I can see that, but it does say

And oddly, firewall is bolded, so they must be emphasising it for a reason.

On a different topic; after looking at the sprite powers, I think TMs might be more flexible than deckers.

What happens when a decker is found in a host? Well, if he engages in cybercombat on the IC, he has effectively done nothing, because the IC will relaunch in 1 combat turn. Now if a TM does it with a crack sprite, now it takes level/2 in turns before that IC relaunches. This is a huge benefit when needing to buy yourself time to find the McGuffin in a host.

Or say you're fighting a Yak with a monowhip. Well, a decker could just brick the monowhip, but a TM can compile a machine sprite and cause the monowhip to critical glitch and have the whip user take off their own arm. Similar if someone is using High Ex Ammo.

If I got some juicy McGuffin data, and the corp wants it back at the cost of my life, well if I give it to my Courier sprite to hash it, if I die, so does their data.

In contrast if I have paydata for a blackmail and they want it gone, I could give it to a data sprite who can hide it within another file.

Yeah, I think technomancers have more tricks up their sleeves than deckers, which I think might make them better. Situational, sure, but what isn't?

That was the balance in Sr4.5, as I saw it: Otakus were generally weaker than deckers in the matrix, at least by themselves. They could do some tricks on their own, but by and large, deckers were superior. At least, until you added sprites into the mix, because Sprites had more cool abilities than the otaku did. A sprite could eat an equivalent agent for lunch, and an army of sprites was terrifying.

That said, from what I can tell, sprites have been nerfed in SR5. I haven't calculated exactly what this means to otaku, but off the top of my head, I'd say it weakens them significantly.

No, they are still worse than deckers IMO. Its not just the oh my god blow out people make it out to be. With the tricks they have up their sleeves they are roughly even with deckers in the matrix depending on power gaming levels, but they are a lot worse out of the matrix. And the idiocy of adept deckers makes both look bad.

Fixed.

Massive idiocy is what I should have put. Magicians are supposed to be at a disadvantage in the matrix not an advantage. It was a important part of the setting that magic and tech did not play nice with each other. Challenges and difficulties add to the setting, just adding benefits on benefits isn't. while they may have beat it to death a bit much, everything having a cost is a good idea. Unfortunately people decided making the setting worse would be a good plan. And just being better than standard deckers is a game mechanic fail on top of that. So whether its setting based or rule based, adept deckers are a pile of fail. You want a magic decker, play a technomancer.

Except that the monowhip has to be wireless, which means it doesn't do that on a glitch.

Sprites have some minor benefits. Sprites are far, far, far weaker than they should be - a compiled sprite should be as powerful as a summoned spirit.

And registered sprites eat tasks faster than shadowrunners go through fake SINs. Not encouraging to me to want to try TMs when one of their aces is now a whiffle bat.

"Mages this," and, "Samurai that!" "The Technomancer hit me with a wiffleball bat!"

Edit: LINKAGE!!

Raw says that trodes gives you a DNI.
Raw says that a datajack gives you a DNI and a few meters of cable.
A cable costs 5 nuyen.

Not seeing how it could be interpreted otherwise?
Only thing a datajack gets over trodes is the wireless -1 noise option.

That said, if I were running a game, I would consider a TM to have a DNI by nature of what they are. but if you want to get into RAW, I guess it costs the $75 nuyen to do it.

p423

Emphasis mine

p257 and just in case you want to see how the gremlin power works.


The wireless bonus only protects against normal glitches. A critical glitch will still take off a limb. Like wise, this still works on explosive rounds and is easier to perform then a data spike and more effective too.

i don't think anyone makes much use of either of those things any more.

but yes, gremlins is a pretty good power. the thing is, it is very obviously outclassed by just having a magician with spirits that can use the accident power whether something is wireless enabled or not, and whether it is technological or not.

a sprite can make bad things happen to someone who is using a wireless monowhip. a spirit can do that, and can also make it happen to someone with a monowhip that isn't wireless, and a regular combat axe, and a wooden club, and a person walking around with no weapons at all, and so forth.

so i suppose if your group doesn't have anyone who can summon a spirit, which is orders of magnitude more awesome than a sprite, sprites look pretty good.

Not to mention that a spirit (or whatever) with the Accident power can affect [Magic] targets at once, where the sprite is limited to a single wirelessly enabled device at a time.

I do agree that accident is more powerful than gremlins, but the one thing that makes it better is that its only defended by device rating + firewall, while accident is defended by int + rea, which an NPC should hopefully have higher than a monowhip, that should be a device rating 2. Like wise, gremlins doesn't require line of sight and there are only so many things that can hurt a sprite compared to a spirit.

Actually, because your monowhip should be slaved up, it's defense would be much greater than that.

depending on GM, matrix LOS is harder to get than RL LOS.

i've recently had arguments on these forums with people who insisted that it's impossible to even try to spot a hidden icon unless you're within 100 meters, or have previously spotted it before.

that isn't exactly better than LOS

and sprites may be hard to hurt (without appropriate tools), but they're super-easy to avoid compared to spirits. i'd rather have a spirit that can ignore most small-arms fire and works just about everywhere, than a sprite that is entirely in the matrix and cannot do anything to you unless you're on the matrix too.

