The Shadowrun Situation

[sabs]

See, I use it very differently. I don't allow it for char gen.
Then I use the craft rules, etc.. for doing modifications on drones, and vehicles. Like I said, I let the players A-Team it up as part of run prep.

That way they're spending run cash, and not BP.

[Whipstitch]

That sounds more or less like what I do. Basically, in my games your fixer has X and can get you Y but you'll owe him a favor. I don't spend any time noting whether the pickup can run on alternative fuels.

[Koumei]

But isn't half the point of Shadowrun (and the entire genre) one of "masturbating to your extended barrel external cooling unit X-ray scope laser sight extended clip recoil suppressor soda-dispensing silenced rocket launcher"?

[Whipstitch]

I totally concede that there is a substantial audience for making up minutiae and mixing sci-fi product names in with your goony hard-boiled narration. It is part of why I have gamer friends who admit to having on multiple occasions statted up shadowrun characters but have never particularly wanted to play the game itself. It's a fun, goofy intellectual exercise. What I'm not convinced about is that all the gun fetishism makes the sessions you actually get to run any better even if the Street Samurai Catalog makes for a fun read. That's because SR4's skills are expensive and some guns are clearly the best in their skill class in a world where the granularity is too low for any of the faffing about to really matter all that much. Even worse, the skill costs for being proficient with different types of guns are punitive enough that the guys who care about realizarm get kinda butthurt when they figure out that they'd really be better off just grabbing their one hammer and pretending everything is a nail instead of sniping with sniper rifles and suppressing with machine guns and all that happy bullshit. So, simplifying shit demonstrably makes people get all whiney at chargen. But I find you actually get more delightfully retarded gun nut narration if you simplify things and let them just grab a shootin' iron labeled "pistol" and encourage people to make shit up as they go.

[kzt]

Yup there is effectively one or two good weapons in each category. The rest just take up space, because nobody ever uses the guns that suck. And in addition the weapon categories suck, because they were written by people who have never actually shot a gun or have the foggiest idea of why a AK-74U is different from an MP-5 and hence why they are not both functionally identical.

[Whipstitch]

I should probably stress for the record that we're talking about small potatoes here and that this stuff doesn't keep me up at night. The gun fiddliness is largely just a sheet space issue and if nothing else, the fact that everyone has a damn Ares Alpha, Ingram Smartgun X or Pred IV means you can probably just remember their mods even if the player didn't bother to jot down a stat block for their gun. It isn't anywhere as near as irritating as, say, the myriad li'l modifiers you are supposed to keep track of in the padded sumo battle that is 4e D&D. It's Shadowrun--you double tap someone, and they'll probably die, cut to next scene. It's just that if you asked me whether you should blow the twelve bucks on a PDF my answer would be "nah."

[Koumei]

Fair enough. And part of the appeal was actually buying new books, because I kind of want to order [a thing] and get a nice shiny new arrival of [stuff]. You know, base consumerism as the solution to all problems.

But seeing as Coleman can help himself to all the dicks, I might just take a trip to the city, tjeck out the small gaming store there and see if there's some kind of [thing] that interests me.

[Heisenberg]

Hackers in SR1-3 had a high level of granularity (programming programs, building cyberdecks) married to a relatively high level of abstraction when it came to actual hacking - that is, a lot of the stuff that we would recognize as hacking nowadays (denial of service attacks, for example) was absent or glossed over, and the actual actions hackers could take was fairly high level "tell it to do this then roll your program rating" kinda stuff.

One of the problems we had with SR4 (and Unwired did not help) was trying to lower the level of abstraction on the action end while increasing it on the granularity end, which vastly complicated the whole Matrix business. So where in SR2 and SR3 you'd maybe focus on programming new hacker programs in your downtime or affording the latest improvement to your cyberdeck, in SR4 you have a much more simple, universal commlink with only two ratings. On the other hand, SR4's actions using those commlinks became an impossible mire of real-world hacking/electronic warfare analogues that nobody could honestly play even if they wanted to.

I think ideally you want a happy medium: a relatively simple piece of hardware (commlink, cyberdeck, what have you) and a relatively high level abstract method of using it. Ideally, you'd probably have it parallel spellcasting a bit, in that you don't want to have a program just to wipe your virtual ass, but you do want to have programs for kicking IC ass. And then once you have a working, simplified ruleset you can add a bit of granularity to please the players who like the nitty-gritty of program options and commlink add-ons without making an intolerable slog of the whole thing.

Even then, you're going to be faced with the online/offline problem. For a hacker to pull their weight as a hacker in physical combat without bringing a gun to the gunfight, they need to be able to do stuff like keep the alarms from going off so the police don't show up, and shutting down the opponent's guns, vehicle, cyberware, and other equipment. For that to happen, you need:

1) To de-incentivize turning equipment off - Mostly this involves the default state for all regular equipment being on, and disabling wireless access should be an additional cost/non-standard option. This involves a vast amount of handwaving, but not unjustified handwaving: there are very good reasons why you might want to be able to track guns online, and have little reports sent off when they fire, and be able to shut them down remotely. That doesn't mean all those functions are apparent to the users, or even the cops - maybe that's just how Ares gets its consumer feedback data, Big Brother style.

2) Make few people realize that hackers can mess with their stuff. This is more of a conceptual leap, but imagine if you lived in a world exactly like today, but every single item you own was a passive or active component in a massive pervasive network around you - and for the most part you'd never know because all of that data is passing back and forth several levels removed from you asking Mr. Coffee to make an espresso. People today worry about hackers stealing their identity, not getting caffeine poisoning because some script kiddy decided to fuck with their java.

And that's just stuff in general. That's everyday life hackers-with-superhacking-powers kind of approach. That doesn't cover corporate cores or secure facilities or any of that, which should have special precautions and be more of a challenge to shadowrunners.

I think you can have solid, non-stupid Matrix rules. Just...not gonna happen under current management.

This post is excellent. It made me want to take a break from my usual shady lurking and chime in that I'm working on my own fan-hack of the SR4A rules, as an alternative to SR5 which I expect is going to be fucking terrible beyond even any of your worst imaginings. My take on Shadowrun diverges substantially from Frank's "Ends of the Matrix" in terms of overall design decisions but it also takes a few cues from it here and there. One of the big "selling points" (not exactly the right term since it's free but whatever) is making the basic mechanics timeline neutral, with plug and play mechanics for simulating anywhere in the SR timeline from 2020 to 2080.

It will probably be available approximately a little after SR5 comes out, and unlike SR5 it will be free and good rather than overpriced and terrible.

I wanted to post here just because the entire issue of finally getting the Matrix RIGHT and allowing hackers to meaningfully contribute in combat by being hackers, not by shooting a gun, is one of my top priorities with SRPC and one of the things that really inspired me to work on it. This is something that SR5 could fix relatively easily...and of course won't.

I agree with everything Bobby said about how to approach it, especially the idea of it paralleling spellcasting. I feel like that parity would help players conceptualize BOTH alternate realities that overlay the physical world. That's what I'm going for in my approach:

Astral Perception = AR
Astral Projection = VR globe-spanning network hopping
Programs = Spells (and work in a very similar manner)
Agents = Spirits

And so on. Reading this post made me excited to work on the Matrix, but that would be getting ahead of myself; I'm still overhauling qualities.

[Neurosis]

Couple of quick questions:
1. If someone wanted to start playing Shadowrun, which books would you really recommend they buy (aside from "the core rules of course"), for making the game a better experience? Also, which edition we're up to would probably help. Fifth?

Still on SR4A. SR5 is in the works, and looking dire. The Shadowrun 4th Edition 20th Anniversary rulebook is okay, though I might be saying that because I have a couple pieces of fiction in it. It's really all you need. Seattle 2072 also isn't terribad if you want a setting book, though see above and below.

2. Would purchasing said things inadvertently result in money being funnelled to CGL and, by association, the personal bank account of a total asshole, or has that already been resolved in some way and rights have changed hands?

Coleman still owns it. If you want to fuck him over, either buy used or don't buy at all.

Use the power of....THEFT!

[Stahlseele]

We don't condone Piracy such as happens on one click file hosters like 4shared here.

[Username17]

I want to go out on a limb and say you might as well go for the SR4 book rather than the SR4A book. SR4A is basically like 3.5, with all that implies. While there are a few rules that are stated more clearly in the SR4A book than the SR4 book, I can't name a single rule that it actually fixed that wasn't already fixed in Street Magic (the Remote Services "Spirit Storm" being the obvious fix, but it was already errataed away by Street Magic years before). Meanwhile, I can name a half dozen rules that got stupider because of the ham handed, unplaytested, change-for-change's-sake that made its way into the SR4A book. Some of them were so embarrassingly bad that the developers were forced to errata them back in shame (the combat spell drain equation that fucks you for trying to do anything but overcast Stunbolt to instantly win and doesn't even make any sense with respect to AoEs springs immediately to mind).

Basically, SR4A attempted to extend the thresholds on the difficulty chart from 5 to 6 because years had passed and experienced characters and min maxxers were regularly able to get the high results. But without playtesting a change that big, you've probably just skull fucked the game's delicate math and pissed everyone off for no real gain. Which is what happened. SR4A should just be rolled back. Start over from SR4 + Street Magic. Augmentation and Arsenal should be taken in an advisory capacity, Unwired should not.

---

I wanted to post here just because the entire issue of finally getting the Matrix RIGHT and allowing hackers to meaningfully contribute in combat by being hackers, not by shooting a gun, is one of my top priorities with SRPC and one of the things that really inspired me to work on it. This is something that SR5 could fix relatively easily...and of course won't.

I would say that my biggest mistake in making Ends of the Matrix was trying to make it compatible with the skill and equipment lists. It was supposed to increase compatibility, but I don't think it helped much. Starting over from scratch is the way to go.

Agents = Spirits

That's... going to be a hard sell.

The core thing that makes spirits Spirits is the fact that they have a comprehensible and consistent limit in quantity to the player. Extra hermetic circles or extra junkies holding commlinks would not allow you to command any extra spirits, which means that there are no Agent Smith scenarios. Note that on release, conjurers actually had an Agent Smith equivalent in the Spirit Storm, but that was quickly errataed away at my insistence.

But actual Agents are limited by... what? Seriously, what is the limit there? If they run themselves, why can't you just put a bunch of commlinks in a giant Hackastack and have a dozen (or a thousand) Agents at your command? Coming up with a rule that makes any sense is a tall order, and you'll note that none of the official SR4 Matrix overhauls (of which there have been at least 3) have managed to stop Agent Smith Armies from running amok.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

The Magic/Matrix 1:1 would work for Technomancers, but not for Deckers i guess, because Technomancers are basically magical Deckers including the special attribute and drain mechanics, which the mundane Deckers don't get.
If there still were the magical divide between Shaman and Hermetic, a Technomancer could be a Shaman with on the fly compiling Sprites and the Decker could kinda be the Hermetic with his always there Agents . .


Now, wether or not you want Matrix Adepts is a different Questions, to which the Answer is probably a resounding:"fuck no" . . if you don't go with a simple adept, a trode net and the appropriate powers to enhance skill / attribute or something . .

[Ancient History]

You could limit agents, but it's difficult because there's no similar restraining mechanic - where a magician has to balance Force and number of spirits against how much drain they can take and their skill, in SR you can basically buy as many agents as you want. Again, part of this comes from having just too much real-world similarity: one contemporary hacker with a iPhone can command a botnet that basically covers the planet.

To narrow the field, you'd have to highly abstract the concept - an agent wouldn't just be a couple of lines of code, it would have to be a semi-autonomous entity that a hacker culled together with specific parameters on the fly - effectively, an inherently unstable, limited-use digital intelligence that could do various tasks equivalent to that of a spirit. Instead of one agent per commlink, the number and complexity of agents you could compile and maintain would be mostly limited to your skill level.

The basic idea there is that (for example) instead of programming each bot in a botnet, you assume that the BotAgent you just compiled has access to a bunch of bot-infected computers and the network is so complex that instead of manipulating the botnet directly, you have to ask the BotAgent to do it for you - and the BotAgent can only handle so many commands before it's artificial intelligence breaks down and crashes, forcing you to compile a new one.

But that would require a fairly high-concept Matrix redesign.

[Stahlseele]

Hmm . . Agents == Virtual Watcher Spirits would probably go too far in the opposite Direction, right?

[Ancient History]

The basic idea is that while any idiot with a commlink can use a Google-bar-esque search function, if you want to really do some infomining you'd compile a SearchAgent that could wade through the crap in less time and without oversight.

[Username17]

Hmm . . Agents == Virtual Watcher Spirits would probably go too far in the opposite Direction, right?

Having five hundred watchers would also be a problem. Not just that it could run roughshod over essentially anyone, but that it would require rolling dice hundreds of times to resolve anything and the game would grind to a halt.

The issue is that people can just buy more processors or more active memory if that is what they want to do. I mean, I know you still play SR3, how many Deckers have you seen trotted out who didn't use the deck construction rules to slot in enough chips to their Active Memory that they could run all their programs simultaneously and never ever worry about I/O speed during cybercombat? The limitations on how many programs you could run was fake because the reality was that you could get enough Active Memory installed to run 10 more Rating 14 Programs for seven thousand yen. That is ass wipe money.

If all you need is memory or a CPU to run a program then there is effectively no limit to the number of copies of that program you can run. Because memory and CPUs can be purchased in functionally limitless quantities and they are cheap.

The limit to how many Agents you can run simultaneously - and there does need to be a limit (so the turn will end if nothing else) - has to be intrinsic to you in a way that physical computers really truly are not and cannot be. You're going to have to next level the abstraction somehow in order to dequantify botnets. You're going to have to do that.

And of course, that runs into a really big problem: because a rather major plot point is "IC", which of course is fully autonomous defensive programming that lives in individual systems. Following the logic of IC backwards with Team Hacker pointing IC copies the other direction brings us to a very very bad place. It brings us to Agent Smith Armies that make us sad and bring the game to a grinding halt. Addressing the Agent Smith Army in a functional way is not easy and represents a huge shift in thinking from the Shadowrun stories that have been told for the last twenty four years.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

@Deckers: None, because of the rules, nobody dares to try and play them . .

Limitation on Bot/Agent Usage could very well be limited by Intelligence i guess. What good does it do to you to have several dozend agents if you have no idea how to propperly utilize them?
And yeah, i forgot that Watchers are not limited in number by anything either, i apologize. I just remembered them being stupid smallish temporary spirits . .

[Heisenberg]

Agents = Spirits

That's... going to be a hard sell.

The core thing that makes spirits Spirits is the fact that they have a comprehensible and consistent limit in quantity to the player. Extra hermetic circles or extra junkies holding commlinks would not allow you to command any extra spirits, which means that there are no Agent Smith scenarios. Note that on release, conjurers actually had an Agent Smith equivalent in the Spirit Storm, but that was quickly errataed away at my insistence.

But actual Agents are limited by... what? Seriously, what is the limit there? If they run themselves, why can't you just put a bunch of commlinks in a giant Hackastack and have a dozen (or a thousand) Agents at your command? Coming up with a rule that makes any sense is a tall order, and you'll note that none of the official SR4 Matrix overhauls (of which there have been at least 3) have managed to stop Agent Smith Armies from running amok.

The Magic/Matrix 1:1 would work for Technomancers, but not for Deckers i guess, because Technomancers are basically magical Deckers including the special attribute and drain mechanics, which the mundane Deckers don't get.

I think I may have been misunderstood--entirely my fault, as I wasn't specific enough, just doing a quick buzz-by. I'm definitely not going for a direct, 1:1 equivalency between The Matrix stuff and Magic stuff, more of a very rough parallel.

In the case of limiting Agents, well...they will be limited. The rationale for how to limit them is something I'll have to figure out, and now you've got me thinking about them, but they will certainly be strictly limited in number. (I am not sure if I am even keeping the idea of "Commlink as hacking device"; if nothing else, having a hackastack will be prohibitively expensive unless you manage to steal a truckload of commlinks somehow, which sounds like an adventure in and of itself.)

Also, Agents will be comparable to bound elementals in SR3..."summoning" them will take time and preparation. A Technomancer's sprites can be compiled spontaneously, rather than having to be pain-stakingly "bound" (coded), rather more analogous to the nature spirits shamans could summon in SR3.

You could limit agents, but it's difficult because there's no similar restraining mechanic - where a magician has to balance Force and number of spirits against how much drain they can take and their skill, in SR you can basically buy as many agents as you want. Again, part of this comes from having just too much real-world similarity: one contemporary hacker with a iPhone can command a botnet that basically covers the planet.

Off the cuff, and I will be giving this lots more thought when I get to it, I'd probably have the number of agents/frames be hard-limited by System rating of the "primary" commlink/deck, and have additional commlinks not grant the ability to run additional agents. This might diverge from real world hacking, but I don't really care. I'm more concerned about game balance and fun factor; also to the point, I don't think that real world hacking is something that NEEDS to be applicable to magical elves and trolls in the year 2070. Even if you take out the magical elves and trolls part, I'm not sure that hacking in 2070 would be anything we'd recognize today. Today's hacking would be completely baffling to the elite hackers of 1980, I'd wot, which is part of the problem in the first place, that SR is not the future, but "the future of the 80s".

The limit to how many Agents you can run simultaneously - and there does need to be a limit (so the turn will end if nothing else) - has to be intrinsic to you in a way that physical computers really truly are not and cannot be. You're going to have to next level the abstraction somehow in order to dequantify botnets. You're going to have to do that.

Or Logic, instead of System.

To narrow the field, you'd have to highly abstract the concept - an agent wouldn't just be a couple of lines of code, it would have to be a semi-autonomous entity that a hacker culled together with specific parameters on the fly - effectively, an inherently unstable, limited-use digital intelligence that could do various tasks equivalent to that of a spirit. Instead of one agent per commlink, the number and complexity of agents you could compile and maintain would be mostly limited to your skill level.

The basic idea there is that (for example) instead of programming each bot in a botnet, you assume that the BotAgent you just compiled has access to a bunch of bot-infected computers and the network is so complex that instead of manipulating the botnet directly, you have to ask the BotAgent to do it for you - and the BotAgent can only handle so many commands before it's artificial intelligence breaks down and crashes, forcing you to compile a new one.

But that would require a fairly high-concept Matrix redesign.

Ground-up high concept Matrix redesign is what I'm going with, along with renewed abstraction.

[kzt]

The other obvious limit is that something fundamentally limits how many agents you can have or modify hacking in general. A couple of examples:

1) It's really damn hard to keep things hacked. Even toasters. Everything is hardened with some sort of hardware based system that will automagically unbot themselves in a very limited amount of time after the hacker stops actively messing with them.

2) Assume that traffic flows are trivially detected and blocked on the global network if identified to be agents/bots. And the system that tracks this is very, very good at telling if it is a human or a hostile agent/bot. In addition, assume that hosts can determine this too and simply blow agents/bot away trivially if they do something odd.

3) Distance=delay and delay matters. A lot. Hacking a really powerful computer that can do literally billions of operations while each of your packets one by one travel through the chain of machines across the continent = you lose. If you are more then a few tens of microseconds away you have no hope. And data in fiber optics travels 200 meters per microsecond.

I'm sure there are other approaches, but I have to do a system upgrade now.

[Foxwarrior]

1) To de-incentivize turning equipment off - Mostly this involves the default state for all regular equipment being on, and disabling wireless access should be an additional cost/non-standard option. This involves a vast amount of handwaving, but not unjustified handwaving: there are very good reasons why you might want to be able to track guns online, and have little reports sent off when they fire, and be able to shut them down remotely. That doesn't mean all those functions are apparent to the users, or even the cops - maybe that's just how Ares gets its consumer feedback data, Big Brother style.

2) Make few people realize that hackers can mess with their stuff. This is more of a conceptual leap, but imagine if you lived in a world exactly like today, but every single item you own was a passive or active component in a massive pervasive network around you - and for the most part you'd never know because all of that data is passing back and forth several levels removed from you asking Mr. Coffee to make an espresso. People today worry about hackers stealing their identity, not getting caffeine poisoning because some script kiddy decided to fuck with their java.

And that's just stuff in general. That's everyday life hackers-with-superhacking-powers kind of approach. That doesn't cover corporate cores or secure facilities or any of that, which should have special precautions and be more of a challenge to shadowrunners.

This reminds me of that Ghost in the Shell thing. Much of the time, I was wondering: "Why on earth would anyone get a cyberbrain instead of a smartphone?" (that was partially because they never seemed to use it for any spontaneous thing fancier than randomly quoting old texts, of course)

Well, as soon as Ares's competitor (let's call it Athena, because Athena is known for not being an idiot) started its advertising campaign "Unlike other brands, our guns work in combat", Athena would grab a nice amount of market share.

Why not restrict hacking to only work on things the user would actually want to have connected to a network? If your gun could be aimed and fired after you tossed it through a window, it might sometimes actually be worth the hacking vulnerability.

[Fucks]

Preview #2 is up: http://www.rpgnow.com/product/114622/Sh ... eview-%232

[Fuchs]

This reminds me of that Ghost in the Shell thing. Much of the time, I was wondering: "Why on earth would anyone get a cyberbrain instead of a smartphone?" (that was partially because they never seemed to use it for any spontaneous thing fancier than randomly quoting old texts, of course).

It wouldn't work for Shadowrun, given the fluff that is established, but for another cyberpunk world you could have cyberbrains allowing people to have backups of their personalities, effectively making them able to come back from death with a new built/cloned body. That would be a pretty big incentive to get a cyberbrain.

[Dragon Instincts]

Preview #2 is up: http://www.rpgnow.com/product/114622/Sh ... eview-%232

Just read it. It's bad, trust me.
In fact, it's just SR4 with SR3 initiative rules and "limits".
And the limits suck. One example in the PDF states how some guy has a high physical limit because of his high BOD and STR. Now, on the same page it says that sneaking is subject to the physical limit.
So, my infiltration tests are now limited by my muscle mass? What the hell? How about palming? Are good pickpockets going to look like Hulk now?

ARRRRR, I'M GOING TO SNATCH THAT PURSE OUT OF YOUR POCKET! HULK SMASH!

[Rawbeard]

I really like that idea. Finally Trolls will me mastersneaks!

[Username17]

I like the fact that I called the method in which the hit caps were going to suck well before this actually came out.

-Username17