Indeed. My apologies, to both you and Moirdryd. Teach me to look more closely to determine whose post is whose.



Wired and running hot is the best way to do it!

Alright, that WAS a loaded question. But. I also realize there's a certain stigmata about the forums here. I definitely recall people mentioning things offhand regarding it - little things here and there over the years, sentiment such as"meh we don't need to do errata, it's all on the web for people to find, its just ds being whiney'. And I doubt that sentiment has changed much, especially in an official capacity.

I personally am withholding judgement until I see a book, and my personal criteria for judging a system is 'Is it balanced? Does it make sense? Does the fluff and crunch mesh well, or are there glaring holes'. I'm trying not to be biased, but as one of the biggest proponents of "Quote your damn page references instead of spouting an opinion as fact", its hard to argue with direct quotes.



I feel I need to respond to this specifically.
The point isn't to cater to one player base. Its to make your product good to your entire target audience.
If there's stuff in prerelease version that makes the average reader go 'wait, wtf? this doesn't make sense' then.... well, you have a problem.

At some point or another, you can't just ignore/push aside/back burner/downvote web feedback "because its from Dumbshock"(my personal nickname for the forums). Do you recall those games on Steam, where the devs accidentally sent in a alpha/beta release of their game, and distributed a broken, buggy, unrunnable and frequently crashing product AS the release version, charging full price? Pissed off buyers, product returns, and bad rep everywhere.

I don't want SR5 to flop like that.

As much as it sucks to read Your Baby/Pet Project get smashed, if there's Broken Shit or Dumb Shit(And I'm not saying there is, because I'm not basing my opinion on hearsay) that didn't get caught by playtesting....
... you fix it before release. You fix it before release because the extra effort and money is ALWAYS worth not having your Shiny New Launch Title! be a turd on display.

If you're getting This Much negative feedback from the official sr forums and other places on the net, over a pre-release - god, I hope you take it as a chance to review the system before hitting the big giant print button. Good on patrick for correcting things already.

Erm, Apple was the other poster.

But thanks anyway. I don't think I'm more Creative given that it was inspired by the reference to the stuff in SR4 and there are people who seem happy with the matrix online bonus Cyberhacking as presented (without seeing the book). Who knows what ideas were looked at and discarded in the drafting and planning sessions? But for the Sixth World as I understand it and will be running it, those are solutions off the top of my head to mesh the Deckers hacking the Cyberware and the tone of the setting info.

As far as I'm concerned if you're having fun then you're doing it right.

Typing on an iPad is way more than a complex action (getting my post in after like six other posts)

Udoshi said everything more diplomatically than I could have, but he's right.

This "wireless boni" thing has set the internet on fire. In a largely bad way, too. Dumpshock is going to be your best weathervane, but it's also hit the official forums, too.

Push the launch back. Take the time to release a working product rather than following the business model of every panned and poo-pooed video game by sticking to a set release schedule come hell or high water. Tabletop RPG players are much more forgiving of schedule slips than we are of paying money for a broken product on dead-tree, a medium which cannot be easily rules-patched.

Yes, inspired by information that we all had on-hand. Presumably, everyone who wrote SR5 had a copy of every SR4 book on-hand, as research materials if not personal possessions.

There is no excuse for not using them and extrapolating therefrom to reach the conclusions you have. Especially the wifi slap-patch, I think that's my favorite of the bunch. It gives the Street Samurai and PhysAd a way to participate in the hacking!





You're operating manually, we might as well be operating in hot sim.

Don't you wish you had an AR interface with think-and-click or think-and-type technology? (God, I do.)

Err. That's not going to happen. The books have not only already been sent to the printer, they appear to have come back. It's not going to be changed for a while.

It's not the end of the world. It's just a gamey set of rules that people will poke fun at and ignore if it causes problems. Now, if they double down in the augmentation book and try the stick approach to forcing it down on our throats THEN break out the torches.

Well, if it's too late, it's too late. If the printing presses are rolling, there isn't anything they can do.

But yes, if the Matrix book doubles down on this approach, we are going to set the internet on so much fire.

Again. We will never know what craziness and awesome was discussed in drafting sessions, planning emails etc. I've been part of the collaberative process that goes into the writing of RPG products before and sometimes the people in charge just like one concept over another (not a lot mind you and I think Everyday Heroes from five years ago is the only thing anyone might recognise). Look at the divides in D&D edition fans, World of Darkness fans (oWoD, nWoD). Some folks like it, others hate it and some use this and that.

