I just finished reading the Matrix chapter and I felt the wireless interactions proposed felt a litte unconvincing from a setting POV and inconsistent gaming-wise . So I would like to hear from the more experienced players around what they think of the following house-rule/modification:

1) the way wireless work, I foresee my group simply switching it off all the times during runs, which sound antithetical to the proposed setting. To contour this I thought that all Wireless devices must be online all the time to have ANY effect at all. So if the Sammy wants to protect his Smartgun from being hacked, he can just turn it off, because "putting it offline" would have the same effect as just turn it off. The in-setting explanation for this would be that after the last matrix crash, all devices were designed to function dependent on the "clouds". In other words, if you examine a Smartgun device in your hand you'll see the only components present are the comms chip and maybe a little storage chip to store user preferences - there isn't an actual processor to make the gun work as intended, because its the cloud which processes this info somehow and sends back to the device.

2) on the other hand, Decker/Mancers can only disable the devices temporarily when bricking them, and not actually fry their circuits anymore. While this sounds like a harsh nerf on the Decker/Mancer part, I think having anything disabled (and necessitating a reboot) during a combat turn is problematic enough. Besides that, it don't really sound plausible to.me that these devices don't have any anti- electrical surge protection at all (when even today's electronic devices have).

tl;dr:
1) all wireless devices must be online all time to work at all;
2) bricking don't fry devices circuits anymore, only disable it temporarily.

Thoughts ? Perhaps the setting explanations could be better worked out, but I definitely would like to change those 2 points. Thanks in advance.

Ok - depends what you mean by "work at all".

For instance, a flashpack, which allows you to gain a wireless bonus of not blinding your friends. Do you mean that it doesn't actually light up unless you have it running wirelessly? Same thing with a Jammer, or a medkit - there are a host of things that do not need the Matrix to function, but gain bonuses if they are connected to it (And before all the Wireless haters come crashing into the thread, I know there are many of those bonuses that don't make sense at all).

So, from a perspective of "things don't work unless they are hooked up to the matrix" there are some issues there - you may want to go through and figure out which don't actually need the Matrix to function.

With bricking only forcing a reboot, it may make deckers too nerfed, as stuff will be back on line seconds after you brick it.

You'll have to playtest it a bunch IMO.

Thanks for the input. Yeah, you have a point. Things like medkits, flashpaks, swords, etc. shouldnt be reliant on wireless mesh to work. When I came up with those ideas, I actually thought about things that utilize some kind of computational processing capability, like smartgun chips, multi-vision goggles, cybereyes, etc. But it really doesnt make sense that things that dont need rely on computational power to operate get depedent on wireless to work.

About the bricking, perhaps if it caused some glitch on a firmware level instead of simple reboot, it could be more significant. Maybe it requires some actual repair, utilizing the current rules as is, only negating the possibiliy of the device being permanently fried even if you fail the repair test.

Would it make more sense to have things be wireless (and hackable) that should be wireless?

A datajack is connected to your brain, and can be controlled through DNI. Trodes are not, and should be open to being attacked in exchange for the cost savings and the convenience of not having a hole drilled in your head.

The same argument can be made with glasses vs cybereyes, and other equipment that replaces cyberware for cheaper and with no essence hit. Why spend the essence to install something in your body? Connecting something directly to your body should provide a benefit. It was an argument being made back at the start of SR4, why shouldn't we use an otherwise terrible idea (everything wired also needs wireless to work) to solve a problem?

It would still allow deckers some decking to do in combat, and the major downside I can think of is it would only hit people who went for convenience over security.

Nice points, Iduno.

What benefits wireless give to cybereyes that a DNI-only interface don't give ? (question is honest, I don't have my book on me)

Can cybereyes communicate directly with the mesh and display different kind of info based on it ? If so, I think it could be a valid argument for implanting wireless-enabled augmentations.

The problem is that sometimes the Wireless Bonuses make a load of sense, and sometimes they are obviously shoe-horned in.
This makes addressing the issue a little more complicated than your proposed fix.

Here for example it makes Sense.
The picture is from a Scene in the series of GitS, where the Sniper character tries a shot over an extremely long distance,
and uses the cyber in his eye, which accesses cloud information to instantly provide him with information about the exact distance, as well as wind speed, etc.
This leads to him missing the first shot though, because the target becomes aware of his position, and can read the trajectory, which enables it to evade.
After that he has to attempt the shot without the eye.
The Flashpack makes a lot of sense as well.

Other things though are a stretch, such as most internal hardware, which might as well work through DNI, as well as some weapons.
Why the Monofilament Whip is easier to handle with Wireless for example still is a stretch to me.

My proposition is for you to houserule for each piece of gear with a bonus.
If you think the bonus could be easily given by DNI, then make it an intrinsic part of the Hardware without Wireless.
If the Bonus could only be given through Wireless (Like the Flashpack), then make it so it can be turned off, but still used.
Whether or not the first group of items are hackable is up to you, I am personally a great friend of hacking everything, as long as it is hard enough.

Basically there are 3 kinds of Equipment in this respect:
1) The one where the bonus at being Wireless makes sense, and where turning it off leaves the Device mostly functional. (The Flashpack)
2) The ones where accessing Cloud information is intrinsically linked to the Devices functions, and so it is not possible to turn it off seperately. (The Hawkeye)
3) The ones where the Wireless Bonus makes no sense, since DNI is sufficient. (Most internal Cyberware)

Let me start with a positive  This is not a bad idea. I don’t think it really makes deckers less effective, but it does remove some of the fear (somewhat irrational) that people can have towards deckers. I would maybe have damage overflow adds to the time it takes to reboot the device so the decker isn’t necessarily spending 2-4 actions to nullify 1 action of a samurai.

I also suggest that you impress upon players to suspend disbelief. Just because some fluff text says that devices ‘fail spectacularly’ does mechanically mean anything. Having your wired reflexes shut down CAN mean that you merely lose the bonus that cyberware provides. Some find this a lot harder to swallow than others.



This can be handled entirely with the setting. The latest crash and Matrix reform took 95% of hackers out of the game. What’s left are basically runners, corp special ops and spiders that work within hosts with mainframes simulating decks but are not portable and perhaps don’t work outside the particular host they manage. Because of this the amount of times your group should come across deckers should be quite rare and so the paranoia is ultimately unjustified.
Remember though that while you’re players are suggesting that they always have their wireless off you can almost guarantee that some will still magically give themselves +2 dice for their smartlinks and have their reaction enhancers stack with their wired reflexes. Make sure this does not happen!

However, at the end of the day there’s no reason why your players can’t act differently to the wider population. As runners they are not a typical group. I sort of consider the paranoia about deckers to be up there with wearing a flak-jacket and helmet everywhere due to paranoia of ISIS. Justified perhaps if you live in Iraq, not so much in say Australia or Canada. Not only that, but in the Shadowrun universe there’s not likely to be much in the media about deckers either.

as an alternate suggestion: hacking still generally takes too long in game terms for it to be particularly valuable for the PCs to hack an enemy's equipment during combat.

it is, however, very worthwhile for the megacorps under the current system to keep a pack of hackers in central locations so that any time they need, they can call up a few dozen hackers to destroy every wireless bonus the poor SOB on the receiving end may have had as well as bricking any gear they can, resulting in a total loss of function purely due to mass attacks (it doesn't matter if one hacker can only deal one box of damage; if you have 20 hackers, you just brick a couple of pieces of gear per round. if you can afford to call up a few security corporations and have them add their own hackers to the mix (or if you just own a few, and their hackers aren't currently busy), even better.

as such, if you basically ignore the concept of wireless bonuses entirely, and just have the *environment* available for hacking (you'll get vastly more out of hacking a random car on the streets and crashing it into your enemies than trying to hack the wireless-enabled smartlink of the security vehicle chasing you, for example), both PC and NPC hackers can have something to do (as has been the case in every past edition) by hacking in combat without needing to indulge in the silliness of a black-ops team needing to connect their spinal columns and eyeballs to the internet, broadcasting their location to everyone, and leaving their gear vulnerable to hackers just because someone decided to save a few hundred nuyen on their half-a-million-nuyen-each team of soldiers.

but seriously, just for reference: a hacker will need to spend at least one action getting marks on a target (assuming they have the target's location, which may take a CT in and of itself). given the difficulty of getting more than one mark in a single action, and the value of having more than one mark (so that you can even attempt the useful actions, you may need to spend more than one action just on that. then you have to actually make your test, 1-2 actions later, to actually do what you wanted to do.

alternately, you can try to brick their equipment, which is again likely to take 2+ actions per piece of equipment unless you're thoroughly optimized (and have marks on the target), which means you're still spending probably 2+ actions (one to find, one to attack) to make them turn off wireless and lose a +2 bonus or something. taking longer for the more impressive pieces of tech that will be guarded by tougher security systems, and bearing in mind that by the time combat breaks out you've probably already run up some OS and are close to getting nuked from orbit (and for the record, rebooting doesn't remove matrix damage... it just resets OS. totally different thing) if you keep hacking difficult targets that will generate more OS on you.

to put it bluntly, a really crappy shooter with minimum investment (read: with 4 dice on the test (1 skill, 2 specialization, 1 attribute) can use suppressing fire to generate on average a -1 dice pool modifier to a *group* of enemies and potentially deal damage to them. which is more efficient: spend a couple CTs hacking someone's smartlink to take away a single person's +2 bonus, or spend a couple CTs suppressing your enemies and giving a whole bunch of them -1 to all their tests except for hiding under cover and not getting shot.

so, don't feel like you need to force wireless bonuses on your players to make hackers useful. it is massively more valuable to hack the environment than it is to hack a person's gear the vast majority of the time (and massively more valuable to just invest in being at least a tiny bit competent-ish with a gun the rest of the time, if you want to be in the shadowrunning line of business). if you want your hackers to feel useful, let them hack the environment instead. it's a lot less dumb than having black ops teams rely on broadcasting their location to the world at large, and it's a lot more effective than letting them shut down smartlinks and vision-enhancing goggles in the first place. and, as an added bonus, the reason your players won't get ganked by a hundred deckers (of varying skill levels and with varying amounts of noise penalties) every time an alarm sounds is that there is no reason for the corps to call in a hundred deckers to gank them, rather than because using the system logically ruins the game.

Not sure where you get this from... My Hacker routinely take 2+ Marks at a time (Generally 2 unless the target is stupid easy). But yes, it takes an inordinate amount of time to take actions, regardless. Much more useful to put a bullet in the target's head.



You are absolutely correct, Hacking people is pretty lame, when they can be shot with but a simple action. And if you cannot shoot a gun, you do not belong in the Shadows, since you will likely get one of your team members killed due to your lack of skill or training.



Agreed... Hackers have always been useful within the environment... still not sure why CGL thinks they are not. Any sane Black Ops team will run silent, for the simple fact that they will be signal dark (which you just cannot beat, really). Having the team being detectable by signal is monumentally stupid in so many ways that I cannot enumerate them all. Yes, when you need to be signal active, you really need it (or can take advantage of it), but otherwise there is no reason to be signal active, especially on an infiltration.

aren't you the person who rolls ridiculously well all the time though? =S

anyways, taking a -4 hit to your dice pool when facing competent opposition is pretty nasty. it can work, but it certainly isn't safe. i suppose it depends a lot on what method you're using to get marks though... one you get spotted on a failure, the other you get spotted on a success. if you're using the one where you get spotted on failure, not failing becomes rather more important. if you're using the one where you're not spotted unless you succeed, i guess lowering your chance of success to be able to get 2 marks at a time is a great idea.

This actually unlikely to happen and we've had that debate before.

You can only detect icons within 100m of your deck, unless you've spotted the icon before. Maybe someone on-site can do a matrix perception check to spot and then put that information through to the nest of corp deckers but really, you can break the game any number of ways by applying ultra paranoid risk management to everything with no heed of cost (which reduce profits, the whole point of why corporations exist).

Deckers aren't meant to be an unlimited resource, not even for Mega-corps.

if you can only detect icons within 100m of your deck, then it is impossible to use the matrix in any location you have not been to. you could not, for example, teleconference to a location in japan unless you personally had been to japan, and even then you would only be able to see what was there when you were last there (and thus, if you had not personally met the person you were teleconferencing with, you would be unable to perceive them). that is not the case, therefore, the matrix spotting rules cannot be based on the physical location of your deck; it breaks too many other things in stupid ways.

and this isn't a huge expense. the corporation needs to keep 2-3 times their active patrol of deckers on payroll as a bare minimum (assuming they don't allow for anyone to get sick, injured, etc). so if they have 20 different hosts defended in a region, they have somewhere between 20 and 40 inactive deckers at any given time in the region, most likely, who can be spared to respond to an emergency call to wreck someone's day. not all of them will become available instantly, and you don't need to disable all wireless the instant you trip an alarm, but the resources are already on the payroll.

then, in addition to all the deckers they have for their own defence, let's suppose the mega owns a security company of some sort in the area (not as prominent as KE or LS in most cases, of course). suppose that company provides decker coverage to another 20 hosts. suddenly, they have another 20+ deckers they can call in to nuke you from orbit if they really feel like it. plus if they have any other security companies they can hire temporary muscle for in an emergency. plus any security deckers from the local law enforcement corporation.

I do tend to roll above average, but in SR5, that is not a blessing, as Limits screw with that pretty hard.

I use Hack on the Fly, with Specialty and Codeslinger geared to that. Running 16 Dice after subtraction (we just crested 110 Karma last week) is not horrible, but is chancy after about Host ratings of 6 (which I still do not feel comfortable going against even at this point). My personal Limit for comfort is Host 6 or less. Don't always have a choice, though.
If the Host is less than 4, I go for 3 Marks simultaneously. If it is 7+, I go for One, unless I am feeling lucky - That is where the Limits get wonky, since defense does not have a Limit apparently (which Really Sucks, in my opinion). Tends to work out pretty well...

Even with managing to accrue two marks simultaneously, it still takes several actions to get decent results, depending upon what you do.

Me Thinks that you are missing the boat on this one. You CAN look for Icons further away from you than 100 Meters, you just do not see them immediately. It requires a Matrix Perception Check to accomplish (unless whatever you are looking for bears you Mark, which would require no roll, regardless of the distance).

Not for nothing, but 20 dice is not the norm for most deckers - you are highly specialized at it (not that this is a bad thing, but if we are talking about "on average" then I don't think you qualify given that you not only have specialized at it, but also have a Positive Quality for it).

And going for 2 marks on a Rating 6 host is pretty risky, as it means that you are most likely rolling with one more die than the target (Host Intuition is 6, and its Firewall should be 9 - and that assumes you have no other mitigating factors like Running Silent, or Noise) - and if you fail, you alert the target.

20 Dice includes the Specialty, the Quality and Running Hot. It is right around average for a Starter (Professional Skill 6) Hacker with a few augments, but by no means extraordinary, in my opinion.

Rating 6 is my Limit for 2 Marks, just because of the only slight advantage (of generally 1 Dice). Noise I pretty much ignore, for the most part. I don't really run silent on hacks that often, though, so that is a thing I guess. Probably should do it more often, to be sure. Yep, Failure does alert the Target some (generally due to the Host not having a Limit for Defense and one applying to the Hack - Even if it is a Limit 6), but I have gotten pretty good at removing marks pretty quickly. Practice makes perfect and all that.

I love on Dumpshock how people can get so set in their own mindset that not only can they not get swayed but they can get amnesia as well. So.....

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...t&p=1281897

To which you reply a couple of posts below:



Perhaps you and TJ need to go and re-read that entire thread (Well, from like page 10 or something)

In summary: You can only detect icons within 100m, unless you know something about the icon. i.e you've perceived it before, maybe had an mark invited onto it, been given some specific data about it from the owner or someone else who has preceived it.

This does not apply to hosts, which is why teleconferences work just fine at any distance.

that quote doesn't say you can't see anything 100 meters away. that quote says you need information about your target. you triggered an alarm, the odds are microscopically tiny that they don't know *something* about you. matrix perception, per that quote, is absolutely 100% possible from greater than 100 meters away, and as such will only delay the inevitable bricking of your gear by a horde of moderately competent deckers that overwhelm you entirely.

(of course, that rule is also still idiotic and leads to completely stupid scenarios, and i bet isn't accounted for in a variety of official adventures because it is so counterintuitive).

Umm... Looking for DRONE Icons out to a Mile... Obviously I can see DRONE ICONS that far away... Looking for VENDING MACHINE ICONS... etc... All you need is something to narrow the search. Once you identify a narrowing parameter, that is INFORMATION that gives you an idea about an Icon. And how do you expect to to Identify a HOST at a distance of greater than 100 Meters if you cannot perceive them from a distance greater? MOST HOSTS FLOAT IN THE SKY ABOVE YOU In the Matrix Environment. Says so right in the book. SOME Hosts are ground level, but the vast majority are not. Ergo, you can detect ICONS at greater than 100 Meters. Having only an inkling of an idea of what they are like is all you need. *shrug*

I find the idea that you cant detect icons 100m away a bit weird.

I mean, Im in my home right now and I can pick my cellphone and see there is a chick 800m from here wanting to fuck somebody.

How can a 'link in 2075 not do that ? Will Tinder die in the future ? That would be... sad.

Agreed...

Because they don't want armchair deckers. Also, the 100m rule applies to hidden icons, comlinks generally aren't hidden.

Shadowrun is the future of 1980s tech, not 2015 tech, plus having a comcode from a comlink is knowing something about a device, or perhaps all comlinks get connected through hosts, etc.

The 100m limit does not apply to hosts TJ. The rules explicitly state that and it's covered in that thread.

Really, you should re-read that thread. This has all been called out before with book quotes, etc.

I disagree with you on the 100 Meter thing, otherwise there would never be NOISE for Distance.
Thanks for the reference to Hosts, though