Says you.

I for one, was glad for the change from "Cyberdecks" to "Commlinks," and I'm miffed that they're going back.

Why?

Because quite simply, a cyberdeck is an uncool, cumbersome thing, whereas it's not too implausible to imagine that they could implant the business bits of something the size of a smartphone into your head. And since the interface is going to remain AR or VR, there's no need to go back to something with a huge surface area.

[e]Also, quite honestly, cyberdecks are a legacy of a time when people literally could not imagine that massive computing power could be held in the palm of your hand. They just couldn't imagine it.

Cyberdecks are a relic of 1980s futurism, where the computers they knew were large, bulky, cumbersome affairs, and to them shrinking something down to the size of, say, half a pizza box, was as awesome as it was possible to get and still have any real power. Nowadays, we know better. My new smartphone has more power, speed and capability than all of the machines in all of the office spaces of 1989 combined, and that may not actually be hyperbole.

It's rather akin to an ancient sci-fi story I once read, wherein evidently mankind had the ability to manufacture anti-gravity drives and superluminal starships, but using electromagnetic tape to do your voice recording and having the ability to compress a minute's worth of audio into a second for radio transmission was considered the height of communications technology. Not even really "Information" technology, communications.


Today, I think, we have a better handle on the way things will look and be in the future, simply because we're already reaching the point where the form factor of our personal electronics is being dictated by the interface technology and the size of human hands and fingers, rather than the size of the components that go within it. I think going back to Cyberdecks is a pointless gesture, an attempt to appease the "harromph, gettin' goddamn iphones in mah cyberpunk? NO THANK YE!" crowd, which will not work because they have already decided they'd rather live and relive the 2050s and early 2060s over and over again than get into the 2070s. Meanwhile, it's probably going to be a baffling step to the new blood that came in with SR4.

Me, I came in on the tail end of SR3. Like, literally a month before SR4 was announced. So I'm familiar enough with the way SR3 was to say that I strongly prefer SR4, and as an aesthetic choice, I strongly disapprove of the retrograde step back to cyberdecks. Cyberdecks should be the province of old characters pulling out some seriously chill old hardware, probably to show it off to the young bloods or have an old-school friendly cybercombat with another old guy who managed to preserve his hardware from the jormungandr worm.

You and I are in accord.

Um they had powerful computers in the palm of your hand in SR1, it was caled the pocket secretary. Now something that could put you in the matrix which includes full sensory submersion required a deck. This worked fine both setting wise(the matrix is far off enough who knows what you would need to hack it) and game balance wise. Making the deck a larger tool put it in the realm it was an assault cannon for the nerd on the team, and not the ultra concealable comlink which is more powerful than any gun.

Re: Cyberdecks -- In defense of Cyberdecks, the reality is that powerful computing has a footprint in the form of required space, and required energy. Any 2070 era Commlink will be outcomputed by a larger Cyberdeck with equivalent processing-to-space density.

Additionally, Commlinks have some reliance on cloud storage.

It sounds like Matrix 3.0 has some incentives for you to NOT rely on cloud storage, and instead maintain healthy local processing/storage capabilities. Hence, Cyberdeck.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

Uncool to you? Fair enough. Freaking cool as hell to me? Yup.

Any powerful computer is more powerful if you can make it bigger. This is as true today as it was in 1980.

Apparently you want small computers but encryption a toddler with a crayon could break is ok. I'm not sure how that gels but ok. You are picking and choosing what you want to 'advance', and that's ok, because so am I.

Don't act like it makes more sense.

Whoa there guys, desktop computers are bygone technology because tablets exist.

Tablets are excellent - for what they do best. There isn't one tool in a 2070s mechanics garage I'm guessing.

And decks these days are, perhaps not surprisingly, tablet-sized or smaller. Some of the lower-end decks are the size of a couple decks of regulation playing cards, in the neighborhood of a Galaxy Note II smartphone of today. The Excalibur is the size and weight of an iPad, give or take.

Interesting. I would have expected something around the same weight class, but thicker and not as wide. Do deckers actually use a screen on their decks rather than using AR/VR to interract with it?

Surely.

Considering that direct computer brain interfaces a la Shadowrun are probably still going to be farfetched in actual 2070, I think we're allowed to suggest they might need something the size of a briefcase in fake 2070.

The bottom line is that miniaturization is expensive, and there will always be a premium on making things smaller versus paying for extra real estate to house it.

Commlinks were an affront to realism, because literally everyone carted around the exact same technology, and it was the result of the smartphone being Johnny Come Lately in the mid-2000s. In reality, common people will use cheap tiny devices for common tasks, but real work will continue to be done on bulky machines. It's just cheaper that way.

That's cool. Even in SR3 decks didn't have a required bulk. I think one of the SR3 archetype deckers had a deck the size of about an old-school IBM keyboard.

I would have preferred bigger. they are more poweerful than any weapon a street sam will bring to bare and more concealable than his backup pistol, that seems off to me. But I guess cyber decks don't make much sense if they are the size of a keyboard.

This is excellent news. Thanks for the info.

Are cyber-implanted decks still possible with this increase in size, or are headware versions of decks not possible now in SR5? Or limited to only low-end stats or something?

Headware 'decks are totally a thing in SR5.

I still prefer the Synthesizer shaped and sized decks of SR 1 - 3.

You can totally still have one, if you want. Cyberdecks right now in the 2070s are still very makeshift, sometimes cobbled-together, affairs. Hackers are only just now catching up to the New Matrix, so there's all sorts of innovation and stuff going on (as has been mentioned about Gentry, the hacker from the SR5 cover). There's no reason you can't have an actual SR1-3 cyberdeck that your character's worked on to upgrade, gutted and replaced the innards of, etc, etc, if it's the older-style case you like.

Bull the Ork Decker carried around a Commlink the size and shape of a large keyboard all through 4th edition. In fact, it said Alpha ALlegiance right on the case.

And no, they don't have to have screens. Patrick said it was the size of a tablet, not that it WAS a tablet. But a screen could be useful. Not everyone has DNI, a Datajack, or even Image-Linked contacts or Glasses. Sometimes you need to show someone pictures or some data, and a screen is really useful for those instances. But not necessary.

Thanks for the answer. How is the size difference handled (as it seems much less likely to be able to cram all of the necessary hardware for a tablet-sized device in a person's skull) ? If it just uses miniaturized components (costing a lot more), I would think a PC could also buy these smaller components to make a commlink-sized deck. Or is there reduced functionality for a headware deck vs. a normal one?

Guess it could be some kind of "distributed system" where pieces of the deck are normal-sized and scattered throughout the whole body...

Considering that Cranial Cyberdecks existed in SR3 allready, it would be quite ridiculous if they suddenly wheren't possible in SR5.
And really pieces of hardware that if combined inside a casing are the size of a 10" tablet(I'm assuming this so that there's a little bigger size difference from smallest to biggest) can quite feasibly fit inside a head, after all it's not like you would just try to implant a normal deck with casing and everything

Silly like reaction enhancers and wired reflexes only communicating via phonecall all of a sudden?

You mean "No you won't, because unh-UH!!"

My point is, given the population in SR4-5, and the law of large numbers, there's going to be somebody, somewhere, with the means, drive, and resources to break this tech's dependence on the Matrix, and a good chance at least one such person would be willing to go open-source or at least anti-corp. Data space is no longer an issue, and we're not dealing with megapulses here. You need atmospheric conditions? Atmospheric sensors will handle that without a full Matrix link. Need some additional processing power to give your cyberleg its basic ability to kick somebody/jump? Fine, install or plug in a co-processor module. Implants with no self-motive components and a DNI interface need wireless to communicate all the way to New York or Mozambiq and back just to work with each other? A firmware update will reduce that to DNI, or at worst your commlink. Why? Because I can do a day's worth of homework and provide real-world science that we already have, and SR's own pre-existing, in-universe logic to justify it. So far as I've heard, there's NOTHING in the books saying you can't build and reprogram things. Even a stupid reason such as was provided for the Smartlink to need to be "always connected to the Matrix" would be easily bypassed by a home-made firmware update and appropriate on-site or personal-sized sensors.

