Yeah, but that way of playing means you may was well just toss the commlink in the bin. After all, breaking into a complex, evade security, unlocking the secure area and stealing the data, where does a hacker even hack anything:

A) Security cameras are out of physical reach and have no wireless. Or maybe they are analog. Either way, this is now a problem for spray paint

B) Doors are cracked by the hardware skill or with a maglock thing.

C) When you do finally find the mainframe, disable the chassis alarm and override the interlocks (hardware), then take out the data storage (hardware).

The street Sammie could do that. If the hacker is supposed to be a meaningful archetype this isn't really going to work out. Hacking has to be mostly about software, because the way the game defines hackers includes tricked out custom commlinks and guys sitting around and coding up their own super l33+ software in their spare time, and not guys armed with power saws and wire cutters.

And if hackers are supposed to be custom code gods with flying fingers in VR -which is how the sample characters and flavour text presents them - the game should facilitate that.

Now, this is just one way of doing hacking obviously, but the lack of consistency, verisimilitude and vision is showing. But anyway, I think I've even had this arguement with you before. This is what I think, in my root cause analysis, is the nature of the problem.

But the symptom is that a sizable minority do not understand the system, as amply demonstrated by this thread and this forum.

Odd...

The hackers in our game spend a great deal of time in the Matrix, running multiple hacks, both onsite and offsite, sometimes simultaneously... much like the fluff in the core books... Using just the basic rules from the BBB and the majority of additional information from Unwired...

We do not use any of the "Optional" rules, and our hacks seem to progress fairly quickly... rarely more than 10 to 15 minutes of in-depth, high intensity hacking (for multiple hackers, one of which is a Technomancer)... the rules seem to be very well integrated, and the ease and functionality of the various hacking modes are a blast to play, even on the fly...

Yes, there are times when the system we need to hack has to be penetrated from the inside (more often than not for the really important runs), but that just adds to the excitement of the run...

I don't know, maybe I just do not see the same things that a lot of people are complaining about... I think that there is a great deal of vision in the Matrix system as utilized in SR4A/Unwired... as to the argument on consistency... What? I guess I just don't see what you are seeing...

My Two Cents...

We found using NPC hackers made the concept work just fine. The mechanics, however, are hopeless.

Yeah, but using NPC hackers kinda defeats the purpose of playing a Hacker, Don't you think?
I find the mechanics quite pleasureable myself... a littel intensive at first, but not too bad once you have the hang of things...
Been playing a hacker/Communications specialist now for the last 175 Karma or so... Great Times...

Yes it does. We didn't allow it. You could do lots of cool stuff like magic or guns, but being the guy who hacked into networks and the guy who trawled the matrix finding crap were not allowed. It just worked a lot better for us.

Hacking involves a little bit more than just l33t h4x0r sk33lz. There were some guys who hacked a Black Jack Machine in Vegas. Guess what: They did program something, but nothing they used on site (a running casino with security and cameras)

My $.02...

I think the open source optional rules need to be written in a much more concrete manner. Me and my GM are in light-war over this idea of "having to spend money for character advancement". Let's forget for now the fact that I vehemently disagree with the idea of just having to spend my own damn money on something that's free. In a strictly rules-based sense, these particular options as they are written are very open-ended and somewhat sloppy manner. This makes it so my GM has a tough time understanding the concept of open source (he's a bit of a technophobe), leading him to enact rules that don't make any logical sense. I'm aware that one of the options is to have open source software cost half price (something I don't even get), but the prospect of the software being free and unlocked should take front and center. Because, you know... that's the whole point. Not only did I follow the rule of having the group contact, but I even kept track of the programs I downloaded to my 'tab' (and honestly, with the 1 for 2 rule that's there, you really don't need to keep track). The GM doesn't seem to think that not having to pay in monetary form to "advance" is unbalanced, or at least since the other technophobic characters in my group have to. I contend that I "pay" enough with the time invested in writing and updating the programs that I do have. One thing that I think is crucial here is placing an importance value on information and time that stacks somewhere with money. This is one of the main differences between the internet and meat-space both in Shadowrun and the real world. On the internet, information can be just as good as money. The reason this in particular is a big issue for me is because it's a big issue for my character for obvious corp-busting reasons.

End $.02

The mechanics themselves are fast. IMO its the frustration of trying to learn the methods/mechanics or in describing the node imagery that makes it SEEM slow. Both the GM and hacker need to be engaged in the hacking segment to make it fun or you're left with either/both a pissed off GM or despondent hacker.

unless the hacker is in VR, dont bother with the node imagery...

and if the hacker is going VR in the middle of a run, he is no team player...

The amount of imagery needs to be scaled to fun levels for the TABLE.
Most hacking I've done has been low imagery but ya never know when a table might like hearing all about it as they watch through image links.

Oh, knock yourself out. While DSers have been able to behave themselves on other threads, I've pretty much given up on this one.

Besides, if I filter through the commentary on things the poster hasn't read and the arguments from personal incredulity, I can find actual data. I just hate having to do extra work.

Sadly, the number of threads like what you describe is at best a statistical blip...

btw, i think the matrix threads are the ones that have had the biggest topic drift overall, or any mention of the matrix will trigger a major topic drift...

Aaron, why not have a moderator delete all replies that are off topic?
[Or move all on topic replies to a locked thread?]

There's got to be SOME way to get your data in a reasonable fashion!

This is tertiarily on topic. To the OP, I just wanted to say that I like the title tagline. I have always loved The Princess Bride. Kudos.

Something to make things simple...

Reality Filter at Rating 6 (higher if possible) should allow the Table to enjoy the Matrix Imagry as it will always be the Reality of the Filter... make it what you want (Baseball Motif, Soccer Motif, Birds Motif) and then run with it... since it is always the same, there will be no confusion for the table, and the descriptions will flow freely and fast...

My Two Cents...

Yes, why doesn't Aaron just get a moderator to delete all posts he doesn't like in a thread soliciting people's "honest opinions" about the Matrix? I can't see how even threatening to do that might poison the sample base.

The fact is that the problem with the Matrix rules is the same thing it has always been. It's a mess. Lots of people say that it is unclear and unusable, and those people who do say it is clear and usable fall into one of the following categories:

• People who say it is "obvious" that you do X in situation Y, where each person is suggesting a different X for the same Y.
• People who suggest not actually using the rules at all and merely ad hoccing procedures.
• People whose "simple" procedures take an hour - or more - of real time.
• People who undertake severe stealth house ruling to make their system in fact completely unrecognizable from the officially printed product.

The last one especially. How often do you hear code phrases like "It's obvious that a good GM wouldn't allow that..." or "I think it's clear that the authors intended for..." ? These are not arguments that in any way support the idea that the printed rules are usable or even comprehensible. Those are lead ins for someone to introduce their house rules. And usually to compound that by being incredibly unpleasant to people who don't use their house rules.

I found Unwired to be a bad enough book that I just retconned it out of existence and made my own house rules for the entire Matrix subsystem. I never regretted that choice and I don't expect to. Even freelancers who worked on Unwired will in private admit that the book is crap. Which is unsurprising because it's a very very poorly executed book. Infinite power loops, confusing interactions, completely meaningless restrictions, contradictory security limits and an untenable matrix topology.

The Matrix rules had relatively few things that they had to do:

• Be clear enough to give unambiguous answers to simple questions.
• Be fair enough that players can be challenged and achieve goals at Nash Equilibrium between black hats and white hats within the rules and setting.
• Be simple enough to allow players to take actions and achieve goals in reasonable amounts of playing time.
• Be consistent enough that the "correct" actions within the rules match up to the actions described in the fluff.
• Be interesting enough tactically that players can make choices that feel meaningful and hold interest.

I don't think it is any secret that the Matrix Rules for SR 4th edition have spectacularly failed to live up to all of those expectations. Ask a simple question, get three or eight incompatible answers. Some of them from devs. Both runners and corporations have been issued with agent swarms and access shut offs that cause them to "automatically win" thus making the entire setup pointless. With the Rules As Written, you should logically be forced to hack your way through dozens of rolls to achieve basically anything, causing the game to grind to a festering halt. The script kiddy stuff is problematic, but it's problematic simply because the actual fluff of the game doesn't mention hackers as script kiddy agent swarm herders at all. The security onion system forces players to play a game of Simon where the GM's choice of security layers forces a set of actions in a set order that cannot be deviated from, essentially turning the Hacker into an NPC who makes no choices at all.

So that's bad. It's really really bad. And the fact that you don't get a consistent answer for any question ever asked by anyone in reference to the Matrix rules is about the most damning evidence of that fact that you could ever hope to find. No subsystem will make everyone happy, but it has become abundantly clear that the few people who are happy with the Matrix subsystem aren't even recognizably playing the same game as each other. So many things have to be filled in by the reader due to inconsistent or incomplete writeups that anyone putting a good faith effort into playing the game has probably ended up essentially writing their own system. And the fact that these systems are usually existing as free floating constructs in the minds of the people using them indicates that there is no consistency or common language between people in different groups.

Unwired was as a book and a ruleset an unmitigated failure. The people involved in writing it should be ashamed. And in personal discussions with some of them, I know for a fact that some of them are.

-Frank

well look who showed up, long time...

This is closest to where I fall. I use the rules where I can, but the rules don't cover every situation. Sometimes you just have to come up with your best guess on the fly and roll with it. I'm also a person who understands that fun > win, so I'd never try to purposefully break the system, and wouldn't permit such an attempt from players. I understand that a system that can be broken will be, but I also understand that no amount of potential rule loopholes can stop a good GM from running a good game. I still prefer the new rules to the old ones, because the old ones were not simple and not easy, they took forever to use, and were blatantly out of line with any sane prediction of the future of computing. The new rules are much more streamlined, but that means they leave gaps which can be very difficult to puzzle through. As far as I'm concerned, it could be better, but it's the lesser of two evils.

Would Frank mind giving a few examples of these "infinite power loops"? I want to know what to look out for.

What's the point? On the "attack side" there are no limits to how many chips you can fuse together or run in parallel, making it so that you can run limitless numbers of programs or have an agent army of unlimited size. Since you can get a new Access ID just by running your stuff through the laundry sensor on your jeans, you don't even need new copies of agents to run your Agent Smith Army. On the defense side, you're allowed to blacklist any access IDs you want - booting them from the system without any kind of opposed roll. These being computers, your black list could just be "all possible numbers" except the previously authorized ones. This means that any attacker - agent, sprite, or hacker is dumped from the system automatically and without rolling dice before they are allowed to take any action or roll any test.

The topology in Unwired is pathetic. Nobody would let any of the hacking fight shenanigans go down, because both sides are equipped with "I win" buttons.

-Frank

Sorry, still don't get it. I do try to read through your houserules, tough. Maybe that shines some light on the "problems". Quotation marks are there since i belong to the group.

"What's the point?" House ruling purposes. I didn't ask for your nerd-rage, just an answer to my question. As for the specific examples, these are possibilities in the real world. Bot-nets the size of small nations isn't a new idea, and isn't extraordinary outside of 60 Minutes. They have happened, and still do. There's merit in the argument that there should be opposed tests to DoS attacks, and that there should be a resource-based restriction on bot-net numbers. However, what does this really do? Does it really take away fairness, or does it just force the player to think more than four seconds ahead when they do something? Is planning an attack or countermeasures to one really asking too much? So what if the attacker has 4,000 agents? If you hack one of the nodes a member of the code army is sitting in without being noticed and successfully spoof it, you could resubscribe all of them to yourself. On the other hand, if you're the defender, you're not invulnerable either, since the attacker - if he can't steam roll you with the code army - can still find the physical location of the node you're on and shut off the power-supply that feeds it.

Executing and defending against both will require planning, but what's a little forethought cost when a successful run is at stake? Matrix skirmishes should be about out-smarting each other, not seeing who has the bigger code-cock.

I wouldn't bother. His hacking rules are, in essence and at a high level, the magic rules with the serial numbers filed off and replaced with 'technology' powers. Which is great of course because shadowrun's magic rules are probably the best thing about the game, and more of them is a good place to start.

The advantage of hacking over being that there is no drain and anyone can access it, the disadvantage being that pretty much everyone gets 2 dice pools to defend, 3 if they have a hacker, vs magic's 1 dicepool to defend, 2 if they have a mage. Unless your a technomancer in which case there is drain, but your abilities are super awesome and/or they have worse defensive pools.

Overall, this makes opposed tests not very rewarding, because even if you optimize, 'joe blow' can probably resist your dice pool with one not much smaller, and Jpoe the sec hacker can certainly resist your dice pool with something the same size. As a result using the 'offensive' powers tends to be much less effective than 'I shoot him with my gun' but on the plus side the utility powers are awesome and speed up the matrix legwork sections of the game by the power of a billion.

of course, that isn't how hacking works in the fluff or published adventures like.. at all. If you rock up at a SR missions table or something from ghost cartels with this going down, you break the game as the designers intended.

So something went wrong somewhere.

Don't much care what the fluff says; the fluff isn't a rule. I never intended to keep in line with what the story writers intended. This is purely about mechanics. That said, arguing from the premise that all resources (of some importance) and their management systems are all linked to the internet in some fashion, the rules as currently written don't really shun any of those actions, and are within the confines of the tests offered in the books.

I am going to take a little bit of a digression, but bear with me for a moment. I'm going to talk about a subsystem that doesn't work in Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition. Shape shifting. It doesn't work. It's horribly confusing and incredibly broken. But for years the designers actually used the first problem to mask the second. That is, because there were multiple readings that were broken in different ways, the people at the top made claim that it wasn't broken by answering questions as if one of the readings that broke the game in manners other than the one being discussed was the correct one. That is, if people asked a question about breaking the game by transforming into an octopus they would answer in terms of the reading where it broke if you transformed into a wolf. And vice versa. And while both readings were broken, they were broken in different ways and by juggling their answers they could satisfy anyone who didn't understand the breadth of the problem - at least for a while.

And that's really where we are with the rules in Unwired. Black Lists either work or they don't work. Both of those potential answers are incredibly problematic in their own way. And the actual authors of the book will switch their answers depending on which way you are talking about breaking the game. I'm not making that up, Aaron seriously answers that question both ways.

So there's no point in asking how the RAW is broken such that you can make a patch to fix it. The RAW exists in a quantum state where it essentially does not even exist. There's no solid foundation to build on, because there is no consistent rules chassis. The matrix topology is not consistently defined, the results of actions are not consistently defined, the dice pools used for actions are not consistently defined, the limits of software are not consistently defined, the limits of security are not consistently defined, the limits of hardware are not consistently defined, and the limits of identity are not consistently defined. To create a situation where "you" hack into a "computer system" to "steal data" requires that you essentially write some rules for that yourself. Now if you really want to, you can have one or more of the subsystems and mechanics you happen to use be isolated lifts from the Unwired book. But you can't make your personal system go without contradicting parts of Unwired because Unwired contradicts itself.

And because you're basically making up rules, the only thing you really have to go on as a scaffold is the fluff. If you ignore the fluff then you're left with a set of incomplete and contradictory rules and no criteria to decide if the compromises and rewrites you make are any good. So I can't help you. No one can help you, because you've rejected externally verifiable criteria for success and failure.

-Frank

Well... I suppose everyone has a choice to make. You can look for problems or you can look for solutions.

