So I'm unhappy with Unwired. I didn't want to be, but I am. Severely. The Matrix rules presented in the core book were severely jacked up on several levels, and while I sincerely hoped that these core problems would be addressed in Unwired, they were not. Agent Smith, Drop Out, and Hackastack are not only still present at the conclusion of the book, they are that much worse because at the end of the day things that were at least extremely vague and arguable in the original BBB are now completely clear in addition to being broken.

The Matrix Topology and Security sections are most to blame, they paint a picture of adversarial computing which while not necessarily unrealistic, is completely at odds with anything remotely playable. Attackers can increase their computational army arbitrarily, stopping only when they reach the limits of personal satisfaction or funding. Defenders can simply choose to arrange their computational architecture in a manner that their data stores are unhackable without social engineering or a distinct personal failure on the part of the data guardians. This is a state of affairs that is highly analogous to current computational affairs, but it is not a state of affairs which is in any way conducive to having hacker characters who mean anything at all. Worse, the system calls for people to make dozens or hundreds of die rolls on a continuous basis to actually play out anything. The Matrix Perception rules alone would take so long to resolve as to grind any actual game to a complete stand still. Actually playing the rules as written in their entirety is likely impossible - a state of affairs which is all too reasonable considering that at least two of the primary authors have separately confided that they never read the completed manuscript.

I have reservations ranging from minor to severe with every chapter, but rather than belabor every minor point of contention I am going to get right to the point: Unwired is not what I hoped for and I don't know how much of it I can salvage. I suspect the answer is "some of the flavor text." And rather than simply harp on every minor detail that I don't like I am going to expand upon what I already have. I am going to make a second generation of my own Matrix house rules. Probably the completed version will be about twice the length and have a lot more examples. And I'm taking requests as to what people want it to include.

Already on the counter: essentially unbreakable encryption. Yes, I think I've figured out a way to include "realistic" encryption and still have on the fly hacking work. It's complicated, I'll draw you a diagram. If people want me to cover other things, I'm willing to listen.

-Frank

Frank's unhappy about the Matrix rules? in Shadowrun? Get out of town!

I haven't read your house rules, so I don't know if it's adressed (probably to some degree), but I find Hacking to often be an all-or-nothing affair. Either the Hacker is so superior to the invaded system that he can do what he wants, or the system detects him and he's fucked.

While not a specific request, I'd like solutions that allow a fair middle ground - partial success. This can of course be done with the current rules, but you sort of have to extrapolate here and there and be a bit imaginative. I would certainly like a system where partial success is built-in.

But, dear chap, there's always the dilemma of realism vs playability.

I thought your house rules were very good...
...But still nothing I would use, because I find the very nature of matrixwork to be a sad little game of dungeoncrawl and magic items [even now, 20 years on and almost nothing has changed] and that's not how I want things to be, now how I imagine the internet of the future to be, and not the focus of games I Ref.

But that's me >shrug<

As always, I'll be interested in your houserules.

Hmmm...
...What do you mean by partial success ??

I was reading a set of rules where your degree of success limits the resources available once in a network.

I'd actually like more exploration of Resonance and Dissonance and Technomancer paragons + streams. Right now it seems Resonance and Dissonance just come off like rebranded versions of Good vs Evil. Some of the paragons sound like overlaps and exist as little more than little blurbs without much else to expand off of. Given that these paragons are not magical/cultural archetypes with which real world players may be intuitively familiar with and thus able to characterize or emulate by looking at history, fantasy, or real cultures, they could do with some more fleshing out without turning them into just copycat mentor spirits.

I'm generally happy with the matrix rules, being that they are very similar to the house rules I've been using. I'm not quite as good at systems analysis as you, however, and I would really like to hear your point by point belaboring sometime.

As for requests, please eliminate the difference between AI and Free sprites. It's a pointless distinction

On the subject of Agent Smith


As for the rest, there are indeed still many problems, but I believe most can be solved by including some of the Optional Rules / Tweaking the Rules.

I will of course look at your rules set once it is completed, and the one thing I would strongly suggest modifying from your original would be the 'Brain Hacking' - most notably the concept of Virgin Brains.

Your matrix rules were a bit far out there for my taste, but they also more or less worked, which is far more than can be said for the core rules, which just less worked. Encryption, tracing, copy protection, program degradation (which I'm hoping will be a one-liner that tacks a few hundred or thousand nuyen onto your lifestyle cost) would all be nice, but really I'd like some way to spice up matrix combat. Right now matrix combat is Attack program vs. Armor program, repeat until dead, with some minor variation in damage type (icon, stun, physical) between Attack, Blackout, and Black Hammer, but really, functionally identical. If you can think of a way to make matrix combat more interesting, I'd really love to hear it.

Agreed. Very sad that they don't have the combat maneuvers like they did in SR3.

Disarm, Nuke, Shield - there are a few nice options available now that are not the same. I do agree it could use a bit more variety, but it is not bad.

I thought it would be nice to apply some damage codes and form some different attack programs. Make it more like the firearms of the matrix? I feel it would at least make matrix combat more interesting. Data bombs don't just have rating, but maybe could kind of work like explosives on the table version of the game. It might spice up the matrix as long as it adds variation. Give hackers nausia with the "fantastic light" R4 program where the rating can add to its base damage code and add nausea to the hacker if successful in the same way neurostun grenades would work in a sense. Programs can take damage and need to get repaired or in a sense kinda "de-fragmented" for a cost? Work in the armorer type angle so a hacker has to maintain and take care of the agent/programs he uses.

