^this was what I was unelegently trying to say in my own poor words. When I said PC vehicles I meant their aircraft.

Unfortunately the bricking rules have absolutely nothing to do with how the tech would actually work, as seen by how they work on cyberware. There is absolutely no reason your wired reflexes need to be online, and zero reason they should accept self-destructive signals from the outside, and making it so any idiot with a wireless connection can muck about with your nervous system is deeply dumb. However, that's what the system is predicated on, and why it causes majorly bad implications for the entire game world.

That plane is, by necessity, going to be online. IFF, aircraft control, and monitoring require it. Given how the rules work, that means it is going to be inherently vulnerable, albeit likely well protected. However, it won't be too protected, simply because the costs of doing so would make commercial air travel impossibly expensive.

Catch 22, neh?

that's what aircraft are like today.

in shadowrun, people are dumb enough to think it's a good idea to connect your spinal cord or your arm to the matrix by default, and there's no good reason for either of those things to be wireless either.

if the question was about what i would use for my houserules, then certainly i would give a different answer. as it stands, people in the shadowrun universe are complete and utter morons who believe that not only should everything be connected to the matrix, but that it's a good idea to arbitrarily make a portion of every device's function completely dependant on being connected to the matrix instead of just building the device to handle all the stuff it should do by itself in the first place.

though to be fair, in-universe connecting things to the matrix appears to enable time travel, so...

aircraft wireless bonus: the aircraft arrives at it's destination before it even lifts off.

However, based on the text for what happens when you brick a rotodrone, it's fair to assume that the plane doesn't simply crash.

Fixed that for you.

Seriously, Bricking as a concept and as a game mechanics is fine - but it needs to be limited to things that are actually based on wireless control.

~Umi

Just because it has the feature, doesn't mean everyone will use it.
I mean, it's like saying that just because anyone could let their smart phones with open access to anyone pinging them, it doesn't mean every one would let that happen...

That happen to me every time I go home for a visit... And I haven't flown on a plane with wireless enabled yet.

A Rotodrone can auto-rotate, and a Glider can Glide. A Large Passenger Liner without propulsion does not glide all that well, and it does not auto-rotate at all. Ergo... Crash.

Actually, passenger aircraft have been known to glide in cases of engine failure, from my understanding. Their lift is generated from forward motion, after all.

devices that have no legitimate use outside of fields where stealth and a lack of exploitable vulnerabilities are of utmost importance are designed to require the matrix to access their full features. what makes you think the rocket scientists who design aircraft are not just as dumb as the brain surgeons who design the cyberware?

They do not glide well enough to not come apart when they hit the ground, however. But you are right, they do have a VERY minimal glide profile, just not one good enough to actually survive impact, at least not very well. All depends upon how far up they are when they lose those engines, and what they are trying to land upon.

Why the frag would the plane lose propulsion? It's not even remotely imaginable. There isn't a wireless command which turns the planes engines on and off. The engines are in no way connected with the part of the system a Hacker could "brick".

People don't build planes that way. There is zero reason to build a plane that way.

"But devices can be bricked, ergo any 'device' which has a wireless connection can be disabled in its entirety, affecting every portion of it equally!"

No. We went over this. If you brick a pistol's smartgun system, it doesn't cause the separate underbarrel flashlight to stop working (unless you wired the two together and gave the smartgun system control over the flashlight for some reason). If you brick a plane's commlink, it doesn't cause the separate engine systems to stop working.

The Corporations aren't stupid. They may not care about Average Joe having his every personal device vulnerable to wireless attack, but they damn sure are gonna care about their own gear. They don't leave their vital information in non-isolated computer systems, and they don't give wirless access to every single vital system of an airplane packed full of hundreds of wrongful death lawsuits waiting to happen. I don't see how any sane player or GM could argue otherwise.

~Umi

You guys and your reality tangents. Seriously..........

What's an airliner worth $300,000,000? If there is a threat of hackers then this is going to be protected in the highest possible way. Why can't the pilot be a decker with the best deck (maybe it's built into the plane? Maybe the friggin plane is for all intensive purposes a deck), approaching pretty good skills? 7+ in their skills and stats? An aircraft of this value probably has a device rating of 6 and would be slaved to the deck and the pilot probably has at least a control rig rating 1 or higher, therefore it would be immune to control device actions, unless it is hijacked.

Planes are probably way more efficient that now, carry more passengers and have more streamlined procedures, so paying a pilot a lot more is probably not that much of a big deal.

Or alternatively, this could not be a realistic threat and deckers tend to not go around painting targets on their own ilk by doing stupid shit like crashing planes on regular occurances and as such, the airlines don't need to be paranoid, which I think is meant to be the status quo in 2075.

Maybe planes are like credstick? Awesome matrix magic just makes them unhackable?

There's 3 completely workable solutions to this non-problem.

people don't build *guns* that way, either, and there is zero reason to build guns that way.

people especially don't build black ops gear that way, and there is no reason to build black ops gear that way.

what makes you think airplanes are so special?

Rotary wing aircraft do not 'simply crash' when unpowered because of the physics behind how they generate lift in the first place. Especially in something as small and relatively light as a drone, which will have significant air resistance compared to it's size when falling. This has absolutely no bearing on a passenger jet liner, which can only create meaningful amounts of lift via massive forward thrust.






Note that even the rules on bricking explicitly bring up that it works on 'your trickedout combat bike', which has absolutely no reason to have any vital components besides nav be Matrix connected, yet it is clearly brickable. Planes, trains, and automobiles, chummer. It's right there in hardcopy.

And, equally, a passenger aircraft doesn't "just crash' due to the physics in how IT generates lift, at least by my understanding. Whether a fixed-wing aircraft of a 2070's design and construction could safely land is a different question, certainly, but they're not simply going to drop out of the air. Their forward momentum doesn't simply vanish on bricking - physics doesn't work that way.

Of course they're not going to 'just drop out of the air'. What kind of idiocy is that?

They're going to be incredibly expensive lawn darts on roughly parabolic arcs instead!

Isn't there some method by which a pilot can descend to pick up speed, and then level off, in order to control the glide? Seem to remember reading about something of the sort.

Sure, and more than likely they can make a rough belly landing on the flattest piece of terrain the pilot can get to, assuming that his controls have not also been bricked. Since, as we know from the rules, even simple mechanical parts of a bricked device like the firing pin on an assault rifle stop functioning if the device is bricked.

If we don't assume the existence of something like Manual Control Override to get around this, which seems like an entirely reasonable assumption. And after the events of Storm Front, you can bet that any planes that didn't have them would have been retrofitted.

what, you mean just like after 2 complete collapses of the matrix that caused probably trillions of nuyen in damage and killed millions if not hundreds of millions (or perhaps even billions) of people, nobody would ever be stupid enough to build everything in the world to require a matrix connection in order to function fully?

why do the people who design aircraft get to not be complete and utter morons when the people who build every other thing in the setting are?

Actually, I'm referring to the part where the nanopocalypse caused planes to fall out of the sky like bricks. Though that may have involved actual gumming of the mechanics, too. In any case, they'd have done SOMETHING to be able to say it couldn't happen again.

And in a near perfectly secure Matrix - it does the work for them, and only some pretty freaking above-average people have a shot at hacking it, and even then only with some damned expensive equipment - it's quite believable that people might think it's secure enough. Especially if planes are slaved up to traffic control hosts prior to takeoff.

Aircraft, particularly the engines, are well-known to be...finicky...about their internal workings slowly being turned into nanomush.

Actually, people do build guns that way.

Right this second, we have robotic weapons that are remotely controlled via wireless command. The weapons are designed to accept certain remote commands which direct them to automatically perform certain actions, such as chambering rounds and firing them. Why are they designed to do this? Because they operate remotely, without a pilot or gunner present to pull manually perform those tasks.

Now, would it be a stupid idea to employ this sort of system on a handgun rather than a mounted vehicle weapon, essentially turning it into a handheld drone? Probably. Would it smarter and safer to transfer any digital signals you want to send to the weapon via cables rather than over radio waves? Abso-fraggin-lutely. But if you want to operate a device remotely, you don't really have a choice.

So why would the Corps make personal weapons like handguns that can be remotely controlled? Well, for control, you see.

If they give Guard Greg a heavy pistol and one day at work his mind finally snaps and he tries to blow away the assistant manager, they have the power to wirelessly disable the gun. If he tries to take it off-site, they can detect that and put a stop to it. If he loads unauthorized ammunition, the gun automatically reports the breach of protocol. Even if he just has it out of his holster and is fooling around with the other guards in the break room, just waving it around and laughing like an idiot, they'll know about it and he'll be having a chat with his supervisor or boss real soon.

If they sell Average Joe a light pistol for home and self defense, they can monitor how he uses it. They can collect data about his shooting style when he practices at the local range, using that information to custom-tailor a slew of AR advertisements just for him. Joe's a terrible shot and uses tons of ammunition, even with his smartgun system? Sell him some fancy new shooting glasses that are supposedly better than his current smartlink, and then offer him "bulk rates" and "special deals" on practice ammo. Joe typically goes to the range on Saturdays? Offer him a "daily special" deal which just so happens to be for Saturdays. Joe suddenly takes his gun with him to work? Remotely lock the workings and notify Knight Errant so they can question him.

So no, there are plenty of reasons to build guns that way.

But you're right - Black Ops gear should NOT be built that way. Neither should aircraft.

Which is why the new system of Wireless Incentives is insane and divorced from all reality, both our own and Shadowrun's. It might be workable if the Wireless Bonuses made any kind of sense, but they entirely operate on Bizarro World logic, so it ends up one giant mess.

And that's also why assuming that just because an airplane is a "device", that means every single aspect of it is vulernable to being hacked simply if mere portions of it (like the navigational system and radio communications) are.

~Umi

Related: Control Thoughts.

By the way, I've been rolling around ideas for better wireless bonuses in my head... Would it be considered more "worth it" if a wireless smartgun decreased range, visibility, and/or environmental modifiers by a step or two, and helped negate cover modifiers?

More like worth it if you could just skinlink your PAN, cut all signal, and still get the wireless bonuses.

As I understand it, by RAW that's not possible because everything wireless must do cloud computing for the simplest functions and skinlinks simply do not exist.

The problem is that you're treating the entire machine as a part of the 'device', and you're assuming every vehicle is identical and built for wireless access.

A standard bike? You're right, no reason for it to have wireless access. But what if you want to remotely control it, for whatever reason? Someone, somewhere is going to want to be able to turn the ignition on and off, to turn the radio on and off, to apply the brakes and turn the steering column and perform all the physical functions required for the vehicle to operate, and do so remotely.

What I'm arguing is that individual devices have different components which can or cannot be controlled wirelessly. If you make it so you can start your vehicle remotely, then when it gets "bricked" that portion of the vehicle is going to cease functioning. Conversely, if your ignition isn't controlled wirelessly, then bricking the vehicle doesn't break the ignition, because it isn't a function that ist controlled wirelessly. If you make your headlights wireless enabled, they break when the vehicle gets bricked. If the headlights aren't wireless enabled, they don't.

Ya know what? I'm gonna go ahead and coin some new terminology here to clarify things.

We all agree that a vehicle is a "Device". But here's the twist.

Every device is made up of one or more "Subsystems".
A subsystem can be either "Wireless Enabled", or "Wireless Disabled".
Any "Wireless Enabled Subsystem" can be activated and manipulated via wireless command and remote control.
Any "Wireless Disabled Subsystem" cannot, and must be activated manually.
When a Device is Bricked, all "Wireless Enabled Subsystems" cease functioning.
However, any "Wireless Disabled Subsystems" remain undamaged - although those which depend on the functionality of other "bricked" subsystems of course may fail.

So an example.

I have a Ford Americar. It has five main Subsystems.

1) Engine / Ignition
2) Suspension
3) Brakes
4) Navigation / Radio
5) Power Windows / Locks

Of those Subsystems, only the Power Windows / Locks and the Navigation / Radio are "Wirelessly Enabled". So when some script kiddie hooligan hacks my car on the highway, all he has access to are the doors, windows, and the central display for my music and GPS system, which he immediately starts messing with.

Suddenly I'm stuck listening to Faith Hill's latest album blaring at maximum volume over the roar of the highway-speed wind slapping me in the face through the now open windows, and my GPS screen is cheerfully displaying footage of a pair of greased up dwarves having something unspeakable done to them by a Dominatrix. I try to reset my radio and roll up my windows, but no dice. At this point if I chose to kill the engine (which is not under the hacker's control), it would "reboot" the device and everything would return to normal.

Alternatively, if the hacker decided to just brick my car for shits and giggles, my dashboard would explode in a shower of sparks like a Star Trek computer console; my radio would melt; my GPS would catch on fire; the motors of my windows would go berserk, crack the glass, and start spewing plumes of smoke; but everything else would be normal. My brakes would operate just fine, my suspension would be perfectly peachy, and when I pull over to the side of the highway to investigate this strange new calamity, I can easily turn off the engine. If my doors were locked while I was driving I'm stuck inside, because those got bricked, but if I was driving with them unlocked I can still open the doors.

Not all vehicles are the same. Not everyone is going to want their car's Ignition to be radio controlled. Some will, others will not. If we're going to go with this whole risk/reward notion, surely we owe it to ourselves to be intelligent about it? If you want the benefits of being able to control a portion of a device remotely, that portion has to be "Wireless Enabled". If you don't care about those benefits, or you're willing to trade them for more security, then you can "Disable" that remote functionality.

Is this not a sane and reasonable proposal?

~Umi

again, that only works if the people in the setting are not complete and utter morons.

now, personally, i prefer it a great deal that the people in the setting not be complete and utter morons. but unfortunately, i'm faced with proof, repeatedly, that they are in fact complete and utter morons. and *especially* the people who are in charge of manufacturing anything that would greatly benefit from not requiring the matrix to function at fully capacity.

so, while i would *like* to believe that humanity is not stupid enough to make all 747s remotely controllable and tie every function of the aircraft to the matrix (and even build the aircraft such that it won't function fully without being actively connected to the matrix) just because they can, i am faced with the new edition of shadowrun telling me that they are in fact that stupid. at least, canonically.

of course, in my home games i can decide that they aren't that stupid. but hey, welcome to fifth edition. please check your brain at the door, and replace it with the new matrix-powered version (wireless bonus: you no longer think it's stupid that everything is powered by the matrix).

I should point out - you can't have skript kiddies in SR5's Matrix.

sure you can. agents can perform most matrix actions, and if anything is even more fitting to be called a script kiddie than someone who at least has the skill.

Fair enough, but an Agent's dice pool caps out at 12 - it's far less than enough for just about anything. But even that's not gonna be at all common, because we're looking at a damn lot of money and some pretty restricted equipment. The basic point is that the risk of hacking for any individual is very, very small, because hackers are going to be a very rare commodity.

Umidori for '76 Presidency

Of which nation / corp / secret cabal?

Ideally I'd like something where I have more than just token authority, but not so much that I suddenly become a concern of folks like Lofwyr.

(Unless we're talking about the Lofwyr Fan Club. At which point, I think it'd be best for my health if I just accepted unconditionally and got to work planning various parades and events in his honor. I've got this great idea for painting banners with normal paint which reads "We Love Lofwyr!" as well as invisible astral paint which reads "Please don't eat us!")

~Umi

I like your proposal a lot.

That said, you are now going to have to create subsystems for each and every type of device, and then have to know which of those is on or off for all players and NPCs.

Not impossible, but a LOT of work.

UCAS presidency
but you can be the president of the Lofwyr fan club if you want to, specially if HE wants you to...

No, I really don't think you do need to literally granulate it out in the rules. Just have a note saying something like:


So Runner Randy buys a toaster at Stuffer Shack and takes it home. He doesn't like that it's Wireless Enabled, so he tries to turn the Wireless off via the control menu. Unfortunately, being a cheap mass-produced consumer product, it doesn't have a built in option to turn off Wireless, so he has to use his Hardware skill and toolkit to open it up and manually disable the Wireless Access chip.

~Umi

This response is now the poster child in support of adding a "like" function.

Not necessarily. Just like random devices have a single device rating, many devices can simply be assumed to be "wireless" or "wired". For instance, it might be that amateur security uses wireless smartguns, but elite security would have a physical wire or touchlink to their smartguns, making the "elite" guns wired-only. Drones might just be entirely wireless, but a plane (especially one pivotal to a game) would have to be built as a series of devices, some wired, some wireless. It's more work than just sticking to the dumb parts of the rules, but the extra work can be mitigated by keeping the rules when inconsequential, and adding the extra work when it's important.

And what you just described is a lot of work. In an adventure, I have to:

1) Come up with subsystems for each type of device. (Granted, for many this is a generic category - I can come up with one set of subsystems for basically all weapons, and not one for the Ares Predator and another for the Viper Slivergun)

2) Decide which parts can be shut off easily, and which require a Hardware test.

3) Allow all the players to manually manipulate each individual device that they own and set it however they wish (in some cases requiring a Hardware check)

4) Decide which NPCs will stick to the corporate line, and simply use the device as is, and which ones don't - and for the ones that don't, how do they differ from the corporate line - i.e. which systems they monkey with. Remember that if what you are going for is verisimilitude, what is good for the runners is good for the opposition.

Now, the end result may very well justify all the additional effort - I'm just saying that it adds a lot of overhead.

General comment on Bricking.
Since the Engines need monitoring by the computer interface of the plane, they would be susceptible in the 2070's... after all, everything is connected and wireless.

But that is the problem, RHAT... we have to ASSUME that the idiocy of being bricked is just that. The rules are pretty clear in that the plane is a lawn dart, barring any common sense ASSUMPTIONS to the contrary. Too bad the Designers of the game did not use that same common sense when creating the rules and instead went with "What sounded cool."

@Lobo

You don't actually have to come up with subsystems. You just use common sense, and ask your players how they're running their devices.

If they have a Ford Americar, you ask them if they are running it Wireless or not, and which features or subsystems are wired for remote control. If they say the only thing they have it set for is remote Lock / Window access, then that means the only thing they (or an enemy hacker) can mess with via remote is the Locks and Windows. This means their Ignition can't be killed by bricking the vehicle, but by the same token it also means if some street-kid steals the damn thing for a joyride, the Runner can't kill the engine from a distance and they lose their ride.

It's like asking a player if their commlinks are running in Hidden mode, or asking them what type of ammunition they have loaded, or asking them what devices they have connected to their PAN. If they only have one commlink and it is running Hidden, they might get stopped on the street by Knight Errant for walking around without broadcasting a valid SIN. If they load their shotgun with APDS, they might need to switch out their ammunition if they need to shoot someone non-lethally. If they're running a PAN with two dozen devices, their commlink better be up to the task of handling that many subscriptions and they better have enough pockets and places to stash those different objects to boot.

This is all perfectly normal data for the GM to have to be aware of, and the GM is perfectly within their rights to ask a player how they have their gear set up and then hold them to their answers.

If a player has a device bricked, it should only affect the components of that device which are actually wirelessly accessible. As I said, assume most or even all of those components are wirelessly accessible by default if you want, but if the player says "I want to remove wireless access from my smartgun's ammo and firing system, but leave it active for the actual smartlink and gun camera", you as a GM just say "Alright, but remember you won't be able to eject a clip or fire the weapon via wireless command if you do so."

They lose the benefit of wireless functionality for those parts of the gun they disable the wireless for, but they gain the security of knowing that even if the gun gets bricked, all they lose is the video recording and the aiming bonus, leaving the base functionality of the gun itself intact. And if they don't specifically inform you that they disabled the default wireless? Then it never happened, and they are fully vulnerable.

~Umi

TJ, I get where you're coming from, I get what you're actually trying to say, but I still find it annoying because clearly you and I both agree: the new rules are obviously WRONG - we both know that.

And I get that you're trying to demonstrate that fact with sarcasm, but damnit man, your playing devil's advocate still ends up pissing me off.

~Umi

Heh... Sorry about that, but no worries...
It just irritates me... the new edition could have been so amazing, and then we get crap like what we got. I really wanted to like it, I really did... It is super frustrating.

Well clearly it's becoming apparent to even the meanest of understandings that CGL doesn't care about putting out quality products.

I got excited, I bought the SR5 corebook when it first came out, and ended I up getting burned. I was utterly disappointed, and it really was the final straw for absolutely destroying their reputation in my eyes. Clearly I'm not the only one, and I suspect the actual number of dissatisfied customers is rather proportionally high. But our complaints aren't merely being actively ignored, they're being flat out denied and dismissed.

I say it's high time we wrote off CGL as what they are - an unscrupulous bunch of uncaring profiteers. If they can't be arsed to give the community what it wants, I say it's high time the community tells them to shove off and stops paying for their drek. I feel bad for the writers and the freelancers and the well-intentioned contributors who actually care about the game system and who try to work within the limits of the CGL system to put out half-decent material for the community at large, but it's clear they're being hamstringed as content creators just as much as we are as players.

With any luck CGL will go under and someone competant will buy the rights. (Dare I hope for Harebrained Studios?) I'm sick of this settling for less, shelling out for inferior products because nothing else is available. If they won't provide a quality product, then by god I want their competitors to have the chance to do so.

~Umi

So Very, Very True... *sigh*

I have a dream that one day this setting will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed - we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all shadowrunners are created equal.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Seattle the sons of former players and the sons of former writers will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even CGL, a desert publisher, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little players will one day live in a setting where they will not be judged by the results of their dice but by the content of their character sheet.

I have a dream today!

Sometimes I wonder if we're past the point of King's style and need to take things to Malcolm X level.

----

As an aside, some of Malcolm X's speeches would make fabulous SR neo-anarchist materials just by changing around a few names and terms.


~Umi

*Clap-Clap*...
So, who is up for starting a business in the Neighborhoods of Redmond, where we live?

My Oni tried that in the several block radius of his neighborhood. It turned out pretty well, wish I had had more time to continue it.

At this point I've gone with the assumption that Deus actually managed to make wide-scale mind control via psychotropic IC work for him, and everything utterly boneheaded the corps have done with the Matrix is specifically to make his return as a Fully Rampant AI more successful.

Makes more sense than any explanation coming out of CGL.