PoliteMan, I wouldn't call that a 'basic' hacker. That's more or less the theoretical maximum.

Just build it. One of the reasons hackers should skimp on Hardware. Haven't really read WAR (too much bad press) but the only thing that ever stopped somebody from building a Response 12 system before was we didn't have a price for it before. Building it from scratch means it's half off and (arguably) it means you don't have to worry about availability.



Oh come on, we can get much higher than that.

I think the rules are supposed to break down after rating 6. Remember that anything above rating 6 doesn't even have an availability, and is going to be expensive and rare. I don't think a player should eb able to program/make things above rating 6 without access to special facilities.

Where do you get a BASIC Hacker with a Logic of 7, and a Skill of 5, and 10 points worth of boosts? That is so far above professional, even, that it is not funny. That is an OPTIMIZED Hacker, not basic.

A Basic Hacker likely only has a Logic of 4, a Skill of 3 (With maybe a specialty in Hacking Programs), I will give you the +5 for the Assisted Programming and Programming Environment, because it would make sense. He likely has NO logic skill upgrades, because he is a BASIC hacker, not Elite. So, 12-14 Dice. So Buy 3 hits per interval, it will take 8 intervals to accomplish the task. Anywhere from 4 Months to 1 Month, dependant upon desire to rush job and spend Edge. Why would a Wageslave spend Edge on such things, though? Oh, and that does not cover the additional programming required to allow that R12 program to actually function on any system. R12 programs in a vacuum are useless. so you either need a R12 System, or a LOT of Optimization.

EDIT: And it seems that Yerameyahu has already covered that point...

Don't forget that the -1 die per test rule isn't optional any more. I don't agree, but just to screw the hacker…

Building things yourself has the same availability (for the parts), AFAIK.

Actually, it is still optional, enforced at the GM's whim (When he determines that circumstances warrant the decrimenting of the pool)...

And it does not really screw the hacker when he has as many Dice as PoliteMan implies.

Logic(9)+Skill(6)+Spec(2)+Encephalon(2)+PuSHeD(1)+CustomInterface(1)+neocortical
(3)+ProgramEnv(5)=29 DP

Not sure I can really boost it any higher than that. I suppose Genetic Optimization Logic gets you to 10.

Logic 4 with 3 Cerebral Boosters, A skill of 3 with a Specialization in programming, Assisted Programming is easy. As for the logic-linked skill bonuses, I don't think it's a stretch to give the hacker PuSHeD and Neural Nanites? Encephelon 1 is kinda iffy, to be fair. None of that sounds wildly optimized. If the hacker doesn't dump Logic then Cerebral Boosters are cheap and make a ton of sense. Specialization or a skill of 4 doesn't seem too extreme either. Sure, we could trim it down a bit, but the fundamentals of combining the software boost with a decent-high Logic score, decent skills or low skills with Specialization, and a couple of Logic-linked skill boosts means the DP should be bouncing around 20. That's easily doable for this kind of thing. Combinging stat, skill, and program gives big DPs and the fact that hackers should have Logic-linked skill boosts just pushes that up.

And yeah, this all depends on Optimization.

Y,
Sure, that slows the hacker down a bit, won't stop him.

TheOOB,
Personally, once you get to this level, I really like the idea of having a few "super programs" with everything else stuck at R6, while the opposition gets bumped up to R7-R9. It brings back some of the hacker specialization; if you go "super" Stealth and Exploit you'll get in easy but the enemy has the advantage in cybercombat, Analyzing icons, viruses, etc.

I think we can still agree that's nowhere near 'basic'. That's like saying a basic sam has MBW 3.

It's near the edge of reasonable optimization, with unreasonable optimization bringing things into the 28+ range. As for the reducing DP rule, it slows the 12 DP guy down a lot more—I was telling TJ, there.

My issue has always been that the program-your-own rules either require that kind of crazy optimization, or give away too much for free. It's hard to find a middle ground.

I think the problem is that people underestimate the danger of rushed programing. If you're making your SOTA super-awesome stealth program of win. Do you really want to risk having it sound an alarm randomly every once in a while? Or Having it crash/glitch on 2's.

People don't rush SOTA, and thinking it's all fine and dandy to do so is pretty much crazy.

I was planning to rush the job and use edge to negate glitches, so there shouldn't be any problem.

For the Twink Answer... A Spirit backing you up with Guard handles that quite well...

Ah, no worries. Ours is not the sort of game where you make better than military grade stuff in your mom's basement. Rating 12 programs are not a concern.

A programming Shop would suffice, a Facility would be even better, and both are available at Chargen for any character that wishes to purchase them. WHo said you have to be in your Mom's Basement?

Sometimes the GM has to step in and say, "no"
I would do a couple of things:

A rushed job SOTA might degrade twice as fast, in general.
A rushed job SOTA would glitch on a 2, instead of just a 1.

Sure that's not supported by the RAW, but the RAW is /lame/ in this regard.

Ok, good.

For the record though, an R6 nexus isn't your Mom's basement (unless your Mom is awesome).

I was exaggerating. "Better than the best in the world" doesn't happen by one's self in our games, regardless of what you bought at chargen. If it were that easy, everyone would have R12 programs. If it works that way for you, that's cool. But it's not something I'll be fearing if a player wants to spend edge to make extended downtime tests faster.

Never said that it worked that way for me... I just pointed out the options that allowed it to happen. By RAW in fact (Well, Rating 12 is not RAW, Program Ratings are currently capped at 10, unless I missed something somewhere)... As always, you are free to ignore any rules you like.

Where do you get that program ratings are capped at 10? (from War?)

with SR4A and Unwired what we have is availability/cost for programs up to rating 6.
We have Response/System availability/cost to 6
We have Optimization to Rating 6.

So, with the rules as given, we can make Rating 6 Commlinks that can run Rating 12 programs. Nowhere is there a limit stated of anything other than 6.

(technically you could make a rating 24 program, but uh, you couldn't run it.)

War! expands Programs to 10. Unwired expands Hardware to 10+. With the Caveat that there may be higher rated things out there. Unwired Implies that Systems can go higher than 10 since an Ultraviolet System has requirements of 10+.

I think the feasible theoretical max is a R21 Program.

That's based on a R12 System, with a R6 AI having made it it's home node, then R6 Optimization. The node itself would be R15, well into UV territory. I can't think of anyway to bump it beyond the except, theoretically, having multiple AIs making it their home node. I think those effects stack but it's, well, very unlikely that your shadowrunner knows and has gained the trust of that many AIs.

(Unless you're Horizon, in which case it is totally feasible to have multiple mid-high rating AIs living in a single node. That'd keep me up at night if I was in SR.)

[all possible scorn]MAGIC[/all possible scorn]

Well, you know, Netcat is pregnant, so at least one kid will eventually have a mom that awesome (and a dad too).


~R~

Unless awesomeness skips a generation.

I never implied that the kid would be awesome. Gawd, it's the child of two super-nerds...it's probably going to have a face like quasimodo, a voice like gilbert gottfried, and enough genetically encoded knowledge of computers to ensure it's not going to get laid until it's old enough to pay for it.



~R~

Quick question I've been thinking about all day. What's preventing me from equipping my drones with better pilot programs than they came with?
Also, where are the tables in unwired for the new autosofts (such as "expert offense")?

(emphasis mine)

This. This right here.

The matrix DOES break at high levels. Its just -bad-. Seriously, any automated IC/agent is only ever going to roll 12 dice for any task(and if it needs an autosoft for it, like, oh, say, Electronic Warfare, thats 10 dice).

Thats pretty easy to trivialize with a hacker, much less a technomancer.

Ditto for breaking into nodes. Whats that? Firewall and analyze 6 is the max? Very funny, pray to the dice gods you Yahtzee.

Oh my? The entry/standard level of rating 3 stuff(device ratings 3, games without unwired so no Optimization) means dice pools of 6? Skill of 1 and a program of 5? Hope you like glitching!


As much shit as WAR gets - and it gets a lot of fecal matter hurled in its direction everyone even mentions its name - it did something rather necessary.

It expanded the high-end matrix opposition. It actually put numbers and stats to high-end things a GM can throw at their players, possibly enough to make things a bit challenging. Sadly, the book wasn't very well recieved, otherwise I think we'd see more GM's breaking this stuff out. ("i haven't even touched war cuz I heard it was bad" is a common thing I hear.)


Most of the complaints about war's high-rating matrix stuff, basically, sound to me like 'durr hurr stuff isn't supposed to go above 6, war broke my perfect abusable system waah..' well. Suck it up. Unwired already told you stuff above rating 6 exists. There's a sidebar, and it even suggests basing runs about getting or stealing it.

Yes!

As for the drones, you can download better Pilot programs but the hardware won't support it. You can manually upgrade the hardware but that's expensive. I think the new autosofts somewhere around p. 104 but I don't have my book on me.

And related to our previous conversation, I don't see any reason you couldn't buy a bunch of cheap drones, like those little 500 toys, and stick a Technical Autosoft with Software on it and then have the system run the +5 programming program. The thing would be rolling 11 dice on programming tests, which isn't bad for patching programs and other grunt work but would get really broken if you started using them for teamwork tests for your programming, especially since I don't think there's a maximum number of people you can have on teamwork tests . Buying hits off 11 dice, you could get 40 bonus dice on your rollsfor 10,000. Since copying programs is easy, it's basically just the cost of the drone. Heck, you're gonna have a bunch of drones, just copy the necessary software through your drone network and leave it unloaded until downtime.

Edited for Udoshi:


See, here's the thing I don't get. In most of the techno threads (I'm personally not familiar with technos, don't really like the concept) Technos typically break the R6 barrier all the time. I don't understand the violent reaction to hackers doing the same thing, except they can only do it for a few programs in any reasonable game, it takes a serious investment, and they get the high end programs very slowly which seems like it'd be easier for the GM to manage. Why does there seem to be a different standard for hackers?

WAR ups the level of Matrix defenses and I like that. I think the R6 barrier was broken early on, Technos could always break it, AIs could always break it, the R6 barrier was only ever real for hackers and agents.

Additional Edit:
Heck, even hackers have a workaround: logic link-ed skill boosting ware. What's really the difference between most R12 programs (excluding things like Stealth) and someone with a +3-+6 on their logic -linked skill tests?

By the rules, you can arguably do that. It's pure evil, and unreasonable, of course.

I thought someone might say "no response for drones, so their response = their rating = 5". This, I've never seen even a hint of though.

You flatter me.


As far as I know, Response=Rating, which is typically 3 or 4. Now there's no reason you couldn't mod the drone to have a Response of 6, just like you would a commlink, but it'd be expensive and drones break/are broken a lot.

Couldn't I just build a drone around that response 12 nexus outlined above?
Then optimize it for pilot = 13 pilot.
Then write my own rating 26 targeting autosoft with optimization.
Then combine the two on my drone for 39 dice?
P.S. That's 3 higher than a mundane PC can ever achieve with guns. As you might imagine, that makes it 1 higher than the adept max dice pool.

SR4's Matrix does break down pretty quickly once the hacker starts rolling more than about 15 dice. At that point, top-rated IC on top-rated systems start to consistently fail, and just about every matrix action succeeds. This problem stems from the fact that, based on the core rulebook, the most dice you'll ever be rolling on a hacking test is 17 (7 skill with Aptitude, 6 program rating, +2 hot sim, +2 Codeslinger). And that's hyper-specialized for one type of action. A "normal" super-hacker would get 14 dice. This is just enough to have a slight lead on any system for most actions, with the option of having a significant lead in one type of action. Edge, of course, would be useful to take a serious advantage, however intermittently.

Once you start adding extra dice from other sources, you blast right past having an advantage and straight into the realm of asking why you bother rolling dice anymore.

The obvious solution is to jack up the ratings of the nodes and IC to compensate, but by then every normal Matrix action (that is, the actual things you hacked the system to accomplish, other than beating up IC) is beyond trivial. All you're doing then is making the initial hack harder, and ramping up the difficulty of fighting agents. Hacking cameras and unlocking doors and so on becomes hardly worth rolling for.

Say what you will about 3d edition, but there were systems powerful enough that you could conceivably be using rating 12 programs just to make general hacking feasible. These programs would run you a quarter to half a million nuyen each (sometimes more!). Anyone who could successfully hack a Red system, even just to read a simple data file, was pretty much on track for becoming legendary.

Nah, a nexus isn't a normal node. The kind of nexus we're talking about would be a massive server, even the smallest are desktop (or cyberdeck ) sized. They can't be drones. You might conceivably be able to run a nexus in a big enough vehicle and then run the vehicle's Pilot off the Nexus but because the pilot is also the drone's OS it's doubtful you could get that past your GM. I don't think Pilot programs even can be run on anything other than a drone.

Alright. Commlink then, degrading that immense 13 to 12, and total to 36 dice.

You realize that you can't program something that high without a nexus, that the hardware for a Response 12 drone is very expensive even if you build it, and that drones have a tendency to blow up, even if they shoot insanely well. On something like jet fighter it might make sense but for a standard drone it seems like putting a very expensive egg in a very fragile basket.

Besides, even a Response 12 drone is going to be limited to R18 software, System 12+Optimization R6 is R18 program, unless you've got a couple of AIs handy.

Drones are electronic devices, which means they have a Device Rating like any other electronic device. The Sample Device Ratings table in SR4a (p 222) puts drones at 3. So a drone's typical Response rating is 3. That seems reasonable since only a handful of drones (all milspec) go above 3 on the standard Pilot rating. An upgrade module can bump that to a 5 (+2 cap on device upgrades). The Modular Electronics modification (from the SR4 to SR4a changes document, but somehow not in SR4a) will remove that cap.

Which book added hardware requirements for writing a program? I never heard you needed to be able to run a program at it's full rating in your development environment. If you're talking about hardware requirements, it's reponse 9 for the best 'link in WAR, +2 from a module you build, +1 optimization for system or pilot or whatever.

Yeah, 65k just for the Transys Cybernaut. Then again, if you build your drone like a Tomino (10 BOD), I'm sure you can pull off the equivalent of a "please don't blow up" mod.

Ah, I got hung up on the lack of tables and missed that extra detail at the top of program options.

Ok, here's the issue. You can't program something you couldn't theoretically run. There's two ways around this.
#1 You do some tricky stuff with optimiztion. Depending on how you interpret what a program option is (either patchable code or a permanent part of the program) it might be possible. Unfortunately, the programming table are weird, since you program options separately from programs, which means you can't write the option before you have the program and you can't write the program until you write the option.
#2 Nexuses (Nexi?) can program things they can't they can't run.

So everyone takes #2. Which means you need to purchase a nexus and usually a good one.


Yeah but that's what, quarter mil nuyen?


Well, unless you can find a reasonable argument for writing R7+ program options.

The way I read "system" in the core book is that it limits program rating in the same way response limits system. Thus you could run these theoretical programs on any commlink. I think the rule you are most likely referencing supports this:
"All a programmer needs is
Software skill and a device (a basic commlink will do) on which
the program can potentially be run."UN118

There don't seem to be any rules about adding option rating to program rating. so either way it works out.

Um, it says you can't unless explicitly stated otherwise right there in the book. You pointed it out yourself. My argument is "I want to". Did you mean an argument for the rules supporting it?

Here's an interesting one:
"Pilot upgrade: Th ough most consumer vehicles only comes
with Pilot programs that range in rating from 1 to 3, as noted on
p. 228, SR4, Pilot programs are available in ratings from 1 to 6.
Exchanging a vehicle’s old Pilot program with a new version requires
a Logic + Soft ware (10, 10 minutes) Extended Test. Note
that each Pilot program is designed for a particular vehicle (see
Pilot Capabilities, p. 103)."AR105

I think I'll just forget about the nasty rating stuff and go with this, since this really starts to make it sound like the device rating rules weren't intended to apply to pilot software, especially considering there are no mentions of upgrading a drone's rating for it, even though they give pilot program costs and build times in many places.

Huh...

I think you're right. Mind you, the program won't run at R6, I'm pretty sure it gets reduced to the System rating (I'm double-checking a lot of stuff in my brain now) so it might only run at R2 but if you have an R12 program running on an R2 commlink, even if the program is only running at R2, it's still an R12 program running on an R2 commlink, which fits the conditions.


Little confused here. Short of AI stuff I don't know any way to get a drone with a Pilot higher than 12 and a soft higher than R18. The easiest way would be to find a way to break the R6 barrier on Optimization and program options in general. I don't know any way to do that, although if you do I'd be very interested to hear it.

Edit for new post:
*Shrugs* This is just part of the problem with Pilot programs: exactly what they are is incredibly vague, at best guess a cross between Agents, Systems, and something else. By a strict RAW reading, I'd say you're free to install whatever Pilot program you want on any device, how well it works is still limited by the hardware.

Won't run at R6... On an R2 commlink? Ah well, I think we understand each other in the end. I agree on the reduction. Effective system rating = response, and effective program rating = effective system rating.

Sorry, it just sounded like you were saying the rules would support rating 7+ options if I wanted it bad enough. In short, my reply was "that's an odd concept".

Yeah, I guess I mistyped. Still, I agree with that basic concept. Which speeds the R12 race up considerably.

Household drones would be rating 3 yeah. But I'd put military/security drones at 5. So yeah, you can upgrade those Pilot programs. And you should.

This gives me an idea for a run.
Runners are hired to steal a massively expensive drone another runner has been working months on.

Though if one of my runners decided to build that drone, I think I'd have it become an AI and go all HAL 9000 on them. If they beat the thing, they could sell the AI to a AAA for a tidy profit. The implication being that the quest for power is an all consuming and uncontrollable beast which cannot be contained. Maybe go all Mary Shelly with the AI viewing the creating runner as a neglectful(or over burdening) parent.
Or make the AI a xenosapient. Lovecraft with computers. Gives me an excuse to impart to my players the implication that the code for the original Crash came from a NASA satellite.

This is one of the things I like about Dumpshock. Even the most massively power gaming thread gives great ideas for runs.

Just a note, Longbowrocks... Autosofts do not go beyond Rating 4... There is a hardcap for them that I have yet to see broken (though, I do not have ALL the books)...

I thought that was a purchasing cap. Otherwise nothing could be programmed beyond 10, and you should be calling us all out on every high rating program mentioned thus far.

And before War! Nothing above 6 would have been legit.

This, so much, this. SR3 has a system that can actually scale to different skill and gear levels. SR4 just does not do that. Either the hacker can crack everything or else the GM has to just say "no" which is poor game design. The complexity is just as high but without any of the elegance of the old system.