Maybe it can make matrix combat at the same time more dangerous, but more interesting. A node can look like anything, and scanning becomes a form of perception. Maybe the berries on the tree in the fairytale node that the Johnson build for his version of fun is actually a remote triggered databomb, which could act like a grenade. Scale down the price of some of the more powerful programs, make them one shot usage with a built in delete command (so companies will make you buy multiple data bombs.)

I would like to see something more like this instead of the bland landia matrix fighting going on now.

What I want to know is if a Techonomancer can make a "Complex Form" (AKA a program) for a smartlink why can't a hacker? Why do you need a Smartlink cyber system when you can just code one for your commlink? If anyone says: "They're Technomancers... they can do this because <insert some good reason>" then my reply is that a Hacker can do the same thing. The reason I say this: a Complex Form is a program not a Sprite.

At first I was iffy on this, but it makes sense that they are treated differently. AI were created by man, while Free sprites are born out of the matrix itself. The AI are easier explained then the Free Sprites, once you start examining their make up.




I don't see any reason a hacker couldn't. It's a rating 1 program, he can get hacking it'll take about a month (maybe less if your GM will divide the month by number of hits). He'll still need the Image Link eye ware for it to be any use, and the modifications done to his gun, so he'll save 475 if he spends the time. Technomancer still needs a smartlinked gun, but doesn't need the image link since they can view AR naturally.

Sorry, no can do. At the end of the day, for wireless hacking to make sense you have to accept one of two conditions:

1. Direct hardware manipulation from across the room.
   or
2. A complete failure of data encryption and a basic limitation of fiberoptic cable as a data transfer medium that isfor some reason not shared by wireless.

If either of these two conditions are not met, then people will simply make their systems unhackable by any of a number of architectural means (you can enjoy yourself in Unwired by slaving your sat uplink to your comlink, connecting them with a cable, turning the wireless off on the comlink master and then laughing like a lunatic according to page 55 - all wireless attempts at exploit have to go through the comlink which they automatically fail at, and any spoof attempts also automatically fail because there's no wireless communication to listen to so you can't have perceived the Access ID of the Master and the cheese stands alone). Furthermore, the human brain is hardware in the 2070s, full stop.

But seriously, have you read the first chapters of Unwired? People can direct neural interface themselves with no internal equipment with no prep time to speak of, on the fly, in the middle of crowded streets. And they do, all the time. Those devices create VR so immersive that you can't even notice people walking through the room and stealing your fridge. There's nothing magical about that equipment that makes it only function when you want it to. The "do you want to be completely shut out of the real world's sensory input and thrown into a fantasy world of the chip designer's choosing? [Y/N]" prompt doesn't magically come up for you, it comes up for the dude holding the device. If someone wants to display shit over your sense data, they just can unless some other piece of tech comes in to stop them. That's what the tech actually does, and the fact that the book fetishizes the ability to voluntarily unplug from that data feed when it is the machine and not the man who is clearly master is just one of its many failings.



Sorry, that's not going to happen or matter. The Access ID is generated by the hardware you are using. Every piece of hardware you load an Agent onto is entitled to one Persona and one unique Access ID. And you can load an Agent into that Persona and it uses that Access ID. Unwired Pgs. 48, 51, and 55. So you can copy the same Agent onto multiple comlinks and they all get to act as unique Agents with unique Access IDs so long as you choose to activate the Persona in each of the separate 'links. The Agent Smith Access ID limits only trigger when they are run autonomously, which there is straight no reason to do because you are entitled to a free Persona with every piece of hardware, which you need anyway to keep the programs from maxing out your processor load.

Not of course that this would in any way stop Agent Smith. If he cost an extra 15000¥ per Rating 6 Agent acting you'd still be in the situation where arbitrarily large amounts of computational badassery were yours for the taking for decidedly less than it takes to get yourself a real man of anywhere near the quality. But it doesn't. You seriously just throw down 8000¥ for the response chip and a few ¥s for a short length of fiberoptic cabling and then you copy your Rating 6 Agent Smith onto the new chip and have it run from there. It even gets a brand new set of subscription slots, so you can wire it up to another response chip that you designate as a peripheral and run a second (or third, or fourth) set of programs there. Not only is there no meaningful limit to the number of Agents that you can throw around for under a 100k¥, but there is likewise no meaningful restriction on how many programs you can have running any more. If a starting hacker wanted to make a point and simultaneously load up all the programs in the basic book at Rating 5 with no slowdown (and yes, I am aware that there is no reason to do this other than hacker pelvic thrusting), such a cluster of datachips would cost... 36000¥. That's asswipe money, costs less than than your reaction enhancement. Costs less than the programs themselves. If you're willing to use up a few subscription slots you can do it for even less with straight accessing of distinct peripheral processors.


I'm totally with you. If a Complex Form can emulate the bonus of having the actual hardware of a smartlink system, then the flavor text doesn't match up. If a smartlink system is pure software and does not require genuine hardware, then it shouldn't take up capacity in your cybereyes. Something isn't right there.



I'll see what I can do.

-Frank

Another 10 minute break from editing for some clarifications.

