I haven't been here for at least two years. More I think.

When I left, the place was a giant conflagration with people being banned, damage control from CGL representatives after Loren Coleman had been found embezzling funds and freelancers were not getting paid and withholding copyright... I walked in disgust when CGL retained the Shadowrun licence.

Now I'm being pestered to run Shadowrun again by some friends so I decided to look in and see what the place looks like these days. It's quiet here. Never seen it so quiet - especially given there was a new edition recently. Place feels dead. I know CGL were heavily promoting their own company forums for Shadowrun over Dumpshock. Did that place eventually take over? What happened with the licence? Is LLC still running things over there and how many of the original writers of SR4 are now working on SR5 or did it become a major staff overhaul as it was looking like for a while?

What, in short, is the state of things these days? Any of the old timers still functioning?

It being quiet here may have something to do with it being almost christmas.
But yes, it has slowed down a bit compared to when you have been here last.


No, the official Board did not take over from dumpshock as far as i cann tell.
The License is sadly still with CGL.
Yeah, LLC still is in it over there.
And i think about half or so of the originals stopped working for CGL or at least on shadowrun.

Yeah, several of the old timers are still here and some even still there working on SR5.
Bull for example, if he's old timer enough for you.

Huh. I would have thought Christmas might make it busier. People off work, no longer at Uni., that sort of thing. But I've been through the recent threads. I see very few of the regular old names (yourself, obviously). That's a real shame about CGL. When I left, they were frantically throwing out PDFs of any material old or new, that they had to hand. War was the last thing they brought out when I left. I was here just long enough to read some of the initial horrified reactions. The quality control on it was awful.

Yes, I remember Bull. He was starting to fill some of the void left by those departing from CGL, I think. Which concerned me at the time because I remember Bull always bemoaning how SR4 wasn't cyberpunk enough. As if that entire genre shouldn't be buried and left to rot being a product of anti-technology fear entirely at odds with how current generations view technology (i.e. a cool thing to be embraced). He was always complaining how SR4 had ditched the 'dehumanisation of technology' or something.

Any others still about? Raise your hand!

He did get decking reintroduced with SR5 and handwaved away nanotech and most technological progress made in SR4. For better or for worse, I guess.

Huh. That was always his wish. When you say "decking reintroduced" do you just mean a return to the terminology of using "Decking" in place of "Hacking" or is it, as I fear you mean, a return to people walking around with great big slabs of "cyberdeck"? Please tell me at least that there is still wireless technology and commlinks in the game? An Eighties view of the future is just going to look stupid next to what we already have today.

Commlinks are still there, but you need expensive cyberdecks to do serious hacking - deckers are their own "character class" again.

Wireless is still there, but unfortunately, they implemented it very poorly. Rather than playing up communications networks and tactical comms, where wireless hacking would make sense, they came up with a lot of senseless wireless "bonuses" to coerce people into leaving themselves exposed to hacking attacks. If you have wireless turned off, then apparently your wired reflexes and reaction enhancers cannot work together. If you have it enabled, then hackers can "brick" your cyberware, not only deactivating but also permanently damaging it.

Decking as in dorks running around with expensive tablets. Wireless still exists, and so do Commlinks, but the latter is just a glorified smartphone that cannot hack. They nerfed a lot of gear, with the option of having the gear perform the way it was pre-nerf by turning it online, such as your Wired Reflexes only stacking with Reaction Enhancers if they are both online. Which, in turn, makes them vulnerable to getting bricked.

SR5 is the grognard appeasement edition, for lack of a better term.

That's a shame. I liked how integrated hacking had become with all team members. Made Hacking less of a solo-thing and it made it more normal. So I'm guessing that even if you have a commlink and are linked to a more powerful computer wirelessly somewhere, you still aren't a proper hacker unless you have the giant slab of plastic swinging at your hip? Sooooo ostentatious. I also liked how easy it made it to be a hacker with a bit of samurai or rigger rolled in. Question - can you still go full VR with just a commlink? Or is this now a feature of a "deck"?

