The obvious question.
Would I have to pay the x1.5 cost for the entire cost of the deck, or x1.5 for the 5000 it costs to have an internal deck made?
One seems much too large, and the other seems too small.

There is no deltaware deck just like there's no deltaware mono-filament whip to go into your deltaware fingertip compartmet if you so choose to have one....you only pay the deltaware cost of actual augmentations...and really, your only saving .2ESS, so it's not like its a savings so huge to be a loophole in the rules.

The entertaining thing to me is the size differences... If a Deck is the size of a Laptop/tablet, it should never fit in the cranium... If you use the concept that the Headware Deck is just a really, really small deck (for no additional cost) then why are we forced into using Decks again, and not Comlinks that can be really, really small to start with... There is an obvious disconnect here.

The way I imagine it is that they replace parts of your skull with the cyberdeck's internals.

Anyway, you want disconnect, how about when cyberdecks were the size of desktops and weighed just as much but could also be cyberware put in to your noodle?

The point is, decks are illegal, and Betaware (the best you can get under availability 12) takes 3 hits on a cyberware scanner, and 4 hits on an assensing roll to detect. Only moderately useful, but worth paying an extra 2500 for. The saved essence is just a bonus.

The cyberware is only the "container" for the stuff, the stuff itself is regular; as was mentioned with the monowhip in the fingertip compartment.

This was also how one of my players in an SR4 game upgraded from a decent, R4 commlink, to a novahot milspec R7 piece. Of course, they had to find (and pay for) a black clinic to do the installation.

Now that I've actually read the rules, maybe a headware deck isn't a good idea. It seems the deck is likely to physical damage quite often, which would be a big pain to repair.

Nope - Had issues with them back then as well... Implanted Comlinks I could get behind... Implanted Decks is just ludicrous. *shrug*

Not to mention bad for the wetware surrounding it.

Decks aren't the size of a desktop in editions 1-3, they're described as keyboard sized. Desktops for decking are covered under rules for terminals or bread-boarding as I recall.
Cranial decks or their components cost four times as much.
(In our games we allow these micro decks as external units, somewhat similar to commlinks in fourth edition.)

IIRC decks weren't the size of desktops in SR3 either. More like the size of a current computer keyboard with a built-in mouse.

And regarding decks, and the previous incarnation of commlinks, I had always figured that there was a lot of extraneous crap that was removed as part of the equipment before implantation. Like the touchscreen, speakers, camera, and all those other extra little doodads that are part of a smartphone or tablet... er, commlink or deck. Just how much volume is taken up by stuff that is beyond useless if it's implanted in your head?

Or if you really wanna save Essence, and really think "how the frag did they fit that in there?", get a delta grade obvious cyberhand for 0.125 Essence and have the deck installed into said hand. Just think how tiny it'd be for a gnome, with a SOTA cyberdeck in their hand... Or possibly a pixie???

And, BTW, cyberdecks aren't illegal (a.k.a. Availability F). They're just Restricted gear, and all you need is a [fake] license for your cyberdeck and there's not much security can do about you having one. Now what you do with it, or the data you have stored within it, well, that's another story altogether.

Sorry, but Keyboard Sized does not fit into the cranium...
There needs to be a certain amount of Suspension of Disbelief, to be sure, but Pre-SR4 and SR5 just do not make sense for Cranial Decking. *shrug*
SR4/4A was the first edition where it truly made sense, since the components were really small to start with (I have seen some stupid small smartphones after all).

Tymeaus, I'd go with what SpellBinder said. I'm thinking that a cyberdeck/commlink is just the processors and memory. You don't need video or audio because of simsense. You don't need keyboard/mouse because of DNI.

It does when you realize the most of the size of cyberdecks was because they still needed old-school non-DNI interfaces like keyboards, a wire spool, networking ports, and chipreaders. They were keyboard size because they needed a keyboard, same reason that the Commodore 64 was.

Not to mention that the headware decks had a fraction of the storage space that regular decks did. SR5 removed all those complications and just said 'pay 5k extra nuyen and stick it in your dome', which I don't like, but it follows at least as good rules logic as anything else in SR5 involving Matrix gear. Which is to say none at all.

After all the surgery and alterations to your skull to get a 'deck to fit in there, don't be surprised if people start calling you "Hammerhead."

Still better than in Shadowrun After Dark (Adult) where one guy has the cyberdeck installed down below in a prosthetic with an interesting way to connect to systems directly.

His Reality Filter was definitely NSFW.

Having him on a run took screwing over the corps to all new and uncomfortable (for the rest of the team at least) levels.

SR2/3 Decks were completely mentally control (RAS overdrive, the deckers wouldnt even be able to move his fingers correctly). The "uses fingers to press button" fluff was in direct contradiction to the rules (at least for simsense interaction).

SYL

the official line on repairing matrix damage doesn't even call for any sort of tools iirc, and definitely no surgery, for cyberware. how does one fix smoking and burnt components without accessing them? i don't know. probably the magic wifi fairies that grant time travel to wifi signals do it.

(more practically, if you assume there is some kind of port that you sort of lift off your scalp to access which the deck slides into, that sounds a lot more plausible... but as far as i can tell, plausibility is not one of the design goals for the 5e matrix).

Take a modern laptop, remove the case, keyboard, and monitor. Replace the disc-based drives with chips. The resulting unit is pretty damn small compared to the full laptop.

Advance 25-45 years. By then "laptops" will likely be mostly empty case with a few chips in it.



-k