SR5 Core 278


SR5 Core 250+Errata

Has this been fixed or addressed by the writers somewhere? My google-fu is failing me.

Sounds right to me. However, I house rule that you can have cybernetics/bioware up to losing a full essence before you lose a point of magic (I don't really like Technomancers and nobody has ever made one in my groups). I always liked the old skool Combat Mage having cyber eyes...

I find myself using the dice engine, and not even all of that, more than any actual rules-as-written in my Shadowrun games. If there is something in the rules or background you don't like, and your group agrees with the change, swap it out and carry on.

That wasn't actually the question.

The question was:

Why does the mage get to recover from 0/(n>0) magic while the technomancer can't recover from the same situation?

Read the bolded sections.

If there is something in the rules or background you don't like, and your group agrees with the change, swap it out and carry on.

You were saying?

It could be part of the overall hostility SR5 seems to have towards technomancers, or it could be two areas that were supposed to be handled similarly, that weren't cross-checked against each other for consistency. Too soon to tell. We have a basic errata out, but there are still huge issues with contradictory rules and blatant errors. In archetypes, for example, we are not talking relatively minor errors, but things like a street samurai that is more than 200,000 over budget, or a combat mage with an Edge of 2 that should actually be 7.

Does that have to be an either/or?

And I'm with psychophipps about the swap if everyone in the group is okay with it.

As written, the only way to cut a mage off from their magic is to put them below essence 1 before they initiate and after that you have to kill them.

This is entirely at odds with SR4's (and I presume prior editions') rules for Magic and Resonance: if you ever hit 0, it's gone for good.

I'm less concerned about the imbalance between SR5's Mages and Technomancers (let's face it, the old guard has it out for Tehnos) and more about the editing quality of all SR5 publications. Moreso, I'm concerned that this is not an error in editing, but an error in game balance/design.

frankly, i'm not convinced that losing the technomancer quality is much of a drawback.

i mean, having ever been a technomancer and invested in it, that's a drawback. but once it's gone? pick up a decent deck and you're probably better off.

Well, it's better in SR5 with how skills have been changed, compared to SR4 where technomancers had their own versions of the Cracking & Electronics groups. In SR4, you'd not only have to invest nuyen in a commlink and software (if you hadn't already), but also you'd be starting your skills all over again.

Considering how it's something you paid for with game resources, it's a loss either way.

If anyone that actually cares about having a viable karmagen one day ever stumbles upon this thread, let me know your opinion on the Resonance/Magic depletion divide.

it was a loss *before* you stopped being a technomancer too.

Obviously you can fix parts of the game that don't make sense to you or you dislike so long as people agree with it. Houserules are fine. Houserules are great. Any game can be tweaked to perfection with houserules. But if you need a myriad of houserules to make the game playable and fun for newbies that don't know better than picking a suboptimal character option (just because it looks, I dunno, fun?), what the heck are we paying for? 5e breaks about as many things from 4e as it fixes and the errata is a joke.

I'll phrase my question more specifically: Have any of the writers, to your knowledge, addressed the change in the Magic Burnout rule or the lack of similar change in the Resonance Burnout rule between 4e to 5e? I don't care how they address it ("working as intended" or "whoops, no it should be...") just so long as they do.



Though you're being passive agressive about it, I assure you, your position was quite clear in the first post.

Technomancers' main inferiority to deckers is that they can't be masters or slaves and other kinks include being unable to reconfigure their attributes or run programs. In terms of game resources however, they are superior to deckers, because they can actively upgrade their 'deck' without buying a brand new one. In addition, they start out with superior (albeit fixed) matrix stats, compared to what a decker can get out of their deck, essentially saving 214,000 or 345,000 in gear.

Technos get the short straw in comparison to Magic users because the karma costs are heavily skewed towards mages and the community that was listened to during the design of 5e was riddled with people like you.

Technos are part of the game and have been for years, so if you want them gone... too bad. No one is forcing you to play or allow technos at your table, but for those that want to play them, your opinion of "playing a techno is a waste" is entirely nonconstructive.

i don't want them gone.

i just feel that mechanically, right now, if you are choosing to be a technomancer, you are choosing to do so at the expense of being as effective as you could be.

also, you've got a few things wrong.

first off, i don't know that many technomancer builds that have 4/5/6/7 as their attributes. even if they do, the fact that you can have the matrix attribute that you need right now as the highest is a huge deal.

