To some extent, but it appears that coding a Limitation into a program, by RAW, takes more time. I certainly think this program option can be keyed on, but what we'd have to do is come up with a houserule for the particular option that reduces the time it takes to code a program using this particular limitation (again, the limitation is that the hacker can only use it on the commlink he coded it on, so its 100% non-transferrable).

Again, the idea is to put solid rules this limitation that would allow a hacker to code his own programs in a reasonable time, but avoid the prospect of him doing that for his whole team or making a profit off selling the stuff for quick money. This fits the flavor it seems everyone is going for: a hacker should code his own shit and be pretty good while not taking months to code and patch making it a viable option for characters.

A Camera or Microphone can fit into a Button. Or an RFID, which is TINY... Why is it a problem for a Microdrone?

Microdrones have a 1 capacity sensor package, so they can only have 1 sensor.
As per SR4A.

And the micro camera is limited to Rating 1.

Deek, some form of 'automatic' Limitation seems fair, like geas/limited versions of spells and things.

And a Camera is exactly 1 Sensor... and has Visual (Video and Trideo) AND Sound capabilities. As per SR4A.
Micro is Rating 1 Camera with 2 channels... With, again, Visual and Sound, so your Micro Drone can support a Rating 1 Tacnet by default.

What's the Problem...

Where do you get the camera has sound capabilities? It cannot take any audio enhancements.

Does not need to... Here, let me quote the book...



Plain as day... Cameras have sound capture capabilities by default.

Micro cameras are limited to rating 1.

A Camera can have as many mods as it has ratings.

And again... There is no need to mod the camera to have visual and audio channels. They are default.

Under the description of camera:


Edit- Ninja'd so more commentary. You can't really mod much for the camera at 1 though. But it does provide the sound and audio channels so a microdrone can join a rating 1 tacnet. With improved sensor array, I'm sure you can leverage it to 4 sensor channels.

Long weekend ahead, so I can finally get onto this:
Option one will not allow a drone to support an R4 Tacnet, so that's probably not right.
It's pretty clear that drones don't use the same rules as metahumans for contributing sensor channels, so option two would be a house rule.

Actually, Option 2 is in the Books. It is suggested that you use Individual Ratings instead of Sensor Rating. If you can accumulate enough "Channels" to cover 8 Channels, you have access to the R4 tacnet Support.
And why do you NEED an R4 tacnet provided through Drones? Just more power creep...

Honestly, I am happy with just R3 from Drones, personally. Our group has yet to surpass the R3 Tacnet. No need really.

Are you talking about page 105 of Arsenal? I don't think the gamemaster would ever consider one sensor to be a hodgepodge of multisensory information detailed enough to support an R4 tacnet.

Does not matter... By the Rules (Like you tend to go), a Rating 6 Camera, by itself, will support a R3 Tacnet. Since the Rating 6 Camera (by itself, as a standalone system) boosts the Sensor Rating to 6. This is why I perfer the method of using "Channels" rather than Sensor Rating, to adjudicate the viability of Tacnet. It makes a LOT more sense.

Now, That Same Camera may only have 3 modes that can contribute to a Tacnet (Basic Visual, Thermographic and Lowlight Modes), the Radar on the vehicle could count as another one (for 4), the Audio Signal processing of the Select Sound Filters attached to the Camera's Audio Components can provide another (for 5), and the Laser Rangefinder contributes the 6th. To me, that is more costly, and makes more sense, than a Single, Rated 6 Camera boosting the Sensor rating to 6.

Either method works, but one makes a LOT more sense in the end.

Going back a bit, our group have at times played with the Attribute + Skill (Max hits = program rating) option. I constantly ran up against the rating max hits on things. When hacking on the fly, hacking a System 4/Firewall 4 setup took 3 or more extended tests to get into for an Admin account. That same system could consistently hit my Stealth 5 or 6 in one or 2 checks maximum, and so there would *always* be an alarm when I got in, assuming it didn't just drop my connection outright.

So yes, it does limit the Technos and hackers in the same way, but that max hits = rating limit is crippling in a way, given that the detection of your intrusion doesn't follow the same rule, to my knowledge.

I personally dislike tecnet very much. Because there is no way to explain how it achieves the effect it talks about. Smartlink is questionable.
But Tacnet is quite insane.
You can easy get two or three dices. But for what?
For some distracting information?

I see the possible advantages but: The bonus is just too big.
If you compare two guys:
One with tacnet 4, Smartlink, Firearms 1 and agility 1 you end up with 8 dices.
Now you get yourself a marin:
Agility 4 and Firearms 4. He also gets 4 dices.
So on the one side you have a guy whos hands won't stop shaking on the other hand a marine.
And because that guy gets a cross air drawn before his face (and some other information) he shoots nearly as good as the marine.
Well, thats just ridiculous.
I get it, that a startup with smartlink is able to shoot like an more experienced guy.
But tecnet just...

