I completely agree.

I just don't like what those "functions" are, as written. Half of them make no frakking sense.

I wonder how someone would go about building that system. It would need to add some degree of security, but come with a few risks as well.

I'm going off the cuff here, and admittedly not as familiar w/ Post SR3 rules as the rest of you, but perhaps a device's security may be augmented with a number of 'Automatic Successes' that represent its hardened security posture. These successes are added to the net successes that the device scores when resisting a decker.

However, for their device to work as expected during a key cinematic event (Such as, but not limited to, combat), they must roll their device rating against that number as a threshold.

Example: Samurai biases his security to favor false negatives. He sets that Bias to '2'. Henceforth, when his gear is hacked he adds two successes to hits result to resist. During a Firefight, he must roll his device rating of '5' against a threshold of '2' (Which admittedly is not in his favor), or suffer some degraded functionality.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

I think the dice pool would be either Device Rating * 2, or Device Rating + Int or Wis. A security threshold of 2 sounds really low, and that already being "not favorable" for the character is rough.

Would depend on other things, but that was my initial thought.

Wis is a stat in Shadowrun? I think you may be thinking of that other game.

I meant Willpower. My brain is a little mushy right now. My weekend was long and had remarkably small amounts of real sleep.

I feel you. Everybody makes mistakes.

: )

That's fair. Though 'automatic successes' aren't exactly a slouch either. A single automatic success is the equivalent of +3 dice (when evaluated an infinite number of times, blah blah blah).

So, any system that would be adopted would need to adequately enforce risk/reward. Gaining an automatic success is a pretty substantial reward. That said, perhaps an Attribute + Device Rating test would be appropriate. Logic is probably the most obvious choice. And highlighting it here makes for an added bonus for Samurai that don't use it as a dump stat.

Of course, there's the very real possibility that automatic successes are entirely too powerful. And instead, this system should just add a single bonus die for the Samurai's resistance test.

EDIT: And, of course, there's the unintended consequences of what happens when a system like this isn't used by its intended audience. What sort of effect might this may have on Deckers who use this rule to secure their stuff? If the point of introducing this system was to give Deckers something to do in combat, then you wouldn't want to introduce a system that completely neutered that.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

All valid points.

I may tinker with that and formalize it a little and see how it looks after I've digested SR 5.

I'm all about options as long as benefits are balanced against drawbacks.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

If devices turn out to be too unsecure you could always go with DRx3. That'd put the top commercial commlinks resisting at 18 dice, with midrange stuff being relatively secure at 9 or 12.

Alternatively, you can increase DR at least for matrix purpose. This is what I'm going for, with the rating now being 2, 4, 6, 8, 9 and 10.
20 Dice should be enough to make the hacking of spacecrafts a risky endeavor.

I think wireless bonuses should have been done more rationally. Devices that work by direct neural input or as stand-alone devices should not need a matrix connection, although non-shadowrunners might still leave it connected to the matrix for things such as diagnostics or performance stats. Like I said, even in GITS, going into autistic mode didn't make people's cyberlimbs suddenly not work as well.

The main bonuses should be twofold. First, communication, both between your pieces of gear, and between you and teammates. Give tacnet-style bonuses, or let one piece of gear make another piece of gear work better (like an ultrasound sensor giving targetting information to your smartlink). Second, blending in. Just like SR4, you should stand out if you are not squacking out your fake SIN, favorite music, groceries that you are low on, and such. Obviously, there will be times (like sneaking into a secure facility) when you want to be a ghost. But most of the time, being disconnected from the matrix should be something that draws unwanted attention to the character.

*Insert image of a giant throbbing heart, here*

While it may feel intuitively correct that as an absolute, a DNI device or stand-alone device would not need a matrix connection for perform a specific function, it is not an absolute.

It may or may not be true. And is dependent on numerous other considerations above and beyond physical medium of interface.

I happen to believe that the underlying reasons for matrix connectivity adding additional functionality above and beyond the core functionality even in fringe cases like the silly extendable baton can be supported with basic undergrad Algorithms 101. And I'd be impressed if anyone on this forum could build a case otherwise that did not first require the assumption of some arbitrary and unnecessary feature of how this system "must operate".

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

If you're using undergrad Algorithms 101 to turn on a motor, you're doing it wrong.

Problem is that your assumptions are just as arbitrary and unnecessary, since you posit some unknown and fanciful mechanism where your "algorithms" somehow work, while the arguments to the contrary provided by others show why they don't.

I don't understand how "extending a baton" is a Simple action in the first place... or an action at all, for that matter. Isn't it part of the Ready Weapon action?

It isn't some weird algorithm, it is called the setting of Shadowrun for the past 24 years.

Apparently not, it evidently requires the extra action as a way to differentiate it from a simple club. The club must be more easily readied, while the baton is more concealable.

Disclaimer: I have not seen 5th edition. This is conjecture based on the fact that an action is required and the stated design philosophy of the edition.

I assumed extending a baton came under the simple action 'Change Device Mode' which can use a simple switch, a virtual button, or a command from a commlink or other control device through either a wired or wireless link.

But it could be lumped under the Ready Weapon Simple Action.

So if your shooting something and another bogie pops up next to you, on your next phase you can punch it or take a simple action to switch out for the baton (this is assuming you just didn't shoot the guy in the face...)

Right, but I'm not the one making sweeping demands about how something must work. What it must do. The criteria by which it has to operate.

The immutable laws of baton extension.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

I think you mean E[xtension speed]=M[atrix linked bonus] x C[onnectivity (DNI, Wireless, Switch)]²

I do wonder what the SR Staff must think of this Baton since we have all focused on it as our rally cry about the wifi bonuses.

In SRHQ

A: Jebuss, another thread about that bloody baton.

B: Yeah, it must be some hot stuff to get this worked up over it.

A: We ARE talking about a hi tech club right? Does anyone even really use one? I mean don't they use guns or magic?

C: I ... I thought it was just a fancy nightstick. Maybe we should have Bernie in Research just doublecheck this.

A: Yeah, and get him to check Martial Arts. Our luck there is probably a whole weapon style built around it... Ninjas don't use these right?

C: *shrugs* no clue.. doubt it.

B: Have him pull Myths & Legends too, maybe there is a legendary version we can write up as an artefact that we we can work into a future publication. Maybe a Baton +3 vs something something

A: Good idea or better yet, put some other gadgets in it. Everyone loves a swiss army knife... Make it into some kind of Baton of Baronly Prowess*

B: Holy ****, this thing is legal to buy over the counter. This means they are picking this up right at Chargen and being OP with it.

A: WHAT?!? Alright, bump it up and make them have to take the Restricted Gear quality if they want their hands on that baby.
---------------------


OK , maybe not.


*with apologies to D&D, couldn't resist. Kudos to any who can name the item we are spoofing

Oh, I know what item...
*Draco18s strokes his calmly

Heheheh. Oh man.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

Still makes no sense.
A smart gun is useless unless the user is either so skilled he needs the +2 accuracy or he is connected.
Since when did you need to be connected to pull the trigger when the dot is lined up with the target?

Also I could see the Matrix Connection being able to compensate for not having all the expensive equipment.

Want to use the smart link at extreme long range but don't have the latest sniper ranger finder?
Connect to the matrix to boost the smartgun's existing ranger finder plus check weather conditions and to some additional modeling to better predict the target and compensate for the extreme range.

But the point is that with the right equipment you should be able to get the matrix connection bonuses without being connected.

This exactly is the Question why some of us are so enraged (See my signature)




This would be a good alternative
Use Matrix and risk getting hacked or by expensive equipment to get the same results but without the "Matrix-risk"
(sticks to the Philosophy that everything comes with a Price )

with a still enraged Dance
Medicineman

To be fair, that IS a separate matter from the wireless bonuses themselves - from what we've been made aware of, it was made +2 Limit instead of +2 dice well before the concept of wireless bonus ever existed.

It makes perfect sense when you view it from a game design point of view: You want to encourage players to enable wifi on their gear, while giving them the option to play it safe by reducing gear's effectiveness when not connected. Now, what would you need to take away to provide an actual incentive: +2 accuracy or +2 DP?

Personally, I would not even consider a matrix connection on my smartlink if the bonuses were swapped, and I'm sure a lot of players feel this way. By limiting the +2 DP to matrix connected smartlinks, players need to make a meaningful choice between physical offense and matrix defense.

That said, it may bother some people from a fluff perspective, but I firmly believe that fluff should not be a reason to imbalance a game. No-brainer choices are inherently imbalanced, since they invalidate other choices. Emotitoys and Skinlink were the prime examples in SR4.

You have to separate the two conditions though to make sense of it.

With the idea of limits being added, most weapons had their bonuses reworked to include Accuracy and add ons were supposed to raise that accuracy limit.

Remember how everyone was panicking at first when they though the starting Acc for a weapon was going to be 3 or 4, but in the end they came out higher, so yeah the addition of smartlink seems kind of redundant, but if those limits had been lower it would have played a bigger part having that smarktlink or other aids to shooting.

So the Acc bonus was going to happen regardless of the online bonuses being introduced or not.

Now you can argue about why the online bonus is a certain value or why it even applies, but that is another tale..

