For some reason, I'm unable to get my team's hacker to do any VR hacking, except when Probing the Target (and then only for the time bonus).

I know there's apparently some way to get some 5 IPs out of hot sim, and there's that +2 bonus to Matrix actions, but with the lingering threat of dumpshock and Black ICE, Wired Reflexes 2 seems to be "good enough."

I suppose a way to show how nasty a full hot sim hacker can be would be to have him get online-murdered by someone with 14 dice and 5 IPs who hacks his commlink and starts loading Rating 6 data bombs on all his programs (command>load analyze.exe >> WARNING DATA BOMB DETECTELKAJSLKFjaskj1230Acarrier lost //// system restarting WELCOME DAVE // command>load defuse.exe >> WARNING DATA BOMB DETEALKJALDIJFALIJFALIjcarrier lost).

No one plugs the cable into their brain anymore.

I'm sure this happens to everyone...

An AR hacker is usually a combat hacker.

In that regard, their challenge isn't out-fighting IC, it's not getting shot to death by corp-sec with the rest of the team.

Also, Black IC was never supposed to be a common thing. Black IC is for places that aren't supposed to exist. The usual response is Trace and drop a quick-response team on their head.

Have your AR hacker run into a for-realsies Spider with 5 IPs running hotsim and getting 5 trace actions per pass. By the time your boy realizes what's up, he'll be surrounded.

When I played a hacker I rather liked those five IPs. But AR hacking has taken a lot of the shine off VR, that's true.

Personally, I think they set up the rule wrongly. It should have been

DNI => vulnerable to biofeedback, but fast
Turtle => no biofeedback, but slow and way less Matrix Perception

Because the AR/VR split is like saying that the color of your desktop determines how vulnerable your computer is to hacking, instead of the OS you're running.

I would say the major fault of SR4 hacking is the loss of the middle space that was gray ICE, the ones that could turn a Fairlight into one very expensive paper weight.

So sure you could go in via AR. But then would have risked having the spider swap hammer for acid and melt that response chip to slag. There would also be the random sec guy going "your carrying how many comlinks?!" (not that it can not happen already if one go for a cluster).

The closest we got is a virus in Unwired that can mess up the comlink OS, but even it operates on a time scale of minutes.

And yes, black hammer is the matrix equivalent of "trespassers will be shot".

More correctly, it's the sign that says "Welcome to Area 51. Trespassers will be Shot."

Because they'll shoot you with alien lasers that won't even leave a corpse. "No guv, haven't seen any bodies come in lately, why?"

the most common response to hacker detection will not be IC. It will be system shut down, disconnect everybody and restart. Sure, in hot sim he will deal with dumpshock, but in AR the chance to trigger the alarm is much higher.
IC shouldn't be a factor in 90% of the nodes, only those which can't be restarted.

and while I like AR Hacking, too, it shouldn't be that good actually. It should be way slower, which is reflected in the interval for Probing. VR=1 hour, AR=1 day. For some reason the devs did not hold on to that and make everything slower. Like e.g. make the Hacking-on-the-fly interval (VR=1complex) 1min in AR. etc...

I thought about that.. just slowing all AR hacking actions down by one step. It basically means you're toast if you get into a fight, because you can't really keep up with any IC. (Your attacks turn from Complex Actions into Full Turn actions)

Not sure that's really a bad thing...

House rules I've used:

- All DNI access open the door to dangerous signals but AR access has a biofeedback filter of rating 4.
- Accessing in AR, even through DNI is detrimental to precision and matrix perception. All combat actions suffer and Matrix perception rolls suffer a -2 dice pool modifier
- When accessing without a DNI, automatic actions become simple actions, simple actions become complex actions and complex actions become exclusive (meaning that getting interrupted / distracted will have you stop your action) complex action that take an entire turn. All extended tests have their intervals go one step up (complex action to combat turn, combat turn to minute, minute to hour, hour to day, day to month).

Be careful since it allows hackers to attack unexpecting DNI-using people with stun attack programs (but he still needs to be connected to a node where the person persona is).

I rather like the idea that hackers assault unsuspecting members of the public. That people thought they were safely cruising the matrix are suddenly attacked. Cyberpunk/dystopia life should be uncertain and subject to sudden accidents and attacks.

There was a scare story in Emergence related to that, but i think it was attributed to wild sprites rather then TMs.

AR still reads your mind, it just doesn't project a simulated reality straight into your brain. If anything AR is easier on your computer than VR.

Matrix perception in AR should definitely be worse, but speed shouldn't be an issue for the same reason that Logic isn't an issue. Hackers use programs and programs do the lifting. Programs are like drones. They are instructed/piloted and act depending on how well they are instructed. A hacker doesn't do massive mathematical transformations just like how a rigger doesn't expel thousands of foot-pounds of thrust from his backside.

Hehe, that's just awesome.

Not unless your using trodes. Glasses and Gloves (G&G?) put a proverbial air gap between the matrix and your brain.

dont forget that if your gear is shut down that you still need to reboot them, while this is painfull in VR, if your hackers only running in AR they wont be able to do much more then reboot their gear every other turn

You mean the gloves that cost 5 times as much and provide no mechanical benefit over trodes, flAvoR gloves?

Yeah, there's no real reason to use those, but AR Hackers do anyway, and they move just as fast as your augmented/magic fingers will propel them.

That's a nice design flaw yeah.

It would have been a lot cleaner to make the big division DNI/air gap interface.

I got the feeling that using Wired etc. to make AR go as fast as VR wasn't really what they wanted but after they accidentally put that in, they had to come up with the two IP boosters for VR.

I mean, before Arsenal and Augmentation got the Simsense Booster & Accelerator, an Adept with Improved Reflexes III in AR was a better hacker than someone in VR; faster and immune to biofeedback.

VR was always supposed to be the "more powerful but also more dangerous" option; it's only barely more powerful, not really proportionate to the increased danger.

That's glogo for gloces and googles interface.

Point. And makes me wonder why they did not extend dumpshock to trode accessed AR (likely at cold sim rates or slightly less).

AR = 1 IP. Problem solved.

It's one of the very few ways my game differs from RAW.
If you aren't afraid of IC & Dumpshock, it's not Shadowrun!

This is one of the Optional Rules...

I thought about that too, but it's vaguely ugly; besides spending 1 IP in the Matrix, can you use your other IPs in the meatworld? Because if you can't, then AR is de facto almost more VR than VR, just sucky.

Of course you can spend your meat IP's in the Meat.
We're just saying that in AR you can only do 1 complex action a round.

No, what he's asking is if someone can do this:

IP 1: Meat action: interact with AR
IP 2: Meat action
IP 3: Meat action

If you have 3 meat IP in a round, why wouldn't you?
I'm confused. How else are you getting 3 IP in AR?

AFAIK there's nothing stopping you. If someone is in the middle of a firefight and trying to AR hack, I'd consider applying the -2 "distracted" penalty to Matrix Perception tests, though.

I'm not sure how I'd modify someone actively trying to do stuff like shoot and dodge and hack all at once, though.

Why would they take those penalties? When shooting guns you don't take penalties from prior passes.

AFAIK, shooting guns does get you the Distracted penalty from meat Perception as well. Besides, logic is stupid. This is game balance.

You can do that NOW...

He's not asking about now, Tymeaus. He was asking about using a 'AR=1 Matrix IP' rule. He's not asking any more, because everyone responded 'yes'.

If you can spend

IP1 AR
IP2 Meat
IP3 Meat

Why can't you spend them all on AR? Saying only one meat IP can be spent in the Matrix just strikes me as a clumsy rule. You seem to be having enough time to do other things, why can't you spend more time on the Matrix that way?

---

I much prefer just increasing the Action Time cost for all Matrix Actions by one size while in AR (Free becomes Simple, Simple becomes Complex, Complex becomes Turn, Turn becomes Minute etc.)

It's easy to apply and doesn't raise the above question. It means you can hack in AR, but in Cybercombat you're way too slow to compete with IC, which is as it should be for AR. If you want to have a shot at winning you need to go into the ring.

My BAD... So, like Mesh Reality for the Technomancer then... Sort of... Got it...

Personally a system like this is the way I want the matrix to be. I liked the addition of AR and wireless but felt in their rush to make it viable they seriously depowered the cybernetic options in favor of more magic run (not that I think that's the sole cause here). Another option i've played with in my home game is giving folks with DNI linkages bonus passes in the matrix that occur simultaneously to their meat world counterparts.

Because if you can hack as well in AR as you can in VR then IC and Dumpshock mean nothing, therefore hacking is no more than a tangential skill, like picking a maglock. It ceases to be a separate and intriguing part of the Shadowrun universe.
If you want to turn Hacking/Decking into Lockpicking or Knowledge: Ice Cream, that's fine. My SR2 players did it with Rule #1: The Decker Always Dies, because we hated the decking system. But SR4 counters that by allowing hacking to be tune in real time along with magic and man. Fighting aling side your compatriots, even if one is in an Ares compound and another is in the astral realm.

The Matrix has always been a cool, interesting part of Shadowrun, with it's own rules and foybles. A separate universe within the universe, if you will. Like the astral plane. But if all you have to do to be a good hacker is slap some trodes on your street sammy and give him some whiz programs, then it ceases to be a integral part of the Sixth World and becomes a tack on skill, inconvenient and ignorable.

The whole reason for needing cyberdecks in the first place was the idea that computers had become so advanced that the average human with a keyboard was incapable of dealing with the vast amount of info and the brain needed it transferred into metaphor to comprehend and interact with properly. I find it difficult to believe that the only problem with with all the people who died in Echo Mirage and Crash 2.0 was that they couldn't type fast enough and had they simply used cyberterminals with Wired Reflexes we wouldn't need all this stupid IC floating around.

AR hacking is a way to have your cake and eat it too, like ignoring Essence costs so the mage can have cyberware. It's for people who were so fed up with the old decking rules that they ignored it, so 4th Ed gave them a nice out. Instead, using the meat body IP = Matrix IP has turn a third of Shadowrun(man, magic & machine) into an ignorable constructive that is seemingly more irrelevant in the rules than it is in the metaplot.

Hacking should be about man and computer becoming one. About entering a world of metaphor and battling it out with your skills. It's about computers becoming so complex in an increasingly complex world that the average man can no longer hope to keep up with the new generation of technophiles. It's a new world.
With AR hacking it's about rolling 2 less dice to become invincible.

I'm not disputing that AR hacking is too safe and too fast compared to VR. I totally agree. I just don't like that particular way of fixing the problem.

If AR is slower, then doing something in AR should be more expensive in amount of actions to do something. It shouldn't limit the amount of time you pour in, just the mileage you get out of your actions.

While I do like this solution, it doesn't really do what you're intending to do. It really doesn't change Cybercombat in the slightest. So a AR Hacker has to use a full turn instead of a complex to attack. Unless he's in a hot zone trying to AR hack and he needs to run while he's doing it, this will very rarely effect the hacker. IMO

Having to spend a full combat turn to make one attack action is going to get you swamped by the IC that's getting 3 attack actions in that turn.

It's not that you are slower, it's that your computer is too slow. Too slow in AR anyway.
Adding more rules to an already rules heavy system seems way more "clumsy" than a minor rules amendment.

My apologies, I was thinking it was stepping up to one full pass basically, so just eating up your free action as well. Now, this I can agree with.

Really it's you that's slower. The computer runs at whatever speed the computer runs. The bottleneck for AR is the need to dump information through your eyes and then receive signals back from whatever hand-flailing you do to input data.

The assertion in SR4 RAW is that with Wired Reflexes, et al, you can do this hand-flailing really fast, on par with dumping information directly into and out of your brain.

What makes veterans of the SR universe balk is that all of these datajacks and implanted head computers and things were long ago deemed absolutely necessary for decking hacking, for the sheer fact that the data throughput required to hit the action/reaction speeds common to programs in the Matrix vastly exceeds what can be accomplished even in heavily cybered reality. Attempts to reconcile ASIST speeds with meatbody speeds in previous editions worked out to something like 5-6 VR complex actions per combat turn, with a decently fast off-the-shelf deck.

I have nothing against the Matrix actions taking a turn rather than an IP per se, it accomplishes the same goal of limiting what an AR hacker can do vs. a VR hacker and it dissuades folk from trying to be invincible AR hackers so at this point we are simply splitting hairs, but I've found that the simpler the rule the better.

Telling my players AR can only get 1 Matrix IP is simple, gets the point across and no one tries to build a Sixth World shattering AR hacker. Telling them that each action is an increased time threshold raises more questions than it answers. When does the action take affect? Does this mean a Data Search takes a minute? Why would anyone use AR if a simple search takes so long? Are you using a threshold table not in the book? Print out this new threshold table for us. Does this new threshold table apply to everything? And so forth.
It's adding a rule, rather than providing a context for one.

Nobody with 1 Matrix IP is going to be any kind of hacker, nor is anyone whose Matrix actions take a turn rather than an IP. I just think adding rules to an already rules heavy system is far more clumsy than using an optional restriction.

I get you. Personally I don't know what I think about what to do with AR/VR hacking.

What it appears that the designers thought was that if you offered up a few bonuses to VR, people would think it was worth the risk. But I think they underestimated how applicable Wired Reflexes would be to AR hacking, and how big of a bogeyman Black IC really is.

What I think the game needs, instead of strict limitations on AR, is some sort of AR bogeyman. Since Black IC are threatening to the AR hacker in the same way that kittens are threatening to the inside of a BlendTec brand blender, and White IC don't really care either way, I think that Grey IC should reappear on the scene as largely unthreatening to the VR hacker, but a potential nightmare to the AR hacker.

If you'll recall, Grey IC used to be the things that would wreck your cyberdeck as opposed to simply trying to crash or kill you.

If Grey IC were in some way less visible to AR, or if their attacks were much more easily defended against (for some reason) or their potential damage limited/mitigated in VR, they could work as a stopgap between the regular White IC and big nasties that have become somewhat toothless. If they were somewhat common features of corporate nodes, you'd see a lot fewer script-kiddie and other AR hackers, since they'd be fearful of losing their wiz gear to their own stupidity.

I haven't thought up a mechanic, but I'd propose that Grey IC could corrupt/delete invading agents, as well as perform some of the old-school carnage from earlier editions -- permanently damage/disable onboard systems and corrupt programs.

Just a thought.

I like it!
In fact, I like it way more as a concept than a mechanic. Maybe that will be something we see once the whole Puck/Rose Garden/Pax/Discordians/Friday thing plays out.

It was really just about the time I started responding to that last post that I realized that Grey IC had quietly gone away and hadn't been later reintroduced.

My guess it that the kind of wrecking-ball-esque damage they could do (and the tens of thousands of nuyen they would cost players for replacing gear/programs) might have turned some of the designers off to including them. Grey IC used to be the big warning sign corps would hang in their hosts to tell people to get out, and get out fast, or else they'd be using that 1.5 million Fairlight Excalibur for a doorstop.

Ah, the good old days, when deckers wished they would run into Black IC.

Unwired added a whole lot of initiative boosters too.
If you take a military grade commlink, like a healthy R8 one, add R6 Response Enhancer, a Customized Interface and run it in Hotsim, you're looking at an Initiative of 16 before even adding in Intuition.

That's some pretty killer advantage.

I'd like to be in your game where a Rating 8 commlink is considered "healthy"

Healthy for military-grade...

On the topic of gray IC, i guess one reason they removed it was to try and make the matrix rules more "real". Also, with comlinks there is no way to explain the energy inputs needed to do the required damage as there is no mains connection to draw on.

There is tho a Unplug virus on page 122 of Unwired, that formats the comlink os. However it do so by rolling virus rating x 2 against system + firewall at a interval of 1 minute. Not exactly something that can be matrix weaponized.

heh, reading the virus rules in Unwired it seems to leave much up to the GM. So something simple as getting tagged with an alarm may trigger the use of a virus infected program rather then a clean one, with the virus set specifically to infect the target of said program or something like that.

Am I the only GM here who hasn't had to worry about any of that? The hacker in my group hasn't shown the slightest interest in wired reflexes or anything else like it. He's perfectly fine with using AR when speed isn't an issue, and jumping into VR to go balls-out. When I told him hot-sim VR makes him vulnerable to feedback, he said "Bring it."

Commlink batteries likely have enough power to blow their sensitive bits. Override voltage regulation systems and tell the main processor unit to start churning through as many watts as possible. It won't blow the commlink case, it probably won't even damage all the systems, but it'll likely be enough to brick the commlink.

Eh. Designing a commlink that can't be sent into meltdown mode is a fairly doable engineering challenge for 2070s tech levels.