As of Unwired, all autonomous programs aka "constructs" — defined as software that can operate independently of the hardware and can autonomously move from one node to another (incl. agents but also intended to extend to roving IC and even AIs) — possesses its own built-in (software) Access ID (p.110) to allow routing and identification regardless of the hardware it is currently using. Because they are autonomous programs and can change their home node, accessed nodes/accounts always identify constructs by their integral Access ID rather than the Access ID of the hardware they are running on. This software Access ID functions just like a normal hardware Access ID on a commlink, but is embedded in the construct's core code to account for hardware autonomy. It can be altered by patching. (As quoted above the line about spoofing agent access IDs in the second paragraph of the Access ID section on p.110 will be removed in errata).

To the best of my understanding, Hackastack isn't the issue it has been made to be (and never has been) due to the fact that active accounts on nodes (and hence access logs) are always associated to specific (hardware or software-based) Access IDs (spoofed or not). This means that if the original commlink is disconnected when you switch commlinks in Hackastack, the connection to the account/node you were hacking is severed and you need to re-log on (usually a setback). If on the other hand, you leave the original connection on and manage to spoof and replicate the original commlink's Access ID (which may or may not be spoofed) and then try to access the same account, your duplicated Access ID will be flagged (p.101) and both accounts are blocked. In both instances you are"safe," but you're back (almost) to square one.
Note there is no provision in the rules for somehow using the first commlink connection as a "trojan" for a second commlink, since nodes require that the account(s) being used be associated to a hardware or software Access ID.

Drop Out has always been and will remain be an option. As with any strategy it has its advantages and disadvantages.

Synner, it absolutely does not matter what Access ID an agent "has" because as p. 55 demonstrates an Agent that is loaded onto a Persona does not get its own subscription slot, and is thus not itself accessing anything. Even though it can act on the target node, it is not acting with its own account, so it does not use its own Access ID. Page 110 does not dispute this and the limitations you speak of kick in when and if you want the Agent to "act independently of its persona" - which you don't because the Matrix Topology chapter entitles us to more Personas than Agents. So having Agents load themselves onto hardware distant from their Persona is in almost all cases a complete waste of time. For one thing, it subjects you to the ravages of the Access ID limits, which nearly double the monetary cost of throwing an Agent Smith attack with 12 die pools at problems.



In this case Hackastack is a severe problem because you can declare a new Access ID for every single piece of hardware you have. The fact that you can at any time (even before you begin to hack) Spoof one or more of the links in your Hackastack into having the same Access ID and tagging out for your primary certainly exacerbates the problem, but isn't nearly a central theme here.

The Hackastack is at its core simply circumventing the limits of Matrix by giving yourself a large number of processors and imitating the benefits of being a large number of users. Unwired made that a reality the likes of which we never would have imagined out of the confusion that was the basic book. Seriously, the hackastack can now expand the number of programs you can run simultaneously without limit. The hackastack can log run around and do things on your behalf with the power of Agents, heck with the power of one Agent. The Hackastack drives Agent Smith. Agent Smith would not be possible without it.



This is the heart of the matter; and why I don't believe that any amount of errata you can levy at this book will make it a non-broken product.

-Frank

Synner, I would like to know why Technomancers can make a program Complex Form that allows them to access a Smartgun. I would like to know why a normal character (or a Mage who is willing to take the Essence hit) who has a cyber commlink (plus had a Hacker make a Rating 1 Smartlink program) and cybereyes couldn't just run a program on his 'Link to get the benefits of a Smartgun without the Smartgun cyberware.

Heck I can almost seeing that program be integral to TacNet Software. Buy a Rating 2 TacNet package and get a free Smartlink Software that runs better than the Smartlink cyberware.

I never really expected you to be happy with that book Frank. I am also quite sure you are reading it and interpreting it in the worst possible way as you already have a parallel system you want to push. It is allright to me and If you are helping some people with your Matrix rules, fine. I rather use what is in the books and fix whatever I believe it's grounds for abuse. It is simpler to me, and I like the flavor text better.

Plus, and I say this while not personally involved in the issue; when someone confides me anything I usually do not post what they said on Internet forums.

So, no requests from me, and good luck with your endeavour anyway.

Cheers

Max

Confide was perhaps the wrong word, these were statements made on this board by the people in question. So no special magic betrayal on my part.

In other news: I seriously would have preferred to have liked Unwired, and seriously suspended work on my own Matrix projects for 8 months hoping that Unwired would address the problems I wanted addressed. And it didn't, so now I'm going to work on my Matrix project again.

-Frank

Though I only know Frank mainly through these boards, I can say, having had a couple of big clashes with him myself, that whilst I can imagine there are people it is more pleasant to be corrected by, I don't think there are many people better qualified to do it. At least on the subject of game systems, anyway. I can honestly say, despite seeing him in some extremely heated threads, that I've never found any real trace of bias. I'm not done with my own reading of Unwired yet, so I've made few comments on it. But my feeling at this point is that it would have been good to have Frank review the manuscript as soon as they had an initial draft.

Admittedly it would probably have ruffled a few feathers.

I also would prefer to work with the existing rules, but I'll be watching this alternative system to see what comes of it.

Regards,

Khadim.

@knasser:

So you say it is a matter of style more than substance? Maybe. I can concede that. I do think it is useful to find loopholes and exploits in the existing rules, providing material for errata and such. I do believe Frank is very good at it and have contributed with his -somehow feather ruffling- rants (bloodzilla fix and all) What I also said is that I feel sometimes he tries too hard.

@Frank: and, Frank, please consider I have been posting to you directly instead of using third person, It is difficult to do both on the Internet. I do not mean to show disrespect.

