I was just wondering in SR what kind of annoying think you would come to expect from the matrix. Youtube is all about getting Rick Rolled, and I for one am sick and tired of it. It did get me thinking what kind of annoying overplayed bully honky goes on in the matrix 2070 that ends up just pissing people off after being funny the 1st or 2nd time (if that.)

Maybe other internet fads might be nice, also it would serve as a way to sculpt the matrix and taking a fluff angle - other then fluff associated with hacking it.

Nadja Davier's perky brown nipples.

*shudders at the thought of goatse with the added kick of simsense*

honestly, script kiddies would be a much bigger threat than they are now.

TubTroll could be fairly disturbing...

are you asking for pop culture or subculture?

pop will always circle around things like sex, music, and trid.

subculture will be the same, only sick and twisted. snuff, grossout, racism, the more shocking the better.

OK now think of /b/ or equivalent in 2070. That would be the strangest place i I can think of.

Hackers are script kiddies.

Draco... your confusing yourself a bit. He really does mean script kiddies. Annoying little do-next-to-nothing apps that just exist to piss you off. Like seizure flashing banner ads?

A hacker has talent, a script kiddie dosnt.

ShadowRun hackers do not have tallent, unless they're the rare build that actually writes their own programs.

You can build a (more!) effective hacker if you say "screw logic" and instead spend those BP on other things.

The Matrix version of being Rickrolled is being Trollhammered. It involves being sent a link to the full simsense version of Trogcore/Deck Metal band Cyber-Troll's hit single Blackhammer, laced with actual blackhammer tracks. Highlights include a preschool-age troll girl in a pink dress prancing through a field of flowers before hitting the viewer with a plastic squeeky mallet. The sensations from the original music video, of course, being replaced with blackhammer.

Hackers still need skills, ergo, they are not merely script kiddies.

Ergo why I think that the dice pools for matrix actions are screwed up. Should be Logic + Program IMO, it's more about how smart you are at sifting through the data a search returns, etc. etc. than knowing how to format your search key (because you'll always get erroneous results).

I find it abhorrent that a brain-dead money wired into the matrix can perform just as well as Einstein's clone (who by the way just woke up and doesn't know anything about computers).

The teacher logged onto the little classroom and smiled down at the composite avatar of her students. It used to disconcert her; the shifting coughing shuffling shapes of a thousand (or more) prepubescent students layered into a single millipedic image sitting before her, each part of a classroom some hundreds (or more) miles away. But time and classes past had made the interface almost intimate. She could almost sense the individual students, see which was paying attention, which was daydreaming. She smiled down at it, at them, and said "Bonjour, class," waiting for the echoing reply of a thousand (or more) voices chiming: "Bonjour, Madame Girard."

"Please open your files to Chapter Three, Conjugating Common Verbs, Part One," she continued smiling but opened up a messenger window just over the students' head. "Let's recite for a few minutes, while I observe your diction, ok?" Jeremy's avatar was there, though she couldn't see what he was doing; he grinned and winked at her, meaning he was too busy to talk just then. Hiding her disappointment, she started peeling through the students, starting with those the software told her were missing the accents and inflections. She flagged a couple, gave instruction to one here and there, but then came across a girl who was giggling while trying to say her alle verbs.

She brought up the classroom the girl was part of, this sort of thing usually meant a class clown was acting up. The room blossomed before her, and she could see that most of the students were laughing, but not what was causing it. Loading their AR, the teacher saw what was happening, a video accompaniment had been spliced into the lesson, showing a baby boy in diapers being spoon feed some messy pasta by his drone nanny. Looking around the teacher could see a teen in the back who wasn't laughing with the rest, but sitting paralyzed in his desk.

Jeremy started talking to her but she waved him to mute while she opened her virtual desk and pulled out the clattering teeth. Some little holo-kiddie wants to make a mockery of my class? She wound up the teeth and tossed the tracking agent at the video feed. The baby boy covered in red sauce promptly disappeared and one of the girls in the class squealed as the clattering teeth sank into her avatar.

