Why you think I try and shoot you to get chicken back?

Chicken can take care of self! Bye Bye!

<chicken shapeshifts into eldritch horror, is later seen heading down road with bag of ammo in beak>





-karma

What gives you that idea?

depeds entirely on how many corpscripts.

I had a face character who usually carried corpsscript from 3-4 differnt corps, had bank accounts from several corps. He even managed to pick up SiN's from several wage slaves and used them and their bank accounts.

Corpscripts from only 1 corp.. that's bought. From several? That's genius.

Like hell it is going to die out. However, Hard Cash in SR is more complicated than the ubiquous dollars of today.

First, there is the dollar. While worth not much, it is effectively the money of the underclass and for any street fare in SR - because all this fad of everyone being all about wireless money transfer in a world where the best possible encryption is worth shit boggles my mind a little too much. Dollars, like other paper money, can be had at banks, though it's more amatter of ordering them and receiving them there, and not all banks will issue dollars. Dollars are counterfeited in an alarmingly large number of cases.

For more upscale business, the Nuyen is used, though (dollars will simply not be accepted there), preferredly as digital money.

Also, there are corp scrip (paper money issued by corps, which is only good within the corp, but technically equates to the nuyen), and other currencies - Irish and Britsh pound, Euro, Rubles, Rand. Also, some governments print out Nuyen notes with ZOGB permission, which are quite highly priced among the more shady and less fortunate of society.

I don't agree that today's developing world can be equated so generally to SR4'S SINless. China is closest to how I handle this, sans the limits on citydwelling; most SINless get by as manual labor in sweat shops or construction (drones are more expensive to maintain with the crap wages these people demand, and because my SR is not supposed to be I,Robot), or Brazil with it's gangs that duke it out with grenade launchers. India too, especially for the Crazies and the havoc they cause every once in a while. Africa though, no. While my SR is a world gone bad in large parts, it is not post-apoc.


Even a rating 6 fake SIN is worth shit under current rules. SINner is not a flaw in SR4, it'S close to mandatory if you do not want to play Zappin Inna Barrens type campaigns.


Neo-Anarchist's, Sprawl Survival Guide, Tir Taingire, London books, among others. Of course, this could all be handwaived by a typical SR4 explanation along the lines of "after the crash, people distrusted physical currency because OMG WIFI IS SO LEET!!!!!"

After all, after the Matrix crashed on them, causing all kinds of bad things to happen, most people chose to openly embrace a much, much less secure and dependable second version of the Matrix with open arms.

I dunno, sabs, I feel like that's pretty normal. Having multiple corp scrips is the same as having different foreign currencies in the pre-Euro days: unremarkable for someone who 'traveled' a lot.

Why not? Look at what's repeated itself in history yet we flock to things that will make them worse anyhow?

Plagues come to mind...

But the Panatomic canal was ever built. It's a difference between being careless with vaguely similar threats and stepping on a mine, loosing a foot and then burying another mine in your foregarden.

In any way, which plagues are you refering to?

All of them. And there's been a few.

We have a pandemic on the same guage as the infamous Black Plague, we're talking "Captain Tripps" from The Stand with the overpopulation and speed of transportation. Not to mention the lack of political willpower to wall off entire cities if need-be in a lot of First World countries.

We may have killed off Smallpox, but there are a lot of others out there just as deadly, and now have drug resistant strains.

Never underestimate human nature for flocking to something new and shiny despite the problems inherant in it.

But the attitude towards the Matrix in SR4 is more likeknowing full well about AIDS and it's transmission and refusing to test blood donations AND introducing mandatory blood donations where needles are routinely reused.

But enough hijacking. I refuse to believe paper currency will be replaced in a world where the Matrix already has shown how vilatoile it is. Technomancers have a harder time hacking bank notes than bank accounts and all.

And you can save your money in old Ammo Boxes that you wall up in your apartment.

All you'd need is a sledgehammer or a Troll buddy to get at your hidden stash of "HOLY DREK" funds.

I'd prefer to hide it in various places or even in a locker at a bona fide upper class bank (anonymously). Troll would get himself killed there.

Not saying this is foolproof, but at least it's a door lock, so to speak, as opposed to having your house without doors and a big sign advertising what it'S contents are worth.