Certainly the WiFi Cyber issue has drawn attention in a more negative than positive light. However. For all the active membership of Dumpshock and all the posts, how many actual people is that? 20? 30?

Until the book is out to see we won't really know how "well" the Dev team have done with the new product.

Like I said, when I have the book I'll be scribbling up my own adjustments to make it work the way I feel the Sixth World says it should as some house rules. I'm guessing that'll take up all of a page. When done I'll pop it up here on DS incase anyone else finds it useful.

Most of the people I have talked to turned wireless off because there was no in game benefit to keeping it on. I always wished there was. Now my wishes, and those of the people I play with, have been granted. To say that we are being drowned out is yet another patent falsehood. Why you feel the need to use these weak rhetoric tactics is unknown to me, and I will not begin to speculate on your motives.


You put far too much credence in the vocal minority. We (you, I , and the others here) in no way are representative of the fan base as a whole. Any attempt on your part to imply that shows a overinflated opinion of your own importance. Besides if it was only detractors here then these threads would not be hundreds of posts long. They live on because there are people on BOTH sides keeping them alive.


A mere half century has seen the advent of the computer, microwave oven, cell phone, GPS, the moon landing, and even rudimentary cybernetics. Saying that we have any idea where we will be in 60 years is ludicrous.


Nothing, it has simply become obsolete. Tried running a Windows 95 program on your Windows 7 PC recently? the gun still works perfectly well, at the baseline level. Where is the issue here. The new stuff just works better with its matrix connection (this is an abstract statement not a factual one.)


I believe that the rules will pan out to be fairly balanced. Involving multiple passes to accomplish various levels of mayhem. The only items on your list that we know can be hacked are the gun and the wired reflexes. Again there are so many opinion drifting about that have no basis in fact. Most of these issues are based soley on speculation. The only thing I am suggesting is that we wait until the arguments can based on fact not conjecture.

Your Ad Hominems aside, anything that doesn't fit on an easy to read 4x6 card is too complicated for a houserule in my group.

Anyways hacking cyberware was a thing in SR4 too and it got backed off from. Which I have little doubt is what will happen again.

You don't have reasons to leave wireless on, you've been beaten with an orange stick made of wrought nonsensium, concussed into leaving it on, and told you were fed a carrot. Very few of their "Online" bonuses make any goddamn sense, and most of them are things that damn well could have been done with an agent running on the local hardware or with a DNI.



No, we're representative of the most experienced, most veteran bits of the fanbase who have put the most time and effort into the game system as a whole, with a great number of people who have worked on the game setting in the past in residence.

Me? I'm not important. But all of Dumpshock as a whole? We're important, and I've yet to see any of the old guard (the ones who are really important) speak up in favor of the orange stick approach.



The computer was a revolutionary thing, as was space flight. Putting computer + satellite together and getting "GPS" out of it, long before the actual implementation of the Global Positioning System, was predicting evolution.

We don't know what real technological revolutions will happen between now and 2060. I read an old-school science fiction story once, where the author could hyposit faster-than-light space travel and antigravity engines because those were the science-fiction tropes, but he could not envision the revolutionary (to him) invention of computers and microprocessors, and so everything was run off analog controls and magnetic tape-storage with compressed x60 playback/record/decompression algorithyms (so you could send a minute's worth of audio in a one-second radio burst) was the most advanced information technology he could envision.

We don't need to know what technological revolutions are going to happen between now and 2060 in the real world, because we've already posited the fictional ones we require. Having posited those and understood them, we can damn well extrapolate the evolution of our fictional technologies, many of which themselves are adaptations of real-world technologies.

I don't need to know the state of things in real 2076 after progressing from out 2013 to real 2076 to know what things will be like in Shadowrun 2076. I know the state of things in Shadowrun 2072, and evolving things a mere four years from there does not arrive at "bend over and take it up the ass from the hackers or your cyber won't work as-advertised".



Actually, yes I have - also, it's only been a few years, so it would be more like making Windows XP programs run on my Windows 7 box. It can be made to run with a little fiddling and some googling, and there's going to be a lot of incentive in the Shadows for the Shadowlands hackers to write protocols to make 2076 computer software work with 2073 skinlinks - and for the Shadows to get their hands on the 2076 skinlinks the corps and militaries are issuing to their own men, because again, while you might want the guys breaking into your facillity to be using this Hackableware, you do not want your own men using Hackableware.



Anything that lets a hacker screw directly with your ware by you needing to use it properly is unbalanced and unacceptable to me, full stop. If he goes out of his way to open your properly prepared security up to his attacks, such as by nano-attack or infiltrating your skinlink with a radio transmitter, then yay, point for him, that's fair. But telling me I have to bend over for him for my ware to work as advertised is not cool, man! Not cool.

How's this for a house-rule that will fit on a 4x6 card.

"Matrix: As in SR4. Cyberware: Works without the Matrix. Things that need to connect to the Matrix: Adjudicated by GM and written down on another card."



It can't happen fast enough. Hopefully, the SR5 version of Augmentation and Unwired will have the "non-idiot's guide to the Matrix and personal information security."

Ummmm...this is going to sound a lot more confrontational than it actually is, especially when you consider my stand on the wireless cyberware bonuses and stuff, but it can't be helped, really. My question is this:

Where, exactly, is the internet on fire? We've got a small hullabaloo going here, and an even smaller one going on over at the official forums, too. Total participants are, by my count (aggravated by my rather meager math skills and the fact that I'm not going to sit down and count all the participants; I'm lazy, I admit, but for this discussion it's really not that important), approximately 60 souls or thereabouts.

That's hardly a blaze.

Hyperbole does no one any good. The internet is not on fire about this; I've gone looking. It's not even a blip on rpg.net, for instance, and they've got a substantially larger, if less tightly-focused, active user base than either Dumpshock or JackPoint. Don't let your sense of self-aggrandizement fool you about how small a blip you are in the overall scheme of things. Thousands of gamers have gone their entire gaming lives without once ever logging into this forum. I'm not saying this to be denigrating. Dumpshock is loaded with vocal and passionate fans, but they are not the end-all and be-all of Shadowrun fandom, or even Shadowrun internet fandom. Catalyst is not going to change things just because you say they need to, especially since even Dumpshock as a whole doesn't appear to be in agreement on the issue.

The internet is not on fire over this. A small portion of Dumpshock is, but that's hardly the same thing.

(For the record, on this issue, I happen to agree with a lot of you. I think wireless bonuses are a bad idea, badly implemented, and I let that be known during the writing of the game. I was over-ridden. It's the way of things sometimes.)

These are the things that really get your goat aren't they. It isn't the rules it is that whole premise behind them you object to. The rules could be bulletproof and you would still object. You know this is simply achieved by you not using them.
The only thing out of this I have taken is how small your argument truly is. There are no points, and no truths to them. I am sorry I have lowered myself to discussing it with you. I will not respond further, and I apologize for wasting the time of the others that are here trying to get to know the new system.
The fact that you insult the masses not present on these forums shows how small your world truly is. Many of the most experienced and intelligent gamers I know avoid forums because of the petty bickering and argument that occur here. I am ashamed that I have become a part of it.

Man, you have a way with words I envy. Well said. Still, highlighting 3 specific points I want to add onto.

Sigh. Overruled. That means Hardy put his foot down, right? Or at least let us know who to frown at.
Look, I'm sure you you know its a bad idea. It just hasn't been talked about yet because, well, the exposure is so low. The game isn't out yet, and gencon attendees are the only people who have access to the rules. Its not "on fire" because it hasn't hit the mainstream.
When it does, though... well, paying customer reactions like "What the hell? Why does my cyber quickdraw holster have to be online to work, and why is the non-cyber version BETTER? Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat is this " could have been avoided.

I know you take pride in your game design, and I respect it, but just because there's Not Enough Yelling doesn't mean it ISN'T an issue, or WON'T be an issue later. Just because nobody noticed until it was too late doesn't mean its quality.

Mister Goodman, I hear you're in charge of - or at least starting on errata and corrections! For the love of god, please arrange for a Black Box Optional Rule Suggestion to 'fix' online bonuses for games that don't like them to be in the core book. Something simple and easy that anyone who picks up the book and wants to run the game can point to and go 'we're doing that!'. Something simple like 'online bonuses apply all the time, if you go online raise your Limit by something-scaling-up-with-grade(if grade is still a thing in 5th)'


Still. The big about RPG.net is right. It IS a giant community - someone should copy paste this over to them. They have tons of shadowrun fans there, and most of them aren't even likely aware of the design decisions happening in the new edition, only that it is on the way. Unlike dumpshock, rpg.net does have the exposure to be influential.