Notifying the school to the offense and offender, the teacher stepped into the girl's personal AR and said something she'd later regret. Maybe if her AutoNav hadn't sent her to Club Rickroll instead of Jemery's house the night before, she would have been more forgiving.

Hacking? Blackhammer? Arg!

Blackhammer is forbidden. Forbidden. Smashing someone with blackhammer is like pulling out an assault rifle and shooting someone with it... probably with crappier results though. Still P is P, and I think the response to something like that would fall fast and hard.

Hacking... Seriously Draco? I wanted to specifically avoid hacking as that is all the matrix is composed of right now. Hacking, and talk about script kiddies. That doesn't really add fluff to the matrix, and I feel just making a cheap copy of what our internet looks like today and trying to add a bit of future tech to it does not give the matrix body or substance.


In my opinion being Rick Rolled is a phenomena that has been created from the internet that does nothing, but spread negativity and piss people off. It is probably funny as hell to the person who put it up on youtube, but for everyone else who wants to just see the Diablo 3 trailer, or maybe a clip from the Chappell show you instead get something that is basically someone being a complete jackass and littering the internet with junk....

However this adds flavor to the internet it is an event that can easily be described. It is also a kind of internet fad where it has spread to the point where being Rick Rolled is extremely common, and most people on the internet understand what the term "Rick Rolled." I feel the matrix lacks this in its ambiguity of "you can make the matrix into whatever you want it to be" malarky. There would still probably be fads, and people doing things that piss other people off. There would be some body to the world of the matrix besides people playing online MMO shooters or having a "virtua pet" on their matrix hub. It would be nice to have something to give me as a GM or player some starting point that at least to launch off of. Some fads, events, or how people handle virtual chat rooms or forums so that I can gain an idea of something other then - virtual sandbox with some roughshod rules and some monthly subscriptions to miracle shooter or whatever. It is only ever from a hacking perspective, and never from the perspective of someone just using the matrix on their free time and I feel that this detracts from the matrix in a big way.

Come on now, haven't you ever been in a situation where you just wanted to pull out an assault rifle and shoot someone with it just for fun?

With a few simple tools like AvatarShop, stealing a person's online identity would require rather trivial effort (for chatspaces and such), and be terribly annoying, if not devastating, to the victim. This could lead to a resurgence of the "secret handshake" among cliques.

read snow crash. Its meta-verse in some ways is how i would treat parts of the matrix. fads wise they'd be similar to now adays butjust diffrent fromats ect.

Snuff Cut (Geek Edit): A simfeed that ends abruptly, usually at the best or most anticipated part. The edit often causes nausea or agitation in the slotter.

Boxing: Creating an AR chatroom that covers or duplicates the user interface, making it impossible to exit or use without physically exiting AR/VR.

Snowballing (Mashing): Editing a simfeed to a much higher tempo (frame rate), or splicing multiple sims on top of eachother, usually in the middle of a feed. Combined with boxing, snowballing can cuase headaches, nausea, and vertigo.

Sleepsurfing (Nightsurfing, Zombie-surfing): Staying connected to chatrooms or games while sleeping, either because one fell alseep while connected or to continue playing/chatting while asleep.

Sheerin (Woolin, Mythin): Fabricating a newsfeed, advertisement, political speech, and so on, and then presenting it as truth, to cause outrage or sensationalism, for the purpose of spreading it. Kudos are earned for how far the myth spreads before being debunked.

Phaking: Posting a trid or simfeed of one's suicide or attempted suicide, either as fishing for compliments, or as a form of mythin.

I'm pretty smart myself (Shut up! Yes, you!), but I couldn't hack to safe my life, no matter what kind of wizz toys you gave me.
So, although the SR system is far from perfect, the skill variant is still better than a logic+proggy would be. Logic+Skill with programs doing something would be awesome, just have to figure out, what something might be.

The one variant I've head of (in one of the books somewhere) that someone thought I was talking about while having no idea it existed, was Logic + Skill with program rating limiting successes.

If you want to insert a single goofy Matrix location, or make a passing reference, or something minor, just take a current fad (rickroll, lolcats, celebrity sex tapes) and twist it in some way to make it both recognizable and strange to your players (wizrolled, lolcadillacs, Dunkelzahn sex tapes). That's usually good for a laugh, since satire and parody fit well in SR without having to strain believability.

If you want something more meaningful to the game, you can still follow that guideline.

For instance, if you play any MMOs, you've probably heard about scandals involving GMs abusing their powers to help out themselves or their buddies. Extrapolate that into shadowrunning terms, and you have yourself an adventure: e.g., have the players break-in an off-shore server farm (manned by security drones) for a popular 2070s MMO, but leave them with only a brief window to coordinate the strike because a prominent in-game guild leader also stages a server-haulting raid exploit with the rest of his guild. Confusion erupts, shadowrunners steal something (like account information for a serious game, or the sword of 1000 truths on a USB drive if you want to be silly), much fun for all.

In short, if you want to incorporate a one-off joke, keep it short and sweet. If you want a game based on a RickRoll, let your imagination run wild, and it can be clever, funny, and actually make some kind of bizarre sense.

I want a working structure for the matrix, I want flavor, and I want fluff.

I don't want spin offs or the internet +1. Shadowrun used to have flavor, street, and fluffy crunchy bits a player or gm could knosh on. Really the matrix being one giant sandbox w/o any explanation means that the internet is like a public sandbox where probably everyone pissed in when they were a kid, and there is probably a homeless person sleeping smack dab in the middle of it.

The concept of being Rick Rolled has become an internet staple that has become a source of anger and amusement to people. I'm sure there are internet fads in 2070, but I at least want some idea or ground work to base an idea off of.

I salute to you, good sir. You gave my TM a Submersion Task.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. There's nothing new on the Internet; Rick Rolling is just bait and switch. It's as old as political promises and whores with veils. Everything on the Internet is a spin off, a +1 to the old world. How would the Matirx be any different?

Secondly, there is no such thing as "someone using the Matrix in their free time." The SR4 Matrix is ever present, people are connected to it 24 hours a day. It is used to interact with the real world in the most basic of manners: you have to press the ARO at a crosswalk for it to activate (unless your using a Walkman or similar nav, which would negotiate the crosswalks for you), your kiosk at BeeBurger is virtual, etc. People walk around, drive around, and work around constant Matrix connectivity: bitching, moaning, chatting, slotting, gaming, surfing all at the same time.

AR - what is possible? had some great moments and ideas for everyday users. *Pulls out his World's Smallest Violin-TM, and plays a special serenade*

Rankling (Raking, Porcupine): Rankling involves adding negative stimulus to one's avatar, or creating a whole-cloth negative stimulus avatar, which, when viewed in AR or VR, can cause any number of acute sensations, from pins and needles to depression. Ranklers join chatrooms at peek periods to induce waves of annoyance, despite how quickly they are added to ignore, block and ban lists. Named after the first noted use, copycats include: the Vomitorium and Strobe, among others. Many software makers now filter negative stimuli out of chatrooms, leading to a rash of euphoric stimulus rankling.

Lovebot (Spamspider, Vampspam): Using expert systems and manufactured personalities, Lovebots infiltrate people's friend's lists, fostering friendships from plutonic to intimate, with the goal of phishing passwords, account names and addresses, along with other direct mail information. Typical symptoms include obsession with a single interest, and continuous availability. Developed from Grid Overwatch bots (used to gather Matrix usage statistics), Lovebots are very hard to trace.

Moding: Obtaining moderator or administration rights on a chatroom or forum through bribery, blackmail, phishing, nepotism, etc, for the purpose of abusing that power.

What would replace Rickrolling? People in 2070 still probably use video sites that spread earworms and viral vids. Memes and whatnot still spawn forth. NERPSrolling, therefore, is clearly the best contender. You get linked to a potentially awesome video (like, some hard trogcore), but you end up seeing one of the cheesier 50's NERPS trid ads with a horrible earworm that you will never get out of your head.

In my social group, we've come to an agreement that one general image macro set are Lolfwyrs - pictures of dragons with facetitious captions. Favouring Lofwyr as a target, but taking any available Dragon in an exploitable pose or featuring a memorable expression. Favourites include "Lofwyr smells bullshit", "IS THAT CAKE?" and "Dragon hate pizza!"

The potential for mangled sentence memes is heightened when you assume that people have totally arbitrary conceptual lebenshtein distances. "I" and "Dragon" can be crossed as easily as "made" and "mead". In fact, it would be entertaining to throw this in for a low Computer character, or someone dealing with heavy penalties. A bizarre substitution if they're using DNI for text entry.

I Love ICs: A Viral marketing alternate reality game turned sour when one of the game's videos got corrupted and caused the watcher's comlink to disconnect from the matrix entirely for several minutes. The company behind the marketing campaign did fix the issue fast, but unfortunately several copies of the video were saved. Links to these videos show up frequently under various guises in an attempt to get unsuspecting users to watch it (and get kicked off the net). No permanent damage is done, save from the ill effects of a violent dump from full VR (even then, the headaches and nausea last only an hour or so).

Electric Koolaid (Icebang): In the one reported case of Icebanging, members of a Renraku Bratpack and AP Computer Science students at a Renraku Education Center, stole user passwords for their Intrusion Countermeasure class, and, impersonating members of a rival Evo gang, invited members to a Matrix Rave at the class node. They sculpted the environment to appear as a typical rave; even the IC were designed as emotbots, serving watered down sim spikes. When the passwords expired at midnight, the IC - thinking that the node was under massive attack - locked down the node and began attacking the Evo attendants, in some cases using black rated programs. Many of the victims were using hot modified sim modules and suffered serious injury. The perpetrators were arrested and tried by Renraku, but Evo's demand for damages have so far been denied by the Corporate Court. A subsequent chilling effect on pure VR raves has led to increased AR focused events. Icebanging is a serious offense.

Freeking: Public displays of cybersex. Minors caught engaged in freeking are often face child pornography charges, and such cases are on the rise as freeking has become more common at AR parties and raves.

Wikimancing: (see Wiki)

Deet: One desensitized to all forms of stimulus, or the condition of being desensitized to stimulus. A deet no longer registers surprise, shock, joy, etc to virtual or physical events. Those inflicted with deet show extreme apathy about their life and the life of other, and while many deets initially go on "rush" drugs or exploits, they soon grow bored with this and progress to passive observation of life. Deet shows similar symptoms, outwardly and atonomically to BTL brainburn, even in those with no contact to high peek simsense. It is hypothesized that long term exposure to simsense from a young age may be the cause, leading to a scare over sim nanny programs. Deet can be treated with a combination of medicine and therapy; however, lack of diagnosis often leads deet sufferers to apathy suicide (starvation, dehydration, hypothermia, etc).

Heh, just had the idea of taking those flashing banners into 2070: Low level IC banners. force you to pay attention to them by causing harm and annoyance.

A hacker is usually someone who finds their ways into systems for the sheer pleasure of it, and the biggest hackers from the heyday of hackign in the 80s and early 90s were fairly benign, with the best claiming certain networks and protecting them from other hackers.

A Script kiddie modifies a script given to them to do what they want, usually just annoying stuff for no real purpose. They're the malicious code stealers who often take credit for doing something after stealing code from someone else to do it.

It's like Something Awful (the Hackers) versus Ebaums World (The script kiddies).

Script Kiddies likely can't even modify prewritten code to make it do what they want. The point it at a direction and click "go" and it "goes."