Has anyone got practice in mastering a self-aware AI character in SR?
I've got a few ideas for an NPC but bumped into a situation when PC hacker wants to follow(shadow) this AI.

Do the AIs have to buy hacking soft or learn complex forms?
What logic, intelligence, willpower and charisma do they have in social interactions and what influence skills?
Do they have dammage track or what hardware suffers if they get dammaged in matrix combat??
Can they submerge?
Can they rig???

I suppose, this topic has already been thouggt/worked over by some of you for 5th or earlier editions.
Share your ideas and expirience, please.

Far as I know, you cannot actually play an AI in SR5.
Not yet anyway. It is currently a Metahuman game only. Maybe in the expansion for playable races.

I predict that AIs will be taken out and justified by nanites corrupting hard drives or something. Either that or they'll be gutted to the point that they're no scarier than a running copy of Notepad, because they're "too powerful" -- sorta like was done with technomancers.

to be fair, technomancers *were* too powerful in 4th edition. they had massive costs to go with it, which basically meant that you were sometimes way too powerful, and sometimes you were completely useless, with very little middle ground. the problem is twofold: one, players will tend to do everything they can to minimise the amount of time in "useless" mode, meaning that it often felt like you were just always too powerful, and two, being super strong some of the time and super weak some of the time is generally not something you can balance the system around, because you are always either overpowered or underpowered and never "just right".

the problem isn't that they reduced the high end of the curve (although imo they did go slightly too far; they should have let technomancers at least have access to programs without needing an echo for each one, and fading values are generally speaking too high). it's that they left the cost of being a technomancer the same. so now, you suck when out of your element, and are mediocre in your element. which makes it a lot easier to balance the system around now that you don't have to worry about technomancers with 18 stealth at chargen (you need a force 6 registered sprite and a good threading roll, but let's face it even if you "only" get 14 or something like that, it's still too much). but unfortunately, it leaves technomancers costing way too much for what they do, which is mostly being a crappier decker but with one or two kinda neat tricks (which will unfortunately nearly render them unconscious if they want to actually use them) and penalties for getting augmented and an inability to have any magic.

AIs don't exist as playable characters in SR5. They are unlikely to ever exist as characters in SR5, because the whole e-ghost plotline appears to be where things are going instead. I expect jarhead cyborgs, free spirit PCs, and player Infected will be the same.

Good riddance.

Don't cheer too much just yet they will probably replace them with sprites .

Yes, because diversity in PC types is bad for Shadowrun.

I, for one, will miss the variety it can possibly bring to the table if they don't reappear, even though my group hasn't used most of them. Aside from one PC free spirit ever*, my group tends towards the normal metatypes. Heck, the only metavariant I can recall was a dark one NPC. Otherwise, we stick to the normal metas. Though, I am sure that PC Infected are going to be less of a thing due to the metaplot and its affect on the Infected in general. Also, my group will be disappointed if drakes continue to pay a premium for being 'cool', rather than being mechanically worth their cost.

*The free spirit was only there because the GM said 'one magical character only, because Lone Star wouldn't allocate multiple magic types to the scenario' and immediately gave it to the person they commuted to game with before the character creation session had started. No one else was given a shot at the slot. So the one player that never plays anything other than magic types was going to walk. Since a PC free spirit isn't a cost to LS, a non-corp free spirit was pitched and accepted, while all other (normal) magical types were given a firm 'no'. Otherwise, we'd have all been a normal random selection of metatypes.

-Temperance

No, seriously, good riddance to character types that are either one-dimensional (in the case of AI and Spirits, who are each cut off from half of the game) or outright hostile to other players (Infected, even if they pretend not to be).

Thanks everyone. Looks like I didn$t make my point clear.

Has anyone met any rules in th 3rd or 4th Edition on AIs?
Maybe made up his own for hacking=decking campaign antagonists?

If NO , will be grateful for any ideas about system side of an AI.
Grateful in advance)))

The first idea i came up with and this idea has been once used is 'Mental Atributes Only Character'. D'you remember Cerberus fron Street Legends (SR4)? He has mental stats and some equipment. He can rig drones to take part in meatworld combats, he has equipment like his personal comlink with parameters and programs. His condition monitor and matrix init depends on the characteristics of tje node he is currently running on.
But...
First - he was technically a hacker, familiar with code and wirh the need in programs.
And an AI from my point of view doesnot percive the Matrix as a program, but as his world. In this way a self-aware AI might have much more in common with TECHNOMANCERS...
Second - it was in the 4th and now "things have changed"©.
I still can not come up with a decisionboth logically and game-mechanicaly satisfieing.
Puzzled...

wait, you're looking for playable AI rules in SR 5, or SR 3-4?

because the former don't exist, but rules for SR4 certainly do.

Sr3 AIs could be counted on one hand and had a Matrix startling that simply read "Yes I Can".

SR4 jumped from them being very rare, almost unique deliberate accidents of coding that same gods inside the digital world of cyberspace to being player characters.