If we have the tech now, we easily have the tech in 2070. When the tech is "jail-broken," it's the new standard. And when an Anarchist can light that fire and bring down at least one pillar, you can be damn sure they'll do it, especially for something as stupid as this.

And his point is that the wireless bonuss crap has no fluff justification, so no matter how much fluff you come up with it doesn't matter one bit against developer fiat.

Developers do not play at my table or in my games. Besides, if there is no fluff justification, that crap should not exist at all.

There isn't any fluff justification yet. Remember the sudden appearance of TMs in SR4 and the later fluff explanation in Emergence? Maybe we have the same here...

-CJ

isn't that kinda what this thread here is all about? O.o

Ah, so a kind of Errata for fluff then . .

A developer can tell me that a bright light flashing will reduce the damage (not accuracy) of a firearm. I can prove out-of-game how that would not work. I can provide physics models to prove that it does not work. I can physically demonstrate it with a firearm, at a shooting range, in a controlled scientific test. If they stand by their faulty presumption on that, I'm less likely to trust their other design decisions as a default, and thus less likely to buy their product. Alternately, it gives me more reason to outright abandon their rulings and just say "Ignore the stupid, we have science and fact." I know how programs and firmware work, and I know a roboticist who could handle that side of the equation. I also know that it's a shorter trip over a direct connection than out into the matrix and back.

The only rationale for some of the matrix bonuses not being there is "DRM." Anybody who's dealt with DRM can tell you that people who pirate their programs will usually have theirs running faster and better than the ones who go the legit route. The moment the source code for that firmware gets out (and it will), you'll have DRM-free chemsuits and implants. The moment the technical specs for those implants and gear come out or are harvested from an actual piece thereof, independent firmware development will be in the express pipeline. There's NO reason other than DRM that you have to go all the way out into the matrix for every "Matrix Bonus" other than Developer fiat, and when I can provide concrete reasons, that "Developer Fiat" will fall flat, useless, and forgotten.

That's a fair point, but I think it's more than that, myself. Most of how the New New Matrix works isn't in the book, and it may or may not be explained in a future book, but here's what I understand of it, for what it's worth. The Matrix was designed to be as safe to the user as walking in a AAA-security Downtown area. As such, devices on the Matrix utilize a lot of distributed computing, since it's "safe" to share, and data security can be easily done with proper encryption (thus the Firewall boosting program). When you have all of the devices within a click or so helping out, computing speeds increase exponentially.

In any case, the Corporate Court and GOD think that they've got the Matrix locked down, and with the exception of the occasional guerrilla hacker, they're right. Kinda like how they've got AAA-security Downtown areas locked down, with the exception of the occasional guerrilla shadowrunners (or bold street gangs).

While I get what you are shooting for, in a world of instant hacks by professionals and security teams it just does not seem viable for combat gear since they will be facing professionals and security teams. So yeah Bob the college kid with no skils and a good comlink can no longer hack, but the pros are sill at it and I doubt the corps are unaware of that. Your security team didn't have to worry about the street thugs before, the poeple thye woried about were the pros and their gear can't be turned on to its full potential when they would actually need that full potential the most. I'd actually mind it less if all cyber was just hackable period, no if you switch it wireless thing. make a dohickey that allows it and move on, that would actually fit the world for me a bit better and hackers would get the IMO unneded ability to hack everything.