Do they not realise that technological progress is pretty much synonymous in the modern mind with small and discrete? If you see person A with a small device and you see person B with a large device, the modern instinct is to view the latter has technologically backwards, not more powerful. Honestly, this is exactly the sort of thing I feared. Is it rationalized in game how a few years ago everyone had small commlinks and now some people have "decks"? Or is it just a Retcon?



That sounds odd. There were some fair reasons to have your cyberware slaved to your commlink in SR4A, but often that would be disabled. Otherwise a hacker might be able to interfere with it. So you can actually do physical damage to cyberware? I take it they were just trying to make Hacking another sort of combat technique, then? How do they rationalize having to choose between your reaction enhancers and wired reflexes working if you turn wireless off? (Assuming I've read that right).

Good to see you all again, btw.

K.

Huh. I see. (We posted at the same time).

Grognard Appeasement Edition.

Speaking as someone who started playing with 1st Ed. I'm not sure how I feel about that. There's a lot in old SR that is just silly today. I'm going to hazard a guess that the tone is a bit more "punk" again.

The Corporate Court ordered all the Matrix to switch to new protocols to overhaul security on January 1st, 2065. 4th edition hacking software no longer worked from that point, but the people involved in the protocols design (including Fastjack) also designed ways to circumvent them, which required dedicated hardware that is already produced and branded by corporations and called "cyberdecks" (technomancers also adjusted, obviously).

and then there is this:
https://twitter.com/BullOrkDecker/status/39...2904961/photo/1

WTF? Brain fused. Too many flaws trying to express themselves at once.

Shouldn't the Mohawk be pink?

yep, that's still the same here too ^^

It might be me, but DS seems to be A LOT slower the last weeks (I´m looking much less frequently since most rules discussions became irrelevant to me.) I do believe the signal-to-noise ratio has become better. I´d suggest to pick up your old stack of books, visit again (occasionally), and get back to playing.

The official forums have taken a lot away from dumpshock. They get a good bit more traffic and posts. Even if several of the regulars there post here as well. New player threads appear far more frequently over there.

That's what I figured. A real shame for Dumpshock. There's an epic wealth of material here.

Anyway, I guess my question has been answered now. CGL got away with it, a lot of the people who left never came back. Those who stayed took Shadowrun back to the old days of cyberpunk-archetype-game that they always disliked SR4 for taking away from them. I've been reading a few threads over the last few hours. Seems like 5th is not something that appeals to me. Stylistically and thematically, it's wallowing in the Eighties, a game for old men who don't realize or don't care how dated everything looks.

I even found a post from Cain still raving about his "Mr. Lucky build" and how you can break the Matrix even though he's been proved wrong at least three times to my knowledge on both subjects. He just is temporarily banned or subsides when his thread is locked and now three years later, I'm still finding posts from him in threads about 5th posting the same bitter lies. Quite possibly one of the saddest things I've ever seen.

Anyway, I guess I'm done here. This place is dead and I'm not giving a penny to Catalyst after what they did. I'll tell the players they'll have to accept Dark Heresy or something.

Thanks,

K.

aw, shame to see you go again so soon <.<

Well I wish you happy gaming. But as you can tell from the tone of my post, I just find how things turned out depressing and it's clearly going in the wrong direction for my tastes and so all I could really bring to the forum these days would be bitterness and sorrow. A sad reversal from the days of yore. I choose to preserve my legacy instead.

Peace and coolness,

K.

For what worth Dark Heresy is actually very fun. My group just went from that to 5th cause some one missed the shenanigans of pink mohawk.

I ran possibly the most grimdark game any of my players had ever played using DH 1st. I actually managed to grim a couple of them out which was amazing as normally they're quite sociopathic when it comes to RPGs.

