To me, decks are going a step back. Instead of obsessively keeping hackers as a core class, they should have made hacking more like GITS as a skill every runner has, like dodging (gymnastics in SR5) and infiltration. Have everyone with a commlink, connected to a tacnet, and have hacking be something that everyone participates in. Instead, they make it a specialized role with a ludicrously expensive barrier to entry in the form of clunky decks, and kept deckers as their own special "class". Hacking should have combat applications, sure, but not the way they have it written. Even in GITS, people could shut down their matrix access and run in "autistic mode", and it didn't make their cyberlimbs suddenly slow down when they did it.

Well, Shadowrun sort of is the collection of mages, deckers, street samurai, faces, riggers, adepts, gangers, etc. You could certainly change things around so that everyone's always a hacker, but I think you'd end up with something new.

A step back that was badly needed. The Matrix is such a vital and unique part of the SR setting, as compared to the rest of the RPGs on the market, that trying to turn it down into GiTS handwavium does it absolutely no justice and eliminates very interesting possibilities of the setting.

Don't mistake dissatisfaction with a single (dumb, poorly thought-out, extraordinarily dumb, wrongheaded, breathtakingly dumb, oh yes, did I mention dumb?) mechanic for dissatisfaction with the rules as a whole. I'm very much looking forward to SR5, even if I am going to take a monochainbeamvibrodaiklaive to the bits having to do with wireless boni.

Glyph and binarywraith are both correct. To me there is an easy way to handle this. For squad level combat (which what a Runner team is) you can use the GiTS type hacking. You are using your skills to frak with the opposition.

Now once you've taken care of the mooks, then most of the team can go into VR and hack the system to get the paydata. It is at this point that the mages of the group can take on the role of sprites or Agents so their player isn't sitting with his thumb up his hoop. The reason I am saying this way is that you would really NOT want everyone on the team going into VR. You would need someone on overwatch.

So, what, hacking should just leave the conceptual space as a character's main focus? Because that's the consequence of what you suggest, and it means failing to support a lot of concepts. That is a Bad Thing.

There's hacking and there's magically destroying all cyberware in one to two actions. And the problem is not necessarily characters (who are balanced by GOD), but NPC security hackers who are not. I see little plausible defense against these aside from the team hacker babysitting all mundane/cybered characters all the time. THAT is (part of) the consequence of super-speed hacking, that makes the go-to, in-game plausible defense of a contracted security decker who patrols the corp grid zone unsurvivable for streetsams, and that is a BAD THING, too. Taking away cybered characters like 5E seems to do (combined with much higher essence costs and cyberware being next to worthless without Matrix access) is a VERY BAD THING, actually, since it does away with the very core of the game for an Urban Magic+Neo scenario where Hackers and Awakened reign surpreme over mere mortals. Not sure where Riggers fall in this, since they supposedly can do some decker stuff too. Maybe defense against enemy deckers is among those.

And do you have to rulebook yet to actually be able to look?

Do you?

Nope. Just saying that without the actual information, you simply cannot draw a conclusion with any degree of certainty.

Available Evidence suggests Bad Stuff.
Available Evidence is not fully conclusive.
Therefor disregard entirely?

We can draw a conclusions with some degree of certainty. Not absolute certainty, but reasonable certainty. The overwhelming amount of evidence points toward Bad Stuff. There is little to no evidence pointing toward the opposite. Thus, we can say with a fair degree of certainty, Bad Stuff.

~Umi

Available evidence is completely insufficient to suggest that reasonable defense options do exist. To suggest that the claim of "no reasonable defense options" has any degree of certainly is completely ludicrous.

We DO know, incidentally, that Commlinks have the attribute needed for Matrix defense, and that the best one is a good deal cheaper than any deck.

Bad stuff? It looks like they've put together a solid system for once. I suppose that could itself be interpreted as terrifying, but this absolute batshit reactionary tendency to overblow the new systems into instant game-stopping total-party-kill inevitabilities is just getting absurd.

Actually, some authors (Bull, Neurosis, Aaron) have provided a lot of information on defense options. It's just that those still put a PC on the bad end of hacking, very much so. 12 dice vs. 18 dice statistically equals 4 vs. 6 successes and a decent chance at a win for the larger pool. Unless other powerful options exist (such as this "full defense" thing, which so far did not come up), there is no good defense against hacking except opting out and vehemently gimping cyber-based streetsams. Hence, I suppose the 5E standard streetsam will rely on bioware whereever possible (unless it just gives gimpy boni, then it's been rendered useless too).


