I don't think you can safely say its cheaper then now since you have a LOT more borders to cross with their own laws and jurisdictions and the fact that nature doesn't actually like you being in it and will fight back. In fact, its probably a lot more expensive to install cables now across vast wilderness with all the wild spirits and awaken critters, and mundane animals fighting the team attempting to lay the cables.

The in-setting explanation you quoted nowhere even remotely suggests the existence of Noise may be intentional.

Considering that noise and lag were nonexistent in 4th ed, it's assumed that noise was purposely placed into the new Matrix protocols when GOD rolled them out. And metagame wise, its also used as a way to force the decker to come on runs, much like mutual signal range before then, and closed off Matrix systems before then.

It's true, critters LOVE it when their prey bring along their own dental floss, errr... cables

Actually, Noise only encourages Deckers to go out on small minor runs. The type of runs where they may only have to hack a single door, maybe 5 cameras at best. Anything larger is probably run in a Host in which the Decker can do his hacking from anywhere because, as has been mentioned, once you're in a host Noise is cancelled for distance.

Part of the problem, really, is that they reversed their own decisions in multiple places. It was decided that WR and RE would no longer stack, then they reversed this decision in adding the wireless bonus. It was decided that smartlinks shouldn't give dice anymore, and then they reversed this decision with wireless bonuses. If they hadn't gone and done something like that, and if instead the bonuses were new functionality that was in some way worth the risk (and, perhaps, had the option for the hacker been something other than bricking), the whole construct may well have been better received.

In point of fact, "noise" and lag DID exist in a fashion in SR4. Static zones and spam zones were an issue (now rolled into the noise system), satlinks gave you a serious Response penalty due to lag... It's distance based noise that wasn't represented, but it seems like the broadcast hardware must have changed substantially, or that the new security protocols start to cause an issue after too many hops along the mesh.

The only problem with using the camera to hack the guy's communit is that the camera doesn't possess an Attack or Sleaze attribute. Sure you deck does but it is a long way away, and the Host does, but it's not the one hacking the communit and has no physical location so can't be within 100m of the target. The camera is only 1m away, but the best it could do is shoulder-surf because it lacks the ability to place a MARK on the target.

I wasn't suggesting using the camera to hack the guy's commlink. What I was saying was that you have two icons, each one within a foot of each other but 1500 or so miles away from your physical location (you are in Denver), one connected to a host (the camera) and the other not (the commlink).

If the decker is connected to the host, he can hack the camera (in order to look through it, or edit the data flowing from it) with no noise, but if he wanted to hack the commlink, he would need to leave the host, FIND the commlink icon, and then hack it, with all the noise penalty of being 1,500 miles away.

Its really hard to hack hosts. And with failed Matrix tests either reflecting damage back or having a mark put on yourself, it'd be way too risky to hack a host directly. Its far safer to find a device slaved to the host, hardline to that device and get marks on the host by proxy.

Ahh, ok, sorry I misunderstood. I agree with you completely. I thought you were implying that by having access to the camera you could use it to hack the 'link.

Now for a security device, how about this setup:
A Host has a linked device that is a Cyberdeck. Now a security spider in Denver accesses said host. The linked Cyberdeck is in New York, can the spider now use the Cyberdeck to hack/brick devices that are within 100m of the NY deck [edit]without noise[/edit]?

Nope. In 5e you don't ever piggyback off of some other device. All tests are made using your own decks physical location - with the exception being that if you are connected to a host and another device is connected to that same host you are considered directly connected to that device.

It can't work -- to be in the host to connect to the cyberdeck in the first place, you need to be a persona. In order to generate a new persona with the new device, you have to drop out of your current device/persona, which means you drop out of the host and you're back in Denver.