The question is why Matrix bonuses make previously DNI-communictating devices require communication via phonecall necessary, and similar things, like why a lock that used to snap shut suddenly needs to ask wikipedia about snapping shut, or a smartlink connecting to weatherbug to determine wind conditions in an underground bunker. You entirely missed the point, I think.

My guess its pure handwavium. It was always that way the hacking skills were just not there to exploit it yet etc.

In-game, certainly. I'm more interested what the writers expected for pay-off for players of the game from such a heavy-handed measure.

I was just pondering the types of things that would work better with matrix and things that would not cyber wise.

Things that should work better with matrix access:
Smart Guns
Electronic sensors (cybernetic hearing/eyes included), and jammers.
Balance augmentation
Math SPU and similar cognitive enhancing devices
Nanites/Nanite Hives
Implanted ranged weapons


Things that might work better, but probably not effected to the same degree as the above:
Wired reflexes
Cyber limbs
Spurs/hand razors
Muscle replacement (cyber-not bioware)
Cyber skates/other motive devices


Things that shouldn't matter:
Passive protective cyber such as Bone Lacing, Dermal Plating, and Orthoskin.
Enhanced articulation
Other dumb cyber that is just parts replacement (cosmetic cyber replacement for example)

There's no reason that a Smartlink (which is a targeting reticule and rangefinder in your field of vision) would work better with a matrix connection nor Wired Reflexes. Also why would a Cyberlimb work better with Matrix connection? Or a sharp piece of metal that pops out of your wrist?

I can see bonuses being valid for some fancy functions of CyberEyes, TacNet stuff and anything else that involves Knowledge or Dataflow and updates thereof (possibley things like the MathSPU etc) essentially a bunch of what was Headware. But the other stuff? Nope.

I'm not sure what you're talking about, here. I don't see a wireless bonus for locks anywhere in the book, and I doubt that a smartlink only needs weather condition data to compute a firing solution on the fly in a dynamic environment like a firefight.


Another fair point, although we could just as easily talk about a world of instant spells by professionals and security teams. Shadowrun has always had three worlds written on the tin: physical, magical, and Matrix. SR5 has us making more decisions about the Matrix dimension of the world. To me it's kinda like the introduction of the forward pass in American football: it adds another dimension to the game, and makes the game on the whole a bit more interesting.

While I don't agree with the idea of having your cyberware open to the matrix in order to receive bonuses, there is still rule #1 to consider - play the game how you want. You don't have to use any rules that you don't want.

Mages cannot cast spells from the Astral (at least I really hope you did not make that mistake, too). Deckers can hack from the Matrix. Deckers need not to be physically present dto hack devices. Mages need to be physically present (line of sight) and hence expose themselves to everybody's guns.


No, it just has us houseruling the Matrix so we can still play a character that is no opt-out Awakened.


Yes, obviously you don't.

He's talking about chemical seal and up-to-date weather data is the bullshit example given for smartlinks matrix bonus.

True dat. =i)


Is this not a decision about the Matrix dimension of the world?


I see. I suppose in the context of those two limited examples, I can see why he's upset. That was from one line in an interview, ne?

Yah I think it was you who brought it up but now in an instant a corp can have a team of deckers on site screwing with the gear from the matrix and one lone decker isn't going to do anything about that. Unless for some reason it can't be done remotely and I have a hard time picturing how that could be worded. Though mages can astrally zip there and command spirits from the astral(i think that should be removed)

Most of these concerns are already addressed in the book.

The smartlink shouldn't need anything from the Matrix, since everything the smartlink needs to do its job should be right there on the gun.



Mid-firefight hacking could be an interesting facet, but the implementation of what you get to hack seems to lack finesse.

Actually, one way I could see this being done is to have the majority of the software be 'in cloud'. Sort of like how a Google PC has the initial boot OS, tries to find the internet connection, then has the actual programs and applications 100% in cloud space. I could see this being done with a number of bits of technology, to allow for less hardware and software being required to get the job done. It also means updating software for these devices is fast - you update on the server, and every single piece of hardware which uses that software is updated instantly. Less work, overall.