The more I think about it, the more I feel that a scan of the gencon book needs to be disseminated.
I'd like to be able to assess the rules craftsmanship, and jump into discussions such as these knowing what I'm talking about, but I can't because I don't have a book in hand.

As much as I can't support piracy, Its hard to make judgements when nobody has accurate information. I'm sure there ARE good rules in SR5(a little bird told me that mentor spirits have gotten an overhaul instead of being useful for just magicians!), and its possible that the Online Bonuses are the one sore spot of the entire edition, but we Just Don't Know. The only people who do are the privileged con-goers(who aren't sharing) and the Writers(who can't really spill the beans).

A peer/player review of the current edition could only help. If there's as many Bad Decisions From Above as patrick seems to imply(please correct me if I'm wrong), then the option of Try-Before-You-Buy is never a bad thing for the customer. The realization that the customers WON'T buy if its not quality is probably the biggest incentive for a for-profit company to make sure their boat floats across the board, and doesn't have any leaking holes in it - say, the matrix section.

Was it ever discussed to expand on the SR4 attack vectors? Online commlink, tacnet, remote drone control, radio communication etc? Was is ever discussed to include the other possible wifi/skinlink attack possibilities like patch links, drone links etc?

SYL

I've been stringing words into sentences for a long time. After a while, you either get decent at it or you chuck it all because you'll never be any good. There are days I'm still on the fence about which I should do.

Yes, Jason made the final decision. I don't want to sound like I'm bad-mouthing him, because he made a few decisions of a similar nature for some of the things I did writing the NPC and critters section, so it's not like I didn't benefit from him making decisions. I just didn't happen to agree with this one, or at least the implementation of it.

I'm not going to just come out and say who wrote the gear chapter, but there's enough information out there for people to deduce the name.


Origins, not GenCon. Other than that, your point is a good one. I didn't say the internet wasn't going to catch fire when the book hits in, oh, two weeks for PDF release. I just said it wasn't on fire NOW.

And I do think it's a bad idea (my favorite item with a wireless bonus at the moment is the throwing knife/shuriken). I'm not a particular fan of GitS-style hacking, but once I realized it was a thing that I wasn't going to be able to make go away, I tried to get wireless bonuses be something worth opening yourself up for, and not basic functionality, to make it a reward worth the risk. I didn't, apparently, make a compelling argument, and at the time I had my own issues in writing a chunk of the book so I couldn't spend a lot of time on the subject.

I do take pride in my writing and my design. I didn't design this. I happen to agree with your assessment here.

To say that I'm "in charge" might be over-stating things, but I am currently compiling a list of know issues and, where we've arrive at one, the fixes for those issues. So to an extent...yeah, I guess I'm in charge of at least gathering the errata up and getting it to the people in charge.

I don't know if we could get that into the book at this point, since it's already at the printers and to add it to future printings would probably do nasty things to layout. But I'll add the suggestion for some sort of optional rule to the list I'm compiling. I make no promises beyond that, however.

I'm honestly not trying to sound snarky here, but: You think no one on rpg.net went to Origins? You think none of them got a copy of the book? You think there's not considerable overlap in the populations? Really?

I don't think there's a lot of first-hand experience with SR5 except from freelancers in that rpg.net thread. I'm sure there will be some snarky comments and threads after the book is more widely available.

Personally, I'm more curious about any broken spirit shenanigans or bizarre vehicle rules

Let's not go violating a number of copyright laws and bringing Topps' lawyers down on people's heads; that way lies madness. And indignation. The PDF drops in two weeks; that's probably soon enough.

Allow me, then, to jump into the chorus with Critias and advise patience. Everyone's going to have plenty of opportunity to look the whole thing over soon enough.

As I said elsewhere in this thread, I got a lot more of those "Bad Decisions From Above" in my favor than were called against what I thought was best for the game. The wireless bonuses where the things I hated the most. I wasn't a particular fan of limits, but the maths were explained to me, and then I actually saw them in action in playtest, and while I'm still not necessarily their biggest fan, I can see that they serve a purpose in the game and they're not particularly onerous.

I think this was a BDFA, but I don't think the game is loaded with them, and if I implied that, then I'm either not making things clear or you're reading more into this than what I actually wrote.

It's not a bad thing, anyway, even if the product is perfect.