I find the trend in SR to be as perplexing as some RL policy arguments. If a little tech causes trouble with crashes and people stealing it then more and more open tech will solve this? meh? Distributed wireless networks are much easier to keep working when they are planned and distributed well, but they make security seemingly infinity worse. But as with the RL strange arguments the agenda can be seen easily and in SR its simple: make hackers, still hurts that they are no longer deckers, more relevant and needed on a run and able to be at the run. And yes they were needed and even more so required to be at the run before but now it takes much less thinking on everyone part.

Last week, I posted a link about mesh networks being used in Australia. It's not a ridiculous, unworkable idea.

Just pretend that all the questions you have were already answered by smart people whose job it was to make it all work. If it *were* dangerously broken, it wouldn't exist. Hehe.

well have a cookie and feel good about yourself.

I have yet to read a whitepaper involving wireless distributed network security that made me feel ok about using it on anything even slightly secure. Last year at a instrumentation conference the wireless security talks all still seemed to revolve around keeping people from snooping the signal in the first place and not using it on the most secure parts of the network.

Yes, but this is The Future™. Six freaking decades.

And I will feel good about myself. Hehe.

Do you realize the rules support a highly unsecured network that is rife with hackers not one that is secure and relatively free of hackers and viruses?

Yup. But, and here's the tricky bit, it *must* be basically safe or the world couldn't exist.

Except that it isn't, as the entire thing is trivial to hack into with very little in the ways of knowledge or skills, just some nearly freely available programs (the availability limits on hacking programs are all below 12, IIRC).

In fact, the system is so insecure that corporations need to employ a host of computer viri to keep the hackers out!

yet if they make it to secure, one may well risk that a single mega-corp gets to much weight, and so tip the scales into a corp war.

its a bit like the drug wars, as while one want to stop the drugs, they also help fund various covert operations in a plausibly deniable way.

heck, it may well be that by the time the hackers learn the tricks, they are being mentored in the art of not making a spectacle, so as to avoid the corps and GOD having to bring out the big guns. But in a way, removing the ability to burn hardware, and making AR immune to black code kinda lowered the risk factor of going after classified info.

Whatever works. Banks still exist, secrets still exist, so we have to assume the setting works.

Or just apply a coat or two of the Wifi-blocking paint, or do whatever else they do to make it a wifi secure area.

The rules the world works by say otherwise. That's like saying the earth has to be flat because you
believe it is, all evidence and laws of physics be damned.


What?

I reread that sentence three times and still don't get what you want to say. If the Matrix is securable and every system is not open to walk in, somehow one corp will get too much weight?

And it's not like Horizon wouldn't totally win a corp war by default and author appeal anyway.


WiFi paint is worth shit once your system connects to the outside. You can just route yourself in otherwise, and with encryption and general Matrix security being the joke it is, you can save yourself the WiFi paint. The only thing this stuff is good for is to keep TM contained in their holding cells.

The only way to be secure in the SR4 wifi world is to opt out and resort to hardwired SR3 technology, where everything is wifi disabled, and that connects to the outside via a chokepoint that is manually opened, or something.

In other words, the only way for the SR4 Matrix to be safe under current rules is to have it stop to exist.

No way Certified Cred sticks are going away.

Too useful for anyone wanting to have a little untraceable cred.

This is the only thing that is "unhackable" in ShadowRun, yet, the same technology can't be used to secure other systems.

Why?

its still technically possible to forge certified cred, its just very difficult. It would seem the orbital vault is sitting on some crypto-tech that its not sharing with others.

I wonder why.

Oh, right, it's owned by the AAAs, and they really like their money secure and stable. Counterfeiting makes a money less stable (Look at what the "Superbucks" are doing to the USA. Or the CAN$100 bill when fakes of it started coming out.).

I just wonder what happens when they catch folks that make fake . I'm thinking something horrible. Like being just handed over to Aztechnology or something...

not really sure if the orbital bank is owned by the AAAs, or if its a separate entity that also rents out space for the corporate court.

It is. ZO and the Geimenschaft are owned by the AAA corporations; the principal companies that borrow money from it to finance their day-to-day activities.

ah yes, now i remember, slow brain day. holding shares in the ZO is the assured way of getting a seat on the court. Not holding such share makes it possible to have ones seat revoked by majority vote or something like that. Makes me think about the permanent members of the UN security council...