Cheers,

Max

I just want to say that I totally disagree with the quoted portion of your post. I'll admit that Frank is good at dissecting game mechanics, but I personally don't like many of his solutions. The back-and-forth that would have resulted from your idea would have delayed Unwired's release considerably, and we already get criticism for delays in release dates.

Second, Frank was a freelancer for a short period of time. That doesn't get you editorial review of drafts. I've been a freelancer for Shadowrun for eight years--longer than most--and I don't get any special editorial review of drafts. Nor do I expect it. Sometimes I'll ask Peter (Synner) if I can read a draft and he'll send it to me, and then I'll offer my feedback and step aside, because it's not my project and I'm not the line designer. Freelancers don't get any special veto on designer decisions, no matter how long we've been involved with the game. I argued strongly against technomancers being in SR4, and you all know how that worked out.

Third, I don't know if you've ever worked with Frank, but I have. I've worked with over two dozen different freelancers in my time with Shadowrun, and I think Frank has to be the most difficult one I've ever worked with. That can be a badge of honor when you're the outspoken critic on a forum (I know, being a sometimes antagonistic freelancer myself), but when you're working in a collaborative environment like RPG writing, it's not desirable. It slows down the production and frustrates the other writers.

So I'm not sure where this over-inflated sense of significance originates, but it's annoying. I'll give Frank credit where it's due, he's very good at pushing the limits of the mechanics and finding the spots where they can be broken. But if you can't work with someone, it doesn't much matter, unfortunately.

I'll agree with you on some of that demonseed, there is absolutely no reason that someone who is not part of the team and is not a signatory to the NDAs which accompany the project should be given a draft before printing.

I will say that Unwired should have been delayed as long as it took to get the people actually working on the project to read the whole thing and wargame out the real effects of what they wrote. I don't think that I should have been entitled to any special reading, and frankly wouldn't have had the time for it this last year anyway.

But I am more than slightly nonplussed that the people you actually had working on this project went to release with what appears to be a very shaky grasp of what they actually did - and even more nonplussed at the effects of some of the work that they came out with.

-Frank

Demonseed Elite - I like your work enormously. And I can well imagine that a comment like mine is annoying. To answer your question, no I have never worked with Frank but I'm a quick study. I can imagine (no offense to any thread starters present) that he is a real pain. But I wasn't suggesting that anyone should have to get approval from him from their work (definitely not)! Merely that "Trial by Frank" is a powerful way to iron out any kinks. Judgement as always, resides with the developers, but outside feedback is useful.

That said, I still haven't completed my reading of Unwired properly, so whilst there are things in there that I'm unsure about, I'm not making any real comments on the book myself yet and I certainly read Synnner's or your responses to people's comments with great interest.

I wasn't meaning to denigrate anyone who has worked on Unwired. Apologies for any unintentional sleight.

Regards,

Khadim.

Maybe a little too powerful... Like using a sandblaster to clean yourself. You the dirt off, but what's left over at the end?

Technically, you can. You just need an AI with Emulate and Spawn.

That means it can thread like a Technomancer and hand out the results as Programs.

How weird...
...My name is also Peter, and my nom de plume is also Synner !!

What's the problem? If your material isn't rigorous enough to stand up to cross examination you should clear it and start over with something with a firmer foundation. Now, whoever you have working on your project should be strong enough in their subjects that they can do it themselves, so you shouldn't need to bring an outside eye in. But if you built your house of straw you should expect the wolf to blow it down.

In fact, the wolf is doing you a favor.

-Frank

Nope, a Complex Form is just a program. If Unwired said that you need a Sprite to act as the Smartlink interpreter then I would be all for it, but Unwired said that a Technomancer only needs a Rating 1 Complex Form to use a smartlinked gun... something ANY idiot hacker can cobble together. Heck with Software 1 and Logic 5, my cybered Chaos Magician can code the program needed to use the Smartlink without too many problems*... my Chaos MAGE. That is crazy, pure and simple.


* = Since this is an "autosoft" (I think), I would need 2 hits and six months to code the Smartlink program.

From your post, I'm going to assume that the reference you are calling on p.55 are the Subscription rules and the relevant table which says that an agent loaded onto a persona does not count towards the subscriptions (and that's all it doesn't count towards.) This would indeed allow an agent (or more) to operate out of your commlink/persona on the same account you possess linked to whatever access ID was provided. It also means that each agent and its program load counts towards your commlink's System and Response limitations. The rules on p.110 are indeed intended to only reflect agents acting autonomously of a persona (even if under a personas direct control).

The Matrix Topology chapter dictates that you can only ever run one persona per commlink, and that nexi can handle more that but they only allow one account per access ID (meaning one per persona/commlink) so I'm not entirely sure (not uncommon in your feedback) what you mean by your statement above. What I'mdeducing that the tactic you are suggesting is that a hacker buy a dozen commlinks (and OSes unless he wants to crack them) and load a dozen agents onto those persona he can use then without the access ID limitation since it'll be the commlink access ID associated with the persona that is logged and you could theoretically have a dozen identical agents behind that. By the rules this seems like a relatively a feasible scenario.

One point strikes me as important in this scenario: a persona is simply a user interface for the OS. If there's no active user any loaded agents will be acting autonomously (ie. the commlink/persona may even be active and sitting in its home commlink node). So as soon as the agent loaded tries to log on to another node, it's the agent logging on and offering its access ID rather than the persona - the agent cannot initiate actions on behalf of the persona as the persona is a user interface. The only way around this is for the hacker to have multiple personas running simultaneously and effectively perform multiple separate hacks with the various personas to acquire separate accounts (possibly over various nodes if chokepoints are used) and then once inside let their agent loads loose. IIRC simultaneous use of multiple persona isn't forbidden by the rules, but at the very least the multitasking required should inflict modifiers similar to those for persona multi-presence or physically attacking multiple targets.