I actually kinda like the matrix section. I'm not sure I've been able to say that before.

Not in my presence, but I'm hardly privy to every discussion.

With a question!

So, the only reason to wireless-enable gecko gloves you wear is so that enemy hacker can turn them off remotely?

One thing I don't get is why Wired Reflexes and Increased Reaction must be wireless in order to stack. It just makes no sense to me and I can't think of any explanation. Why do they even need this kind of sync while agility enhancers and strength enhancers apparently don't need one.


Skinlink went away? Wow, that's big. Is there an explanation why this happened? I mean, It was in the setting for quite some time and then just stopped working?

All that most of us know is that it isn't in the core book.

Patrick, you and the other writers do/did good work with the confines you were given. People tend to get incensed about things (on the internet?! Never!) and forget that it's not necessarily the writer's fault. Sure, sometimes we get things like a port in Bogota (I really try to not bring it up, honest!) or rules that are misinterpreted easily. But I'd like to think most of these people also know that every attempt was made to make the game as good as it can be. Jason made some decisions in regards to doing things with Decking; he's the line developer, it's his job to make the system work better. It's just a shame there wasn't (apparently) more work put into having it all make sense. But many of these same people were afraid about the shift to wireless and commlinks with SR4 and adapted just fine. So, thanks Patrick, Critias, and all the other writers who put their time into this.

Now, I have to go get my pink jumpsuit ready for my +3 initiative bonus.

Consider the numbers involved and the fact that the book isn't even out yet, and this is rather akin, oddly enough, to Jackpoint and ShadowSEA getting hold of advance material that hasn't hit the broader Matrix yet, and having the experts and others-who-have-an-interest-in-the-topic having an argument about it.

As I said: Dumpshock can be expected to be the weathervane, and we've got a nice brouhaha going here. For a product that hasn't even gone on-sale yet! If it lights a fire in Dumpshock before it's even on sale, it's going to touch off a firestorm when it becomes broadly available.



Look at who is in agreement versus who isn't. You know who's in agreement? The folks with lots of posts to their name. The old guard. The experienced players who are very vocal about the game, who invest a lot of their time and energy into thinking about the game. The people who know a god-damn thing about real computing and security, the people vested in older editions and the history of the setting. Hell, you!

Who's wedded to the concept of "wireless boni" and can justify sending the calculations for your hydraulic jack leap out "to the cloud" to have "calculations done distributively" and bounced back to you?

Not those people; not the people whose opinions and discourses on the matter should be very heavily weighted in the consideration process.




Weathervane. There will come a firestorm over this.



They're a terrible idea horrifically implemented. It's pure gamist "Don your glowing pink suit to gain +3 to initiative" nonsense, and abrogates a very large part of the history of the setting and what we know of actual computing and laws of physics.




I do object to the whole premise behind them, but I can accept the notion that some pieces of gear might work better, for some applications if you let them get Matrix access. And you do that by choke-pointing them through your commlink, which, if you're in the field or near your team, you choke-point through the hacker's commlink. Because you're not a flaming retard.



Uh, no, in fact you haven't taken scope of hardly any of my arguments against the topic. You've just focused on one, decided that since I hate the whole idea in general, that's an invalid opinion that invalidates all of my other, logical arguments against the implementations of those ideas and declared yourself to have the moral high-ground with false humility and apology.



Try claiming some moral high ground that doesn't lie on the artillery range there, pal. This bickering and argument is anything but petty, it's anger because the new edition of the game is including an entire subsystem wholly designed to fuck over several entire, integral character archetypes in one way or another, and it does so in the most highhandedly, verisimilitude-destroying manner possible. "Because we say so." It retcons entire technologies out of existance and ignores the fact that old gear which doesn't do "online boni" should still be extant and installed in player characters in order to force the new "bend over and take it up the ass, because hackers need to hack in combat" paradigm on everyone.

That is not a petty complaint by any stretch of the imagination. And if your "experienced and intelligent" gamers avoid forums, they're going to be blindsided by this nonsense.

Oh, and take your false humility "I am ashamed that I have become a part of it" schtick and stow it. You're not morally superior because you can say "Oh, this is an argument, I want no part of it, therefor I declare all of your arguments to be without substance so I don't have to actually address them, look at me for I am Ghandi-like in my humility." In fact, that's kind of the opposite of morally superior, and it's distracting us from the real subject at hand: the fact that these "online boni" rules and the "either on the Matrix or completely in luddite mode" black and white dichotomy of equipment are utter crap.