secondly, technomancers suffer from the fact that they can't readily pick up programs. for a decker, that's a few thousand nuyen. for a technomancer, it's a few hundred karma. considering some of those programs are worth an additional +1 to whatever attribute you care about right now, that's yet another loss in terms of effective matrix attributes.

thirdly, technomancers suffer from reduced resources elsewhere in chargen, because they gave up something good to get something that is quite frankly not very good, having had to assign at least priority C to being a sub-par decker.

fourthly, the fading values on their complex forms mean that you basically can't even afford to use the one unique thing you get. not that most of them are very unique, mind you.

fifthly, you suffer if you should ever decide to get augmented. for example, if you should ever choose to get a cerebral enhancer, on account of it boosting a large number of your offensive dice pools, now it's costing you essence and resonance.

sixthly, it costs a huge amount apart from just the priority spent on being a technomancer just to be an effective decker, and whereas the decker can spend excess resources on gear to shore up gaps, the technomancer has to spend their entire technomancer priority on being a technomancer (at best, they get two skills... and they basically need those two skills if they're going to make use of the one other half-decent thing they have that a regular decker doesn't; sprites)

seventhly, and in what i suspect many GMs don't particularly like, you're giving up the opportunity of being an adept decker, which is about as far ahead of the standard decker as the standard decker is ahead of the technomancer.

that is a huge amount of drawbacks as compared to a regular decker.

whether i like it or not (and i don't), technomancers got repeatedly kicked in the nuts in 5th edition. whether you like the concept or not, the simple fact is, the moment you chose to be a technomancer, you already resigned yourself to overpaying for stuff that you can barely use, losing out on versatility, and having lower dice pools. therefore, it was already a loss before you stopped being a technomancer.

this isn't a question of liking technomancers or not. this is about recognizing that a perfectly valid character type got nerfed hard, then got nerfed hard again, and then again, and if the developers had stopped to ask me at any point i would have plainly told them to their face that they went too far in their nerfs and created an archetype that costs more than it's most comparable archetype, and is at the same time less effective. my personal fix for technomancers is two-fold: lower fading values on their complex forms (which are all too often not even doing things a regular decker couldn't have done anyways), and dropping the priority cost for technomancer abilities by one level. i would also consider altering the echo that gives them a program to letting them have a blank program slot which they can swap just like a regular deck instead of a fixed one (and possibly even giving submersion grade blank program slots), but i'd have to see more play with the first two changes before making that decision.

so no, the devs didn't listen to me when making SR5. technomancers were a bit too strong in SR4, and i would have recommended that they tone them down a little bit for the new edition. but i would never have suggested they should be made so much worse than a regular decker. i feel like several different people all nerfed technomancers, and then nobody cared enough to bother playtesting them after all the changes were made to realize that they went too far.

I'm calling shenanigans.

TMs are powerful. I would actually say, more powerful than a decker in the Matrix.

Say you're fighting a decker, he has an agent. This is going to be a bit annoying, right? Totally one sided. Well, puppeteer his deck and make him logout. Because he didn't switch to AR, he gets hit with dumpshock and resets his deck, which kills the agent and wipes all his marks. So if he wants to fight you, he'll have to do it in AR, which to be fair, you'll just be faster and better if you're running hot.

Say we're in a host. We set off an alarm. As a decker, we're screwed. We have to hope we can finish whatever it is we're doing while dodging IC.

As a TM? We'll we can just compile a high level crack sprite and we've locked up the first IC from loading for level in turns. Which should be enough time to finish up our data steal or whatever it is we're doing.

There are a few other awesome tricks, like using a machine sprite to help the Street Sam shoot better. Or use the machine sprite to use gremlins on someone with a monowhip causing them to critical glitch and take off their arm, or cause explosive rounds to blow up your opposition's guns in their hands.

TMs are still the masters of the Matrix. They have to hyper specialize in that role, and they still come out on top like in 4th. A decker how ever, much like in 4th ed, are going to have a much easier time spreading out their skills. It's easy for a decker to cut their arm off and be a half decent Sam. TMs will have a much harder time at that. But since TMs have to rely so heavily on their mental attributes, it means that they also make pretty good faces. But you'll basically be a hacker face with no combat skills at all.

yes, well, when you automatically win every dice roll for no good reason whatsoever, i suppose almost anything looks overpowered.

here's an alternative possibility:

that hacker has a better defensive dice pool than you because he can just put a 7 into the appropriate matrix attribute and he doesn't need to spend as much (if anything at all) on physical attributes to be moderately useful outside of the matrix so he also has a good mental attribute to go along with it, and in any event defensive dicepools are better in SR5 matrix to begin with. as a result, the technomancer eats 8-9 points of fading and accomplishes absolutely nothing. assuming he can even spot the decker in the first place. and assuming the decker doesn't just win initiative and land an attack first, and just knock out the technomancer in a single shot.

or, the hacker has better stealth, and doesn't get noticed as easily, so that one turn grace period (note: the next turn, the host can just launch another IC and you're just as screwed then) the technomancer gets quite possibly merely puts them level with the hacker, or may not even be able to do that. meanwhile you haven't actually done anything about the alarm, or the spider, both of which are the major problems, in either case (again, assuming the decker even triggers an alarm at all, which isn't a given because he most likely has better dice pools unless he's doing something really screwy).

of course, that even presumes you have a crack sprite with services available, considering just about everything under the sun costs a service now. those bonus dice to tech-only stuff a machine sprite can give? with a small investment in charisma and leadership, anyone can give a small bonus to just about anything. the glitch thing? yeah, that's real nice. except you can only do that if they have wireless enabled. the magician can already cause accidents, except that they don't even care if anything is wireless at all, and you probably already have a magician in the party because unlike the technomancer they're more than worth the cost.

the best use of a technomancer is to have a technomancer contact for your decker, so that the contact can boost your decker in important situations. about the only halfway decent tricks the technomancer has left are to buff other people by a little bit, and you'd be better off at that supporting by making a face/shaman and loading up on useful buff spells, because then you can provide bonuses to basically everything whether it involves technology or not.

To be fair, though, Jaid, Technomancers are not all that bad.

I am currently playing a Technomancer with a Resonance of 3, 2 Complex Forms (Resonance Spike and Infusion of Firewall) and Stats of 3/5/6/3, and an Essence of 5 (1 Point worth of 'ware). She has shined over the Hacker/Rigger we have (who is honestly not all that good at either role, due to the nature of the split technologies involved) and is generally capable of taking on Hosts of Rating 5 or less on a consistent basis. She specializes in Data Processing and Sleaze Actions, obviously, as her Attack and Firewall are both only 3's. However, her Firewall can and does often go to as high as 6 due to Infusion of Firewall. And her Dice Pools are really respectable, in my opinion. Sadly, I often hit Limit (even on the 5 and 6 Limits) on my rolls, but that is unavoidable due to the dice dynamic (Last session I rolled 7 Times, Hit Limit on 6 of them, and, when I absolutely needed to break Protection on the file spent Edge for the last roll, gaining 13 hits to completely devastate my Limit 3). I absolutely HATE that mechanic, and consider it the worst of the lot in SR5.

Complex Forms SUCK for Fading, to be sure. Needs to come down about 2-3 points or so to be competitive with the Mage's Drain.
And I am still on the fence about Sprites. They have their uses, but I am not all that impressed about them YET. Time will tell.
And the lack of Program options really blows too.

Ahh well...

you're better than the guy who took two areas of focus which offer very little overlap except in terms of the areas they both draw resources from (that is, both of them need to spend a lot of nuyen on toys to function, and the attributes to focus on for both archetypes are generally not the same). that's no surprise. if he was instead to make a character that has two areas of specialty that don't draw too much from the same pool of resources, for example a decker/medic, or even a cyberlimb-enhanced combat decker, i expect he would be doing a lot better than he is.

edit: also, like i said, if you always get incredible rolls, just about anything looks good. and you seem to have some very impressive rolls on a regular basis, from what i've heard.

Yeah, the rolls come up pretty good, about 65-70% of the time. Last Friday was freaky because all her rolls either hit Limit or blew past them. Only rolled 7 times, though...

I agree that the other Decker (Single aspect) could probably rival me (though his money would only have allowed him to have one more point of Deck attribute over my Living Persona, though configurable which is a great advantage). Programs make a big difference, though.

Have you looked at the Fading code of Puppeteer?


The sprite needs to be already using this power when you trigger the IC, and it only lasts Level/2 turns

Good thing edge exists. You could always puppeteer at level 1, soak 6 fading with res + wil. So a well optimized TM, so that'd be 11 or so soak dice, average 3 hits. While 3 stun is a bit much. The enemy decker now has to soak 6p with only his willpower since his deck just reset and will be taking -1 to all actions for 5 minutes. I'm pretty sure 3 stun is worth that.

And why wouldn't a TM have compiled a 6 or higher crack sprite in his down time, since it only cost him time and that's it. And 3 turns is more than enough time to get most paydata and avoid IC and jackout.

3 Stun is NOT worth that, not in the moment, not in the least.

You make assumptions that a character is willing or able to compile and Register such a Sprite of that capability. I assure you that not all Technomancers are that capable.

3 Stun is worth that. Or would you rather fight the decker in cyber combat and have them hit you with data spike and take more than 3 stun?

Most PC TMs should be able to. With 6 resonance and 6 Registering and a handful of edge, registering a level 6 Sprite is more than doable. If you intentionally hold yourself back and make a TM with 3 resonance and low to no Registering skill, and ignore edge, because you think its cheating or something, then yes, you are playing a suboptimal build that will have a hard time registering a level 6 sprite, as well as hacking into anything notable. And at that point, I do have to slightly question, why are you playing a TM? But considering your legendary rolls, TJ, I'm pretty sure you can still do it.

That 3 Stun may come with no effect from the Puppeteer at all. You predicate everything on a successful roll, which you MAY NOT GET. So, you may take that 3 Stun and STILL get owned by the opposing Decker.



Assuming that your Table does not put brakes on such things, like having the Sprite resist with Edge (ala Spirit Summoning/Binding). At our table, Spirits AND Sprites at Force/Level 4+ Spend Edge to resist. So, NO, I generally do not have a Rating 6 Sprite just hangin' out on call, especially since the Compiling would likely kill me, let alone the attempt at actually Registering one of that power level. AS to whether I like this rule or not... Yes I do, I have had no issues with it over the years. I think it fits for the genre, personally. Starting Characters should never be able to summon powerful Spirits or Sprites at Character Generation, even if they ARE min-maxed to hell and back.

As for Holding myself back, No, I tend to make a reasonable character that could be IN THE WORLD with the background given. If that character does not deserve a Resonance 6, or Skills of 6, SHE WILL NOT HAVE THEM. I am far more concerned with having a character that makes a bit of sense internally than with having a maxed out monstrosity just because I can. In the Technomancer's case, she is a starting (experienced) character who can routinely take on up to a Host of Rating 5, and if I am careful, even a Host 6. Maybe in a hundred Karma or so I will start looking at Hosts of 7 to 8, Who knows...

My character generation style has worked out well for me throughout all of Shadworun's History, so I am not likely to change it just to max out starting characters - That is not fun for me. As for Edge, I just think it is generally a waste of resources beyond a few points. If you design your character in such a way as to not really need it, then you don't have to purchase a whole lot of it. One of my big beefs with SR5 (and Limits) is that they design it with the idea that you will want a LOT of Edge, and I just hate that philosophy. *shrug*

As a note... I have played Mages and TM's alike, and I have NEVER summoned Spirits or Sprites of a Force/Level of 6+. I play in the realms of Force/Level 2-4 for Power Level on Spirits and Sprites, because they are useful, and I have rarely needed anything more. I have rarely (once or twice) summoned Force/Level 5. Nothing greater because it is just not a necessity. I think our Combat Mage summoned Force 6 Spirits once or twice (he liked Force 3 and 4 specifically, and the Force 5 Water Elemental almost killed him in summoning alone., let alone trying to bind it), and even a Force 7 once. Our Optimized TM routinely used Level 5 Sprites for his stuff, though I think he went to one of Level 7 once. Personally, I just do not see a need or a reason to use high Force/Level Spirits/Sprites.

even with resonance 6 and compiling and registering 6, it isn't by any means guaranteed to register a rating 6 sprite. and considering it practically burns tasks just to say hello to them, it's not exactly easy to keep a bunch of them on hand, especially if you don't want to worry about starting off a run with several points of fading damage.

Oh great, so all your fancy combat trick takes are
- 2 net hits on a Threading roll
- ...without getting more hits than your Resonance to stay in Stun territory
- Spend Edge to do it at L 1

And your target still resists with his FW, unless you bricked his deck. Which given your default assumption of a godlike roll, seems a far more straightforward route.


Not just compile + register, but also have it around using that power every time you're in a host.

Here's a good general rule: If a thing needs Edge to work, that thing sucks.

Bingo... and Ditto.

Agreed.

The reason technomancers suck is because people build them all wrong, wasting high Priorities on things like their many required skills or high mental Attributes - when they should be like the example character, James' technomancer, and put Priority A in Resources! You can get lots of rounds of ammo to miss people with, 12 months of lifestyle, a Super Platinum DocWagon contract, an expensive SUV that you let your friends drive, etc. Who cares if you don't need 'ware or a cyberdeck? Just get lots and lots of stuff! Be like James!

+1

My Sarcasm meter just pegged in the red.