So, your Smartlink, with the Smart System v1.6 by Ares, updates to v1.7 without you having to do a damn thing, because you're connected. Your chemseal v2.6 by SK is updated to v2.7 which includes more refinement on chemical detection, or can detect a wider range of chemicals, to warn you when to seal up.

Which reminds me - one thing which isn't covered that often is the kind of 'apps' that come with this kind of stuff. I'm certain different brands have different little programs and do-hickeys associated with them, it'd be nice to see more of this come into play. A chemsuit which detects what you're exposed to, to give you the warning to seal up, the smartgun which gives you a running tally of how many people you've shot, breaking it down by race, or gives you a 'killstreak' as you run a corp... It's very unlikely that most of these things are just 'generic bleah' programs, each probably has a certain flavour to make it unique.

Not at a Convention.
When You go there You expect everybody to play as RAW as possible (Common Grounds etc.)
Or You have to agree before Play which Houserules to use
Which is...cumbersome

JahtaHey
Medicineman

Except that no one who plans to use these items to commit crimes, or in any sort of conflict is going to be dumb enough to accept this sort of limitation on their equipment. If you're scaling a glacier to hit a hidden corporate research site deep in Trans-Polar Aleut territory, you don't want to keep losing access to the ultrasound sensor you're using to test the ice every time the snow storm blinks out your satellite link. Do you want the electromagnetic interference from a cooling water spill to impair the operation of your Geiger counter or your radiation suit as you're trying to fix a nuclear reactor?

You certainly don't want the corporations inserting their own IFF software into your guns when you're planning to use your guns to shoot their staff. These ideas are all well and good for legit corporate users, but they're extinction-event stupid for criminals or anyone using them in any sort of non-permissive or austere environment to tolerate.

For the bush league urban-only runners, they'll settle for hacked firmware that redirects any software requests to a datastore connected to their satlinked nexus out in the van. The real high-speed types will keep everything hardwired into EM hardened modules they carry on their person, or they'll run hacked firmware that already has all the information that they need.

And that's why Missions S5 is going to be Deckerrun. The Background count and FAB 3 will take care of the opt-out mages, meaning the only folks playing wired up hardboys will be the folks who either don't know they're being hit with this idiocy, or don't care.

Even the opt-out mages are screwed when the opposition decker pops their commlink and simply tells it to call home every few seconds.

Look, mom, I planted a tracker on someone without ever leaving the basement!

To be fair, how much do you really know about guns and marksmanship? That has never been a strong suit of Shadowrun writers or artists, lol.

Ultimately, if the smartgun system has been programmed properly, the only possible Matrix fed calculations it would need was wind to make a proper targeting solution. It's already going to know the true zero ballistics of the projectile, meaning how far it will fly and on what arc, based on propellant and barrel length/twist. Basically the smartgun system is doing near-instantaneous calculations similar to what championship marksman/snipers/etc do in their heads every time they fire. If it has the ability to calculate the distance to the target (it would have to in order to function), and then place the reticle on the exact place the projectile will be at in its arc of travel at that distance, then the only alterations it would need based on environmental factors would be altitude (for air density), temperature, and wind (for external affect on the travel of the projectile). The first two should be accomplished by sensors on the weapon, not by asking the Internets. Then again, this is SR5, where everything is stupid and counter-intuitive when it comes to technology, so maybe there's the official Catalyst explanation (I'll accept a minor commission for the technical/creative freelancing).

The question is, though, how much data is floating around about the wind at the specific location of the target (or are weather sensors ubiquitous in the future? lol) , and how would it be being fed to the gun anyway? That's always going to be a variable the shooter will have to take into account at longer ranges, and why the Smartgun isn't a free hit, but instead a bonus.