Lokathor wrote:This question came up today: Once Transfigure becomes Permanent, does the target ever get additional resistance rolls even once they're hooked back up to biofeedback filtration? Or do the implanted facts stand up to the normal process of veracity comparison and building over time?
Can I brainwash people into thinking that I'm their friend and then give them back their commlink, or can I only have people brainwashed as long as I never give them a commlink?
My question from earlier stands if you'd care to answer that one.
Also, you've said that sprites need the Back Door CF to open a connection, but you also wrote that they get a free connection like a technomancer does whenever they need it. Since it can't be both, care to pick one or the other? I think it should be that sprites don't get free connections, but that's just me.
Established facts can be refuted, but biofeedback filters won't stop them once they've become permanent.
Sprites need to be able to act on nearby machines the way a Technomancer does, because otherwise they can't exist or take actions. Establishing connections via the Matrix is how they can move.
FrankTrollman wrote:Sprites need to be able to act on nearby machines the way a Technomancer does, because otherwise they can't exist or take actions. Establishing connections via the Matrix is how they can move.
What's the benefit of the Crack sprite having Backdoor, in that case? Is the technomancer supposed to carry around a high-signal retransmitter so the Sprite can handshake with other devices from far away?
RiotGearEpsilon wrote:Is there any way to salvage this ruleset if my friends consider both brainphreaking and funny-action-at-a-distance hacking to be dealbreakers?
Not really.
I mean, you could come up with some completely different answers to the big questions, but then it would be completely different. Without brainhacking and action at a distance, there's no reason for people to allow their stuff to be hackable. Everyone would just put all their information behind a password lock that was 150 thousand characters long and store the passwords on vetted machines. Then "hacking" would be "beating up someone with an authorized terminal and then using it" because you couldn't get into any server with your tricked out home deck before the heat death of the universe.
In order for it to make sense that you are hacking into things with your wireless device from home, there has to be a reason why the secure installations can't lock you out. If you take it as an article of faith that secure installations can lock you out, then it is unreasonable to expect that they don't do that, and then your personal commlink is useless.
Yeah, that's about what I was thinking... I've considered proposing that the brainhacking / action-at-a-distance requires a specialized induction rig to punch through the air gap, but frankly I'm just playing the Street Samurai anyhow, so the sum total effect this has on me is whether I have faraday cage armor or electro-insulated armor. I'll wear out my welcome in a hurry if I push this any farther than I already am, but I'm really feeling for our technomancer.
Seriously though, a ton of people just reach the ''brainhacking action-at-a-distance' conceit and immediately walk away. I wish I could find some way to repackage this in a way that was less... I dunno, immediately implausible to them.
Last edited by RiotGearEpsilon on Tue Mar 01, 2011 3:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
The thing is: what people want with hacking is incoherent. They want to be able to hack corporate servers on the fly and they want to be able to give themselves 100% protection by putting a hard password lockout. They want both of those things, even though that doesn't make any fucking sense.
Novatech has more resources than you do. So any protection you can afford yourself is protection they could also have. If you include 100% protection for your secrets, then it is unreasonable for the corporate servers to not have the same thing.
I mean yes, you can make a whole game based around actually secure technology where you have to fabricate biometrics and steal validated computers and shit to get anything done, but that's not what people want. People want to do hacking like in Ghost in the Shell, where you just fucking do it. And that doesn't make any sense unless there's some reason why computers can't be secure.
RiotGearEpsilon wrote:Yeah, that's about what I was thinking... I've considered proposing that the brainhacking / action-at-a-distance requires a specialized induction rig to punch through the air gap, but frankly I'm just playing the Street Samurai anyhow, so the sum total effect this has on me is whether I have faraday cage armor or electro-insulated armor. I'll wear out my welcome in a hurry if I push this any farther than I already am, but I'm really feeling for our technomancer.
Seriously though, a ton of people just reach the ''brainhacking action-at-a-distance' conceit and immediately walk away. I wish I could find some way to repackage this in a way that was less... I dunno, immediately implausible to them.
The thing is, they've already accepted the basic conceit that trode rigs exist, and have for fifty years by the time of SR4. Think about what that means for a moment: people in SR have been able to read and write raw braintext longer than TCP/IP has existed in this world. Van Eck Phreaking is nearly a hundred years old by 2070; go back 85 years from today and you find the invention of liquid fuel rockets, aerosols, and frozen food.
Combine the two, and is it really so hard to believe that the 2070s could prominently feature three-dimensional arrays of induction transmitter/receivers that can emulate a fifty-year old protocol over a distance of a few meters? How else do you expect to get high-bandwidth wireless signals through the crowded EM background that will be 2070s Shadowrun?
Last edited by Eyeless Blond on Mon Mar 14, 2011 7:17 am, edited 2 times in total.
FrankTrollman wrote:
Novatech has more resources than you do. So any protection you can afford yourself is protection they could also have. If you include 100% protection for your secrets, then it is unreasonable for the corporate servers to not have the same thing.
This isn't necessarily true. The player is going to be operating from a dedicated system. He can afford to sacrifice functionality for security especially the kind of functionality a multi-user corporate server has to have. If the corp wants to be able to access files remotely, that's a potential flaw. If they want to be able to access files from multiple users, that's another potential flaw. If they have backups, multiple servers, automated systems, the need for real time systems etc those are all flaws that a hacker could exploit. The hacker doesn't have to work around that stuff so he is going to be able to secure his rig much more easily than the corporation is going to be able to secure their server.
I'm coming from the perspective of a computer engineer with an emphasis on network security and information assurance.
The problem with coming from the assumption of security with specific flaws created only to allow functionality is that you then have to play a game of Mother May I? where you have to actually think about every fucking piece of functionality that a computer system designed sixty years from now would have. That's bullshit, because you have no idea what computers are doing in sixty years and neither do I.
Essentially what you are doing at that point is going to Magic Teaparty where you try to guess the completely imaginary bullshit that passes for futurism that is resting completely incorrigibly inside the MC's head. That's not a playable basis for a game.
Instead we go with:
Yes there are flaws, Yes you can abuse them if you have the hacking skill, and a /suite/ of programs that we collectively call "exploit"
In order to make Hackers playable as a PC you have to basically assume that Security lost. The problem with that, is that in a world where hacking is fairly trivial, why is everything on-line and trusted. It's a weird combo. Also, there's no clear indication as to why electronic currency is defacto, and /really/ hard to steal/forge. When it's all electronic bits on the same systems that dedicated hackers break all the time.
You first have to explain how the currency works, and then that helps shape how hackers function.
Mother May I, only works with cool GM's. And there's very few of those, and even then the cool GM's aren't doing Mother May I, but they have a system in their heads on how to figure it out, they just don't necessarily have it written down. Mother May I, for 1/3 of Shadowrun's core systems is bad.
sabs wrote:Mother May I, only works with cool GM's.
It's actually way worse than that. Mother May I only works if the GM and the player are the same person. Because no matter how "cool" the GM is, you really literally can only read your own mind. And Mother May I hacking requires telepathy.
Which means it makes a perfectly good novel. Computers are in general completely secure, but there are various completely arbitrary one-time security breaches that individual computer systems have that the character can "figure out" at the last moment. But in a game, the player can't ever "figure that out" because there's nothing to figure out.
Well, I play a lot of system less rpgs with a friend of mine. And we're both computer geeks, so when I play a hacker, it often turns into a series of question/answers with session over session build up of understanding, and 18 years of playing with this particular GM. That being said, it's a complete Edge case, and does not work for 99.999999 percent of games. It even doesn't work with games this gm runs, when people who don't know him as well play. Because they don't know how to ask the questions, interact properly. Which is why, usually if there's more than 3 of us, we use some system that's houseruled to death.
FrankTrollman wrote:The problem with coming from the assumption of security with specific flaws created only to allow functionality is that you then have to play a game of Mother May I? where you have to actually think about every fucking piece of functionality that a computer system designed sixty years from now would have. That's bullshit, because you have no idea what computers are doing in sixty years and neither do I.
Essentially what you are doing at that point is going to Magic Teaparty where you try to guess the completely imaginary bullshit that passes for futurism that is resting completely incorrigibly inside the MC's head. That's not a playable basis for a game.
The assumption of security is unplayable.
-Username17
Or you could figure out what settings the server has (maybe make up a table of common systems for large corporations, small businesses, government etc) and run everything off that. If the system is intranet only you have to get on site, if they have multiple users you can attempt either brute forcing the system with checks for things like unsecured admin slots or try using some social engineering to gain access, if it's just some mom and pop thing you can probably just hack into it from the outside etc. This stuff isn't actually that complex, just make a basic set of requirements for what the players have to do to see/access/control the network and what they can do at each of those levels of intrusion.
One almost-decent option that preserves the spirit of the rules is to completely ignore them and set up the matrix exactly like a physical location, and then use hacker skills and gear instead of the usual. The main downside is that everyone needs some hacking or it splits the team. When Agent Smith shows up, matrix perception works like normal perception (and you can start dropping data nukes).
The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor from stealing bread, begging and sleeping under bridges.
-Anatole France
Mount Flamethrower on rear
Drive in reverse
Win Game.
-Josh Kablack
Technomancers take damage on their Stun track when they would otherwise take Icon damage, but is this a matter of not having an Icon track at all and just taking it in the face, or do they have the ability to repair Stun damage of some kind by the Medic program (even if it's just Icon-originating damage)?
Quantumboost wrote:Technomancers take damage on their Stun track when they would otherwise take Icon damage, but is this a matter of not having an Icon track at all and just taking it in the face, or do they have the ability to repair Stun damage of some kind by the Medic program (even if it's just Icon-originating damage)?
So, I am confused. Maybe I'm overthinking it...
In my (german) SR4.01A on page 287 is a table named "Common Rigger checks" (Häufige Rigger-/Drohnenproben)
I tried to order Frank's Rigging Dice Pools into it.
@Remote Weapon Firing: I'm pretty sure that Remote Weapon Firing is if you personally are jumped in and targeting/firing the weapon through the VR interface; Logic is the Agility-corresponding mental attribute for jumping in, and Gunnery is the "shoot vehicle weapons" skill. So you roll Logic + Gunnery instead of Agility + [whatthefuckever your weapon otherwise uses].
I think Drone Targeting is the equivalent of the "Identify Targets" action under Matrix Actions. It isn't necessary if you give it an actual order to "shoot person X", and there is no equivalent for being jumped in because you're sapient and know who you want to shoot guns at. Drone Self Firing would then be the equivalent of actually firing the weapon for both "without Rigger" and "Remote Controlled". Remote Weapon Firing, but using the Programs on the drone rather than attributes/skills.
@Program Limits: While Jumped In you aren't using any programs, so there are no program limits on net hits - everything in that column uses your personal skills and either your attributes or your attributes + Sensors (which is a Drone attribute, not a program). I suspect the drone will be hitcapped by its Autosofts, which are in turn capped in Rating by its Pilot attribute. That won't apply to any action that doesn't use an Autosoft.
Last edited by Quantumboost on Mon Jun 06, 2011 7:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:I'm not going to go full-asshole, but I'm turning up the dial about 50 millikaeliks.
I'm a new-ish GM running these rules with some new player. One of them is a rigger-type, and we're not sure how a firewall would work with them. The only gear reference we see to firewalls is in the Operating Systems section. Are drones supposed to be run with an OS? If not, how do drones handle firewalls?
Last edited by Agent_0042 on Fri Jun 24, 2011 9:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Agent_0042 wrote:I'm a new-ish GM running these rules with some new player. One of them is a rigger-type, and we're not sure how a firewall would work with them. The only gear reference we see to firewalls is in the Operating Systems section. Are drones supposed to be run with an OS? If not, how do drones handle firewalls?
Every device has an Operating System. This isn't always super important, especially if it is slaved to a network and using the hub's Operating System, but they all have one. Autonomous drones care about their personal Firewall and System ratings.