Ironically enough, for all my complaining about designing games for "old men", I'm becoming something of a curmudgeon myself. Only the other way around - I also have the same issue with the new edition of DH (it's currently in Beta). The original Beta was innovative and new and played really well in my tests. But there were howls of protests from some of the existing players because it was different and not backwards compatible. They loudly demanded something like Only War. So now the DH2 version that is coming out is essentially Only War: Inquisitor Edition. Everywhere I look, it all seems to be about placating the Old Guard. Which is pretty ironic as I stared Shadowrun with 1st edition and my experience with Warhammer RPGs goes all the way back to the original WHFRP where my elf apprentice died in his first combat at the hands of a goblin with a shortbow.

Every year as I get older, I get grumpier and grumpier about the way things aren't changing how they used to.

SR5 -> SR2/3 being a case in point.

we are all bitter here, but suit yourself.
i had just hoped one of the great old ones would come back.
frank was banned, Ancient History left as well. aside from his farcast thread in other gaming at least . .

To be entirely, unrelentingly fair:

Disclaimer: this is not a defence of 5th Edition. I do not own 5th Edition. What I have seen about it largely repels me so far. I hope that they will fix it but I'm not holding my breath.

Let us stipulate for the sake of argument that replacing the human sensorium is somewhere around the data density of IMAX (depending on some fiddly details, around 48 megapixels with around 64 bits of data each, which is around 400 MB per frame) once you include tactile and olfactory information, and that for all this to run so beautifully fast that there is a speed-of-thought advantage, you're running at around the maximum cycle rate of neurons (about 1000 Hz), you need, for full VR, to deliver around 4Tbps of data to the brain.

Bear in mind these numbers are largely thumb sucks, but are actually reality-biased in terms of what the human input system could handle (although I strongly suspect that the tactile sensorium would challenge the visual for data density), and are based on current knowledge of neural performance.

So. 4 terabits of data per second. Even assuming, entirely gratuitously, that you can somehow squeeze that down, with complex encodings, canonical representations and merciless data compression to 4 gigabits of data per second (this is a ludicrous level of compression, for those unfamiliar with compression of data streams; you'd be insanely lucky to get it to 400Gbps), that is still the kind of data throughput which is problematic in the sheer terms of data capacity of wireless data channels. There's just no way you will stuff that into a single wireless channel with plausible energy/clutter penetration/interference/carcinogenic qualities. This means that anyone trying wireless VR (where VR means simsense, as opposed to a simple headset view) will chew up every available wireless channel in reach. Bear in mind that to supply 4Tbps, you need 4000 independent Gbps channels - good luck doing so in plausible available electromagnetic contexts. Even 4Gbps is hard to deliver wirelessly, assuming multiple users, interference from various other electromagnetic sources and other real-world concerns. 4Gbps with constant bitrate (that a smooth experience requires) is massively unlikely.

I am all there for Moore's Law, and the genius of engineers exploiting quantum effects to increase the density of chips and drives and all the rest of it, but when you're coming up hard against the stark physical, information theoretical limitations of the world, well, it's like the fact that chip designers are actually running up against the speed of an electron in copper, and the speed of a photon in optic fibre.

I'm not saying VR is impossible, or that simsense is impossible, nor am I particularly arguing that VR wouldn't be more potent in some meaningful fashion than a keyboard - although there are serious unanswered questions there. All I'm saying is that wireless VR stretches the limits of credibility to and beyond breaking point, and that it was a mistake in any system where computers do not purportedly work on magic. On that front, 4th Ed made a serious mistake, and should have restricted actual VR hacking to a physical connection, even if allowing for an AR hacking environment wirelessly.

Once you include tactile, olfactory and other data sources in parallel with everything else, the mathematics of it all gets insane. This is, not even counting anything like error correction, redundancy or similar overhead sources.

EDIT: @kokeban - you posted whilst I was writing. Interesting points. Sorry I can't respond now.



Alas, the stars are not right. Perhaps in stranger aeons...

