The Grid: a digital frontier. I tried to picture pulses of data as they moved through the Matrix; what did they look like? Ships, motorcycles? Were the devices like freeways?

I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see.

And then, one day...

I got in!

In game terms, Seattle's LTG is the main overarching hub that connects all of Seattle, and the Seattle 'plex, to everything elsewhere; with a Rating 9 Signal (whatever else we might decide its stats are, I think we can all agree on that,) it has a transmission range of 400 Km, putting it in constant real-time connection with orbiting satellites, every 'plex grid within 400 Km, and any device which is within its own Signal rating of reaching the LTG. For instance, my group is basically never going to not have Matrix access, since one of them has a Singularity Battle Buddy in her head with a Rating 7 Signal device, giving her a range of 40 Km. Even in the farthest reach of Tarislar, and assuming that the Tarislar transmitters are down, she'd be within MSR of Ft. Lewis and southern Auburn and Tacoma, which will definitely be enough to link her into the LTG. In most of Seattle, she'll be within MSR of the LTG itself.

This also means that you should basically never be able to get lost in the wilderness, as long as you have a commlink on you. Even if your transmitter's not beefy enough to get a signal back, unless you're way out of the realm of probability, you'll be within Signal range of the Seattle LTG, so it shouldn't be too hard to just head towards it and pray you find something civilized before the critters get you.


But for all of its utility as the matrix backbone that connects Seattle to things in the sky, and to other 'plexes within its 400 Km range, what does it look like? This became important in my game recently, because the climactic battle of the Run my group was on took place on the Grid itself.


I decided to make it a mix of Seattle's AR sculpting of an "emerald city" Wizard of Oz motief and TRON: Legacy, heavy on the TRON and light on the Wizard of Oz. Basically the Grid from TRON: Legacy with a greener color scheme. My explanation for this (IC) is that the artist they hired to design it was a huge fan of turn-of-the-century flatvids and not a fan of the Wizard of Oz, and nobody in an oversight position caught on to what he was doing, too wrapped up they were in the shiny green transparent panels.


The Grid (and you can rightly call it that, being the Local Telecommunications Grid,) is a web made out of a series of tubes; enormously huge, leviathan hollow tunnels floating high in the digital air, a web of tunnels spreading out, connecting all of Seattle and beyond. Government matrix locations appear in the midst of the grid as floating green buildings, connected by huge on-ramps, along with other major Matrix sites in the vicinity, though those may or may not have their own representation. But major matrix sites are only the half of it; by far and away the most numerous thing that goes through the LTG is going to be data, whether comm-calls or email or what-have-you.

Far below the Grid is a sea of white lights burning on the ground, forming an outline of the metroplex made out of burning dots indicating devices in connection with the LTG and official sub-grids, such as repeaters in the different districts. To get to them, data (or someone riding the Matrix) flips to the outside of one of the tunnels and drops off of it, sailing down towards whatever they're heading to. To get into orbit, or to another metroplex grid, take one of the mega-tubes out of the city.

Basically, "information superhighway" as a literal metaphor, interpreted through TRON: Legacy. Anything happening on the grid should be cast in light of constant, blazing motion, balls-out speed. I didn't shy away from giving my player's icons light-cycles when they jacked in, either, which turned what might have been an otherwise boring roll-off between Trace IC trying to track them down and them trying to analyze a virus (so they could get a full copy of it, so as to reverse-engineer a countermeasure,) into a very literal chase, complete with one player's light-cycle crashing, smashing and de-rezzing when she used a rating-3 stunt to float away from it and hover.




I'll post the stats for it (and its security measures) when I've done them. I'm sure my idea of the stats and security protocols will differ from yours. But what do you think the Grid looks like?

Like this: http://bannockburn1981.deviantart.com/art/...-Grid-308095672
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Nice one ShadowDragon8685! I think such descriptions help make the Matrix less dry and more interesting to play with.

As a GM, I adapt my vision of the Grid to my players. Some of them enjoy the whole VR metaphor/TRON-like approach while other hate it.

LTG's are basically made to look like the city they represent.
To give users a feel of familiarity of the surroundings, so they find their way around easy enough.

In my game, I instituted the Stunting rules as an Exalted player understands them, pretty much wholesale.

Basically,
A dry description devoid of anything 'fun' ("I shoot him with my Ares Predator, double-tap quick-draw, using Krav Maga to take a free Aim on the first shot" gets nothing.
A simple description with some color and flavor to it ("Hard Exit's hand twitches at her side. Her experience in fights lets her expertly appraise her shot before her pistol is even clear of the holster, and she quick-draws fast as any gunslinger in the Old West ever did, twirling her custom Predator IV around her trigger finger as she brings it up, placing her smartgun's trajectory over the street punk's center mass and pulling the trigger twice in rapid succession") gets one bonus die on the test(s) applicable. (Sometimes two, if it really good or there hasn't been much stunting lately.)
Anything that's at least somewhat descriptive and involves the environment in a dramatic way ("Recognizing the intent in the street tough's eyes, Traveller Jone's eyes go wide. He goes for his guns with both hands, whipping Lefty out of her holster, spending a precious second to exhale and size up his target. By the time his discarded lo mein hits the ground, spilling his authentic wheat noodles into the rainswept-gutter, the Predator IV is in line with the tough's chest and has barked twice") would be a guaranteed +2 dice.
Anything better than that - anything that makes the GM go "holy shit" (in the good way, not "holy shit, I don't believe you just iced Mr. Johnson" way - though they might ice Mr. J spectacularly enough to be a rating 3 stunt on its own merits) or otherwise makes the GM's jaw drop or rob him of speech (in the good way) gets the player +3 dice to the test, and their choice of refreshing an Edge use or one Karma.


Without a good idea of what your character (or his/her persona) is doing, where they are, it's hard to get any good stunts going, leading to boring, cut-and-dried stuff. But once I described the Matrix, suddenly the two hackers in on the fight were getting into things wholesale, and throwing around 2- and 3-die stunts.





That's boring.

But seriously, There should be a default look to each Matrix location, but there should be software out there to change that look if the user desires. Toggling back and forth between the default and custom views should be trivial. Default could be an idealized replica of Seattle, with a Wizard of TRON view you can download, or maybe a character prefers to see Wild West buildings.

@Shadowdragon:
It does not look like streets for the most part.
It looks like a Web of 3-D-Icons connected to each other and other stuff.
And the Icons of Corporations and Shops are, on the grid, where they would be relatively to each other in the meat world.
The connection between these is usually following the lay.out of the streets, so users find their way around there easier.
Computers/Networks ARE BORING BUT WORK!
Whereas as soon as a Computer/Network gets interesting/exiting, it usually stopy working like clockwork and starts working like a broken clock.
Right only twice a day . . in a 24 hour model only ONCE a day . .
INSIDE the Icons/Shops it looks completely what the owner wants it to look like.
Their own specific iconography is used. This was a boon to home-turf-users and a problem for invaders.

This is how the matrix had been officially described in the olden times. In the beginnings, the most icons would look like geometrical shapes with only the larger corps having a distinct icon.

No idea, how you would represent the net with AR and the wireless matrix, as there is, basically, no real infrastructure but thousands of moving nodes . .

Well, per RAW there is no mention of ever being outside a node, the "grid" no longer exists...probably my biggest flavour-wise gripe with the new matrix

Naah... the grid still exists, it is just not all that important compared to the Node Architecture of the individual nodes.

They have that. It's called a Reality Filter, and it lives on Page 233 of Shadowrun, 20th Anniversary Edition.

Using it creates an opposed test between your commlink and the node you're on. If your link wins, your reality filter asserts itself well enough that you gain a +1 bonus to Response. If you botch it, the system's sculpting is so strong that, while you still see everything in terms of your chosen metaphor, translating it is so costly, processor-wise, that you suffer a -1 Response penalty.

Toggling is as trivial as running your Reality Filter program or turning it off; a Simple action to turn it on, and a Free action to turn it off.





"Boring but practical" has little place in an RPG, and none whatsoever in the magical world of the Matrix.

Even if the world described seems chaotic and nutbar and impossible for a metahuman to navigate, it is not. You can always roll your Data Search skill (+Browse) to find something, even if the metaphor for the node you're in is a completely barren room or a labyrinthine maze.

It works because it's awesome, and because you're in a computer system.






*points at the SR4 icon next to the thread.*

Anyway, the "Grid" still exists, in the form of the powerful nodes that connect those millions of devices. Even if a sea of tiny devices serves to create the wireless architecture for a city, you still need mammoth signal devices to create wireless connectivity between cities; and you'll still usually have a couple of powerful nodes in any given district of the city, with each neighborhood having its own big node to serve the small devices in there that can't reach the district nodes.

In the absence of deliberate attempts to spoof and obfuscate your trail, data is still going to want to take the shortest route between two places. Say you have a Disposable commlink (Signal Rating 3) Your commlink has a Signal range of 400 meters. So unless you're basically within a block of the guy you want to call, you can't call him, right? Wrong. Let's say you're in Tarislar, and the person you want to call is in downtown Vancouver.

Your commlink looks for the nearest high-Signal device in range, and it finds a few commlinks your neighbors have. Through them, your call is webbed through small (Signal 1-3 devices) nodes until it gets to the neighborhood tech geek's commlink. That guy has a commlink with a Signal rating of 4, which is enough to bounce from his commlink to the neighborhood repeater the good citizens of Tarislar have bought, a Signal 7 device, with a range of 40 Km.

The call reaches the highest-signal devices in MSR of the Tarislar repeater, and in this case it finds the Signal 8 military hub in Ft. Lewis. The Ft. Lewis hub doesn't quite have the range to reach Vancouver (it's barely able to reach Everett Naval Station, though it can,) but it does have the Seattle LTG within range. The Seattle LTG, which is a Rating 9 device, bounces the call to the Vancouver LTG, also a Signal 9 device. Vancouver's LTG then bounces the call to the district hub in downtown Vancouver nearest to your friend's commlink, and since your friend has a Signal 5 commlink and is within MSR of that district hub, the call goes straight through to him.


Remember that each of those devices is also a node in and of itself, a node which can have sculpting. Sure, you could ignore that, but why would you? The Matrix still exists, the Grid still exists. It's changed form, but it's there. You can still picture pulses of data as they move throughout the system, and envision them as ships or motorcycles or whatever you please.




Unless the chicanery you need to get up to is on one of the nodes that make up the grid.

But again, that is a specific NODE, not the Grid.

When you're playing around on one of the major backbone hubs - anything that's Rating 9 - the distinction is largely academic, especially given that you're only a few hops from anywhere.

But you see none of these nodes, the devices on which these nodes run merely retransmit the data. By RAW you always are in a node, you can do stuff there or go into another node, but never outside the node to see the matrix around you. Unwired expanded on that with "portals" in nodes, but still nothing outside.

You're thinking about it the wrong way. There is no nebulous "Matrix outside the nodes," unless you want to start playing the metaplanar equivalent card for technomancers.

The Matrix is the nodes that make it up.

I do, for the Resonance Realms are all-encompassing, all-knowing and all-powerful

While I don't disagree with anything you've said here particularly, I like the idea of areas of the barrens (and other wilderness areas near the 'plex) being without wifi (and doesn't it mention that somewhere in canon?!?). You can get round that by using sat links to reach other cities (much like today) can't you? The main signal routers have them and so anyone that can connect to them gets a signal...beyond the mesh you are out of luck.

Yeah, if the LTG of Seattle is a rating 9 device, shouldn't the Barrens have constant matrix access?

Where do the outages and flakey signals come in? Seattle to Vancouver is ~200 km, so even Oregon should have access to the Seattle LTG.

Technically, the reach is limited by the smaller component.
so if i have a reach of 1000m and you have a reach of 100m it only works at 100m, because wireless communication is a two way street.
you need to be able to send me data, not just receive mine.

Yes, two-way communication is indeed that way, but if I only need to receive your communicaiton, with no need to send anything back, then I can operate at the higher rating (Yours), rather than the lower (Mine). Not all wireless communications need to be two-way. Think Radio here.

Redmond Barrens, Puyallup Barrens, are not out of the Signal range of the Seattle LTG. They're not even going to be out of range of the district hub set up in tourist town.


The problem in Redmond Barrens, for instance, is that there is no mesh of repeater boxes to grab your call and route it to the district hub.

Remember, you need to be in Mutual Signal Range to be able to use the Matrix. Otherwise, all that being within the 400,000 meter range of the Seattle LTG transmitter will do is tell you which direction to travel in to get to downtown. Your device needs to have the Signal to reach it in order to be within MSR.

So, if you're in Redmond Barrens, in the part of it that's farthest from Downtown, you're going to be roughly 30Km from the Seattle LTG. If you have a Signal 7 device, you're golden, you and the LTG are within MSR, and you have direct access to the Matrix backbone.

If, on the other hand, you're using a cheap disposable commlink with a Signal rating of 3 - 400 meters - you're probably going to be screwed unless there's either a high-Signal device within your 400 meters range, or for some reason there is a trail of lower signal devices stretching from within MSR of you to within MSR of a high-signal device.

So, if you ever find a part of the Barrens where it appears to have snowed toasters, that's what's happening. Someone is using their 40m range to establish a net of Matrix activity.

I should also point out that RFID tags, Rating 1 devices, have that same 40m capacity. They cost 1/20th of a nuyen each. 1,000 of them costs only 50 nuyen. You could literally crop-dust the Barrens with them to establish Matrix connectivity.

Yeah, but you can't tell the radio what to play.
Which is exactly what you are doing using wireless data transmission.

all the time, a wire-less client sends data to the access point so he knows who is who and who wants what data.

No, but he is correct. If, say, you have a Rating 7 device and you need to send a burst of data to someone who is within 40 Km of you, and their response is not necessary, you can do so without being in Mutual Signal Range.

Examples of such messages include "Bugs! Position overrun! We are pulling back!" and "Mission is go."

No, actually, you can't . .
Because that needs an authentification from the recipient that tells your link that he is allowed to hear it.

I am making it my next character's mission to seed the Barrens with toasters. The next Ork Underground Initiative. Project Toasters for Connectivity.

Actually, it does not...
See ELF transmissions IRL (they are a bit slow, to be sure, but the receiver CANNOT authenticate back).
At worst, you have a One Time Pad authentication at point of receipt. You cannot authenticate, you cannot decrypt.

When I was in the Gulf, I had many instances where I could hear Commad, but Command could not hear me. We also used hardwired Crypto Gear, with scheduled crypto and frequency changes.

So, what did you describe then? I'd say the matrix you see once you "step out" of a node in Seattle

If you "step out" of a node, I'd say you go to the next-highest node, until you hit the local telecommunications grid. There is no node "higher" than an LTG, just laterally removed from it and equal in stature.

Well, an RTG is of a higher order than an LTG, since an RTG will have many LTG's under its Control.

Yeah, but there isn't, to my knowledge, any Signal rating available higher than 9. So there's nothing "higher" than those nodes available. The only way you could make one would be to get a big nexus and hardwire it into all the LTGs.

And exactly this hierarchical structure does by exists by RAW. You start out in your commlink node and from there can "teleport" into other nodes, but you can't take a step back and watch the grid to which all of those are connected

Or you can, if you like. It is all in the descriptions involved.

I believe that Signal can actually go to 10. Not sure though.

Arn't satlinks considered signal 12?

Satlinks are signal 8.

How do they reach the deep space stations?
these are out of reach for even signal 10 i'd think?
On that note:
how dangerous would these kinds of signal emitters be?
i mean, a high powered radar dish for example is pretty lethal if you are cought in front of it for some time, if i remember correctly . .

Standard Radio will reach deep space. Just takes time.
I would call that Signal 10-12 Though.

It's simple enough to extrapolate what a signal 10+ would have for range, at least.
Signal 11 would be 4000 km, for instance (a tenth of the circumference of the earth), signal 13 would reach everywhere on the planet. We'd need the equivalent of signal 20 to reach Mars. Signal 37 would roughly let us be in contact with the nearest star (excepting the sun), 4.2 light years away. Signal 38 would let us contact the nearest 7 stellar systems. Signal 57 would afford range beyond the observable universe.

Radio Works...