Rigging and decking without having to swap plugs. Jump out of one and into the other.

The White Dwarf: TN'd be +4 for Decking without RAS Override active, and another +4 or +8 for meatbody actions while rigging. Otherwise, you covered the extra uses.

~J

Me neither. To me, the second datajack solution was very simple and elegant. In my games, I use a hybrid. The player has to state what datajacks/routers/other headware their VCR is hooked into, and on those datajacks, or any other datajacks that share a connection path through routers/other headware, the penalty applies, unless the player uses a reflex trigger to turn off the VCR. If the character has a Datajack that's 'clean', that shares no connectivity with components hooked into the VCR, then they can use that datajack penalty free for decking.

This makes for some interesting cyberware installation questions. For example, there are a few things that headware memory can be useful for, with relation to Rigging, but if the Decker/Rigger wants to use headware memory for decking too, they have to get separate banks of memory put in, that don't cross-communicate with each other.

Of course the really hardcore Decker/Rigger Characters under this system will not only have a reflex trigger for the VCR, but also a pair of datajacks on both the "rigging" side of their headware, and the "decking" side, and a patch cable that they can run between datajacks on the two sides, for when they need connectivity between one side and the other.

Excepting of course the high end ASIST signals generated by the Control Rig and Control Deck themselves.

Sorry, I have trouble buying into this one. The bulk of the metal-to-meat connections for the control rig deal with hijacking the organic processing power of the lower brain. I just don't see a plausible mechanism for the Rig to cause brain wide systemic effects.

So do you give your riggers any sorts of bonuses/penalties with regards to BTL addiction unless they use a reflex trigger to switch off their control rigs first?

That's just it though. BTL Addiction rules assume the "default case" for how the brain processes an ASIST signal. If you come out and say that a certain piece of 'ware makes the brain handle every type of ASIST in a way different than "default" (unless you have a second piece of ware that lets you switch back to default) then realistically, you have to look at all the other types of ASIST and figure out what the impact would be.

Take the case of a rigger who has a control rig and no reflex trigger for turning it off. Under your explanation, because of the rig, all incoming ASIST is focused away from the higher brain, and more twoards the middle/lower brain. What happens when this rigger slots a BTL?

Since the ASIST signals from the BTL are now focused at lower portions of the brain, one would expect that they'd likely have a more potent effect, since things like heartrate, adrenaline production, overall state of the endocrine system, and the bulk of what goes into the "Emotive" tracks on the BTL, all reside in those same lower portions of the brain.

On the flip side, you can say that having the ASIST focused on the lower brain deadens the external sensory tracks of the BTL, which spoils the overall effect, but that doesn't take into account moodchip BTLs which are all emotive track, with no external sensory tracks at all.

And that's just BTLs. That's not even looking at the other common types of ASIST your typical runner may deal with, which is everything from skillwires to smartgun links. ASIST is more than just rigging and decking, so to try to explain why a control rig penalizes decking by saying it changes how the brain processes all ASIST without even stopping to consider the other types of ASIST leaves a lot of unanswered questions.

Since when?

Since ASIST signals, as per the rules as written, are more like simsense shorthand. Only the largest ultraviolet hosts can possibly interpret or generate an entire simsense feed on-the-fly. Decks and hosts work by accessing the brain's own processing power to help it do its job. For instance, instead of actually drawing the shape of a ball in your visual field, the ASIST signal just says, "ball here," and the brain does the linking up and interpretation for you, putting a ball where a ball is supposed to be.

Most of the time this works just fine. You'd actually be surprised at how much of your current visual field is just your brain filling in blind spots without you ever noticing, or how much of your sense of touch is your brain interpolating between several distant sensory nerves. The VCR, however, mucks that all up because it completely changes the way ASIST signals are processed. When a person with an active VCR receives an ASIST signal, the VCR immediately hijacks the midbrain, using the midbrain's superior data coordination and reflexive processing to make minor adjustments to what the imaginary vehicle is doing. Of course in this case there is no vehicle, so the rigger's Icon just ends up jerking spastically.

This is all covered in the books. P. 18 and 29 Matrix and p. 26 Rigger 3

Disregarding the question of whether "a crucial component" means it is in fact Simsense until I have more time (after all, it's more than possible for a component to not be able to be considered the whole; light is a crucial component of movies, but light is not movies.), BTLs ride high on the emotional track, and nothing in canon suggests that ASIST has an emotional track.

~J

Doesn't change too much ...

Let's assume that Simsense == ASIST (as opposed to Simsense != ASIST).
This would mean that the following logical expression would be true as well:

Simsense <=> ASIST.
This expression is composed of:

1. Simsense => ASIST and
2. ASIST => Simsense

Now let's look at those in detail:

Simsense => ASIST

is correct because one can say that if something is Simsense, it'll automatically use ASIST as well, since the latter is a crucial part of Simsense.
Now for the second part:

ASIST => Simsense

is false, since you cannot say that all forms of ASIST automatically involve simsense.

Thus the initial assumption fails. Thus ASIST != simsense ...

And this is the point I'm trying to make. If you explain away a certain rule with "It changes how all ASIST is processed by the brain", you'd better at least make a show of having looked at all the other parts of the game that'd use ASIST and determined how that change will impact them.

A canon example of something that'd affects all types of ASIST would be the Simsense Vertigo Flaw. If the explanation for why the control rig interferes with decking is "it changes how all ASIST is processed by the brain" then I'd expect the list of things impacted to resemble what's listed in Simsense Vertigo, with spelled out explanations for the exceptions.

To the best of my understanding, ASIST, as it has been presented in the published material, is a data protocol for machines to be able to encode, store and process sensory data and other nerve impulses. The sensory data can be either external (the "classic" five senses, plus the senses of balance and body position) or internal (the various states of arousal of certain internal systems that the brain interprets as "emotion"). The motor impulses that an active skillwire system uses to translate what's on the chip into an actual activity fall under the category of other nerve impulses.

In practice, this means that no matter if what's coming down that datajack and being piped into the brain is a signal from a Rigger's Control Deck, a signal from a Cyberdeck, a smartgun's output as to where in the field of view to display the crosshair, The latest Neil the Ork Barbarian Full-X simsense that's been modulated into the "California Hot" range, or a moodchip BTL, they all send an ASIST signal of some type, even if the types and qualities of that data vary greatly.

That's all well and good, but the rules of an RPG should represent the physical laws of the world in which it's set. How would you interpret the rules of a game set in the "real world" which stated that on a roll of 1 on a single D6 that any character can fly? I know what I'd do - if the rest of the game was as bad it would go with the other cr@p games I used to buy, if the game's OK then it's time for a house-rule.

One of my bugbears abour RPGs in general is that it becomes difficult to estimate naturally an individual's chance of success in a certain task - if faced with a jump between 2 buildings IRL you'd probably instinctively know whether you can make it even taking into account wind conditions, run up etc. Adding together target numbers is not as easy - if a player was about to do that in the game would the GM tell them the target number and then both parties work out how likely that is to happen? - which is exactly why rules need to be simple - OTOH, make it too simple and characters start doing freaky things that don't match the game world and the atmosphere turning the whole exercise into a dice rolling comptetion (might as well play Yahtzee).

The *rules* in SR are abstract (and contradictory), but the atmosphere and world are pretty detailed - if ever the two conflict I know which should win...

Seeing as in this case, it's not so much a rules change, as it is going back to a previous edition's rule and then merging the new rule into it, I see it more as not letting a not-very-well explained rules change get in the way of a perfectly good in-game explanation.

Necro Tech's sniper example on the first page of this thread is a very good example of how multiple jacks would be useful.

No kidding. I have no problem with external Routers, because all of my characters (PCs and NPCs) use them in non-DNI context (Two are non-cybered physads, one is so batshit crazy he doesn't even know what he's doing half the time, and one eschews ASIST, and yet has like 0.3 Essence left from all the combatware crammed into him). DNI should be absolutely no different.