The Shadowrun Situation

[Ancient History]

KE will only show up to arrest you if it is in their best interest. Remember you're their customer. They glorify gun violence because it sells more guns. They don't want to arrest you unless there's a ricockulously good reason for it - like you were raiding an Ares facility. You have to remember, you general megacorp is not making decisions based on what is good and lawful - they're looking at the bottom line. They want the data from your guns for their customer feedback and performance metrics, not because they're afraid you're going to go postal in the newborn room at Seattle General. So yeah, I think in a sufficiently fucked up future, the fact that your gun is online and spitting out data need not be an immediate and game-ending thing.

[Username17]

The whole idea of cybercombat is stupid. It's time for it to just go away.

We do "cybercombat" right now in the real world. It doesn't look anything like Tron fights, but it happens. In fact, the Pentagon created a new cybercombat task force this year. And they are totally fucking serious. Information warfare is a real thing, and an increasing number of warriors are being detailed to "fight" battles that are entirely online.

The task before the designers of a new edition of Shadowrun is to bring cybercombat off the battlefield and into the skirmish. To give an individual cybercombatant something to do in a small units tactics scenario.

The designers trotting out their horse shit about how "Maybe you could hack the chemseal on their armor if they obligingly left the wifi on" means that they absolutely don't have a fucking clue how to deliver on that task. But it's not a stupid or implausible task by any means. The obvious things to do for Shadowrun would be to have the Hacker be a buff/debuff specialist who could run roughshod over enemy groups with digital illusions or incapacitating brain static unless there was a hacker on the other team jamming their bullshit in real time. But there are of course other ways you could go. Worrying about whether they can hack into one device or another is a level of granularity and stupidity that simply will not do.

-Username17

[kzt]

The whole idea of cybercombat is stupid. It's time for it to just go away.

We do "cybercombat" right now in the real world. It doesn't look anything like Tron fights, but it happens. In fact, the Pentagon created a new cybercombat task force this year. And they are totally fucking serious. Information warfare is a real thing, and an increasing number of warriors are being detailed to "fight" battles that are entirely online.

Sure, but that is a totally different thing than what SR means. Chinese government hackers emailing three HR drones at EMC hacked excel spreadsheets so that the PRC military can eventually stroll into the classified systems at Northrop Grumman via cloning RSA tokens is very, real thing, but has a limited level of applicability to a game with 3 second turns.

Brain hacking bothers me at a fundamental level, as do technomancers. Hence I'm much more receptive to a solution that turns a SR group into a bunch of people who all can shoot and each can do something else rather then insisting that their "something else" is the only way they can contribute.

[Username17]

Brain hacking bothers me at a fundamental level

Given that tazers exist, Pokemon had to pull an episode because it caused too many children to have seizures, and auditory resonance weapons have been successfully tested, what actually bothers you about it? The human brain is hackable, no science fiction black boxes required. You aren't getting "bothered" because of Souls and Searle Zombies or some shit are you?

Now in any setting where direct neural interface is not only a thing, but a thing you can buy "off the shelf" and then plug directly into your head without spending weeks or months calibrating the damn thing, brain hacking would obviously be way more advanced than "Start Seizures", "Void Bowels", or "Stop Heart", but I remind you that we can "hack" the brain to do all those things right now.

-Username17

[Fucks]

The task before the designers of a new edition of Shadowrun is to bring cybercombat off the battlefield and into the skirmish. To give an individual cybercombatant something to do in a small units tactics scenario.
[...] The obvious things to do for Shadowrun would be to have the Hacker be a buff/debuff specialist who could run roughshod over enemy groups with digital illusions or incapacitating brain static unless there was a hacker on the other team jamming their bullshit in real time. But there are of course other ways you could go. Worrying about whether they can hack into one device or another is a level of granularity and stupidity that simply will not do.

So... fukcing with their opponent's minds like mages do? Programs = spells? Not saying it's a a bad idea, though.

[Avoraciopoctules]

@Frank

Maybe it just doesn't sound fun to have in a game? If you're trying to have a tactical gunfight game, incapacitating strobe lights and hologram clones to draw off enemy fire might skirt the bounds of stuff people want in their conceptual space.

A lot of gamers nowadays are looking at stuff like Deus Ex, Bioshock, Ghost in the Shell, etc. for inspiration as far as "combat hacking" goes. There are almost certainly people who want to be able to hack people's eyes and wirelessly possess dudes, but there will be a significant number of others who'll think the possibility of that happening to their character is lame enough that they don't want it in the game at all.

Even Ghost in the Shell had named characters who stayed away from augs because they didn't want to hand over their character sheets as soon as they walked near a hacker without an appropriately leveled firewall. And the PC with a brainhacking specialization spent way more time shooting at stuff and driving vehicles. It was a situational, niche ability.

[Whipstitch]

This conversation always makes my head hurt because I've found that people will grumble way less about playing mages with minimal houserules yet magic is even more insidious than what frank is suggesting and even has an arbitrary "no homers" clause attached to the most practical forms of defense against it. I swear, for a game about the future Shadowrun has the most conservative fanbase I think I've ever come across.

[kzt]

This conversation always makes my head hurt because I've found that people will grumble way less about playing mages with minimal houserules yet magic is even more insidious than what frank is suggesting and the most practical personal defense against it comes with an arbitrary no homers clause attached.

I don't understand why people run anything other then mages in MagicRun. Every other option you can choose has comparatively no growth options, and there is very little that gets excluded by choosing mage at the start. So my starting assumption is that everyone already has that. The balance issues of direct vs indirect, possession, countermagic etc I already understand. But one topic at a time.

And yeah, you can get away with because "it's magic" that people will absolutely not accept with guns or technology. Because they understand guns and technology. That's just how it is.

[kzt]

Now in any setting where direct neural interface is not only a thing, but a thing you can buy "off the shelf" and then plug directly into your head without spending weeks or months calibrating the damn thing, brain hacking would obviously be way more advanced than "Start Seizures", "Void Bowels", or "Stop Heart", but I remind you that we can "hack" the brain to do all those things right now.

You can do a lot of interesting, things, but sending people into convulsions via flicker vertigo is not exactly what you seem to limit your system to. I don't know, it is just a step further than I want to go. It's like "technomancers". Sorry, not.

And how do you reliably induce heart failure without contact?

[Whipstitch]

But one topic at a time.

It's barely a separate topic when you have people mentioning how unfun it might be to have to worry about getting possessed or being unable to target people because of intervening illusions.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I suspect that a significant subset of the people who complain about brainhacking in combat would also complain about some magic. Not all of them, though, since there's a greater deal of fiction out there where PC-esque people exploit magic for crazy useful stuff in combat.

When people think about magic in Shadowrun, a lot of it feels like stuff you could defend against as just a dude with some guns. Hellhounds and mantis demons can be shot in the face, though you might need some fancy bullets. Energy blasts can be avoided if you have enough armor or cover between you and the laserwizard. Horrible voodoo doll curses can be avoided by not leaving any bits of yourself behind that haven't been sprayed with a sterilizing agent or something.

Although I think I do remember that in the actual rules, all 3 of those solutions don't actually work unless you are some kind of magicky yourself or the mage is obligingly using some of the stuff that mundane gear actually does work against. (An HEV suit will be better against a fireball than a stunball I think) Now, honestly, I don't play Shadowrun. I've got some books, and reading gameplay stories is often pretty fun, but I'm more interested in the paradigm of Arcanum or maybe Girl Genius when it comes to magic-and-science games.

But I do have some experience reading terrible arguments about how people are having fun the wrong way in their games, and I think I can hazard some decent guesses about why so many people have negative reactions when they hear about hackers "hacking" opponents directly to contribute in combat instead of driving, piloting a gun drone, messing with machines linked into the building's matrix, and so on.

[Seerow]

@Frank

Maybe it just doesn't sound fun to have in a game? If you're trying to have a tactical gunfight game, incapacitating strobe lights and hologram clones to draw off enemy fire might skirt the bounds of stuff people want in their conceptual space.

You mean like having a mage cast chaos, trid phantasm, or control actions? These are all things literally already in the conceptual space of the game. Why is it so much more offensive if a tech-guy can do it (and since it's tech it can be defended against with tech, something everyone has access to), than when a mage can do it (and only another mage can defend against at all)?

I really can't understand the complaints that "it's not fun" or "it takes away player agency" since these are affects that are literally already in the game. There are other arguments out there that are at least slightly plausible, but this one in particular I really cannot comprehend.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Like I said in my last post, I suspect people might start whining about those as well if they totally incapacitate dudes with guns. In Shadowrun, "artifact sword" style balancing is much more difficult to pull off while maintaining suspension of disbelief. And people want to play "fighters".

[Dragon Instincts]

(An HEV suit will be better against a fireball than a stunball I think)

The fun thing is: Given how magic works in Shadowrun, the HEV suit (with full helmet) would block LOS and you would not be able to harm the guy inside with your stunball or any other direct spells like all the shiny mind fucking spells (you must see your target to aim them them, so you could harm the suit but not the guy). At least the fireball, an indirect spell, would still be possible to aim.

The devs circumvented that problem by stating how clothing and armor can totally not block your line of sight when casting at the guy behind it. Because you know he is inside there. The rule is inconsistent, because that would mean you could cast at people behind walls or inside of vehicles as long as you know exactly where they are. Obviously, it was made for game balance reasons, but it is not how magic works inside the setting. If they would use their own ingame limitations of magic, then clothing would provide cover modifiers against direct spells.

I've read a discussion about aiming spells at the official fanboy forum a few weeks ago. Of course most people over there did not understand how magic works and failed to realize that this problem exists even when it was pointed out.

[Seerow]

Like I said in my last post, I suspect people might start whining about those as well if they totally incapacitate dudes with guns. In Shadowrun, "artifact sword" style balancing is much more difficult to pull off while maintaining suspension of disbelief. And people want to play "fighters".

All of the things I mentioned are available right in core shadowrun, and incapacitate in basically the exact same ways you complain about hackers doing. On top of that the dude with a gun is in fact MORE capable of defending against being brainhacked (just get yourself a decent firewall) than he is defending against any of those spells (sorry, if you're not a mage yourself, you're relying on another mage to defend you against such attacks).

Seriously every argument you bring up applies to magic, only moreso. And you claim that the people who complain about hacking will also complain about magic, but years of experience with actual shadowrun players says otherwise. I've never seen anyone complain at an actual table or online that a mage incapacitating an enemy with magic is unfair, or shouldn't be able to happen. I'm sure there is some minority out there that feels that way, but the majority of shadowrun players are totally cool with the idea of a mage being able to take control of your character away from you. The claim that it's somehow worse when a tech guy does it is just a perpetuation of the "Mages rule everyone else drools" double standard that plagues the TTRPG market in general.

[Avoraciopoctules]

@Dragon Instincts
haha, I'm not surprised. It's probably obvious I've spent more time playing Shadowrun SNES and reading SR novels / other people's game summaries than playing real SR or reading the rulebooks.

[Avoraciopoctules]

@Seerow

Okay, you're the one with SR experience. I admit that my guess might be off-base. But, are magicky mind-control options really magic-only to block? I thought I read something about healing spells working less well on people with lots of cyberware. Are mundanes really screwed both ways?

[Seerow]

@Seerow

Okay, you're the one with SR experience. I admit that my guess might be off-base. But, are magicky mind-control options really magic-only to block? I thought I read something about healing spells working less well on people with lots of cyberware. Are mundanes really screwed both ways?

Yeah the game specifically calls out healing someone with reduced essence giving the healer a negative dice pool mod. It doesn't apply to any other form of magic that I can remember. As you note, mundanes just get fucked from both ends.

[kzt]

I'm sure there is some minority out there that feels that way, but the majority of shadowrun players are totally cool with the idea of a mage being able to take control of your character away from you. The claim that it's somehow worse when a tech guy does it is just a perpetuation of the "Mages rule everyone else drools" double standard that plagues the TTRPG market in general.

Everyone I played with mutually agreed to ban all the mind control spells. They are horrible overpowered and we just didn't like what they did. So yeah, I'm not going to allow someone else to occupy that conceptual space.

[Whipstitch]

The way you resist magic in shadowrun as a mundane is with bullets and smoke screens so hopefully they never see you. Seriously. Casting pools in sr4 are an opposed test between your spell casting+magic pool vs. their willpower plus counterspelling if someone capable of magic is available to provide the skill, give that counterspelling is not available at all to mundos. Merry christmas.

[Seerow]

I'm sure there is some minority out there that feels that way, but the majority of shadowrun players are totally cool with the idea of a mage being able to take control of your character away from you. The claim that it's somehow worse when a tech guy does it is just a perpetuation of the "Mages rule everyone else drools" double standard that plagues the TTRPG market in general.

Everyone I played with mutually agreed to ban all the mind control spells. They are horrible overpowered and we just didn't like what they did. So yeah, I'm not going to allow someone else to occupy that conceptual space.

What are you counting as mind control?

Do you consider the mage debuffing/disabling someone offensive? How about creating illusions? Alter memory? Knock the target out/kill them? Even if you're actively against direct mind control, there's a lot of conceptual space for "brain hacking" that isn't just "I take over his mind". Interestingly almost all of it Magic is capable of.

[Username17]

You can do a lot of interesting, things, but sending people into convulsions via flicker vertigo is not exactly what you seem to limit your system to. I don't know, it is just a step further than I want to go. It's like "technomancers". Sorry, not.

So what you're saying is that you just don't like Cyberpunk as a genre.

Cyberpunk has always been about blurring the lines between man and machine. Of having human bodies and minds upgraded and modified and having their inputs and outputs compromised just like machines. I mean shit, we're talking about a genre defined by books like Neuromancer and Snowcrash and movies like The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell.

Now I'm not saying you have to like cyberpunk, but if you don't like the conceits of the genre then obviously Shadowrun shouldn't spare a second thought towards trying to appeal to you. It is fruitless to do so, and can only be done by offending all the real fans.

Now from a technical issue, causing brain damage is incredibly easy. If you want to use invisible radiation to leave someone unable to choose which words to say in order to express themselves, you can just do that. Right now the primary issue is that it is hard to interfere with the brain's activity in a way that is reliably permanent or not. If you just want to take away a person's ability to stand and walk that's trivial. They just might not get it back. And of course, the equipment is bulky and far more expensive than a gun. But people who flap their arms and rant about how such things are impossible are not making arguments that make any sense as far as what current neuroscience tells us about what future neuroscience could look like.

My theory is that the people shitting themselves about brainhacking are actually thinking in a very non-scientific way and believe on some level that things work in a Cartesian manner: with the body being a physical lump of meat and the mind being an angelic supernatural force imbued to them by God. This is of course ridiculous, and worrying overmuch about pleasing such people with scientific predictions is just as futile and counterproductive as attempting to reach out to people who don't like the cyberpunk genre in the first place.

-Username17

[kzt]

Do you consider the mage debuffing/disabling someone offensive? How about creating illusions? Alter memory? Knock the target out/kill them? Even if you're actively against direct mind control, there's a lot of conceptual space for "brain hacking" that isn't just "I take over his mind". Interestingly almost all of it Magic is capable of.

Our goto "debuff" was stunball. Illusions we did. Alter memory, influence and mindprobe were just never used (nobody had them).

I'm certainly not saying that it's unreasonable to be hacking someone's DNI. That is perfectly reasonable, if you can get into the device running the DNI or the DNI directly. I think the idea that you can virtually instantly do subtle things to a particular target on a crowded street when he's not wearing a hackable DNI is not so reasonable.

It's why asking me to have my iphone display a video is reasonable, but expecting my brain directly download it from youtube via Verizion's 1900 MHz CDMA towers is not. As my brain doesn't have a 3 inch long antenna in it, nor a transmitter or the ability to interpret CMDA encoded signals at megabit speeds, or a TCP/IP protocol stack my brain has no ability to do that.

[Kaelik]

It's why asking me to have my iphone display a video is reasonable, but expecting my brain directly download it from youtube via Verizion's 1900 MHz CDMA towers is not. As my brain doesn't have a 3 inch long antenna in it, nor a transmitter or the ability to interpret CMDA encoded signals at megabit speeds, or a TCP/IP protocol stack my brain has no ability to do that.

And you are completely full of shit. We know how to induce siezures in people with audio or visual stimulation. We know that just seeing colors effects people's thinking.

Lightshow based induced effects are not less realistic than magic based ones.

Great, you don't want to play Shadowrun, because you don't want any filthy sci fi or magic in your theft game. Good for you. But you already house banned all the magic stuff, so how about you go the fuck away and let people who actually play Shadowrun talk about making hackers real characters in Shadowrun, and you can ban whatever changes they make from your totally realistic no magic no sci fi heist games that use the Shadowrun system.

[Seerow]

Do you consider the mage debuffing/disabling someone offensive? How about creating illusions? Alter memory? Knock the target out/kill them? Even if you're actively against direct mind control, there's a lot of conceptual space for "brain hacking" that isn't just "I take over his mind". Interestingly almost all of it Magic is capable of.

Our goto "debuff" was stunball. Illusions we did. Alter memory, influence and mindprobe were just never used (nobody had them).

I'm certainly not saying that it's unreasonable to be hacking someone's DNI. That is perfectly reasonable, if you can get into the device running the DNI or the DNI directly. I think the idea that you can virtually instantly do subtle things to a particular target on a crowded street when he's not wearing a hackable DNI is not so reasonable.

It's why asking me to have my iphone display a video is reasonable, but expecting my brain directly download it from youtube via Verizion's 1900 MHz CDMA towers is not. As my brain doesn't have a 3 inch long antenna in it, nor a transmitter or the ability to interpret CMDA encoded signals at megabit speeds, or a TCP/IP protocol stack my brain has no ability to do that.

Shadowrun is a game where Technomancers are a thing that actually exist. Regular (meta)human minds that have some quirk that allows them to directly interact with machines, and even do things that no normal tech can.

The game already accepts the possibility of the human brain and technology directly interacting. To me it seems simple that what can go one way, can also go the other. Basically somewhere along the line in the Shadowrun universe, someone studied some technomancers, probably trying to figure out how to awaken that innate ability in normal people or some shit. Weren't able to figure that out, but along the way reverse engineered a way to send a signal directly to the brain that the brain translates as meaningful information. Perfectly reasonable explanation for why this wasn't around before, how it came to be now, and gets access to the same handwavium that Technomancers use to justify their existence.