Short version: it would require you to have two personae at once, which you can't do.

it's not an assumption. i didn't quote it initially because i didn't consider it to be a central point, and it's in the middle of nowhere in the fluff section of the book. but, since you've demanded i dredge through everything to find the bloody quote, here it is:



this doesn't explicitly say that the megas added noise to the matrix specifically, but there's not really anything else that changed which has the stated effect of making it harder for long-distance hackers to do any damage.

(to be honest, i can't really blame anyone for not noticing this particular fact... the only way i found it was by using ctrl-f with various words i thought might be in those sentences that i remembered reading when i slogged through the book front to back).

Thanks all. That's what I was thinking, but wanted to bounce the idea off of others.

I think that a lot of the problems, having read very widely (old threads and current) on this point boils down to a few issues which people have, of which the most noted is trying to decide when real world physics and computer science apply to wired/wireless, and when they're meaningless.

As someone who has studied a lot of computer science over the years, and even made some measurable amounts of money off it, including the infosec niche, I have to say that the hacking/decking ruleset in every single edition of shadowrun is moonlicking madness. Seriously - it's worse than the firearms rules in every single edition of shadowrun I have seen from any publisher.

I close my eyes, I think peaceful thoughts, I repeat my mantra: "In the Sixth World, computing devices run on fragging magic." Then I play the game.

Want examples where quantum droolputing doesn't help you? In encryption? Here's one: the simple, basic, one time pad. I don't care what processor you have doing whatever task you have set it - any interpretation of a given message length is necessarily equivalent in plausibility to every other interpretation of the same message length absent the key. Frequency analysis doesn't help. Factoring large numbers doesn't help. Dancing around the pond might get you sweaty, but doesn't help. But a hacker with a decryption unit can decrypt it magically and somehow know that those eleven characters equate to:
I love you.
and not:
I hate you.
or:
f^jKK4@#cxR

Also, on the wired/wireless thing: aerials use electromagnetic radiation to induce signals in each other. That is precisely and only how they work, now and forever. If you have something else, it's not called that. If you're using pigeon post, it's called pigeon post. But you can send the exact same signals between two sockets on shielded cable and it not only will operate correctly (given appropriate connections, shielding etc.) but will work better than wireless because of greatly reduced attenuation. Wireless isn't magic. The bizarre notion that some communications can only work in wireless mode ... only makes sense if you remember that computing devices run on fragging magic.

Now, as to the bricking thing. Yes, many things can be bricked, provided that you can write their firmware, abuse the hardware, or confuse the software to a sufficient level. In the heat of combat it doesn't matter that a thing will be fine after a reboot - by then combat is over and you're being hauled into an organlegger's van. However, the hacker/decker/electronic monster doesn't have time, in combat, to wander through a series of logical analyses to find a way to do it. It would have to be prepared ahead of time, hoping that he can predict what hardware you'd have, and then hope that he can gain access, and fire off whatever exploits he has in a hurry. Planning exploits takes hours, or even weeks, not seconds.

If I were to advise the shadowrun writers of any past, current or future edition, I would say something like:
Hacking before the run, as part of legwork, establishing back doors and obtaining information.
Command and communications during the run to keep everything going smoothly.
Exploits as either a long planned activity, or a series of preset activities run at desperate speed.

There were some nods to at least the first and second of those three in SR4A, so kudos where it's due, but that's about as far as it goes. Computers are just magic boxes in shadowrun, and probably always will be, and any notion of verisimilitude is just plain ignored.

Hint to GMs: if you want your hacker/decker players to weep great salty tears of frustration about how unfair you are being, study how real infosec professionals set up environments which they expect will be attacked, and put the analogous tools in place. When the hackers discover that not only did the corp's folks know precisely what was up, within minutes (at most) of it happening, tracking their every move, whiteboarding it out and giggling to each other about the mistakes, they get very sad.

Personally, I've come to the conclusion that Shadowrun takes place in a world where P=NP, and just let it lie from there - makes everything a little easier to live with.

I found, from reading the Matrix actions, that you can actually 'brick' devices in a much more (semi) realistic way using a different method. You need to:
a) Get 3 marks on a device
b) Take Format Device action
c) Take Reboot Device action

This takes a little longer, but (to my mind) works more like bricking in reality; overwriting firmware. It causes no physical damage, but it can take weeks to put right (by the rules). Also it doesn't stop the device being used normally, doesn't affect it's mechanical function. These rules seem better thought out and written than the bricking rules.

Yeah, I think there is something here. They started to get a bit...concerned, or a little afraid, or something, about the 'outside bonuses.' And given that some die pools got silly in SR4, I can understand this somewhat. I don't think this was the stuff they needed to hit to solve that, though.

See, how I'd have done it, I'd have given the bonus dice base(as usual), and introduced things like Limit increases and the like for wireless. You're getting more dice, which means you have a better chance of hitting your Limit. So now it's suddenly a real choice that DOESN'T feel like a nerf. You have Pistols/Semi Automatics 5+2 and an Agility of 7, with a Smartlink. That's 16 dice. That Predator you have has an Accuracy of 5. You'll very likely hit it with those 16 dice and possibly go over, wasting more successes. Do you take the risk to up the Accuracy for two potential more successes, or not? (I do, however, feel stuff should not have been out and out destroyable, but just 'messed up temporarily/knocked offline for awhile.' That's still a risk, it still 'Has a Price'. I mean losing your hearing or smartlink in the middle of the fight sucks-it makes the decker still relevant in combat, but it's not so dang heavy.)

Then again, I'm not terribly fond of Limits either-I don't *hate* them-I think they had good intentions behind them with making it so you didn't want to pump your die pools to stupid levels-but honestly, I think they're an overly complicated thing that could have been dealt with with a quick 'Die Pools involving skills capped at X, done' rule. Saying 'We don't care how you get there, but it caps out here.' I'd have said 18 for street, 20 for basic, and 22 for prime, with a very clear sidebar of 'the GM can always waive this if they want a more cinematic game.' Honestly I think that could have solved a lot of issues, including them being concerned about giving bonuses for stuff.

Why could your Persona not just travel to the Deck in NY and enter the Deck that way? It is on the Host, after all.

Which is honestly not making any sense, since anything you want to hack is likely in a Host, and Noise is irrelevant in the Host. So the addition of Noise as a mechanic is nonsensical in that regard. It does absolutely nothing to protect the Mega from the Hacker at all.

In short, what you just said doesn't make any sense. Without generating a persona, there's no way to go to a remote location on the Matrix to find a device, and once you have a persona you can't use another device to generate another persona until you drop the one you're using.

P235:



So you can't just zip over to somewhere else and hop into another device.

It's not explicit, but to generate a persona I'm under the impression that you need physical access to the device -- you have to reboot it and link up to it, which I assume means you at least need to be within the 100m handshake range (otherwise you need a persona to go look for it).

See, this is part of why I think the Matrix rules have gone full on dumb since 3e.

A Persona is, in fact, an iconic representation of the hardware you're using to connect and your conciousness (or your soul, if you're a tacomancer, but we'll disregard them as they violate both P=NP and Magic not working on the Matrix). So it -should- be explicit that you can't generate a Persona from a device that your brain is not currently directly connected to, because the Persona is just a representation of that device generated by it and visible to other Matrix devices.

Which is why I asked, because it is not explicit, and is a bit confusing.

What I mean in saying it's not explicit is that there's no line of text in the book that says, pXXX:



The way the rules are set up, that nonexistent quote is accurate, you just sort of have to figure it out from the rules on connections and personas. The restriction on only being able to have one persona at a time, and requiring a persona to go out and run Matrix Perception (even though finding a device you own/have a mark on is automatic) to find distant devices pretty much leaves you with those limitations.

In other words, it's implicit to the rules.

It's implicit if you're familiar with the older rules.

A lot of the really glaring errors are like that. Intent on them is obvious to experienced players who can see where the concepts or literal text were just yanked from earlier editions, but a newbie would get some really strange assumptions.

As to the former, I'm curious as to why you figure that. As for the latter, that reasoning requires the erroneous assumption that Resonance is Magic.

I think you're mistaken about something - specifically, that there was a goal to limit dice pool size. That's not the case; the stated goal was to change where those dice CAME from so that it was more about the character. That's also why skills go to 12 or 13 (allowing Improved Ability to go to 6 or 7, for 18 or 20 dice from skill alone) and augmented maximum is based on current attribute rather than natural maximum.

I would agree that a more... In depth system would have been better in terms of the hacker's options - being able to do something to a person with wireless reflexes, for example, rather than just harm the 'ware itself (such as something where you got a bonus with your wires based on external sensor data, including both carried sensors and sensors in the area, to improve their bonus; the hacking action would then be the insertion of false data into the sensor feed - no marks required, but absolutely no permanency).

honestly, the new matrix is basically magic. it can take a signal sent out from a device, pass it around through the matrix, and then send it to a second device... faster than that first device could have even possibly sent it to the second.

so really, if we're going to complain that technomancers are magic, well, so is the wireless matrix these days.

Which is an Epic Fail all its own.

I'll point out that capital "M" Magic is semantically different here from lower case "m" magic - the latter being simply "we don't know how it works", and the former being a specific thing that does not interact well with technology.

well, no. there's a difference between "i don't understand how to code a program that could be written 60 years from now" and "i don't understand how this hardware appears to operate at faster-than-light speeds".

i mean, both statements are true... i don't know everything there is to know about the technology of 2075, by any means. but i do know that the direct line between two devices is operating at the speed of light, because that's what fiberoptic cables do. and since going through the matrix and back again is in the vast majority of cases going to be several times as much distance to travel (if not hundreds of times the distance), that must mean that the technology the wireless matrix is operating on can relay signals faster than the speed of light.

which, for all intents and purposes, may as well be magic, because we sure as hell don't have any laws of physics that can help us out to comprehend what that entails.

I'm not arguing with your physics standpoint, but I don't understand your premise. Where does "the new matrix... ...can take a signal sent out from a device, pass it around through the matrix, and then send it to a second device... faster than that first device could have even possibly sent it to the second" come from?

Possibly from the fact that you can do some things faster through the matrix (wireless bonus) than through a direct connection (no wireless bonus)?

Ah, ok. I didn't realise we'd gone back to wireless bonuses. I thought we were still on hacking

Which to me just seems to invalidate the assumption that connection speed is the issue in wireless bonuses.

Explain the chemical seal, then.

Predictive algorithms using an expert system and a heuristically updated external system for the generation of facts that allows it to partially close automatically at about the same time as you realize you want to close it?

no, it just means that many wireless bonuses make absolutely no sense whatsoever. if you want to defend SR5, that's fine, but i'm baffled as to why you seem intent on defending every last aspect of it just because it's SR5. SR5 has lots of good things you can and should defend, but it also has some really stupid awful things in it. when you go around rabidly defending those idiotic things, it just makes me less inclined to listen to *anything* you say about SR5, because it makes me feel like you've really go the rose-tinted glasses at full strength.

the fact that it's written in the SR5 core book doesn't make it brilliant, logical, well-written, or good.

many wireless bonuses are complete and utter nonsense. it is perfectly reasonable and valid for people to think they are poorly implemented, because they simply don't pass the sniff test. they might work well in something other than a roleplaying game, but the thing with a roleplaying game is that it's supposed to help you immerse yourself in a role. having stuff that just slaps you in the face with how completely implausible and nonsensical *is* a bad thing for a roleplaying game.

