not nearly as much as it did with SR4 though.
probably because some of the most vocal people had already left.
and more had left after LLC embezzeled 1 million dollars for his new house.

and the rest simply does not give as much of a shit about things CGL fucks up anymore it seems.

Well, when something happens regularly, it tends to lose its novelty.

This thread is like the bad ending to a video game.

And entirely self-inflicted by Catalyst and the decisions they've made concerning the game. Shadowrun ends with a whimper and not a bang.

Makes Catalyst sound like EA.

Compared to SR3 to SR4, this is pretty mild. And even a lot of the people like me, who dislike it, are less "Bah, don't change my Shadowrun," and more "I wanted to like it, but...".

I'm waiting for CGL to offer to send out the errata for SR5 real soon now. In exchange for you sending them a mere $45 bucks for a new hardcover.

One guy I played SR with a few times was an Air Force Pave Low pilot for Air Force Special Operations in real life. He mentioned once that the real life missions he went on had a hundred or more people researching and planning the mission for weeks to months with multiple full rehearsals before they did the mission for real, in SR they met some dude in a bar and broke into a supersecret site 6 hours later.

You give your PCs six hours of prep time? That's crazy talk!

You shouldn't have to be superhuman to kill people with a sword or axe. What you should have to do is get close enough to hit them before becoming a colander, as contact weapons like that do horrific damage to the human body. The problem in 4th was that you could get there and then not really hurt them.

I read this thread cause I'm actually going to get to play Shadowrun for the first time in close to 4 years soon, and I wanted to know what the world was like from the trenches as it were. I haven't gotten to much into 5th yet, but so far, nothing has made me have to repeat it to others to see if they laugh as hard as I did, so...it can't be that bad.

Someone remarked it was the Appeasement Edition for the old players, and I do have to say, who else are you thinking are buying tabletop RPGs anymore? The advent of MMOs, where no one has to be the GM has cut out at least half the people that would have been tabletop players a generation ago, I'd go so far as 75%. The people who have the cash and the interest in RPG books are old RPG players who are looking back at the games they played in high school and college with nostalgia, and the occasional bored new gamer who has a local brick and mortar store that sells books at all, and has more than D&D which is getting to be quite rare.

Same as any other edition, we'll read it, play it, change the rules we all agree are dumb(I'm still looking at you, auras can pass through each other rules). As for the 'where did all the old names go'....it'll happen to all of you someday, you'll get tired of the feeling of deja vu every time you start to post, seeing the same old discussions with new names substituted and wonder why you are bothering about halfway through typing out a reply, and lurk instead :7

Running around with a sword or axe when firearms are cheap and abundant is just asking for it, though. This isn't an anime or Joss Whedon game, where swordguy is equally viable to assault rifle guy. This is a game where guns are supposed to be the optimal choice in terms of combat for mundanes, and the system does a good job of modelling it by making melee inherently worse, with the option of playing a melee specialist if you invest a lot in it. And even then, that melee specialist should have some ranged attack options.

Also note that body armor in SR is supposed to outclass most of what we have today in terms of body armor, whereas melee weapons have not made vast improvements, with certain exceptions such as monowire. Going frontal assault with a sword against an armored, trained and cybered professional with an automatic rifle should result in a dead swordsman, otherwise the system gets ridiculous.

But even if you have Str as base damage in SR45, a ranged weapon should still be better, especially when used with normal human strength 3-6.

SYL

No specifics are needed, but you are really telling me that someone can break a good secure host/LAN in less than one day WITHOUT the need of social engineering? Just using softwares and L33T skillz®? Because that's stuff that hackers/deckers CAN DO in Shadowrun and I find highly unlikely having spent 6 months as an intern working on the security of the company I now work full time that someone can breach your network so fast except in two occasions:

1- He somehow social engineered to get his way accross.
2- He somehow worked on the place before and left a backdoor. Which I actually learned to do and left for a time to see how much time my boss would notice it, he noticed the day later I tested the backdoor from home when he got to work, by then, ok, he noticed and I really didn't try hard to cover my tracks and anyway if I wanted to do harm it would be done already.

So, I'm not telling I'm a security expert but I dabbled on it and this is from my own experience and perhaps the bias of the company I work having a fairly competent spider, but I'm really interested, again, no specifics needed, if this is indeed possible.

Or SR5, which gives STR/3 (rounded UP!)?

My bad, I always forgot that 5th edition rulebook now that I shelved it next to the D&D 4th books and the Star Wars 1-3 and Matrix 2-3 DVD.

Got a page ref for that? I can't find a damn thing in this book, and I must've missed it on the first several read throughs.

