QUOTE (redwulfe @ Jun 16 2013, 08:15 AM)
What I find odd about this conversation is that people are trying to justify technology that is 60 years beyond us. 60 years in the past we would have had a hard time justifying today's technology in some regards.
Because cause and effect are violated by this nonsense, that's why.
Sixty years ago, if you had told someone that he would be able to place a telephone call from inside a moving vehicle, he would have said that was ridiculous, but then if you told him to just posit the fact that the nation becomes covered in radio repeaters that enable a small handheld device to reach anyone, he would likely have agreed it was possible. If you then told him it was possible for that same device to use its radio transmitter to open your garage door, or to use an infra-red light beam to control your television, he would likely say it seems far-fetched, but not technically impossible. (Also, if you were talking to the right person, you probably just sped up the invention of cellular telephones by thirty years.)
If you had told that same man that by choosing to use those features, however, you opened yourself up to the risk that malicious people would then be able to use your phone to make your car's tires deflate, he'd call bullshit, and at the very least demand to know why your car's tires are radio-controlled.
Are you seeing the problem here?!It does not make any kind of sense, it does not follow any kind of plausible cause-and-effect. There is literally no reason for Wired Reflexes and Reaction Enhancers to be incompatable,
unless you open yourself up to a hostile hacker shutting them off by connecting them to the Matrix. Why?
What possible use do those things have for Matrix input?None. Jack shit. Their
entire goal in life is to speed up the rate at which signals inside your body travel from your brain to your extremities and the speed at which your brain processes the input coming from your senses, allowing you to react quicker. Would they benefit from being connected to
each other, certainly, but they don't need to be exposed to the wireless world for that to happen. They can be connected internally, either through running some ultrafine superconductors (something that evidently exists in Shadowrun, whose existence I can accept on the face of it,) from your wired reflexes to your reaction enhancers, or by using the skinlink electrical field that we've already established has sufficient bandwidth for full DNI control over your smartgun.
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Second off this is a game where magic and dragons exist it isn't our world so why do we try and justify it. It already doesn't make since cause elves don't exist.
Oh no, you did not just go there.
Just because something explicitly violates the laws of physics doesn't mean
everything does. "Magic" is a great excuse - it's
literally magic. The laws of physics as we understand them need not apply - but the laws of
magic, which are predefined and only wiggle around slightly with each new iteration of the setting, do apply to magic. For instance, Magic cannot conjure physical mass from nothing, it cannot enable a physical object to teleport, it cannot allow one to travel through time - these are set precepts that everyone, from the humblest Magic 1 hedge wizard to the mightiest Great Dragon and Immortal Elf must abide by. And
nothing in the magic rules changes how computer science works. Magic and electronics
explicitly don't get along well. If I could waggle my fingers and chant some mumbo-jumbo and chuck a fireball in real life, that wouldn't mean that the entire nature of telecommunications just changed.
You don't get to play the "Magic exists so shut up" card, not in Shadowrun, not when there isn't an explicitly magical phenomena at work.
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So maybe corps and such have decided to put low powered tack nets in there reaction enhancer products and maybe from that they have chem seals with early detection and asist the user in sealing up faster. To be honest to me it is a very small problem, in a game I love to play. Every edition of any game has had stuff that made no since, this one is no different.
It's one thing to have rules oversights create situations that makes no sense, it's quite another to do something absolutely made of 100% bullshittium to incentivize people to open themselves up to Matrix attacks in ways that do not make sense, just because they've been telling hackers for an edition that they can hack people's cyberlimbs but literally nobody in the history of ever saw any reason to enable wireless on their augs.
This is very much in the realm of "accept a -3 penalty to infiltration/stealth/disguise for wearing a bright pink glowing and blinking outfit, get +3 initiative." It's the kind of straight-up MMORPG balance "logic" that we do
not want in our table-top RPGs.
Hacking is not usually a combat skill. If the hacker wants to hack in combat, he picks up a gun and shoots someone. Or maybe, situation permitting, he hacks the other guys' drones and auto-turrets. If he's really desperate, he can try hacking the lights and environmental controls to impose a penalty on them. But he shouldn't get to hack their cyberlimbs, because
what fucking moron would leave his cyberlimbs open to wireless attack?! No moron, that's who. Your cyberlimbs have no business being connected to the wireless Matrix, they perform no Matrix function, there is no
reasonable, consistent explanation for why anyone who isn't a
complete idiot would leave his cyberlimbs open to wireless attack! They perform a function, that being to manipulate objects, most likely better than your original meat-and-blood arm did.
Nothing in their operation or job requirements necessitates wireless connectivity.
Neither does your chemsuit - and don't give me any bullshit about it sealing up based on what a remote sensor told it. The only way that makes sense is if you have the foresight to deploy sensors in advance, and if you're that reasonably worried about chemical attack, you don't leave the question up to chance, you just seal up from the get-go. If the sensor is on the suit itself, then there is literally no need for wireless connectivity, because the sensor can be hard-lined to the suit. And if there is no sensor, but it's all about you sending the DNI command to seal up, then there is literally no reason again, because it can either be skin-linked, or even hardlined into your datajack.
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It becomes really hard to come on to the forums to talk to others about a game you enjoy, when most post are cynical arguments against that game. With that I would like to take back this thread to its original purpose to ask questions about 5th.
Welcome to Dumpshock, we're a bunch of cynical, analytical bastards who demand that our games follow some kind of consistency. Hope you enjoy your stay, and maybe, through osmosis, will pick up enough critical thinking to say for yourself "Hang on, that does not make sense!"