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Kai Tave posted:I mean, it's hard for me to come up with a way to rationalize someone leaving their eye replacements vulnerable to wireless intrusion that doesn't seem dumb as hell, because in a world where a dude with a fancy cellphone loaded with warez can do all sorts of crazy techno-poo poo why the hell would you? But at the same time it means you probably can't ever pull a Laughing Man and hack someone's cybernetic visual feed on the fly or make that security troll's smartlinked machinegun try and feed two rounds at once or anything like that. The answer sincerely is "because one out of one thousand people actually have that capability, and one out of one thousand of those people would do it." There's a lot of poo poo that's easy to do that most people in society don't really defend against, because most people don't do that kind of poo poo. Having to constantly turn off and turn back on all your gear and all your augments and disable all your chips and etc, etc, every loving night, is a goddamn chore, especially when on 99.9% of the nights, nothing is gonna happen. How many of you regularly follow every single protocol of computer security every night? How often on the news to major companies or people get hacked because of dumb, easy mistakes? I mean hell, I've worked with security and police before - most criminals who get away with stuff, do so because people legitimately don't expect to be hacked, or robbed, or what have you. Chances are if you're robbed, you only catch the dude if he himself is careless. A lot of the problems come down to the really dumb GM school of "If the PCs do something, do it right back at them." This ignores that the PCs are usually loving weirdos. SINless are not the norm. Of those SINless, runners are not the norm. Runners are almost all by default loving weirdos who are usually incapable of being a productive member of society for whatever reason. Expecting Joe the Security Guard to act like a Runner is dumb. I think a lot of this comes from backdraft of tournament D&D style play, where everyone, PC or NPC, was to be considered a tactical genius at whatever it is they do. But what works in D&D doesn't work in Shadowrun. The rules very stupidly don't allow for the dumb, ignorant slobs that the vast majority of humanity is made up of.
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Apr 2, 2013 14:26
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Hey man, I totally agreed with everything you said last page, you don't need to convince me twice. I like it, I think that's how they oughta do it. poo poo, if you wanted to you could even try messing with some of those "SOTA" rules they always flirted with for a couple of editions where your computer programs degrade over time if you don't update and patch them, maybe make it an optional rule that your gear will slowly (and I mean slowly) degrade slightly if you keep it constantly un-networked so you have to eventually turn it back on even if only for a little while, but maybe that's too much of a pain in the rear end so.
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Apr 2, 2013 14:42
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That Watch Dogs clip is good. I hope that in 5E they really do what they've been threatening to do and bring hackers into the same timescale as everyone else. I know it's much faster in 4e than it was historically but it's still not fast enough to do during dramatic situations. I would like it if hacking was effectively technological spells, or like Mass Effect powers, but which effect technology. You choose an action, say, "Tamper Weapon", pick your target, and roll your dice against their firewall. If you succeed, the magazine pops out of their gun right then and there. In the pass that you do it. Powerful, yes, but so's a stunbolt or two grenades fired at someone's feet. The problem now is that hacking takes... so... long... that if you're actually in combat the hacker might as well just shoot people like everyone else. If you actually stop to eject someone's magazine, they'll have shot you twice before you've even found the signal.
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Apr 2, 2013 14:54
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Kai Tave posted:Hey man, I totally agreed with everything you said last page, you don't need to convince me twice. I like it, I think that's how they oughta do it. You mean sort of like DRM? That would totally make sense. If EA can force DRM ala the latest SimCity debacle, imagine what the actual evil corps in Shadowrun would do? Of course, it's all moot if runners can program their own stuff. You're not going to program your own DRM. But you could force some kind of alternative shadow network that, while it doesn't force your programs to be online, it does constantly update your code and security references, which in the near-singularity world of Shadowrun would make sense.