P. 175, third paragraph under the "Recoil" heading.

Only slightly related, but I'm still bemused at the idea that, as editions pass and the technology advances, drones become less and less capable of rivalling with metahuman shooters (not having a Strength attribute in this case, using Body instead, so a medium drone now gets just as much as a tough ork, it's mostly other things like autopilot and autosofts stuck at rating 6 max).

Zero Day Exploit knowledge and custom written program for that. It would of course depends on the connections and/or knowledge (access) of the hacker, but this is partially simulated by the horrible SOTA rules in SR4 (and partially in skills like hacking, matrix theory, security protocols, host knowlege, network design etc)

SYL

If you ever had a chance, go read the Background and fluff from the 1st matrix book. The concept of metaphor is sometimes lost in some of these matrix threads. Attack programs focus on corrupting, removing important files, black IC is trying to override your safety protocols and deal a heafty amount of voltage directly to your brain, stealth programs remove traces of your exsistance.

I guess what I am getting at is that the core concept of decking has not changed, just the rules used.

What Apple said.

Realistically, very few sites actually keep up with their vendors' patch schedules because of perceived risks to function (not all mythology - I've seen vendor patches break things horribly), and vendors are often well behind the security curve in the patches they put out - weeks or months.

And yes, I have (in the context of security checks) used tools to get into real, running sites in minutes without credentials, stolen or otherwise. Sometimes it's just having a recent hack on hand, but usually it's a hack which was patched many months ago. Then I talk to the actual admins, and this is almost invariably the structure of the conversation:

Me: So, couldn't help but notice that I owned your ecommerce server with a crack which was out 18 months ago, and patched 16 months ago. How about patching it?

Admin: No can do. Can't run production changes without change management approval and QA testing, and we can't get on their schedule because the devs are always pushing their deadlines.

Me: Same as every other place. OK, well, your workaround would have been to lock down port blahblahblah through the firewall, why wasn't this done?

Admin: No can do. We reported that to the project manager at the time, but they wouldn't put in the specification change without QA time, and there's never time for that.

Me: You're looking for a different job, right?

Admin: Nope. They are all the same unless I work for the government and that's even worse.

The only time I have ever seen anyone seriously punished or fired for a security breach, it was the security guy who put out gigantic warnings about what was wrong, well ahead of time - this wasn't me, but I learned my lesson and moved into other fields. And until that changes, information security is basically a fever dream.

That said, the shadowrun world contains all the ingredients for actually changing this, because the incentive structure is radically changed. One of the worst syndromes of real life silicon valley crotchstrokers is their apparent inability to plan for a maintenance cycle on deployed applications, by which I don't mean occasional functional patches, but everything else down to OS updates and hardware refreshes. I know, I know, it takes longer and costs more. That there sure is a bummer.

A lot of people forget that it doesn't have to be one or the other. Bayonets work just fine. Rifle butts work just fine. There's nothing wrong with toting an LMG, but keeping a combat tomahawk strapped to your thigh just in case.

One tomahawk maker has a well known product - I know that there are others. Take that, scale up for a troll, and it'll do a fairly quick and quiet take down through all but the toughest armour.

Regarding security, I can echo Koekepan's claim.

Cracking into a network where management cares about security is in fact extremely difficult and time consuming. It is almost trivially easy to shut out 90% of attacks (in fact, the NSA just recently released a report saying exactly that!) But since the majority of attacks are invisible and the only visible cost is a hit to network performance (if anything), most managers have other priorities. Patching takes time, every office manager is king of his own dominion so installs his own software, everyone with any sway at all gets an admin account just for asking. I'm glad where Shinobi works they have their stuff together, but out of the past 3 places I've worked, none of them I would consider secure.

It's pretty easy to create a little back door application and email it to someone in the organization saying it's the agenda for today's meeting. Send it to 10 people, you get 6 hits. Sure, that's technically social engineering, but it's nothing that requires a pornomancer.

We find that when we hire a company (trustcc) to do a penetration test that they have always managed to accomplish a lot more than we though they could. Often via things that make me want to bang my head on a desk. Unless you have had a professional run pen tests you really don't know how secure you are. The fact that it is in theory possible to secure your network if you do everything correctly doesn't mean everyone is in fact doing everything correctly. Adobe lost pretty much EVERYTHING (users, passwords, source code) due to a well known issue in ColdFusion (an Adobe product) that was not properly patched or properly deployed on several of adobe's web sites.

Regarding dumpshock, I sort of have to agree with Snow Fox.

Of course, CGL needs to make new editions to keep the line profitable, and probably the worst thing for Shadowrun and dumpshock would be to dwell on one edition forever more.

But it seems like with every edition change, we lose three people for every two new people we gain. I don't know why that is. Maybe the official forums are getting those new folk? Maybe the forum is too curmudgeonly? Maybe SR just isn't making the sales? Maybe it's just me, as someone who doesn't read the SR4 threads? I don't know, and I'd love to be set right. But I just get the sense that with every edition, we're seeing a slew of people who say 'whelp, I'm out! I'm sticking with SRX forever more, so there's nothing further to discuss.'