Agent Smith is still very much possible, in fact it's the same core principle as a botnet. It was never our intent to erradicate it completely, just to introduce limitations and balance it when used by individuals. For instance regardless of Hackastack, Agent Smith is feasible by simply taking the time to patch dozens of agents.

These limitations come in the form of time, money, programming skills required by a hacker to pull it off and are balanced with the potential benefits. Because of the persona issue I've described above an Agent Smith strategy is at least partially dependent on using agents as autonomous programs, this in turn is limited by the software access ID limitation and program degradation rules. All in all its the difference between full blown ewarfare and a normal hack.

I have some more thoughts on this matter but right now I just don't have the time to get into them.


Errata would imply we think there's anything wrong with Drop Out. We don't.

Could someone point me to a description of "Drop Out?" I'm not sure what that term refers to. I searched, but search terms <4 chars are verboten.

basically, it means that if you don't want to be on the wireless matrix, you can choose not to be accessible from the wireless matrix.

One of the 'game' requirements of the matrix rules should be that the infiltration hacker is both a playable and required archetype. This means
1 The matrix rules should not devolve in to separate 4 hours hacker dungeon crawls
2 The hacker should not be replaceable by an agent or drone
3 The hacker should be required to walk along with the team, not be a guy in a wheelchair in Malaysia
4 There is a reason for the other side to be hackable at all

Right now, the rules seem to be failing on points 2, 3, and 4.
There's little need to have the hacker physically with the party.
A high level agent (that's quite cheap) is almost as capable as a 400 BP hacker for many tasks.
It usually considerably safer and simpler to design your security systems to be immune to hacking at all, so that actually having a hacker is mostly pointless.

The current drop out methods seem to rely on subscription lists, wired connections, wifi blocking paint, jammers, and similar tricks.

Compare to the rules for mages.

As long as there is not much stuff in astral space, there are not mage only dungeon crawls.
You can gain back some of the utility of a mage by having something like a hell-hound along, but the full utility of a mage is hard to replace.
The mage must infiltrate as part of the team.
People who ignore magical related security are screwed.

Couple of points in response:
2) Yes, agents are cheaper and roll some good dice, but they're *stupid.* The more complex a piece of software, the more subject to GIGO they are: they can't react quickly in stressful situations, nor can they interpret ambiguity. Agents are autonomous mostly because they can run on nodes apart from hackers, but if the node they're hacking into is suddenly not what they were instructed to deal with, they will completely lose it. If your hacker is only there to roll dice, great, yeah, replace him with an agent. But roleplaying is interesting (well, to me) because strange situations arise that nobody planned for. So you can't just say "Go here and get me the great paydata," the agent has no idea what paydata is. You'd have to say "get me all the information on the Yakuza stored on this node." And then what if its missing? What if they've replaced references to the Yakuza with references to the Company? That should pretty much ruin an Agent's day, no matter what they're rolling...there's no roll for "divine intention behind purposeful obfuscation." Well, ok, it's Pilot, but it should be against a really tough threshold.

3) Why? I think it depends on the shadowrun team and what they want. If they want a hacker who can infiltrate with them into the wifi-blocked black research lab, then they get someone who isn't a parapalegic. If they know the node is online and staying online, why not go with the Stephen Hawking of hackers? There's plenty of room for both in the world. If its an issue of what's fun to roleplay, then I agree, but there's hardly anything in the rules stopping someone from playing a mobile hacker. Can you as a GM build a world that is totally unhackable no matter what? Sure, and if your story needs an unhackable system, build one. But if the story needs a system that isn't hackable, i.e. they decide they want to hack the Ork with a Golden Tooth and steal the 1500 in the register, why should it be unhackable, just because the rules say it can be?

4) If I want my computer to be unhackable, I can cut power to it and sink it in the Potomac. But it doesn't do me much good as a computer, does it? If Renraku wants to have a lab where researchers can exchange data with each other and their gear wirelessly from anywhere in the building (which is a common expectation in today's RL business world), your system is hackable. Why doesn't everyone use perfect strong encryption? I dunno, probably for the same reason not all web pages are SSL access only. If something is usable, it's abusable. (forgive the malapropism).

Um, that sounds like a rant, sorry. I don't mean to be attacking anyone, but I felt like I needed to put in my 2 cents.

Yeah, I completely agree. 4th Edition Matrix draws the most flak out of the various aspects of the game because it's the most interpretive player environment. Plus, whereas astral space is "loose" enough in description that it merely acts as the magical stage for a run, the Matrix pulls double duty because it must be a reasonable gameplay mechanism, deus ex machina, and at least partially recognizable real world analogue simultaneously.

First off, I wholeheartedly agree with the idea that hackers should be integral and required concepts for a strong team. I've bitched and moaned enough about my feelings that Hackers in SR4 became a hobby class picked up on the side by AR hacking sammies or script kiddies with a bunch of agents. Some things in Augmentation, Arsenal, and now in Unwired have renewed my faith in hackers a bit though, so I'm not quite sure I can agree on the failings you're pointing out.