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Apr 2, 2013 14:55
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children overboard posted:I would like it if hacking was effectively technological spells, or like Mass Effect powers, but which effect technology. You choose an action, say, "Tamper Weapon", pick your target, and roll your dice against their firewall. If you succeed, the magazine pops out of their gun right then and there. In the pass that you do it. Powerful, yes, but so's a stunbolt or two grenades fired at someone's feet. Hacking-as-spells would be brilliant design. Particularly if the spells were as much attached to the item being accessed as the runner's programs. For instance, "Weapon Tamper" is a function of Smartlinked weapons, it's one of their qualities, as much as it is something that is part of the hacker's toolkit. It's like reverse spells. The weapon you're attacking holds the effect you want to use, not the other way around.
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Apr 2, 2013 14:57
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Mendrian posted:You mean sort of like DRM? And! And and and, this is the brilliant part, those shadow networks already exist in the fiction. JackPoint, Shadowsea, Shadowland, all those in-character chatrooms where all the shadowrunners make comments and bitch at each other in the sourcebooks? Bam, there you go. All shadowrunners who're serious about "the biz" will eventually wind up registering for one of those shadow networks in order to keep their illegal, off-the-books tech and cyberware patched up and up-to-spec with compliant codes, and that gives you a built-in hook for shadowrunners to know other 'runners, to network with people, get them involved in the underworld. poo poo, you could even make it a rule, every shadowrunner gets one free contact which is the underground network they subscribe to. Mendrian posted:Hacking-as-spells would be brilliant design. Particularly if the spells were as much attached to the item being accessed as the runner's programs. For instance, "Weapon Tamper" is a function of Smartlinked weapons, it's one of their qualities, as much as it is something that is part of the hacker's toolkit. It's like reverse spells. The weapon you're attacking holds the effect you want to use, not the other way around. This is exactly how I'd do it, including for things like cyberware. You could list the effects of things in the hacking chapter and then simply tag gear and cyberware with the names of poo poo you can do to them. So Cybereyes gain the tags "Remote Shutdown, Hijack Sense (Vision)," and "Remote Operation." Wired Reflexes get the tags "Remote Shutdown" and "Neural Feedback" or something.
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Apr 2, 2013 15:09
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Kai Tave posted:This is exactly how I'd do it, including for things like cyberware. You could list the effects of things in the hacking chapter and then simply tag gear and cyberware with the names of poo poo you can do to them. So Cybereyes gain the tags "Remote Shutdown, Hijack Sense (Vision)," and "Remote Operation." Wired Reflexes get the tags "Remote Shutdown" and "Neural Feedback" or something. I think this would set up some neat parraellism between hackers and mages. Hackers do stuff basically for free in terms of immediate resources, but their poo poo costs money and is limited by what's available in the environment. Mages aren't limited by their environment, but they require time and Karma to make their stuff work. This is, for course, kind of how it works now, but making the effects explicitly spell-like would reinforce the point.
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Apr 2, 2013 15:17
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Kai Tave posted:Hey man, I totally agreed with everything you said last page, you don't need to convince me twice. I like it, I think that's how they oughta do it. Haha I wasn't trying to like DOUBLE convince you, more that I saw your comment and springboarded from there. Really the thing about security that Shadowrun tends to forget quite often is that corporations by and large do not make the best weapon and the best drones and the best armor and the best tech support they possibly can. They make the most profitable. Sure, Renraku's Elite Guards are gonna be some incredible assholes to fight, but most facilities aren't actively defended by them, they're defended by simple corpsec, and they're going to be using Cyber Microsoft Internet Explorer.
