The Ends v4.01

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Aryxbez
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Post by Aryxbez »

FrankTrollman wrote:So I scrapped the project with the tiny addendum of "Fuck you guys, I'm not writing any more SR material, even as a hobby, ever again."

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Whoa, quite the extreme there I'd say, after all that affects yourself if going to say, run a Shadowrun campaign for your RPG group. At least you still have the "Cyperpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker" (hopefully still in development), which I had considered waiting for, till I'd start possibly running a Shadowrun game. I appreciate the quick responses, and providing of the link, seems add bit more depth to brief recoil houserule. Not sure if I'd want to use those remade version of the weapons, after all, I and some players I'm sure want to make use of Arsenal supplement. Although knowing there is stat for a Jackhammer, I'm sure will make a friend or two of mine rather happy (or a good chuckle).
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Post by Neurosis »

I just think that what most of people who wanted alt.war didn't seriously want a complete overhaul of the basic mechanical core of combat in Shadowrun. I think they just wanted a version of the late 4E WAR! sourcebook that sucked less.
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Post by Username17 »

Schwarzkopf wrote:I just think that what most of people who wanted alt.war didn't seriously want a complete overhaul of the basic mechanical core of combat in Shadowrun. I think they just wanted a version of the late 4E WAR! sourcebook that sucked less.
The problem is that they wanted to have, you know, wars. Tanks. Planes. Very Big Guns. And none of those things work in SR4, because the linear damage equations break down completely.

So if you want to have a "weapons of war" chapter (which people did) and you want it to work at all (which people did), then you need to accept that you need to recalculate the damage equation on a relative scale. The people who wanted alt.war wanted those things but were unwilling to accept the conclusions that necessarily followed from those things. So: fuck 'em.

The reality is that the vehicle rules in SR4 are bullshit. And they are not bullshit because some number is a 7 instead of an 8. They are bullshit because the combat system of SR4 cannot be extended to larger targets. If you want playable vehicle rules, you have to accept that you can't have them or you have to accept a major overhaul of the system so that vehicles can be accommodated. There is no option 3 where you keep all the old numbers and then cars and tanks just magically fall into place with a slight stat tweak. And getting pissy because someone can't deliver something that is literally fucking impossible is not a way to get someone to continue writing free content for you.

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Post by Blade »

You can have new rules specific for wargear (vehicles and big guns). That's what they had in SR3 with Naval damage codes and things like that. This way you don't change the rules people have been using during five years for assault rifles and body armor just because they might want to have a frigate show up at some point.
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Post by Username17 »

Blade wrote:You can have new rules specific for wargear (vehicles and big guns). That's what they had in SR3 with Naval damage codes and things like that. This way you don't change the rules people have been using during five years for assault rifles and body armor just because they might want to have a frigate show up at some point.
OK first of all: the Naval Damage rules were a joke and didn't work for shit.

But more importantly: if you makes a separate set of rules for dealing with big guns and big targets, it still has to interact with the weapons and armors that already exist. Which means that you have to write conversions for every single thing anyway. Sure, you can half-ass it by writing crappy conversion equations like the SR2 vehicle rules, but even that is a total conversion of every single weapon, armor, and target type in the game to whatever your new combat mechanics are.

So your solution is really just my solution plus a bunch of confusion because the new combat system only partially rather than fully replaces the old. The new system still has to be complete, in that it still has to handle every type of weapon being targeted at every type of creature, vehicle, bunker, and spirit. Except now it also has to handle weird bullshit half states where one side or the other is attempting to handle itself with the old rules.

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Post by Fuchs »

If all you want to do is have a frigate show up, then MTP the thing. Just arbitrally declare what effects if any the weapons of the group have, and what kind of area gets turned into a "dead, no save" zone by the frigate's big guns.

But if you want to have an actual war playing out, then you need rules to handle a tank/infantry/air battle, with artillery firing missiles from afar. And then people want to know if their rocket launcher can take a tank, or a tank track at least, and what kind of damage a MMG will do a helicopter if aimed at the blades.
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Post by Aryxbez »

Ah yes, a sad realization, is I think I kinda wanted wars, and definitely a vehicular encounter. Ya know, like where characters are jumping from cars to cars, shooting at each other from vehicles, using em as cover, motorcycle sword/chain fights, gunning down a helicopter, the works. I like to think that with the current rules, can least scrap something together for such special encounters. Such as, could've sworn that Arsenal or some such, had rules for when vehicles get targeted in specific spots, so that shooting car windows didn't have that like 10 body + 14 armor on top.


If I may ask, how bad were these "Naval Damage rules" for 3rd edition of Shadowrun, that talking here, like Runners Companion-bad, WAR! perhaps??
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Post by JesterZero »

So I was wondering what changes would be required to convert EOTM to alt.War-style mechanics. Since I'm hoping to get Frank to notice and weigh in officially, I'll do a good faith effort to account for the issues I can see with solutions of my own. Hopefully I'm not too far off base.

In no particular order...

1) Condition monitors are now made up of 10 boxes, not 8 + 1/2 system.

2) Sprites need to be adjusted. Fortunately, there's no issue with attributes, but they should still have their skills be equal to 1/2R to bring their dicepools in line with player characters. I believe Frank already mentioned this previously in this thread.

3) We should check the fading formulas for both compiling sprites, and for the decompiling and registering forms. Let's start with sprites.

Compiling was already 1/2R + successes (of the sprite), so there's no need to change that. Registering was originally 1/2R + successes (of the sprite), but to create parity with alt.War that should be changed to 1/2R + 1/2 successes (of the sprite). Lastly, Remove Tasks was originally 1/2R + successes, but conversion to alt.War would reduce that to simply the number of successes.

Ok, now moving on to the decompiling/registering forms. From alt.War we know these will start out at 1/2R and vary up or down from there, with the vast majority of them being between 1/2R and 1/2R+3. At some point, I'd love to convert the table of Drain Modifiers in Street Magic to get something analogous for EOTM, but for now we can be sure we're at least in the ballpark, especially considering that most registering forms would at least fall into the equivalent of a "major change" category.

4) Check and adjust damage formulas to account for LMSI. Ok, this is where things get more interesting. Generally speaking though, I'm assuming that the new damage for these will typically be in the 1-3 range, since very few of these attacks are intended to drop you straight away. If that's the case, most of this can be resolved fairly easily.
  • Rend Icon: Replace base damage of CHA + net hits with 1/2CHA + net hits.
  • Black Hammer: Replace base damage of R + net hits with 1/2R + net hits.
  • Data Bomb: Replace base damage of R with 1/2R.
  • Medic & Recover: Not sure about these, since I don't believe there's a Matrix equivalent of 10+ wound boxes under EOTM rules. When you hit 10, you're just incapable of taking action and your System and Firewall go to 0 right? So there needs to be some other reason that this program would exist at a rating higher than 4.
  • Can of Worms: Replace base damage of R + net hits with 1/2R + net hits.
  • Death Note: Replace base damage of R + net hits with 1/2R + net hits.
  • Pop Ups: Replace base damage of R with 1/2R.
Does that work, more or less? Anything else I'm missing?
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Post by Username17 »

JesterZero wrote: 1) Condition monitors are now made up of 10 boxes, not 8 + 1/2 system.
Yeah, the 8+1/2 kludge is one of the biggest things that keeps the system from being able to scale up to large vehicles. Every 12 Body (chosen because it makes everything come out in nice integers) adds 10 to the amount of damage required to put the target down in one attack. But it only adds 7 to the amount of damage required to put the target down in 2 attacks, and only 6 to the amount of damage required to put the target down in 3.

This makes the ability to set a "proper" damage code for large weaponry essentially non-existent. If you're trying to balance to "one shot kills" then you have to scale things about fifty percent faster than if you're balancing towards "two shot takedowns". Which means that there are no right answers to the combat math.
2) Sprites need to be adjusted. Fortunately, there's no issue with attributes, but they should still have their skills be equal to 1/2R to bring their dicepools in line with player characters. I believe Frank already mentioned this previously in this thread.
Yeah, that goes hand in hand with Spirits. They scale too quickly. That is, if you summon or Compile a Spirit or Sprite, the Force/Rating you can pull off goes up by 3 for every 3 dice you add to your dicepool. But the Spirit or Sprite's dicepool goes up by 6 for every 3 points of rating the Spirit or Sprite gets. That means that their dicepools are raising at roughly double the rate of the dicepools of the characters who are calling them into being.

Giving Sprites and Spirits a skill of half rating instead of full rating makes the scalage by +50% instead of +100%. The sprites and spirits would still get to insanity eventually. Fortunately, there's a separate cap on that sort of thing, where the drain/fading on conjuring is really random, and the variance increases as forces/ratings rise. Also, drain resistance is fairly limited. This means that Forces above 15 or so are pretty much out of consideration even for Great Dragons. So if we can keep Spirit/Sprite scaling from going off the cliff before drain variance makes higher forces unfeasible - our work is done.

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Post by JesterZero »

Makes sense.

Any thoughts on Medic/Recovery programs, and how the removal of damage would work with LMSI? Inflicting it is pretty straightforward, although our group hasn't tested it yet in combination with the alt.War-style mechanics.

In the interest of proposing my own solution, here's what we're currently bandying about:

LMSI accounts just fine for damage levels 1-4. Dying starts at damage level 5 and goes up from there, depending on how prevalent insta-death is in that particular campaign. As you mentioned, setting insta-death at 6 results in frequent trips to chargen, and setting it at 9 results in something more akin to Saturday-morning cartoons, where people go to the hospital a lot but are always back the next week.

Assuming we set it at 7 or 8, then we have a 2-3 level range where you are incapacitated and increasingly dying (in the real world) or incapacitated and increasingly almost-crashed (in the matrix).

Now, in the "increasingly almost-crashed" state, your System and Firewall still go to 0, which make you easy pickings. BUT...there's also the possibility that a Medic or Recovery program can get you back up and running without the need for a Reboot, which could put you right back in the action without having to wait for the System and Firewall to spin up again.

Thoughts?[/u]
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Post by Lokathor »

LMSI causes a wound level which is converted to a number of boxes damaged and applied to the target. Two L wounds in a row is 2 boxes damaged, they don't add up into an M wound (which would be 3 boxes damaged). For healing programs you can just work directly with healing a number of boxes based on your hits.

With the digital world, anything with enough damage boxes to take you into Crashed is enough damage, and just forget about the rest. With biologicals, there's "out of combat but alive if you stop the bleeding" and "totally dead forever". With digital things, it's either a network which can be rebooted or a sprite which decompiles instantly, so you don't need to deal with the edge case either way. Well, unless it's a technomancer I guess, but there's already very clear "bleeding to death" rules that they'd follow in that case.
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Post by JesterZero »

I was originally going to argue that having a triangular progression for damage but a linear progression for healing didn't make sense, but it occurred to me that they don't necessarily have to be related. It makes sense that you'd want a triangular progression for magical healing and subsequent drain, (because otherwise the heal spell becomes a must-have or a do-not-want), but it doesn't follow that you'd need that in the Matrix, where there is no corresponding fading for the programs in question.

Lokathor, since I know you've playtested EOTM quite a bit, what's your thought on the idea of a crashed-but-recoverable state? My thought was that it might add a little bit of strategy in situations where a hacker rushes to run a medic program to get an ally back in the fight rather than waiting for the whole crashed/recovery/spin up process to run it's course.

Just curious at this point.
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Post by Lokathor »

Any healing, regardless of source, can be linear. In the specific case of the Healing spell (where you're taking drain when you use it, instead of burning medpacks or something), the result is that players are encouraged to go light on the healing so that they don't take too much drain.

But for that matter, drain should probably be dealing you direct boxes of damage, and not wound levels. The point of triangular damage is so that weapons/armor can get bigger faster, so that the differences in scale between two combatants has a bigger impact on the fight. Drain doesn't need that effect, it does the job just fine being an entirely internal affair.

As to a crashed-but-recoverable state: EOTM already is setup with that being the case when your damage makes you crash. There's no final state beyond that of "so damaged you absolutely must reboot". Once a network hits 10 damage taken, it sits like that (and with System and Firewall of 0) until someone takes an action on it to reduce its damage. Adding in a non-recoverable state would be the new rule, and that part I wouldn't do, just because it's bookkeeping that doesn't really add anything.

The thing is, if there's just 1 guy in the fight then it doesn't matter, but the more people you have in the fight the more it doesn't matter that you're taking time to reboot. The valuable resource is combat actions, and Medic is actually a kinda bad combat action. If there's several of you defending a location, the best course of action is usually to reboot (which also clears the backdoors) and then go at it again. The enemy can either try to keep the weak guys down over and over, or they can keep taking out strong guys who are fighting at full power.

With hacking, the best you can usually do is knock everyone over and get away before they can get back up all the way.
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Post by JesterZero »

I see. I was under the impression that the recalculated drain mechanics in alt.War were using damage levels instead of boxes, but after re-reading the text, I'm not so sure that's the case anymore. Food for thought.

And thanks for the analogy of Matrix warfare as bowling. :biggrin:
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Post by Username17 »

Drain isn't affected by character size and isn't ever going to have to be inflicted on jeeps or bunkers, so it is not constrained by the same things that constrain weapon damage. Quite simply: Drain doesn't really have to scale. The question of whether you want unresisted Drain to go up triangularly or not is 100% about the degree to which you want people using large magical effects. The difference between 1 and 10 is a lot more than the difference between 1 and 5.

The variance on unresisted drain is always going to go up with more powerful magics in play - that's not just conjuration, it's a property of dicepool systems generally. So as more powerful wizards use more powerful magics, the amount of unresisted drain they will expect to take during high spikes is going to be larger. If Drain is calculated triangularly, powerful mages will take bigger chunks of real damage when those spikes happen. That makes higher force magics more dangerous, even for characters for whom they are nominally routine.

Whether you like that or not depends on whether you think mages knocking themselves out to cast big fireballs is "cool" or not.

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Post by Korgan0 »

Yeah, man, I like putting up things too.

On a different note, Blackhammer and other brain-hacking programs have a range of Signal (LOS), which means that they can't be used over a connection, and there has to be direct line of sight: therefore, IC and defending hackers can't use that kind of stuff on you if you try to hack in. Getting your brain wiped because you hacked into the wrong server is a pretty classic cybperpunk trope, and I'm not sure if that's an intended consequence or not.
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Post by Lokathor »

It's not explicitly stated, but the IC section heavily implies (and I always ran it) that if you have a Connection open, then all programs can be run across the Connection, even if LOS isn't maintained. IC can Blackhammer you as soon as you open the door.
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Post by Korgan0 »

On the other hand,
FrankTrollman wrote:
Is this phenomenon of multiple programs doing similar things to avoid monotony the same reason why Backtrack and Whois seem so similar?
Absolutely. WhoIs is much the better effect honestly, but BackTrack is usable by IC.

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This implies that WhoIs isn't usable by IC because it doesn't have a connection range, seeing as IC obviously can't draw line of sight and programs with an M range aren't explicitly mentioned.

Also,
FrankTrollman wrote:IC can't use any programs with a range greater than Connection.
I'm pretty sure the rules say that IC can only use programs with a range of connection, and I also think that having IC or defensive hackers blackhammer dudes who connect in is a good thing to have in a game of shadowrun.
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Post by Lokathor »

Then I don't know man, that's just how I play it and it works out perfectly for us and IC doesn't take over the world because they still need open Connections.

Connection is a "closer" range than Signal. If you've got a Connection, you're definitionally in Handshake range, which is already the weaker of the two Signal values for the two connected Networks. So it seems legit enough for an IC to be allowed to use longer range programs over a Connection.
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Post by d0gboy »

My friends and I recently started playing Shadowrun 4A, and I'm playing a technomancer. We independently came upon a number of the problems you discuss in your posts -- way too many die rolls, very ambiguous ruleset, etc.

Your system seems unique in that along with having a set of game mechanics which seems to be faster and more tractable, you also managed to come up with a 'theory of hacking" that is actually the logical extension of the technology you see in the world of 2070-odd, and it manages to be even more dystopian than the one in the actual core rulebook. :P

That said, I have a general question: How many of the people on this thread are running this system, and do they have personal experiences with gameplay? I'm new enough to shadowrun that I'm griefstricken that I internalized all the technomancer rules (insofar as this is possible) before I realized that it's really kind of a nutty system, so before I spend that sort of effort on a new system, it'd be helpful to hear how the system survives first contact with actual players.

I'm particularly interested in hearing about how it changes the build strategy for hackers and technomancers, and what their power curves look like after creation and after some karma buildup -- since just reading the rules is very different than seeing them in action.
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Post by Username17 »

The number one way that Hackers and Technomancers can screw up game balance is by investing in combat drones. Combat drones in SR4 are just a whole lot cheaper than Street Samurai or comparable effectiveness. These rules don't really address the fact that you can have a walker with a light machine gun on it running around with extremely comparable dicepools to what a street sam can pull off for less than 20k.

The second concern is that there are expansion items that were put in to Augmentation and Unwired that are explicitly there to boost the effectiveness of Hackers. Some of them can get pretty silly if used with these rules. At the very least, I would ban the SimSense Booster from Augmentation. Encephalons are kind of pushing it.

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Post by Korgan0 »

The dudes I was playing with threw an absolute shitfit over brainhacking (which was kinda funny since none of them had read the rules and we wasted like two hours arguing about it since none of them had bothered to realize that I could induce seizures in random people), so you might want to take a look at that. It's not really that big of a problem, given that high density signal is really detectable (I think), everyone is going to have decent firewalls, and you can't really do that much by blackhammering a dude from across the plaza,
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Post by d0gboy »

FrankTrollman wrote:The number one way that Hackers and Technomancers can screw up game balance is by investing in combat drones. Combat drones in SR4 are just a whole lot cheaper than Street Samurai or comparable effectiveness. These rules don't really address the fact that you can have a walker with a light machine gun on it running around with extremely comparable dicepools to what a street sam can pull off for less than 20k.
Ok, I haven't spent a lot of time figuring out how to use hardware upgrades to drones & the like. I just knew that with my Command CF of 6, a machine sprite to assist, the right specializations, and a few points in gunnery, I could be sitting at 16-18 die pool on a drone at character creation. [After consultation with my GM, we agreed capping my effective die pool at 2xPilot was a good compromise...]. So, it doesn't surprise me there will be gotchas with drones.

As long as I have your ear (and feel free to tell me to buzz off), I'm trying to get my head around a few concepts related to some of the things in the document.

Ranges:

- I get that some powers are 'Line of Sight', reflecting that you need precise control with a high density signal to target just the right part of the brain/device. It feels like a few of the programs are a little 'off' here. For instance, Blackhammer has a range of LOS. I get why that would be: You wouldn't want a hacker/TM blackhammering someone within signal range (which could be km!). At the same time, does that mean IC can't blackhammer someone unless the PAN has LOS on the intruder? That doesn't "feel" right to me, so I wonder if I've missed some section that says that 'Connections can act as a bridge for certain programs', so that we get traditional IC type scenarios.

- Is "Line of Sight" intended to allow for LOS gained through the use of sensors? It seems so -- no reason I couldn't rig up a drone with good sensors and a signal producing device, then control the drone on a battlefield that distributes these attacks at a distance?

Technomantic VR:

- This is described as being liked Astral Projection in most major ways (with the exception of the TM being affected by EM disturbances in the physical world). What are the limits to a Technomancer affecting PANs of people in the real world? In astral parlance, you have to materialize before doing something. Would a TM in VR automatically get his or her connection? And would you be able to Blackhammer someone from VR?



The second concern is that there are expansion items that were put in to Augmentation and Unwired that are explicitly there to boost the effectiveness of Hackers. Some of them can get pretty silly if used with these rules. At the very least, I would ban the SimSense Booster from Augmentation. Encephalons are kind of pushing it.

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So, would +1 IP be that much more broken with these rules? I guess it was baked into me that 2 IP is great, and 3 is good, but after that it doesn't matter all that much. But I guess there are more ways to hose opponents as a hacker/TM now?
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Post by d0gboy »

Korgan0 wrote:The dudes I was playing with threw an absolute shitfit over brainhacking (which was kinda funny since none of them had read the rules and we wasted like two hours arguing about it since none of them had bothered to realize that I could induce seizures in random people), so you might want to take a look at that. It's not really that big of a problem, given that high density signal is really detectable (I think), everyone is going to have decent firewalls, and you can't really do that much by blackhammering a dude from across the plaza,
I think there must be some sort of visceral reaction thing going on. I had it momentarily, but I immediately thought of how _magic_ could screw with people's head in the Sixth World. At that point, I was more worried that mages would remain distinctive than the brainhacking would necessarily be game breaking.
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Post by Username17 »

