Hey guys,

I've managed to float around this board for a while, just reading what fellow gamers had to say about Shadowrun. My friends and I have contemplated playing Shadowrun for a long time, daunted by something other than kick down the door. Thankfully, all that has recently changed, and we're currently neck deep in Ghost Cartels, and I can safely say that everybody is enjoying it so far. The only person with an issue is me, the GM.

I'm having difficulty with two main concepts: dealing with a wireless world, and trying to offer challenge for the "lawn-chair" characters.

The first issue is my inability to properly understand the Matrix. I know the rules, but so much is left unsaid. Can the team's hacker really hack into the PAN of the DocWagon Clinic, and gain control of all it's systems, just by getting past it's firewall? Is this sort of stuff a GM call, or are there hard rules for this?

My second issue is my inability to truely with what I call a "lawn-chair" character, or a character who can run with the group despite not actually being there. The two best examples of this are the team's hacker and the team's drone rigger. The hacker is content to sit at home, blowing stuff away with her huge dice pool. Nothing that is in the book can handle her. Couple that with my limited knowledge of the Matrix (see above), and that character comes out as easily the most effective member. The drone rigger is not much different. Although she is technically the driver for the group, she drives a van so decked out that it might as well be a tank. Her "fly" drones are easily more effective than any normal infiltrator, and she can still deal loads of pain with her combat-oriented drones. Obviously, I could stop their antics with some GM blockage, but I want to be fair.

What do I do?

One could do this but this would be halted by a number of things. First off the Docwagon will have very tight and intense Matrix security as befits a major corp. Secondly, there are likely to be a multiple nodes to the server each of which will have it's own redundency and security. Maybe the bit of important data you need is behind the third node which can only be accessed by the second, which can only be accessed by the first unless of course your hacker infiltrate the facility and skinlinks into the node. The way you stop lawn-chair character is the same issue as the node, to hack a node you have to have two way communication with nodes which means your commlink has to be within the signal range of the node and vice versa. Now you can access the node through other node and daisy chain a path but running across that many nodes adds a ton of variables to your connection and nothing fucks over a team when the cab company down the street from the target resets the servers after checking their registers for the night dumping you from the hack and leaving your team stranded. Secondly, if you wanted to help the group in hacking the tacnets, commlinks, drones and the like of the targets you'll need to be relatively close to them, they'll have hidden systems and probably low signals ratings both of which will require you being within the lower of the two signals ratings to hack. Drone Rigging is a little harder but honestly your drone rigger is going to be want to be simmed into things so that his precious drones stand more of a chance of surviving the encounters unscrapped, simming is going to incur some risk for the rigger and again simming across a dozen nodes can cut the rigger off from his precious drone and bam that thing is on it's own. That's the best advice I've got off the top of my head, other dumpshockers might be able to help.

i've got only two games under my belt and have the exact same problems. what i've done is (until we all learn the rules) veto any out of body experiences... jumped in rigging, astral projection, VR hacking. i've toned down the threats there too otherwise it would be unfair. hacking (despite reading the core book, wired, and various noob threads here) is still largely beyond me and my players (all SR4 noobs but two that played back in SR2).

Thanks for the input, it's a huge help. All the help I can get would be appreciated.

Some more relevant information is that the hacker uses the rigger's drones as, I guess you you could call them external nodes. Essentially, she can hack nearby things because she is inhabiting a drone from miles away in her house. Is this legitimate? Would the node line still apply?

Please excuse an old D&D dog for his newbisms!

One of the problems that SR4 has is that the offensive and defensive options are not 'evolved' to deal with each other very well. So reading the hacking rules one way, the hacker can run right over any opposition; reading the same rules another way, the hacker will quickly have teh brain fry; reading them yet another way makes it trivially easy to keep the hacker from doing anything interesting, ever (skinlink, disabled wireless, etc). This is the option that most non-hacker PC runners seem to adopt, simply because they don't want to deal with the rules baggage. However, if the other side uses the same rules constructs, there is very little for the hacker to do. It doesn't help that the rules (even with the addition of Unwired are pretty horribly written).

As for hacking via drones yes; sorta. A common way suggested by the book to prevent hacking from a distance is wireless blocking paint, so that someone wanting to hack into the place would have to be inside the building already. Of course, the idea is that once you are in, you can then use regular wireless inside the building. But it is trivial to establish a matrix connection to the outside world by having a drone with a transmitter on a cable. You leave the transmitter on a cable outside the wireless blocking paint, your drone rolls across the wireless boundary and your wheelchair bound hacker logs in from Madagascar.