We have been using it for a year or so now, and I love it... Besides, You want to extend beyond your Hit Cap, Use an Edge Point.

Anyways...

Or only ever take time to probe the target so it only gets one single roll to detect you. But most of the time, you won't always have hours to hack in to a location. Similarly, I'm not going to blow an Edge point for *every* time I need to hack into something. I'd be out of edge halfway through a single session. Contrary to a previous post, Edge does *not* refresh every session. It refreshes at GM whim. That can be every session, or only between adventures. If one run takes 4 sessions to complete, I'd better not be blowing Edge every chance I need to hack if the GM doesn't refresh until the end of an adventure (as happens in our games).

Distracting information? heck no.

Ever played a video game with a minimap? I mean, a good one, that shows the location of all enemies you can see?
Right, not too bad. (Most shooters, like, oh, alien vs predator, UT, or even halo)
Or one that shows a level map. (No, not like diablo. )
Or a really good game that lets you see all the enemies your entire team can detect (section 8, dystopia, planetside).
Back in the day, there were a handful of excellent flight sim games that had a nifty thing called a Leading Indicator.(Privateer, freespace). you target an enemy, and it tells you how far ahead you need to lead with your ships guns to score a hit.

A Tacnet does all of this by tying all this convenient smartlink and sensor data into one easily-accessable, non distracting package. It turns a soldier into a wallhacker who always gets the drop on someone coming around the corner, knows exactly where his friends are, their status, their ammo count, and even which targets they are aiming at. If you're fighting a recognizable force, it even tells you the gear they have, and tactics you can expect to face.

And thats before you plug other crazy stuff like shot-spooter sensorsofts, into it.

No, tacnets aren't easily lumped in as random information. Its basically a really, really excellent HUD system.

Re Smartlink: Think Robocop with his pistol, being able to see where it's aimed (like the crosshairs in your FPS game; most players will have worse aim without that being there). Or, if you want, being able to see down the barrel of your gun from the bullet's perspective. Couple in extra information like range, where to really aim to hit the spot you want, wind direction and speed, and such, and there's your bonus.

Re Tacnet: Along with the sensor channels to collect the information, figure the tacnet software is using that info to coordinate where all its members are, potential targets are, movement of all involved, and triangulation mixed in with GPS (via your commlink running the tacnet) to help tell you where targets and such are. I've figured some kind of triangulation is involved since you've gotta have at least three members in a tacnet to get any bonuses. As for distracting, I'm with Udoshi.

In all honesty I never figured that the full details needed to really be flushed out. After all, we're talking about fictional technology that's sixty-some years more advanced than what we've got now. Better to not think too much on it and just enjoy the game.

Yeah, in general, bonuses equal-weigh skill + attribute, and outweigh low skill + low attribute.

*Ah, in the game I mean, just so we don't start another IRL argument.

I like method 2 if you want to be fair, but I still say the drone must have some sensors that make its sensor rating 3-4. With those in the mix, no number of sensors will raise your average to 6.

Yes, yes.
But take a first person shooter of your choice. deactivate the minimap and even the crossair(if there are regular possibilitys to aim) from one team and get the other team drunk like hell (to reduce their skill and attribute)
Or, hell. Just take one group of regular guys and an other group of pros. The pros are walking over the regular guys. Crossair/minimap or not. They do not care.
Well, maybe in Space shooters it is going to be a bit different. But I would not like to bet on that.
Because well, it does not help you much. The newbes would start looking at the minimap, while the pros would just use the sound to pinpoint an enemy. So the distraction from the minimap would may even be a disadvantage.
And yes while I was young we had Lan partys and I could see bad players using wallhack and stuff and the good ones still butchering them.

And I agree with you. When you can slow hack the system, you prep for the intrusion with the creation of Backdoors or legitimate accounts, or you use a Trojan to set up the system for the Actual run. My Character has done this many times. Sometimes, though, you just cannot go that route. That is why the Programming world created the "MUTE" option. Used correctly, you will be in the system before the Alarm goes off, and then you can attempt to shut it down before it totally hoses you (as most systems get 3 passes, and many Hackers get 3-5 passes, you will have awesome time padding before any alarm goes off). For simple systems, you are likely to get in on an OTF Hack before any thresholds have been met, dependant upon what access you are going for. For those systems where you have a high Threshold to penetrate, well, you need a high rated Stealth as well. Push their threshold as high as you can and the dice rolls eventually become even.

As a note. The opposition's agents will be of minimal use against a very skilled hacker (in the optinal Rule that we use, and even in the normal rules, most of the times). This is because of a few things. The primary one being that Agents get no Edge. Another is the hit cap on dice rolls when using the optional rule (to get the full use of a Rating 6 Program, you need, on average, 18 Dice. Agents cannot compete in that realm). You really only need to worry about the Spiders in the system. Leave your own worms and agents to deal with the less challenging opponents.

For the Record, My Cyberlogician rarely spends Edge on a Hack. It is rarely worth it. He always has better (read more critical) areas in which to spend Edge. Of course, it doesn't help much that he also has Bad Luck, so he rarely spends Edge anyways, unless it really, really, really matters in the moment. Otherwise he takes his lumps and moves on.

Which is why we like Method 2 ourselves. Most Drones have a Sensor rating of 1-4, and is easliy upgradeable to a 5 with minimal effort. There is a list of the common sensors on a Vehicle in Arsenal (Vehicles have 12 Points worth of sensors). A Drone will likely have fewer of these, and there are several you can easily eliminate, Vehicle Radar being the easiest with its 5 slot requirement.

Making the 'Runner purchase the upgrades to each sensor individually works well, because it causes them to spend money on each sensor. Which I am all for, as a GM and a Player. Besides, depending upon the individual sensors, you can get the package to a Sensor 6. Just remove any of the rated stuff that does not go that high and replace with one that will.

Anyways...

This brings up something I've been curious about: Why is radar so capacity intensive? Ultrawideband radar seems more useful. Plain old vision seems more useful for details.

Cuz Radar is big? It's vehicular radar. The UWB is a personal sensor.

So, it's that signal 8 monster suggested by SR4A 222?

Truth be told I didn't know about the Mute option. Hell, I didn't have the resources or time to get beyond program rating 5 on anything until near the end of that game. Probably also why I didn't have access to mute. As to the node detections, I was under the impression that OTF hacking generated an automatic detection roll by the node each time I make a roll. So regardless of initiative passes, it will always try to detect each time I poke it. Am I wrong there?

Regarding stealth, I think I finally got that to 6 by the time the game had ended. Still, that's 2 rolls on average from the node to find me...

That said, our game's hacking rules never got very complicated. We never had multiple agents, IC, spiders and such all at once. It was usually me vs node, deal with ic or hacker and that's it....

Could be our minds are still stuck in the SR2/3 days when decking/hacking/matrix rules were so damned slow you simply didn't deal with them ever and just handwaved them. So we're likely not taking full advantage of the capabilities and intricacies of the current rules.

A commnt on Tymeaus's oft repeated house rule...

It's a lousy way to do things. (cerebral boosters + cyber mean it's very easy to pull in +5-6 dice). It makes the attribute + skill (where attribute/bonuses completely dominate skill) even worse.

Two the artificial cap on hits is pretty bad way to handle program ratings. There's no reason someone w/ a simple tool can't do great things with it. It's also at odds w/ the other optional rule to use skill rating to cap successes/net successes that is sometimes seen elsewhere. (the point of that rule was to make skill rating more important).

Also a master can do great things w/ a simple tool... someone sculpting wood w/ a chisel vs a chainsaw comes to mind.


Hotsim (2), Encephalon (1-2), pushed (1), Cerebral boosters (2). Math SPU(2).... those all add up to a lot of dice a lot cheaper than actually buying the skill/groups on top of classic base attribute + 1 rank in skill ploy. With all those bonuses it's really easy to get a hacker tossing ~15 dice on everything he does right out of chargen w/o much room for future improvement. To me the biggest problem w/ the system is there's so little room for future improvement coming out of chargen. Only ~4 dice or so more... it seems more that as play goes on the biggest advantage is access to more hardware running more things at once.


If the goal is to simply make the attribute matter then this has played out much better IMO w/ a little bit of playtesting.
Simply use (Logic + program rating)/2, then optionally use skill to cap net successes. It makes the logic relevant, as well as the quality of the tools. Without making either largely irrelevant and still making actual skill level very important. (this is anothr way of saying each point of program is worth half a die, and each point of logic is worth half a die). It also doesn't result in much larger dice pools straight out of chargen where you have someone w/ 7-10 logic straight out of chargen taking the place of response/system capped rating 4-5 programs out of chargen.

Yeah, we've had a few threads running up and down the issue. It's not half so simple as it sounds.

You said it.

Something like that, but in a slightly smaller package, usually Signal Rating 3, 4 or 5, because it depends upon Device Rating.

Yes, for OTF Hacking the Node gets a role each time you roll.



Could be. Hacking is MUCH more useful now than it was then, in my opinion.

Not a House Rule there Falconer, it is one of the Optional Rules in the Books.



I disagre, it has worked out wonderfully well for our group, and Dice pools tend to be much less than the Normal Way in my experience.



Again, It works well for us. You can only go so far with a minimal tool after all. As for being at odds with Skill Rating Caps, it is not using that rule. it is using the equivalent Cap for Magic. Magic is Capped at Force. Hacking is capped at Program Rating. No difference here. And again, not a House Rule, but a book supported Optional Rule.