That makes no sense. If its going to do that, it might as well just seal automatically. Your explanation is along the lines of "the airbags will inflate when you yell 'AIRBAG!' during a crash. If its wirelessly enabled, they'll inflate instantly, otherwise it takes 1 second because that's how long it takes you to say 'airbag'"

I'm not arguing that this is a good example of what wirless bonuses should be, but: The free action could be to confirm that you want it to close.

I'm questioning an assumption I do not see the basis of - that being the assumption that connection speed is the least-bad explanation for more wireless bonuses.

"No, it's ok Jarvis, I do not wish for the airbags to deploy. Yes I realize I'm going to break every bone in my body if they don't."

More like "No, Jarvis, I don't want the airbags to deploy - my face is too close to where they deploy from, and the force could kill me".

Airbags deploy with some seriously high acceleration, after all.

More like, "Wha--OH MY GOD, MY FACE IS SMEARED ALL OVER MY STEERING WHEEL. JARVIS YOU *******."

There's a reason airbags explode when they do at the speed they do. It's so that they finish inflating before your head as moved four inches. Having to ask the user "is it ok to deploy the airbag?" and get a response would take too long.

I'm supposing that there's simply a low expectation of you actually hardwiring your gear to your commlink and your commlink to your brain. In other words, a DNI might logically suffice to brain-activate your telescoping baton, but there's a low expectation of you plugging your baton into your brain.

What would you say if a wired DNI was sufficient for most wireless bonuses (except the ones that actually need to access the whole Matrix), but there was some penalty or potential consequence for the wires?

For example, let's say you wire your telescoping baton to your datajack. If you glitch a test while wired, the wire pops loose and you suffer some measure of dumpshock (say 2S). If you critically glitch, you accidentally rip the wire out of the datajack and suffer worse dumpshock (say 4P) and have to get the jack repaired.

Or perhaps the unexpected disconnect could force a reboot for a combat turn (glitch) or potentially brick the device from feedback (critical glitch).

Further, people who know about / can see the wires can call shots on them.

With airbags, you have a point. But we're not actually talking about airbags, merely using them as an analogy. So keeping to that analogy I pointed out a circumstance where the deployment of airbags might be more harmful than airbags not deploying, depending on the factors of the situation, to make the point that sometimes you would want the safety measure not to deploy.

Of course, "Chemseal automatically closes in presence of harmful chemicals" would be a better wireless bonus.

"WARNING: Do not put baby in front seat."



Yes, yes it would be. Along with "wireless bonus" also being granted by DNI (read: explain the wireless bonus for extending batons).

Which does not work logically. If it worked the way you want it to, the suit should seal itself with no intervention at all. Just saying...
EDIT... Which others have already said... Ignore the person in the corner rocking back and forth, it is nothing.

A bit of a better system, really, would probably see certain classes of wireless bonuses, such as:

• Sensor
• Source
• Connection
• Processing

Where a Sensor bonus is something like giving someone with wireless reflexes a bonus to defend (and possibly other things) based on access to sensors in different places - both carried sensors and ones in the environment. A hacker would then have actions for Sensor Wireless Bonuses using both Sleaze and Attack (the Attack action being more aggressive and immediate and the Sleaze option being more under the radar and perhaps more lasting; Attack would use Cybercombat, and Sleaze Hacking), such as inserting a burst of garbage data to confuse the expert system that's processing everything; the Sleaze action might do something like temporarily alter one of the rules the system relies on (which then gets reloaded from ROM at some point). The first would produce a single large error that would have some major impact, and the latter woul produce multiple smaller errors that would have some smaller impact, but have it multiple times.

A Source bonus would be about connecting to an external source for some purpose or another; a Connection bonus would be about DNI access and exceptionally work over a wired connection (I would, however, suggest Skinlink imposing Noise when it is re-added, and bring in rules about wires having issues in some contexts), and Processing is about using distributed processing to do something. Eahc type of bonus would have actions associated to it so that when the GM tells you what kind of bonus it is, you know what you can do. There would then be a general rule about what effect that action would have, and possibly specific rules on some gear that would override that.