good at sneaking around.

In fact, the only role in the game that really takes hardcore dedication to be good at what they do is a magician, and even they have an easy time being more than just a magician.

There's just some bizarre mass hypnosis going on regarding hackers for some reason. That they somehow need to be special and unique and purposely cripple themselves when they don't. Sure, you can make someone who's really good at one particular niche in the game at the exclusion of all else. But that doesn't mean you're not stupid for doing so, nor that the fault doesn't lie entirely in your lap. Example:

Jason the AEthernaut

Qualities (0 BP): Astral Chameleon, Magician, Infirm.
Attributes (275 BP): Body 1, Agility 1, Reaction 1, Strength 1, Charisma 6, Intuition 6, Logic 6, Willpower 6, Edge 2, Essence 6.00, Magic 6
Active Skills (94 BP): Astral Combat 6 (Wards +2), Banishing 4, Etiquette 1 (Astral Entities +2), Navigation 1 (Astral Plane +2), Negotiation 1 (Astral Entities +2), Spellcasting 4, Survival 1 (Astral Plane +2)
Knowledge Skills (0 BP): Arabic N, Astral Plane 6, Magical Groups 1 (Astral Explorer's League 3), Metaplanes 4, Named Spirits 4
Spells (12 BP): Analyze Magic, Astral Clairvoyance, Astral Window, Mystic Armor
Equipment (19 BP): High Lifestyle (3 months), Weapon Focus 2, 5,000 nuyen of miscellaneous goods.

Get him on the astral plane and he's a total bad-ass. But he's not much of a shadowrunner. And who's fault is that? The rules or mine for creating him to be so pathetic in the flesh? (Heck I even cheated on his attribute points.)

Agree. Just because a sam can do some hacking and the hacker can do some shooting doesn't negate either role.

And a lot of you keep implying that
- players that choose to be primarily a street sam want to hack
- players that choose to be primarily a hacker want to kill everyone in sight.

It's so integral to so many people's arguments, and I don't buy it one bit.

I think a lot of discussion here has devolved to "in theory, under these precise conditions that may potentially one day exist, the hacker is useless, and I'm going to completely ignore anything that shows that they aren't".

Doc, for god's sake, read what i'm saying. i'm going to put it in all caps because we've been going at this for almost a full page and you're still arguing the wrong point: I DON'T CARE IF HACKERS NEED TO HAVE COMBAT SKILLS. THAT IS NOT THE ISSUE I AM TRYING TO POINT OUT. i'm not trying to piss you off, but jesus christ, read.

the issue i am trying to point out is that hacking is so easy, and so affordable, that anyone can do it well enough to get by. that's the issue that Gelare is pointing out, and it's part of the issue that's causing FrankTrollman to come up with wildass ideas like brainhacking.

And then Doc Funk will just repeat his statement that shooting is so easy and affordable that anyone can do it well enough to get by. Such is the glorious(ly stupid) circle of life.

Maybe a better direction to go: you have demonstrated that there is at least one dedicated mage build that is ineffectual. Is there at least one dedicated hacker build that is not ineffectual?

I don't know the answer, but I think that's the disconnect here.

~J

At this point in shadowrun I can't imagine building a character who's a "dedicated" hacker OR samurai. They're both archetypes that can easily afford to take 50 gear bp at chargen and throw money at weaknesses until they're no longer a problem. Were I not always playing Awakened characters I'd probably just grab Wired 2, a stick and shock filled Hammerli, an Agent program and a small army of Steel Lynx for back up and probably end up ruining everyone's night.

because he wasted all those points he put into being a badass hacker, since most of the time, the computer hobbyist street sam can do just as good a job.

@Doc: Since you asked, I'll clarify my position. Up front I want to say that when I say I see a problem with the system, I mean I see a problem with it in the context of the kind of game I want to play. The fact that my statements are supported by a long tradition of hackers being valuable members of a shadowrunning team is nice, but really, it's a game - do whatever. Also, I have different reasons for liking Frank's rules than Frank has for liking Frank's rules. Now, to define some terms:

Dedicated hacker: A dedicated hacker is a character who has spent the significant majority of his character resources on hacking-related equipment and skills. This means someone with a tricked out commlink, ranks in all the electronics related skills, high mental stats, etc. A dedicated hacker should have some ranks in Perception, Etiquette, and Pistols, because they're very useful skills for all shadowrunners. But shooting people in the face is not what he does, and it's not what he should be expected to do. What he should be expected to do is hack. What exactly this word, "hack", should encompass, is the subject of this thread, and is therefore not defined here. It may potentially include brain hacking and black hammering. As I will show a few paragraphs down, I think this is desirable.

Dedicated mage: A dedicated mage is a character who has spent the significant majority of his character resources on magic-related equipment and skills. This means someone with some foci, some bound spirits, ranks in the appropriate magic skills, high drain and magic stats, etc. A dedicated mage should have some ranks in Perception, Etiquette, and Pistols, because they're very useful skills for all shadowrunners. But shooting in the face is not what he does. What he does is use magic for purposes of both investigation (astral recon, detection spells) and killing people (spirits, manabolts).

Now, anyone can pick up a gun and shoot people, just like anyone can pick up a commlink and view an AR feed. But it is my opinion (and if you're looking to argue against me, this is probably a good place to start) that just like a mage doesn't have to resort to pistols or to spirits possessing drones to kill someone, neither should a hacker have to resort to pistols or commanding drones to kill someone. A mage, with nothing more than what is normally found on his person, can kill people all day long with low-force manaballs. A hacker, with nothing more than the commlink and related equipment normally found on his person, should be able to kill people by black hammering their brains. Mages and hackers are equally valuable to the story and setting of Shadowrun. They should therefore have comparable - not equal, mind you, but comparable - options in combat. The informational potential of the Matrix is typically higher than that of the astral, so it's okay in my mind that while the mage can go wild and blow stuff up in the real world, the hacker is more limited to killing people one at a time. But a hacker without an army of drones to back him up should not have to resort to as crude a method of killing people as the pistol, when a mage doesn't have to.

To address one of your points, Doc, if a street samurai, who spent most of his resources on becoming an android and learning to kill people painfully, can buy himself a commlink, load up a few programs, and call himself a full-fledged hacker, that is a problem. Because this means that hackers as an independent branch of character don't exist, whereas sammies and mages do. You might be okay with this, but I'm really not. I hope that clears some stuff up.

We need a new trid show:

PIMP MY COMM

Holy crap. When are we going to get access to the controls back? Because honestly it's getting harder and harder to politely abstain from rising to the bait of the trolling by eidolon and Doctor Funkenstein on this thread. It would be better for everyone if I was able to put both of them on ignore. As is I have to scroll past their posts manually, and that always inadvertently involves reading some of the face-palm worthy, offensive, deliberate off-topicness.

Kagetenshi: Incredulity on your part frankly does not concern me. I understand that you do not, and will not play SR4. So your opinion on any particular discussion of SR4 house rules is academic at best. SR4, among other things, has a wireless Matrix declared as an integral component of it. And I know you don't like that. So when you express any negative reaction towards a suggestion designed to salvage the Wireless Matrix from a playability or Detente standpoint - that carries substantially less weight than the reactions of any random SR4 newbie who actually plays. Even though I value your opinion on other matters, I simply don't care what you think on this particlar issue.

---

Shadowrun's Matrix rles have a number of minor problems. Fault Sprites don't really exist because they exist only for Matrix Combat bt they can't see and therefore can't fight; Technomancers cost way too much for what they can do; the rules talk about defaulting but also use non-standard dice pools so noone knows what defaulting even means; and so on and so on. But those are all actually something that a GM can just handwave away in any of a number of ways and have the game continue unabated.

But it has three glaring weaknesses which are endemic and structural:

Script Kiddy Your personal investment in your own skills and attributes is, i the Matrix, completely meaningless in the face of having more and better eqipment. Not overshadowed in the way that being a badass with a pistol is sometimes worse than being mediocre with a machine gun - but a complete negation of your entire character investiture as your character.

