In SR4, as in SR3, Electronical Warfare is handled with the Elecrtronics skill (group). But yes, it can be handled with specialisation (SR3) or just upping the EW skill, not the entire skill group. And she supposedly is really damn good in that.


Ok, point. In the Oshii movie, it definitly is in her skin, though, or she'd not strip naked in front of that crab tank.

heh, that i think have more to do with oshii then with how the tech works.

or it could be that the tv series are trying to be a bit more family friendly (us and japanese attitudes there are very close imo).

I don't know, Oshii always appeared as one of the least sexual anime directors ...


It's notably tamer than the Manga are, at least. don't agree with you on US and japanese definitions of family values, but let's not stray there.

heh, could be my memory failing but i do recall a comment at one time about the first movie, where it was stated something about an artist that loved to draw breasts.

but this just highlights the point i was trying to make early on, the manga, series, and movies diverge on how the person is presented. and thats even with the people creating the series going back to the manga creator for info.

I'm actually pretty glad they kept the crazy sex stuff to a minium for the series. I've seen some of his erm... other work and it would have really detracted from the story in my opinion.

I think her skin is still therm optic camo in the series it's just that she has clothing that is tied into that system. It's also shown that other people in section 9 have similiar clothing.

Plus I wouldn't be comfortable having to strip off my flak jacket everytime I wanted to go invisible. I don't care if i have armored skin, getting shot is still uncomfortable.

Plus it takes a nonzero amount of time to take off your clothes, even CYBERCLOTHES, and it's not like they have budgetary considerations to worry about.

Yeah "Hold on I need to take off my clothing" is not something you really want to say before a fire fight .


OT: I have to say that Japan does have quiet a bit in common with the US in terms of "family values" at least when it comes to popular broadcasts on relatively public channels. I know that there were episodes of Cowboy Bebop that weren't aired because of offensive material. I forget if any of that censorship happend to GiTS but I'm sure there were a few episodes that got shit canned because of the topics or approach.

Now Japanese mores as a whole, that's another matter. There's so much pent up sexual angst here it's painful I can only hope that they loosen up sometime in the next 60 years.

I can only second that.


Plus, it makes you look much like an idiot, with RuPo'd clothes readily available.


Well, they do - but yeah, their budgetary concerns are on a whole other level.

That said the GiTS manga did go into what a sex BTL probably feels like (and some fluff on how it works) and it gave amusing imagery of someone dipping into a simsense feed they didn't know how to interpet.


God I want to see that in a game now.
*Character starts to remove all his clothing right before a firefight*
*Character #2 gives him a look*
"What the FUCk are you doing Johnson?"
"I uhm..."
"Put your damn clothes back on boy! There's killing to be done."

Nah, that was a standard cybersex node. Though Bateau punching a cybereye of his out because of an overdose of hot lesbian sex was cute.



Y'know ... I know of a character who did just that, with the aim to seduce the OpFor. In the middle of a raging firefight, though.

I thought Batou got hacked by the Major and /forced/ to punch his own eye. I seem to recall that being a popular past time for her


I can see it now:
"Dude, I think that guys taking his clothes off?"
"Seriously? Wow, no shit, he's pretty hot too."
'Yeah, too bad I want to see if I can shoot his nuts off one by one with my new scope."

Wasn't he all "oh, all those juices, yearch, I cannot take it!"?


We're talking about a nympho elf max-charisma chick here, but otherwise ... exactly.

That's true but I think that's abou the time the Major realized he was there. There was some indication she hacked him.

Fine change the line to "I want to see if I can shoot her ovaries from here..."

Okay, that's a viable interpretation. And she loved slapping Bateau around in the old Manga ...

She does the fist hack in the series too, which was freakin hilarious as far as timing and the face she made after he socked himself.

She does? I must've forgotten that!

Yeah it was at the end of one of the episodes and Batou is working out and jokingly challenges her to take him on. She nods and than pauses for a moment, than Batou socks himself and she smiles and walks away. One of my favorite bits from the series

It is in the first TV series. I think episode 8 or 9. It was one I saw for this 'research'. I think a Stand alone episode with the med students selling organs. At the end Batou teases her "Hey major Macho, when you going to upgrade to a male chasis?" He says she will have more strength and authority.
She gives a cute anime smile, and he knocks himself flat.
Togasa: "You ok big guy?"
Lying there Batou just raises the 'thumbs up.'

I think the problem is we are mixing the major from films, TV and manga and SR3 and SR4 (I do not have SR4 and did not know of the change in electronics).

Join us on the dark side and get SR4.

I am already on the dark side, come back to us! (I play in the same group as Snow Fox, you might have noticed she is adamant about not changing. the rest of the group is liek that, they spent enough money on core books and to be fair, it works well for us.)

then again, I'm already like that with dnd, no 4th edition for me. hmm, I'll be a diehard in only one game line, gotta change for the new srun.

Actually, the name of the skill in SR4 is Electronic Warfare and it´s part of the Cracking skill group (not of the Electronics one).

So, I'm almost a total Ghost in the Shell virgin, having only seen a couple episodes of the SAC series. Is the best place to start the first movie?

I'd actually argue for watching SAC and SAC 2nd Gig first, the movies are a separate continuity, and there is some support for the manga (or at least, the manga I ahve) being AFTER SAC 2nd Gig.

It is? Oops, my bad then.


Something I understand only too well.

i think this thread started out with SR4 in mind, specifically focused on jarhead cyborgs from augmentation, using the antroform drones in arsenal.

I concur about watching the series first, it's a must stronger work in my opinion. That said I really enjoyed the first movie. The second movie was pretty but spent way to much time going on about philosophy and so forth, some vaguely interesting discussions but I'm not sure that it enhanced the movie at all. Didn't see the third movie.

I consider D&D 4th ed the Vista of the D&D game. Draw what conclusions you will. SR4 is kinda like XP, sure it has issues but it certainly gets up and running decently.

I have to say that the main reason I'm playing SR4 is because I have a bunch of new (to RPGs) players and all they can get their hands on is SR4 stuff. SR4 seems to excel at getting a game up and running for newbies with the minimum hassle and I appreciate that. Now that I've been playing it for awhile I probably won't go back to SR3. Because I have newbies I've been able to avoid the trouble areas of rigging and decking because they take one look at the rules and say "So... if I play a street sam I can shoot people 3 times a turn right?". We've just now introduced a newbie Rigger and we'll see if I can slowly break him into the errated rules.

But back to the topic at hand. What sort of background skills would you give her? The manga seems to indicate she'd have quiet a bit of skill in simsense editing and she has an enormous number of contacts (course she's been killing folks for going on several decades so this make sense to me, plenty of favors to call in). The movie indicates she has a fascination with diving and that's not an entirely useless skill for someone who, if she glitched a diving roll, would end up at the bottom of the sea.

She also has to have at least a 1 in origami

close but not quite. 9mm bullets do not fire from a .38 sp/.357 mag. they are very different in sizes-not diameter but length. I have a S&W .357 mag and a .38special. The magnum can handle .38sp rounds but the gun sold as .38sp does not have the structure to survive magnum rounds-and the bitch kicks in my hand firing just .38sp. The mag is actually more comfortable to fire. Daddy's Little Ninja's husband has a 9mm and we've compared rounds.

The .38 special is not a .38 caliber. You're right. It is actually .357th of an inch in diameter but not a magnum. To call it a .38 is a 'vanity round.' The way differnet women's designers have differnet sizes. I know men's cloths are measurments but owmen's clothes aren't. What is a '6' for one designer is a '4' for another and they hope women will buy the '4' even though it's the same size as the other guy's '6' because then the woman, vain things that we are, can claim 'I wear a 4.' The .38special is that. The manufacturer was competeing with a company that made .36 calibers. in a guys' 'mine bigger than yours' marketing move they competed with the .36 caliber by claiming there's was a .38 (2/100ths of an inch, guys geez) "38 caliber?" "Uh, no, .38 special"

To look at a .357 and 38special bullets are identical unless you see the marks stamped on the base. but both are substancially longer than a 9MM

One-handed origami specialisation, please.

the thread has no 'sr3' or 'sr4' header.

