From Bull's "What is SR4" thread:

Somebody is a fan of Tad Williams Otherland, hm?

SYL

As one could easily state that Shadowrun always was (and probably will be...) a setting featuring the ultimate victory of the technocracy, the thought that this ability is magick isn't that far stretched...

There are no known animals that emit or detect radio frequency communications, nor are there any known biological processes that operate with the temporal resolution necessary for frequencies useful for high-bandwidth data transfer.

If technomancers are living radio antennas, it is necessarily magic.

There's actually another option that those of you with a more humanist bent might find attractive. Instead of being actually magic in the Shadowrun sense of the term, it could be the result of an advanced biological function like ESP. Technomancers learned to use 100% of their brains and lo did they emit radio waves.

It is. But "Magic" isn't a good enough reason for most people. So you have to dress magic up in fancy names like Electricity.

I´m with blakkie on this one. They are geneticly altered cyber-freaks created as a part of the AI´s plot for world domination.

I'm guessing Technomancers are the adepts of the sixth world.

If you look at mages, shamans, phys ads, all of these could work in the fourth age. Technomancers may just be an evolution of adepts as they interact with the technology of the sixth world.

How would you genetically alter a biological organism to give it the capability to sense radio waves, given that nothing we know has genes that impart any such ability?

Well how would you genetically alter a biological organism to give it the capability to sense mana, given that nothing we know has genes that impart any such ability?

I would say, because it is a fictional reality we are talking about, in which "seeing" emotions this is already possible. So why shouldn't they be able to perceive electromagnetic waves?

So you want Technomancers to be magical then.

That's not what i said.

I only said, if it is possible to perceive magic, why should it be impossible to interact with radio emanations?

Because physics didn't change in SR. Magic just got added on.

Sure physics changed. Look at that map of California.

Darkness--I agree that the rules don't model real-world physics very well. Nor would you want them to, since then you may as well just do stuff in the real world.

However, when it comes to developing the setting, then as a game designer you should think about whether you want to foster a sense of this being like the real world or not. If you want it to be a fantastic, amazing world, where rivers flow backwards and mice spring forth, spontaneously, from grain, then there's no point paying attention to real-world physics. If you're trying to develop a near-future, partly sci-fi setting, then you have to pay some attention to the "sci" part, or you'll leave people behind who know anything about "sci".

For example, you wouldn't believe a realistic, nonmagical, present-day setting where trees grew from seed to 60' tall in minutes. Trees don't grow that fast--there is something really unusual here. If the author had never been around trees, they might write that, and if the audience had never been around trees they might accept it. ("Wow. Trees grow fast! Cool.") But an audience who knows something about trees would probably not be so amused. ("Yeah. Right. And the earth is flat, too, for real.")

Since a lot of people who are interested in tech and science fiction are interested in real tech and real science, you can't assume that they don't know anything about science, just like you can't assume that your audience doesn't know anything about trees. One doesn't have to choose to do hard science fiction, or even soft science fiction. One can just make up random stuff, string together important sounding words, and hope the audience is amused. But if one does a little more work, you can put together nonrandom stuff that isn't obviously bizarre to those who know and which is more engaging to people who don't know because you can draw on the tremendous backstory of "the real world", which is much more rich and varied than an author's imagination.

They already explained that the Awakening was an exception to the "real world" status of things. And they've given broad parameters for what the Awakening did and didn't do, and can and cannot make possible. If they're going to make an exception to the exception, they should explain it as such; if they're going to make another exception to the "real world" status, and they don't claim otherwise, then the natural conclusion for readers is that it, too, is part of the first exception.

That is, technomancers are magical.

I don't think you actually mean that you like things simply because they are unrealistic, but I think I understand your point. I also don't think you mean that you believe that trees can grow to 60' from seed in minutes. (Well, not in less than hundreds of thousands of minutes, anyway....)

I'd be surprised if you think it would be "not fun" if technomancers were genuinely magical, and also "not fun" if they needed electronics to interface with the wireless matrix (but were simply, like otaku, geniuses at using them at a low level, largely transparently), but that it is "fun" because they do not need technology and inexplicably it just works.

But maybe you like playing games where things just plain don't make sense. If so, there's really nothing else I can say.

If you do like them to make sense, but enjoy it when it is different sense than applies in the real world, that I can understand.

The cheeky part of me says, "If they're named like magicians, sound like magicians, and have a stat like magicians..." But then, that is according to my own bias.

In the end, though? It doesn't need to be wholly one thing or another. Or it could be some weird third thing thrown in from left field. You're the GM of your own game, even if the Gospel According to Fanpro answers it, nobody's going to stop you from making Technomancers whatever you want to be in your game.

I plan on making Technomancer origins a big part of my games. WHo are they and how do they work? Imagine cultish science facilities dedicated to abducting known technomancers for dissection and experimentation.

The good ol' Electric Ray has an actual organ that produces electrical discharge. IIRC...

That's a large step away though. Electrons and even their movement isn't emf. One can lead to the other. But you have to get electrons moving back and forth, or at least moving and stopping, in controled manner to create a usable emf emission.

thank you, hubert. you have managed to say what i keep trying and failing to get out.

here's another issue with technomancers. where did all these no-cyber computer junkies come from? it's been five years since the Crash 2.0; is that really enough time for a whole new generation of post-otaku to have a) discovered their power, and b) trained it to the point of being viable as runners, corp wage-hackers, etc.?

Actually, yes. The Crash would be the biggest dumpshock of all. Quite likely, anyone who survived it would have their brain permanently altered. In this case, the special connection the Otaku had with the Matrix may have altered them in a different way, allowing them to access this new Matrix due to their altered brain waves.

I guess their datajacks and math SPUs and so on just fell out of their heads, or something?

you're missing what i'm saying. where did all these no-cyber computer junkies come from? all the otaku have, at a minimum, a datajack. do you see most players creating technomancer characters with datajacks? or other cyber that they had installed before the change? being a mage/technomancer is hard enough as it is in SR4; i seriously don't see many players making that sacrifice.

I'll wait to see the actual fluff before making any judgements but, personally, I am not the kind of person who complains that the crew of the Starship Enterprise should have been cooked to death by the waste heat from their warp core long ago.

Movies and comics have obviously shown the writers that any horrible accident involving radition, chemicals, or electricity imparts superpowers.

A minor side note on the "no creature transmits/receives radio waves" idea. Go get a radio and tune it to very near a station, so that you hear some sound and some static. Now touch the antenna, connecting your bodily electrical field to the antenna, increasing the amount of sound that the receiver gets. Not exactly the same thing, but near enough to maybe help boost the signal to usable levels. Still need to overclock the brain a bunch though.

two problems with that. the minor problem is that a) the fact that the WMI was to be ready for deployment by 2065, and b) the ubiquity of the Matrix 2.0 in 2070 both indicate that the downtime was relatively short. but you could stretch it and say there was maybe two years where there was no Matrix, and therefore nobody got datajacks (that doesn't answer the problems with other cyber, though). two years doesn't even qualify as a mini-generation.

the major problem, though, is this: assuming that the Matrix was down long enough to spawn a generation, however miniature, of no-datajackers, where the hell did their skill with computers come from?

as for Star Trek, there are people out there who will argue that with you all day long. at least with Star Trek, somebody's got an explanation. and, really, Star Trek has other things to recommend it. thus far, at least for me, SR4 doesn't.

Saline solutions function as antennas, albeit poorly. What's your point? It doesn't have anything to do with electric currents from neurons and muscles--you'd get the same effect with a tub of salt water. And there still aren't any biological processes that are fast enough to do anything useful with the signals. They're a million times too slow.

Wish I had a snappy comeback, but right now I ain't got a clue. Talk to me in a couple of weeks, when I have the book in my greasy hands, and maybe I'll have the official answer.

Meh, we've decided in our gaming group already to ditch the whole concept of "Technomancers as Bunny Ears", and instead require all Technomancers to have a Sim Module and a Datajack (since the only explained origin of Technomancers was the fact they were "jacked in" during Crash 2.0, they should probably also have a datajack), and to manipulate AR and VR they have to have Commlinks, and these essence costs do not count for the purposes of reducing Resonance (we are playing with numbers, but 0.5 Essence compensation seems about right). The only reason that FanPro made it that was simple (in our opinion): So no one can make the "Uber" technomancer by loading up on Bio/Cyberware and hone their otaku ablities at the same time.