Agent Smith Equipment can not only purchase you a better dice pool, it can purchase extra actions. In fact, it can produce functionally limitless actions with the expenditure of more money. Indeed, the player characters themselves have the amount they matter approach zero as the amount of money in play by the corporations approaches the million yen mark. Yes, if NeoNET has in total spent a million yen on IC the player characters vanish into monadial irrelvence from a statistical standpoint.

Defender Opt Out Right now, every part of the Matrix can only affect you if you choose to allow it to. That means that player characters never get damaged by Black IC, and they never get hacked. And the entire rest of the world can operate in exactly the same way.

Aa far as I know, Unwired will not address those three points at all. And people like Eidolon keep trolling this thread to remind us that if you just don't care about versamilitude you can move on with the game and just accept that it doesn't make sense and still have fun. I'm happy for you I suppose, but honestly.

I've seen some people suggest that a method to handle Defender Opt Out is to punish people outside the Matrix for opting out or rewarding them outside the Matrix for opting in. These would potentially work, but despite the length and breadth of this thread noone seems to have actally gone ahead and implemented such a strategy.

-Frank

Perhaps because one can't (and maybe shouldn't?) really do that with rules and dice, Frank. It's about fluff.

Personally, I'm looking at this and shaking my head.

Why?

I think the view of the hacker's utility in tactical situations (when the shooty person is shooting and the magicky person is shooting lightning bolts from their fingertips) is ignored because people are looking at hackers completely the wrong way.

In SR1-3, they were the "computer people".

In SR4, they're not just "computer people". They're not even really "tech people".

They're "info people".

Hackers may not be able to Kill You Dead quite as flashily as the others, but they do something just as valuable:

Provide information.

Outside of combat, they do legwork. In combat? They're your very own AWACS, intel shop, and EW guy.

They don't need brainhacking; they have an entirely different, perhaps more subtle, role to play in combat.

that's the thing, i'm not talking about real technology. i'm talking about SR technology. SR's technology does not allow this, by any stretch of the imagination. you can change that... but it's a really, really big change. it would have far greater ramifications on the world than just the ability for hackers to raygun people at random. and there are huge issues related to how the technology works. as i've pointed out before, unless there's some kind of two-way communication necessary to hack a naked brain--and note that such two-way communication is impossible by almost any reasonable fictional standard--it's easy for a lone hacker to wipe out huge swaths of the planet. hacking naked brains is some heavy shit, and i think people are jumping into it without looking at what it really means.

Then I have no idea what your concern is as, since you can't distinguish between a dedicated hacker and a hobbyist hacker beyond labeling them as such, there really isn't a difference between them beyond how crummy you build them.

I again point back at my lousy astral mage. He's a dedicated astral explorer, yet any "hobbyist mage" who merely dabbles on the astral can be nearly as good as he is. Does that mean that the entirity of the world is collapsing around him because all that work (not really) I went into finding everything remotely relating to the astral plane in the books didn't give me a significant edge? And instead merely made me a crappy character because I did this thing called overspecializing?

And in both cases, while the advantage is only slight it is still an advantage. If my crummy astral mage had to duel a typical starting mage with Astral Combat, he'd likely win. Just like your dedicated hacker would likely beat the crap out of the hobbyist hacker.

That said, all the fluff in the world is moot since the Second Crash. The Matrix has completely changed, a hacker's roll in a shadowrun group has completely changed, and metagamingly (is that even a word), even the rules for playing a hacker have completely changed. Even the defacto hangout for shadowrunning hackers has changed. Now -- both in-game and out -- you don't have to be a dedicated hacker. As everyone has pointed out in one way or another, it's even a bad idea to overspecialize compared to what you can do by being more rational about everything.

And you know what? That was obviously an intentional design choice for SR4. One of the biggest complaints previously was that hackers didn't have anything else to do except be off on their own. Now that they don't have to, people are bitching even louder and coming up with stupid things like this whole brain hacking garbage. It's crazy.