Point. In SR3, I tried building her as an adept with deltaware full-borg conversion, three geased points and 750 KArma. I'll see if I can find her stats again and post them here.

i sat down now and looked at giving her a cyberlimb based body, as a suite.

average body 6
(maxed out customized synthetic limbs on a human, no added body mods)
average strength 7
(maxed out limbs again, now with 3 added points in each arm, bringing them to the max augmented for a human)
average agility 8
(again maxed, but with 3 point in both arms and legs)
armor 3
(1 in head, 2 in torso)
hydraulic jacks 6
(taking up that much room in each leg)

unless im reading the jacks wrong, she can jump about 5-6 meters straight up, and 17,5 meters forward standing still!

hell, she can drop 12 meters down before getting hurt at all...

essence cost is about 5,63. but thats all standard grade (probably needed to shoehorn that comlink in there, unless it can fit into the skull or something if i strip the armor out)

Put the link into the body. Actually, put four links there. After all, she says her firewall is four-layeres ... four successive links, three iced to the max for gateway duty, one being the mother link. And make it deltaware. Section 9 isn't really that short of money.

sadly, a comlink requires 2 capacity, and a syntetic torso only fit 5 total...

as for her having a 4 layer firewall could just as well be covered by a rating 4 firewall in SR terms. or it could simply be that she is running 4 levels of user access, with only the highest being able to access her ghost and similar regions.

still, if unwired brings virtual machines back, she could be running 4 of those on top of each other.

at least thats a impression im left with when they are hacking the brain of kuse in a season 2 episode.

btw, i forgot to give her cybereyes and ears...

so after giving her all delta and cybereyes and ears rating 4 (should be able to fit most mods she have or need) im landing on about 3,26 essence cost.

also, i stripped out the armor fully. instead i put the comlink in the skull and put more agility into the torso. so now the avarage agility is 8,5. should that be rounded to 9? even before rounding she should (if she can hit a treshold of 18, ouch) be able to jump 18 meters horizontally.

Just to comment here on GitS stuff, Togasa's gun is the Mataba, A semiautomatic revolver. Speaking from experience it is wonderfully accurate, there's virtually no recoil from a .357 mag round.
the down side, the puppy is big and bulky I'm petite and a normal size male might be able to hide it unnder a jacket, but it's still a honking big gun. It is also very loud and each time you pull the tirgger, there is a blast of air in your face.

didn't the company that made the Mataba go out of business?

That's ridiculously low level for the major. She expressed great surprise at being hacked once. She wouldn't with a rating 4 firewall.


Unless it also brings back decks (aka portable supercomputers), that would drain processor too much to be of any use, restrictive as it already is.


Neat. Sounds much like the major.


Having never used it, that's good to know. And the gun does look neat.

well given how the heros of any entertainment medium is often larger then life, and SR never was intended to simulate anything like it, im not sure we will get close to recreate her fully. and the net of gits are more like a story tool then a fully fleshed out system.

hell, that may be where games and writing in cyberpunk diverge most. the net of cyberpunk works are never really explained in their workings, its just there for a collection of brave or foolhardy people to venture into, a frontier of sorts. for it to be used in a game, it needs stats and rules, that inherently removes the mystery.

hmm, this echo a discussion i had about recreating magic on a game as well. it often turns into just another tool. but in writing it isnt just a tool, its something thats barely understood by its "users", something that can go unpredictably wrong at the best of times.

Don't know. but it wouldn't surprise me. They are damned expensive finky guns.

4 layers of firewall can just as easily be 4 layers of security. Without getting overly complicated, I've got 3 layers.

Level 1 is encryption (something that never appears in GitS). Level 2 is a standard firewall. Level 3 is databomb. Admittedly, databomb is closer to a GitS "attack barrier" but whatever. Fail to get past layer 1 or 2 and you'll never get in, while layer 3 will cause damage and sound an alarm.

The big differnece is the way the major and Batou can jump out of airplane, leap tall buildings in a single bound or bounce from building to building without any problems.

check my finding with maxed out hydraulic jacks in cyberlegs, in combo with near max agility. a 12 meter drop without damage? no problem. 18 meter forward jump from standing, possible if you make the threshold.