You can call it "Crude Fight."

The very definition of a hacker character makes him require something to hijack from its intended role to play with. It can be a passing car to hack to either flee or ram someone, a building with doors and elevators to hide or trap the enemies in.

If there's no such element, a hacker is logically as useless as a magician whose Magic attribute is reduced to zero by Background Count, or a sniper without ammo. Most Gamemasters would consider Background Count 5+ should be rare. Most gamemaster make it relatively easy for the PC to keep or find firearms and ammos.

SR5 is trying to make as rare a situation where a hacker has nothing to do, by introducing incentives for both PC and NPC to have hackable gear. It is however one important lesson in economy and political sciences that incentives never guarantee results.

hackers do have other options. several have already been pointed out.

just because you're a hacker doesn't mean you have to be completely and utterly incompetent at every other thing in the world.

or at least, not in SR4. earlier editions it took a bit more as i understand it.

but in SR4, it is very possible to build a character that can hack extremely well, *and* be able to do other things... whether that might be infiltration (ie allowing you to slip past the gangers, run around a corner, and "disappear"), being a combat hacker, being a face, being a rigger, etc.

the only reason anyone should end up with a character that is unable to do anything other than hack stuff is because they *chose* to build that character (note: this largely includes choosing to be a technomancer, although frankly dealing with a couple of thugs armed with improvised melee weapons should be achievable for even technomancers with an extreme focus on hacking).

all that needs to be done in SR5 is leave room for you to be a hacker and still have some other basic areas of competency. there is no need to suddenly decide that everyone just got a brain-ectomy and suddenly thinks it's a good idea to have no meaningful security against a hacker (because let's face it, if your hacker is going to be competent enough to cut through the matrix defenses of a multi-million nuyen facility with a security budget likely going into the hundreds of thousands if not the millions, owned by a multi-trillion nuyen megacorporation with no legal restrictions on what they can do to you once you attack their installation, you should be able to get through the defenses offered by some schmuck's discount cyberware in next to no time).

The carrot approach only works if there is an actually carrot and not a stick your trying to claim is a carrot.
In other works new bonuses on gear that make sense, not taking away of basic functionalities of gear

Freakonomics did a fun little segment on the unexpected consequences of incentives. The more poorly conceived the incentive, the more likely it is to have unforseen side effects.

The old Combat Decker was not too hard to do back in the day. Again it involved sinking some points or karma into a skill or dropping some nuyen into a set of R4-6 wires and a Reflex Recorder (infact if you did it right you could set your Cyberdeck up as a Skillsoft Jukebox and run Pistols, SMGs, Edged Weapons and Shotguns at R6 over your wires all while you were jacked into the Matrix so you didn't have to do anything went you dropped out). An SMG, a Pistol and a Cougar Fineblade would see you fine in most situations. (The reason I say wires is that you really wanted to sink your karma in all of the Design and Developement Knowledge Skills that went hand in hand with Computer for writing your own programs as well as the B/R skills).

Then I guess my wife's shadowrunner isn't a 'runner. She's got the pacifist flaw, for one. Second, she's got almost no weapon or combat skills to speak of. She is, however, a valued member of the team, because she's got the means to repair anything we've got broken, and to hack into places we can't get to.

Not every Shadowrunner has to be a combatant.

That's not a Shadowrunner, that's a Contact that gets unfortunately dragged along on runs and is too loyal to demand extra nuyen or tell you to go frag yourself.

By that logic, Street Samurai aren't Shadowrunners because they can't hack, and their magical skills blow goats. They can't even take on an intangible spirit.

That's why Shadowrunners work in teams - to cover each other's weak points. A hacker doesn't have to have gun-fu, and may rely on her friends to keep her alive. Hell, for me, Cleric is a gun-and-car sort, and doesn't even go INTO the runs, he just drives you there, drops you off, and picks you up. But he's one hell of a driver and marksman.

Or, 'it isn't what you can do, it's who you know'. If you don't have a lot of skills, but can pull together backup like nobody's business, I'd qualify that, too.

What? Every situation must be hackable, is what I'm reading.And that is a bunch of bunk, a mage can't handle every ituation with magic even in non background count situations, a sam can't shoot a soultion to every problem and a face can't talk his way past everything. It seems like for some reaosn people have this belief that hackers need to be able to hack in every situation when no other archetypes abilities crosses into every situation. Mages potentially go the furthest but drain, visibility, back gorund count, actually having the spell etc make it less of a reality.

Despite what the anti-awakened propaganda would have you believe, hostile spirits are not an everyday risk of life in the Barrens, unless you piss off some Street Shaman or something. A couple of tweaked-out lunatics looking to get on with their torture, murder, rape, cannibalism, or combination thereof, however, is.




