Yeah, sorry, I don't really buy into that iconography thing. If it doesn't make a real difference, then it just gets ignored; then it's just the hacker's player trying to figure out what he's really dealing with and he'd be happier if the GM gave it to him straight. YMMV, but that's how it is for me.



See, the normal game system doesn't really do anything like that. So you'd be houseruling that in anyway. The question is, are you putting loads of effort into patching a game system that wasn't worth saving to begin with?



But the consequences are exactly the same, so it's just confusing without adding any real difference. Again YMMV, but it doesn't impress me or the people I play with.
I tend to play hackers like people who actually understand computers; they prefer a minimal GUI. Why waste processor time on iconography if it's just going to do the same thing anyway?



... Which is exactly the point of having house rules; the RAW rules aren't good.

So instead of tracking heaps and heaps of programs, you could just track about 4-5 of them and that would be enough. What's really needed is some overhaul of the hacking system that reduces bookkeeping while increasing the number of different ways to do things.

See, deek, it just seems like that's a really odd double standard: Skill*2, but Program*1. Thanks for your account of how well it worked, anyway.

We have the so-called "Look what's in this pocket" rule.
Minding that Shadowrun is a game largely centered around equipment, and nobody's able to remember EVERYTHING, I let the players spend a point of edge to produce a single piece of equipment of up to 12F availability and 500Y of cost. It's supposed that the character remembered to take it for the mission, or it just happened to be in the pocket. I find that it eliminates a lot of deadlocks in games nicely.
And yeah, I am aware that it's a bit prone to abuse. I just warned the players against abusing it, unless I decide to abuse them in return :3

Also, we don't use the standard training times (supposing that the characters use the time not accounted for for these activities) and availability rules (mostly up to GM, you either have contacts who can get you the thing sooner or later or not), because frankly, they're rather clumsy.

Also, each wheeled drone in the book is supposed to have a walker equivalent made by the market competitor of the original's producer, and vice versa (except for humanoid robots, of course).

We also allow critter powers to be counterspelled, let all devices with Signal over 1 to lower or raise their Signal rating with a Complex Action at will, and use a homebrew movement rules system.

[quote name='Ascalaphus' date='Jan 13 2011, 02:28 PM' post='1030567'
So instead of tracking heaps and heaps of programs, you could just track about 4-5 of them and that would be enough. What's really needed is some overhaul of the hacking system that reduces bookkeeping while increasing the number of different ways to do things.
[/quote]

While I disagree with you that the iconography solution isn't valid (have you played really old D&D, where every weapon does 1d6 damage regardless of what it is? People still choose different weapons...) I'm interested in hearing ideas that fit with this last idea.

I think that combat isn't terribly onerous - could we model hacking on combat, and what would that look like?

On that note ('heaps of programs')… how many pieces of gear do you carry? Programs are your entire set of gear for a complete VR world. *shrug*.

I don't like my D&D that dated either. By 2nd edition weapons were already differentiated, and for a reason.

Modelling cybercombat more on "real" combat would be a possible approach; you'd need stuff like Terrain, Distance, Cover, Ammo, different modes of Attack..maybe even weapons...

And I think that issue may have come up from my players. Its been a while, but I'm trying to think whether I changed anything about it. For some reason, I am thinking that for tests with programs, that the skill x 2 limit was removed and it fell to just being capped by program. I'm not 100% sure on that and its certainly not consistent with the rest of the mechanics, but then again, matrix has always been different...

I think, when SR4A came out and suggested a 20 die dice pool cap for, was it social rolls?, that I just put that out there across the board. At that point, my players had sufficiently put points in skills to diversify and they weren't really trying to max out every dice pool they could.

To be honest, the whole reason I put any sort of caps on my games was because of all the horrendous minmax stories I read on DSF before we started play. I went in thinking the worst and was proactively trying to limit my players from dumping everything into one or two skills. The limits were a great way to get that ball rolling the way I wanted our game to go and once my players were conditioned, then I removed some of the limits. It also helped since my players, and I, were new to SR4...

I think it would have been a good alternative to make VR based on mimicking the real world. Similar to how you can astrally perceive or project, its an overlay of the real world, with some auras and the like, maybe being different, but in general, you can navigate around the real world, just with a different filter. If the matrix would be like that, then you would have all your same combat rules, with line of sight, range and different modes of attack. You could then even have used it to scout things out, as you could travel through the matrix like a mage projects and travels astrally.

Now, some places on the matrix would be hidden or they may sculpt things to look drastically different than the real world, but generally, it would be just another reality based on the physical.

I think that could have made the matrix less confusing in play and also given the hackers reason to physically be with the group. Granted, they could still go places wirelessly in the matrix, but for general runs, it would probably just be easier to handle the matrix like the astral, based on the physical world.

P 2.0 does not exist. Might be nice if you run a "legit" media campaign, but for shadow ops?

But that would be such a waste of the potential of the Matrix: infinite space. Why restrict yourself to three dimensions? You could easily have buildings with insides bigger than the outside in the Matrix. Also, why anchor things to a specific meat-location at all?

You could still have the insides of building bigger than the outside, or entry points to some systems that randomly open and close that are not anchored to the meat location at all, but those would be exceptions that you could bring in from time to time when you wanted to showcase more matrix "stuff" at the table. The rest of the time, it would just be a digital clone of the physical, hacking and spoofing doors and cameras in VR, or scouting locations or buildings and seeing commlink personas moving around and data traffic...

To me, it would have made a lot of our games flow better when we got into matrix actions and legwork.

Hmm. On further thought, that does have some great possibilities. At least using the earthmap as a kind of top-level interface for the Matrix - for finding nodes relating to companies and such - it's pretty nice. I think "pocket universes" would be pretty common though - for example, any Ares logo could be a gateway to the Ares Matrix pocket universe.

It gets more complicated when you throw in Reality Filters. Two users of the same system won't necessarily experience the same 'universe'. One might see a dystopian hospital setting, while the other may be scaling the peaks of some golden eyrie.

VR lends itself to the complete imagination of its users, from non-standard physics (some nodes might not have gravity, or different gravity, or may be underwater) to non-standard iconography (attack programs are now large trout, or maybe cybercombat is a game of chess/checkers/backgammon). The whole system is like Inception's bigger brother; everything is a metaphor and dreamlike.

Many systems would adhere to standard 3-D architecture though, as that's what people are most comfortable with.

Restricting the Matrix to physical rules really limits the potential of the Matrix, at least from a story-telling perspective, IMO.

Reality Filters are problematic, because they basically shoot the "description instead of working rules" in the face when a hacker turns on a minimalist RF.

As a hacker, I'd just turn most of the VR physics off; if it's just decoration, then it'd only distract me from the real job at hand, i.e. hacking.

Dreamlike is nice for vision quests and magic, but it doesn't really suit hacking. Hacking isn't about vague symbolism, it's about speed, technique, insight and such. The system should be fast and flashy and precise, not vague and mystical.

That's what would work for you, but others might find that vivid and even "vague" symbolism helps them focus and excites them. Its one of the reasons that Reality Filters would be so popular.

But even the minimalist approach is 'just decoration'. A Reality Filter can't act as an uber-Analyze program (though I'd think a reasonable house rule would to have the RF give a bonus to matrix perception); the hacker can't have data bombs appear as giant black fuse-lit bombs, after all. The 'minimalist icons' will give a general idea of their approach (do files appear as paper documents in a filing cabinet, or as blocks of swirling alphanumeric numbers, or as floating folder icons?), it's still just a metaphor for what's behind the icon. Your idea of 'minimalist' might be very different from someone elses: how does it display a slaved camera feed? how does it display a slaved drone? What about a piece of IC loaded with Analyze/Attack? It can't simply be a text blob with rating numbers (until Analyzed, perhaps), but it'll have to display as something.

The rules deal solely with the rules, which is probably why they appear so boring. Range doesn't matter in VR, high ground doesn't matter in VR, etc. etc., even though the combatants might be experiencing the simsense as swimming through some underground kingdom flinging harpoons or stars or whatever. It's a conundrum.

I think a good example was the fiction in one of the older edition books - Virtual Realities, I believe - with Lucifer and the otaku, where it explains some of the cybercombat, both in VR and behind the scenes. To the actors, it was stars flying and burning the IC, but behind the scenes it was just code corrupting code.

In a certain sense, an RF is just a frontend for an Analyze program. It takes the objects in VR and gives them an appearance.



This is exactly the problem: why would you want to be distracted by illusory higher terrain that does nothing? It's fun if you're just a wageslave looking for entertainment, but as a serious hacker it's just distraction.




For a hacker, a good RF clarifies, rather than decorates.

The problem I have with Sculpting is that it doesn't do anything about the real problem - the rules for cybercombat are dull - and instead gives a lot of fancy decorations that don't truly matter, because they don't have any real effects.

For example: burning the IC or hacking at it with a sword makes no difference - it doesn't require swordfighting skills, and it also does exactly the same kind of damage. So you're being presented with a fake option.

Much better would be to have several different kinds of attacks you can make, that require different skills to be good at them perhaps, and that are more or less effective against particular opponents.

A good hacker knows that the terrain, or the big, scary monster IC, is just an icon, and not really a slavering, hairy, smelly beast. Remember, the whole point of VR is to take immensely complex code/computer interactions, and convert it/them into brain waves that can be manipulated. Behind the scenes, the commlink/deck/computer knows that when you peer at the door intently, you're really trying to analyze the function of that VR structure or icon. When your persona swings its sword, it knows it's running an Attack program. The point of VR is to make difficult, complex things intuitively understandable.

Maybe the hacker gets jazzed by imagining he's a knight with a sword, or a samurai, or a nova-hot rockstar. Maybe it gives him an edge to view his VR world as some idyllic glade and he/she a hunter, or an old castle and they're a ninja. It's all for the psychological edge, which in the playpen of the mind is an important thing. Sure, it can be that they prefer cold, sterile minimalist icons. Sure...but what does minimalist mean? Maybe their whole VR experience is them sitting in a room at an antiquated terminal scanning through text files? Or sitting lotus and and playing some text-based adventure in the air before them.



The words on a page can be dull, but for some reason people still like reading books. Again, it's a sandbox environment. Not everyone likes that. You could make a similar argument for weapons in SR: most heavy pistols are pretty standard. They all do the same damage and have the same AP (with a few minor exceptions), varying only in minor details (like clip size, accessories, and price). And yet for some reason that's fine.

If I shoot you for 5P damage, or use a combat axe for 5P damage...it's the same thing. In VR, the onus of describing the action is more on the actors, as opposed to the rules. If you want more program options, more programs, or more commlink options (hardware-based armor or biofeedback filters, perhaps?), that's definitely understandable.

What I mean by minimalism is not having lots of nonfunctional detail. Having 5-dimensional space and gravity that goes multiple ways is just annoying, and since you don't need gravity, you'd be better off having your RF cut it away for you.



Not really. You use different attack skills, different defense skills, and different armor. It's different to a degree that it gives you choices: you could think that my Impact armor is much worse than my Ballistic armor, and that therefore the axe is useful. Or you might want to stay at a distance from my melee attacks, and shoot me instead.

A gun in VR and an axe in VR, however, do exactly the same thing. Different appearance is just fake choice.

---

I don't mind having Sculpting - have it if you like it. But I do object to sculpting as an excuse for having rules that don't deliver.

That's fair (though I disagree with the fake choice; style has to account for something ). I think one reason the cybercombat rules don't bother me as much, is that I see them as one facet of the hacker's toolkit (the spoof/exploit/cybercombat triangle, if you will). Hacker's have tactical options, with cybercombat being one aspect (and often a last resort option at that) in their handbag.