Which can ALL be used in the normal way of hacking to boost your pools above 20. The Optinal Rule makes Attribute and Skill more important than the Program Rating. And it makes Program Ratings of Low quality actually mean something. Otherwise there should never be any program ratings below rating 5. If I have a Hacking Pool of 9 Dice, WHY would I spend 6,000 Nuyen per program for Rating 6 Hacking Programs when I am only likely to ever get a consistent 3 Hits per roll? I will never be able to use the Program to its potential. It makes absolutely no sense. Instead, I am going to spend 1500 for that Rating 3 program. By the same token, IF I am throwing 18 Dice, Why would I buy A Rating 3 program? It limits me severely at that point, as my intellect now surpasses my tools. I am going to go for more powerful programs in that situation.

Really, you should try it out and see how the Hacking Dynamic changes. I actually like the change, as does our table.



First, Why do you assume that we did not playtest the Optional Rule? Secondly, Why add a different Mechanic to the game? The goal of SR4 was to use a single mechanic (or a few Simple Mechanics, as opposed to the 15 Different Subsystems of SR3) to produce a Dice Pool. Now you want to construct a Pool, and then Half it for the Roll? No, I am against the SR3 methjod of subsytems. You do not need a different subsystem for everything. We have just a few Subsystems currently. Why add another completely different one? I choose to use the Magic Subsystem instead. It works great, and is very easy.

It works great for you.

Those sidebars are suggestions for house rules. That's how I've always read them.

My issue with it comes down to this... It's trivial to obtain larger dice pools than if you were doing it the normal way. For those large dice pools... the program limit doesn't work well. For low rating programs you might as well just 4:1 and call it a day... and even higher rating 4-5 programs are almost always going to cap out except when you're unlucky on the roll and the nature of the cap is to stop pretty much. If I'm a mage, I can always dial up my force to get more successes if I'm willing to pay the price... a decker though... that isn't an option, you have the equipment you have. So drawing that analogy is a bit strained.

It's very hard to get rating 8 or 9 programs and get the hardware to run them on, it's very easy to boost your logic up that high though.

That same sidebar also had the suggestion to use attribute to cap... which IMO works better as the dice pools are lower. But I'm still not a fan of capping successes based on anything besides player skill. There's too many ways in game to get along w/ bare skill investment and coast along on attributes + gear alone.

What about averaging the rating+attribute+skill to get the die pool or something? More hassle, but kind of averages out the three components. Or maybe cap based on the average.

There are a few concerns in this whole question. There're certainly balance issues, and power curves. It's also important to try to minimize complexity, as well as avoid novel mechanics (like averaging for a DP). To me, that might be too out of step with the existing DP paradigms. :/

Of Course... Me and the Table I play with. But if you have not actually played with the option, then you really can't bash it any, can you?

That's nonsensical. It's easily conceivable that you can examine something and come to the conclusion that it's not a good idea, without actually implementing or trying it. Black tar heroin, for example.

Or Army Surplus Morphine.

Sorry, just finished LA Noire and...

Just as Epicedion says. You can hardly accuse me of not raising many detailed, analytical objections. Playtesting is for discovering loopholes you forgot, not for testing the basic statistics.

Honestly, if some mechanic allowed hackers to spontaneously increase their program rating (assuming the optional rule in place here, not the RAW hacking rules), with the risk of that program failing or losing rating points due to the code falling apart from being used in ways it wasn't meant to, then that would be awesome. Redlining for programs, for lack of a better term.

Oh, and any sidebar that presents a rule that says "Optional Rule" is exactly that. It's not a house rule, because it's not manufactured by the group at the table. It's an official alternative presented by the company. That's the difference between "Optional" and "house" rules.

But they could just make copies and restore from backup.

So make it burn out hardware in the 'link instead. People will be less likely to run their gear extra hard if their response chip burns out on occasion.

Point taken... But most of the complaints I hear about it are not real complaints. I understand if you do not like it, but to complain that the rules suck, without an actual playtest, using the rules, makes no sense to me. How do you know that you do not like it if you have never actually used the rule?

No worries though...

We have been using the program rating cap optional rule for years at our table as well and we like it. Everyone once in a while, someone wants to go past the cap and they use edge to ignore it. It doesn't happen all that often, though. I mean, when the best hackers (at our table) are rolling 14-16 dice, a Rating 6 program rarely caps hits. And even when it does, we are talking about 6 hits, which is more than enough to do almost anything.

Exactly my point.

Highlighting, of course, the fundamental flaw in that system. If you rarely (if ever) pass the hit cap, why bother about program rating at all? If you implemented some active memory limit on the summed rating of all active programs, I could see a hacker having to make important decisions about what programs to run at 3 and what to run at 6, forcing them to choose where to risk the hit cap.

Implementing a hit cap that's rarely an issue just makes program rating a useless feature.