The fluff is the reason for the rules. The rules exist entirely to allow us to simulate the actions of characters in the world described by the fluff.

Shadowrun was built on the Fluff.

Shadowrun proved you didn't even need a workable combat or matrix system to be a hit if the FLUFF was cool enough.

So no disrespecting the FLUFF.

Yeah. What cndblank and binarywraith said. The rules exist to simulate the setting, otherwise what you have is GURPS.

Actually the other way works better from a game mechanics perspective as the +2 dice increases the likelihood you will need the +2 limit. anyone who is moderately gun focused will bump into the 5 limit on the ares predator all the dang time when you have an additional +2 dice to roll. This was a fail on a game design perspective and a fluff perspective. And the rules while they need to be solid should try to reinforce the fluff.

Risk vs reward is a decent game design concept but it needs to be used where appropriate and not slapped on top of everything with no concept of whether it fits or not. Though I am kind of curious what the risk vs reward is for the decker. If the weakest archetype needed extra risks slapped on his cyber for rather pathetic rewards how did the decker or rigger get boned.

That would be true if it was a purely simulationist game, and they have gradually moved away from that approach since 4th. 3rd's matrix rules may have been perfectly fine in simulating the fluff of the matrix, but it was simply unfun and awful from a gameplay perspective, requiring the decker to play a side adventure where he was the only who got to participate, with everyone else waiting for potentially hours. What they did instead was to streamline certain aspects of the game for the sake of playability, and 4th has done a great job at it so far, with the occassional exception such as no-brainer choices blotting out every other option. Which, let's face it, skinlink was: 100% of the benefits, zero opportunity cost. From an optimization point of view, not taking skinlink when you relied on smartlink/visual enhancement glasses etc. meant you intentionally gimped yourself.

With the new system, players need to actually weight the pros and cons of going online with their gear. And +2 Accuracy is simply not enough benefit for hacking vulnerability, but +2 DP might be. Yes, I agree with you that some of the benefits seem rather illogical from an ingame perspective, and they probably could've thought of other benefits. But that is beside the point. What they did achieve on the majority of matrix-capable gear is to give players a meaningful choice between risks and benefits. Being offline and still having 95-100% of the benefits is bad balancing; it invalidates the choice of going online, since the benefit wouldn't be worth the risk. I am, however, under the impression that this is what some posters feel entitled to. Which is kind of sad, really.



I agree that their choice of benefits is odd sometimes, but in regards to the sheer rage at +2 DP on smartlink online available when online, I believe that this is what players desire more.

As for the decker, he finally becomes a viable PC archetype without everyone else requiring special adjustments. In earlier editions, decking was often outsourced to NPCs or slapped on a Streetsam ("Combat hacker") or Rigger. With Riggers being distinct now, and decking requiring a significant investment of resources,

I approve the the move to lower dice pools and the limit system/accuracy is a great way to do it.
I just think they rushed it a bit for the Smartgun link and a few others.
And I understand they had to get it out for Origins and Gencon.

You have a point.
I think I'm going to house rule that you can have either the +2 dice or the +2 accuracy.
Sort of an basic mode (hit the target) and advance mode (hit the bulls eye). Free action to switch between them.
It makes perfect sense that a crack shot would use a smart gun link differently then the average shooter.
A matrix or good Tac Net connection lets you get both.

It doesn't make sense that a smartgun would do zero to help a poor shot hit the target.
Plus the GM gets a lot more use out of a smart gun for his mooks (+2 dice to a ganger with Automatics 3 is a much bigger help then +2 dice to a runner with automatics 5 and a specialization).

I haven't seen the ranged combat rules, but how does ranged combat over variable distances, work? Do you lose accuracy based on distance? If you do, the raising of the limit becomes more significant. For instance, if Medium distance is -1 accuracy, and long range distance is -2 accuracy, then you're going to want that limit raised. Possible even more than you'd want the +2 dice.

For instance, consider a base dice pool of 8 and a long range shot with an Ares Predator under such conditions:

If you added +2 dice to your roll, your dice pool of 10 dice against a limit of 3 would result in wasting successes thanks to the limit 44% of the time you fired. You're frequently going to roll 3 successes, with a few times where you roll less.

Meanwhile, with a dice pool of 8 against a limit of 3, you'd result in wasted successes 26% of the time with the following breakdown: 17% of the time you'd roll 4 successes, 6.9% of the time you'd roll 5 successes, and about 2% of the time you'd roll 6+ successes. Granted, with a dice pool of 8, you'll roll 1 and 2 successes more frequently than with 10 successes. But in close to 1 of 5 shots you're getting 1 more hit, and in over 1 in 20 shots you're getting 2+ hits.

Based on the above, that means that a user with a dice pool of 8 who has raised their limit back up to 5 is a better shot 24% (17% + 6.9%) of the time with a raised limit on a long range shot, than with +2 to their dice pool.

This could be an important consideration, particularly if you're not shooting a stationary tin can, but someone who is resisting your shot actively with their own dice pool. That said... someone with the actual rules could certainly jump in and clarify that ranged combat distance modifiers DO NOT modify accuracy.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

This is the simulationist philosophy. I am a gamist. My philosophy is that you build solid rules and then develop fluff around them. Two sides of the same coin. Neither of us can say with any degree of legitimacy that we are RIGHT.

I can believe the Megas marketing Matrix-required products to consumers, and have them sell quite well. They probably do offer a lot of convienence. They also let the corps get all up in your personal info and habits. All the better to tailor future products for you to buy, of course.

I cannot, however, believe that any serious paramilitary, security, or shadowrunner group would accept such products. They would demand secure closed-system gear and they WILL get it. Either one or more corps would make the specialty gear demanded, or they'd make it themselves.

If runners can cobble together nova-hot decks out of boxes of scraps to hack the matrix they can damn well put together devices with enough on board power that they don't need an external cloud connection to compute whatever.



-k

AMEN

By your own definition then SR is a simulationist system and SR5 is striking at the bedrock of what makes Shadowrun special.

But seriously, I think you can agree, that good game design says you weigh the pros and cons of major changes to the system and game world even if it is just "Fluff".

Especially when this is an existing Cyberpunk Urban Fantasy setting to begin with.
Shadowrun has been around long enough to be its own genre.

I love SR4 for having a clean set of game mechanics (considering how complex the Sixth World is).
I'm glad SR5 is continuing that.
And I have no trouble retconning some thing if it is a major balancing issue.

But a few of the changes in SR5 seemed rushed or forced and just don't fit the genre.
I'm still looking forward to SR5.
But I think these couple of issues will prove to be a hassle for all concerned and the cons out weight the pros on making the change.

Your philosophy is ass-backwards for game design, however, and the exact reason that D20 'flavor of the week' never took off.

Great rules don't necessarily make a great game, because great rules don't tell a story. A great setting will almost immediately suggest stories which are, at the end of the day, why people are playing an RPG instead of CounterStrike or WoW.

Well, paramilitary and security is largely corporate, and the corporations largely high-fived each other over the Matrix security lockdown that forced runners to build cyberdecks. Now they're stuck plugging the security hole with the hunched, pasty bodies of their own spiders, which is probably the cheapest solution -- after all, it's not every day that your security guard has to deal with someone carting around half a million nuyen in gear, so it'd be a little extreme to expend billions on new R&D and production lines.

Runners themselves don't exactly get a vote, and it's unlikely that many of them have the education, expertise, or facilities to manufacture their own cyberware.

My contention is that for the simulation of the world, it's best to think that cyberware as of the last Crash (so for the last decade) has had embedded wireless (which it has) and that a side-effect of the new, more powerful cyberdecks is the ability to attack the wireless bits when they're in standby mode (nothing has physical circuit switches anymore, they're all signal/software controlled). In other words, cyberware was leaching off the wireless Matrix the whole time, but in a passive way that no one had the technology to exploit. Now they do, and the current offline protected mode / online bonus mode became available as a patchwork response to the new threat.

In that model, it wouldn't be surprising if some of the corps have secret projects they don't want to release to the public or even tip their hand over, since they'd be able to use deniable corp military assets running completely dark to do some of the dirtiest work.

Your contention fails utterly in the face of the existence of fifty years of previous cyberware designs floating around, much of it still installed in people. Someone wanting a non-wireless piece of ware isn't reinventing the wheel, they're updating last year's Jackrabbit design.

Cyberware can't have been leeching off the Matrix that whole time because the wireless Matrix didn't exist for most of it.

And they never get maintenance, or upgrades, or new parts, or replacements. The fact that old might exist doesn't make it readily available or even acquirable. A 2020 Hyundai Elantra might exist, but everyone doesn't still have one.

Desktop fabrication is already a thing as of SR4.

Well. In all fairness, there are no historical Cyberware designs that provide matrix-aware bonuses while in an offline mode. They provide identical bonuses to Matrix-Aware gear that is not using its matrix connection.

So, someone wanting a non-wireless piece of ware that gives the bonuses of a matrix aware piece of ware isn't reinventing the wheel -- Not because they're updating an old design, but because they'd be inventing a fundamentally new capability that does not exist.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

You really shouldn't do that in public, you know...

You extend it your way, he apparently has his own way.

Better question would be does that constitute a complex action or an extended test?