Ok so questions in no particular precedence.

For being a good little corporate lackey I now have a vehicle pass for manhattan. I have a few questions related to this, and I apologize these may be in rotten apple but I'm away from them right now

1) Is the pass itself vehicle specific or can it be transferred?
1a) The pass is for a vehicle without a F or R rating for it or any of it's modifications. Now if i get the pass applied to a vehicle and then mod it myself with a restricted or forbidden mod, say something that's not obvious like one of the spoof chip options will it invalidate the pass? I can make an argument for the logic but I wanted to be good with the letter of the law.
1c) Provided the pass is non transferable how would I or someone else get a vehicle pass for the island is it just a fake license (vehicle) or a certain rating? I've had this one asked of me as a GM and I really didn't know the answer. It's important as until I know this I'm not sure how feasible it is

2) There are no rules forbidding one player giving another money or gear correct unless it is a faction reward? THe reason I ask is i've got someone else willing to chip in with me on the new ride.

3) Is cracked software allowed? My understanding was that cracked software and skillsofts were an optional rule and therefore not allowed in SRM, the reason I asked is that while sitting a table at one of the big cons I had a player* hand me a list of cracked rating 6 software and skillsofts that his teams hacker was somehow maintaining and said I could use anything I needed for the mission. Now I as a GM would have problems with this and therefore declined to use the software as I wasn't sure of the legality of this. My understanding is that even if cracked software is allowed you need to be able to demonstrate through the bought dice downtime method how it is cracked and maintained which by design gets pretty impossible if your maintaining more then one prog. However with Active Softs no costing signifigantly more under SR4A it's a question that takes new interest for me.

4) Group gear, is there a way to do it legally or should we jsut avoid it as much as possible.


*To the player in question: I have no issue with you, in fact your pretty awesome, but this has been something I wanted to get clarification on.

Well found at least one of my answers.



Now i'll admit this wording has a lot more wobble then i normally like in such things, but the way I see it at the very least you can't update or patch a cracked skillsoft.

I'd taken that to mean that the individual hacker couldn't write his own patches to skillsofts or BTLs, not that the megacorps who make skillsofts can't update them to offset degradation. If legitimate users can update them, then the patches are piratable.

There aren't going to be hard and fast rules for this stuff. It's situational and relies on a GM call. Just don't dick over the player, and have fun with it. If the PC got a benefit, make sure it is used as an advantage, not a reason to make life miserable for them. They have a license, which they paid for, so let them gain an advantage from it. It's not a way to find something else to track and monitor and another chance to screw things up.


1. It's for a vehicle. (You could use it for a different vehicle with a little imagination)
1 a it could be invalidate the pass if it is discovered, but you might have other problems in that case.
1. fake license covers this

2. That's right, you can give your money to whomever you like. They rarely refuse it.

3. Most optional rules aren't used in Missions. Your understanding of the time consumed is correct. If it took two months to crack, the player would need to have the mission log with two months of lifestyle paid off and the calendar entries to account for this time.

4. There's no method to track group gear for a missions team. For a regular table of people playing at home you can of course do whatever you want, but for cons and FLGS games I doubt there will be a way to track groups.

Hmmm so what they are really saying is that skill wires are completely worthless by RAW correct?

1. Rx10k for legal skillsofts.
2. Legal software is set to SIN X. And ONLY legal skillsofts can be updated, otherwise they degrade 1 per month.
3. All legal software leaves a data trail.
4. All runners by that token should never run legal software. Unless they want to spoof ids which may or maynot allow the software to run.
5. Eula's being what they are, the folks behind the software could decide never to let you update again if caught in a crimial activity.
6. The Corps are behind the BTL chip trade, since the mother programs are not avaible.....


Am I reading this correctly or missing something? And if so, am I the only one that thinks it's complete BS?

PS: Not to affend anyone, just seems like someone put a bandaid over a bandaid on a skullfracture and called it good.

PSS: Just curious why does Simsense degrade at all? Understand hacking/computer programs, but why skillsofts/BTL? Shouldn't they work regardless of updates since the hardware isn't changing at all. Could understand having to reload it up from the base program every once in a while if there is an error but past that.....

I have just kind of always assumed that they do not degrade.

Tymire first off let me say that I certainly agree that the price jump on activesofts in SR4A was patently ridiculous. Also I feel that Cracked software in the context that SR does for it is a bit silly.

For our purposes if you have legal software especially hacking software it's presumed that however you got it the manufacturer has taken pains to make sure it leaves as little data trail as possible otherwise they'd have little or no repeat business. Motto of the software industry, why fleece them once when you can fleece them later on the next version.

Now missions, at least as far as I run it and it runs at conventions is a by the book affair even when the book is rather silly because consistency is king. By my reading you can get pirated skill softs just fine, you just can't patch them yourselves. I certainly can see you paying for upgrades throught he same venue you got them. That means even if they degrade and you can't patch them they are still substantially cheaper then buying them legitimately. Hope this helps.