Drunken Review: Shadowrun 5

[OgreBattle]

How about hacking is represented as a cut down game of Netrunner with the cards being played over the course of the run.

[Username17]

That's how normal stealth should work too. Your spidey sense doesn't tingle when you fail a perception check, you just have no idea what's going on until the shit hits the fan. So why have that check at all? Just let the guy doing the sneaking make the roll and that's that.

It doesn't matter if the odds are the same, if a player character gets snuck up on and shot in the back of the head without ever getting a chance to roll some fucking dice, they are going to scream bloody murder. And if you can't understand why that might be, you have no business offering game design advice to anyone.

How about hacking is represented as a cut down game of Netrunner with the cards being played over the course of the run.

That's a terrible idea. For one thing, Netrunner games take a long time relative to the amount of time it should take to perform an action in a game. Secondly, Netrunner is not scaled to the a single RPG hack, it's an ongoing war between an evil corporation and a hacktivist - so the actions on the cards would necessarily have no relation to what was happening in the story. You might as well play Poker or Chess. For another thing, if playing cards was a better resolution mechanic for your RPG than the one you're using for the rest of your game, why aren't you using it for the rest of your game? For another thing, netrunner always and only has two players who are nominally equally matched and doesn't even pretend to scale to having two hackers or the hackers having to defend something or even having the hacker gain experience. I could really go on at some length about how terrible an idea that is, and all the myriad ways it doesn't work.

But the bottom line is that it is a shit idea because it is obviously a shit idea.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

I know Frank is being facetious, but a hand of Poker may be the best idea yet floated to represent a unique hacking minigame. It still has all the problems that having unique hacking minigames have, and is therefore still not actually good,

....But....

it resolves relatively quickly, it scales to multiple players (one hand per character), you can change the "terrain" by calling a different game (five card draw vs texas hold 'em, etc) and players get advantages from knowledge of probability, knowledge of psychology and the ability to cheat. Just set a scale of what each side has to wager per chip that starts out at something like IP ban bet against access to restricted file and scales up to something like having your brain burnt out by black ICE and your system vaporized by orbital lasers against forging transactions that give you majority control of a corp.

[Maxus]

Then you could have hole cards to represent good hacking programs or intel about the target that is beneficial to hacking it.

[TheFlatline]

I know Frank is being facetious, but a hand of Poker may be the best idea yet floated to represent a unique hacking minigame. It still has all the problems that having unique hacking minigames have, and is therefore still not actually good,

....But....

it resolves relatively quickly, it scales to multiple players (one hand per character), you can change the "terrain" by calling a different game (five card draw vs texas hold 'em, etc) and players get advantages from knowledge of probability, knowledge of psychology and the ability to cheat. Just set a scale of what each side has to wager per chip that starts out at something like IP ban bet against access to restricted file and scales up to something like having your brain burnt out by black ICE and your system vaporized by orbital lasers against forging transactions that give you majority control of a corp.

Deadlands had you play a hand of poker to cast a magic spell.

It fucking sucked because the game comes to a GRINDING halt.

Next idea.

[TheFlatline]

How about hacking is represented as a cut down game of Netrunner with the cards being played over the course of the run.

We already had an entire thread devoted to this.

It... doesn't work. Plus, the idea of spending 5 minutes setting up and playing out a hack is such a bad idea that it needs to be taken out behind the wood shed and shot in the head Ol' Yeller style.

[Ancient History]

One of the Cyberpunk games actually did have rules for using Netrunner cards to simulate cybercombat...I don't recall it working well.

Most of the issues with hacking come out of Neuromancer. Case spends 90% of the time sitting in a safe and secure location, planning out a run long in advance, and using a hideously expensive and complex icebreaker to actually hack the ICE; all of his programming is done during downtime, and most of his "skills" involve knowing where to find various exploits in interfaces and pick up secretive information on the Matrix. As the protagonist, his main interaction is in a very atypical full-VR experience where the AI decides to talk with him.

In Headcrash, the protagonist is still at the mercy of the rules of the VR simulation, they only gain super-user abilities because they're using a full-body tactile interface (complete with the ProctoPod!), and it's just like navigating a giant video game for them.

Even Snow Crash isn't much better; the internet/Matrix there is like a giant video game world with its own local physics rules and Hiro Protagonist's major advantage is that he wrote part of the code and so controls a piece of it - but even he ends up racing lightcycles while the virtual villain's avatar "physically" carries the code-nuke to where it's supposed to go off, and he only wins the virtual swordfight because he helped program the rules.

So while the hacker mini-game is very iconic of cyberpunk games, it's not typical even in reference to the literature - you're looking at some very technical people who have a collection of exploits and maybe icebreakers and top-end equipment at hand, and they mostly sit back in safety and let the icebreakers do the work whenever they want to do some serious hacking.

So when Cyberpunk 2013 and Shadowrun rolled around, they basically treated hacking as a giant video game VR simulation based off of 16/32-bit game consoles; they married it to a few basic computer concepts like RAM and processor speed, but you can't help but look at Matrix Combat in SR1 as anything other than building a videogame character to basically use the slightly-modified combat rules with - complete with Matrix Initiative, damage, healing, etc.

Hell, even Charles Stross made a point of that kind of thing in Halting State, where the protagonists literally create avatars in a giant World of Warcraft style virtual reality MMO and interact with the data structure from that level - including the kind of trippy bit where the actual hacker guy ports their characters to different games and picks up caches of in-game weapons and crap.

I don't think the Matrix and real life hacking need to be completely separate, but the Matrix mini-game needs to be something that basically anybody can play, and the hacker/decker character specializes in; and the guide to being a good decker needs to be a balancing act between knowledge of individual exploits and access to a really good icebreaker and the hardware to successfully run it. The ideal would be one where a hacker has access to enough exploit tools and everything is online and security is generally shitty enough (due to the complexity of multiple interface protocols or whatever) that pretty much any device can be hacked on-the-fly - but the megacorporate cores and government facilities have some heavy (maybe illegal) IC and require much more serious programs and reconnaissance, often requiring physical penetration to get to less-secure terminals and servers and shit.

I could totally see a Matrix where things happen so fast that they come up with a game-like VR interface just so that humans can interact with it in near-real time instead of typing addresses into their web browser, but trying to marry video game combat with real hacking has always been a recipe for disaster.

[Hadanelith]

Thank you very much, Lokathor, for pointing me in the right direction. I now get the basic idea of the proportional damage system. However, I am also aware that the system in AS is a simplification of the system in Shadowrun (older editions). And Frank has been talking about the Shadowrun system specifically. Something about 'LMSD damage codes'? If there is a good page cite for an explanation in an actual Shadowrun book, I can work with that.

[kzt]

The basic logical flaws of this whole video game approach are these:

1) Computers are far, far faster then humans. They are almost infinitely faster then a human sitting 80 milliseconds away. It's would be like playing a FPS with a 2 minute delay between your pushing a button and anything happening.

2) The definition of "I Win" for a hacker is getting the remote system to run your code. In the SR video game approach that is the STARTING condition.

So no, I feel there is no need to preserve the idea of "hacking" as written by a Luddite on his mechanical typewriter 30 years ago.

[Seerow]

Thank you very much, Lokathor, for pointing me in the right direction. I now get the basic idea of the proportional damage system. However, I am also aware that the system in AS is a simplification of the system in Shadowrun (older editions). And Frank has been talking about the Shadowrun system specifically. Something about 'LMSD damage codes'? If there is a good page cite for an explanation in an actual Shadowrun book, I can work with that.

LMSD is from older editions of Shadowrun, and is basically the same as the damage codes in the linked post. LMSD = Light, Moderate, Serious, Deadly. Which correspond with Petty, Ordinary, Serious, Incapacitating from that post.

[Nath]

Comparing combat and Matrix only as different "subsystems" somewhat misses the point. The combat subsystem only deals with physical encounter to overpower an opposition. The Matrix subsystem is about moving inside the Matrix, breaking in, overpowering opposition, and searching and retrieving items. It's a set of rules for the Matrix equivalent of the Running, Lockpicking, Perception, Infiltration, Close Combat skills lumped into a single chapter.

Matrix combat is just as fast and even simpler than physical combat. But what people expect from "combat hacking" is the hacker to break in something in the middle of the fight. If a character was to search for an actual door, pick the lock, move, sneak and look inside the room to find some lever to pull, it would be just as long and boring as a Matrix run.

An extra layer of boredom comes from Matrix Perception, which is much more tedious than any GM would ever make physical Perception ("There are six persons in the room. Now you have to take a separate 'Observe in Detail' Simple Action and roll Perception for each of them to see how many are pointing a gun at you. Before shooting at them, you will also roll to get a list of their body parts that can be targeted for effect.").

[Username17]

Thank you very much, Lokathor, for pointing me in the right direction. I now get the basic idea of the proportional damage system. However, I am also aware that the system in AS is a simplification of the system in Shadowrun (older editions). And Frank has been talking about the Shadowrun system specifically. Something about 'LMSD damage codes'? If there is a good page cite for an explanation in an actual Shadowrun book, I can work with that.

OK. You have ten damage boxes:

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

If you take a "Light Wound" you fill in one box:

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

If you take a "Moderate Wound" you fill in three boxes:

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

If you take a "Serious Wound" you fill in six boxes:

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

If you take a "Deadly Wound" you fill in all the boxes:

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

If all your boxes are filled in, you are unconscious. And there are breakpoints along the way where you take wound penalties. So a Light Wound plus a Moderate Wound plus a Serious Wound, or two Serious Wounds, or one Deadly Wound would all incapacitate you.

One of the Cyberpunk games actually did have rules for using Netrunner cards to simulate cybercombat...I don't recall it working well.

Cyberpunk 2020. That is a game which got a lot more slack than it deserved because peoples' expectations in the 80s and 90s were pretty low.

-Username17

[Cyberzombie]

It doesn't matter if the odds are the same, if a player character gets snuck up on and shot in the back of the head without ever getting a chance to roll some fucking dice, they are going to scream bloody murder. And if you can't understand why that might be, you have no business offering game design advice to anyone.

They always get a soak roll of some kind to resist it, so it's not like you have a death where the character doesn't touch the dice at all. If you're really worried about that, you can allow a use of edge to attempt to negate surprise in some fashion, perhaps allowing a last second perception test to deny a surprise round.

In the case of hacking, it's not even a PC getting killed, it's about his smartgun not firing or he's getting false information. I think that's fine to have that be something that happens behind the scenes to save time (assuming the enemy hacker succeeds on his check).

And besides, the majority of the time in hacking, the PCs are the ones trying to be stealthy. So unless you want the constant opposed rolls (which takes forever, especially when you have multiple hackers), you have to cut some corners when it comes to matrix rolls. If SR is going to get sped up, it needs fewer opposed rolls.

[TheFlatline]

One of the Cyberpunk games actually did have rules for using Netrunner cards to simulate cybercombat...I don't recall it working well.

Netrunner was based in R Talsorian's Cyberpunk game. So probably someone did a splat dump on how to hack using Netrunner cards.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Here's a chart for opposed rolls (assuming you win ties)

Warning: WIIIIIIIIIIIIIDE image

(I hope I got the formulas right; they feel like a bit of a mess, because I'm attempting to do a 3rd order tensor operation in a 2D spreadsheet)

EDIT: Spoiler tag

[Hadanelith]

Thanks, Frank. I'd actually figured that bit out by inference from the AS rules. I guess what I was really wondering was what was up with this stuff about 'staging', and why weapons in earlier editions of Shadowrun had damage numbers like '9M' (what, I had a copy of the old Street Sam Catalog that I picked up from a used bookstore because it looked cool). I got the M, but the 9 part threw me. Finally just tracked down a copy of the SR3 core rules and checked both of those bits out. Had no idea that bit was some of the old target number fuckery. I remember you bitching about how the variable target number stuff was madness in older editions, but actually perusing the combat section of SR3 made my head hurt just contemplating it. I had no idea how deep that rabbit hole went. I'm definitely in favor of the sorts of changes you championed in AS and praised in SR4 if that was what you were changing from.

[Stahlseele]

The biggest complaints about the variable TN systems are 6=7 and the exponentially rising difficulty. Directly afterwards comes the fact that you need to actually do math instad of simply skimming over the dice and ignoring all that are below 4 to figure out wether or not you have any hits.


9M Damage is what the Ares Predator does.
9 is the TN you need to roll and M is Medium Damage, meaning you need to roll 4 hits with TN 9 to not take any damage at all.
Armor directly substracts from the 9, so with the Ares Predator Heavy Pistol, if you wear 5 points of ballistic Armor, your TN goes down from 9 to 4, so you need to roll four hits with the TN4. Which is a LOT easier than 4 hits on TN9.

[JesterZero]

9M Damage is what the Ares Predator does.
9 is the TN you need to roll and M is Medium Damage, meaning you need to roll 4 hits with TN 9 to not take any damage at all.
Armor directly substracts from the 9, so with the Ares Predator Heavy Pistol, if you wear 5 points of ballistic Armor, your TN goes down from 9 to 4, so you need to roll four hits with the TN4. Which is a LOT easier than 4 hits on TN9.

Also, damage codes such as 9M or 6S are actually the streamlined damage codes from SR2 and SR3. In SR1 those codes would have been something like 9M2 and 6S3, where the final number is the number of hits required to stage down the damage to the next lower level. In SR2/SR3 they just made everything require two hits.

In this case, you would need 4 hits on the 9M2 to negate damage, and 9 hits on the 6S2 to negate the damage completely. SR1 also had some rather odd armor rules, but I don't recall them offhand.

[Hadanelith]

Wait, it was actually worse in SR1? I...gah, that's absurd. At least I get the terminology being thrown around now.

[Username17]

Wait, it was actually worse in SR1? I...gah, that's absurd. At least I get the terminology being thrown around now.

Yeah. In 1st edition, they varied the amount of hits required to bump damage up or down a wound level. Also they handed out automatic hits like they were candy, rendering your actual dice pool something of a formality in a lot of instances.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

SR3 had some faults, but untill SR4 it was the best rules system after all . .

[silva]

Ressurrecting this thread to say Im finishing reading the 5th book and finding it the best version of Shadowrun so far. Yeah, it has glaring problems (the editing and writing are atrocious, I had to read the Matrix chapter twice just to grok that the entire process of hacking is simply getting user access/privilege from icons, why didnt they just called Marks user access or something? ), but even then I find the positives obfuscate the negatives by a wide margin. While I hated 4th edition with a passion, its core mechanic of fixed target numbers is the better thing to happen to Shadowrun, and seeing it fused with old (revamped) concepts like priority chargen, cyberdecks and the initiative system is great. Besides that, the aesthetics are spot on, with the Seattle-centrism, amerindian influence, and the pink mohican feel back with a punch. In fact, I think the art direction is the best since the 2e days of Bradstreet, Aulisio, Nelson and Laubenstein.

Frankly, 4th ed left a sour taste in my mouth. It never felt like Shadowrun to me. This edition, on the contrary, feels like the real modernization of the game I loved to play 20 years ago. (I just hope playtime confirms my excitement in reading it, because I played just 1 session so far )

[angelfromanotherpin]

2/10, too obvious.

[Korwin]

Ressurrecting this thread to say Im finishing reading the 5th book and finding it the best version of Shadowrun so far. Yeah, it has glaring problems (the editing and writing are atrocious, I had to read the Matrix chapter twice just to grok that the entire process of hacking is simply getting user access/privilege from icons, why didnt they just called Marks user access or something? ),

OK, so only negatives

but even then I find the positives obfuscate the negatives by a wide margin.

Wait, what are the positives?

While I hated 4th edition with a passion, its core mechanic of fixed target numbers is the better thing to happen to Shadowrun, and seeing it fused with old (revamped) concepts like priority chargen, cyberdecks and the initiative system is great.

You do know there is an priority Chargen in SR4? (It's bad, but so is the one in 5, so whatever.)
And if you really wanted you could describe change comlinks as to cyberdecks, and Initiative could be easily ported to 4.

Besides that, the aesthetics are spot on, with the Seattle-centrism, amerindian influence, and the pink mohican feel back with a punch. In fact, I think the art direction is the best since the 2e days of Bradstreet, Aulisio, Nelson and Laubenstein.

OK, pretty Pictures.

Frankly, 4th ed left a sour taste in my mouth. It never felt like Shadowrun to me. This edition, on the contrary, feels like the real modernization of the game I loved to play 20 years ago. (I just hope playtime confirms my excitement in reading it, because I played just 1 session so far )

So you are saying, you like the watered down Version better, because it feels more like older Editions, even if it had more bad rules?

[Whipstitch]

I doubt he's really trolling, since he's basically just coming out as a nostalgia hound like Bull. I mean, seriously, the dude backed AW, so why would you expect him to start drawing a line in the sand about shitty rules now?