In any case, I was issued magazines with same ammo capacity as the M-16's.

Well, there's your problem!

Those are retail prices. If you wanted to fudge it, you could say that megas (in particular, those that are known for software/cyber) could produce / implant their operators at cost- in this case, an out-patient procedure and a 5 nuyen chip.

-DrZ

yes, they won't get full price for it.

This discussion is a disconnect, though, from Reality to Game. In reality, very few people are willing to risk getting dead by operating in a suppressive fire zone. In the game, hoewver, all it takes is the decision to do so (since no one really dies), and a character with a semi-competant design to almost completely ignore the ramifications of the Suppresion zone. Unfortunately, the mechanics do not support the reality. Suppressive fire from fully automatic weapons designed for sustained fire is a devastating thing. Suppressive fire from fully automatic weapons using grenades is truly horrifying.

Suppressive fire takes a Complex Action, uses twenty rounds of ammo, and ignores recoil. Though it may appear as a “spray and pray” technique it is in fact a combination of controlled and fully automatic bursts focused over a narrow area and directed at anything that moves. A character can suppress a triangular area projecting from the shooting character outward up to a distance of his choosing, up to the maximum range of the weapon, with a width of 10 meters at its end and a height of 2 meters. Make a (Weapon Skill) + Agility [Accuracy] Test, including bonuses for smartlink, laser sight, tracer rounds, and other gamemaster-approved modifiers, and record the hits. The suppressive fire zone lasts until the end of the Combat Turn as long as the firer does not move or commit to any other action. Anyone in the suppressive fire zone or immediately adjacent to it takes a dice pool penalty to all actions equal to the shooter’s hits, unless they are completely unaware of it (a magician using astral projection, for example).

Any character who is in the suppressed area (but not behind cover or prone), or who moves into or out of the area before the end of the suppressive fire, risks catching some flying lead. That character must make a Reaction + Edge Test (+ any dice they may get as a result of choosing to use Full Defense) with a threshold equal to the hits scored by the suppressing attacker. Note that in the test, you use your full Edge rating, regardless of whether you have spent points during the session (though you do not, of course, use burned Edge points). If the test fails, the character is hit, suffering damage equal to the weapon’s base Damage Value modified by any special ammunition being fired. Characters in the suppressed area who remain behind full cover or drop prone are not at risk (though they suffer the normal modifiers for being prone; see Melee Modifiers, p. 187, and Ranged Modifiers, p. 173). Characters may choose to avoid rolling and use their Free Action to go prone and avoid getting hit. If a character does not have a Free Action remaining she may use the Hit the Dirt Interrupt Action and go prone instead of getting hit. Any character who stands up or moves again before the suppressive fire stops must make a test to see if she is hit.

I'm curious what percent of the book value for used 'ware people think the runners would get for fencing something they ripped out of a guard on one of their own runs. Imagine being asked to deal in something so identifiable, and being traceable from both ends -- either from people who have tracked down the runners and forced them to rat out who they sold it to, or from people who have tracked down the 'ware itself and forced the new owner to rat out who they bought it from.

And what about the reaction of a street doc contact when asked to harvest from a a recent casualty. Are you sure she would be okay with it? Would the Johnson or fixer be cool with it if they were to find out?

you get to have it one way or the other; it's either expensive and rare (ie most editions), or cheap and common (ie 4th edition). expensive and common makes absolutely no sense for the setting. it would be like arguing that corporations are using the GMC banshee to ship people desperate for any kind of work from the barrens instead of an old, beat-up bus. sure, they could, but it's just not reasonable to expect the corporations to choose an expensive and complicated solution over a cheap and simple one, whether that be for transporting untrained labour or giving their workforce the skills needed to do their job.

you get to have it one way or the other; it's either expensive and rare (ie most editions), or cheap and common (ie 4th edition). expensive and common makes absolutely no sense for the setting.

Actually, "was cheap, became common, got expensive" works. Just because it's now much more expensive to put the wires in doesn't mean that the existing wired workforce suddenly vanishes.

