Gentlemen, Ladies,

Let's all take a deep breath. This thread is rapidly picking up speed and turning into a train wreck.

I suddenly realize that optimism and willingness to compromise are in short supply nowadays.

this is dumpshock, so i would not say its something that have shown up nowadays...

im just glad these people are not religious and involved in politics...

Lets not open a can of flesh eating worms we can't close....

noted...

RPG fanatics only put people in their immediate vicinity and limited protions of the internet in jeopardy. Send a huge box of RPG´s to <insert fanatic here - any name mentioned could raise an argument> and hope it offers sufficient sublimation to take the edge of those destructive urges.

I doubt that would help.

look, blakkie, if you want to turn your brain off when you game, go right ahead. i prefer to game with my brain on, because i think SR can be--and has been in the past, and might be in the future, but isn't in the present--more than another mindless game. personally, if i want to turn my brain off, i'll go play D&D, or just plug in the X-Box. if playing SR the way i play D&D does it for you, great. have fun.

my point--the only thing i'm in this thread to say--is that the only logical explanation for technomancer abilities is magic. that's it. if you don't want to use logic, if you're fine with not thinking about it, bully for you. i'm not stopping you, i don't want to stop you. i don't care. that's not what i'm arguing. i'm not coming over to your gaming table and calling you stupid because of the way you game (though i am calling you stupid for a number of other reasons). why don't you get the fuck off my back about the way i game?

I tend to agree (about the Technomancer part). If they just came out and said that Technimancers were, in fact Matrix Adepts, then I really wouldn't have any problem with it. Any other explanation (or lack thereof) just seems contrived.

People more or less shrug their sholders at magic in the sixth world. Evil AI´s and ghosts in the machine, technomancers and otaku are still spooky fairytales. Why in gods name would you be in a hurry to change that

Because, the way they are presented, there is no logical explanation for what they can do outside of Magic.

So what?

a GM wants to know how the world ticks so that they have a firm grasp on how to present it. the players on the other hand dont want to much info, all they realy want is a name and if its dangerus or not.

so in many ways the two book approach used for say blue planet or d&d is nice when you can split the world info from the game info. the world info explains how and why everything is as it is. the game info only tells you how to play the game.

right now its to much game info and to little world info about the technomancers. and the world info that exist seems to rub the "hard" sci-fi people on this forum the wrong way. something that could be simply avoided by putting the mancers in the magic category of the world as then its just another fantasy element and dont have to be explained in the same way that a sci-fi element have to be.

just look at the amount of theories and other stuff that are trown about to cover star trek and the workings of the technology shown and then apply that to SR and one may well see the problem.

thing is tho that i feel otakus and now technomancers are there to put a kind of mystery into tech in the way that only magic have at the moment. kinda like the statement by, i belive it was, einstein: technology on a high enough level will seem like magic (not sure about the exact words but about the same content).

problem is tho, that while tech may seem mystical to a joe wageslave, its not supposed to be for a trained engineer or professor. they are more or less trained to "hate" the unexplained.

so basicly people are getting their feathers rubbed the wrong way because mancers are made to look magical but are not magical, and therefor there must be a logical explanation how they do what they do. right now there is none, some even say its physicaly impossible for them to do what the book claims they can do without it being magic.

funny thing is that some of the best cyberpunk was written by a person that didnt know what a computer was, much less how it did what it did. he just took the basic idea and ran with it. creating a world where not even the great tech companys fully knew how their products worked as it was made by AI's at so high a speed that all they could do was put it out on the market as fast as they could do.

hell, the icebreakers where written by AI's to take on the ice written by other AI's, but it was the humans that used it. the users however didnt know how it worked, only that it either did or didnt, and that they where doing what they where doing by the seat of their pants. kinda like the early pilots. they may have had a basic understanding of how things worked but most of the time it was gut instinct that made the diffrence between crash and fight.

so basicly, some like mystisism in their tech, others dont, yet others dont care as its just a game anyways. problem is tho that you cant remove the mancers without removing a large chunk of what makes up SR4. on the older versions "they" where addons in a extra book, meaning it was easyer to ignore their pressence and impact in the world.

i wonder it this makes any sense at all

If that were the case, you could take a technomancer apart and point to the (extremely divergent from normal metahuman) bits of anatomy responsible and say, "Well, I don't know how it got there, but there it is." Then you can start trying to figure out how it got there. To the medical technology of SR, the modifications to the body required to make you into a radip transmitter would be about as obvious as a third eye.

AFAIK, you can't point out that bit of technomancers when you take them apart.

This would mean that Technomancers are esentailly 'matrix adepts', which is an acceptable explanation. But if you want to stick to a 'technological' one I expect some bloody radio generating organs on my desk by lunch time tomorrow.

thing is that both vampires and cyberzombies can be spotted as just that on the astral. right now technomancers (and before that otakus) register as perfectly mundane...

personaly i kinda like the unknown factor of otakus and technomancers, even tho the former got a simsense translator added to appease the screaming critics, and most likely the latter will get a implant wifi transmitter for the same reason later on...

why can magic go without explanation while technology have to be explained down to very superstrings of things?

hell, going by the latest books it my well look like the very precence of magic effects the very "laws" of physics...

Explain? It's possible to cause subcritical masses to blow if you subject them to enough pressure, so I hope that's not what you're talking about.

~J

Knock it off. No need to start a pissing contest on who can flame harder.

*shrug* my point's pretty much made. if blakkie wants to limit himself and his games, like i said--i don't care.

On the topic of Technomancers using their entire bodies as transmitters, that just doesn't seem to be the case. You could easily have a 'Mancer-in-the-Box™' with no extraneous body parts and still have the same transmission range.

eh. limbs, muscle, etcetera all eat energy, not produce it (well, they do, sorta, but not in ways that can be harvested by anything other than the specific producer). a limbless technomancer would actually have more energy for his transmissions, assuming that they transmit using the body's energy sources.

great. i'm happy for you. i'm not here to tell you how to play your game. hopefully, you're not here to tell me how to play mine. and hopefully, in the future, you'll be nonpartisan enough to note little details like how i didn't get in the last shot--which implies that i wasn't trying to get in the last shot, since nothing except banning could stop me (or anyone) from continuing to try to get it.

ah. point. i'm not sure about the jar, though. there aren't rules in SR for replacing internal organs with cybernetics (or tubes, for that matter), so you can't really say anything about the canon effects of doing that.

I'll accept the (admittedly weak) suspension of disbelief of Technomancers being more 'advanced' otaku, modified in some way to be able to sense and alter the matrix around them.

I don't really view it as if they emit strong radio signals, but rather that they manipulate existing signals in a way that makes them able to intuitively manipulate the wireless matrix (yes, I know - they would still need a certain amount of transmission strength, and it doesn't fully explain all their powers, but close enough for a pseudo-scientific explanation in the style that shadowrun id rife with, imo).

My problem is that there is no conclusive explanation of what limits a technomancer has in how they are created. Even when otaku where new (and unplayable as PCs) there was the general consensus that they were changed or awakened by something in the matrix, or perceived to be in the matrix - what was later explained as the resonance and brain-structure manipulated by AIs, to varying degrees (Mirage was more successful than Deus, for instance). They required a datajack.

Technomancers were first explained as a further alteration of the human brain by a similar process or entity within the matrix; thus requiring a datajack - but that 'fluff' seems to have been diluted, ignored or (perhaps worse) changed in the transition to SR4. Now they don't require a datajack, and cyber disrupts their abilities (alright - I'll buy either the magic angle, or the 'cyberware disrupts their signal-manipulation' angle (in which case a datajack and non-wireless matrix link should allow full resonance to be used)). But we are missing an important piece of background info here.

It's like leaving out the fact that elves and dwarves are only born, not goblinized (though there are exceptions to that too), and someone making a character who goblinized only to later found out that this is an impossibility (unless he took a dip in the Ganges).

So there is a discrepancy in the explanations, and that causes confusion and disrupts the suspension of disbelief that we do have...

or the confusion can be the same as the SR world feels as they dont have all the facts and are working on 50% or more guesswork.

allso, only place i know of that technomancers show up outside of SR4 is system failure (and then only as some story on the shadowland board or something). was there any rules/info on how to play them in there?

and if so, how does it differ from SR4 stuff in flavor?

thing is that as the matrix is all around them carryed on the airways, the otaku no longer have to jack in to enter the deep resonance. ie, they can be it 24/7 if they want to.

then there is the question if there was any residual effects of crash2.0 and how it can have affected the deep resonance effect.

many unknowns. and i for one like that...

only reason i can see it a problem is if one trys to spin a story about the mancers and how they work and then a sourcebook pops up and contradict that. but thats no diffrent from say you playing dunkie to be re-elected and then a book comes out and says he died right after he got sworn in the first time. thats the dangers of trying to move to far ahead of the metaplot

Didn't think of Essence loss, but if it follows along from previous thinking on the matter, there shouldn't really be any. Losing things doesn't usually cost Essence, it's when they are replaced that it becomes a factor. I don't think being hooked up to tubes would count as replacing things in the spirit of the Essence rules.

In the end though, in my games they will be considered Matrix Adepts.