Of course, you could have multiple anti-wireless barriers and similar setups; but at this level of complexity and expense it is both simpler and cheaper to simpler wire all of your stuff and make the hackers abilities irrelevant until you get into the computer room... and then your infiltration team just lpugs in the transmitter and Madagascar goes to work.

Knasser's home page should have some useful stuff on his web page, sample matrix sites, what would samurai do, scale comparisons of the metas and whatever else he has come up with.

There are also Frank's Matrix rules which usually come up in any discussion of how to handle hacking these days.

Nah it's cool cat, I came to SR4 from a primarily D&D and Mutants and Masterminds background myself, no worries. We had the same problems in our first run through in Shadowrun, we had a dedicated rigger and a dedicated hacker in the form of a technomancer, all sorts of squirrley things were done by those two, because in Shadowrun one learns the rules they use first and foremost and I as GM as to learn all four sets of rules at one time (the four being IMHO vehicles, meat, matrix, and magic). So I studied what they did very closely and how they went about doing it and found reasonable ways to circumvent them. I wasn't trying to gimp my players, but if it's that easy for a hacker or a rigger to do their thing remotely than what's the point of security?

So first thing first, a hacker went hacking a node assuming they don't have a shit load of time and are in range of the node they are trying to hack (and if they are piggybacking the signal off of a drone you have to keep in mind the subscription rate to the drone, running programs, etc etc and see if all that shit doesn't cause lag cause it probably does). The node will get checks to find the hacker at every attempt and that works on accumulated hits both ways, a highfirewall on the target means that a hacker has to get the firewall's rating in successes on a exploit + hacking test to break in before the computer sees the hacker on a Analyze + firewall test against the hacker's stealth odds aren't necesarilly in the hacker's favor. Now let's say you're hacking a corp that has four nodes each linked together with a firewall at the front. Your hacker is 20 KM away from the target node and can't access the four nodes without breaking into the first one, maybe he has to have adiministrative access to even access some of the node, complicate it as you wish. He's got a signal rating 6 commlink which gives him a signla range of 10k. The node he's hacking is is 20k away, so he's going to need to bounce his signal through two public access nodes to get to he target node, now he'll like be running a shitload of programs, at least stealth, and exploit and probably analyze and maybe an agent or two etc etc. He'll be dragging alot of resources down in both of those nodes not to mention his commlink. Let's say one of those public nodes that he didn't bother to get admin access kicks him off their node, he'll need to reroute likely on the move. This gets more complicated the farther away he is and becomes flat impossible if the node he's wanting to hacking isn't within range of a node he can wire through. The rigger has the same problem, if his drong is 40k away he's going to need a hell of a commlink to not have to bounce it through multiple nodes, which means the hacker can't either. If both of these players are up nice and close to the node in question they dont' have those issues, they can control their own security better and not risk drawing attention or operating at the behest of various admins or other curious parties. Now if your hacker and rigger take the time to hack all the nodes in question, daisy chaining them together however they do and pull it off for their big raid, good for them let them be armchair cowboys they earned it. All it'll take is one passkey that's not on the grid to nullify the hacker's ability to get the group farther in without a B&E guy or a security rigger and hacker to combat the hacker and spoof the rigger's drones (or just blow them up or track him if the rigger is hotsimmed in). Now I'm not 100% sure if all that I have said is canon and I'm not trying to get in a nitty gritty rules argument with various posters but this is how we have been rolling things, there's enough variables and concerns that my hackers and riggers at least stick to the step van parked out front with the satelite dish attached, assuming they don't just break in with the team because they might be needed on site and don't want to try coming in on their own with their fragile bodies and far away Street Sams to back them up. Signal ratings with two way communications, subscription rates, and node security are really important to the questions you're asking about. I'd read those sections carefully and study very closely what your players are doing from night to night and how they're justifying it. Technomancers are a whole 'nother beast with their fucking sprites.

Unfortunatley for me I have players who know just enough about IT ,networks and all the fiddly bits, to be dangerous. One way I can see to get around the long distance caller problem is just hit them with modifiers to response for all the extra variables they have to keep track of or subscribe to, this in turns affects how effective their other programs are.