Korgan0 wrote:The dudes I was playing with threw an absolute shitfit over brainhacking (which was kinda funny since none of them had read the rules and we wasted like two hours arguing about it since none of them had bothered to realize that I could induce seizures in random people), so you might want to take a look at that. It's not really that big of a problem, given that high density signal is really detectable (I think), everyone is going to have decent firewalls, and you can't really do that much by blackhammering a dude from across the plaza,
Brainhacking is a huge psychological barrier for a lot of gamers. I have no idea why, but it is. They will accept that a trode net can project the Matrix into your brain without a literal hardware connection. They will accept that Black IC (or Black Hammer) can turn the Matrix in your brain into something deadly that can kill you. But the moment you combine and streamline those two facts into a single action of "projecting deadly Matrix into someone's brain without a direct connection", they throw a shit fit. Well, even that isn't true, because these same people will accept deadly Matrix being projected into peoples' brains without a direct connection in Brainscan and Psychotrope, it's just when a Player Character does that that we see people dig in their heels.
d0gboy wrote:Ok, I haven't spent a lot of time figuring out how to use hardware upgrades to drones & the like. I just knew that with my Command CF of 6, a machine sprite to assist, the right specializations, and a few points in gunnery, I could be sitting at 16-18 die pool on a drone at character creation. [After consultation with my GM, we agreed capping my effective die pool at 2xPilot was a good compromise...]. So, it doesn't surprise me there will be gotchas with drones.
You get much the same scenario with spirits. Guardian Spirits with guns are basically just as good at shooting people as street samurai are. But in any case, the primary offender isn't even the fact that you can get a couple of combat drones with dice pools that are every bit the equal of a street samurai by pimping yourself some machine sprites. The focal issue is that when a drone rigger jumps into a drone, he is every bit as badass as a street samurai, and spent way less resources to do that.

Part of that is that SR4 way reduced the cost of drones. Steel Lynxes used to cost over 34k and the SR4A book lists it for five. But also that's because there's no longer a meaningful penalty for shooting through a wireless link. And perhaps most importantly of all: it's because being a Street Samurai is simply overpriced in 4th edition. What you get in terms of actual butt kicking ability is simply not worth what you pay for it under SR4 rules.

That's outside the purview of modified Matrix rules to solve - but you should know it going in. If one person invests in being tough and strong and good with a gun, and another person buys a small-arms immune robot with a weapon turret that can absorb all the recoil from a machine gun... then you're going to find that the guy with the robot pal will have gotten way more bang for the buck than the guy who wanted to be a character from Predator.
Is "Line of Sight" intended to allow for LOS gained through the use of sensors? It seems so -- no reason I couldn't rig up a drone with good sensors and a signal producing device, then control the drone on a battlefield that distributes these attacks at a distance?
Yes. At least, I think the answer to your question is yes, because you asked an ambiguous one. The idea of LOS is that you have to get a physical object that is projecting your signal directly to the target without interruption or corner bouncing or anything. It's OK to get a proxy into the enemy bunker and hack from there, but you have to physically breach their perimeter with something before that can happen.
At the same time, does that mean IC can't blackhammer someone unless the PAN has LOS on the intruder? That doesn't "feel" right to me, so I wonder if I've missed some section that says that 'Connections can act as a bridge for certain programs', so that we get traditional IC type scenarios.
If they bring their brain to you, that's OK. Once an open connection is established, you have "LOS". In this case, you've breached their perimeter with their own computer, which they have obligingly allowed you to run code on.
This is described as being liked Astral Projection in most major ways (with the exception of the TM being affected by EM disturbances in the physical world). What are the limits to a Technomancer affecting PANs of people in the real world? In astral parlance, you have to materialize before doing something. Would a TM in VR automatically get his or her connection? And would you be able to Blackhammer someone from VR?
Active PANs are like being dual natured. The projecting Technomancer can connect with nearby PANs and blast Black Hammers through them.
So, would +1 IP be that much more broken with these rules? I guess it was baked into me that 2 IP is great, and 3 is good, but after that it doesn't matter all that much. But I guess there are more ways to hose opponents as a hacker/TM now?
Extra IPs are really, really good. The SimSense Booster exists in no small part because the official rules take really a lot of actions to resolve. This system is much more streamlined, so giving people extra actions is at the very least unwarranted.

-Username17
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