No; Sprites are equivalent to programs. Remember that "one Combat Turn's worth of Matrix actions" that was sneered at earlier in the thread? Use that for Teamwork tests. With an easily-resisted Level 3 Sprite you can add a couple dice and +1 to the appropriate limit (per assisting Sprite, if you want to register some ahead of time for extra beef when you really need it). Or have the Sprite go at it and you be the assistant, and then the Sprite takes the backlash if the test fails (like, say, Defusing a Data Bomb). Sprites tend to have pretty good Matrix Attributes in their specialties (Level +3 or +4), so they can make use of a lot of teamwork dice. And Sprites can of course act independently, too, so there's your Fork.

The fact that this is an argument anyone would make amply demonstrates how fucked the situation is.

I would agree since that statement demotes sprites (equivalent to agents/IC in SR4 at least) and in a way makes TM's appear even worse compared to deckers.

the absolute best sprites at stealthiness will have 9 dice to avoid being found at rating 3, and will have 4 dice to make their teamwork test if they're running hidden.

so basically, you call one up, the patrol IC gets to make it's matrix perception test, and as i've said earlier, you can probably expect at least rating 5 hosts if someone is willing to hire shadowrunners (so, depending on what your guess as to the patrol IC's dicepool is, at least 10 dice).

so the sprite has 9 dice to avoid being spotted, vs at least 10, (more for a higher rating host than 5), for the IC to spot them. now, obviously i'm not expecting to never trigger an alarm; i'm the guy who suggests using brute force to get marks on things that are only within the host, which triggers an alarm... but that only triggers an alarm *after* you succeed. which is a very big difference from triggering an alarm *before* you succeed.

also, good luck getting a sprite to disarm a data bomb. that uses software skill, which no sprite actually has. (the only other matrix actions i could find at a glance where sprites could not at least theoretically offer a teamwork test are set data bomb and jack out, so in *theory* if you're not worried about being spotted before you even make your attempt, a sprite could offer teamwork tests on most of the other actions. mind you, if you're not worried about being spotted, you're probably not hacking anything difficult enough to need help with, anyways).

also, most of the programs are good for defensive bonuses, which keep you from getting spotted, marked, hit, etc (which, really, is when all the bad stuff happens). sprites aren't even guaranteed to give any bonus at all (like i said, a rating 3 sprite will have 4 dice on the teamwork test if hidden), and probably won't give a large one (and may even glitch or critically glitch on that test), in addition to being pretty easy to spot. bonuses to your offensive dice pool are nice, but not that great (and in any event, i can run an agent for the same benefit if i want, except the agent can benefit from my programs and matrix attributes, and while a rating 6 agent isn't available in chargen, it's not *that* hard to get, or that expensive, after chargen).

Poor phrasing on my part - more accurate would be that Sprites can do a fair chunk of what programs do. Of course they can do other stuff, as well.



Good points - that'll teach me to think of examples like Data Bombs off the top of my head without thinking them through.

sure but lets face it rating 3 is a pathetically weak sprite, one which wont be compiled by any but the weakest of technomancers. Rating 6 will probably be the norm and it only stops there at char gen because for most technos it changes to physical damage after that. Registered sprites might be probably force 5-6 as well. If it didn't go physical I suspect most sprites would be rating 8-9 when compiled. They would be pretty damn invisible and add a crap ton of dice to a teamwork test. Though I suspect a agent could do a teamwork test as well, so the teamwork test part of it is less impressive.

a rating 6 compiled sprite is likely to deal anywhere from 2-6 points of fading, with the average number of hits generating 4 fading. that's not exactly inconsequential, and being compiled, you have a much smaller window to sleep off damage if you try it before a run.

registering sprites is, as i've mentioned, pretty awful. a higher rating registered sprite probably has close to your dice pool to resist the registering, so you probably won't get many services out of it. telling it to not stalk you 24/7 costs a task, as does attempting to re-register, so unless you're going to be averaging more than 2 net hits for re-registering the sprite, you've basically signed up to get punched in the head for no benefit.

and you can go through sprite tasks *really* fast, even for registered sprites.

so basically, i wouldn't count on having a large stable of high rating sprites with dozens or hundreds of tasks each for a technomancer. if you have a dicepool of 14 to register sprites, you don't want to re-register sprites that have a dicepool within 6 of yours... so our theoretical 14 dicepool technomancer would want rating 3 sprites for registering if he's going to re-register (rating 4 sprites have a dicepool of 8, which is 6 lower, which is on average going to merely equal out the cost of re-registering). unless of course you plan on re-registering twice before sending the sprite away, but that's a bit more risky (even those rating 3 sprites on a registering test generate an average of 4 fading, with potential for 6, and taking enough fading to chip away at your dicepool lowers your chances of gaining anything out of the next test).

note that for a chargen technomancer, you're only getting a dicepool of 14 if you specialize, so that's with only one type of sprite.

so ummm... no, i wouldn't assume that the typical technomancer has multiple rating 4-5 registered sprites on call for most purposes. or, if they do, they won't have very many tasks, as it will likely only be the tasks from compiling in the first place, plus maybe 1-2 more.

Not to mention that registration is like binding. It takes a number of hours equal to the Level of the sprite to complete a registration process, and it's 2 DV per hit that the sprite gets on the opposed test regardless of how many hits the techomancer got. That Level 3 sprite could potentially cause you 12 damage in fading from registration.

Unlike binding, it's also stated that you nor the sprite can take other actions, so a real dick of a GM could say no bathroom breaks or even snacking during registration (I didn't notice this for binding). Sometimes I think that even the bit about "the sprite's Overwatch Score does not increase due to time" might have been added as an afterthought.