What if the abstracted process of actually hacking means that you have circumvented the blacklist? I mean, are you going to black list your MSP's Access ID? You wouldn't be able to log on to anywhere. So, perhaps part of an exploit attack is rotating the attacking Access ID through the ID of every major MSP in the area. Yes, you can make your Commlink unhackable: you can cut off the possibility of any transmissions to or from it of any kind. At that point you have to ask yourself: what's the point?

I suppose if you really think its broken you can simply say, "This doesn't exist." Frank's alternate Matrix rules use this to fix much of these "broken" issues, they simply said "Nah, multiple IC programs on one system can't happen" and "Nah, independent, free-roaming Agents can't happen." The much-ballihooed "Agent Smith" problem has been addressed in the latest Unwired errata, as well as essentially "legalized" with the Botnet rules.

I agree that the Matrix rules need a few more solid examples to show people how all the pieces fit together, but I do not think they are as fundamentally flawed as some have said. The problem with the Matrix is that is relates far too much to a real-world counterpart so people are unwilling to accept the normal explanation of "you can't do that." In the Magic sub-system you can't cast Force past your Magic x 2. Why? Well... you can't, it's Magic. But in the Matrix, since it's computers, when a game-mechanics-driven limit is put in people come out and say, "This is dumb because IRL you can just hook up a booga-blooah and circumvent this limit!" Really, I think unrealistic expectations are put on the Matrix rules to cover every possible situation. The other game sub-systems do not cover every situation either, but the complaints about that are so much less.

That would be an example of Blacklisting not working. Yeah.



Indeed, perhaps the game would be better without having a separate Spoof program.

-Frank

Yes, you hate the RAW; we know. I figured you might allow others to decide for themselves what's pointless and what's not, but you clearly have no intention of getting off your stint. What I do with the knowledge is up to me, and it's not up to you to decide if it will help. Next time, just say you're going to dodge the question so I can get on to other things.
What if the blacklisting imposed an increased threshold or created a long interval? And just to dispel this now, don't even mention the fluff. GMs should be bright enough to come up with their own campaigns, and due to the amount of power the RAW gives them, they do. The fluff was noticeably too far-reaching in Unwired, and since you seem to dislike the interaction of the two anyway, just ignore it. As said before, the Catalyst doesn't decide the story; the GM does.

Since you are admitting that both the fluff and the rules don't work and the GM has to house rule everything, why are you defending the computer rules of SR4?

Just a couple points:

This if a fight that's been had before. Unless someone knows what we'd gain by having it again, maybe we could all just cool it and agree to disagree.

Both sides can agree that the matrix rules aren't perfect. The difference is how we feel about that. Some of us think it's ok, because the 3rd edition rules were no peach either. Some of us think it's awful and would spend hours and hours rewriting the rules just so we don't have to use the RAW. Neither side is wrong, it's not a matter of objective fact, it's based entirely on how you feel about the problems with the system, whether they bother you or not.

Closer to:

"But in the Matrix, since it's computers, when a game-mechanics-driven limit is put in people come out and say, "This is dumb, because this other rule over here allows me to circumvent this limit."

IE, buy two comlinks and make them a nexus. Voila, avoided both the limitation on #programs <= response and the maximum +2 matrix stats upgrade limit.

The assorted idiocies are pretty intrinsic to having spent 25 years trying to play TRON with D6. It's the best example of Ancient Histories "terminal Continuity Porn". The damn matrix rules didn't work well in 1st edition, and I don't think that they have improved. At their core they try to model computers as seen by a guy who wrote books in the 80s on a mechanical typewriter and a movie that didn't make any particular sense when it came out in 1982.

This is what I was getting at with my earlier comment about the system trying to do three things all at once and succeeding at none of them as a result, because at least two of the goals are actually mutually contradictory (Be futuristic and different vs contemporary & reflecting modern computer science)

Yeah. Maybe less is more with the Matrix Rules.

This. Now that you've gotten yourself a nexus, go set up several nexuses and give them their own personas. Now load the exact same agent into each one, and you've just bypassed the one agent per person limit. And no, the Unwired hackastack errata doesn't stop you from doing that, it just means that you have to take some time (several complex actions last Thursday) swapping between your different personas to set up your agent army to attack. Now Exploit the crap out of things. Unfortunately, it turns out that the target doesn't even have to play the Firewall versus Exploit game, because they can bypass all of that by making their stuff wired-access only or giving a standing order to refuse/terminate connections to any access ID other than a trusted few.

So yeah. Pretty much all the explicit limits in the rules - both on offense and on defense - have their own explicit loop holes that are also in the rules.

-Frank

And the core of the problem.

Developers, and in large the players, who have only scrapings of knowledge about what "hacking" is. Trying to hard to make it realistic and (equally) hard to make it work in a roleplaying game.

The real stuff is boring. Really really mind numbingly boring. In fact what we see in Shadowrun is literally just over hyped scriptkiddies. Which is fine because that's how cinematic hackers work and cinematic hackers are cool and are fun to pretend.

Problems start popping up when you forget that and you start trying to emulate real world computing. Like the Access ID mess.

You sure? I loved to read The Art of Intrusion and it really read like something i'd like to play.

Ah, sanity, all to rare these days.

If the avatar was any indication of gender, i would be down on my knee already...

There is an expanion for cyberpunk 2020 called '<edit: actually it appears I cannot remember what it is called. It was based on some scifi writers stuff. Someone help me out here.' that includes a hacking system pretty much based on real life complete with social engineering and going through the garbage. I found it about as exciting as being repeatedly punched in the head, but if you like that sort of thing, look it up - you could totally graft it into shadowrun with minimal effort.

Edit: I think it was hardwired.

CthulhuDreams, It was Hardwired. I thought the matrix rules were similar to Shadowrun 2 ed.?

This is a many beers ago in a land far, far away so I could be very wrong, but I thought the base CP2020 rules where the ones with black ices decks and other shadowrun and the hardwired ones were the ones all about getting an account and then running privledge escalation attacks - and the sample in the book included him phone up people to get account details?

I don't know where my copy is anymore.

I'm not sure what the problem with blacklisting is. I'm not even sure why it's a loophole -- isn't a loophole some unintended consequence of the rules that isn't obvious? This one seems pretty explicit, like you say. It's a feature, not a flaw, it's just a feature you don't like.

Most nodes wouldn't even use blacklisting, because they exist expressly for the public. A business' public nodes want to attract net traffic, of course. And most people use their commlinks for everyday communication and buying stuff at the store, etc., so it would make no sense for them to blacklist everyone. Most people would probably consider it too great a hassle to un-blacklist each node as they wanted to do a transaction, because you'd have to do that hundreds of times a day. It would probably even go beyond what a hacker wants to do. A universal blacklist commlink wouldn't even be able to access the net, because you have to hop across the mesh to access the grid, and so you'd have to de-blacklist each of the random mesh nodes you travel through every time you access the net, and you'd need to switch them each time one of those nodes logged off. Not really practical, especially when you're still just as vulnerable as ever to spoof attacks.

It's not a big deal that an ultra high security node can blacklist everyone but trusted sources either, because the other option would just be to have it inside a shielded building, with much the same effect, except it would force you to plug in manually instead of just entering the building. Blacklisting is just like being cut off from wireless, except there's the chance that you could figure out the trusted access IDs and run a Spoof, or hack those nodes and use them to access the target.

Of course every method of attack has a counter, and I don't see why this is bad. It doesn't make those offenses useless under Nash Equilibrium*, because there are strategic concerns behind each defense. Most nodes won't use blacklisting because they have a constant need to access outside nodes, so for most nodes, regular hacking works. Blacklisting simply means that there is no perfect offense. There's also no perfect defense either, because nothing can truly prevent runners from breaking in and direct-linking to a node, or from social'ing the passcodes out of someone to access an unhackable node, or whatever. Once your team has a hacker with 6's in everything, and all the goodies from Unwired, the GM has to have tools like blacklisting to make the game interesting, otherwise it's auto-hax, auto win, auto zzzz. Either that, or you have to sic that hacker with a cloud of spiders or IC every time he hacks, which would also get boring.

*Honestly, peoples conception of Nash Equilibrium seems to be something like "If nuclear bombs exist, then everyone will use nuclear bombs on each other all the time, regardless of the consequences, and regardless of the fact that they cost millions of dollars." This can't be right. If it is, then Nash Equilibrium is retarded.

No.

It's just like getting cut off from the wireless for the players. But it's distinctly different from getting cut off from the wireless from the standpoint of the base operators because they can still use the wireless!

It's one thing to give people an "Everyone loses" option where matrix activities just don't work for either side. I don't like that very much, and feel that it is as bad for the game as letting everyone decide to be magic immune for 0 points whenever they want. But at least it's reciprocal, so sometimes it won't happen when you're on a mission.

The Blacklist is not reciprocal. My stuff still works, and their hacking powers don't work at all. No matter what they roll, no matter what they do. That's not good for the game. That's the same structurally as simply erasing the Hacker as a playable archetype. Which is something that I hasten to point out: many groups that do try to use the RAW have actually done.

As to running a spoof, you have to get a matrix perception on a trusted item before you're even allowed to make a spoof.So if you're stealthing in you can't get access to the goods of the security rigger until he shows up and starts shooting you. Except you know the part where Aaron has said specifically that you don't have to spoof an access ID to hack into a system. Which leaves us back to the very real possibility that we are just hallucinating the possibility of blacklisting Access IDs and that those rules aren't supposed to be in Unwired. But I'm not going to hold my breath for a coherent explanation, because that book is now a year old and we haven't gotten one yet.

Edit:


Nash Equilibrium is essentially the actions that everyone takes when they assume that everyone else is going to be using their best available actions. Essentially it's the endpoint after everyone exhausts all possible "Win in front of Me" arguments. So in the case of nuclear bombs, it actually means that everyone will threaten each other with Mutually Assured Destruction, and then not use their bombs.

The problem is that in the Shadowrun Hacking, there is no Mutually Assured Destruction. The Hacker either wins and gets the data or he is caught and he is shot. There is no meaningful increase in threat available to either of them. The Hacker's actions will - if they succeed - only marginally impact the megacorp. And if the megacorp succeeds, the Hacker is dead. So when people talk about nuclear options, there's really nothing in it for the Hacker to not go there - because the stakes are already "he will die if he doesn't win."

-Frank

The wargames otion of don't play does exist to but is bizrre in the context of an rpg

CP2020 rules came after Hardwired.

Hardwired rules involved doing things like social engineering and flow chart data fortresses.

CP2020, were like D&D miniatures rules, except making less sense.

I started playing SR with 4ed. really. So I could be confusing them with the rules for Twilight/Merc:2000.

But only in a limited fashion with trusted nodes. This wouldn't be an option for their busy servers that handle a lot of transactions and communications from a large, uncertain class of nodes. It would only be an option for high security nodes with limited traffic.



That's where you're wrong. I can't believe how many of your so-called gripes about the system aren't even based on the RAW. When wireless traffic is blacklisted, a node can still be hacked via direct connection. That means infiltrating a facility and playing with hardware a bit. Last I checked, sneaking into facilities was one of the staples of Shadowrun, not some kind of flaw in the system. If there wasn't blacklisting, the GM would just make high security nodes shielded or non-wireless, with the same effect on the players. You seem to be complaining about the option for the GM to force the hacker to be part of the team instead of doing the whole run from his coffin motel. Again, that's a feature, not a flaw, as much as you might dislike it.

Nor is it true that blacklisting is non-reciprocal. If a node has to talk to more than one specific set of other nodes, then blacklisting is impractical. Even a building's security nexus would be a poor candidate for blacklisting, because it has to talk with incoming deliverires, rearrange schedules accoring to traffic and weather patterns, provide access to the police in case an alarm is triggered... Your conception of blacklisting, as an automatic shutoff for all hostile traffic, is a highly questionable interpretation of the RAW. This is typical Frank. Argue the worst possible interpretation of the RAW to "prove" RAW is broken. Don't admit that other interpretations are possible, because of your deep-seated need to "expose" flaws in the system.

And now that I look, I can't even find the "blacklisting" option. Is the technique in and of itself a made-up "loophole?" Unwired explicitly says that they can limit authorized access to particular IDs, but the Exploit program bypasses normal authentication and thus is unaffected.



I'm thinking it's the latter, and you just haven't read carefully. Check page 63 of Unwired. Access IDs can be authorized, no unauthorized access IDs are allowed in without further authentication. They might be able to get in with a passcode, they might not, depending on the setup. However, Exploit circumvents access ID authorization. So I guess your biggest loophole in the system was fabricated in the first place. And you don't need a dev to tell you it's not there. If it breaks the game, don't use it. If there are two interpretations of RAW available, choose the one that you don't hate. Otherwise you're stabbing yourself in the crotch and crying foul against the devs. You're doing it to yourself for the express purpose of venting your dislike of the system. You have only yourself to blame for deliberately breaking the game with a questionable interpretation -- it would be nice if the devs had written more clearly, but they're not the ones who created blacklisting, it's you.



Isn't that what you'd expect from an ant attacking a mountain? That's what Shadowrunners are, little ants scurrying around in the shadow of the megacorps. They risk everything just for a payday, while the corporations they attack swat them like flies on a horse, not terribly concerned about it, because flies are not much of a threat to horses. It's only when the Shadowrunners hitch onto another horse (i.e. a great dragon, or another corp, or some kind of uber organization) and get access to powers beyond what's available on the street that they really start to shake things up.

Just for those on the sidelines keeping score (so to speak), Slaving a node is essentially blacklisting every Access ID except for one (the authorized Master) and this is what Unwired has to say about Slaving:

I've made the interesting bits bold. You know, I never really saw that part about "forwarding the connection request" before. That's interesting. To me, that means if you have a door lock that is Slaved to the master Security Node, you can be in Signal range of the door lock and when you try to hack it, you just end up having to hack the master Security node instead, even though you may not be in range of the Security Node (it may have its wireless turned off and be hardwired to the door lock). Interesting.

Right, but a node can only be slaved to one master. This isn't the auto-win infinitely versatile blacklisting that Frank made up. Slaved nodes are always hackable by taking over the master node. Nodes can be used this way as chokepoints or daisy chains to escalate the level of security. What it doesn't do is make it impossible for hackers to break in.

Hi Aaron,

I have thought about this. Originally my great concern is that I do not feel qualified to talk about rules questions. There are far better people to pick nits about the subject.

Once the rules were explained to me in a concise manner, I could finally understand how does hacking work. I found that the SR4 rules in the book to be very verbose. Instead of having to find rules information, it was very helpful when it was clearly and concisely explained to me, which left no leeway for interpretation.

A process oriented method was more helpful than a descriptive one, when I had to understand the rules.

The problem I have with the Matrix rules is that they imply that Hackers will be hacking other commlinks, not say larger systems with different abilities. It also means that the hacker has the advantage as long as they remain undetected.

The advantage with the rules is that hacking can be very fast, if the GM and the player do not focus on the minutae. The problem is that anyone who has read the rules will focus on the minutae since that is where all the minor fractions of odds come to play, which while making hacking very slow means the hacker has a greater chance on winning the hack.

Since I only just started to get annoyed about it... there aren't enough uses for Electronic Warfare that aren't dick moves on the part of the GM from the player perspective. A skill the players didn't take shouldn't be made vital to succeeding on a mission if you want to be liked by your players - unless you happen to have a good excuse or be good at quashing dissent (probably by saying "dude, you should have realised that in the grim darkness of the near future Encryption eludes you!" Or words to that effect).