No, he doesn't have to have gun-fu. He might know kung-fu, he might be controlling drones, he might have a grenade launcher or have a set of spurs or whatever. But he does have to have some means of taking care of himself in a physical confrontation.




You know what that's called? A "Fixer." Not a Runner, a Fixer.

Yeah, right, because in SR1234 Hackers and Deckers were such poor characters who could never contribute to the success of the run. All the legwork, information gathering, faking proof, security device hacking, oberservation overwatch, drone control, tacnet manipulation never happened.

Poor bastards. They really were never any useful in previous editions.

SYL

Nexus (my Cyberlogician) would like to have words with you...

apple's irony would like to have a word with you

Did she take Athletics, or at least some bloody social skills? Because otherwise, yeah, she's created a liability with a character sheet, not a Shadowrunner.

A character who can't get themselves out of the day to day incidental situations of their profession is badly designed.

pretty sure that's sarcasm, not irony.

That was my guess as well...

So now you fell prey to mine ...

She has social skills, and some athletics skills, and some driving / piloting skills. And lives with a combatant.
And, by the by, having a walking liability as a character is a perfectly valid character. And can still be called a Shadowrunner. 'Competent' is not mandatory, as long as they can do their job. *cough, cough* rocker *cough, cough*

Dot Matrix, from Reboot. Granted, that episode had her swordfighting (she snagged the sword as part of her infiltration), but the conflict was resolved not merely by her talking to her opponent, but rather by negotiating and ultimately HIRING her opponent.

Alternatively, Banshee (X-men / Marvel Comics).

It's not their job I'm worried about, it's their plausibility as someone who has to live in the Sixth World.

Your sixth world is not his sixth world. There is more than one way to play this game. And besides maybe he character stays in safe areas of town if not accompanied by a bodyguard. Or would random street gang attacks have to happen to the character to prove a point in A rating neighborhoods.

I'm quite certain the vast majority of people living in the Sixth World do not need combat and athletic skills to live. Just like the vast majority of people in the world now don't need to know how to fire a firearm (and in fact, don't).

Someone who can afford to live in an A-rated neighborhood by virtue of having both the money and the clean SIN (or the clean fake SIN) to live in such a neighborhood has no business running the Shadows.

But no, random street gangs in an A-rated neighborhood don't happen. However, the local security forces determining that you and the "combatant" you live with are wanted in connection with a number of crimes and coming to pick you up tends to happen. Then, assuming you manage to slip out before they find you, your SIN or fake SINs are burnt, and you're going to have to relocate to a part of town where random street violence does tend to happen.

At which point you'd better work on buying off that pacifist flaw and buying up some other means of resolving your problems besides saying "I'm a rich bitch and I run the Shadows for fun, but I don't kill people because EW!"




You're absolutely right! The vast majority of the people living in the Sixth World do not need combat and athletics skills to live, just like the vast majority of the people living in Faerun do not need Heroic Class Levels, because they don't spend any time diving into dungeons or clashing with dragons.

We call those people "NPCs".

If your team can cope with you not having combat skills, I don't see the problem.

~Umi

Could we come back to the Topic please ?
I'll start with :

what about Laserpointer or Red Dot ?
Do they follow the same rules like Smartlink ?
like +1 Accuracy without Wireless and
+1 Acc & +1 Dice if online ?

With a curious Dance
Medicineman

I come back to Questions and answers :

What test should be done by a hacker to hack the commlink of someone else and what test should be done to resist ?

I suppose that the hacker launch Intuition+hacking skill dices (with limit based on a cyberdeck attributes), but is it now an opposed test or a treeshold test ?

Doest the commlink resist with only attributes/programs (Firewall indeed) or we take into account a skill or an attribute of the owner (for exemple, Logic+Computer with limit=Firewall) ?

I'm rather curious as to why you consider yourself qualified to decide who does or does not have business running the shadows.

Forced Evolution does that quite nicely, actually. If you cannot defend yourself then you are Meat, as was explained somewhere above. *shrug*
The Shadows will grind you up and spit you out, especially if you are incapable of actually defending yourself.

The question, though, is what counts as "you." Why does it have to be the individual character that needs to be able to defend themselves, individually? Why isn't the concern about whether or not the team can function as, well, a team? And why does it matter so much if the "forced evolution" at one game table isn't the same as the "forced evolution" at yours?

...um, what the hell happened to "What happens at my table doesn't have to be what happens at your table"?

Well that is because at your table you get fun wrong, at my table we get it right damn it.

Do spirits have the same power as in SR4 rules or powers were reworked to give more differences between two kinds of spirit (contrary to SR4 where air, water and man spirit have rather the same powers) ?