"Sorry Timmy but since your hacking in from your underground comand bunker (Moms Basement) 20 KM away your gonna be hit with a -2 to your response because of the extra nodes and backup routes that you have accessed to make sure you have complete redundancy and can maintain your connection."

of course if they spend the time setting up the hack in advance and as Thad says above they should get their just rewards but after a couple of attempts either they or the other players will start asking Isnt there an easier way to do this and you can tell them to get their ass in the van

Firstly, tell your players to ignire their IT knowledge. The Matrix != the Internet.

Matrix problems: buy Unwired. Read it a bunch of times. It totally helped me get my head around the Matrix.
Your DocWagon problem can be solved by architecture (like they said above, add loads of nodes in between) or by remembering that secure nodes like that will often have security hackers present and/or will have Firewall and other program ratings higher than 6.

Lawnchairs: Jammers and wifi-inhibiting paint start off here -- even with ECCM programs running, if they're a long way away a high-level jammer will completely ruin them. Similarly, wifi-inhibiting paint means they have to be within the building itself. Or a successful Track program leads to a corporate hit squad turning up at their house...where they don't have a team to defend them.

Plus, of course, their signals might be intercepted by another hacker and listened into.

How big are these massive dice pools you're talking about?

Welcome! If everybody is enjoying the ride, you have no issue as GM...


DocWaggon will likely have a dedicated node for connections to the matrix, behind that will come a chokepoint node that protects the internal nodes. Then you have patrolling IC. Sensitive data might be kept on offline nodes, or nodes that are hard to find if you don´t know what you are looking for. The structure of a DocWaggon matrix network will be more complex than a PAN with only one central node.
But yes, hacking is often a matter of a few simple tests. Do you run Analyse on nodes that are supposed to detect hacking attempts? Doing so changes the probabilities of successful hacking rather massivly.


If it is a problem for you, trace the subscription, attack the hacker and rigger at home. "You notice an active security alert sending four squads to your flat. You have about 5 minutes to get away."

From what you are writing about the hacker, I would assume that you are so far trying to make do with passive security measures? Active security measures are not really optional in SR, less so for nodes that provide public functions. An onsite security hacker randomly checking the subscribed users on a node for fake accounts will limit the time a hacker has to do stuff severely.

How about you post some baseline stats for the hacker, so that we can help you design some challenges?

Despite running with the RAW for quite a while now, I'm sick of getting bogged down with the matrix, scouring the books backwards and forwards while my players twiddle their thumbs. I find that the PCs either can't do anything with their matrix tech, or can obliterate the opposition I've set up for them.

In order to make things simpler, we're going to begin testing Frank's rules startign today. At the very least it means all the rules exist in one place, and there is no time wasted searching through the BBB and Unwired.

I have added a rules summary sheet to my An Introduction into the Matrix Rules thread, at the end of the opening post.

An interesting read Ryu. Depending on how things go today I'll point my players towards it.

Ideally I want a system that is reasonably intuitive and require minimal book-keeping. The book-keeping advice I can readily see, but of course 'intuitive' depends on how one's brain works, so what might be obvious to one user is perplexing to another.

sorry guys but this is just not how a wireless mesh network works. it would be freakin asinine to set up a network with so many potential problems like that - you don't choose which nodes you connect to or through, just like you don't have to spend time worrying about what servers you go through to get from your computer to dumpshock. the entire wireless matrix in shadowrun was designed to be redundant and pervasive - EVERY wireless device is also the backbone on which the matrix operates, and the time it takes to route a signal between nodes, or to reroute a signal should a routing node drop out of the network, should be so nearly instantaneous as to make no impact on response speed.

GM's nerfing the 'trix is one of the most despicable forms of houseruling. cyberpunk is nothing without its societally pervasive consensual hallucination!!

as to lawn-chair characters, any well-designed encounter should preclude their use (for the most part, anyway) - security shouldn't be a stop-gap measure, it should be a nigh-impenetrable wall. thievery, both physical and electronic, is all about access rights - the real deal is about finding that hole, not brute-forcing your way through everything. remember that anything your characters can do, their opposition can probably do better. astral signatures, access ID's, ritual links, they're all dead giveaways to who you are, and the speed at which one can move either electronically or astrally is so great as to make physical distance almost a moot point for anyone who actually cares about stopping you.

the last thing to remember is, YOU ARE THE GM. it's your game, your world, and what you say goes. if you're uncomfortable with the capabilities of the characters, then maybe you neglected to get more involved in character creation, or inform them of what your strengths, weaknesses, and expectations for running a game were. It seems that the majority of GM complaints/problems I see stem from a lack of respect for the cooperation that is necessary for the art of roleplaying.

