Say a post joking about a +1 magic sword that can become +2 for a short time when they insert 5 WeaponCoins™


Now imagine being in the middle of a fire fight and your SmartGun using their Wireless starts offering you special options like Multi-Targetting or an additional Wild/Exploding Dice if they just slot in another 500 Nuyen for 5 minutes of ownage.



Corp Eeeevil at its finest.

Aha, so the real reason runners disable corp add-ons isn't that the mega will remotely take control of it or track its location- it's the ads.

Reminds me a bit of the guy who posted on reddit offering their services as a "paid GM," where you can pay more IRL money to get more karma and nuyen.

Why stop at a flat sum? Every PAN in signal range can bid on whether the gun gets is pwnage bonus or just jams

Runner: That's why I will NEVER update to the newest version of the SmartLink software.

I wonder if runners are all using linux distros for their cyberware? Or will corp-designed cyberware "lock out" if it detects a jailbreak/third-party software?

Considering what Runners do, I would say that the firmware on cyber is completely replaced with a black market version. I mean cyberware isn't like the 5th edition Matrix where no one knows how it works. Cyberware is a known quantity, and the OS for it is well established.

Or Runners can install an extra chip to route all the data that would be collected to a dump file on their 'link. The firmware thinks that it's phoning home, but in reality it's just getting spoofed.

You're walking down a dark alleyway, and someone steps out behind you. There's a metallic click, followed by a simulated voice.
"Your free trial has expired. Would you like to purchase Ares Smartshot Pro?"

"We have tried reaching you about your extended warranty."

"Your IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) trial period is due to expire in 3 days. To avoid accidentally shooting your teammates you may wish to renew this service.


Remember: Friends don't shoot friends in the back."

Let's hope they don't take inspiration from printers:
"Cannot shoot bullets: you're low on grenades for your underbarrel launcher"
"Please wait while we check your new magazine. *guns starts shooting half the bullets* Your gun is now ready to fire."
"Your magazine is not compatible, please only use Ares Predator VI bullets and magazines."
"You've shot your gun fifty times. For your safety, your gun will be deactivated. Please visit your local Weapon's World for maintenance."

Brrrrr... that sent chills down my cyberspine.

This is when you hack your weapon's firmware and replace it with something a LOT more secure.

"You have toggled the safety on your gun. Please wait while I perform some noisy cleaning which will waste half your ammunition"

This is the stuff absolutely nobody involved in writing 5e or 6e has ever thought about at all.


He who does not airgap vital systems deserves what he gets.

They thought about it, but they wanted to be able to hack someone's eyeballs because they saw it on an anime. That is actually what happened.

The curse of working in IT, is that you'll see some of those rules and think "Why would they have wifi on that system? It's unnecessary and completely insecure!" and then you'll end up remembering a time where such a thing was done on a network meant to be secure...

Still, insecurity shouldn't be the standard. It should be the equivalent of your infiltrator scouring a building and finding an unlocked window, or the wizard building a timetable of when the patrolling spirits come by to find a gap.

I buy that the average slob has wifi on their eyes- they want to play flappy bird AR. Maybe a few beat cops or low-level grunts have wifi up on their weapons because they're too lazy to count ammo and rarely see action beyond the odd drunk. But serious corpsec and HTR? Something like that should be a fireable offense. And if the host for your super-secret-squirrel corporate research is exposed for anyone on the matrix to connect to, that's a "strip all your family's corp SINs and dump them penniless in the gutter" type of deal at best.

Worse punishment still: you find yourself stuck in a 5th/6th edition game! Oh the humanity!

Yep, and it begs the question even more to ask why shadowrunners who are professional paranoids by nature, would ever leave something like that active.

CGL said they must do so because otherwise the Decker wouldn't have anything to do, and he might go home and cry to his mommy. You wouldn't want to hurt his fee-fees now would you, Binary? /sarcasm
No, anyone even remotely intelligent wouldn't leave that humongous hole in their security.

Technically they were hacking their head computers, not their eyes, but.

At least I thought it was a cool idea.

It is cool! With that said, that should only be useful against noobs and idiots. Professionals would have their drek locked down tight.

I feel that there should be alternatives. Rookies are going to have wirelessly connected smartlinks and cheap comms, but professionals still need wireless to operate at peak efficiency.

First up, any professional team is going to be in constant communication, and you can't really have that wired or skinlinked. It'll be encrypted, but a Shadowrunning hacker should be prepared to deal with encryption.

Secondly, a high end team is going to be running drones and probably a rigger. Again, very hard to run that wired.

thirdly, a high end team is likely to be running tacnet software which, again, wireless.

They won't leave gaping holes and will have IC on their network, but a wireless network is definitely something a high end team is going to use.

suggesting that the hacker is useless when the enemy stops making rookie mistakes shows a complete inability to understand the hacker's role.

I say this as someone who, pretty much religiously, played Deckers all through the 90's. You know what a decker does in combat?

Pulls out their pistol and gets in cover.

Eh.... seriously depends on the style of the team. Communication isn't necessarily a computerized wireless network. You could just have radios and speak in code, which has the added advantage that you can't hack past code-words or phrases. Sure, anyone could just tune their radio to the right frequency, but what are the odds they have a radio tuned to the right frequency? After all, communication should be minimal. The idea that you're constantly communicating is a little odd. You should only be communicating when communication is necessary. Either A.) When you've hit a snag that will delay you. B.) To confirm you're in position and you've done necessary tasks for other team-members to go forward. C.) To request help. or D.) To indicate you've hid a snag that means the mission should be scrubbed and everyone should bug out.


As for drones and a rigger? Don't even need to hack it to mess that up. The idea of a drone rigger with an army of remote control toys is..... kind of eh. Just point a jammer at the drone and it's dead in the water, and given a Jammer is less than half the price of the drone.... it's a pretty poor idea to bring a drone into a fortified location.

Tacnet software is a big investment for not a lot of return.

And it's not that the hacker is useless, because there are ways of compromising that air tight security. It's just it's not trivial to do.

I was looking at this in terms of a team of Shadowrunners vs an elite corporate team, rather than the other way around. Ways for the GM to have the PC hacker be able to viably combat hack without requiring the enemy to have wirelessly accessible eyeballs.

Or just... don't combat hack.


Something SR has never been good about, but other games these days get right, is having clearly defined separation between the parts of the game, and an emphasis on building characters that have things to do in each of them.

Deep dive decking is for legwork, preparation, and infiltration. A decker coming on site is there to access systems that are airgapped, and needs to have some minimal training to survive a fight and likely double as an electronics/security tech to pop doors and alarms that aren't connected to the Matrix.

In the same theme, your party combat monster needs to know how to sneak just a little to get in without a frontal assault, and have contacts he can lean on to help with legwork (or be willing to go get the pizza irl and just show up for the part of the game he's interested in).

This is a poor comparison because failure by the combat monster to sneak means they get to do their thing and screw the rest of the party. (Sorry, but I've seen this too much.)

Yeah, but that (like combat being a thing) is a conversation you have to have with your players about sharing the spotlight.

A failure in stealth goes to combat. A failure in combat goes to exfiltrtration. Either way that part of the run is likely blown.