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Apr 2, 2013 15:53
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ProfessorCirno posted:Sure, Renraku's Elite Guards are gonna be some incredible assholes to fight, but most facilities aren't actively defended by them, they're defended by simple corpsec, and they're going to be using Cyber Microsoft Internet Explorer. This was precisely the problem I had with SR4. I usually assumed rating 2 or 3 at most guards at most facilities. Corporate security, a single security spider/hacker. A big, non-headquarter facility might have a Mage on speed dial but that guy is a freelancer probably. Only the most important facilities have a Mage on staff. The computer system is maybe Rating 4 or 5 at most. My players then breezed through almost all content. There needs to be some way of making things, I don't know, flatter. Mendrian fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Apr 2, 2013 |
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Apr 2, 2013 15:57
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Mendrian posted:This was precisely the problem I had with SR4. Yeah, at that point the issue isn't  hacking! it's Shadowrun! You want flatter math? Get ready to get the gently caress out then because apparently the current system approach they're looking at for SR5 is: 1). Increase the cap on skills from 6 to 12 to provide a bigger range out of the gate. Why? Beats the gently caress out of me, man. "Let's give people more bigger dice pools" would not be my first solution to Shadowrun's crazy-rear end problems but what the gently caress do I know? 2). Then the actual method for reigning things in seems to be imposing limits on how many successes you can actually keep in your assnormous dice pool, so essentially like a roll-and-keep system. The example they give is that weapons now have an Accuracy stat which governs how many successes on a shooting test you can keep. Sniper rifles have high accuracy while a streetline special has low accuracy. Which simply means that players now have two tracks of numbers to max out, dice rolled and dice kept. Actual chance that we'll see flatter math in an edition of Shadowrun anytime soon: eat poo poo.
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Apr 2, 2013 16:19
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Mendrian posted:This was precisely the problem I had with SR4. <grumpy old man> What you're describing is a direct result of the “mix everything with everything” power creep that SR4 introduced. It used to be that higher-rating stuff was nigh impossible to get; that cybering your mage or adept made you horrible in every way; that there were limits to how many dice you could throw at a problem. It's also a double-whammy result of the move away from variable target numbers and towards having difficulties become modifiers on the dice pool instead. This had the primary effect of simply putting more dice onto the table — more stuff needs to be available to let the players pile up the dice needed to counteract those penalties, but the same stuff can then also be used to just rack up dice to make easier tasks trivial. It also had the secondary effect of removing the (kind of) exponential increase in difficulty you saw with target numbers, and as a result, the value of higher-rated equipment. For instance, an old-style rating 6 system would have a target number of 6 to trick/hack/break/whatever. One die in six would give you a success, and the nasty ebil GM probably required you to roll at least four or five successes. That's twice as difficult as if it were a rating 5 device (one in three is a success). Suddenly, rating 2-3 is still fairly easy, but since you had maybe 7-8 dice in total, you still stood a decent chance of not succeeding on your first try; rating 4-5 is getting dicey, and you'd be happy to get 3-4 successes; rating 6 is wtfawful and you will probably try to think of a way to simply go around the problem. Now, I understand that from a purely mathematical and probability standpoint, adjusting the number of dice rather than the target number is “cleaner”, but it requires a complete rework of the system, and a re-evaluation and rebalance of every last rating and modifier… and they didn't do that. In a bid to keep as much of the legacy material as possible compatible, they kept things like 6 as base attribute and skill maxes; 3-4 as some kind of general “normal” device rating; modifiers that sometimes naïvely turned from “+2 TN” to “-2 dice”. …and the aforementioned R2-3 NPCs. None of it actually works in the context of the overall redesigned system. </grumpy old man>
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Apr 2, 2013 16:21
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Tippis posted:Now, I understand that from a purely mathematical and probability standpoint, adjusting the number of dice rather than the target number is “cleaner”, but it requires a complete rework of the system, and a re-evaluation and rebalance of every last rating and modifier… and they didn't do that. In a bid to keep as much of the legacy material as possible compatible, they kept things like 6 as base attribute and skill maxes; 3-4 as some kind of general “normal” device rating; modifiers that sometimes naïvely turned from “+2 TN” to “-2 dice”. …and the aforementioned R2-3 NPCs. None of it actually works in the context of the overall redesigned system. That makes an enormous amount of sense. The advice in the book always makes it sound like Rating 5-6 is rare and super evil and don't do that to your players unless you really mean it. And then you include a Rating 5 ICE program or a Rating 5 security guard and your players are all like, 'lolwut?' and there's a cyper-splatter or regular-splatter where your obstacle just stood. It seems like they wanted those high-rating threats to be a big deal but mechanically they're not due to the combo legacy/systems problem you're describing. Insane question: why don't they just nuke the whole thing? Reboots are all the rage these days...
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Apr 2, 2013 16:28
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Kai Tave posted:
The problem wit hthe 6 cap is they made it too narrow. You can start with one skill out of the gate at 6 (or 7 with aptitude) and guess what? If you have one useful skill at 6/7 you are literally at Olympic Athlete/Groundbreaking Scientist/World-Famous Profession of choice by the rules, not to mention specialization. It is ridiculous.
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Apr 2, 2013 16:40
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Mendrian posted:Insane question: why don't they just nuke the whole thing? Reboots are all the rage these days... Because D&D isn't the only game that has a bunch of fans that will pitch an absolute bitch if you so much as change anything. People still gripe about wireless AR Matrix and, of all things, how they don't use the stupid PG swearwords in the fiction anymore. Apparently if your game of cybercriminals murdering, robbing, kidnapping, and everything else-ing under the sun for kicks and profit involves actual real-world swears then you're just "trying too hard to be edgy" or something, because sometime between magic coming back to the world and people sticking wires in their brains the word "gently caress" just totally falls out of fashion or something, I don't know. Catalyst has had to deal with financial setbacks and a bunch of their talent pool jumping ship, they aren't about to risk causing a bunch of the people who continue to give them money for Shadowrun stuff to go into rage-spasms, they're going to pander like hell and pray it works.
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Apr 2, 2013 16:41
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Mendrian posted:If ICE were more like security protocols and less like programs that you fight, it would be interesting. If they behaved more like actual firewalls and security programs and less like a ten foot lion that shoots data-lasers from his data-eyes. Especially considering the experiment to see if you even need to do VR hacking in SR4 always came back as a conclusive 'no'. This is pretty much exactly how I feel about hacking. Along with: ProfessorCirno posted:As far as hacking things goes, I think quite frankly the sidebar should say the opposite. Turning the connection in your gear or ware is seen as dangerous, crazy, and illegal - the kind of stuff only Runners do. Most corpsec, cops, or not knowing any better gangbangers will not only have their stuff running, but also spawning the occasional advertisement. Just as in the real world, most people trust their firewalls, no matter how crappy or out of date they are and are really, really bad at following security protocol. DeclaredYuppie posted:I feel like this is also why a lot of people see new edition Shadowrunners being much more "all pro assassins" and less "expendible punks outside the system". This is another issue I have with how I see people playing the game a lot. When I started playing SR3e back in the early 00's, my GM was adamant that we were all just loving street filth with low skills, fairly low attributes, and access to only the most basic of gear. We could work our way up to better gear and better skills and attributes and so on, but slowly and with a lot of hard and dangerous runs. And we died. A lot. Not like how I've seen it now where players basically weep and beg you to reneg when you kill their character. PC death was routine rather than the exception when I used to play 3rd ed. Granted, our GM was so ruthless and brutal that our running joke was: Player: "I walk outside my apartment." GM: "Roll Body." But it was loving fun and it really felt like we were these dregs-of-society cannon fodder the corporate masters thought nothing of throwing at each other like so many grenades. There's definitely something to be said for both sides of the game though. Kai Tave posted:how they don't use the stupid PG swearwords in the fiction anymore. Apparently if your game of cybercriminals murdering, robbing, kidnapping, and everything else-ing under the sun for kicks and profit involves actual real-world swears then you're just "trying too hard to be edgy" or something, because sometime between magic coming back to the world and people sticking wires in their brains the word "gently caress" just totally falls out of fashion or something, I don't know. Haha, when I read my first Catalyst book and saw the wonderful word "gently caress," I was like "Thank God, I don't have to roll my eyes outta my skull every time I see the words 'fragging' and 'hoop' and 'drek' and all that other nonsense."  But it's atmospheric! It's like Clockwork Oran
Martello fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Apr 2, 2013 |
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Apr 2, 2013 16:41
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Martello posted:But it was loving fun and it really felt like we were these dregs-of-society cannon fodder the corporate masters thought nothing of throwing at each other like so many grenades. I feel like the ideal Shadowrun should be able to easily accommodate both sorts of styles out of the box. I agree that it can be fun to play gangers trying to go big and script-kiddies looking to make a name for yourself, where $10,000 fun-bucks split five ways is a solid haul and there's a sense of working to carve out a rep and a name for yourself, and that it can also be fun to be the Leverage crew only Nate Ford is also a mage and Hardison is the nerdiest elf ever. Honestly, I wonder if build-points are even the best way to go about it, maybe a full-on return to the days of the priority system and simply have different priority choices for different "tiers" of play, like Street Punks/Up-and-Comers/Pros/Edgerunners, stuff like that.
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Apr 2, 2013 16:50
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…on the other hand, their insistence on maintaining a measure of backwards-compatibility also means that a lot of the stuff is surprisingly forwards-compatible. If you (like me) prefer one of the older editions, it's actually very easy to convert the stats and gear you get from 4th-ed splat books into something that makes sense to the 2nd- or 3rd-ed rule set.Martello posted:This is another issue I have with how I see people playing the game a lot. When I started playing SR3e back in the early 00's, my GM was adamant that we were all just loving street filth with low skills, fairly low attributes, and access to only the most basic of gear. We could work our way up to better gear and better skills and attributes and so on, but slowly and with a lot of hard and dangerous runs. I just checked my bookshelf: A Killing Glare (bodyguarding a sports star) paid 5k N¥ per character and a max of 14 team karma; Celtic Double-Cross (a suicide-run into Tìr na nÓg) paid 2.5k N¥ a day and ≤9 team karma… These days, that doesn't even cover the ammo cost. Then again, it didn't cover the ammo cost back in those days either, but that was kind of the point back then. 
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Apr 2, 2013 17:01
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Mendrian posted:This was precisely the problem I had with SR4. I have had this problem too and I can sympathise--sometimes it doesn't make sense for there to be much security. I found the way to solve it is to send them against bigger and more important targets! If they're only nicking a car from a warehouse then there'd only be two mall security guards in there. And have one of those missions to start off with, maybe. But... if they're stealing secret plans for a revolutionary HMHVV cure from Shiawase's desert research facility then there's no end to security. You don't put it all on patrol at once--it takes a few minutes for the beehive to wake up properly, and if they can sneak around and quietly get the job done they don't come up against it. But once the alarm triggers just throw everything at them--not in a "rocks fall you all DIE" kinda way, but in a way to really give them something to use their abilities on. Finally they'll be glad they carefully selected what type of grenades to bring when they can blow up a hallway full of mooks, and suddenly the mage is busy banishing these beast spirits that are showing up and the hacker's got to start taking control of enemy Citymasters and woah now the troll's 20 soak dice are actually necessary because we need someone to draw fire for a second so we can spot the spirit-concealed-enemy's muzzle flashes and aaaargh. Holy poo poo they were testing this serum on live ghouls and their containment cells broke and now they're flooding the place, fighting retreat, break out the incendiaries! The system doesn't work amazingly well when you send them up against threats like them: People with 15 dice to attack with their DV 10 assault cannons (You win init? Okay you win). But there is a way to flatten things, and it's with more lower-level enemies. I have run what I thought was a pretty fun mission against an encampment full of: 30 rating 3 soldiers 1 street sam with decent soak and a grenade launcher Two APCs mounted with heavy machine guns (they sound like they're a challenge, but they're actually to give the hacker something cool to take over and mow down baddies) A giant spider... thing, that was a pretty powerful mage and that tried to run when things went bad and they had to chase it through the jungle on one of the stolen APCs. And the player characters shine when they're mowing down mooks, and they still have to think about it if there's a couple of bigger threats (but not quite one-hit-KO) in the mix. It's not cruel to amp up security, it's fun for them! Now, I did have one player whinge that the grenade launcher wasn't fair when it pegged his character twice and knocked them down to 0 (they chose not to spend Edge to survive or even to try to dodge, I think to highlight how unfair it was that they got hit twice in a row), so this approach won't appease everyone and some people will say "Rating 6 firewall here? But the book says..."