And where do we know the best oen is good enough? Available evidence suggests otherwise.

We don't, however, know with any certainty what the consequences something being bricked are (as the released information has been contradictory), I certainly haven't seen any certain information on the subject of how much damage you get from 2 net hits nor on specific damage track lengths... Now factor that your feared "remote GOD decker" has to deal with some unknown noise factor that is supposedly going to actively interfere with what he's trying to do... That may not be at all practical, in fact. There is also a "Full Martix Defense", though we have very little information on how that works. And that's excluding any possible defensive programs.

So... There's ample possibility that it's nowhere near as bad as you suggest.

And seeing as we KNOW that the best commlink has the same Device Rating as the best deck, A decker would have to dedicate his highest Attribute to Attack - carrying a significant cost to his ability to hide, to defend himself, and to do whatever it is he'd need Data Processing for.

May, if, would. The things we know point a different direction. You can choose to ignore this, and believe in some secret fix nobody bothered telling us. I, for one, prefer to go with what I know. In case there really is a fix in the rules, I'll mention that in my review.

I wholeheartedly agree. Bringing decking back was mostly to appease the grognards, with questionable gameplay value.

Actually we do. The device ceases to function in any electro or mechanical way. Guns stop shooting, gears stop rotating, generators don't gen, alternators don't alternate, and pistons don't work either. But you can still stab and bludgeon people.

I strongly agree with this post, it phrases (more succinctly) something I've been thinking about putting words to for a while now.

Basically, I think there's a conceptualization program going on. I see the chain of causality as looking something like this...

1. Hacker's in old editions of SR can't have nice things/do cool stuff.
2. No one really plays hackers in older editions of SR; they become extremely under-represented as PCs, i.e. "Hackers aren't PCs".
3. Newer edition of SR givess hackers nice things/the ability to do cool stuff.
4. Rather than re-orient perspective to the possibility of being able to do cool stuff as PC hackers, people see the above as stuff that can be done TO their PCs, not BY their PCs.



Alright brosely, you're really going totally nuts with the dicepool inflation here.

18 dice is a totally absurd assumption for an out-of-chargen hacker. Even with Exceptional Attribute Logic, Logic 7 (9) with two extra points from Cerebral Booster (Max available at chargen IIRC, AFB), and Cybercombat 6 with a specialization in Data Spiking or whatever, that's "only" 17 dice, and that assumes a colossally absurd and unlikely amount of minmaxing.

The reason it's so colossally absurd and unlikely is that attributes other than Logic and skills other than Cybercombat are immensely valuable to hackers, so an out-of-chargen hacker that squandered that many of their limited resources on Logic and Cybercombat is very unlikely to be a viable character, because they're unlikely to have the resources left for a good Intuition (used in hacking), other halfway-decent attributes to survive contact with the streets, other Electronics and Cracking group skills (such as the "Hacking" skill itself which is kind of a little important for hackers), other "basically everyone needs this at some level" skills like Perception and Pistols or whatever, and oh yeah, an HFS expensive deck good enough to have a Limit that makes having a dice pool of 17-18 even matter at all.

TLDR; basically, an out-of-chargen hacker with anything like 17-18 dice to bricking devices is about as likely as an out-of-chargen street samurai that somehow has 17-18 dice to resisting hacking: not, at all.

***

The reasonable dice pool range for a GOOD (i.e. well built) out-of-chargen hacker is 12-15. Because that hacker is also going to want 12-15 dice for actions that are based on Intuition + Hacking as well as actions that are based on Logic + Cybercombat, to say nothing of at-least-marginally-useful skills like Electronic Warfare, Hardware, Software, and so on.

So no, I'm sorry, as dedicated as you are to selling this 12 dice vs. 18 dice BS, the truth is an exceptionally good out-of-chargen hacker is rocking at best 12-16 dice. 12 Dice (Logic 5 (7) plus Cybercombat 5 would seriously not be unreasonable, particularly if the character wants a natural 6 or a 7 in Intuition (which can't be cybered up) and at least a 5 in Hacking. Generally speaking, the average net successes a really good hacker gets against anyone even moderately interested in investing in matrix protection is a whopping...one or so. And that's if they have a cyberdeck with limits good enough to support their dice pool: a DR3 Cyberdeck which costs about 4100% what a DR6 Commlink costs. This is not SR4 + Augmentation + Unwired where you could routinely build a character that threw 20 Dice hacking on the fly versus a DR5 system that had around 10 Dice to resist.

Cybercombat (Data Spiking) 7 (9), you can have "exceptional" skills too (don't remember the name and I'm at work, so I can't check in the book). Yes, granted, that's an extreme - although possible - example. But it's certainly NOT colossally absurd; it costs a fair amount of money and karma, but still allows for a fair set of secondary skills.

And 15-16 dice? No problem for the hacker's specialty (outside of it, it's more like 12-14); moderate-level minmaxing is endemic to Shadowrun. And following the same reasoning, the defense pool usually isn't 12 dice, it's closer to 10.

But frankly, it's not how easy cybercombat is that bothers me - although I don't like that "bricking" is the main consequence of cybercombat, instead of just causing a connection error. What bothers me is how easy it is to put marks on secure devices. Rating 6 is "top-secret prototype" level, and most chargen hackers can hack that sort of stuff with incredible ease in very short times (with 20 dice at chargen, thanks to the dedicated program that gives Hack on the Fly bonuses).

Who said anything about out-of-chargen?

I know you'll go to any lengths to try to make something look good, but if you're going to write a wall of text, you should probably address it to what's actually being discussed rather than a strawman.

Since when is rating 6 top secret prototype anything? Rating 6 is usually the high end of normally available. High end nonconsumer is 7 to 9, with 10+ being crazy prototypes.

Good to have some perspective on this. Having not had an opportunity to see SR 5 yet, firsthand, I was curious about where the numbers really wind up.

Seems like one thing I'd want to do, if I were a Samurai, is find a way to decentralize some of my device log storage, so that if I saw my 'Check Engine Light' going off on some of my stuff, I could at least freeze the access logs for further analysis at a later date. then provided that log analysis was fruitful, that later date would subsequently be followed by kicking some doors down.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS.

The book says something about ratings, and rating 6 being the level of very sensitive stuff like multi-billion nuyen prototypes.

Well, they wind up to 17-18, as the post you quoted showed (you need both an exceptional attribute and "talented" -or whatever it's called, the book isn't right next to me ). The claim that it requires ridiculous amounts of minmaxing is very subjective, at least for a dice pool of 17 (18 might be pushing it).

Can't you walk out of Chargen with Rating:6 gear up the wazooo?

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

No, rating 4 max.

That's not quite true...

+2 to accuracy regardless if your connected or not
+2 dice to roll if you're connected.

The second adds to the first, it doesn't exclude it.

Interesting. Forgive my lack of recent edition knowledge -- Was that a change introduced in SR: 4 and carried into SR: 5?

It would seem to me that SR: 5 would have modeled gear ratings in line with skill ratings. In SR3 (The edition I last played), you could pick up Rating: 6 gear in chargen all day, every day.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

That's true for non-Matrix devices like commlinks. A door lock is Rating 2. A door lock on Zurich Orbital is Rating 6.

Yes, I wasn't talking about hosts whose ratings can go up to 12. But a rating 6 device (which can be a military drone prototype, if I understand correctly) is exceedingly easy to Hack on the Fly.

What he's saying is that the Smartlink should give +2 dice offline rather than +2 Accuracy. The online bonus should be the Accuracy bonus. This would put it more in line with the historic Smartlink making it easier to shoot things, with the online bonus making it possible to shoot things better.

I'm actually on the fence about this one. My perfect Smartlink would be +2 dice +2 Accuracy offline, and +4 dice +2 Accuracy online. That would put it in the camp of Wired Reflexes + Reaction Enhancers not working together offline, but online allowing you to stack the two and ignore the normal +4 augmented maximum rule. Of course that means my perfect WR+RE would probably be stackable to the +4 offline, but stackable out the wazoo online. That would make WR 3 + RE 1 a safe and powerful set of gear (+4 Reaction), but WR 3 + RE 4 (+7 Reaction) with the added risk of being online would blow it out of the water, so long as you've got some hacking protection.

That would really help define the online bonus as a major leap forward from baseline functionality in all regards, and make the risk really worth the reward without hamstringing the Matrix-phobic.

Applied across the board, basically shifting everything a column to the right might actually be a good house rule if you find gear a little underwhelming or Matrix bonuses too weak to justify the risk -- that is, most gear could give its online dice bonus while offline, and twice that bonus online.

Of course that relies heavily on the context of the rest of the systems, so I wouldn't go in and do it willy-nilly, otherwise you risk making some ratings or combinations of cyberware too effective.

It's dice pool is only 12 when it's alone (possibly more if it's running programs). If it's being used with a prototype RCC, it's probably going to have a higher Firewall.

Well, and a hacker can defend that multi-billion rating 6 prototype or spacecraft, but I still feel that the hacking rules are somewhat a bit much on the easy side because static defenses are really low even for things I would think would be exceedingly well protected.

Of course the best defense is a good offense -- get your decker to sidle up to the enemy decker in VR and matrixfacepunch him over and over until he passes out. That'll make your rigger's squad o' drones with VR decker overwatch pretty damn scary.

You'll probaly also have Prime Runner sams buying decks and becoming part decker like back in the day, if only to get a Sleaze attribute.

Hrm. Wonder if devices can be outfitted with a Sleaze attribute with some advanced rules available in the SR 5 Matrix book. That'd be pretty sweet: Lacks the full functionality of a cyberdeck (No attack capabilities), but it's able to go all stealth-like.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

Sounds like how I play my Hacker/Deckers anyways. I always preferred Stealth over Attack, even when I was discovered. Drop your Baitworms and IC and then run.

One of the cheaper decks and a little Cybercombat would make for a nasty surprise for that enemy decker who thinks he's going to take a chunk out of your street sam's gear. Also a straight-combat setup could allow anyone to watch the dedicated decker's back and jump in to take some of the heat in a host.

I believe you missed the point Neurosis was making, Werewindlefr - some minmaxing is common, but leaving Chargen with 17-18 dice for Data Spike is, or at least is suggested to, require min-maxing to the point of hamstringing your ability as a hacker, much less ability outside of hacking - the hacker needs other skills, and definitely needs other attributes. SR's traditional minmaxing very much avoids that sort of shooting yourself in the foot. Especially since, to get a deck to support those sort of dice pools, a character would almost certainly HAVE to take A Resources if it's even possible to get with chargen resources (remember, the best one costs near to twice what you can get at chargen).

Probably not. There's a huge price differential between a rating 6 commlink and a rating 3 cyberdeck (the latter is much more expensive). Sleaze and Attack ratings seem to be 90% of a cyberdeck, so much that modding a commlink to add an Attack and Sleaze rating are probably close to buying 200k in parts and building your own deck from scratch.
I disagree. Sorry, it doesn't require THAT MUCH of a sacrifice, especially for 17 dice (18 IS pushing it, but he said it was impossible - it's not). I can build you a hacker with a decent set of secondary skill with 17 dice for cybercombat (and by the way, Hotsim adds +2, so if he's well protected and quite daredevil, it's 19 dice) that can shoot decently and do a couple other things semi-decently.
Some tables don't optimize their Shadowrun characters, but some *do*, and after having browsed through these forums, it seems to be a frequent and somewhat accepter practice among Shadowrun players (with the reasonable justification that the characters are professional who sharpen and optimize their primary skillset anyways)

Also, you don't need to take "A" resources, you can take B (275k nuyens, enough for a good cyberdeck and rating 2 cerebral booster) and put 3-4 karma towards money to buy you a jacket and a low lifestyle. Exceptional attribute and Aptitude only cost 28 Karma together, so if you're willing to take ~10ish karma of flaws, you can pull it off, get 20k nuyens for your random gear AND buy a decent cyberdeck and a rating 2 cerebral booster, and still have a priority 'A' for attributes or skills.

A hacker rolling 16-18 dice for cybercombat at CharGen IS a thing, and if you take into account the possibility of using HotSim, it's more like 18-20.

And frankly, it'll still be at least as able to thrive in the shadows as half of the sample characters in the rulebook.

And then I guess you take Skills C, for Computer 6 and Electronic Warfare 6 and Hacking 6 and Hardware.. oh wait you only have 3 more points and 2 skill group points.

So let's put Skills at A, that takes care of skills. So Attributes are C. So that 6 points on Logic, 4 points on Willpower (you don't want to keel over in Cybercombat after all), 3 on Intuition, since that's Matrix-useful, which leaves you with 3 Attribute points to split amongst Body, Strength, Reaction, Agility, and Charisma.

So basically if you make a character that only has the skills for Decking, or make a character that has 1's in so many attributes it's amazing he can leave the house, you can pull 19 dice to hack someone's cyberware.

No, attributes are A. I just don't take 4 skills at 6. It's a somewhat specialized character - you know, like the combat mage or occult investigator. Not so good at using Sleaze, but very good at bricking stuff. A cyber-hooligan.