Maybe if the new editions were more backwards-compatible, it would reduce the drop-out rate.

Sure. I'm not saying players should do this, or that the game should reward the strategy of having guys with swords running up to guys armed with machines guns. You should get turned into a colander if you try. But if the guy with a contact weapon reaches contact range things should totally change. All the advantages are on the side of the guy with the contact weapon. You don't want to bring a knife to gun fight, but you really also don't want to bring a gun to knife fight.

Heh, maybe I'm biased to the enviroment I live, indeed. And yes, no place is ever secure that can't be breached, it just needs to be difficult enough that:
A- the hacker gives up after a while and looks for greenier pastures (less protected hosts)
B- it takes enough time so that the spider can notice something is trying to breach the host and take counter-measures (unfortunately we don't have Black ICes yet )

Anyway, thank you for the enlightment, it seems I indeed work a the outlier of system security (which I now believe that part of the reason comes from the fact that 2 of the owners are from the Academia world).

I would add to this that a truly secure environment doesn't rely on passive security (set it up, check it once, leave it forever) but also security monitoring (anomaly checks, general monitoring, intrusion detection systems) and also active security (penetration tests, honeypots, periodic threat assessments) and recovery programs (shut everything down, quarantine the bad stuff, get back up very quickly with known good data sets).

I have only ever once worked in a place that did it more or less right, and even then the information security team (of which I was a member) regularly found people doing stupid stuff. The good news is that we had layered defences, including internally, so that cracking Joe Idiot Developer's box would mostly have given you the crappy source code he was working on, maybe a few others in his group, and not a whole lot else.

A) Usually not possible in Shadowrun, because if runners are coming for you, they're coming for you specifically.
B) Should be very possible. Even without black IC, it should be a standard practice to simply drop anomalous hosts and quarantine them. Oh no, the hacker just lost link to his target. Very sad. Pour out a forty for his dreams.

To this day, I still believe this is the most successful way of hacking:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/zealous_autoconfig.png

Honestly, I think the issue has been quality control. SR4 had deep-seated enough problems to spawn SR4A. The CGL products on the run-up to SR5 all had serious editing, story, and game balance problems, as exemplified by the mythical Docks of Bogota. Then SR5 itself... the rules as printed are embarrassing. I wouldn't have released this as an alpha, frankly. Basic proofreading changes never got implemented, discarded playtests were printed verbatim, page refs are universally wrong, multiple versions of the same rules appear in different sections; the list just goes on.

There are no official errata in sight. Bull had to cobble some bare-minimum ones together for Missions, and even then the first released Missions doc intentionally straight-up ignores the wireless hacking by occurring entirely in one of the few places in the entire UCAS with a natural noise rating. Hell, they don't even respond to the rules clarifications thread on the Official Forums, it's a dozen pages or so deep in unanswered questions.

There's really very little to honestly discuss about SR5 because the rules as written are so damn incoherent and sloppily organized that it just rolls down to debating design intent until one of the writers stops by and goes 'Oh, SHIT, that made it into print? Totally wasn't meant to.' Again.

Then, one've the first .pdf splatbooks released, Gun H(e)aven 3? Contains the Rainforest Carbine, a serious contender for most ludicrously mis-statted weapon I've seen published in a decade (disregarding the stats for nukes from War).

Yeah, and sometimes you can be successful with much simpler tactics.

But you know, I would have been happy even with Hollywood hacking, as opposed to the current nonsense that being connected to the Matrix supposedly gives you a better ability to communicate with equipment than a DNI (direct neural interface).

Fix bayonets.

So... you bring a gun-blade to both fights?

Into the valley of death rode the six hundred.

I always wondered why people invest in home defense carbines or shotguns but never seem to mount bayonets on them.

You know, that never occurred to me before, but now... damn, why don't people put bayonets on their home defense guns?!

The only time the melee person should have an advantage is when they get the jump on ranged person. Even if they close the gap, I expect melee person to have a hard time vs a shooter armed with a CQC capable weapon (carbine, PDW, riot shotgun or pistol) trained in center axis relock or similar techniques.

Note that I'm not against carrying melee weapons in general. Having a tomahawk/combat knife/shock glove within easy access can have its uses. Upon encountering a prepared enemy without you having the element of surprise, the using the gun should always be the optimal solution.

Hard to round corners with it.

-- The freelancer pool is completely different from what I personally remember. There's a few people that remain from the old days (SR3 being my touchstone) but most have moved on. Some left after Colemangate and others just transitioned to other pursuits.
-- I know some people got flat-out banned from here (I missed all that), but some occasionally comment/crap on Shadowrun at the Gaming Den forum (see the [Shadowrun thread in particular). The official forums are pretty lively, but I still find the Dumpshock forums to be easier to read and use since everything is not spread out into a ton of sub-groups. Threads pop up on rpg.net regarding Shadowrun at a regular basis too.