I always liked Frank. Was never mutual mind you - don't think he ever forgave me for actually forcing him to concede an argument (twice). But I kind of liked the way he always backed things up and got into fights with the mods. I've met religious fanatics with more compromise in them than Frank Trollman. I liked him. Ancient History - I don't blame him really. Given I don't think there was ever anyone as dedicated to the setting as he was and then to be kicked out of the dev forums for spreading rumours (which turned out to be true) that Catalyst had stopped paying Freelancers! I don't think he would ever be able to come back under the current regime after all that was said and done, and I doubt even his love for the setting could overmaster how galling it would be to ask permission to write again from the people who were the reason he left. Method always insightful, Fistandantilus always too nice to be a mod whilst you could always rely on Bull to dismiss any views other than his own with a quick argument by assertion stating what Shadowrun was actually about. Critias - always talented, always believing that somehow he could change the system from within if he just worked for CGL long enough. So many names, all forgotten now, like tears in the rain.

No, I thank you for the invitation, Stahlsteele. But I'm not yet ready to sit sipping bitter drinks in a dark forum reminiscing. I think it's still afternoon outside, I'm going to go and find some new names. SR5 can sail without me. I wish you a good voyage. But I'll not lift one finger to put a penny in the pockets of CGL who treated my friends so badly. Maybe some other life.

Peace and coolness,

Khadim.

Decks can be quite small, it's just that you need some kind of ASICs to hack those new matrix protocols. It's back to SR3 in the way that decks and cyberterminals differ in their hardware, but the sizes did not make a return



Easier than a smuggling compartment opening faster with wireless enabled (even if you open in manually, what matters solely is that the cyber has wireless access). And then there's the wireless baton...

Hiya Knasser (if you come back to read this). Good to see you, but sorry to see you take off again. Shoot me a PM with an email, if you've got a kindle and would like a quick read.

And as to...

I appreciate the sentiment, but don't martyr me as some revolutionary just yet. FWIW, I'm not so much out to "change the system," as to "write the best stuff I can, for whoever I can write it for." Just like in my day job I'm not out to "change" academia, I'm just out to make a couple history classes as interesting and informative as I can for my students, y'know? Same thing here. Adepts, the Tir, the Ancients, some urban brawl, lots of fic...I've gotten to do some fun stuff, I think.

I'm trying to tell cool stories, I like the Shadowrun universe and the stories I can tell there, and I'm taking my shots as I see 'em.

Note that in the previous editions, "VR" simply meant "Virtual Reality," which did imply "Realistic Virtuality," let alone in real time. It wasn't anything near simsense level. Icons and background were always obviously computer-generated. Only the few so-called "Ultraviolet" hosts were achieving reality-like level inside the Matrix. Otherwise, Simsense was only available on cable network at home and chips in the streets. The 4th edition did not differ a lot:


Also, most people forget that 3rd edition Matrix book was the first to make cellphone or satlink an option for Matrix access, which put a restriction on up/download speed, thus only affecting file transfer but not the VR experience itself (including the occasional UV host). Simsense file happened to be small enough to still be downloaded easily.

I'll take that as a mention of me. I'm still here, and as far as I know people still remember me.

Fair enough, but I think it's obvious to most readers that I'm talking about full immersion, regardless of appearance (and allowing for terminological confusion), which also applies to wireless rigging, as opposed to remote control. What I'm trying to point out is that anyone using wireless for hacking should not get a sim bonus (hot or cold) since the sheer level of data transfer would offer no substantial advantage over a well tuned regular interface, and that riggers trying to genuinely feel the thrum of the fuel pump should absolutely be plugged in to their vehicles.



This is where it breaks down into nonsense again, if the download is wireless. Bear in mind that we are talking a level of neural override and sensory detail which will let Bog the Trog spend half an hour experiencing what it is like to be Getlaidriel the elven porn starlet while she's being gangbanged by a bunch of dwarves, down to the specifics of Thorin Oakenrod grabbing her delicately pointed elven ears and the smell of his groin, while Gimlet son of Growin's corona rubs against her cervix. Half an hour at our reduced assumption of 4Tbps is 7,2 petabits, or roughly one petabyte allowing for a little bit in protocol and error correction overheads. Even assuming you have magical wireless and nobody near you is exploiting the same base stations much, to the point that you get 1Tbps (hah!) while wandering through a Seattle Arcology, you're looking at a couple of hours. Bear in mind this is where you'd be surrounded by wireless access points on a level beyond pretty much anything except a testbed lab, and bathed in radiation like an experimental test subject, and somehow mysteriously nobody else is around to compete for the same bandwidth, and you are doing nothing else with the available bandwidth either. Unless your definition of `small enough' after laughably huge levels of compression, ludicrous assumptions about electromagnetic radiation, and a treatment of information theory in signalling which is flat-out insane under fantasy-level ideal circumstances is most of a day to download the equivalent of a 90-minute movie, it just ain't so.

If we reduce the aggression of our assumptions in favour of that theory to, say, 100Tb per displayed second of data (much more plausible), 100Gbps under still marvellous but more plausible conditions, we're looking at 1500 hours of downloading a 90-minute movie, or roughly three months. Basically, simsense transmitted wirelessly is not really plausible.

So, to bring this back to the point at hand:

Wireless rigging? Implausible, as a full sim exercise.
Wireless hacking? Sure, just no reason to believe that hot or cold sim would offer any advantage which a set of goggles and twitch game grade controls wouldn't offer. In other words, non-sim VR should work basically as well.
Wired hacking? Now the arguments in favour of sim make a (tiny) bit more sense.

Now, before you wave the flag of Shadowrun-ain't-real-so-magical-technological-leaps-are-all-fine, let me point out that real live brokerage houses today are running into speed-of-light problems in arranging their global networks, and that is not a joke. We're also pushing hard against the kind of wireless bandwidth which can even theoretically be offered by a given wavelength. Alternatively, if you want to argue that the brain doesn't run at 1000Hz even if particular neurons do so the data throughput should be smaller, then great, but where is the huge edge which simsense is supposed to offer? Response time? No, because hacking is actually a decision-making and analytical exercise more than a twitch game. Throughput? No, because sim is more demanding than VR in networking terms. Intuitive data presentations? If they're largely visual the difference between stimulating the cortex directly versus the retina is at best counted in milliseconds (bear in mind that some predigestion of visual data occurs in and around the retina) - and the stimulus is a tiny part of the whole where the brain actually has to digest, interpret and react to the stimulus. Unless your responses are strictly rote or drilled reactions, you need to think about them. Look at kids writing examinations in anything requiring analytical thought. They aren't just scribbling as fast as their pens can move - they're pausing to think, count, examine the data. Sometimes increased writing speed might help - but just as often it would be a meaningless bonus. The typical time saved over a three hour examination would at best be maybe five minutes.

The good news is that all this offers an up-front, clearly explicable set of reasons why wired hacking is better than wireless, especially if you can get your wired connection in a vulnerable part of the target network. Should it require a huge deck? I don't care. I see no inherent reason a cyberdeck should be larger than a laptop.

The bad news is that it makes it very clear that SR4 style wireless matrix hacking introduced a whole new layer of technological bulldrek into the milieu because it apparently dawned on someone somewhere that smartphones were getting popular.

Too much information!

There are times...

Bitter olds vets.
Remembering the days of the dead.
Wondering about the gone.
Thinking about the past.

My biggest gripe about the other forums is they are using the worst forum software I have ever had the displeasure of coming across.

It's terrible.

Yes. Much too much for wireless.

For our hard core, superdetailed, MAXrotica™ experience, wireless won't cut it. We take you all the way into the action.

All rights reserved, Horizon Entertainment Division.

In your world hacking would be the hacker sending out a few million Matrix messages to random people about how a Nigerian Prince needs a few thousand nuyen to get a valuable item out of customs. Yeah...that sure sounds fun. Way cooler then decker duals.

it's just my opinion but the edition changes are discouraging people from posting. I know it certainly is for me. I use to post a few times a day but as 3 went to 4 , 4 to 4.1 or what ever they called it 4 whatever to 5 I feel left behind. I can do just fine with 3rd ed rules as do my group with the 4th ed decking. but each time they change the rules and things like damage and spell casting I feel more and more disconnected and less of a reason to post or even an ability to do so. The fact that they seem to want us to shell out for all new core books every 5 years gets damn expensive

so I come here for the over stories and soft stuff and ideas but see little reason to post in the 'what rule do I..." threads the way I use to. I suspect there could be a lot of the older hands like me who do that.

While I take your point concerning duels, there are other ways to take it. Even if phishing or some variant thereof were an element of what a decker might do as part of preparation, that wouldn't really go on-screen, as it were. While matrix duels might not be part of the whole plan, a less metaphorical aspect of it certainly could be.

On the other hand, you could visualise it in an arbitrary VR interface any way you wanted to.

I'm still here, you know.

Right now, none of the splat books are out. There is only so much you can gripe/poke/break in the main book. The new edition is in, but not all of the players are on the field.

I really hope the matrix books offers extensive optional rules to make the matrix more 4th edition like, undoing the recent changes. Probably not going to happen with the current staff, though.

I am totally going to base a run around Getlaidriel. That name is too good to pass up.

Seriously. 4th edition was such a turn off that I stopped paying attention to the rules and settings.

Ha, this thread appeared serendipitiously for me. Having pretty much abandoned Shadowrun few months later after knasser (I think it was spy games the last book I saw by then) I had the opportunity of finding a Shadowrun 5th edition while visiting my cousin in Montreal, so, I bought the book, I actually liked some of the changes (limits of success was a great idea, as well as turning programs rankless and make them give boni to specific actions).
So, after returning home, decided to see how good ol' dumpshock was faring.
I actually liked the changes for matrix and while they may be only lightly firmed on how real hacking goes, well, real hacking is BOOORING and is nowhere near as was displayed by the old nineties movie 'Hackers' (with Angelina Jolie barely legal, since we are talking about Getlaidriel ).
My final point is, the breaking point for me buying the book was recognizing so many of the writers' names from here, otherwise, I would have put it back on the shelf.

It was EIGHT YEARS between SR4 and SR5. I had time to finish university, get a job, get promoted a few times, get married and have a child between the two. Why don't you spread out the cost of ALL the books you bought over eight years. Or better yet, divide that over the number of hours Shadowrun has entertained you. Compare that to ANYTHING else: going to the movies, the price of your cable subscription, whatever the hell else you can think of. Then see if it's still "damn expensive".

If it is, you've made mistakes in your life, and that's not Shadowrun's fault.

A lot of things have changed around here over the last couple of years. I think that Snow Fox isn't far off, that 5th edition has been a part of that. Think back to 4th edition though, and there was a lot of people raising a stink (including me) when it first hit. We've got enough editions now that you can roll with whichever one you want. But I think the issues with the license and who's working it has affected the game pretty seriously. Of course, that may just be our little corner of the internet talking.

I'm pretty grateful for those that are still willing to work through the difficulties, like Our Boy Crit, and still put out good stuff despite all the people that have left to do other things. It's been neat seeing some people step up as other people have left. But there's still a lot we just don't see anymore. I still miss Fortune, mfb, and of course Knasser.


I'm still here, just more quiet these days. I've got a lot going on personally, and 5th edt, which is the main hot topic, hasn't sold me yet.

I will say for Dumpshock as a whole, on our side anyway, things have been a lot easier to handle. I'll always like Frank Trollman, although he was a huge pain in the ass, quite frankly. But he had a lot of interesting, intelligent things to say. Of course, I miss Doc Funk, AH, and SL James too. Some were more liked than others. But for whatever reason , the number of flame fests has been way down. So that's nice. I'm busy with other things lately so I rarely get the chance to log in, but the latest mods are doing great with it. Redjack has really taken the ball and ran with it, and does a lot to keep us going, which is awesome to see. Honestly, any issues with the software you need to direct with him, cause I know jack all about it. What I do know is that what we've got works for the money.

I still love DS, even if I'm not on as frequently. Personally I like it more for the fact that there is an official SR forum out there, and we're still here. We're not concerned about making CGL happy or unhappy. DS has been here through a lot of companies now, and we're not going anywhere. The mods try to keep the peace and keep it open for Freelancers, guys like Bull who skirt a couple of different lines (he's more nimble than you'd think for his size ), and readers and players who just want straight answers and to argue stuff out. I think it's become a more relaxed environment lately, which I appreciate. Hopefully guys and gals out there like Knasser can still find things they enjoy , without having to worry so much about the politics behind it.

I'm a fan of shadowrun, nots it's owners. Authors, developers or varied editions. Played since my first edition arrived in the mail and can assure you it wasn't any mechanics or reality based tech that turned me into an SR junkie for life.
It inspired me as a storyteller. It's strangely insightful view of the future, fantasy elements which let my players access it from a D&D background and the ability to look into the future and still be living in past due to vitas and the first crash twisting history. The shooting helped.
New editions mean new concepts and new mistakes.
1st edition wow umm it was a first edition.
2nd edition cleaner and nearly daily games for several years endears this version to me.
3rd edition walls of text...little art, again cleaner but a painful read.
4th edition someone got chocolate in my peanut butter. Lots new concepts also lots of right moves. (And growing pains)
5th edition obviously made with the best intentions, some rollback, more new concepts. Made by people who care even if you don't share their vision.

I was here last edition, probably be here next edition. As a GM who's run dozens of systems for dozens of people I always find myself coming back to SR and it's fan base . Digging through dumpshock is nearly as fun as getting that box of 1st edition books out of storage for inspiration.

All I ask is that you tell us how it goes. We want to know about how Gimlet squeezes into her elven ring.

Or at least about the escapades of the group she hired to extract her from her current contract so that she could go independent.

There are lots of things which are boring. Picking locks over and over and over is boring. Spending hour after hour after hour lifting weights or running is boring. Shooting the same target again and again and again is boring. Waiting in a surgery while a cyberdoc performs microneurosurgery on your knee is boring. Standing in front of a mirror learning to deliver exactly the right expression in exactly the right way is boring. Reading the latest hydraulic diagram for the fifteenth revision on the damn stupid drone model's parts is boring. And yet shadowrunners do all these things if they want that edge. This is why these things happen off-camera.

A sweating hacker hastily splicing into an optic fibre link while the clock ticks so that he can deliver the carefully tuned exploit so that he can control the secured freight elevator and let the delivery team escape with the prototype without being caught on camera, and still have time to evacuate himself with the infiltration expert through the company's laundry chutes is not boring.

It is up to the game master to work with the parts which are engaging.

Heh, all we need is seedy SR pr0n appearing on Google image search.

Our jobs as we get older are to be more grumpy and curmudgeon-y. Good to see you stop by for a quick fling, knasser. For my own money, I found Rogue Trader and Only War to be the better of the settings and rules (in that order) for the FFG titles.

All of those stuff is either practice/training for something else or work.
Picking a lock while the rest of the team is giving you cover fire against a bunch of red samurais is not boring. Running for your life is not boring neither is lifting a barrel or something to blockade a passage from pursuers. Shooting the same practice target is boring. Shooting someone who's shooting you back OR running towards you to split you in half with a monofilamente sword is not.

Anyway, my point is, hacking in real life has not the drama you just mentioned, so that's why I don't mind if the matrix/hacking is shown somewhat impossible to how it should actually work because if it did, the game would be like this: