Br0ni 4 lyfe brah

"And bring the drenchin' tool, Joe-Bob. Reckon them critters'll have all kindsa worms."

Actually I think that one has the misspelling vyrus. Incurable.

After some thought, I don't really agree. There are a hell of a lot of very cheap, incredibly crappy sensors out there. False negatives and false positives abound. Oh, you wanted a quality sensor? Sure. Just pay through the nose.

That matches a rating system in my book. Hell, some places I worked, alarms were actually off because the sensors kept going crazy.

I've actually gotten the impression that different writers have varying ideas, but that nobody's really touched it for reasons I haven't really been able to figure out. There are certainly a number of possible ideas - I have my own theories - but they've DECIDED to keep them unexplained for now.

Then the canon material needs to stop talking about runners who forget to use a tag eraser on their morning breakfast, or they'll get caught.
(Protip: tags only come in one rating)

At least with Otaku they kept them a touch more plausible. With the whole bit about needing a datajack and ASIST filter to actually convert network packets to sensory info, even if they were essentially spoofing cyberprograms via their brains.

Then we get to the tacomancers, and 'welp, guess someone evolved a wireless receiver/transmitter in their head, sure glad it's IEEE compatible!' which is where we go from suspension of disbelief to 'it's magic, deal with it'. There were multiple explanations for how Otaku happened floating around in the novels, even, but tacomancy just plan requires shrugging and accepting that it's a game mechanic that can't be rationally explained in-world.

Yep, Otaku made sense (somewhat) in the setting. I've always had big problems understanding and accepting TM's, game mechanics aside. Those were their own ball of wax. The explanation that made sense was some Dev going "lets make Mages... in the MATRIX!! And we'll give them MATRIX Spirits! It'll be AWESOME!!!!!"

Never was my cup of tea.

By the by, was it 4th Edition brought technomancers about? Or was there a 3rd splat that brought them into being? I can't recall anymore.

I always liked Smedman's take from Psychotrope, where Otaku were essentially just people who'd been modified by psychotropic means by a rogue AI.



TMs are Crash of '64, so solidly 4e.

That's what I always considered them, and that worked for me. And since the had to have some 'ware it wasn't ALL that different from a chip carrier equipped regular hacker. They just got to use their crazy brains as programs, which worked for me.



That's what I thought. There was very little of the fluff added in 4e that I liked, at all. Pretty much drove me away from Shadowrun for a few years. That and all my playing friends lost interest/moved away, etc. Ghost Cartels I liked, however.

Same here. I played a demo of 4e at a con way back, then didn't really start even looking at new SR publications again until 5e was announced... just in time to get WAR.

The trouble with technomancers is that their abilities are confined to the matrix, so it is harder to keep them balanced with hackers and distinct from them. I think people need to really think about what they would be better, or worse, at than someone who uses programs and hardware. I also think the "natural wireless" should be done away with - like otaku, they should still need a technological means to connect to the matrix.

Adepts were comparatively balanced with street samurai in SR3. Sammies were tough, fast, and good in a variety of combat situations, while adepts were more specialized - ninjas, marksmen, and martial artist types. They tried to keep them in those niches in SR4, by making initiative and Attribute enhancements expensive, but other abilities comparatively cheaper. Unfortunately, the high cost of certain adept powers, and the low Essence cost of bioware, created the (possibly) unintended consequence of bio-adepts who used muscle toner and synaptic boosters instead of buying costlier adept powers. The other problem with adepts was that their abilities often stacked with those of augmentations. A mundane face could not ever get kinesics, but an adept with kinesics could get tailored pheromones.

in order to avoid that there needs to be a larger penalty for losing essence for an Adept. I can already see Bio Adepts or Bio Mystics being a huge boon for most people in 5E.

SR5 did make some odd changes in the matter of Augments and Adepts. "Critical Strike" for example. Double the cost and no more, than one level. All the while, the (bioware) "Bone Density Augmentation" grants up to 4 resistance dice, P unarmed damage at up to str+3, for little cost (low essence- and monetary cost).