-- SR5 itself is more of a throwback to classic Shadowrun (SR1-3) which I personally find appealing. Your mileage may vary.

Long guns in contact range fights are less that ideal. Once the muzzle is deflected you just have a noisemaker, and you are getting stabbed like the guy has a sewing machine.

What typically happens with someone who brings a gun to knife fight is that the guy with the gun gets kind of focused on the blade, in particular not continuing to get stabbed. Then it usually turns out that guns are not magic wands and that people with knives who are willing to take on a guy armed with a gun tend to be pretty determined and hence keep stabbing until they are physiologically incapacitated. The lesson is that you need shoot them to the ground before they get to you, as having knife guy also die later from your gunshots is usually not a great consolation prize.

I'd expect that someone facing a sword will tend to focus even more on the blade given that that a single hit by a sword is perfectly capable of removing large pieces of their anatomy that they are really fond of.

Not always...
http://www.laserlyte.com/products/pb-3

I actually got handed one of those by Dennis Tueller at a glock armorer class . I think the context was useless junk people hang from their rails.

LOL, i clicked the link before I read your full comment... When I saw that my first thought was... "looks neat, but pretty useless". Then I cam back and saw the rest of your comment and laughed.

You are assuming that the melee person just magically got close to the gun person, and that the gun person is wielding an unwieldy weapon not suited for close quarters



You are assuming that "knife fights" exist outside of the magical world of movies and dueling, and that the knife person somehow magically got into close range with the gun person without getting noticed or attacked first. Outside of an ambush situation, that is not going to happen.



Again, this assumes that the swordman magically got close to the gunfighter without taking any damage.

If you can prevent the guy with a contact weapon from reaching you then there is no problem. If he does reach you then the game should present this as really serious problem.

Situations where the melee guy can reach the ranged guy unscathed are usually ambush situations, and I'm perfectly fine with them having the advantage there. They usually earned that advantage by setting up the ambush in the first place, and the rules impose a -3/-1 penalty for the shooter in this scenario, in addition to getting hit by melee guy while they can't defend for the ambush attack.

I just don't want this to be D&D or Star Wars were the default course of action for fighting ranged attackers is "Charge into melee".

Sure and if this weren't a game where dude who kicks you in the head is supposed to be a valid archetype you might have a point. Magic/cyber they can change the rules more than a bit. If the rules don't support the fluff and archetypes they make the rules failed hard whether or not it fits our model of reality.

To answer an earlier post of yours, Shadowrun actually veey much is an anime or Joss Whedon game, where swordguy is equally viable to assault rifle guy. Shadowrun has always had ludicrous dodging mechanics where getting into melee unscathed is an option in a very much anime fashion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzKr_uP6lAg

Bayonet charge scene from "We Were Soldiers". In general there's no reason that using firearms and using edged weapons needs to be in any way discordant with history, narrative styles, fiction, verisimilitude, or anything. I think the only problem arises when a RPG system causes a forced dichotomy where someone has to invest so much in melee to be good at it that it ends up making them a one trick pony and then this causes discussion or argument over what exactly a melee guy should be able to do when going toe to toe with a guy with a gun.

If you want something that seems realistic or more in line with contemporary sensibilities, all you need to do is allow characters to be able to be good at both guns and melee without being overly penalized. In real life, I have observed SWAT officers, military personnel, and firearms instructors who have strong interests in or hobbies of MMA, philipino martial arts, western historical fencing, and things like that. It doesn't mean they can't also be elite marksmen. Hand to hand combat might not come up all the time but if it does you know that they will also have an advantage over someone who doesn't also train hand to hand combat or combative sports every weekend.

For an 80s style adventure, I'm okay with a melee specialist, like a Mr. Miyagi character, having such power that he can somehow go toe to toe with gun toting mooks, because that's kind of an 80s cultural trope.

If someone doesn't want that in their game but still wants super powered melee guys who can't charge gun toting mooks head on that's very doable. Look at how that was handled in Batman: Arkham City. Batman is still a badass, but he can't charge gunmen head on most of the time.

I guess the bottom line is that I think this point can easily be adjusted to any game style by editing the damage done by melee versus firearms, or by adjusting skill costs so that characters can be pretty good at both melee and guns as opposed to having to be either one trick ponies or un-optimized cripples. All you have to do is adjust your number values in your rule set and you can easily have whatever style you want.

RL is how we check what should be, right? If melee weapons were outdated and unneeded, the bayonet wouldn't be there.
It doesn't even have to be a bayonet charge, urban fighting is mostly CQC.