QUOTE (hermit @ Jul 21 2013, 04:17 PM)
Rating 5? You take that from where? Besides, hiring ONE professional person means you can not possibly hire other, less well trained people for other branches of your security? The mind boggles, Jaid. You're really trying too hard here.
That makes flat-out no sense. Or are American college grads joining the Cartels in droves?
No, they're on standby to deploy to hotspots. Like Herr Suelzer does. There's IC for real Matrix security as an equivalent to corp goons. What Herr Suelzer does is keeping a virtual eye on the upper grid 'aether', much like a security mage does, because IC cannot do that for him. Hence, the corp needs one (1) Herr Suelzer. Or do, in your bizarre world, the corps only hire squads of Magic 2 mages that physically patrol because otherwise it would be an inconvenience to PC mages?
No. You presume wrongly. I have them on standby somewhere in the facility, to be deployed in terms of a breach to overwhelm intruders. Like American police precincts use SWAT teams, see.
Uhm, seriously? Because hiring a team of level 2 deckers costs the corp more and can do less? In my world, corps do not optimize facilities to be runner b&e friendly, you know. They will hire someone who can go toe to toe with real deckers, and use IC to keep tehm busy in hosts until the real decker logs in. Same as grunts are used to contain a threat and the HTR team is there to mop them up.
Your and my definition of "useful" are clearly not the same.
- yes, professional rating 5. it's very simple. i open my book, start digging through until i find characters built with similar amounts of power, and that's when you've got roughly the same rating. the guy you've got patrolling the matrix is equivalent to an elite corporate security team that is given things like augmentations to their various attributes, and have skills above the level of chargen shadowrunners. which are professional rating 5, well above what you have checking your systems every second or so.
- who needs droves? there's something like 500 shadowrunners total in seattle, from what we've been told. some will be quite good at what they do, some not so much. some of them will be former corp employees, some of them will be naturally gifted and worked their way up from being in a gang, some will be anarchists, some will just not be suited for corporate employment for reasons other than skill. of those, only perhaps 1/5 (if that) will be hackers. do i seriously need to go through and list every possible reason someone could possibly be running the shadows for you? i kinda assumed that, given it's the central concept of the system that there are these extremely skilled people who are shadowrunners, you'd be able to figure out some reasons why highly talented and skilled individuals may become shadowrunners. in all likelihood, given that in your world being top of your class and being the guy that other *professionals* go to for advice gets you a job doing the equivalent of staring at a security monitor for hours on end, waiting for stuff to happen... there's a heck of a lot more potential for advancement, apparently.
- "standby to deploy to hotspots" = "randomly patrolling in a corporate facility so that maybe he'll randomly find some shadowrunners to kill for fun" in your world apparently. so why aren't there elite physical corporate security teams doing the same thing as your sample matrix corporate security guy? why aren't there squads of elite security that pick random hallways to set up in to just shoot any random intruders that might walk through, if that's what you've got your elite matrix security forces doing?
- the setting is built with security guards that are professional rating 2. because you don't take a highly trained, exceptionally intelligent, and experienced person, put them into a massively accelerated reality, and have them stare at a screen for what will feel like 24 hours a day. you put them to work making money for you. this guy is skilled enough to be doing research. it takes a freaking matrix perception pool of 3 to generally notice if there are nodes running silent in the area. a dicepool of 6 is even more beyond what is needed. 7-8 is just crazy, and given that you can pay these chumps minimum wage instead of what you would have to pay to bring in someone who is near the limit of human intelligence, and has very good skills and experience (skill rating 7 is a veteran who other professionals turn to for advice), would command. you really can hire those professional rating 2 guys by the dozen and still have it be less expensive than hiring a single person with the qualifications of your example (not to mention the cost of augmentation etc).
a team of 10 rating 2 deckers will have 10 times as many actions as the single professional rating 5 deckers. they can use teamwork tests to get some very impressive things done. they have an excellent chance of being able to hack anything that is online before it can be shut down (by acting first, and by being able to target things after the person has already used their free action).
- apparently i do have a different definition of useful than you, because having +2 reflex and +2d6 initiative dice is pretty damned useful to me whether or not i can get another +2 reflex on top of that. a smuggling compartment is not made viable by what kind of action it takes to open or close (even if that being dependant on matrix access is stupid), it's made viable by how hard it is to detect. there's tons of great gear that either doesn't have an online bonus, or doesn't have one that determines it's usefulness. not everything is smartlinks on already high-accuracy guns and perception enhancements.
regarding the possibility of cyberdecks with high firewall: sure. the best one you can buy at chargen is almost all of your starting money, and provides just as much firewall as a rating 7 commlink, which is a mere fraction of the cost and is not restricted at all, meaning it's quite easy to get your hands on as well.
but device rating also decides how many devices can be slaved to it. as i recall, a rating 4 cyberdeck (best you can get in chargen, again costing most of your starting resources) will protect a grant total of 12 devices. if your team uses a technomancer instead of a decker, you actually get none. so for your entire team, you can have 12 devices, and not a single one more, slaved to the best chargen cyberdeck... and a single matrix perception check will generally speaking still reveal that there is a hidden node where there wasn't one before, and you'll still be screwed over.
or, you can just turn off wireless, like any sane human being who doesn't want to be trivially easy to detect the presence (if not the location) of, and not have to worry that your opponent making a single threshold 1 test (likely with dicepools that make said threshold very reliably) won't ruin the entire thing.
It's more about being a dick and setting people on the path of Not Telling Lies than to actually hurt people.
