I enjoyed it. Built a whole character around the concept in fact. Played him for about 400 Karma before finally fading into the Shadows.

You're the exception to the rule, though.

Kinda like how I'm the one guy on these forums who likes the idea of playing Infected PCs for reasons other than munchkining, and who has grappled extensively with the mechanical problems of building a highly accurate T'skrang Taildancer.

~Umi

I built a drake character that wasn't just screwed* and was also pretty non-combat.

*Build a drake and take an objective look. Would the character be better if you'd picked Orc instead? If no, then you have a drake that isn't just screwed.

What an odd (and poor) analogy, especially considering that the terms "Soldier" and "Police Officer" can these days both include cyber-security specialists.

Not everyone has to like every role - it's obvious that some don't like decking, but that doesn't mean nobody does. But I'll grant that it may have too little appeal at the moment. In large part, I think, because of the lack of GM description/shared imagery I mentioned before. I think people who already have cool & interesting hacking/decking imagery as part of their imaginations are more inclined to "get" and like decking, but the cumbersome mechanics don't help either.


Professional athletes and anyone dealing with dangerous animals or physically dangerous environments on a regular basis, off the top of my head.

I could see that.

"Fireman" "Beat cop" and "Navy Seal" then.

Indeed, it wasn't meant to be an iron-clad sort of analogy, but a silly simple one existing pure to convey the basic point.

~Umi

That point being to portray decking as boring and unexciting - a point which would quite possibly be contested by the very professions you've used to in your analogy as examples of something exciting.

After all... Even in the Military, Service is tons and tons of Boredom punctuated by minutes of Sheer Terror (if and only if you actually see combat).

Professional athletes. Police groups such as SWAT who rely on ambush and surprise tactics. The former is actually canon.

They don't really rely on ambush and surprise...it just makes their job way easier when they have it.

Clearly not only did you never think being a soldier, a police officer, or a fireman was exciting when you a kid, but I also am starting to suspect you never even were a child.

~Umi

I have participated in all three of those industries, and they are ALL boring and Uninteresting, except when they are not. And the Exciting parts are the exception (and a minimal one at that), and not the rule.

And yet, in contrast, they're way more exciting than being a Garbage Man, which essentially never has exciting parts at all.

My point is when you ask a little kid what they want to do when they grow up, most of them will tell you something that at least sounds exciting - like a race car driver (turn left all day!), an astronaut (hope you like checklists and calculating every conceivable way you could die horribly!), or a field agent for a spy agency (strive to be the least noticeable and uninteresting person possible so you can stealthily steal paperwork - as a bonus, never truly trust anyone ever again!).

Very, very few will tell you they want to be a Garbage Man. Those that do probably eat a bit too much paste.

~Umi

But... but....but....Men At Work


Given Sheen's history and habits, paste might have been a step up at times.

I guess if you mix cocaine and water, it probably does form a kind of paste...

~Umi

Heh... But PASTE TASTES GOOD.

Which is exactly why I think it's a poor analogy for Decking... glad you're finally starting to catch my drift

EDIT: And here we are back again at a lack of interesting cultural references/shared imagery. When I think of Decking, I think of stuff like Neuromancer, which I find interesting and (potentially) exciting. For someone who doesn't have a good reference or idea already, I can see how Decking might seem boring to them (especially if all they have to go on are the rules in 4th or 5th edition SR....)

You'll forgive me if I don't find anything Deckers can do to be exciting in the same way as shooting things, stabbing things, and hurling magical fireballs, yeah?

~Umi

professional athletes don't get to use them for the most part, probably because if you can't see the really cool thing the athlete just did, it's not all that cool to watch. but seriously, there are in-universe discussions about how adepts aren't even allowed into professional sports in many cases. the market you're looking at is probably only combat biking and urban brawl, and in both cases they are expecting to fight, and i bet they value the ability to move around unnoticed which can be negated with a simple matrix perception check and a commlink if you have wireless enabled.

anyone dealing with dangerous animals - really? you think so? you think the job can't be done a heck of a lot cheaper but just as effectively with a long range dart rifle, or drones? the only animals that can outrange a dart rifle will be magical in nature using magical attacks which you can't dodge anyways, so the reaction is pretty meaningless. the extra initiative passes, well... i can buy those for dirt cheap if i invest in a simple drone. 5,000 nuyen for a doberman, or 6,500 for an aztechnology crawler with a weapon mount, vs at minimum 39,000 for wired reflexes. not to mention the immunity to poisons, not caring about skunk spray, built-in armour, no need for air, immunity to magic that affects the mind, object resistance vs other forms of magic, ability to fit into smaller spaces, etc.

physically dangerous environments: name one where an upgrade with extremely powerful combat 'ware is even remotely justified.



where are the professional athletes with wired reflexes in canon, exactly? unless you mean urban brawl and combat biking, where as i noted above they *are* in combat, and most likely try to use stealth to get better positioning on the other team all the time.

SWAT teams - ummm... are you suggesting that SWAT teams don't get into combat, and never need to rely on stealth? because i'm pretty sure that neither of those things are true, especially in the shadowrun universe, where these are the people you would call to deal with shadowrunners. you know, those people that generally have some form of hacker on their team, and frequently 2-3 heavy combat-focused team members as well? not to mention having to deal with terrorists, which have been responsible for a virus that dealt massive damage across the entire world in recent memory, for example. and out of curiosity, who do you think responds to a report of, say, a rogue technomancer: regular police, or the SWAT team?

The fluff also talks about separate augmented leagues vs non- . Also, UFC-style fighting and such.



Sure, if you think you can train a hellhound, barghest, or one of the various large biodrones in Running Wild while it's unconscious from tranq darts, or remotely using drones, go right ahead.



Define justified. Do you think 90% of the consumer crap companies try to sell us today is "justified"? It doesn't need to be logical, it just needs to marketable. How much is an improved chance of avoiding/surviving a workplace accident worth to someone in a dangerous job? Besides, do you think the corp is paying for these things? Heck no, the employees buy them for themselves.

I'm picturing an advertisement showing a construction site, with some workers on break drinking soykaf and chatting when suddenly there's the sound of splitting metal cables and someone off-camera yells "Look out!" just as a plasteel I-Beam crashes down onto one of the workers while the rest dive out of the way with lightning reflexes.

Cut to a low camera shot looking up from the point of view of the crushed worker with the faces of his colleagues peering down at him, grimacing and going "Ooh, that had to hurt!", and then the foreman leans in from out-of-frame and says with a smarmy grin, "Shoulda bought Ares Reaction Enhancers!"

Cue jaunty whistling jingle in the background and calming voice-over confidently intoning, "Ares: Making The World A Safer Place".

~Umi

oh sure, a construction worker is going to buy 40,000 nuyen worth of combat 'ware out of pocket. yup, i bet that happens all the time.

it has to be justified because 'ware is bloody expensive, and odds are good that the only way the average person is getting them is if their employer offers a plan for it. you can sell someone a 200 dollar jacket because there's a pretty decent chance of having 200 dollars (or nuyen, in shadowrun) to spend on a semi-regular basis. you can't do that with a 40,000 dollar piece of combat cyberware. and good luck persuading a construction company that they should offer their employees wired reflexes.

also, i'm not sure why you think someone who trains hellhounds is going to have combat cyberware. you start training when they're young, before they are dangerous, otherwise you don't train them at all.

Reaction Enhancers are only 13k per rating in 5E (up from the 10k per rating in 4E).

That's in the lower end of the price range for cheap cars like a Honda Spirit, Chrysler-Nissan Jackrabbit, or Ford Americar (in both 4E and 5E, even). I can easily see Construction Worker Larry saving up for a Rating 1 Reaction Enhancer, especially if he witnessed a buddy get crushed by falling equipment - call it insurance against his employer cutting corners on safety. Or maybe he realizes he's getting old and will never make it to retirement age if he doesn't keep pace with the younger workers. And it doesn't hurt that it'll help out when he pals around with his buddies, tossing the old pigskin or hitting the batting cages.

Yeah, it's not chump change, but when a pickup truck costs 25,000 nuyen (down from 35,000 in 4E), investing in Reaction Enhancers sounds pretty feasible for a lot of folks. Given that the Average Joe only has a Reaction of 3, even a Rating 1 system is a huge improvement. If you told modern day folks they could permanently improve their physical reflexes and reaction speed by 33% for the cost of an economy car, plenty of people would make that investment.

~Umi

It was only 11k just a few years back in 2072. And they don't buy it out of pocket, they buy it through corporate purchase programs and have the cost deducted from their paycheck over time. Nothing like the good ol' company store, hm?

There's also a certain extent to which some people doing work around hazardous sites (certainly not all, often tragically) will find a way to make the money work if it means they'll be making it home at the end of each day.

This is the crux of it. It doesn't matter how much we dress up how good deckers are/potentially can be, the reality is that while almost all players are interested in playing Samurais, Adepts, Magicians, hell even Faces and Riggers (to perhaps a lesser extent)! a much smaller percentage will have any interest at all in playing deckers and would still probably prefer all the rest regardless.

This has been the case ever since 2nd edition and the writers have been playing catch up ever since. They have recognised the problem, yet perhaps they haven't reached the best solution.

Someone mentioned earlier that perhaps the problem stems from the fact that we can't relate to decking, but I don't think this is the case. I personally spend much more of my time using the internet and spending time in simulated environments (games) than I do in combat (which I never do).

Personally, if I was faced with a reality where adopting cyberware would aid my survivability measurably against 95% of the enemies I was going to face but made me more vulnerable to the other 5%, I'd probably take that risk. However, 5th Ed doesn't make that assertion. In essence it asks that the samurai increase their effectiveness by 1% over 95% of enemies to become more susceptible to the rest which tends to result in the risk never being taken. That design choice was a mistake.

Pro Athletes, check Prime Runners (Seattle Seahawks linebacker with titanium bone lacing and WR2, plus a bunch of bio.) and Shadowbeat. NFL, NBA, and (to a lesser extent) MLB all use cyber to some extent or another. One could reasonably extrapolate that both Hockey and Football (the real kind) may also allow cyberware. I hold that rugby wouldn't, but they have Trolls.

I didn't mean to imply that SWAT teams are not combat capable nor that they do not get into combat. I must admit a lack of knowledge on the subject, so please forgive that. What I have come to understand (no doubt from too many apocryphal sources) is that SWAT teams rely shock and awe tactics the vast majority of the time. While combat capable, they generally try to prevent outright combat by taking the opposition down before the opposition realizes their drek has hit the cooling turbines. Come to think of it though, SWAT units are going to be a thing of the past (at least as we know it), most of what would be handled by such teams is likely going to be handled by the Rapid Response Teams of whatever security company is being paid for security. On corporate property, we not only have much scarier foes, but fall back to (what I feel is the logical assumption, ymmv) security forces with effective support and back up.

I love people discounting combat bike and Urban Brawl players as 'not professional athletes' when the source material points to both as bigger draws than any of the 'traditional' pro sports.

i'm not saying they aren't professional athletes. i'm saying they get into combat, can reasonably expect any security loopholes to be targeted (if nothing else, by people trying to rig the game) and value the ability to hide, which means that they are not going to be looking for wireless required products if there are other options.

the others all seem kinda crazy (bone lacing, for example, must lead to a lot of fatalities in football) and not very well thought out. but ok, so we now have one market for combat cyberware apparently that isn't terribly worried about the stealth portion (although if i was a professional athlete, i would still be inclined to worry about 'ware getting bricked by people trying to rig the game).

in any event, given that there are probably only a few thousand professional athletes in the entire UCAS, i doubt that's exactly a huge market when compared to military, not to mention that you're going to want those advantages for your own private soldiers even if for some reason you're too stupid to take over the entire market by being the only person to offer a superior product.

Well that's you.

Across dozens of groups and hundreds of players I have not seen what you are trying to portray. Do some players prefer X to deckers sure, but in my experience deckers are easily in the top 3 archetypes for what players want to play even back in 1e and 2e where they were a pain in the ass to play. They are the thieves of the modern world, and we never had problems getting people to play thieves in D&D.

Even before PF decided they needed to be World of Warcraft-style DPS.

Point very much stands.

The problem with hackers is that they do to shoot things, stab things, and hurl fireballs - as online avatars in a virtual world. Unfortunately, this setup does not lend itself well to group play. So with the advent of SR4, on-site, real-time hacking was emphasized more, but the rules were still needlessly complex, and hacking took too long to be viable in most firefights.

Everyone opted out of the GITS-style hacking of 'ware and guns by making everything skinlinked, rejecting the concept utterly, only to have SR5 shove it down their throats even harder. Honestly, I don't blame them. GITS itself doesn't have a separate subset of people solely concerned with matrix things - matrix security is omnipresent (and there are still times when people run things in "autistic" mode to prevent being hacked). If non-hackers could assume a more active role in defending themselves, instead of risking permanent damage to their 'ware in a lopsided dice contest with an unseen attacker, it would probably have been better received.

I don't think you can say for sure that behaviour shows what you're saying it does, because in SR4 there was basically no reason to choose to have wireless on; I'm reasonably sure that most people would feel otherwise with sufficient motivation to have wireless active (and a better system than bricking).

The real problem, by the way, doesn't seem to be a competence issue, but an approach issue - a good system would require that the bonus and hacking systems be developed in tandem; because of the way CGL seems to assign work, that wasn't really possible.

Why are you 'reasonably sure' of this in the face of SR5? There -is- sufficient motivation to have wireless active, given the very, very good wireless bonuses available (where else can you get Limit increases after all?), and players still hate it.

Even the Missions writers opt-out of it by setting their adventures in places with such massive Noise ratings that wireless is moot.

This seems like a turnaround from previous argumentation on the subject...

A present motivation is not the same a sufficient motivation.

I have to admit I do not follow the Missions much beyond guidelines laid down by Bull and Co. for reference points that may not otherwise be well defined...

So do the Missions, which should sort of serve as examples of the game system in action, really opt for the TJ Fallacy and remove the issue in question(wireless) from the overall equation (playability) so it is not an issue(via Noise so wireless is moot)?

If so, that..... is sort of depressing.

The current season is in Chicago, and thus has a Background Count and Noise level of 2 basically everywhere; you'd need to slave stuff up to keep wireless working.

Of course, odds are that was in planning long, long before the SR5 mechanics were laid down, given what I've heard about the Missions publishing schedule.

My point is that there -is- no sufficient motivation to get players to make choices that are, for their characters, deeply stupid. The risks are too high.

As far as I can see there are very few items in which turning on the Wireless is really a good idea. There are many where it helps, but don't have to be on for any length of time.

Bug Scanners, Jammers, MedKits etc. all allow an unskilled person to have a decent dicepool when the wireless is on, but these items are then turned wireless on once, used, then turned off again. The Hacker could attack during that period but that would probably require the hacker being proactively looking for you already and hacking peripherals as a minor annoyance is not what people are worried about anyway. Plus buying a cheap Drone and sticking a Wrapper program on it and running silent should make any general matrix scans ignore your items like these.

The main ones that having Wireless on 'ubiqitously' I can see are Wired/Reflex Enhancers, Smartguns/Laser Sights and Audio/Visual perception mods as all of these add dice to passive things you'll always be wanting to use.

Though a sequence of Wireless activation/deactivation (Free action to activate the wireless, simple action to fire, simple action to deactivate? Is this allowed?) within your initiative pass could exploit the bonus for Smartguns without leaving it vulnerable, the others you'll want active out of your IP as well.

Then people start weighing up the options and come up with the mildly silly solutions of carrying a drone so you can stick a cyberprogram on it like Wrapper to hide the icons as something innocuous, combined with running silent and carrying a pocket full of silent RFID chips. Now the passive scanning will either not find the Silent Running icons and if they do will find that they are really datachips with porn stored on them or a pocket full of random tools and screws and such. if the alert does go up the Hacker has to take matrix perception tests to identify that the silent icons exist and then after doing so will have all th eicons be presented to him as a nonsense to make picking the Wired Reflexes out really hard so it becomes a guessing game that you stack in your favour by carrying a pocket full of irrelevant RFID chips.

It feels metagamey and a bit silly to do this. But if the decker gets it wrong and bricks one of your RFID chips then you will know that you're being targeted and shut everything off wireless. They get one chance to brick your key gear and you can stack the deck against them really easily for very little investment. (Y1k for the cheapest drone, Y250 for the cyberprogram, Y1 or Y10 for the RFID chips).

The trick to designing a system for this, though, is modulating the risk according to the reward. What you're saying is not intrinsically true.

(of for fuck's sake, bitching about wireless bonuses AGAIN? Really?)

The fundamental problem that I see with the decker and the Matrix rules is not that the role isn't fun, and not even the pizza problem...it's that in order for the decker to be able to do their thing, they need a Matrix system to deck.

The environment that the decker is operating in NEEDS a Matrix system to interact with. Which usually means in a place where the system was hooked up to a bunch of things for the decker to do Stuff with. Whether it's popping open doors, turning off cameras, or going toe-to-toe with a hostile decker, there always had to be a Matrix network/system in place for any of that to happen. Once you took that away or the decker was in an environment where there was no Matrix system in place, they were useless as a decker. So in the middle of the city they'd be fine, but outside the city and in the boonies, or out at sea, or in any other low-tech environment, they were fucked. If all the doors were operated by hand, or there were only dogs to keep watch of intruders, and no enemy decker at all, well those aren't exactly problems that need to specifically call for the decker. At that point, now they have to rely on skills that are non-decking related to do anything.

To me, this would be if the mage could only do mage things if they were on the astral plane, and where outside of it, they couldn't do any mage things.

SR4 sort of tried to address this by adding wireless hacking, commlinks, and PANs. The problem with that, as was the whole reason for wireless bonuses to even exist, was people turning off their commlinks in the middle of combat, not connecting any important devices to their PAN, skinlinking everything, and other stuff. So nothing really improved.

The other archetypes really don't have this problem (and before any of you bitch, I'm looking at pure archetype builds, and not any of the weird hybrids):

-Street samurai, while combat oriented, are the guys that tend to take augmentations. And not every single augmentation is geared towards use in combat. There's plenty of more utility augmentations that are perfectly viable to take.

-Magicians and adepts are overall the most versatile. They have a dozens, if not hundreds, of spells/powers to choose from, all of them for different uses. While some spells/powers are more sought after then others, they still have a wide amount of uses: some can let you breathe underwater, some can blow through walls, some can read minds, some can make you invisible/harder to see, some can make people more interested in listening what you have to say, the list goes on. So there's certainly a lot a mage can do beside throw fireballs and heal people or the adept being able to do Jedi ninja shit. And I don't think I need to state how freakin' awesome spirits are, no?

(...and yes, I know I totally made an argument supporting MagicRun. Shut up)

-Riggers have the benefit of being able to control drones AND vehicles, and not because they all have guns on them. While serving as the wheelman, they can still get the team places. And if they choose to invest karma into the appropriate skills and the right nuyen purchases, could potentially take the team anywhere over any terrain, land, sea, or air. Drones have multiple uses besides disposable combat allies. They're useful for scouting out an area before your team hits it for a run. They can also be used for sending them into places that the actual runners can't go (and for certain non-astral places that even spirits don't want to go. A drone can't exactly refuse the rigger if it doesn't want to go in that abandoned, irradiated nuclear plant).

(which by the way, if there was ONE good thing that came out of blurring the line between hackers and riggers in SR4, it was that riggers could hijack enemy drones on their own. While now in SR5, only the decker can do that, and who isn't going to be as good at using the drone as the pure rigger is)

-The face, admittedly does have a similar problem problem to the decker in that they can only shine in specific scenarios, in this case social situations...but not in combat situations. Their thing is either negotiating with the Mr Johnson over the pay, convincing the suspicious guard that "You don't need to see our SINs", and the social engineering for setting up an inside job. And while the things that the face can do are a little bit more specific then what the other archetypes can do, they're still plentiful enough that could happen anywhere. The problem, for the longest time, was in combat. When it came to combat, the face could not contribute anything meaningful that only they could do as the face. They would either pull out their gun and fire their shots, but they just wouldn't be as good as the street sam, or they'd run away as their more capable teammates took care of things.

SR5, however, started to change things around when they added more functionality to the Leadership skill. Now, when the bullets started to fly, the face could contribute to combat in ways that only they could: they could perform the equivalent of a Teamwork test with one of their allies, even if they don't have the proper skill; or even give them a boost to a teammate's Initiative. So in other words, now the face has the option of being more like the Warlord from D&D 4th. While they still aren't as versatile as the other archetypes in combat, I found it to be an overall good step in the right direction.

So with all of that, the decker has nothing when it comes to the other archetypes. Nowhere near the versatility that the other archetypes exhibit. Nor is it the type that has options available for a large enough variety of situations to do Stuff. This of course goes for in and out of combat.