So for instance Cybercombat 7 (9), Hacking 5, Computer 4, pistols 4 and 7 points for various skills, plus 2 points for a skill group (so you can squeeze in a few social and physical skills)

I can also make an Attribute B/Skill C/resources A version that compensate weak physical attributes (parents' basement type) with cyberware/bioware.

This isn't "ridiculous overspecialization", the only costly thing is 28 karma that wouldn't even buy you a rating-6 attribute. It's just specialization, it requires sacrifices, will have weaknesses and will rely on teamwork to cover the hacker's rear. But this *isn't* exceptional in Shadowrun, this amounts to a significant fraction of the characters threads I see on these forums.

It is a fallacy to arbitrarily decide that hackers are the only character that can't be strongly specialized. I've made a summoner that had exactly the same issues - even worse, because it required more sacrifices - and yet it's perfectly playable by someone who understand how to deal with the strengths and weaknesses of such a character.

It's at least somewhat ridiculous. A hacker can be strongly specialized, but if he's dead weight on a run except for one neat trick that can sometimes shut down cyberware (if the enemy has enough of or the right kind of cyberware), it's overspecialized. If the Decker needs the next squad around the corner to be running Wired Reflexes + Reaction Enhancers to use the only strong power he has, he's got a slight problem if it's actually Lone Star hopped up on cheap combat drugs and a Rating 6 commlink with an encrypted file on it.

Also, as it's been pointed out, you'd need a deck that could accommodate at least 6 hits for this to even matter, as you'll be at or over the limit a whole bunch. Which I don't think you can get for 200k. I think that one's more near the 400k mark.

But the game doesn't stop after chargen, what makes it interesting to see how the game mechanics and game balance will play out once characters have dice pools of 16+.

1)Certainly *not* a hacker-only debate, and again, very subjective. Calling it ridiculous is quite close-minded, considering it seems to be the playstyle of at least a fair amount of people. And defend-ably so: very specialized characters have always been around, including in fiction - sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. The strength of a specialized character is that if you're smart enough to make sure the fight will be on your own terms, they you quite often have a strong upper hand.
And a team that would call such a powerful tool a deadweight shouldn't run the shadows. They may decide he doesn't fit well with the team, but it's NOT a deadweight. A good team will adapt to use the hacker's strength and avoid its weaknesses. That requires planning and vigilance, but if you can pull it off it's VERY effective.
2)Again, he's NOT a one-trick pony. His secondary skills are fewer, or slightly less strong, but they're good enough for a vast variety of tasks. Yeah, he'll have a couple tertiary skill fewer than the regular decker, and yeah, he'll be less balanced than the regular hacker, more effective at one task and less at others, but still significantly above non-decker PCs and NPCs. Your non-specialized hacker won't be much better against regular Lone Star cops - this is what you have a Sammy or Mage in your team for. Or Rigger.

Anyway, look at the example characters in the book: most of them are ACTUAL deadweights. A well crafter specialized hacker with 17 or 18 is a hell of a lot more useful that most of them.

Or 22+ (the maximum you can get for Hack on the Fly by stacking everything in your favor at chargen, including circumstances... or a few runs worth or Karma and Nuyen).

But if we're looking at advancement... It remains to be seen what a Sam can pick up to improve their defense over time as well.

I agree with your sentiment - I'd posted an idea like this awhile ago. Many people think that specialized deckers are iconic to SR though and shouldn't go away...

Does the price reflects that?

SYL

Thats quite okey to do, considering that that Neurosis completdly missed what was being talked about.
Nobody talked about out-of-chargen PC:s, in fact nobody talked about PC:S in the first place, but NPC-hacker enemies attacking streetsam.

You know, in real life, there are two ways that you can configure your security posture w/ respect to intrusion detection/prevention:

1) A posture that emphasizes 'False Positive' intrusion detection/prevention, and thus impedes some legitimate use.

OR

2) A posture that emphasizes 'False Negative' intrusion detection/prevention, and thus allows some non-legitimate use.

For systems of all but the most basic, basic, basic simplicity, the Goldilocks 'Just Right' only exists in fairly tales.

As a GM, I'd be perfectly fine with Samurai who wanted to 'enhance' their security against Hackers that did so with the possibility that they're periodically find something that they wanted to use, wasn't working the way they intended. At its most benign, the bonus would be reduced, or not there. At its worst, the system itself may refuse to function.

A well formed system that allows something like that would really seem to play well with the whole 'Everything has a price' mechanic that the game designers are reinforcing, and also allows players to choose where in the spectrum they fall. Additionally, since it models real life, all the better.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS