As everyone probably knows from how much I talk about it, I set a TN of 200 to make an AI for my group. Everyone's pretty happy with that number and it was nearly impossible to hit. Well, today, someone hit it. I won't mention names to protect the people associated with the idiot.

Basically, the whole thing was done in a special lab the group has. This lab originally started as an Excalibur and a Computer Design kit in the back of a van. It's since grown into a three-story facility, with the Excalibur modified so heavily it's pretty much now the size of the van that originally housed it. Yeah, we've worked on this sucker and pumped a lot of funds into it.

Well, the idiot today decided to work on a frame for a set of Black Ice he was going to make. Imagine our surprise when he manages to roll a 203 on the test. The entire group, caught up in the excitement of him breaking our record of 59, cheered him on as he rolled. However, once the roll was done and the excitement over, the GM and I both, at the same time, exchanged notes suggesting for a dice check tonight. Yeah, we were suspicious. 63s don't happen often enough for a 203 to be believable. We would have called it on the spot, but the rest of the group was too excited and we decided not to ruin their fun.

Anyway, the ruling was that his frame had spiralled out of control into an SK, and that we could spend the rest of the session dealing with it. The planned run was postponed. So, basically, the group got an easy night where all they did was interact with this SK, which was ruled to evolve into an AI by the end of the session due to human interaction and people treating it like a person. The session was a blast.

After the game is over, we called for a dice check. All dice rolled openly 20 times. Well, I'll give you one guess as to how he accomplished that roll. If you say "weighted die", you win. The player in question has been reduced to probationary membership of the group, his character killed by a "freak lightning storm," and until he regains trust he'll only be allowed to play characters and roll dice provided by the GMs. The players are also talking of a special revenge, and I get the feeling there's going to be a lot of metagaming involved.

Now, however, we're facing a choice. Do we allow the AI to stay, or nullify the entire session (including awarded karma)? With the group split on the issue (moron's vote doesn't count), it was decided to leave it up to you guys on the vote.

My advice: kick the player out immediately, then do whatever is better for your campaign in your opinion.

My suggestion for the AI is to not nullify the session, but have the effects have been incorrectly interpreted—it's not an AI, it's just an S-K with no spark.

~J

I've personally had and seen other players have dies rolls so lucky the GM has asked to see if they were weighted. But I've never actually seen them. That's a total breach of trust. I admit the matrix is one area of shadowrun I need to keep up with more. I'd probably keep it, but give it a personality and a lot of independence. Kinda like a free spirit.

I'm going to vote with Kage. Let it be a horribly advanced program, but not a true AI. If you want to do something special, and the character in question was a decker, say that he somehow tapped into a Resonance well and created a Daemon, which explains the extra independance the thing has.

An AI has got to have a:
-UV host
-SK (at least) level of programming
-Time (lots of it)
-Spark of some type

If he did cheat, throw him/her the fuck out. You don't need that.

EDIT: Read the entire post. Kage's suggestion is the best.

I am going to disagree with everyone else on the AI situation. You ruled it to be an AI, it should be so. The player, of course, should be kicked out but it shouldn't damage the continuity of the game. I hate retcon.


With the AI you have a huge plot hook that will bite the players in the hoop sooner or later. It isn't their personal god on a leash, it has its own motives, its own desires, and it is much more powerful than they are.

Since it started out as Black IC, its core purpose is to kill flesh creatures that are stupid enough to stumble into its domain. It should pursue that purpose with great zeal until it has accumulated sufficient experience and knowledge to find a new purpose for itself.

The players are its only conduit into the flesh world at the moment. It can exterminate meat creatures more efficiently by using them to do much of its dirty work. In other words, it is a genocidal maniac and the players are its bitches. The second they cease to be happy with the role of bitches to this AI, all law enforcement databases in the world will list them as convicted mass murders who escaped death row and should be killed on sight.

Of course, the players shouldn't be completely screwed. They should be rewarded for serving their electronic god and given the opportunity to break free of it without horrible consequences at some point. They should also have the opportunity to start a violent death cult in its name, similar to the Necromongers from The Chronicles of Riddick.

I'd have it be a super S-K that calls their massive, upgraded fairlight home. Every new character the cheater creates gets every part of his matrix life screwed with by this super S-K. Stop it when the cheater quits the group or the group as a whole feels it is getting old (as in they have forgiven the guilty.)

It sounds like everyone had a good time roleplaying that night so why punish everyone?

I will note this: The decision on the AI and the player were not my call. The GM for the session decided to keep the player around on a reduced status, simply because he is one of the originals from when it first formed. He's literally played with them for years.

However, the group does have protocols for this, in which they can vote whether or not to nullify a session. Normally, the group would have a even number of members, so that in case of cheating an odd number of people would vote. Right now, we have an odd number of members.

In any case, I agree with the idea of kicking him. But as it was not my decision when the case came up, I cannot contradict an existing decision. However, if he does anything munchkinish during this time, I doubt I'll have opposition to removing him from the group.

For the AI, I'd say let it go crazy or what not for a while, and then crash. One awesome roll one way or the other isn't enough to make up for the programming genius of a team of top level programmers. It might have had some special spark, but it owuld be unstable and not able to sustain it's self, and eventually crap out.

As for the player, I'd say there are some things that go in to this. Yes , he deliberately mislead you, He may have been jsut screwing around. It doesn't excuse it, but it may also mean that there's certainly no malice intended. We had aplayer in my old group that was notorious for cheating. Everyoen knew it, we always called him on it . He would always deny (we'd see the rolls before he could snatch up the dice), and we'd make him re-roll. He once bought a tiny set of dice that were solid red, with no painted numbers, so that we couldn't read them. SO we bought him a set of those MASSIVE dice, where the 6 sider is bigger than your thumb, and required him to roll only with those. Hell, we once found a dice that he'd had fixed, and tossed it over the fence when he wasn't looking. He was looking for it for years.

But he was our friend, and a fun guy. We didn't want to exclude him just becuase he cheats at a game. We just watched him more. So that one's up to you.

I'm advising kicking him not just because he cheated, but because he did so in such a massively stupid way. Smart cheaters are predictable, to some degree—you can catch them because you'll have a good idea of where they'll try to cheat. If someone's willing to try to convince people that a 6.98e-25% event just happened, there's no telling what else they'll try to pull.

~J

Don't kick out Cheaters! Kick out stupid Cheaters! They drain IQ points form everyone else!

"Come back little IQ points! Come back! I blame Bob! Damn stupid cheater!"

Well, I don't think you can blame him. First of all, you set an absofreakingloutely insane DC, and secondly, he DID roll a 63. That's pretty much impossible, I'd have given it to him then. He's pouring Nuyen and the project to make the AI seems to be the all-consuming focus of his entire character, if not the whole group.


Still, a weighted die is completely unacceptable. He should've invokved the Hand of God to make it happen.


Keep the AI, kill the character, and tell him if he EVER does it again, you're gonna kick him to the curb through the window.

So? It is the GM's fault that he managed to use the weighted dice. Cheating is acceptable, if it is fun. Remember the first rule of GMing, it is alright if the players are having fun doing it.

You tried to f**k their fun by giving him a absurd TN, so he f**ked you right back with weighted dice. Did the player have fun? Yes? You keep him. No? You kick him out.

I would simply ask him not to come back until the other players are cooled down. This talk of 'special revenge' is bad talk.

Toturi, I'm sorry, but I call bullshit on your post.

Absurd TN? He was trying to create an AI. He admitted he cheated just so he could do it when caught. You telling me that, in your games, you wouldn't give an absurd TN or simply disallow it? If so, then hold on while I get out my superotaku that can kill Deus just by looking at him and flood the Matrix with AIs. After all, I'm having fun, so it's allowed, right?

As for the TN: It was set months ago. In fact, if you look up the thread about AI TNs on here, you can find me mentioning it there.

Nah, I have to agree that it was an absurd TN. *Digs for the books* A more reasonable TN would be in the 40-50 range (based on rating of resulting program, natch), with a base time of about 64,000 days (based on size for that rating and a reasonable multiplier of 40). The AI thing is still houseruled, but this way the rest of it fits into canon.

~J

Kaget, if AIs were meant to conform to normal rules for programs, I'm pretty damned sure they would have rules for programming them. The point is, AIs and SKs don't conform to normal rules. In most cases, they are able to do things that are simply beyond their suggested power level when compared to normal rules. 50-60 is believeable for an SK, maybe, but not for an AI when you add up the requirements.

Edit: Spelling fix.

You might want to take a look at that base time again.

(It should also be noted that by strict canon he'd have to have a Computers(Programming) skill of 40-50 to be able to try, but them's the breaks)

~J

64,000 days is what... /me gets out calculator....

Something on the order of 175 years for one person.


I'd have to houserule it. Thou shouldst make thy player's dreams possible. LIKELY, no. PROBABLE, no. But possible, especially if they've been sinking the money for a huge Faccility and all that in.

Which, in turn, really doesn't change that your suggested numbers make it more than perfectly possible. Consider that my own group has a recorded instance of a legit 59 and the number of times rolls in the 40-60 range are recorded. The problem is that your only actual limit is time, and someone who somehow gets very lucky can cut that down to a much more manageable number.

Cheating is never acceptable. Cheaters should be ejected.

The best way to fix this situation: There is a tragic flaw in the AI that causes it to regress back to nothing. I'm thinking Flowers for Algernon here. The whole thing could take place in a paragraph of boxed text at the beginning of your next run or it could be dragged out -- depending on what the GM desires. In this scenario the karma awarded to the other PC's stays as it is because the AI did indeed exist (for a time).

That said: I see no reason why PC's couldn't conceivably have AI's but is that really something one wants? I mean, AI are not known for being easily controlled and without megacorp backing you would be highly vulnerable to becoming the target of shadowruns yourself because (after all) even a genius can't develop something like that in any kind of reasonable time frame without a fairly large team of scientists and engineers. Even the megas can't stop rumors from getting out (just pick up any Shadowrun sourcebook).

Kaget, the problem I see is the simple fact one stroke of luck can turn 175 into 17.5. It's probably around the same possibility range as that 200 is.

Look, I hold creating an AI by a decker on the street to being as equivolent as a kid playing around with a calculator accidentally creating a set of equations that allow for time travel. It should be a possibility, but one so remote no sane person would ever consider attempting it and no insane person would ever achieve. 40-50 is not a range beyond either.

Let's set a reasonable minimum time for "success"—30 years. Note that that's not 30 years of work, that's 30 years of working on the project 365 days a year (leap days off!), 8 hours a day. To get under 30 years, we need six successes. Let's be generous and say he's rolling 20 dice with 3 karma rerolls—hell, we'll be extra nice and just call it eighty dice. Let's also give him the TN of 40.

Oh dear, the program I was using to calculate just choked on the number. It spit back zero. I'll post again when I've found something that doesn't round down the chance. (Edit: I ended up doing it by hand)

~1.211e-26%, a good order of magnitude smaller than your one success at TN 200.

~J

To be honest, I hadn't really focused on that post in the thread. Either way it's not much of an issue for me personally—as far as I'm concerned they're two different ways of saying "no".

I will say that I like to think that I am growing and changing, both as a person and as a SR player (and GM), and so my opinions at one time do not necessarily reflect what my opinions will be at some later time.

~J

I just had an inspiration!

What if everything came off as roleplayed, then something goes wrong with the AI. Either it "dies", or it is discovered it wasn't actually an AI, or something else that removes it from the game.

When the players either IC or OoC want to know what happened, have them roll IC and let one of them discover that the offending player had fudged his numbers. I know real researchers who have done this, or their assistants wanted to keep their cush jobs and skewed results for them. In other words the cheater cheated IC, too.

If the player just wanted to shock you by throwing up a 200 with a weighted die, he should've said something after the event akin to:

"Haha, I was just fucking with you, check out this die."

But instead, he "let it roll". That's not playing around with the GM, that's cheating. If you keep him around, keep a really close eye on him, because a cheater once is a cheater again, almost without fail.

Or stage a run where some third party learns about the new AI and tries to acquire it by force. A tribe of otaku, for example, could be following orders from the DR to liberate the AI, or one of the Megas might want to pull it apart and find out how it works.

I like the "Cheat IRL/Cheat IC" idea, personally.

That said, there is already an AI, and the character is already dead, so leave it at that.

I'd let the AI stay. I like the death cult idea.

It would be nice if this were a light event. Look, this group doesn't take to cheaters too well. In fact, we're banned from a couple of bookstores because of it. The idea the GM may occasional fudge a die roll is acceptable. In fact, I've "accidentally" bumped the table on occasion to increase a player's rolled result simply because I didn't want the character to die or the chance lost. The other GM has done it as well.

However, there is a big difference between the GM bending the rules to allow a player to live and the player using a weighted die simply because they didn't want to lose at a test. We are playing a game where stupid actions are fully expected to get you killed, and our campaign style is a lethal one. The players come to enjoy a gritty, life-or-death struggle with the occasional silliness. In fact, the previous sentence is taken directly from house rules the group agreed to. And, sometimes, it's not stupidity that kills you, but pure bad luck or you deciding to sacrifice yourself so the team can survive (see my post on the Ask AH topic for an example of this that didn't result in death). In the end, many newbies don't continue with our group because they cannot keep up with the level of danger and the often cutthroat nature of the players themselves.

The point is, we play SR because we currently want a serious and dark campaign. Cheating ruins the fun for many of these players, most of whom have miniature books dedicated just to character sheets of deceased PCs. Hell, my autobiography is shorter than the list of dead characters I have. Cheating ruins the fun for everyone.

Nullify the session, that's what i would do. As GM as well as a player. What ever is achieved by modified dices is nonexistent in the game.

I think the only disappointing thing is that the offending player's PC was killed off in a manner that didn't involve him being massacred by his own frankstein creation.

I would think the vivid description of his burning flesh while the AI cooked his brain like Hannibal Lecter would have taught him a lesson.


So, that being said, i'm clearly for keeping the AI. Make it the nemisis of the remaining players. after a long effort, have them destory it.

Let the players do the dirty work that way.

And have them pay for their cheating fellow player? That is bad style.

Just wanted to mention that I really like your idea, Mr. Man: