The Shadowrun Situation

[phlapjackage]

I can only conclude they do this on purpose. American quality work, as it is.

You've been quite anti-American lately. Just because CGL and Aaron are asshats doesn't mean we all are. I manage to refrain from concluding that all Germans are pretentious arseholes even though I have some certain posters to go by.

[rasmuswagner]

Viewed from the outside, US public discourse has taken a sharp turn towards JOB CREATORZ!!! FAP FAP FAP over the last 20 years. It's pervasive in Hollywood and HBO. Nobody is telling stories about corporate for-profit rapecamps or whatever, it's all lone psychoes and terrorists.

That's probably why the asshats at CGL would rather tell stories about dragons and evil wizards. They can't stomach stories about real evil.

[Username17]

Wait. You didn't expect Catalyst to portray a corporation run by lying embezzlers who make shitty products while screwing the little guy to be the bad guys, did you?

-Username17

[Maxus]

Touché

[virgil]

[quote="Shadowrun Core Book]Ghouls feed on the necrotized flesh of metahumans, along with that of other animals.[/quote]Ghouls can survive off of animal flesh? For the ones that retain their sentience, that seems to make them fairly capable of being regular citizens; especially if they, at minimum, get some trode paste and a camera if not cybernetic eyes outright.

If I'm reading that wrong and metahuman flesh is needed, do they ever reveal how much it would cost to grow cloned metahuman flesh of just high enough quality to satisfy ghoul dietary needs?

[Username17]

[quote="Shadowrun Core Book]Ghouls feed on the necrotized flesh of metahumans, along with that of other animals.

Ghouls can survive off of animal flesh? For the ones that retain their sentience, that seems to make them fairly capable of being regular citizens; especially if they, at minimum, get some trode paste and a camera if not cybernetic eyes outright.

If I'm reading that wrong and metahuman flesh is needed, do they ever reveal how much it would cost to grow cloned metahuman flesh of just high enough quality to satisfy ghoul dietary needs?[/quote]

Funny you should mention that, but I actually did write up a bit of a discussion on that in Augmentation.

Bioware implants are a different story: cultured ware has no resale value except as ghoul chow, but the type Owen stuff can be turned around for full price, which means that it can be sold off to a medical warehouse for perhaps 40 percent of retail with no unpleasant questions at all.

So yes, you can totally eat the cloned meats if that is what you want. If you bought and ate rack body clones, it would set you back 250 nuyen a week. Obviously if you're buying sub-surgical quality clones, the price would be lower.

-Username17

[Krusk]

So if I throw out the fluff and stuff about the cities and specific megacorps and use my own setting how well do you think it will hold up? The rules from a rules standpoint? Also can't be assed to google but does anyone have a real release date? My game shop could only tell me juneish.

Lastly I preordered a copy today at my flgs so how much of a sucker am I?

[Rawbeard]

If by pre-order you mean also pre-paid, than the amount of suckitude might be great. Otherwise, no one knows when it's out and how horrible it will be, so you can still never pick it up, I guess.

[Neurosis]

This is basically why Bull and I aren't friends: fundamental disagreement on the nature and direction of the game. Bull is fairly conservative as Shadowrun goes, and I don't think SR4 ever really sat well with him. Granted, even the freelancers that did consider me a friend think I have a mind like an open sewer at midnight, but I like to think that any setting has to advance or else it's going to go stale.

Agree with you pretty much 100% AH. Bull has a downright restrictive view of what Shadowrun "is".

[Aryxbez]

I read some bits of that Stormfront review by hermit, and sad to find that they killed my favorite Great Dragon: Sirrurg. I've been wanting to see more story information on him, but disappointed in how it seemed to have been handled, and just got michael bay'd.

[Antumbra]

I read some bits of that Stormfront review by hermit, and sad to find that they killed my favorite Great Dragon: Sirrurg. I've been wanting to see more story information on him, but disappointed in how it seemed to have been handled, and just got michael bay'd.

Sirrurg wasn't killed. Instead, when his Kamehameha imploded, he was rescued by a pair of Dragon Cops who took him to Dragon Court and The President of Dragons sentenced him to Dragon Jail until the metaplot needs him to secretly eat 100,000 metahumans now that Alamais is dead.

(Unless Alamais comes back from the dead, seeking to collect a set of Magic Artifacts and only the PCs can do the fetch quests that allow the real Heroes, Immortal Elves and Dragons, to stop his villainy once and for all.)

[Korgan0]

Wow. I don't think they're jumping sharks, I think they're doing orbital flights over blue whales.

[Dragon Instincts]

(Unless Alamais comes back from the dead, seeking to collect a set of Magic Artifacts and only the PCs can do the fetch quests that allow the real Heroes, Immortal Elves and Dragons, to stop his villainy once and for all.)

Tasty lemonade there. Interested in a developer position? Maybe for Clutch of Dragons 2?

But here's how to take down Alamais once and for all: Just let a female character bounce her boobs. According to Attitude this is enough to cause a significant distraction in combat.
You might think that nobody in the sexually oversaturated world of 2075 would even care for a topless woman. It works for demure mormons though.

On a more serious note: I've heard rumours that in SR5 essence will cap your social skill tests. Dunno if that's true, but it's sure stupid if it is. As if even the tiny bit of lost essence from your datajack induces a cyberpsychosis and reduces your empathy. Wouldn't that invalidate cybered faces with things like olfactory boosters, voice enhancers and tailored pheromones? Here's the new uberface: Vampire Adept Pornomancer. Gains 2 CHA from being a vamp and can boost essence to 12. There you go!

Nerfing gear (will provide less boni) and cyberware (by the above rule) is a great idea anyways, because mundane characters were totally overpowered in SR4. Good thing they buffed mages by letting them cast with a simple action now.

[Stahlseele]

yep, sounds like the rumors i have read as well . .

[Rawbeard]

Oh well, some ideas aren't bad, but they can't make a working rule to safe their life. They can't make shit that does not the opposite of what it's supposed to do! This is hilarious. Equipment is bad, m'kay?

[Stahlseele]

CGL SR5 Devs seem to have gone full on balls to the walls retarded somehow . .
http://www.shadowruntabletop.com/2013/0 ... s-bonuses/

As we mentioned in a previous blog post, one of the main design philosophies going into Shadowrun, Fifth Edition is that we like Shadowrun, Fourth Edition. One of the noble tasks of Fourth Edition was involving hackers more in the action, thanks to the existence of the wireless Matrix. Wireless activity gave them all sorts of cool things to do, including shutting down wireless-enabled guns. They may not be able to shoot as well as some of the other players, but by taking out another combatant’s gun, they can be powerfully effective in a fight.

This power, though, came with a hitch. If you were going into a fight, and you knew that your gun could be shut down by an enemy hacker, would you want to use a wireless-enabled gun? Would you take that chance? For many people, it simply was not worth the risk. So they went in with wired technology instead of wireless-enabled devices, and the tool hackers briefly had started to disappear.

We decided that one of our goals for Shadowrun, Fifth Edition was to make it harder for people to decide to turn off their wireless functionality. We thought about using carrots or sticks for motivation, and we settled on carrots. The way this works out in game mechanics is that gear comes with a standard bonus and a wireless bonus. Want to use it without a security risk? Great, you still get good functionality from your piece of gear. Want a little extra performance? Then crank up the wireless.

The type and size of the bonus varies based on the kind of item it is. Take, for example, the chemical seal armor modification. This is not something that you would expect would depend much on wireless performance, so its basic function–protecting you from inhaling or contacting harmful chemicals–does not depend on wireless functionality. The wireless bonus is very simple–when wireless is off, you need a Complex Action to activate the seal, while when it’s on, it only takes a Simple Action–and that’s in keeping with the low risk of having it wirelessly enabled. Of all the things a hacker might target on the battlefield, a chemical seal is pretty low on the list.

Vision enhancement, though, is a different story. This is a piece of gear that could stand to gain from being wirelessly enabled. The gear could collect data from signals flying all around, translating it into useful visual information. This means if you don’t have this enhancement wirelessly enabled, you add its rating to your limit on visual Perception Tests. Activate the wireless, and you also get the rating as a dice pool modifier on visual Perception Tests. The enhancement might be a more likely target for hackers, but it’s also delivering a solid bonus for having its wireless functionality on.

Is it worth the risk? That’s your choice. As with everything else in the game, the bonus comes with a price, and you have to decide if you want to pay it.

[Rawbeard]

Adding fiddly shit to keep track of greatly improves games.

Also, this is stupid.

[Username17]

Superficially, it looks like they are spending several years going through the very simple Nash Equilibrium discussion I laid out for them in 2007, back when I was nominally still an "insider" and communicating regularly and directly with the developers. If you allow the players to set their devices to one or more settings where they cannot be hacked, then they are going to do that unless there is a very very good reason not to.

So here's the important parts: it can't be simple or cheap to keep out a matrix specialist, or people would do that. That means that the air gap, even the sneaker net, can't work. But it's more than that. The cheapest alternative of all of course is simply not having a computer, which means that you're down to one of three possibilities:

1. People gain benefits from computers which are so astoundingly awesome that they would genuinely be willing to accept the vulnerability of potential hacking anyway.
2. Not having computers makes you more vulnerable to hacking.
3. You have some sort of crazy ace that I don't even know.

Now, having rolled up on this very simple conundrum, they have gone all-in on Option 1. Quite possibly because they want to save their pride from the crushing realization that I was 100% right and they were 100% wrong six actual fucking years ago.

Now we get to sit back and watch the fireworks as they slowly realize that writing in an "astoundingly awesome" benefit for every single thing in the game that you would have the option to allow or disallow Hacking for is a crazy amount of work, and also is inevitably going to be just as "unrealistic" as Option 2! We're already seeing this with the vision enhancer. What the fucking hell is the excuse for the vision enhancer giving out bonus dice for seeing things just because it allows inputs from potential Hackers? That already doesn't make any sense unless and until you pull out some weird science fiction black box bullshit. And going down the road they are trying to go down, they're going to have to pull out new bullshit for every single fucking device that any Shadowrunner has ever owned or considered owning.

This basic line of objection was raised, by me, as the third god damned post of that thread:

Saying that people can't accomplish basic life and archetype functions without being plgged [sic] directly into a computer would in fact force a Nash Equilibrim in which people ran systems that were hackable.

Would you find that less offensive than a situation in which people who have machines that can directly affect the mind, and attack programs that damage the minds of enemies, could use those two together to damage the minds of enemies directly? I know definitively that I would not. I would find it more insulting if I was unable to effectively shoot a rifle or sneak through the woods without an active computer link than I find the concept of people remotely triggering conformational changes in the nerves of targets who don't have any special antenna equipment on them.

Of course, I don't find the second option at all implausible or far fetched, so the fact that I find the concept of it being in any particular way difficult to fire a gun or walk quietly without computer asistance [sic] makes the question pretty one sided.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

incredible o.o
not very surprising knowing you, but still incredible . .

my first reaction:
cheap broadband jammers, packed into grenade casings so i can fire them at people!

[Nath]

I must say I find it odd, to say the least, that the "Everything has a price" principle lead to first fixing the price, then deciding what 'everything' would be on a specific, case-by-case, basis.

If anything, it sounds more like "Every sacrifice has a reward". But that would be an entirely different conception.

[Whipstitch]

I remember bailing on that thread super fast and never posting because someone pulled out the "People are not rational actors" argument pretty much immediately. I mean, yes, it is obvious that in most situations people would leave their wireless on so they don't miss the 2070 equivalent of Kanye West tweets. Most people do not believe anyone in particular is after them. Or not that day, at least, and so they are comfortable with a degree of risk. This is in part because their job isn't to worry about long odds. Of course, things go from long odds to a near certainty if instead of being Joe Schmo you are in fact a hit man contracted to take out Glide, a notorious survivalist and anti-corporate hacker.

[Username17]

I remember bailing on that thread super fast and never posting because someone pulled out the "People are not rational actors" argument pretty much immediately. I mean, yes, it is obvious that in most situations people would leave their wireless on so they don't miss the 2070 equivalent of Kanye West tweets. Most people do not believe anyone in particular is after them. Or not that day, at least, and so they are comfortable with a degree of risk. This is in part because their job isn't to worry about long odds. Of course, things go from long odds to a near certainty if instead of being Joe Schmo you are in fact a hit man contracted to take out Glide, a notorious survivalist and anti-corporate hacker.

Yeah. That and the absolutely relentless spam and thread shitting from Funkenstein (now "Ol' Scratch"), mfb, and eidolon. Signal to noise ratio was incredibly low, because of all the thread shitting from moderators. Is it any wonder that I don't actually mind being permabanned there?

But the thing that caused me to remember the thread and link to it is really that their "new" revelations are simply them finally coming around to the thing I told them six years ago while signing off from that thread:

The underlying problem where in Hacking in a world without naked brain hacking is an attack where the defender chooses whether they will be subjected to it hasn't really been addressed on this thread. It's possible to address of course, some people have done initial concepting on some sort of carrot-based system where being Matrix active made you revolutionarily more effective in some way and thus that denying yourself access to the Matrix was at least almost as bad as being hacked.

And that's fine. It's not the game I want to play, but I understand that some people like the idea. It's also not a finished idea since the dicepools that people have in Shadowrun are already set at a point where you don't get any particular bonuses from being connected to the Matrix - meaning that such an overhaul is actually much more invasive to the system as a whole (affecting such things as stealth and driving success tests) than my own.

Now the current crop of clowns has finally come around to the conclusion that if they don't want to accept my Option 2, they really have no choice but Option 1. And I warned them during the Bush administration that going down that road would require an "extensive overhaul" with a lot of moving parts. They are apparently just now coming to the horrifying realization of how extensive that overhaul is going to have to be.

They apparently believe that by fiddling with the "hit cap" and the dicepool separately that they have enough levers to pull on to make their carrot model work. They don't, as it happens. I've already wargamed that. Their hit cap shenanigans don't work the way they think they do and only even matter on opposed tests. But the reasons no one ever made a functional carrot are:

• Dicepool bloat is already a problem, and any carrot model cannot help but make it worse.
• Since people can flip switches from "on" to "off", you're going to need to put carrots on every action in the game lest the players simply take some portion of the carrot benefits and end up immune to enemy spiders and IC anyway.
• Actually, good fucking luck with that, since you're committing to writing hundreds of interlocking carrots, it is virtually inconceivable that people won't be able to figure out some combination of carrot bonuses that they have and can live without that nonetheless leave them practically or actually unhackable. Remember that the players will be able to destructively test your product within the first week thousands of times more than you'll ever be able to - so if you create several hundred moving and interlocking parts it is virtually inconceivable that a break point won't be found and posted online.
• Finally, you're doing all this because you think the "stick" model offends your sense of "realism". But you've just committed yourself to finding an available carrot to "sneaking around in the woods" and "stabbing people with a knife" and every other action for allowing incoming hacking attempts. And it is very hard to rationalize that in a way that won't offend your sense of realism even harder.

It's why, six actual years later, no one has proposed a coherent carrot model. My guess is that they are going to putz out with a quarter of it done. Half the devices won't even have something that they do for setting hacking to "allowed", and the decisions for which items you want to set wireless and which you do not are going to be very clear and obvious. And the final result is that in-combat hacking is simply not going to be viable in the slightest, and all this fucking around is going to be for nothing.

-Username17

[kzt]

Wow, the stupid is strong with the Devs.

Pretty much everyone posting there seems to think this is a sucky idea for numerous different reasons.

I like this one:
"Here's an idea: If players everywhere kicked a concept from their games as soon as 4th Edition was released, maybe the concept just failed and should not be forced upon players with bogus fluff about wireless being better than wired transmissions."

[Whipstitch]

Actually, as it turns out I was totes wrong and eventually did post in that thread, and over a long enough period of time that some of it may not have even tequila induced posting. I guess I'm dumber than I thought.

[Maxus]

If you want to do Matrix-gives-bonuses, it makes me think of the end of Snow Crash, where Hiro Protagonist is attacking the Raft with a concrete tactical advantage because he's also got his computer and broad scanning/detection sweep going so he's got a map of the ship in his HUD, and pretty much total awareness of everyone around him, thanks to the radar and infrared and all that.

And that guy earlier, Lagos, who was running around doing optical scans on people and could find a lot of info about you in a hurry just from that.