This is giving me flashbacks to when John Chambers was steering the helm of Exalted and knew practically nothing about it, but frequently overruled the freelancers who actually knew a goddamn thing. Whomever made this decision made the decision to make combat hacking of people's cyberware a thing, no matter what they had to trample upon to do so. And they have trampled upon pretty much all of the "cyber" part of "cyberpunk fantasy."



He called it out as crap during the design phase. If they wouldn't listen to him...

Well, unfortunately, we don't have much of an option to vote with our wallets, do we? We can't exactly pick apart rules that suck without buying the books (well, unless we pirate them, which is a bad thing,) and whomever's got the helm of this thing has a knack for taking precisely the wrong takeaway lesson from the data he has at-hand. Such as the take-away lesson that players need to be forced to expose their cyber to hackers, rather than that nobody wants to expose their cyber to hackers because that's a dumb thing to do voluntarily.



A complex problem can't be fixed with a simple solution. (Unless the simple solution is to consult Shadowrun 4th Edition for the particulars of how the Matrix works and looks like and functions and use that to extrapolate to SR5's actions, programs, and hacking rules.)




You'd think the quality of the opinions in question would matter more than the quantity. Unfortunately, you'd be wrong in so many tragic practical applications where the voice of ten thousand laymen who know little carries far more weight than the voice of ten experts. I guess someone is going to have to beat RPG.net like a drum until the internet starts to resonate with how ridiculous this is. Not it. I don't even have an account there. I prefer to glean my information from dedicated communities.



The rest of the book might be polished golden, but we've seen enough of the Matrix stuff and "online boni" to know that you'd be an idiot to have any 'ware installed, because the mere possibility exists that someone hostile to you will brick the motherfucker, which will at the very least cost time and money to replace, and given how 'ware tends to replace vital bodily functions, could literally kill you outright (if it's your cyberheart that gets bricked) or will make you easy prey for any random unaugmented joe (if it's your eyes or arms or legs that get bricked.)

Sadly, someone's going to have to pretty much rewrite the Matrix stuff and online boni from the ground up to work with the new mechanics introduced in SR5 and try to keep the new cyberdeck stuff (ugh... Sigh. Can I just call mine a commlink? I liked my commlink,) and other things, but make the Matrix rules congruent with a world which is not populated by people who wear their underpants on top of their heads and consider nostril-pencils to be the height of fashion. I imagine Dumpshock is up to the task, though. I know I'll be taking a stab at it - out of spite if for no other reason!



I'm broke and jobless, but right now I would rally all my spare cash to deposit in my checking account for one hurrah to buy a PDF of the con version or the full version just to get a head start on this task. It rubs me that wrongly. This is pure MMORPG gamism at its finest - it's nerfing things that don't need to be nerfed in order to force people to play "correctly," when people want to play sensibly.

Uh, UmaroVI, could you please explain how this works without a Matrix connection? Because I'm pretty certain that this gun doesn't talk to the Matrix to make the shot. Also this tech is available today. I would think in 60 years they can make it small enough to put in pistols.

My opinion:
I don't think it's whether or not you would need to be connected to the matrix to do some of this sort of thing. Yes, I'm certain a lot of these things could work fine with software built into the device itself. No argument there.

It's whether or not that's how things are done, and I can easily see this as a matter of corporate control. The software isn't put into the device, because the corporations don't want to. They keep the software nice and safe in their networks, the hardware has just enough technology for basic functionality, and for anything else, you need matrix connections. This allows the corporations to keep control of the programs (limiting hacking and such), allows them to update in an instant and know everybody's got the latest patches (whether or not they want them), and allows them to gather user statistics in an instant. To the corporations, this is data mining and control at its finest.

This is like Microsoft having it so every laptop had no hard-drive. Instead, you turned on your laptop. It scanned for a network connection, logged into the OS that's on Microsoft's servers, and let you go from there. Everything you want to do goes through Microsoft's servers. If there's a new patch to the OS, they patch, and next time you turn on your laptop, you're running that patch. Your word processor, your web browser, everything is run through Microsoft's servers. If you need to save data, you bring out your thumb drive or what-have-you, or you stick it on the cloud.

(Point of fact, for all my roleplaying games now, I have everything stored in Google Drive... saved me crap tonnes of space on my HDs, and also means I can access it from any computer, any time... including my cellphone. That's actually a perfect example of this...)

Now, a shadowrunner may absolutely hate the concept, but to the corporations, this is gold. And your typical corp citizen might find this a godsend, since the corporation's doing all the 'work' for them. Sure, you might need to put up with the odd corp ad, and sure, you might be restricted to corp-approved software, but that's the price for security.

I can easily, easily see this being 'standard' in Shadowrun. I can see shadowrunners going apecrap over this. And I'm pretty sure the 5E version of 'Unwired' will go into more detail about how to get around this kind of thing - but for the core rulebook? It's laying out the base setting. And I'm more than willing to accept this.

So what you're trying to say is: In a game setting where the focus for players lies with criminals called "shadowrunners" the core rulebook should revolve around the presentation of how "ordinary" people live and not about how the main protagonists of the game deal with such a situation?

I think the technology presented should be 'standard', and mods to the technology can come out later, yes. Note that every program isn't hacked and cracked, and that vehicles aren't modded in the core rulebook.

We're playing Shadowrunners, not Joe Bob Salaryman. The gear being presented should, thus, be written to be useful to shadowrunners, as those are the characters we are creating with that core book.

I completely disagree. If that was the case, every vehicle should be presented, modded for shadowrunning, every weapon, every piece of gear. I'd rather know what's 'normal' in the setting, then try to figure out how my character would use it for his job.

For out-there custom stuff? Sure, that makes sense.

But we're talking about something that's a no-brainer. If a way to not have to have 'welcome aboard' tattooed above your ass cheeks in every decker's AR exists, it will be one of the default tools of the trade for shadowrunners.

Just like skinlink was.

Joe Salaryman doesn't need white noise generators, wired reflexes, or bug detectors.
Joe Runner does.

He also needs gear for when he needs to go off the Matrix like skinlinks (included in the 4th edition core rule book) or a smartgun link induction pad.

And if it was in the previous core rulebooks then why wasn't it included in this one especially when they just rolled out some shiny new options for the decker to pull on anyone with cyberware?

Not to be confused with Joe Bob Celeryman from GURPS: Veggietales


A problem is there is so much stuff no one is ever going to be completely happy with what starts it off with, the book starts off with one could call 'starter' gear, the most commonly available elements, not necessarily the best.

And of course it sells more books to spread out the new shinies abit, so there will be rehashed versions of Arsenal and the rest. It is afterall a business and there is tons of materials to cover. It would sound nice to just have it all in one tome/pdf but it would be staggering in size (though I would so buy that, even if it was a giant paperweight-- Encyclopedia Shadowia?)

Another problem is the wide range of backgrounds. A paramilitary backgrounded op is going to be all over wired security and what not to do to be boned by it whereas your starting ganger probably has not seen a decker outside of the local triad or such so probably does not know all the ins and outs beyond the basics. The former will probably be cybered up a bit and be wanting whatever he can to reduce his web presence whereas the ganger wont have tons of cyber and probably using secondhand ware bought off the streetdoc so he takes what he can get, wired or otherwise.

You raise a very good point, actually. Most starting teams aren't going to have everything hacked and modded up to the nines.

And you are aware that the design goal of combat hacking (the main reason behind the changes in question) will go extinct if such mods to technology actually arise? Because once our protagonists have access so means of getting both the bonus and maintaining their "offline" state, that'll become the default again.

Oh and ofc you are aware that by definition GOD and thus to an extend the software providing corps are capable of performing real time threat evaluation and user authentification under your stipulation. So your "100% of software is located in the cloud" not only opens the attack vector of combat hacking but also makes it even less likely to go unnoticed than under the "RFID everywhere" assumption of SR4. And since your stipulation now works as the standard, it should be noted that under such circumstances being "online" would be the default and not having access to the matrix actually be just the fallback ... thus your corps would even try to make it impossible to deliberately go offline. Yet we're presented with a situation where going offline is a matter of standard choice and not something that needs hacking to achieve.

So this whole thing is a mess both in terms of fluff (and the resulting, logical consequences for the world setting) and eye-brow raising, particular implementation of specific bonuses that have been presented so far. And to make things worse: For now it's players trying to come up with explainations as to why and how stuff works now, instead of those who should be giving such explainations ... even in their previews.

The skin link technology was patented in 2007.
And is likely pretty slow but if all you need to do is tell your Predator to eject a clip or have the bipod deploy on your LMG then you don't need much band width.

I always thought that if you had a cyberlimp, then you had a DNI interface with the gear incorporated in the cyberarm. If you have a pistol built in then you could fire it with a mental command because the arm was attached to your nervous system. If you had an endoscope/cybereye built in to your forefinger and a datalink in your normal pair of cybereyes then you could see through the endoscope with additional special gear because the cyberarm by definition had a DNI with your brain.

Depends on the difficulty and cost of being able to do it. If they make such really hard, or really expensive (or hell, just make sure that the difficulty of obtaining it is high), then it isn't as much of a problem.



Pretty much. I also make the assumption that the camera system we see in London these days is pretty much everywhere, and upgraded. Advertising is everywhere, and you're probably under surveillance almost all the time unless you're in the slums or sprawl. As it goes, I like taking the natural progression of technology as it stands now, moving it forward, and then using that as the prime difficulty for Shadowrunners to work around to do their job. (Or, in the case of my character Koryo, he embraces it completely, and uses it to his advantage).



Possibly. But if they're also selling in areas with poor or no connectivity, they want the item to be at least passably usable. (PS3 / XBox 360). You get full usability if online, partial if offline. Again, a reflection of modern society.



I don't have the book, so I'm just going with what makes sense to me - nothing stands out as 'OMG this would never happen!' from what I've seen so far. Which means it doesn't bother me in the slightest, no matter how much it would screw the shadowrunners. They just need to evolve, or decide not to go with the full bonuses.

Actually, I could see that, too. A sec team with full wired access, versus a shadowrun team who decides to be 'off grid', and use the base effects. I could so see that... giving the secs an edge.

And that is my main problem.

A Pro on the job should know how to take matrix security seriously and be able to do so.
There are times and places when a shadowrun team needs to be totally off the Matrix except for the decker (who has the gear to spoof his presence.) so they don't tip off the building spyder or have any gear leaving digital fingerprints by connecting to the Matrix while on the run.

A decker shouldn't be able to on the fly hack the gear and cyberware of a Corporate High Threat Response Team or a SWAT team because they will have locked every thing off the Matrix.
But in SR5 they have removed or ignored the gear to do that.

And on go multiple Jammers.

Sec Team loses their edge.
Runners laugh.

Which is perfectly fine. I'm cool with that.

Let's just hope that the players that take on the runner role rule have "fun" in such a scenario, because that certainly is not the core setting of SR (neither for pink mohawk nor shades wearing spy types).

Yes, and they can have specific books for that come out later. No core book in Shadowrun has ever dealt specifically with high-end teams out of the main book. SR4A brushed it, by allowing Initiation and Submersion in the main rulebook - that was a first, but for most SR core rulebooks, it deals with 'the start' to the 'mid level' sort of play. When you get into the advanced stuff, they put it into later books.

Depends on the play group. The GM is expected to tailor the game to the playgroup. For me, as a player, part of my fun is having an idea of what could be set against me, and plotting and planning how to circumvent it (re: my sig). SR5 just makes it more difficult, which means it's more of a challenge, which means I need to plan with more care. I'm fine with that. I don't think my group's going to mind either. With them, they tend to work semi-legit, so being connected to the matrix is less of a problem for them.

Yeah, at least in the A level security zones.
As a GM you just have to kinda ignore just how Big Brother the surveillance side of things would be in 2075.
Or as you say, take advantage of it.
Magic helps a lot.
The Balkanization of every thing also helps. Just cut through a couple of different Corp extraterritoriality zones.
Plus with walk in Plastic surgery people can change faces like they change hair color.

As a GM? I embrace it, completely. I see no reason to ignore it.



Yes, those are tools the players have, and I'm fine with that.

Just as liking or disliking these changes depends on the individual players, right?



And now let's just assume that I as gm decide to throw every "legal" thing at you when playing with the force and including all logical consequences that this has from both crunch and fluff ... Then I quite obviously "fail" at tailoring the game to my group's desires, despite merely using what the makers have envisioned as the now normal setting.



Depending on PoV it has made not just "more difficult" but "immersion breaking impossible" ...



... which means that they either have to try to come up with additional ideas to rationalize the new cirumstances (and no, your explainations quite obviously don't satisfy their needs), that they have to walk away or remove major parts of the "new game features" as house rulings (thus questioning the need to make the edition transition in the first place).



You're kind of lucky in that case.