Every AAA corporation receives a share in the bank upon attaining AAA status - that's their ticket onto the board. When you lose the AAA status, you lose the share.

i could have sworn one of the newcomers have a seat, but do not hold a share. Not sure what corp it is tho. Neonet is there thanks to villiers managing to hold onto the fuchi share all this time. A voice in the back of my head keeps claiming its wuxing.

Both Horizon and Wuxing have attained seats as of 4th. I'll have to check my sources when I get home and see who snagged CATCo's share.

horizon, from what i can read in the SR4a opening text.

while i have yet to snag corporate guide, corporate download claims that Yamatetsu, Wuxing and Catco (now Horizon) can have their AAA status revoked, while the funding corps Ares, Aztechology, Novatech (now Neonet. via their Fuchi backstory) Mitsuhama, Renraku, Saeder-krupp and Shiawase cant.

I picked up most of my current info actually from 6WA, IIRC. I'll be picking up Corporate Guide soonish - I just have to 'tweak' my budget.

yet to read 6WA.

I have no doubt Corp Guide will have more of the info we want. =P

So that the game can be playable by hackers, but the game still needs to be played (to actually earn money) by everyone else?

Yes, thank you, the reason money is unhackable is for "game balance."

Of course, silly me.

Duh. What's the problem, exactly? Everything works fine.

Well...I mean, it is. I'm sorry, what sort of answer do you want?

Money can't be hackable, or no one would ever go, y'know, do Shadowruns.

Everything else -- to some degree or another -- has to be potentially hackable, because it's a part of the genre, it's a major character type, and downloadable Macguffins are central to the theme of the game and probably the single most common adventure/Shadowrun goal.

So most things are hackable, and money ain't. All sarcasm aside...so what? It's just the way the game is, and it helps the game work the way it does. I'm sorry if that's not the answer you're after, but...*shrugs* Oh well.

You can already hack lifestyle, easily getting Middle for free. I mean, that's as much as most people *ever* aspire to.

If you're willing to spend edge, you can hack yourself a high lifestyle pretty easily.

Right. Spending Edge isn't within what I meant by 'easy' in my post, but you're certainly right. It's not a highly-optimized DP either, maybe like 11? I forget.

Another way you could handle this is to allow money to be hackable, but apply inflation in proportion to how often it's done and to what degree.

Suppose that a character cannot afford the 10 Million for permanent high lifestyle, so they decide to hack their account and add it in doing whatever they need to do to cover their tracks. They don't get caught but at the same time they have just added 10 Million Nuyen to the money supply. Now compard to the Global Money Supply 10 Million is nothing, but since hacking money isn't all that difficult as was pointed out assume that lots of people also did it that month. So to counter the players ill gotten gain divide 10 million by their current earned nuyen and then use that as a multiplier for all prices to "account for inflation" then watch as their jaw drops when they go to buy an Ares Predator and find out that it costs 35,000 Nuyen because the value of the Nuyen has dropped precipitously. If they make a habit of hacking money make the modifier cumulative for each time they do it.

Ha, oh jeez. And then the world explodes, and it's a post-apoc dystopian future, instead of a cyberpunk one.

I actually found it led to a game where everyone quickly agreed that they wouldn't hack money and could accept that the corps would treat counterfeiting & hacking money as a crime far worse than murder.

I'm horrible with teh hackins. EXPLAIN

'Spoofing Life', there's an example on p99, Unwired. Extended Test (Hacking + Spoof, 1 day). Middle is Threshold 12, so AFAIK you can pull that off (on average) with 10 DP (Spoof 5, couple ranks in Hacking, couple bonus mods) in 5 days. Low is *much* easier. You can also redo the test anytime you want, which (maybe) effectively means no DP-reduction for each successive roll.

Runner's Companion has rules for Advanced Lifestyle Spoofing, which is basically the same, with all those RC lifestyle options, and glitches create Negative Lifestyle qualities (for that month).

Interesting. Sleaze your way into a wageslave enclave. Make for a heck of a safehouse...

Well, it doesn't let you into restricted areas per se, but it makes you appear to be a normal paying nobody.