Actually, "was cheap, became common, got expensive" works. Just because it's now much more expensive to put the wires in doesn't mean that the existing wired workforce suddenly vanishes.

i'm not entirely certain what setting you think you are playing, but tamanous is known for having connections that extend into legitimate hospitals, never mind the street doc who probably lost his license for some reason or another (and is no longer legally a doctor) and cannot even *access* regular channels for organs and such that (s)he needs.

the organization has a very long reach that extends to almost any medical facility, legitimate or otherwise, that you care to name. and they're only one organization that does this sort of thing.

organ-legging is a known phenomenon in shadowrun. and tamanous is actually an organization that people who fairly often will find themselves needing to make a body disappear (say, into the mouths of some ghouls, after all the valuable parts have been taken out by a doctor) can benefit from, and it is *extremely* plausible, even likely, that any given character you create has a contact that is in some way attached to the organization (although they may or may not have told you about it).

if your gang has ever gone in to a shadow clinic to buy a set of handrazors, odds are good that your gang knows someone with connections to tamanous.

I heavily disagree that an M16 converted to FA and Belt Feed would make a better SAW than the SAW... I really liked my M16A2... I LOVED my SAW...

Everyone I've met who trusted their life to a SAW loved them. FN made a great gun. But that's not the point. The point is that the game mechanics mean a belt fed assault rifle is better for everything an LMG does than an LMG is.

C'mon. That's exactly what's happened with every single piece of equipment - they vanished. The workforce with cheap wires DID vanish, because the world was retconned. It's why noone has "old school" smartguns/smartlinks anymore.

edit: somehow missed the quote. this was in response to:



as phlapjack said, it pretty much did. 5th edition only makes *any* sense at all if you pretend like the world didn't suddenly and spontaneously change completely to be the way it is now.

it doesn't make any sense at all if the smartgun from the 2050s made you better at using with your gun without wireless, but the new ones need wireless to do the same, unless you presume that the old smartguns *never existed*, for example. it doesn't make sense that in the 2050s you could ground spells through a focus when you're on the astral, but now that they've broken all sorts of other barriers in magic they've suddenly all completely forgotten how to do that; that only makes sense if grounding also never existed.

and so on, and so forth. we pretty much have to presume that in most cases, 5th edition is pretending like certain things never happened. if there was still a huge stockpile of dirt cheap skillwires in the world, then rating 1 skillwires (plus the skilljack you need if you want to use them) would not cost more than rating 5 skillwires used to cost. and you also wouldn't need a skilljack, because SR4 skillwires had done away with that.

If the original purpose of the smartgun was retconned so that it was meant to help people who already had excellent, then was a similar retcon made for lasersights? If I recall, you only get a DP modifier from those in wireless mode as well

Not a valid comparison. The mechanical function of smartlinks was retconned, pure and simple. Wires, on the other hand, are running into the issues caused by the nanotech disaster - the workforce with cheap wires is still there, but the methodologies that allowed for cheap construction and implantation of those wires is no longer viable.

Skillwires are part of an in-setting change, smartlinks are not.

It's totally valid. You expect to be able to say most pieces of gear aren't around because of a retcon, but OH WAIT this one OTHER piece of gear, nah, it wasn't retconned? Doesn't work. Either the world as a whole was retconned, or it wasn't.

You can't just make stuff up and blame everything on the nanotech disaster to try to prove your point.

It's totally valid. You expect to be able to say most pieces of gear aren't around because of a retcon, but OH WAIT this one OTHER piece of gear, nah, it wasn't retconned? Doesn't work. Either the world as a whole was retconned, or it wasn't.

You can't just make stuff up and blame everything on the nanotech disaster to try to prove your point.

Smartlinks are generally better than they were in SR4, since a +2 dice bonus is harder to come by. Of course it's still no SR3 Smartlink, which for a TN 6 (modified to TN 4 by the smartlink) shot had the roughly equivalent outcome of tripling your dice pool.

Smartlinks are generally better than they were in SR4, since a +2 dice bonus is harder to come by. Of course it's still no SR3 Smartlink, which for a TN 6 (modified to TN 4 by the smartlink) shot had the roughly equivalent outcome of tripling your dice pool.

so as a matter of fact, yes, if the guy who installed your cyberware is willing to install more cyberware into you in exchange for money, then that guy is a contact.

and no, it's pretty obvious that skillwires have indeed been retconned. the 4th edition version needed no skilljack. all you needed to run a knowsoft was a DNI from any source. not so in 5th. we can safely say that the devs looked at 4th edition skillwires and decided that no, they don't work like that anymore.

furthermore, it is *extremely* obvious that skillwires got retconned, because we know *exactly* what old skillwires are like; exactly like the current ones, only not wireless-enabled. not sort of like the current ones, but needing different pieces of equipment to function, and an order of magnitude cheaper. SR4 has pretty clearly had it's augmentation costs errated out of existence.

if there is any significant danger that a person with the old skillwires is going to go haywire and destroy everything, do you think they're still going to be around in anyone's workplace? really? i mean, who's going to pay to have the ticking time bomb in their factory? who the hell is going to be *insane* enough to hand them a heavy machine gun and a skillsoft on how to use heavy weapons ranging from machine guns to grenade launchers to rocket launchers to assault cannons?

basically, if it leaves you particularly susceptible to something significantly bad, then they would be rare. because most of them would have been killed by angry mobs, by now.

turns out, having an exceptionally high chance of suddenly becoming a danger to everyone with no warning: does not increase your life expectancy.

edit: oh, and by definition, if someone is willing to do business with you, well... here's the description of a loyalty 1 contact:

"Just Biz. The relationship is purely mercenary, based solely on economics. The
people involved may not even like each other, and they won’t offer any sort of
preferential treatment."

so as a matter of fact, yes, if the guy who installed your cyberware is willing to install more cyberware into you in exchange for money, then that guy is a contact.

regardless, this still makes the ridiculous assumptions that:

a) those skillwires are somehow not viewed as being even remotely close to the same value for no apparent reason.
b) those skillwires didn't actually get retconned from having wildly different prices and hardware needs.
c) those skillwires don't already have actual rules stating they cost runners the same amount to obtain in the core book.

yes, we could come up with some ridiculous and convoluted explanation for why skillwires, and nothing else, suddenly became an order of magnitude more expensive with nobody in the whole world bothering to question why, but that just sounds silly and contrived.

the logical conclusion is that, just like everything else that went through significant changes in SR5 without getting any specific mentions of the transition occuring, it was always like that. why does nobody want to know why skillwires went up to 20 times their old price? because they didn't. as far as SR5 is concerned, they were never 2,000 nuyen per rating point.

that's the simple and logical explanation. it's ridiculous to presume that we're supposed to somehow infer some convoluted chain of "logic" that explains the change, and yet the only even remote indication of this logic chain we're supposed to follow in the book is a brief mention that something related to nanotechnology happened a while ago in the description of an assault rifle.

yes, we could come up with some ridiculous and convoluted explanation for why skillwires, and nothing else, suddenly became an order of magnitude more expensive with nobody in the whole world bothering to question why, but that just sounds silly and contrived.

No., it is not the case that either all changes are retcons or no changes are retcons. There's a shit-tonne of middle ground. Skillwires are in that middle ground, as is most gear. The retconned gear is only a few examples - specifically things where their old dice pool bonus function is now new and shiny funtionality that comes with the new Matrix, and their new Limit bonus is now the function they've always had. That's pretty much the ONLY gear retcon. Things like price changes are trivial to explain in-universe between the massive economic issues and nanogeddon.

Even if we assume that the world as a whole has to be retconned, you can still say that that piece of gear that "wasn't retconned" was retconned but it now functions similarly to the pre-retconned version.

Or you could ignore the fact that SR4 made skillwires an order of magnitude cheaper for no apparent reason.

And as an aside, coming up with new terms whenever I mention the nanotech thing is fun. Wonder how long I can keep it up.

I don't believe that having done business in the past is sufficient. Otherwise every character would have scores of contacts collected throughout their lives.

And as an aside, coming up with new terms whenever I mention the nanotech thing is fun. Wonder how long I can keep it up.

You also have to consider that a lot of those contacts shift over time. Some retire, some die etc....

Trying to constantly juggle all of that in the game would be a lot of tracking, but when you need to find that just right piece of equipment, it's good to know people....

But YMMV, some runners stick to just one area/region and do not really associate outside their immediate comfort zone, relying on the fixer to do the middlemanning.

Indeed... In game, my characters do tend to spend time juggling their contacts... As you say... they come and they go.

I don't believe that having done business in the past is sufficient. Otherwise every character would have scores of contacts collected throughout their lives.

That's your position, which I think isn't at all supported by the book/fluff/common sense. You posit that "old-versions" (SR4) of gear exists, yet any time it's brought up about any piece of gear, the answer is always "never existed in this timeline" (SR5). Saying "nano!" for any explanation you want is not a reasonable explanation but rather a cop-out.

That and the ensuing economic problems are the explanation that has been offered. And you can't say that the given answer is always "never existed" when we're discussing a piece of gear where this isn't the case. Skillwires have a different and superior explanation for their changes, as do the general changes to 'ware pricing (in that we've been told that those two factors are what have made all these costs go up). Where are SR4's skillwires now? Sitting useless in a warehouse until they can actually be implanted again.

That mean I can plan a run and steal them all?

Shouldnt I be able to buy retro ware used?

You could, but then you'd still be stuck with the dilemma that skillwires are really, really expensive, and it doesn't make sense that the fluff says corps like to install skillwires rather than train their workers.

Training people is ridiculously expensive, skill wires are still a steal on the front. 120,000 and you can make a worker a professional in a wide range of fields, it would cost that much or more to train him normally in just one field. While for corps this would be true anyway, but the main mechanical problem with skillwires is the programs cost too much on top of a high cost for implantation. Sure go ahead make wires 6 cost 120,000 hell double that. Just make the programs dirt cheap. Software is too easily copied/stolen making the cost prohibitive makes very little world sense and with the high cost of the ware I don't think makes much game mechanic sense.

Training people is ridiculously expensive, skill wires are still a steal on the front. 120,000 and you can make a worker a professional in a wide range of fields, it would cost that much or more to train him normally in just one field. While for corps this would be true anyway, but the main mechanical problem with skillwires is the programs cost too much on top of a high cost for implantation. Sure go ahead make wires 6 cost 120,000 hell double that. Just make the programs dirt cheap. Software is too easily copied/stolen making the cost prohibitive makes very little world sense and with the high cost of the ware I don't think makes much game mechanic sense.

Now this does raise a good point, I remember there was discussion about how a team broke into a facility and the defending spider basically downloading combat op specs into the janitors, turning them into short lived combat monsters.

It is a good point. Once you have those skillwires in you can then adapt the subject to any training you like.

The cost of the programs is absurdly high, especially when you figure they are probably just burning multi-copies for the download and using that.

Now this does raise a good point, I remember there was discussion about how a team broke into a facility and the defending spider basically downloading combat op specs into the janitors, turning them into short lived combat monsters.


So is there a ShadowSkillNet out there somewhere offering black market skill downloads for rapid use. Because that could be an interesting find, even if you always run the risk of a infected download.

If the corps are able to turn janitors into combat monkeys in seconds, why shouldn't the decker/face/other traditional low to mid lvl combat type get the same option when needed?

What's good for the cybergoose is good for the cybergander.

Wireless Bonus: access to almost any active skill anytime.

While training is expensive and skillwires are cheap in comparison, janitors seem a bit of a stretch to me. They are pretty much non-skilled employees. Its a tough job but not because vacuuming is a complex skill. Are there tricks of the trade, sure. Just not enough of them to justify skillwires IMO.

Unless you're Horizon, in which case that janitor might have been helping out in accounting the week before, manufacturing the week before that, and so on.

Unless you're Horizon, in which case that janitor might have been helping out in accounting the week before, manufacturing the week before that, and so on.