1. You didn't list it as a failing, but still mentioning it. The whole addition of AR hacking lets hackers tag along with the groups doing their things while not zonked out, though with a lot less IPs than they can manage in VR usually. Even when they jump into VR, things have thankfully dropped to the point where most things a hacker does take place on a single 'network' and can be fairly quickly abstracted with a few rolls rather than the painful bygone days of dungeon crawls. There's still some bits that might take time. Slicing through chokepoints, handling cybercombat if they get jumped by IC or trigger an alert, etc. But since they're all concurrent with meat IP passes (as much as that bugs me), it can just be handled as part of combat potentially at the same time as the team's combat.

2. It may be a mostly fluff reason, but Unwired tried to make it fairly clear that Agent's are only as good as the agent script that they run on. They tend to freeze up with unknown situations or make stupid moves like continuing to attack ineffectively if their Attack program is hit with a Disarm. Now an agent being run by a hacker gets the benefit of the hacker's understanding of the code and how to set up the scripts, but an off the shelf 'hacker agent' or one set up by a script kiddie is probably going to run into situations where it just runs itself into a virtual wall over and over again, but that falls to the GM to come up with those sort of situations and make sure to emphasize them. As to being equivalent of a 400BP hacker. Debatable. A 400 BP hacker is probably going to have 4 IP and a DP of 13-20 (4-7 skill + Specialization 2 + PUSHed 1 + Encephelon 1 or 2 + VR 2 + Prog 5 + Optimize 1 for their most used program). A week out of chargen, they'll have response 6 and the progs go up by 1. I wouldn't call that equivalent necessarily to a DP of 12 (plus a few agent autosoft ratings potentially, though usually can't fit a lot for the payload). DP of 12 is enough to do a couple things well admittedly, but it's nothing compared to the 23 dice my adept hacker throws on exploits. So I don't really see them completely replacing hackers.

3. You mentioned the reasons they have to walk along with the group yourself. Wireless negating paints, faraday cages, wired-only access, scary as hell chokepoints, etc. Same reasons in the old days that they could sometimes drag deckers off their asses to make a physical run with the team. Admittedly, with arsenal is another nice option of a Transys Steed drone wheelchair with a rigger cocoon on it and now with the Covert Ops autosoft so it can even make infiltration rolls. Which leaves the VR hacker able to join up with the team safely while still working in his strongest environment. All in all, I don't really see the failing on this point. I thought they did a good job in SR4 making it so hackers needed to be part of the group not just distant paraplegics with VR skills.

4. This one I can get a bit. With all the options available, it makes it seem like any corp not using them all is wanting to be hacked, but if they were more realistic, nothing would _be_ hackable. Runs into the same problem again that was addressed in previous edition fluff concerning the fact that to make something completely unhackable is to make it completely useless. Something that never communicates with the outside matrix is missing out on all the power and information found there. Something that completely does away with all wireless connection is missing out on the ease of use and productivity improvements possible through that sort of thing. Something that is completely cut off even from wired access and is put in a deep dark room with three hundred irate guards protecting it forces the company to pay for those three hundred irate guards and all that security, not to mention the annoyance of the hour long process of anyone actually needing to get access to such a site. So in the end, most things are trix accessable and thus hackable. More secure still have local wireless that can be hacked. Still more secure probably have fiberoptic lines that can be tapped or they can be gotten to by a good team somehow. The most secure are the most secure for a reason, but even they probably have some way that they could get hacked. So again, I don't really see where the failing in this is if you take into account the grand scheme of things. Admittedly, the other big reason it all comes down to is "cause that's how the GM wants it and so the people can have fun and hackers have something to do."


Sorry for the hellacious spam, but I just don't see things quite as broke as they're made out to be. Conceptually at least. In terms of system, there are still a lot of issues that need to be worked out.

Synner: People can and will carry multiple commlinks. They will turn all of them on with active personas accessed through AR. And they will load powerful Agents in them which are set to take orders from whatever Persona the character is actually using (this uses up a single subscription slot).

This means that your limits on Agents are not limits. It doesn't take time and money. It just takes money. And the money is less than 10 grand - the price of an additional link to run a persona and an Agent.

The rules for clustering and stacking commlinks together are so incredibly generous that there is no reason to not do it. You can "be" dozens or hundreds of users all with their own Personas and their own otherwise identical program sets. And you would be a damn fool to not do this. Unwired was clearly written with the vision of everyone running a single commlink and giving a damn about program limits. But the optimum play strategy is to not do that. For just a couple month's high lifestyle you can cover your body with commlinks and agents, performing tasks as if you were literally a small army of high end hackers rather than a single person. Heck, you can do this with no appreciable Matrix skill, and you will slam dunk someone who bothered to spend 400 BP on making a single 'link hacker be all he can be.

Sombranox:



This doesn't limit hackers in any meaningful way. The Agent Smith cloud is under the control of a person watching in AR, the fact that he gets to act dozens of times every combat round dwarfs any possible shrinkage from the rules which essentially just say "periodically the GM should be a dick to Agent users." There's no real consequence that could possibly have. After all, the only thing that gets any explicit screwing is unsupervised Agents. But that's not even what happens, because unsupervised Agents have a lot of restrictions placed on them. We're talking supervised Agents, each running on their own commlink loaded into their own Persona and under the constant watchful eye of a real person who tells them what to do.

It's just that the rules don't actually require any real hacking skills on the part of the real person minding the store. It can be your little sister, it's really not important.

-Frank

Can you explictly define how AR works, expecially

A) What categories of tests does AR give a bonus too

B) How big is that bonus

None is an acceptable answer, but after the handwave in the books it would be nice to understand how that actually supports operations.

And Synner, before you try to rebut this with the "you only have one brain" discussion from p.91 of Unwired, I'd like to point out that particular argument against the Hackastack does nothing to deter someone who wants to try to use multiple unconnected commlinks with their Datagloves & Image Linked Glasses. Unless we assume that one of the technolgical advances lost in Crash 1.0 was the inner workings of the KVM Switch and how to upgrade it from working with a Keyboard, Video Output, and Mouse to working with more portable technology.

On Hackastack: Reading complaints about this has me wondering if certain GMs have any control over their games at all. "Well the rules still make it possible for me to <fill in the blank>!!!" WTF? Why do you need a rule to prevent every level of ridiculousness that your players can come up with. There's no rule in the book that says my players CAN't show up to a knife fight wielding panther cannons and wearing military armor, but somehow I manage to prevent it anyway.

Take a look at the link in my signature for an alternative view on all the bitching about what RAW does and doesn't do.

Frank, I respect that you do have what I consider some to be some good, alternative ideas to how hacking is run. I also think you end up being a bit nit picky about some RAW issues that I would consider to be pretty minor. For example, thinking about a player attempting to unleash the Agent Smith scenario (or hackastack) that keeps getting bitched about reminds me of the solution a previous GM of mine had for such shenanigans.

GM (when asking about a starting SR2 character): Dave, how many dice do you roll when in melee combat?
Dave: 12
GM (Picks up a large handful of dice, rolls, but doesn't look at the results): Dave's dead. I expect your next guy to be built with a bit more common sense.

...Sorry, can you translate to SR4 for the noobs?

To be a credible melee combatant in SR4, you need at least 16-20 dice. The 12 dice guy is chewed up by devil rats long before Mr. Johnson lays eyes on him .

[edit]
But I should probably stop crapping in Frank's thread.
One thing I'd like out of the matrix rules is for the team's hacker to not have to basically risk everything any time he tries something. So every time he tries to just hack a camera, or something simple, he risks of setting off all the alarms. Such systems basically are heavily in favour of being a gunfight generator, since the hacker can't be relied on the pass every hacking role required. So at some point, you can expect the alarms to get set off, and you'll have to kill everyone.

So only if you are trying for admin access over the whole system or something, risks setting off all the alarms, but doing something much more modest is much more failure tolerant. This way, the players have much more choice about what they want to get vs what they risk to get it. The problem with most hacking systems is that the hacker always risks everything, so he might as well try to win everything.
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Congratulations Crank, I think you managed to combine the Oberoni Fallacy with an explicit endorsement of game destroying ass-hattery. I think that gives you the dubious honor of having just given the worst game advice in the history of mankind.

Anyway, yeah the discussion on page 91 of Hackastack (virtually by name and in-character) may have been intended to limit the procedure, but they don't really do that. All they really do is establish in-character that people can and do use the Hackastack strategy in the world. Slamm-O doesn't like people who hack this way, but that has no actual bearing on how effective it is, which is instead a function of the rules. The rules are that if you set the Hackastack up exactly in the daisy-chain format described, and then run an Agent in each and every link of the chain - then all disadvantages of both Agent Smith and Hackastack go away.

The one-brain-limit is completely meaningless as long as you don't actually need a brain's interaction to accomplish hacking. And with the rules in Unwired you very explicitly don't.

The ideal set-up is to chain together a series of comms that are themselves either Clusters of commlinks or wired to peripherals such that they can each simultaneously run an acceptably large number of programs without slowdown. On each of these chain links you will also put a single Persona and loaded into that Persona you will put a single Agent. And then you will rock out with your cock out.

And this isn't some sort of weird power interaction with poorly written character abilities, this is seriously the way the topology of the Matrix is described as working in and out of character, in flavor and rules text. That's just straight up how the Unwired book tells us that the Matrix is put together. It's the model of computational interaction that the NSA warns us about: everyone pretty much lines up parallel processors until they run out of money or feel like stopping, and the skill, power, and ingenuity of each individual computer or person is virtually meaningless in the face of the gestalt purchasing power of whoever is racking the machines.

And that's terrible news if the computer operator is supposed to be a meaningful and contributing member of the team.

-Frank

Instead of spending months on end working on alternate matrix rules or debating the rules to the point of frustration for both yourself and everyone else. You just say nope agent smith fails. When the twink that just attempted it asks why? Take out a slice of cheese and throw it at him or her.

There is no set of rules on the face of the planet rpg or non-rpg that cant be broken or loop-holed to death. At the end of the day if it is that frustrating and broken just say no...

Repeat after me: GM fiat is not a substitute for solid rules.

To expand, every time you "take control", you introduce another rule into your game. It is a rule that is unwritten, and consequently not available for examination. If you sit down and write it, and spend the time to make it consistent and correct and ensure that it doesn't introduce further issues, good on you—but you've just spent valuable time fixing something that was sold broken. If you don't, your rule is unpredictable (will you remember it next time? And also apply it in precisely the same way?), which has deep consequences even if you never actually have to apply it again, as your players then have to work around it—without even knowing precisely what it is.

Insert a few paragraphs about how people's ideas of "reasonable" varies wildly, and double them if not everyone is on precisely the same page about the tone of game you're in. Note that the problem doesn't get fixed if people are on the same page, it's just not as bad.

~J

And, unfortunately, that is a ridiculous number of d6 to be using - per person.

I thought Vampire, et al was bad enough with 10d10


But then, I made my choice and moved onto something else.

That's as much of an asshole move as the guy running Agent Smith. More so because the GM could have told the guy that it wouldn't stand beforehand.

The rules exist to regulate play, if the GM gets to say "nuh-uh, it doesn't work because I say so" then the players should get the right to say "nuh-uh, I'm not dead because I say so!" The game becomes a childish squabble, or else the game is not a meeting of equals and the GM gets to force the players to do whatever the GM wants. Even if the players then walk in protest of what the GM has started to do, a possible source of enjoyment and an investment of time and energy have been lost - which is an obvious failure of the game. So we accept that rulesets matter and work towards crafting rulesets that emphasize our desired style of play. Nobody can complain about a rule that they knew about beforehand, because they accepted that the rule was fair by choosing to play with those rules.

Yes but what if what you want is really a house of straw and don't want to live in a house of bricks? I'd rather build a solid house of straw (using some kind of mortar to make it wolf-breath proof) than switch to a brick house I don't like.

What I'm saying is that even though your house rules fix a lot of issues, they change the whole feeling of the game. Brain hacking is not a main part of Shadowrun 4's matrix system. It is in your rules. That has a huge impact on the fluff, and completely change the way the game is played.

Seriously?

First of all, a Vampire weapon character can get up to 5 dice from attributes, up to 5 dice from skill, up to 5 dice from the weapon, up to 5 dice from discipline and any of a number of dice from specializations, circumstantial bonuses, and backgrounds. You're lucky if a Vampire swordsman is "only" rolling 20d10.

But second of all, we aren't talking about rolling d10s or adding dice together, we're talking about rolling a handful of cubes and counting hits. You can use very small dice without damaging anything because the dice are cubes and both roll and land very nicely at any size. Since you're counting 5s and 6s rather than adding up the totals on the dice, determination of result is very fast. Indeed, since TNs are static in SR4, resolution speed is actually very fast for each individual test. Rolling 16 SR4 dice is much faster than for example rolling 8d6 and adding the results of each die, and it can be much smaller in your hand than even rolling 8d10s. You can get a block of 36 d6s for less than 8 dollars, so the whole thing ends up as one of the easiest engines to deal with logistically on the planet.



That is a very good point. The direction I am intent upon going with this is not the direction that everyone wants to go. The Brainhacking thing, while I view it as a clear and obvious extension of how hacking works in Shadowrun, is not to everyone's liking. If that's not the way you want to go, you have several options. But one of those options really isn't just shellacking the house of straw and then living a wolf free existence. Honestly, at that point you will be living in a house of shellac, and the fact that there may be straw embedded in the material somewhere is pretty much meaningless.

The foundational difficulty is that a Matrix run is not like an Astral Quest. It's supposedly designed in the world by someone whose actual job it is to make you fail. So while an astral quest is quite likely created in the world to challenge your abilities and your assumptions, Matrix Security is designed by the Big Bad Wolf to blow your house down and eat your piggies. Because the game world posits billions of yen being sunk into pushing the limits of the rules, it is unreasonable to expect that any exploit in the rules won't be taken advantage of. That being said, there are several options that are distinct from the direction I'm going:

• Abandon Pretenses of Realism: Doctor Octopus, the Black Knight, Heat Wave; these are super villains who have no super powers at all. They are literally just dudes who happen to have cool gadgets. Nothing is stopping them from making copies of their gadgets and selling them to corporations or outfitting small armies or whatever. But they don't. They dress up in costumes and rob banks. For, and this is important: No Reason. And that's fine because they live in the world of Superhero Logic. And f you just embrace that, you can have any Matrix architecture you want, and still have players and antagonist security do anything you want them to. As soon as you just move to superheroic logic and the hand-waving principles of epic storytelling, no one's actions have to be justified against the backdrop of what they are nominally capable of doing - whatever it is that people do is just what they do and that's the end of it. You don't have to justify why computer systems are hackable or why people don't use hackastacks - it just happens because people are wearing red spandex and that's the story you want to tell.
  
  And that's a very real possibility, but the cost is that you have to acknowledge that your Matrix system is explicitly less realism driven than for example the Magic System. And if you're trying to play with realistic responses and actions and countermoves for the face, ninja, and magician, the fact that you specifically scrapped all that for the Hacker might ruffle some feathers.
  .
• The Voluntary, Mandatory Brain: Imagine that trodes didn't even exist, and to get yourself a DNI required a fair amount of effort and invasiveness of your part. Also imagine that accomplishing much of anything of note without a DNI is out the window crazy talk. So basically we dump trodes and AR Hacking altogether and we get a system kind of like SR1, where in order to accomplish anything on the internets you need a data jack, but that doing that opens you up to the ravages of Black IC. That's certainly a start, and it clips the Hackastack off without issuing people momhammers. But you'll note that while we haven't made a house of bricks, we certainly haven't made a house of straw - the created landscape is to my mind even less recognizable as the Wireless World described in Unwired than what I'm talking about.

Basically, if you want to live in a world where hackers can't hack into techless people, you have to eliminate the availability of technology that allows techless people to hack. Or you have to accept a world in which Hackers can voluntarily choose to hack in a manner where they cannot be hacked in return, and then you have to come up with a really good reason why corporations and other hacking targets don't do the same.

You can do it. You just can't do it without changing core assumptions. The current core assumptions being contradictory, all things are possible.

-Frank