Oh, but you can do that kind of routing if you want - set up a chain of proxy servers. It will make traces take longer, kick your response in the nuts, and that´s about it. Routing that doesn´t happen via proxy servers functioning as such has no impact on the game, as far as I know.

Aren't hackers limited (I don't have the time to find the specific rules atm) by the node they're connecting from? What I mean, and I probably won't explain it so well, is that if your hacker is sitting in a basement somewhere trying to hit a node well away from their commlink's signal range by accessing yet another node (in this case a drone), then isn't he limited to the signal and something else of that drone's node?

In addition, security hackers are probably going to be looking to clear their airspace of unauthorized drones by hacking them themselves if possible. After all, the drones tend to be a big giveaway that unauthorized intruders are probing or attempting to breach the site that security is watching. This gives them more evidence on the intruders, may allow them more visual on the intruders and if done well they could easily run a trace from the drone's node.

The part of a system connecting it to the worldwide Matrix should be the most secure part of the system. Don't be afraid to break out a Rating 5 or 6 Firewall with a Rating 5 or 6 Analyze program, backed up with one or two Rating 5 or 6 Agents running random sweeps of users and actions (you decide when a roll is called for). The system should be throwing 10-12 dice against the Hacker's Stealth each time they try to break in ("on the fly" anyway). For the Agents, you roll their Pilot + Analyze vs. the Hacker's Hacking + Stealth (BBB p. 217). Since this is an Opposed Test, there's always a chance that the intruding Hacker will roll poorly and fail. The Hacker should have to remain in this "chokepoint" system, while they attempt to hack into the next "layer" which could in turn be another chokepoint. Considering they have to sit in the chokepoint system while they hack the next one should eliminate the possibility of them doing a "probe the target" since they will surely be discovered if they have to sit in there for hours. Also, if they roll a Glitch, then they've tripped an Alert. As soon as the System or an Agent spots them, they've got their Access ID which means eve if they log off right away, they can be traced back to the physical location where they made the hack from. If that happens to be their home: time to pack up and move.

Emphasize to your players that the best way to hack a system is within direct signal range of the target computer, bypassing the chokepoint node(s). This means that the character needs to put their physical butt on the line, and that's what makes the game fun. Any decently secured facility will also use Wireless inhibiting paint or some other system to ensure that the wireless signal of their system doesn't "leak out" very far (if at all) from the walls of their building. This means that the Hacker and the Rigger (with all their drones) must be inside the building. The only alternative is to send in a drone dragging a cable behind it, which might be suspicious to patrolling guards and such.

Changes to the SR4 Matrix were all about getting the Matrix specialist characters back in the party, sneaking into buildings and such right with the Sammie, Adept, and Mage. Your first tool as a GM is to emphasize that this is the weak point in the Matrix security, hacking "from the outside" should be nigh impossible.

If your players start to protest and complain, then its time to have a "out of game" discussion with them. Tell them where you're coming from, and the fact that its "no fun" to have a game where the players can do anything they want without incurring threat to themselves. Risk is what makes this exciting and suspenseful and that's what makes the game fun.

My Three Data Monty thread shows how I plan and run Matrix stuff as part of a complete adventure. Post #15 in that thread is where the Matrix stuff happens.

Rating 6 Area Jammer = 3000 nuyen, cheap easy, ruin a Remote Drone Riggers day. What corp facility wouldn't have a few of these around?

Sure, most of the time it's cool to sit at home and do things from long distance. It's fun! Let them. For day to day stuff that's normal. Everyone does it.

Now, if your doing something a wee bit questionable, do you really want every cheap easily hackable constantly logging node relaying your signal to have a record of your actions? Can you really hack every single one of them and erase your tracks? Can you prevent someone with legitimate rights to those systems from searching for those logs and tracks? Do you even know which systems you used to route your long distance signal? That's just for the logs and later forensic matrix searches, what happens if someone wants to spoof your drone? Is it easier for them if they choose the weakest Node in your long distance chain to Hack and Spoof you?

Just because you can do it, doesn't make it a good thing to do.

Never fails mention rulse one way or the other on Dumpshock and squabbling shall shortly begin, it's like some kind of cattle call. I will say, that reality and the way the book explains the way things work seem to operate differently. If a dev is about, I'm all ears.