Hoi Chummers,

Was just wondering, how big a task pool can you generate?
A maxed-out Encephalon will give you +2 Int and +3 task pool...can you get any more?

I swear I've read this a hundred times, but task pool...you just use it for skills, right? As in, any skill?
Damn. I've been an idiot.



Happy Fraggin'!
Tiralee

Unless that's from an erratum I haven't seen, I don't think that's right.

M&M.19: Chipjack Expert Driver [3] gives you a +3 Task Pool for the Skillsoft in the chipjack's surface jackpoint
M&M.20: Encephalon [2] gives you a +2 Task Pool for Intelligence-linked Skills (and pretends Intelligence is 2 higher for the sole purpose of determining Karma costs of learning / improving Intelligence-linked Skills)
M&M.72: Cerebral Booster [2] gives you +1 Task Pool (and +2 Intelligence)

No - only the skills it applies to.

Thanks Bodak!

Yeah, Forgot about the Cerebral booster, mainly because of dem Nuyen - still, it makes all those thousands of blue-green paydata runs worth it, yeah?

-Tir

Still corrupting the innocent, bwhahahahahaa

Does the Encephalon still allow someone using a VCR to slot Skillsofts? They can't use skillwires because rigging is mental, but in SR2 it did let you slot and use any softs that could be used while jacked in and rigging, the Encephalon could interpret them.

No - it hasn't got that function any more. You need a Chipjack to access Active/Know/Lingua/Data-softs or a Datajack and headware memory and a Skillwire system (for Activesofts) or Knowsoft link or Image link (for Knowsofts) or Display link (for Datasofts). Real headware memory (MM.20) can be used for active and storage memory (RAM and SSD) whereas everything else (such as DNI memory in a cyberlimb) can only be used for storage memory and the Skillwires don't have their own memory (CC.60) so you can't just slot an OMC into a datajack -- unless you want to pay Essence and Nuyen through the nose you really need a chipjack.

The SR2 rule I think you are referring to is:
whereas now we have

Thanks, I would say the part about activesofts answers it.

I would then have to ask, "Why the change?" When I was re-reading 2nd, I liked the idea. I checked 3rd but guess I ignored the quoted part as it seemed to be addressing skillwires. But I like the idea. I agree, skillwires would not have much use but I am not following the logic of why if the skill is present in your mind, why it can't be used while rigging? Just game balance? The rigger character would need even less skill points if he can just buy more skillsofts with the huge resources already needed?

Drones and vehicles with Autosoft Interpretation use Softs that are like Activesofts but completely incompatible with them. I think this is justified considering Activesofts such as Athletics will be doing things like clenching the adrenal glands and contracting muscles within the safe tension limits of tendons and ligaments, whereas an Autosoft is pumping hydraulic fluid into pistons and ensuring the motors and processors don't overheat. Even if your rigger is jumped into an anthroform drone, it still doesn't have any of the wetware an Activesoft can address (via Skillwires or, hypothetically, by the Rigger Interface "black box" which seems to do the same job of translating neurological and mechanical signals).

There are plenty of active skills that don't depend on the rigger's wetware though: Biotech/Telepresence (MM.139) for jumping into a Valkyrie module; Mechanical Arm Operation (R3.24) and any of the Vehicle/Remote Operations skills you're only ever going to use in a drone; and Small Unit Tactics - for them the Skillwires really don't get to flex your muscles. Therefore the Activesofts jacked into them are going to be functionally very similar to Autosofts streamed from your RCDeck. (Maybe Small Unit Tactics should have been a Knowledge skill in the first place.)

Often, physically-enhancing 'ware has about as much benefit on simsense environments as each other, ie decking the Matrix as it does on rigging. But Activesofts are applicable to decking.
So you can deck just fine using an Activesoft while your Skillwires really don't get to flex your muscles (RAS override and all). It would make sense for such "inactive" Active skills as Computer, Small Unit Tactics, etc. to be addressable in simsense from a chipjack without Skillwires, but I guess someone decided the rules were complicated enough (!) already that it wasn't worth deciding.

Sorry - that last quote was from Matrix p26.

Rather than the absolute prohibition of accessing Skillwires while rigging on R3.27 I think an appropriate house-rule would be to instead allow the "Modify by +8 all Perception tests and actions involving the real world" (MM.21) penalty due to the RAS Override suppressing I/O from/to your meatbod (and its cybersenses and Skillwires).

Hopefully this will be one of many areas Kagetenshi's SR3R project will improve.

Thank you for mentioning this project. I wasn't aware of it before.

Is there anywhere to get the rules as they are now? I quickly looked through that forum, and any links I saw to the current rules don't produce anything usable. I also noticed the last activity on that forum was over 3 years ago. It doesn't bode well for the completion of the project.

I don't know - you'd need to contact Kagetenshi.

Ideally, SR3R would compile all their fixes into one volume so that players could apply it like an overlay where ever they like it. Quite some effort has gone into that project with the aim of improving play.

I've looked around on the SR3R-forum, but only managed to find a very incomplete PDF with some of the rules dated August 10 2011; maybe it's just that my search-fu is weak (I *knew* I should have put more points into Computer!), can anyone point me to a more complete SR3R-ruleset? And you better make it snappy, my Predator II is smartlinked and my mohawk is newly set, so watch it, chummer!

You could ask nezumi, I believe he used some SR3R in his games.
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showuser=5760.

Thanks!

Thanks for addressing the issue. But If anything, drones being able to use softs similar to activesofts only weakens the argument for not continuing to allow characters with Encephalons to use skillsofts while purely rigging as they could in the previous edition.

I think I'll just house rule it. I was hoping for an explanation rationalizing why it changed, maybe just a missed cut and paste, lol.

Not really. I don't see how you've come to that conclusion. As I said, for most skills, autosofts and skillsofts are fundamentally very different.

Now, if you had said you should be able to plug an autosoft chip into your Encephalon and stream it to your drone's autosoft interpretation system, that sounds viable. As it is though, it sounds like you maybe just a missed cut and paste somewhere above.

My point is drones can use autosofts. Autosofts are drone versions of activesofts. The autosoft interpretation system is like an encephalon, if it was like skillwires, it would be something like rigger adaptation.

A rigger can jump into a drone and he loses control of his body, having those sensations replaced by simsense versions of the drone. The rigger is using active skills with only the power of his mind, imposing his thoughts through the rigger adaptation to the drone. This is the reasoning behind skillwires and activesofts not working while rigging because the activesofts are replicating muscle memory through the skillwires, which makes some sense because it is producing physical results and those physical results are shut down and overridden by the VCR.

The Encephalon in 2nd edition allowed the rigger to use activesofts while rigging, which means jumped into a drone, without any need for skillwires because the rigger is calling on the same memory to use them whether it was real memory the rigger learned in the physical world or bought memory on a skillchip being recalled through the encephalon. I have never seen any explanation why they suddenly quit working in 3rd edition. This is why I threw out there that maybe it was overlooked in a cut and paste between editions, as I overlooked it back when I played 2nd edition for years. Now looking into 2nd edition again, even if a character did not have the encephalon, it looks like they could use activesofts if they had the skillwire system.

page 17 Rigger 2: Furthermore, the unique nature of the encephalon enables riggers to use Driving skillsofts without the need for skillwires for the purposes of rigging. Characters without encephalons cannot use skillsofts without skillwires.

Did they forget that a character with a chipjack could use knowsofts and linguasofts, or are they saying that riggers could use skillsofts while rigging if they had an encephalon or skillwires, or even both?

All the explanations so far ignore Rigger 2 as quoted above. Rigger 3 changes how skillwires work to only allowing them while physically controlling a vehicle, going so far to state: page 27 rigger 3: Because control of a rigged vehicle takes place entirely within a rigger's brain, skillwires do not work for a rigger who had gone into the machine. If a character has a driving skillsoft slotted in a chipjack, the encephalon should still be able to interpret it, make it seem as though the character knows it, and since it is totally within his mind, be able to use it while he is in the machine. Depending on how much one allows chipjacks to interpret knowsofts and linguasofts, maybe just the chipjack is enough to interpret the driving skillsoft.

Obviously, something changed regarding skillwires and rigging between 2nd and 3rd edition based on physically driving the vehicle. Did it actually change regarding the encephalon and chipjacks or did it get overlooked? The physical aspect regarding skillwires makes sense, but I see no explanation for things purely in one's mind to no longer work. Was it a missed cut and paste or due to some kind of game balance or...?

Ah right! Yes, I think I see what you mean. Indeed, the connection is something like brain-VCR-datajack-fibreoptic-RCDeck-RCNetwork-RCInterface-Rigger Adaptation-servos and pistons. Naturally, the VCR at one end handles the whole convert-brain-activity-to-electronic-signals part (R3.26). But then the Rigger Adaptation at the other end is a "black box" that translates machine code into neurological stimuli and vice versa (R3.130). Hadn't that been done already by the VCR?

I can see what you're saying about Skillwires and Rigger Adaptation - they are essentially the inverse of each other: Skillwires allow electronics to drive a meat body; Rigger Adaptation allows a meat brain to drive an electronic body.

This is indeed like the SR2 Encephalon and like the SR3 Multi-slot Chipjack (MM p22). But the SR3 Encephalon doesn't mention having a port.

A similar thing happened to the Program Carrier. I mean, there's a single reference in Shadowtalk that says it was deprecated because taking Matrix damage corrupted cellular integrity, but that's it. I haven't seen even a Shadowtalk rumour for why Encephalons changed.

Although I first cited the excerpt from Rigger 2 the only potential explanation I offered was:

While Skillwires have a limit to the rating of an Activesoft that can run on them (CC.58) there's no such limit imposed on chipjacked Know/Lingua/Datasofts. In contrast, Autosoft Interpreters limit Autosofts (like Activesofts) and Knowsofts (unlike chipjacks) to a rating equal to the Pilot. Therefore a Rigger Adaptation is inadequate prerequisite for Autosoft Interpretation; a Remote Control Interface is also necessary to provide the Pilot rating.

Having replied to some 5+ year old PMs about the project, I figured I should clarify its status publicly, and this seems as good a place as any:

As far as I’m concerned, SR3R is dormant but not abandoned. It sits in the back of my mind and occasionally reaches out a tendril to get me thinking about one issue or another that I’d been working on, and it remains something I’d very much like to revisit and bring to some useful partly-complete status at least. On the other hand, it isn’t especially high on my priority list—I can’t offer any near-future prospects of a return to active development, and especially not in a sustained fashion (so if I produce a chunk of work on some aspect, don’t necessarily assume that more will follow in a timely manner). Who knows, maybe the completion of SR3R is what triggers Deus to go Rampant.

That said, Skillwires were not especially high on my agenda—though that could be because I never used them, there could be low-hanging fruit there.

Anyway, I’ll see if anything more can be easily done to collect what we have so far, though again I make no guarantees about how soon that could happen.


I was originally hoping to (in addition to a summary PDF) produce a delta that could be merged with some of the rulebook PDFs to produce SR3R PDFs, but after looking into it a bit I realized I was putting the cart massively before the horse, so I never figured out if it was feasible.


~J

When you're packing a VCR3 there isn't a lot of Essence left for Skillwires and an Expert Driver, so that makes sense.

Much appreciated for the update! Perhaps a wiki would work as then you can dump the work so far onto a bunch of article pages and let the community organise and format them or even build on them. Normally, Wikia is a decent mediawiki host but Shadowrun material would likely contravene its TOS (I doubt they tolerate in-universe racism or sexually explicit content like sex-switch augmentations and the shadowtalk that surrounds using Shapechange to assume a favoured sexual / gender identity for a year... probably a little too controversial for their censorship / legal team).

Although I dabbled in SR4/a as a medic adept for a year or two (chop your hand off so you can install a nanite hive in a cyberhand!) SR3 is where it's at for me. Not sure if it's the crunch or the fluff, but it's just the right blend for my tastes. When the Shadowrun Returns / Dragonfall games released recently with a homage to the old SNES game I loved them despite the foreign mechanics, so maybe it's the SR3 era grunge I like. I'm still playing SR3 these days (though via Discord instead of round a physical tabletop) due to plague restrictions (haven't seen any ghouls yet...) and I set my group on to Dumpshock and SR3R hoping to pre-emptively scrounge up fixes to some of the wonky mechanics in SR3 but we couldn't get a lock on anything solid. That's fine. Real life always comes first. But if you do manage to nail down some SR3R content in a platform Dumpshockers can collaborate on, I suspect support for 3rd Ed is slightly swelling recently. It's not dead. Your existing investment would find a warm welcome on the tables of several of us I am certain!

Back on the original topic of Task Pools, I like the fact that "The Task Pool uses the standard dice pool rules" (M&M.48) and "Some pools have limitations on how many dice can be added to a single test" (SR3.43) but the Task Pool is not a pool with such a limit. In the main book, the section on pools gives the general rule that some pools have limits and then lists a number of pools, each of which specifies that this particular pool is one which has a limit. But the Task Pool does not specify that it has any such limit. So a Rating 1 skillsoft with an Expert Driver and Cerebral Booster (and Encephalon, if we're dealing with an Int-based skill) can chuck a larger number of Task Pool dice than the rating of the base skill it is boosting.

I second, third and fourth this!

One of the big things I had planned for Cyberware was breaking out components of some of some ‘ware and allowing certain parts to be shared between systems, to both provide incremental advancement to Streetsams and make some choices more practical by allowing them to remain Essence-intensive while not requiring Deltaware (or cyberzombification) to combine them with your standard big-ticket VCR or WR. Sort of an extension of how you can hook a Smartlink up to an Image Link instead of installing the usual Eye Display. That seems like it would make Skillwires more practical with WR/VCR (keeping in mind how easy it is to find reasons for incompatibility if balance problems emerge).

As an aside, while I’m pleasantly surprised at how quickly the rules are coming back to me I’ve lost my sense of what order things are in. I opened the BBB to midway through the Gear section and had no idea whether I wanted to go back or forward to get to the Cyberware.

(Not to put the cart too far before the horse, but while reviewing threads mentioning SR3R (gratifyingly many!) at least one person mentioned they didn’t like where it was going. If at any point this applies to a reader, please speak up! If I have an idea that’s a bigger change I’ll often float it to see what kind of pushback it gets, so remaining silent means you’re relying on me to independently decide it’s a bridge too far. I have a certain vision I’m working towards, but given the nature of the project you’d be surprised at what you can probably convince me of. That person made no attempt to explain what they didn’t like, so unfortunately for them they probably won’t be any happier in the future.)

~J

Yeah, one of the major issues with Shadowrun is that it's insanely expensive to upgrade cyberware, because you need to replace what you have with higher quality (10's or 100's of thousands of nuyen) to get enough essence back to add anything, and then you have to pay for the new 'ware.