ive tried looking it up but i cant find it anywhere

so, seriusly what's a decker?

Decker is a Hacker from earlier editions. They are the Matrix specialists of the game.

-D

The term comes from the piece of gear they carried back then - the cyberdeck - for hacking matrix systems.

Basically, the keyboard in the hand of this guy here.

Now I feel old.

Try this:

http://dystopia.wikia.com/wiki/Cyberpunk_Glossary

The term predates Shadowrun actually and is one of the things they borrowed from Cyberpunk literature.

Bull's gonna see this, and it's gonna kill him.

You kidding? Damn near killed ME!

*cries*

I fraggin' hate SR4 for this alone.

I have to admit, I would be perfectly fine having deckers rather than hackers, and doing away with technomancers.

I wonder what it would take to make the Matrix wired again...

Crash 3.0 and some heavy Technobabble.

I agree that they could have continued to them Cyberdecks instead of Commlinks, and could have still called them Deckers. I even get that plenty of people don't like Technomancers and their Otaku predecessors. What I don't understand is why, given the wireless world in which we now live in, taking Shadowrun back to a wired matrix would be preferred.

I'm pretty sure this is exactly why they're coming out with the Shadowrun 2050 book.

There's a lot of universe issues with it, indeed.

I miss the old slang. It feels like language never evolved in some ways, which is completely false for English.

Think about how people talk today versus 1912!

People giving up on soy-processors and using microwaves again?

Simple, make Technomancers the only one who can manage the high traffic wireless network and regular Deckers require to log in with a cable - gives technomancers an edge and hackers can optimize to be damn good but require a jackpoint.

What is funny is that the top end deck of the time had a name related to keyboard synthesizers, not computers.

As for the name and concept, i could not care either way (tho i somewhat miss the build rules of previous edition, in part because i found myself writing a VB program to calculate the cost of a custom deck from specs).

you have never worked in IT/Tech-Support/Security right? <.<

You'll find a deck, as well as what used to be Shadowrun, all packed in this short video.

What I like about this video is that it both shows why/how we used to love Shadowrun and why we can't do the same thing today.

Me too. Deckers are so 21st century. Hackers are so 20th....

And it is at this point I realize I have spent 20+ years playing shadowrun. I feel old now....

Pure security standpoint. Besides that, in Sr4 Honestly IMO hackers/techomancers are gods. Unless you have EVERYTHING turned off, they can hack it, if you have a comlink, they can hack it, they can get in your PAN (I iz in ur PANz, ejecting ur clipz) and once their, well, your kinda screwed.

I've spent 20+ Years WANTING to play Shadowrun.

I ended up GMing instead just to scratch the itch.

That's just it, actual security isn't what drives the technology. Wireless, the ability for users to log-in remotely, and many other aspects of IT all weaken security; yet that hasn't stopped those things from becoming more common to the end user, and similarly more 'requests' from bosses to implement regardless of security. My experience, a LOT of IT security work is trying to minimize the risk your company forces you to take.

In the next 70 years, as IT people become even more of the corporate wageslaves to the mega-corps, I absolutely seeing things going more wireless and less wired. In Shadowrun for sure, the real world maybe.

The offer still stands. You make it over here, I'll run a game for you

I know this has been answered, but you need to read some Gibson. For flavour, if nothing else

I feel your pain. Out of my last 9 games (in 3 different systems), I've only gotten to play in two of them. Not for lack of trying to push everyone from several different groups of friends to run games. I'm always amazed that they will spend 14 hours reading through every possible book to see if they can min-max a character for a few extra dice, but they don't have time to run a game. Oh well, I guess that's how it is everywhere.

I'll make the same offer. If you happen to be in Atlanta, I'll run a game.

Seconded. If you lend the group I´ll raise it to "If I´m ever on a vacation near you."

Not only that, but try to spend 45 minutes IN THE MIDDLE OF MY GAME trying to justify exactly why they should be able to this....

But honestly I dont have it to bad, one of my players and I switch off weekends, it gives everyone a little variety and gives us two weeks in between sessions to work out our seperate stories.

my offer still stands too:
if you make it to germany some time, tell me in advance and i will see if i can not get one of my two or by then maybe three GM's to master one for you . .

Reserve a seat for me please.

I consider GMing as playing Shadowrun, just that I got more characters to play with.

Not the same.

Oh i would have to agree, I find it much more satisfying to destry the GM's toys as they player, then I do destroying the players toys as the GM. Then I just kinda feel like a bully....even if he DID make his drone charge a squad of guys with FA Weapons.....

Maybe this could be used as a form of captcha for new registrations . .
If you don't know about shadowrun, you need to read up to answer questions and then you get your registration for dumpshock . .

Going back to original subject: what's the etymology for using decker? As far as I understand it, hacking became associated with computers because of the difficulties of using them, so you had to hack away at it, for things to work. The people who were good at clever solutions to problems then became known as hackers, which then got transferred over time to people who liked to play around with computer systems, which gradually became malevolent with successive generations. But why decking?

Because the first man portable cyber-terminals in the keyboard/syntheziser size were called CYBER DECKS . .

Same reason for calling people bikers, gunners, lancers and the such . .

'Decking' is exclusive(or almost) to the cyberpunk genre. Cyberdecks were first coined by William Gibson in Neuromancer. Thus a decker is one who uses a cyberdeck. And throughout the trilogy, if someone had a deck, they were most likely a hacker.

It's also synonymous with 'cowboy', from 'console cowboy', but that isn't used much(if at all) in Shadowrun.

Then I find it interesting that people like to stick to that terminology, when the RL technology of laptops are "cyber-terminals" of that size. I'm sure we all enjoy our nostalgia, but when SR is meant to portray the future, it seems backwards to have it be iconic of it to have tech that is a step backwards from what we're currently using. I don't get why people are nostalgic for cyberdecks. I'm sorry to all you old fogeys, but it just seems odd to me.

I shall get off your lawn with the utmost haste

because deckers are the keyboard cowboys, the cyber samurai . .
and hackers are script kiddies doing it for teh lulz . .

LOL..I love the irony in this statment, using a line from Hackers to describe deckers, then calling hackers script kiddies...hehe



Edit: P.S. Halinn ...back in MY day we had to roll dice uphill both ways!

SR has its roots in cyberpunk. All we HAVE is nostalgia, brother.

In fact, we didnt even Have Dice, we put divets in rocks and hoped they ended up almost balanced, charred sticks for pencils, and wood slabs for character sheets. The GM didnt have a screen, he had a cave...

i know, but i could not find a better fitting quote . . and at least here the probability is good for people getting these references and appreciating the irony therein . .

From what I understand, hacking came from the Civil War. One side would be sending their orders over telegraph lines and the opposing side would "hack" the line with a hacksaw and try to cover up the broken line. The first side wouldn't get their orders and they would have to start looking for the camouflaged hack in the line. After a while, someone got the idea to "hack" the line and splice their own receivers so that they would then be able to intercept the enemy side's orders. It got its name because they would actually hack the lines.

I always think of a Decker as the top or bottom part of a London Bus.

Shadowrun is, or was, the future of 1989 (debatably earlier) rather than the future of the moving Today™.

An apt comparison might be taking a steampunk game, updating it to have internal combustion everywhere, and then asking why we'd want to go back to steam engines.

(Of course, the memo didn't get to every writer—there's always been a tension between future-of-the-past and future-of-today—but the WMI and SR4 ended up swinging the pendulum all the way over to future-of-today and then breaking it off there.)

~J

The problem is that having a game set in the future of yesterday is that it becomes even more of a niche game, when that yesterday is a fairly recent one. It's easier to romanticize an era far removed from the one you're familiar with (as is the case with steampunk), than it is to romanticize an era people can still remember living in.
Setting it in the future of today works for keeping the setting something most everybody can relate to (with the added problems of having to change things again if a major technological shift occurs, of course).

Lurking, because SR4 can bite me, but this topic always interests me.

There's a fair point to be made that if you change the game too far from its original theme, it really becomes something else. SR4 has very little in common with its previous editions, except for a bit of shared history (much of which you have to ignore anyway). Really, it's trying to mix too much old (cyberware, elves, etc) with too much new (wireless, augmented reality, etc) and ends up awfully portraying our real future and awfully portraying the fictional one.

I don't think the "it should have X technology because we have something like X today" argument is a good one. Most of the iconic techs in SR are ones we will never develop in the real world, so it's not exactly fair that real world technologies should be forced into SR. I really think it's just an attempt to be interesting to people who don't understand what the internet is apart from their iPhones.

Having new tech introduced is not a problem, that's part of anything future-based, but when it's introduced in a space where RL tech already exists, it has to actually improve on the RL tech in some way, and suspension of disbelief also becomes easier if it is not going back to tech we already now consider obsolete (and also follows a fairly clear evolutionary path as to how it became the future tech that it is)

Why?

(Also, note that even with an answer to that, there's still an additional step to argue that where previously-introduced tech becomes in the future inferior to RL tech, the fictional tech needs to catch up.)

~J

SR universe is ostensibly a future version of our own, so in order for new tech to gain hold, it has to beat current tech in some way, and if it is to become the dominant tech, it has to provide ease of use for the normal user.
I just have a hard time with the cognitive dissonance required for me to imagine companies going back to develop on tech whose key patents are about to run out, instead of focusing on either improving current tech or introducing new things (rather than more powerful old ones).