Its been a while since I wrote an adventrue for SR and I was hoping that you guys could give me some pointers on running a good Matrix intrusion and how to go about narrating it. I need to know how best to go about designing the Node and how best to make it interesting and compelling to the Decker charater.

Thanks!
Moya

Well, you could bulldrek and just make it a UV host. But seriously, assuming by "a while" you mean "before SR4" then you should remember that the decker hacker decker can come with the rest of the team now, thanks to the miracle of WiFi. About node design, go nuts. As long as everything has a logical connection to a Matrix activity, then the node could be modeled off of Sailor Moon ON DRUGS!

Well Moya, in my mind this depends on three key factors:

1) Are you running sr4? There is a pretty massive paradigm shift in how a matrix intrusion goes in AR/hot sim as opposed to when the old keyboard monkeys came out and decked in.
2) Do you need to worry about a lot of other players sitting around waiting for the decker/hacker to finish his intrusion before you can get on with the game? If you are running the matrix interactions off to the side so that nobody will have a significant amount of downtime you can do some exciting and entertaining things with matrix encounters. On the other hand, if you are making three other people sit at the table grumpily waiting for their turn to play in your game...then you need to be a little more loosey goosey on the details of the node.
3) What kind of nodes are your runners trying to crack? The easiest way to make a matrix encounter memorable is to have a fun motif that the PCs will find difficult to overcome with a reality filter. Nothing better then your player's cartoon bunny icon fighting a medieval knight!

Hope some of that helps you.

To answer your first question, yes I am running SR4. I recently purchased the lovely 20th anneversary base book and decided it would be a good time to start running some games again.

I play in a semi-regular SR game but my GM tends to like to NPC his Hackers (I still rather like Decker) to speed things up for the rest of the party, so I never really get to see a lot of the Matrix stuff first hand. The last time I played in a game with any hacking, you had to map out systems with geometric shapes and so fourth.

Dramatically, it turned out that you had to almost go room to room looking for things and getting to places where you could affect the system the way you wanted. In SR4 it seems more abstract. I would just like to have the same feel of a digital "dungeon crawl" more than just a set of abstract numbers and events.

I will be picking up UNWIRED from a friend soon and that should help. I just wanted to see if anyone that ran a lot of net based adventures had any tips on how to spice stuff up.

Thanks again chummers.

Exactly. Put some thought into a Sculpted System that is internally consistent but requires some thought on the part of the hacker decker to understand fully. Like roleplaying social encounters, dice and numbers should take a back seat to an interesting interaction with the (simulated) world. For a lark, you could have a sculpted system that's based off of the last RPG game you played before Shadowrun.

Yeah, but then everyone realized that TRON was a lousy example to try to build a user interface around if you expected to get any actual computer work done.



For what it's worth, just because the system's been abstracted to apease the portion of the fanbase that wanted versimiltude with how present-day computer security works, doesn't mean that you can't take those abstract rolls and use them as the basis for describing a "dungeon crawl" through a sculpted system. If you ever had to run a metaplanar quest (in any of the editions) the approach is similar.



Yes it will. One big stumbling block to trying to use SR4/SR4A's ruleset to model a matrix run that has the old-time dungeon crawl feel is the fact that under the basic rules, Matrix Perception Tests are node-wide. Unwired clarifies that nodes with large processor limits, such as Nexi and clusters, require mutiple Matrix Perception Tests to be able to see everything in the node. Furthermore, when one node is slaved to another, you can perform perception tests on the slave while in the master, or on the master while in the slave, but you can't percieve both with the same action. Once you can no longer take in all of the node in one look, things like "Patrol Cycles" for IC and rooms sculpted into the node's VR interface begin to make sense.

I just read Virtual Realities, VR 2.0 and Unwired, and it's amazing how the system changed so radically so many times. And yes, the SR4 rules are by far the most correct analogue of real-world networks, but they are also the most boring as far as roleplaying is concerned. VR1/2 may have been complicated TRON simulations (2.0 less so), but they had a colourful charm and really blew my mind the first time I read them and had superior writing the second time I read them now. The visual impact of the earlier books was quite pronounced, whereas Unwired is just plainly functional. Superior rules, lacklustre presentation. Kind of how the Internet was a glorious Information Superhighway in the early 90s and is now just the local electric utility in the late 2000s.

They're also the least likely to have the rest of the table go out for pizza while the matrix specialist does his thing. For every roleplaying opportunity for interacting with a piece of GM controlled digital code that's nothing more than an imaginary pretty picture wrapped around a potential brain hemorrhage that was lost, there's a roleplaying opportunity for supporting and interacting with the rest of the team in meatspace that was gained.

True, but only because most players don't care about the Matrix part of Shadowrun, at least IME. For those of us who do care about the more intricate aspects of nodes and protocols in a futuristic internet, quite a bit was lost. However, my experience with SR4 is very limited so I'll stop complaining now.

Oh, I care about nodes and protocols, my only problem is that I care enough about them that I want them to make sense and not send me to fetch a set of disbelief suspenders to wear. No one knew when the setting was first concieved that three dimensional virtual spaces wouldn't offer much in the way of productivity gains in the same way that the advancement of graphical user interfaces had. In the mid to late 90s, when it became apparent that the 3D revolution would only benefit productivity in specialized fields like design engineering and molecular chemistry, that's when you first started to see a shift in the philosophy underpinning the matrix rules.

SR2's Virtual Realities 2.0 from '96 introduced the host-wide ACIFS ratings (Access/Control/Index/Files/Slave) which was almost as much of an abstraction from the previous Universal Matrix Specification system maps as SR4's rules are. (In fact, one of the in-universe quotes at the begining of one of the chapters, even outright mocks the previous system: "Alla BOXES, chummer, an' alla datapulses onna lines, trillions of 'em, an' they all connec', chummer, alluvem, ev'rywhere, like alla TIME!!" -- Ruth Morton, Mitushama system designer, explaining her breakdown.).

VR2.0 also introduced into the rules the concept of Tortises, low-cost decks without ASIST, capable of accessing the matrix through just a simple flatscreen and keyboard, just like a contemporary computer. Up to that point, conventional personal computers exisited in SR's rules, but weren't capable of matrix access. Now the setting no longer required legions of wageslave deckers jacking in to VR environments to do the mundane accounting spreadsheets and TPS reports that would become the paydata that was the objective of some shadowruner team. The office and the office software could resemble something much more familiar.

Still, even with the shift in philosophy, both sides of the matrix security equation were still tied to the VR metaphor. The big question on many player's minds was "why?" as in the real world, when you want to establish or subvert a limitation on a machine, you typically want less abstractions between you and the bare metal, not more. Much discussion was thrown around about "speed of thought" but ultimately, that's due to Direct Neural Interface, not VR. The other talking point was "representations of what would be otherwise overwhelming amounts of data" but any system capable of parsing and translating all that data into a coherent VR metaphor where your instinctive actions, which would also have to be parsed, would be translated into the most correct choices, could just dispense with all that translation, and simply filter the data into a simple choice menu with less overhead. When it came down to it, the only reason deckers still acted in VR came down to "That's how they've done it since Echo Mirage" and the Rule of Cool.

And don't get me wrong, I can live with Rule of Cool -based design choices, and did so up to the release of SR4. I had a the fluff counterpart to a house rule for my games for justification of VR. My House Fluff was that the Master Persona Control Program was actually pre-programed expert system decision tree style with the decker's own hacking style and protocols, and that the cyberdeck was actually tapping the organic processing power of the brain as a co-processor. The ASIST imagery generated by node sculpting and/or the deck's own reality filter was actually the result of a lucid dreaming state induced in the brain while it was crunching bits for the cyberdeck. It made the decker one step removed, as the deck was really doing the decking for him, but it explains why the otherwise clunky choice of a VR interface would continue to be the go-to from a computer security standpoint.

The nice thing is, I can continue to use that explanation under SR4. It's just that processor power by the 2070s has gotten to the point that you no longer need to use the brain as a co-processor if you don't want to. A user with good enough reflexes can be just as fast using flat AR-style interfaces for most instances. The only real time that it makes a difference is with Probing the Target tests, where it means an interval of 1 hour instead of an interval of 1 day, which incidentally, was the reason why Echo Mirage established VR interfaces as the gold standard for computer security for five decades: it cuts through secure authentication protocols like nothing else.

Maybe SR4's system is less dungeon crawl and computer-subsystem "flavorful" than the Universal Matrix Specification maps of SR1Core/VR1.0/SR2Core, but the game's used a whole-host based approach for going on 13 years now, with several oportunities for the developers to switch to something else based on customer feedback, and while details have changed the general level of abstraction hasn't. Keep in mind that sculpted VR systems have let GMs roll their own flavor since the original Virtual Realities Sourcebook in '91, so this may be why there hasn't been a push to change it back. The only real difference in SR4/SR4A is that all that VR sculpting can be bypassed in AR, but if the hacker's doing that, they damn sure better be pulling their weight in meatspace by using those reflexes to be another gunbunny for the team, commanding drones, and/or maintaining the team's TacNet.