SR5 doesn't have them yet and I genuinely hope that they go back to being like Morgan and Deus.

Uhh, away from the books now, but I'm pretty sure they're in Unwired and Runner's Companion. I find them to be quite unbalanced, though, the resulting AIs are rather weak and have little potential for improvement, so if they inhibit a nexus, I suggest allowing them to buy upgrades for their home node that mimick implants, with an Essence-like stat to track the limits of customization. That might seem like overpowering them, but you have to remember they can be forced to abandon that node.

Beg your pardon? AIs can't be mages, that's for sure, but how are they cut off from the rest of the game any more than your average rigger? Spirits are even worse an example, since they can even use the Matrix, as long as they stick to tortoise mode or AR (and how many non-Matrix specialists in your games work in the Matrix in VR?)
As for having an agenda different from the party or even conflicting with it, if your players are aware of such possibility and agree to that beforehand, why is that a bad thing? If anything, shadowrunner groups unified by a shared purpose feel one-dimensional and devoid of actual motivations...

Negative - "Note, however, that spirits are unable to see or interpret simsense, electronic projections on screens, or AR displays." RC p92

You might be able to convince your GM to let a spirit learn to "read" a braille data output strip or other output device that creates physical shapes (I recall seeing a clock that created numbers by raising and lowering pins in patterns), but that's about the closest one will get to interacting with the matrix.


-k

It does of course make the computer illiterate quality a no-brainer.

By no brainer you mean 'worth no points', same as a mundane character cannot get points for taking the Incompetent quality in sorcery, enchanting, or conjuring.



Funny story about that, Riggers work just fine in places that have Noise, or are straight up off the grid. Hell, even Deckers can go into areas sitting inside a Faraday cage with their own hardened networks, like truly black corporate sites, and work them from the inside. None of which an AI, which is dependent on a Matrix connection to its home node, can touch.

Oh, and they're all also capable of schlepping a box across a room or flipping a light switch.



Giving players bonus points in exchange for setting up the GM to have to deal with the PVP dickery they were going to inevitably do anyway isn't exactly a good plan. I've never disallowed them in my games, but they do suffer the full and sweeping drawbacks of their choice to make a pariah.

Incorrect unlike Incompetent there is not text in CI about irrelevant or exploitative choices. As to balance free spirits receive a -6 DP penalty for not being able to see the screen but could still make comm calls etc. If they have computer illiterate quality they would have to make a test (with a -8 penalty) to make the call.

Where may this information be found? Which 3e/4e books are the insightful sources of knowledge?

Runner's Companion (Character Build) and Unwired (Additional Character Options) in SR4A.

AIs were not playable in SR1-3 and did not have rules for such.

They were also a lot more interesting Nd meeting even one was a big deal. Hopefuly 5th edition goes back to that. (And also forgets player infected or other non-metahumans).

You are aware that 4th Ed AIs no longer need a mainframe as home node, right?



Somebody who kills people to make a living is a pariah? I guess all your other characters must take the Pacifist quality...

Yeah, but as of SR5 they likely won't be able to run on anything less since even the most powerful commlink can't run the simplest of programs anymore.

Ho! My bad.


AIs can do all of the above with a bit of work, too. After all, any Matrix-capable device is automatically a wireless router, so a drone with a cable is all you need. Or have your team bring you inside on some device.

They don't even have to be a pariah: after all, Infected can live within the confines of the law, if they so choose. And if they just eat up the dead bodies runs tend to produce, I fail to understand how that is any worse than killing the people in the first place.
Anyway, I see no catastrophe if there is intraparty conflict (again, if the players all agreed to that).


That's the reason for my homerules suggestion: as long as the AI home node is a nexus, it might get implant-like bonuses; so it gets to choose whether its wants these or mobility; plus a reason to protect his home node on physical.

Eating people is a touch more personal than the occasional gangland shooting, yes.



Exactly. This is why I think we're talking past each other, as I'm going by SR5 rules due to the thread tag.



Again, not so much in SR5.

Occasional gangland shooting? The very definition of shadowrunning is trespassing (at best) and shooting those who want to stop your illegal acts.



SR5 also has tablet-sized and cranial cyberdecks, and also drones capable of running programs.

Drones are only capable of running autosofts. Any other program has to run on a rigger control console. Cyberdecks are back to being terminals to access grids and hosts rather than pocket supercomputers like 4e's commlinks. The closest thing you can run in SR5 is an Agent, and those are dog-brains like pilot programs, nothing like an actual sentience.

They deserve the old name for them, semi-autonomous knowbots.

SR5, p. 223
A cyberdeck—usually just called a deck—is like a commlink with some extra features. It is a bit bigger than a commlink, about the size of a small tablet or a spiral-bound notebook, or a pair of playing card decks.



...because AIs have not been introduced as characters. The computational capabilities are there, unless AIs suddenly need far more processing power than before. Which is not impossible, but just guesswork at this point.

Well, given that we basically know zilch on how AIs interact with the new Matrix, isn't discussing 5e kinda a moot point? I mean, we've been asked for SR3 or SR4 rules, after all.

I would say quite probable. When commlinks in SR4 are capable of running high end software and hacking into high end networks, and in SR5 are barely capable of running your latest version of Miracle Shooter ™, it's quite likely that A.I.s will be flooding the matrix for newer homes capable of supporting them on 2075.01.01 when the processing power of the commlink and Bust-A-Move ™ drones plummets to the levels of the Atari 2600.

Except that that Terminal somehow magically fits in your cranium when it is an Implant, and is at least tablet sized when it is not. At least Comlinks in the head made a lot more sense than a Tablet that is not a tablet when installed. Of course, that issue existed in SR1-3 as well... *shrug*

Difference being that in at least SR3 (unfamiliar with SR2 or SR1), the more powerful cyberdecks ate up more Essence upon implantation. Now it's a flat 0.4 Essence regardless of the quality of the cyberdeck (less if you get a cyberhand with the deck in it).

I don't see how this is a problem to imagine. Remove the screen, casing, and other bits that don't go into your head. This shouldn't come as a surprise unless you thought the process of installing headware commlinks in 4e involved taking a standard commlink, opening your skull, then placing it inside.

then you should equally be able to get a cyberdeck that doesn't incorporate those completely unnecessary and obsolete components, because seriously: who springs for a cyberdeck and isn't using simsense, which doesn't need any sort of manual input or optical output whatsoever?

Agreed, but it's not core book material, and we haven't seen the matrix book for 5e yet. Even when we do, there's an argument to be made that you'll not want to be stuck with simsense only when it's fresh out of the box (literally or not) and you still have to configure it properly. Or, to quote Unwired;

Headware RCCs went away with 5e as well, thankfully, although the Control Rig remains headware. Although the cranial cyberdeck is back, and way undercosted at .4 essence and 5k nuyen plus the cost of the deck.

At the same time there are AIs which somehow can store themselves in nanites. But really, we are trying to divine meta decision from fluff here, despite the fluff saying "everything changed" and the meta decisions being made a company with a rather spotty record of canon consistency. TL;DR version: Everything is possible.


For the costs of implanted decks, IMO it makes sense that the Essence remains the same. What gets wired to the user's brain is the Simsense interface of the deck, which seems to be equal for all decks, the rest just sits in the skull but might as well be elsewhere. What does not make sense is the ¥ price, because shrinking a deck down to installable size should require a lot of the electronics to be rebuilt. Something like "a headware equivalent of a given deck costs n*[original price]" would be more logical. Problem is, nobody would use a CCD then...

With the requirements of everything using cloud computing in SR5 to get the same bonuses that didn't need such insanity before, networking a few million nanites into the matrix cloud for an A.I. doesn't seem all that unreasonable. However that is also starting to sound like the CFD nanovirus.

Also, didn't most of the nanite stuff just grey goo sometime between 20a and 5e because Reasons?

"Reasons" is very likely to be "Designed killer overwriting nanites to wipe out the other nanites that might interfere with Operation Skullfuck".

Just have to say that I find a whole lot of Asimov-type AI thought in SR. One of my favorite AI examples in fiction is the AI in the novels "Hammerjack" and "Prodigal" written by Marc D Giller. It was, well...frightening...and not in a "randomly has access to nasty IC but still limited like everyone else by program types" kind of way. This thing tore the entire world a new ass when it busted free.

IIRC, only the stuff made by infected nanoforges had a literal meltdown. People with nanites in them now have self replicating colonies as the compromised systems actually now replicate themselves (and induce cravings for raw sand in some).

Of course, instead of Deus and his borg army of cyberzombies, it could instead be Oberoth and an army of replicators.

It's one of the little things that I'd like to fiddle with. There're quite a few small thing sthat jar the overall worldview, here or there, that slip through the cracks. This is on my personal hit list.

That might be because CFD is exactly what I meant when talking about AIs inside nanites

Indeed... I was of the opinion that the Comlink trend was the way to go with that particular line of development. Alas, apparently others wanted big honkin hardware. *shrug*

See, I'd written that off as cruft to ignore because a rogue nanite hive that can Von Neumann is the classical example of an antagonist you literally cannot win against, because one of their available win conditions is to convert the entire planet into grey good and/or themselves.

I mean, I know we can't expect Catalyst to read their own works before writing new ones, but you'd think that someone in that process was familiar with classical science fiction tropes...

SR5, p. 269:

The raw COmmlink idea was problematic, while the dedicated Decking machine was superior for several reasons.

That said, I'd have like to see some more crossbreeding between the two, with COmmlinks having limited access to programs, programs pushed more over pure hardware, and a few other little things. As noted, I certainly wanted two Matrix chapters, one for commlinks and what 99% of the world does online, then a second for Deckers only.

Yep, CFD was expected to reign in the magical cure-all capabilities of nanites, instead they now are even more powerful...