Buying that stuf alpha is easily affordable, so while you get "Killing Hands", +1 damage and 4 points of armor for about 3 powerpoints, you could also get it for 1 powerpoint, if you are willing to go bio and loose 1 essence. The biggest downside would probably be to forgo the "magic damage" that "Killing Hands" would have allowed for, but having 2 points more base damage in unarmed combat may make up for that...that and the saved powerpoints.

So it still is perfectly understandable, if going cyber or bio, is tempting for adepts. It also feels a little, as if there was a lack of communication between the responsible authors.

EDIT:



It would be preferable to serve both parties (Augs and Ads) better at home, instead of trying surgery with a sledgehammer.

there is another difference, Critical Strike has now been broadened to more than just fists. Which means your best bet is to use Bio to boost Strength, then get an additional DV boost from Crit Strike, then any other boosts from new splats.

True, it would be nice if it were more tempting, to get additional damage through "Critical Strike" than to go bio on it. As far as I see it, not even "Attribute Boost" raises the damage (temporarily) ... I mean... who get's strength mainly for the dice?

well, it is more important now in sr5, a Melee focused Troll Adept who maxes Strength & Agility can be running an 11str & a 7Agi out of character creation with an Axe they will do 16P+nets rolling 19 dice to hit

Sure, but that is not Str 11 just for the dice...

The main value of Strength as an attribute is in damage, recoil-compensation and physical limit calculation. These things aren't affected by "Attribute Boost" and damage can be raised only slightly ( by +1 max) for half a powerpoint, if you buy critical hit. Raising attributes per "Improved Physical Attribute" is far more expensive than to simply go bio and get damage or attributepoints there.

While I really do not like it, it just makes far to much sense, to go bio adept.

no, that is a Bio-Adept Troll, that 11 str & 7 Agi are modified after stats I would have gone higher but the Availability limit of gear kicked in.

It's unavoidable that one class of possible explanations for technomancers is that there's something supernatural at play that isn't Magic, which would be what is represented by Resonance. Other explanations go to some sort of experimentation/alteration by some organization or entity, though many of these theories (especially those tied specifically to Deus) have notable holes in them. Still other possible explanations would go to some sort of evolution (more accurately mutation, as no selection effect can be inferred), wherein the capability may have already existed but didn't become known until the wireless systems came around (and in the case of these explanations, it must be assumed that it is possible for the technomancer to interact with a range of signals (which nicely explains how E-Sensing works, actually), which includes those used for the Wireless Matrix. Once you have something that's physically capable of sending and receiving signals on the right channel, it's just a matter of the right software (which in this case is the brain learning how to go about this).

There are many possible explanations that can be perfectly compatible with the assumptions of the setting (for example, the assumption of the existence of Magic is really the assumption of the existence of at least one supernatural force; nothing I know of in the setting is incompatible with there being more than one).

Another area which needs more work for real verisimilitude is the way that the world works.

If you read many of the discussions here on how things work, or how dystopian the world of Shadowrun is(n't), it's obvious that not only is there a lack of clarity on how things work and why shadowrunners can even exist (regardless of how pink their mohawks are, or how black their trenchcoats) but it's far from clear how society actually functions.

On the one hand, you have high energy, high density, high sophistication areas where the corporations produce breathtaking technology and people live in almost aseptic conditions under a purportedly benevolent dictatorship where they can spin their little hamster wheels until they die of natural causes.

On the other hand, less than a good rifle shot away, you have starving beasts rending each other limb from limb in the vilest of squalid, hazardous conditions, and where the closest thing to a functioning governing structure is the local gang boss and whichever drugs his cronies took that morning.

There has to be some recognition that the aseptic world of miraculous perfection has to be supported by primary industries (farming, fishing, logging, mining) which are largely not present in those aseptic conditions, and that, where those primary industries do exist, things are necessarily less aseptic (if only because it is just not feasible to patrol thousands of square miles of thinly populated countryside, beyond a certain level).

Up to a point, the technocratic panopticon must be, can only be, strictly localised. You walk around in the Renraku arcology? They can tell from your gait that your bladder is full, they can tell from atmospheric and auditory analysis that you are urinating in a potted tree, they can tell from your mass that your bladder is now empty, and they can tell by vocal analysis how stressed you are when Renraku's security shoves a gun barrel up your left nostril.

On the other hand, shadowrunners must necessarily be able to escape the panopticon otherwise the entire conceit behind the game becomes impossible. Do they slip under the umbrella to do their dirty work? Sure. Do they later leave it to receive their ill-gotten gains? Yes - if successful - because if they couldn't the first shadowrun would be the last.

The intersection between the ultra-shiny first world and the ultra-grungy third is what makes the whole thing possible. Borders - not merely legal, but also social, infrastructural, and technological.

Please observe that this is not a stable situation.

In the big picture, shadowrunners are bad for business. Business benefits from stability, and shadowrunners add risk to every investment. At best they can be seen as reducing the friction between burdensome regulations and functional needs. They are a symptom of authoritarian overreach in an environment where authoritarian control is limited. However, people in authority like it and benefit from it, and want to expand their authority and reduce challenges to it. Shadowrunners are a way for people with less authority to get some of the benefits of subverting, circumventing or claiming higher authorities. Therefore one should expect to see concerted efforts by high authorities and their collaborators (such as civil servants of all stripes) to tame and incorporate the less controlled areas.

How? And what countervailing efforts would one see?

Many approaches are obvious. Buy areas, condemn them, bulldoze them, build on them. Pay for more security, establish control, round up undesirables and wash the area clean. Educate and assimilate the barrens brats, get them some stake in the system, and thus establish their cooperation.

On the other hand, there are neo-anarchists who value their liberties (as they perceive them) more highly than pretty much anything the authorities (corporate or otherwise) have to offer. There are also gangsters and other informal authorities of various stripes who are performing an equivalent subversion of conventional authorities so as to expand their own standing.

The return of magic is also a factor. The authorities can try to regulate it, but it is astonishingly destabilising, and empowering to individuals rather than to groups. This is a major factor in limiting the ultimate power of authoritarian structures - the empowerment of the individual.


Fortunately, the shadowrun background materials (such as the Shadows of Europe book) have done a fairly good job of illustrating these things, but I am of the opinion that the broader structure, the way it all fits together and why it fits together could be better elucidated.

In the end, such an analysis provides a pretty good idea of who might be a shadowrunner, why they might (in the big picture) run the shadows, why the shadows are there in the first place, and how they can get away with shooting people right in the face for money, time after time - and what their major challenges would be in doing so.

You know, CCP employs a full-time economist (seriously, the guy's got a Ph.D.) to study and help them understand the economy of EVE Online. It occurs to me that Shadowrun would benefit, at least a little, if Catalyst hired a sociologist to figure out how the Sixth World actually might work.

Please understand, I'm not saying it can't work. It's a world in flux, things are changing, the very concept of the law is going to be pretty shady, it's the general equivalent of crooks going south of the border to evade pursuit, as per cowboys and bandits lore. Right now in places like Brazil you can have the shiniest of shinies cheek by jowl with the most broken favelas, and Brazil isn't alone in this either. It certainly is plausible. It just needs investigation.

Yeah, except that fails plausibility hard. We've been flooding the RF range with signals for over 170 years now as of the 2070's. The range of signals hasn't changed, because the laws of physics define a fairly limited set of useful signal frequencies. Even assuming (and it is a huge assumption) that a human body was capable of receiving and generating RF signals of enough power to be useful, the chances of the human brain suddenly being capable of reading and recreating Matrix encryption standards (which like any computer standard, are going to change fairly frequently) is astronomically unlikely, and thus not plausible.


Seriously, take ten seconds and go look up how radio frequency transmission works.

That's very true in the real world. It's a lot less true in SR - wireless wasn't much of a thing until the WMI. Until then, there was basically no use for that send/receive capability. - so a person's brain very well might have filtered it out as meaningless input. Once the WMI got going, there's a lot more going on and there's a lot more structure there, so the brain learns to work with it (a certain difference in neuroplasticity may be requisite here).

Also, I think you're vastly overestimating how often standards for things like network transmission change. IPv4 STILL carries most internet traffic, for example.

As for the SR world's wireless behaviour, the problem is verisimilitude, not what's internally consistent.

As for how often transmission standards change? You are picking the wrong standards for comparison. Look at the development of cellular signalling. There have been dozens worldwide in the last couple of decades - and it's a cinch that different standards would be used in different areas in Shadowrun. There are still parts of real world networks which run on variant network topologies. You've heard of ethernet, I'm sure. When was the last time you heard of Banyan being used? Or token ring? I come across such monsters all the time.

I just don't buy the technomancer concept, and even less with these issues factored in.

In SR, it's actually highly unlikely that such things exist, as there have been complete and total overhauls of all networking structure multiple times, driven or controlled by a central group and an overarching oligarchy that benefits from having everything be the same. They'd just pick one way it was going to go, and if you didn't like it too damn bad. Verisimilitude has to recognize the points at which the world of the game ACTUALLY deviates from the real world, because there is no verisimilitude in making something resemble reality in a way that is not consistent with the assumptions of the setting.

Not to mention a Matrix that has been rebuilt from the ground up twice now, both times with entirely new technology (simsense and ASIST the first time, and wireless the second) with massive megacorps all having every reason to push their own variant topology for their advantage.

Actually, if nothing else they NEED everything to work together in order to avoid horrible reductions in the consumer base from which they make money.

To an extent, yes. But megas creating whole sections of the grid where their own hardware 'mysteriously' works better is pretty in-setting plausible.

Yes and no - that pretty much means making everyone else's hardware work worse, which makes it very, very easy for the competition to claim that their grid works better and to actually back it up. You don't want to hand business over to the other guy.

Look at real life. Standards fights between corporations are par for the course and have been since time out of mind. Even look at railway gauges, if you want examples going back well over a hundred years, and still in practice today. But think of any large scale industry where interoperation matters, and it comes up time and again - expecting universal uniformity, as opposed to an adequate (and shaky) level of interoperability between different vendors on the Matrix flies in the face of human and corporate conduct.

Right now if you purchase routing equipment from any two large vendors, despite the fact that both expect to pass the exact same kind of traffic through those routers, using IPv6 or IPv4, there are simple little differences based on things like an ambiguity in the RFC. Then there are proprietary standards for all the cool little functions which they hope will make you buy their stuff instead of the competitor's - and those are radically different from each other.

So no, I see no reason to remotely expect the Matrix to be a uniformly encoded, managed or structured system. Yet another strike against the plausibility of technomancers.

Difference being they don't get to have full control over the world and process. The megas do. Besides, the things you're mentioning don't impose enough of a difference at the device level to start kicking things off the global mesh network - and in fact, that sort of networking structure is intrinsically hostile to the sorts of things you're talking about, because EVERYTHING has to act as a router. The Matrix as presented MUST be relatively uniform or it simply flat out cannot function.

The megas don't control each other. Mitsuhama and Saeder-Krupp would love to control each other - but they can't.

As for the things I'm talking about and their consequences, I invite you cordially to study the differences in behaviours of enterprise switches from Cisco and Juniper. It can be scary stuff when you try to move from one vendor to another - things you took for granted suddenly become impossible, or change radically, or suddenly become much easier. The differences can be staggering because of implementation details. The fact that things mostly work because they've been hand massaged to do so by an army of network administrators should not be taken as an indication that everything is hunky dory under the covers. The Matrix has to be interoperable at some level - but I see no inherent madness with the idea that you might want the commlink equivalent of a quad band phone.

Collectively, however, the megas get to do whatever is going to be in their best interests, and shape things accordingly. No concern can ever override theirs.

And SR is dealing in a radically different network structure where the things you're talking about simply don't exist anymore - dedicated network hardware is effectively a thing of the past. Everything has to be able to work together - and for that matter, most explanations for technomancers aren't inherently incompatible with multi-band structures either.

That still presumes, for relevance to this concern, that they find total uniformity to be in their best interests, in which case the most plausible step would simply be creating a joint venture with global monopoly power. I don't see that they would find that desirable, or necessary, and it isn't confirmed by the canon since we know perfectly well they're competing with each other in the marketplace for the equipment.


As a matter of fact (and I'm giving away my age here) things were worse in the bad old days when your typical network element was a server rather than a dedicated unit. There's a reason why providers and corporate offices embraced dedicated network hardware with such glee. The problem which I pointed out is that there's no reason to believe that technomancer bodies somehow incorporate all possible protocol codings. That, and incompatibility with all the most plausible electromagnetic radiation bands, as I believe binarywraith already pointed out.

I think you need to take another look at how the Matrix works - it's a mesh structure, neither servers nor dedicated network hardware play a part. There are no such things to be selling, just devices to work ON the Matrix, at which point it is certainly in their best interest that the market for their product be as large as possible. In any case, it's absolutely confirmed by canon that it all works together - the mesh connection can be established by any devices as long as the signal has sufficient reach to get to other devices - even a chain of toasters will do it.

And as I tried to point out earlier, once you've got the hardware to send the signals, sending the right ones is more a matter of software - and the software is the technomancer's MIND, which would learn the protocols and adapt to suit. And as I pointed out, there's a tacit assumption in the spontaneous mutation explanations that the range that is covered includes the bands used; that assumption is not needed for the other explanations as in those cases there's no room for the right bands not to be covered.

Yes, and?

A spontaneous mutation that creates a working biological radio frequency transmitter and receiver and a mind with an ability to read RF pulses, convert them into machine code, and act on them in ways that other external devices will read as valid input. Not only at a basic level, but at a level that keeps up with cyberdecks, bleeding-edge technology that is miles ahead of most consumer electronics.

That's not even getting into what Sprites are, or the Reasonance Realms.

Plausibility is not so much a thing, here.

Koekepan, binarywraith, you're both overlooking a crucial point, here: RHat is a die-hard cheerleader for anything and everything that comes out of Catalyst, to the point where I halfway suspect him of being a sock puppet. He can rationalize absolutely anything, no matter how ludicrous, as long as it's in a book published by CGL.

Personally I prefer the supernatural-but-not-Magic theories, because the alterations theories have timeline issues and the the mutation theories require the brain to do a shit-ton of stuff. But as far as the setting goes, they're far from the most fantastic elements.

Can you just come back when you actually have something of value to add? Thanks.

I find the contention that technomancers cannot be explained to be wholly invalid. Pure and simple. The fact that there's so little information on them means that there's actually very little to falsify any given explanation.

In the end, after some thought, I'm a big fan for ideas both of game balance and of verisimilitude of slowing the creative, analytical sides of magic as well as decking way down, but letting both sides prepare quick delivery of slowly prepared things, ahead of time.

Here follows a thumbnail sketch:

Samantha the Samurai, Maximilian the Magician and Devlin the Decker are given a mission: break into Bubba the chicken molester's coop and try to rescue any little pullets they can, ideally without alerting him, after his next big order arrives three weeks in the future, from the hatchery.

Max spends his time first summoning several watchers as scouts, then he prepares a Mass Chicken Hypnosis spell, and instantiates it in a single use fetish. He also prepares a couple of high potency stun spells in similar fetishes in case they need to shut people up in a hurry.

Devlin spends a few days cracking his way through the security of the hatchery, establishing precise routes and delivery times, chick condition and so on. Then he finds Bubba's entertainment link, and plants some truly enticing chicken-related pornography on it for the very evening after the delivery. He also gets (or creates) access codes for all Bubba's locks and security.

The Night of Action arrives. Devlin fires up the Chicken-chick-a-bow-wow, puts Bubba's security into maintenance mode. Sam takes her favourite silenced rifle, and puts one through the brain of ol' Blue, Bubba's guard dog. The team slips by in the darkness near Bubba's trailer, hearing the enticing bwok-buckaw from Bubba's trid, and reach the coop. The pullets are sleepy and incurious, but all start nodding their heads and listening to Max when he fires off his Mass Chicken Hypnosis. What luck, it hits all of them, and he starts back into their waiting truck like a sort of pullet pied piper.

Oh no, Bubba heard the noise of the unoiled gate hinge! Devlin curses, grabs his gun to cover Bubba, and Max grabs for a stun spell, but fortunately Sam is on the job, and sneaking down the line of his trailer she catches him with the butt of her rifle under his chin. Bubba goes down for the count with his coveralls down around his knees. Tragic.

The team hustle the birds into the truck, gun the engine, and fly off into the night, with a clucking and peeping cargo.

On the radio side we started with the totally incompatible AMPS, TACS and NMT in the 70s and 80s. In the 90s GSM was introduced, along with IS-95 and W-CDMA (which are also totally incompatible). For data over cellular we had GRPS and EDGE. Then for 3G we have UMTS, which includes W-CDMA as well as the incompatible TD-SCDMA and HSPA+. Or alternatively you can go with CDMA version (incompatible with GSM), CDMA2000 which is a development of IS-95 and includes RTT, EV-DO and EVDV. Then with 4G we have Mobile-WiMAX and LTE, along with TD-LTE used in China (and is not compatible with regular LTE).

Yeah, not much change here...

But the wireless mesh Matrix technology all came from the same source, Transys Neuronet and Erika, which became NovaTech, which later became NeoNET. So the reason why its all standardized is that everyone is using NeoNET's protocols after Crash 2.0. And after Crash 2.0 the Corporate Court formed the Grid Overwatch Division to police the Matrix, but it seemed did a really bad job at it, so GOD overhauled the entire Matrix Protocols to create SR5's Matrix. So there aren't multiple companies setting the standards, its all one standard, which everyone has to conform to, since its ordered by the authority of the Corporate Court.

Its like how HTML standards are set by the W3C, but it's up to the browser makers to interpret the standards as they see fit. And when a browser maker doesn't conform to standards we get something like IE6, which becomes everyone's bane and is loathed by people that actually use modern HTML.

Which, entertainingly, can all be accomplished with the same efficiency in SR4A. Hell, your Hacker did not even need any of the bricking abilities that every one claims are so intrinsic to the Hacker's participation in Combat.

The example appears to only be able to be done in SR4. Since in SR5 there is a limited window to do hacking, so you really can't hack a device days or even hours before a run. Instead you have to hack everything on the fly and deal with unforeseen complications then in the now. While in SR4 you could hack a node weeks in advance, leave a backdoor in so you can come and go as you please, and can usually see most complications days in advance to plan around.

Yeah, I could see that. Thanks.

The point I was trying to illustrate (admittedly not very well) is that it makes sense to have the hackers as well as the magicians do very flexible preparations, and then bring them to bear at the critical time.

After all, there is no listed mass chicken hypnosis spell, so Max would be designing it and preparing the effect as a single shot for this run, and maybe never use it again.

If magicians can pull arbitrary rabbits out of their hats it is not only unbalanced, but shortchanges the in game concept of magic as an intellectual field worthy of academic study. If they are limited to a tiny spell library to invoke at a moment's notice, they are, as I said above, five trick ponies of destruction. This approach makes them usefully flexible, without being godlike, and still recognises the canon in terms of intellectual effort and investment.

Would these rules be at the cost of casting and hacking on the fly, or in addition to them?

Except that few to no mages will ever actually design a custom spell for a 1-shot use (and definitley with a paltry few days lead time), and then spend their resources for it. They will make a Generic spell, that is usable in a variety of situations. And because a Mage HAS to design the spell in the first place (which takes a lot of time) and then acquire it with Karma, it is never arbitrary, in my opinion. Not sure where you are getting that from, really. Maybe I missed something, would not be the first time.

Honestly, I do not like Alchemy (Preparations) as presented in SR5 (WHY are you forced to buy the same spells multiple times, exactly? That makes absolutely no sense. Make it a Formulae with a prep time/duration and just go from there). They may be useful, but I really do not care for thier implementation at all.