The intent of the wireless bonuses I don't mind; to add solid mechanics to gear and 'ware hacking, to give something for the decker to do when there is no Matrix system to fuck around with. But, as has been said before, it's the execution that was off. The simple fix without changing the mechanics would be to just change the bonuses around, and to clarify which are gear that's supposed to be connected to the Matrix, and what's just being connected to PANs. Fix that and things could be kosher.


Um, no.

The choice of Chicago has nothing to do with making wireless bonuses. At all. Please don't try to find twisted reasons just to fit your own justifications.

Have you even read Chasin' the Wind? It's almost entirely inside the Containment Zone, where noise is indeed a problem... and the enemies you encounter have 'wireless is turned off' in their stat blocks. Chicago being the setting wasn't chosen because of this, but it definitely isn't the best way to show off your new Wireless Matrix by being the setting for the very first published official adventures.



Why yes, if you designed an entirely different system from the one that was published, it might work better.

What the hell are you even trying to argue?

Limit Increases do not require you to have active Wireless enabled. Only the Dice Bonuses require that. *shrug*
And many of the non-dice related wireless bonuses were just stupid and unnecessary to begin with.

Cloned... *sigh*

@tasti man LH

While i don’t like your style, I understand the intention and the feelings behind your post very well. I also have to admit, that I mostly follow your argumentation. You are right, that being a hacker is a problem, because his main-playground is “beyond” the other character-classes´s reality. It is even farer away than the astral-ground, because from this field you have at least minor influence on the real world (seeing, hearing it, maybe summoning a spirit, direct interaction via manifestation, no need of technical infrastructure, etc.). So SR5 (and even SR4) tried to press this class into a role that is - realistically speaking - nonsense. The future of hacking will surely not be, that systems are not connected to the matrix-infrastructure, so that you need to come physically into close-range to affect them. I wouldn’t have a problem if the developers had argued, that they wanted to make playing a hacker more attractive and therefore twisted and raped the rules as much as needed to reach this goal. Unfortunately they tried a semi-technological-argumentation that was so stupid, that I feel intellectually offended.

IMHO the classic SR-feeling is gone. The superhuman-and rare mage is now just another kind of support-character, that doesn’t even cause the raise of an eyebrow anymore if he flings his spells, the emaciated hacker that hardly knows how to survive into reality, now hast to be physically active team-member, because he is not able to stay at home anymore. The samurai needs to be in fear to switch on his implanted cyberware, because most of his stuff is only working usefully, if wireless is activated and therefore in danger of being hacked. It is so absolutely no-fun anymore, if I were a woman, I would cry.

1st and 2nd edition rogues were not DPS. they had a lousy chance to hit (worse than priests, as i recall, but at least a bit better than mage THAC0), no weapon specialization, no exceptional strength bonus, and their only damage-increasing ability (backstab) was limited to one attack per round even if they did use dual weapons (which was an option introduced at one point, but since they were lacking in bonuses to hit outside of their backstab and already had bad THAC0 to begin with, it wasn't exactly a great idea). also, their weapon options were in general not terribly impressive either.

in fact, most of the time, you would only get to use your backstab once per fight never mind once per round, unless you had something like improved invisibility running.

you're thinking of 3rd edition rogues, which had the potential to dish out a lot of DPS. totally different thing.

as far as deckers being weak out in the middle of nowhere, i'd have to say that the GM really should be tailoring the job offers to the group, just like the fixer and Mr Johnson would be.

i mean, if the group consists of 3 heavy weapon specialists and a mage who only casts indirect AOE combat spells (and health spells so that he can soak drain better and act more often), the fixer isn't going to tell the Mr J that he's got the perfect group available to steal a prototype from a facility while remaining undetected. the same should hold true for groups that feature a hacker who can only hack.

Nothing wrong with a bit of man-tears. Just be sure they get sucked back up into your eyes before people can see them.

PF (aka Pathfinder) is what I was talking about. You know, essentially D&D 3.75, went a bit farther than 3e did on that same route. Not sure what you thought I was talking about, honestly.

edit: ah wait, i misread. my bad. thought you were saying the point about people choosing DPS classes stands, which is exactly the opposite of what you were saying.