Does the drain for summoning still "2 x Success" of the spirit ?

you forgot to write *shrug*

Everyone ends up alone from time to time, and even end up in a bad pickle with no backup, occasionally. If you cannot defend yourself, then you lose, simple as that. Now, that said, defending yourself can take many paths. There is no one way to do so, but some are far more effective than others.

As for what happens at each table, that was never a consideration, to my knowledge. It was a simple statement of the reality of the Shadowrun environment. As a runner, you will eventually be in a position where you have no backup and need to defend yourself. If you cannot do so, then you lose (in whatever way that occurs). *shrug*

Nothing at all... That still holds.

Or it might never come up. You can live in a lower class location and never, ever be in that situation. Or, you can just luck out. I've been in an armed holdup at a convenience store (is that a Shadowrun scenario, or what?) I was standing right in front of the front window, by the comic book stand, and the gunman just never saw me. He came in, he held up the place, he left, and through the entire thing he didn't see me at all. It was uncanny.

The only other time I ever had to deal with something like that, a guy threatened me and pinned me to the bus shelter. I recognized that he was a 'punk' sort of individual, and (lying) pointed out he didn't want to beat me up, there were a few 'skaters' who went by down the block a short while ago. He decided beating up skaters was more fun, set me down, and took off.

But, there are people who don't even go that far.

True, it can happen, but as a Shadowrunner, are you willing to bet your life on it, because you are. It only takes once, and if you cannot stand and deliver, you lose. Shadowrunners are not known for their sane behavior and reticence for getting into places that they should not be... places that can end in their death if caught.

And that's a choice. And I don't see a need to punish the player for that choice. She has a concept, it works, I run with it.

And I bet that you don't put the character in a situation where that "Choice" obviously works against her either. Because doing so would show the character that the choice was flawed just about the time that the character died.

Does your GM make the flaw of not tossing 20+ dice apparent?

What is a flaw in your game may not be a flaw in their game, there is no universal take on the SR universe. It is totally reasonable that in some games individuals don't get jumped often enough as long as they play it safe that the GM would not feel the need to make that "flaw “apparent.

True... But if a Flaw is never exploited, it is not a Flaw...
Our GM is good at exploiting our flaws. And he is good at not shoving them in our face all the time, too.

It stops becoming a problem if you decide to go the angle of combat being a once-in-a-blue-moon kind of thing (which I've heard stories of people doing, and is something I'm looking into doing)

Otherwise, I see no reason to punish people for going with a concept they want to explore.

Perhaps, but I have yet to see any Shadowrun Campaign have absolutely zero combat in it. It just, to my knowledge, does not happen.

My Shadowrun games have combat about once every 7-8 sessions, sometimes going as long as 10 sessions without conflict. The characters live their lives, make contacts, work for their employers, prepare themselves, meet opposition, then rinse and repeat. The pacifist just finished getting her drones repaired (who launch fire-retardant foam as a weapon), and the group is about to protect an exploration team going into the Deep Laguna for a documentary.

I prefer my Shadowrun to be closer to Minority Report / I, Robot than Bladerunner or Robocop. Sure, there's sections of the world which absolutely SUCKS, but that isn't the defining characteristic of the setting for me unless the players want to play that level of game. For this campaign, we decided to focus on the higher strata of society.

Plus, for my current group, it's starting to become more and more apparent that combat just isn't their thing, and that they prefer to lean more towards the RP side of things.

That, and I've been stressing to them how it's very easy for your characters to get killed with one shot, and they they're better off avoiding combat whenever possible.

Point being: combat doesn't have to be the end-all-be-all for SR.

i don't recall anyone saying you had to be able to kill the thugs, or defeat them with violence.

the litmus test is "can you deal with them".

so, for example, having good enough social skills to make them go somewhere else: congratulations, you just passed the test. in fact, i would bet that the method most people will choose in the shadowrun world will not involve deciding to fight them 2 on 1.

but if you don't have *some* means at your disposal of getting out of a bad situation, on your own, then you should have died in chargen.

If the game is 'balanced' with the assumption of a given runner team having specific archetypes and roles present, it will make writing for Shadowrun Missions real interesting, since in those games you CANNOT assume anything about what players are bringing into the game.


-k

Well, consider this: If that is true, the system cannot be said to be supporting a concept if the concept cannot pass that test, There are various valid decker concepts that without some strong form of combat-relevant hacking could not pass that test. Is it your suggestion that the system should not support those concepts?

Yes, it is. Such a character may be technically skilled, but if they can't handle themselves confidently taking a walk down the street in the quieter parts of Redmond Barrens, they are a Contact archetype, not a 'Runner. They exist to do one thing and one thing only, and irregardless of whether they do that one thing well, they're just not able to honestly hack it. At best, they're a mission payload that gets dragged into a 'run to do something and then extracted by the rest of the team, but they're not really a participant.

Crippling overspecialization is for insects.