Damn it, stupid work filters.

It's concession. It's letting other players not have to sit and listen to one player getting to play a single player session in the middle of a group session.

Yes, it's Hollywood hacking. Big frippin' deal. Real hacking is interesting to read about, boring to implement in a game situation. Hollywood hacking means hitting a couple quick buttons on a keypad, watching icons go at it, and moving along with everything else.

Elsewise, it's really doesn't take that long either. To probe takes an extended test with hour intervals. Considering that most firewalls most players will go up against hit the three to four threshold and considering bonuses from cyber / bio & vr bonuses (again: mmm, hotsim) it'll only take a couple of hours, tops. Out of game, it's a few dice pool chucks and you're done.

Hacking on the fly? Minute intervals or one spoof check. Doesn't take that long.

Cybercombat works at the same time rate as physical and astral combat.

I'm really not seeing where the issue is. Houserule it to heck for all you want Cain, because it seems to work for everyone else.

(Ps: no offense meant BlueMax, just your example gave me something to springboard off of)

1998 Black Hat Hackers challenge 15 mins to beat the new cisco firewall. It was a pretty cool hack to, he told the firewall it was a toaster and to run toast (a virus he wrote to compromise a network)
2003ish Black Hat FBI breaks 256bit WPA encryption live in under 8 min. The FBI actually thought it would take longer.

So it can be done in minutes with a fast computer and good software (heck with some of the software out there you can be an idiot and use it), if you know where the computer your going after is and depending on how locked down it is. If you have physical access than forget it you can pull any data off it in under a min just boot your own OS. Now if they encrypted the information it will take time to decrypt it but you cant take the files with you. My favorite security compomise is still the guy with the dreamcast pulling all the banking accounts by walking into the server room dressed as a janitor and pluging it into the switch directly.

As for 4e, I would say I'm still waiting on fluff but the back fo RC was a good start.

Yes, "longer than the current age of the universe" does count as "take time".

~J

I had to look that phrase up, fan service, so I'm curious as to what you see as fan service and 'wankery' in the Fourth Edition book?

I can deal with Hollywood hacking. The problem is, the consequences of that kind of hacking simply don't exist. If we leave everything wired (per the setting) then we're faced with the fact that every single security company out there is comprised entirely of idiots. If we fix the setting-- make things believable-- then there's nothing for deckers to do in combat except shoot people.

And even if you don't feel this is a problem, you still have to deal with the fact that actual hacking goes on a different timeframe than regular combat, so hacking during a shootout is not a viable option. Decking in combat just doesn't work.

I totally missed where it says this in fourth ed. Honest. I even quoted something to the opposite from the BBB. I am not saying anyone is wrong but my assumption may be. Can anyone tell em what page the speed offset is detailed on?

p221 says that Hacking on the Fly is a Hacking + Exploit (Firewall, 1 Initiative Pass) extended test.

Attacking, crashing, data searching, editing, spoofing--all can be done with complex actions, according to p219.



There's very little that doesn't fit into a tense, second-by-second timeframe, and the stuff that doesn't fit with combat usually fits with regular legwork timeframes, like someone else mentioned. It's an extremely viable option. Maybe you're talking about SR3, though, judging by the use of the word 'decking'.

Anyway, this topic is getting a little sidetracked... but maybe all of my questions were answered. Pretty much the same arguments as I remember. =P

To be fair, it had to do with a flaw in the encryption where the returned packet (on, essentially, a ping) contained known data.

And it still takes upwards of 100,000 packets to break the encryption with a 98% success rate (more packets: better reliability). I tried messing around with the software once, but my wireless card doesn't have a compatible driver.

It also took 5 years before someone discovered the vulnerability (WPA was hacked in 2008, the method was created in 2003) and had to do with the fact that WPA used TKIP which was the vulnerability in WEP and only allows the injection of fake ARP packets into the datastream, not the encryption password. WPA2 closed this vulnerability.

Source

Yeah, but you can't combine regular legwork timeframes with tense, combat timeframes. Decking in the middle of combat is not a viable option. If the opposition has half a brain, there's not much you can do to them anyway; and extended tests in the middle of a firefight are boring.

And yes, I use the term "Decking". This is a Shadowrun forum, we use Shadowrun slang.


We're not allowed to discuss actual methods of hacking, as per the TOS. That being said, I know of script-kiddie programs that can crack WEP keys in 30 minutes or less, and I bet I can find warez to crack WPA.

If hacking on the fly and running apps are defined in terms of Initiative Phase and Complex Action, I don't see why not - rules-wise, anyway. I'll continue to agree that my realistic sensibilities are somewhat in a state of disbelief but I can ignore that for the sake of buying into their paradigm.



You don't have to directly hack the opposition to hack during combat. I've given examples of environmental hackables in situ already, but out on the street there's all kinds of fun crap you can do with devices [un]wired to the grid. Vans you can drive into people, security drones you can put on alert at the opposition, department store doors you can use to shut out their reinforcements, etc.

re: Extended tests in the middle of a firefight - BlueMax's character rarely needs more than an IP to hack many daily-encountered devices on the fly. The threshold is Firewall for the test, and 4-5 successes (especially when using his copious amounts of Edge) are simple enough to come by. And Hacking isn't even his primary specialty...he's a combat medic first and foremost. Realism aside, it's totally doable in game and not a hassle in the slightest.



Yeah I'm still stuck on that parlance as well, especially when running my game.

On the topic of real-world fasthacks, 15 minutes is still not truly "combat hacking" in comparison with the SR4 rules, but again - I'm willing to suspend belief for a bit and assume that hacking software frameworks in the future are able to make very fast, real-time adjustments in attack patterns to fit a brute force into 1 second (1 IP). Think a hyper-fast version of metasploit coupled with a gigantic rainbow table stored somewhere in the "cloud"

Back to the real topic of this thread, while I found the rules of SR4 to be more than palatable (and actually much more likable than SR1-3), I don't really much like the treatment of the 2070s world. Maybe I'm just nostalgic, but I love the 2050s and 2060s, which is why I set my game in the early 2050s. The SR4 rules are easy enough to port backwards in time, and if you assume that someone was genius enough to invent the AR Intarw3bz before 2050, it all falls into place just fine

Sure, here you go:

Hacking on the fly, blah blah blah, 10 combat round extended test.

Even if you drop that down to 1 round combat is likely to be over before you get anywhere. Combat for my group at least, has never made it to the end of Round 2. Today IP 3 of Round 1 was cutscened as there was a mage (under Control Actions) and a street sam left alive (and 3 slowly cooling bodies on the ground--opening round was them surprising us, a Flash Pack, and two thermosmoke grenades; we should have been easy pickings).

I don't think I've ever seen a 10 combat round extended test for hacking on the fly, but I guess it's possible.

On the topic of combat being over too fast, I'll definitely agree. If anything though, I see that as combat being over *too fast* for my liking. I'm starting to become very liberal with throwing out combat modifiers at people to try to mitigate that, so we'll see.

I've also started doing a lot of full-burst-run-away-to-cover type actions with some NPCs, and that seems to help extend combat out a bit.

10 combat rounds = 1 minute.

To quote Veggiesama:

p221 says that Hacking on the Fly is a Hacking + Exploit (Firewall, 1 Initiative Pass)

To get to 1 minute, that's 60 attempted tests vs. a threshold of 3-5, sometimes 6 (assuming hacker has 3 IP)? Or maybe I'm reading you wrong.

Nope. 10 combat rounds = 30 seconds.

20 combat rounds is a minute. But as hacking on the fly is an extended test done Initiative Pass by Initiative Pass, not Combat Turn by Combat Turn, I'm not sure that's such a big deal.

We've pointed out that companies would rather take ease of use than straight security every time. That was the point of my (original) long winded rant. It's not worth it in time, cost or brainsweat to uber-secure everything you've got; that's not idiodicy, that's being economical. Which is what corporations strive to be.

We've also pointed out that your time frames are blown out of proportion. Probing takes the same amount of time as requisitioning equipment or talking to contacts; it's an hour interval extended test. That's long? Hacking on the fly is a single initiative pass interval extended test. That's long?

People's heads get stuck on YOU CAN HACK CYBER! First, yeah, most teams are going to leave their cyber on and broadcasting. That's because, again, ease of use > security. Second off, beyond basically being a dick ("Ha ha! Hope you enjoy your troll bondage porn!") hacking people's shit takes too long to be of any use. Instead, the hacker's got admin privileges on the node and he's using it to do things like give his team an overlay of the area, giving them feeds from the security cams to help position, and possibly even turning things like auto-turrets against the opposition.

It's not as big a deal as you always make it, y'know?

Just as an add-on comment, hacking the opposition's cyber-shit, even when it's broadcasting, is rather pointless as the 'ware's signal is so weak that a hacker practically has to be touching it for it to be effective. It's like cracking some yuppie's Bluetooth while breathing on his neck.


That term isn't used in 4th ed/2070s, even as slang.

Per the online FAQs.

My real world office in a software company is completely wireless but we have plenty of security policies and procedures in place to meet PCI compliance. Sticking our network into plug-ins/land lines wouldn't make it any more secure, it would just change black hat hacker tactics and kick us back to 1980. And just because someone can subscribe to Starbucks' wireless hot spots without buying a cup of coffee, that doesn't make him a hacker.

Yeah, people always think the "secure" stuff (autoturrets, cams, and the like) are buried 500 nodes down the pipe but that's not always the case, because it's expensive and makes using it difficult. Most day-to-day security people operating out of a SOC (Security Operations Center) are going to be lower-skill people that don't want to have to deal with multiple auth schemes just to get to the app that runs the autocannon. In fact, that only becomes a deterrent to use in an emergency situation. Hello PerSec - I'm not bagging on you, just being realistic!

Anyway, most security design these days is favoring a flatter architecture instead of a deep one, and relying on partitioning and difficult-to-beat unified identity management that gets people where they need to be faster and more efficiently - all courtesy of that there newfangled "cloud" computing thing that everyone's so in love with. Given the [un]wired aspect of SR4, I don't imagine security architecture being much different - so I typically bury my autocannons about 2 nodes down the pipe from the wireless-enabled node. Easy enough for a truly prepared deck-er...hacker to get to given a little bit of prep time and successes (and the software to back him up).

The ease and frequency with which hackers crack into nodes in SR4 seems like it would cause people to go "Hmmmmmmm...maybe we should be re-thinking the way in which we secure our electronic infrastructure"...but if you think about it, there aren't really that many true shadowrunners out there. You just end up seeing the hacking a lot *because you're doing it*!

Oh, the 4th Edition base book is actually pretty good. It's the stuff after that I generally have an issue with.

Not with the ease of the scriptkiddie approach. Genuine decker power should be dirt-common, especially with the cheap costs of pirated warez. When you're trying to present a challenge to a team, things need to be challenging. What's more, fiction needs to be believable even if reality isn't.

Real-time combat decking is a myth. There's not much for them to do, except shoot people. That minigun isn't going to go down in one IP, unless the person who set up its security was monumentally stupid.

Finally: Yes, *decking*. When I use the term, people know I'm talking about Shadowrun. What's the first thing that comes to mind with the other word? Not Shadowrun.

Isn't time really the "security" for hacking in SR4? Just as several have been saying, trying to hack things during combat is not much good...even a poor shooting hacker is worth more taking aim with a pistol then trying to shut down one opponent's cybereyes while the bullets are flying by.

I guess I've just come to terms with the fact that hacking is really easy to do if you have invested in the equipment and skills. If the hacker has taken the time to probe whatever the team is going up against, I give them full control, resolve it fast and move on. That equates to less opposition when on site. Now if they screw up and get "noticed", that means more mooks.

If some important digital data is stolen by a hacker, big deal. The corp is either going to deny, deny, deny, or they are going to send some heat in the hacker's direction (and that can be about anything, from LoneStar to a Runner Team). But at the point of the hack, an average hacker is going to be successful, so no need to slow the game down...let them have what they want and move on.

Or you're talking about Neuromancer which SR lifted wholesale. Bill Gibson just made up an acid-trippy word because the concept of computer hacking didn't exist in the popular parlance of 1984. And Gibson wasn't any kind of computer expert.

A hacker isn't going to be any good against a cybered opposing force unless he's any good with a gun. But if he needs to break a system to unlock a door to escape from pursuing baddies, there you go. A diceroll to get into the system, a roll of the dice for opposing countermeasures, a couple more rolls on either side and if the hacker wins, boom, the game continues. It's like twenty seconds out-of-game time. And if PCs are caught out in the open against a minigun, you're toasted no matter how many IPs the minigun gets. Unless you use (gosh!) cover.

You can always throw a lot of "but what if...!", "but what if...!" stuff at the concept but what it boils down to is if the GM is doing his job right and the game balances out, worrying about "realism" isn't an issue.

Here's another concept to mull: every PC in Shadowrun is exceptional in some way, be it in hacking, combat, or what have you. It stands to reason by the very nature of the way the game is set up that a hacker is going to have a distinct advantage against the rest of the world when it comes to computer systems (be it from programs, abilities, or attributes) just as the street sam will have an advantage when it comes to killing shit. That's how these fantasy games work. It wasn't any different in 1st through 3rd editions either. You simply needed a physical entry point into the system. And then came the long... tedious... boring... cybernetic dungeon crawl for the "decker".

That, friends, is a Pizza Party.

Hacking is dirt common. Hackers are dirt common now, they're just not out in the spotlight. Think about how often you hear about identity theft, stolen data, heck, pirated betas to games not due out for months.

You want an example? TJ Maxx (a discount clothing store) had over 45 million credit and debit card numbers stolen from their databases. How?


Source

This is the kind of hacking that is probably common in the Sixth World - and is probably the kind of stuff corporate 'Rix security is on the lookout for. SR level hackers are probably the very last thing in most of the sites that would get hit's minds.

As a note, we were one of the peole nailed in this. Bah.


Well, there's a few scenarios here. The first is the hack on the fly. Most security, unless we're talking a highly restricted area, probably leaves their security with the baseline rating 3 firewall, maybe jumping it up to four. If you've got the right gear (Remember? Unwired's got gear that'll give you 5IP) you can probably crack that security in no time.

Or, you've been a smart hacker and planned ahead, pre-hacking in to gain security privileges on the system and gaining leverage over that turret. Let security continue to think they've got the upper hand, all the way up to meeting up with the hacker's team, when their feeds go dead and they get booted from the system.

And if you didn't have time to plan ahead and you don't have the time to spare to hack on the fly, spoof. Spoof like hell.


To the small subset of people still using editions < SR4. Just sayin'.

But if security is set so that any scriptkiddie can take it out, why do you need a dedicated decker? I mean, if security isn't going to be a challenge for the PC, why bother even having one at all? You can accomplish the same thing with a team of agents, or someone with backup skills.

As far as pre-hacking goes, it should be worthless, since everything important should be hard-wired or off-line. Maybe as a recon run, intel gathering, that sort of thing: but not as a setup for a decking run.

Finally: When I say: "Frak!", you think of the new BSG. When I say: "Smeghead", you think Red Dwarf. When I say "Decking", you think Shadowrun. That's just how it goes.

We'll just have to differ on that as a matter of opinion and experience then. From what I've seen dealing with corp, gov, and related security, anything hardwired is still eventually connected to a network that is [un]wired. And often the number of hops between is not as much as most would think.

Not always when talking about high level government systems. They have no connection to wireless or the interwebs.

Not high-level, no. But your average military base already has wireless all over the place, people putting up rogue nodes so they can get access, blackberries in peoples' pockets, etc. It's kinda sad, really. If the mil would just invest a bit in centralizing access it would make things much better, but as it is general internet access is so crap that people are always finding ways to get it themselves. Couple that with a lack of regular audits and it's a recipe for disaster.

Everyone should just follow the NSA's model.

That's rather the point. Any one of us could hack a generic system. Heck, I have no meaningful computer skills, and I can crack wireless networks using scriptkiddie toys. You don't need to hire an expensive shadowrunner to penetrate those systems. You need runners to get into the high-security areas and get sensitive data, places where the wanna-bes can't go.

If you're setting up your high-powered PC's to face weenie security, you're not presenting them much of a challenge. You may as well handwave giving them the paydata. What's the point of having a decker in the first place?

Somehow I feel we've drifted off the original point, but them's the breaks.

My point in bringing that up is that *not everything is going to have a rating 8 Firewall with an 8 Analyze*. Some runs may, and those are the ones you have to prep for because you know that hacking on the fly ain't gonna cut it. Most challenging runs are going to have Firewalls in the area of 5 to 6 - you're not likely to drop that in 1 IP, which means you spend Edge to do so, or hope for the best. I'd say that's challenging.

You don't always put your gunslingers up against cyberzombie trolls do you? Sometimes they just have to go smash some mook face in order to advance the story, get some info, or make a point. Ditto for hacking.

To recap:
- Hacking rules *do* permit turn-by-turn hacking at the same rate that your gunslingers are shooting bullets (disbelief notwithstanding)
- You don't always have to hack the direct opposition to make a difference - in fact, it may not always be efficient
- Much like physical combat, some opponent networks are harder than others

At this point it just seems more that you don't like the rules or the paradigm - and hey, that's totally cool. There's plenty not to like, hence some of my houserules; to each their own. But I don't think there's any need to nitpick this one, because by now it's mostly a matter of opinion and how you choose to play/run your game.

Neither should the mooks just come at them in waves with no cover. The opposition needs to be a challenge for the team. The problem is that the only way to challenge a decker properly is with all-hardwired opposition, which makes them pretty redundant.


If you play Shadowrun Missions, you have no freedom to alter either the rules or the paradigm. Even within a home game environment, you don't have total freedom to change the rules or setting concepts willy-nilly. Someone may have based his character around the main paradigm; once game has started and you discover that they don't work, you can't just change the rules to what does.

*blink* This thread has drifted so far off-topic that I'm not sure what it was originally about, and I was the one who started it.


SOLVED. Okay, moving on... =P

Okay, if you guys still want to talk about hacking, then tell me this. In the meat-world, we have rules for shooting people, punching people, concealing equipment, falling damage, vehicle collisions, etc. Lots of situations are covered.

However, I don't know if this kind of rigor exists with the hacking rules. For instance, a common tactic is to hack a security camera, feed it to the party, and give them a view of what's going on. Great... but how is that interpreted mechanically? Do you limit it to better descriptions of the enemies (like "there are four more coming up the stairs, and you spot grenades on their belts!"), or do you grant the party +1 dice pool bonuses for all attacks, or -1 to enemy attacks because they no longer have that advantage, or what?

There are a million other things like that, and I would hate to arbitrate on a case-by-case basis. That's not to say the rules can cover everything, but I would expect a few baselines to give the GM an idea for how to do it.

My main question: do the new rulebooks clear up situations like this (e.g., a list of cool stuff to do along with associated bonuses), or do they just add more layers of complexity with fancy new items?

Easier way of putting it:

There used to be a bunch of house rules that let players build characters with the karma system. Runner Companion introduced a karma system character creation, and now I'm guessing those house rule sets have fallen out of fashion.

There were a few huge FAQs and house rule guides to "fixing" the Matrix. Has Unwired (or Runner Companion, or anything else) made those house rules obsolete, or do people still use them?

Oh, finally: someone mentioned hackers could get 5 IPs? WTF?

That is pretty easy to answer actually. Here's how it happens.
Default Hacker in VR: 2IP in Cold Sim, 3IP in Hot Sim
Add in 'Simsense Booster' Cyberware (AUG, P.37): 3IP in Cold Sim, 4IP in Hot Sim
Add a 'Simsense Accelerator' Commlink Mod (UW, P.198): 3IP in Cold Sim, 5IP in Hot SIM (Has rule exemption to limit of 4IP)

It just adds layers of complexity. What you can accomplish with the Matrix has always been vauge in SR4, later books just game you more ways of doing nothing.

Oh, and 5 IP's? Both deckers and otaku can go up to 5. According to uncle AH, it was added to prevent adept deckers from trashing traditional ones in AR. I'll let you decide if it was effective or not.

Ummm, I built an Adept Decker in the 800 point thread who has 5IP. He also throws something between 24 and 30 dice with only rating 6 programs. And his DP in all the medical skills is 20 before any equipment bonuses. Plus he is very good with a PAB, so he will rewrite your mind and make you a good little Sith Apprentice.

Actually, I think: "Damn childish censored swearing!" (Which, at least for movies and TV series, is usually dropped in German dubbing anyway.) In all the groups I've played SR with in the last 15 years shadowslang was hardly used, except maybe "chummer". After all, if somebody's an asshole why should we call him "drekhead" instead of, you know, asshole?

Maybe because he's being a drekhead rather than an asshole? I found that SR profanity goes down much more smoothly if you consider it as augmenting rather than replacing traditional Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. If the Irish can find room for "feck" somewhere between "oh, bother" and "fuck", imagining that "frag" goes somewhere in there isn't that hard.

~J

Perhaps "hoophole" might be a little more appropriate than drekhead.

The variant SR slang is a direct knockoff on the world of Cyberpunk by Mike Pondsmith. Mike also wanted to have "edgy" slang and apparently isn't so big on the classics like "fuck" so he made up a whole slew of slang that would make zero sense to anyone who a) wasn't raised in the hippy era with it's Nubian roots for African-Americans, b) wasn't a computer geek, and c) has any clue how real slang evolves from older slang.

I sometimes encouraged the use, but alot of that was b/c of the hosts kids or the store I was playing in had a few kids running around.

and if they had added the needed pages for the details your requesting, people would just go SR1-3 and leave the task up to a npc, as it would be a solo game all its own...

its a no win scenario for catalyst really. but then it would not surprise me if thats the agenda behind said wish for details. show that SR4 cant work no matter what, and attempt to force a roll back to SR3.x?

sounds a bit like how cyberpunk v3 have become a discontinuity, as it didnt take the game where people had been dreaming of where it would be go, instead taking it where cyberpunk literature had been going during the same time...

If SR4 can't work, I don't know how SR3.whatever miraculously could.

I've been running the same campaign for exactly one year (toot! toot! Happy Anniversary!), so that's been 52 4+ hour sessions. And I have never ONCE run into any sort of rules problem or game play problem involving hacking, rigging or the Matrix. Most of my rules wrangling has involved vehicle combat (note to devs: new optional vehicle-usage rules would be awesome! k thanx bye) and resolving multiple Initiative Passes with weird combat stuff such as PCs and NPCs playing hot potato with a hand grenade.

Hey Veggie, sorry we took this quite off-topic, but hopefully there's some value and insight to be gained by our witty [hacking] banter



Depends on the mooks, but sure. I think a system node with Firewall 4 and Analyze 4 is challenge enough for a half-combat-hacker-half-combat-medic, and those are not rare. A full on deck-er...sorry, hacker still stands a chance of failure (and detection during hacking on the fly) if the dice aren't working out in their favor. When that happens and cybercombat begins, I just weave it into the combat that's already occurring on the physical "plane" and go from there. Cybercombat operates on the same IPs and such so it works just fine [for me].



Fair enough. I guess that's why I don't play in official tourneys and the like. There hasn't been a game system that I haven't houseruled in some way, which doesn't lend itself to such endeavors. I do make sure my players know well in advance that I may tweak the game system *during the game*, but by that same token I'm totally open to character "respecs" so long as they don't deviate too far from the original concept.

Back on the topic of hacking, I think there is some value in the whole scenario involving the hacker getting at the highly-secured data *while* a firefight is taking place and having to physically be in situ. This was a common scenario in old SR versions that was more often than not turned into an NPC endeavor simply because the decking rules were so cumbersome - not to mention on a different timescale. With the timescale now roughly equivalent and the rules being fairly easy to grasp, this should be a pretty doable scenario. Note that I haven't experienced this myself, BlueMax's half-hacker specializes primarily in cracking nodes, and not specifially around grabbing data (read: Needs better progs).

What, haven't you ever played Star Wars, and called someone a "Scruffy nerfherder"?

Shadowslang variants exist in every setting. They're part of what makes it into a setting. They don't have to be real words, even: the Lord of the Rings wouldn't be the same without people swearing in Elvish and Dwarvish.


Like it isn't now? The pizza problem keeps popping up.

Dice can go against anyone's luck. I've personally got an unbroken string of critical botches, at least one every session I GM, going back to the late 90's. That's over ten years, and that includes the SR3 days when you had to roll all 1's to botch.

But that's beside the point. A Firewall 4, Analyze 4 node isn't going to stand a chance against a decker throwing 15-20 dice to hack it. Heck, a Firewall/Analyze 6 node isn't likely to be much of a challenge either. The worst it'll do is slow a decker down, which compromises his actions in real-time combat.

Our GM pretty much only ever threw 5s and 6s at us because of how easy they were.

Even if you look at the sample systems the lowest rated one is like a bar with Firewall 4, Analyze 3 or something like that.

So should a rating 4 node stand a chance against a decker with program rating 6, skill 6, appropiate spec, in Hot-SIM, and four dice from appropiate hacking augments (beyond the hot-SIM module)? An extremely experienced hacker with solid hardware should be (and is) able to reliably beat standard nodes. Good, yes?

I would warn those who try out the matrix rules to not follow into the "r6 is likely no challenge" trap. Rating 6 nodes with Analyse running have pretty good passive protection for anything beyond user access. It will not "at worst slow the hacker down". At worst it will make the player of the hacker totally frustrated with the PCs inability to accomplish anything.

Well, I already mentioned German dubbing... In Das Imperium schlägt zurück Leia says: "Sie aufgeblasener, schwachsinniger, mieser, widerwärtiger Wookietreiber!" - in English: "You pompous, half-witted, wretched, vile wookie-herder". Not a word about "nerfs".

BTW, a more literal German translation of her tirade would've been: "Sie hochnäsiger, schwachsinniger, dreckiger Nerftreiber!"

I prefer Fierfeck, Yes Yes.

Oddly, I haven't seen anything but the most glacial node manage to do more than slow a good decker down.


Forgot about the German translation, but the point stands. "Go kiss a Wookie!" immediately brings Star Wars to mind, and shadowslang automatically brings Shadowrun to mind.

What about Defensive Hackers in the node? Has that helped any?

That's part of what, for me at least, changes a node from IC-y to glacial.