... but I think everyone else loved that run. Rating 3 enemies are fine. Just use dozens of them. And that said: I use them not necessarily because it's realistic to have soldiers be around rating 3, but because it's fun to have them around that level. I wouldn't worry about world realism when putting together your runs. How many runs does each campaign have? The longest game I ever ran had four. Make the mission to suit your campaign, not to be realistic within the game world which is only going to exist briefly anyway. If I want super ICE on one mission to give the hacker some fun and a little risk well, damnit, I am making it Firewall 6 here and full of databombs because this poor schmoe's nude pics were once hacked and now he's paranoid and spent his kid's college fund on ICE. Mendrian posted:The advice in the book always makes it sound like Rating 5-6 is rare and super evil and don't do that to your players unless you really mean it. And then you include a Rating 5 ICE program or a Rating 5 security guard and your players are all like, 'lolwut?' and there's a cyper-splatter or regular-splatter where your obstacle just stood. It seems like they wanted those high-rating threats to be a big deal but mechanically they're not due to the combo legacy/systems problem you're describing. I only use that as the loosest guide because I want to make a challenging mission more than I want to work out what's realistic. I do think you have a point that even rating 6 firewall isn't much to challenge a hacker who's been through all the supplements and gathered every +1 to be had here and there. But a sprite in every node is. And if you want to challenge the hacker don't send them to nick an old lady's password, send them on a mission where it makes sense that there's a sprite in every node. quote:Insane question: why don't they just nuke the whole thing? Reboots are all the rage these days... I don't think that's insane at all. I have no problem with nuking and rebooting, personally, but it may not be necessary. What does it matter, fiction-wise, if 5E limits dice pools to 12, or institutes my wishlist Mass Effect hacking? The fiction has no concept of success rates anyway (unless you have retired runners sitting around bars going "y'know, when I was a runner, I coulda sworn people shot better in those days") and all the stuff we'd want to change conceptually about hacking can be explained with advances in technology.
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Apr 2, 2013 17:03
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Thanks for the advice. I've got a lot of work ahead of me for when I get home. Hah, it seems like I should get in the spirit of things by thinking, "Metal Gear Solid freak boss". Certainly funnier, and it's Pink Mohawk. With my luck there's probably already a Bee Shaman in the jungle.
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Apr 2, 2013 18:12
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Tippis posted:…on the other hand, their insistence on maintaining a measure of backwards-compatibility also means that a lot of the stuff is surprisingly forwards-compatible. If you (like me) prefer one of the older editions, it's actually very easy to convert the stats and gear you get from 4th-ed splat books into something that makes sense to the 2nd- or 3rd-ed rule set. Decking was king in SR1 and 2 though. It seemed like every system had some data stores worth hundreds of thousands of nuyen in each adventure book. I think Mercurial or Silver Angel had one with over a million.
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Apr 2, 2013 22:25
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Bigass Moth posted:Decking was king in SR1 and 2 though. It seemed like every system had some data stores worth hundreds of thousands of nuyen in each adventure book. I think Mercurial or Silver Angel had one with over a million. Yup. Also, if it was a Nigel D. Findley adventure, you knew that somewhere along the line, there would be a half-dozen ninja adept-trolls with weapon-focus pole-axes hiding in what the young whippersnappers call a monster closet these days, and if you could take those guys out and sell the weapon foci, that would be a nice chunk of change too… …D&D-style looting in Shadowrun, awww yeah!
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Apr 2, 2013 22:49
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Hey, this might be a stupid question, but does Analyze Device work on guns?
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Apr 3, 2013 00:56
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Kai Tave posted:Well the good news is that according to the Shadowrun 5E devblog they're planning on changing the Matrix again in some sort of hazily-defined "it'll still work like it does in 4E but it'll be different...somehow" fashion that coincidentally also happens to require them to bring back cyberdecks (which are wireless-enabled computer devices capable of hacking things with the right programs...y'know, like commlinks...but which are a totally different sort of wireless-enabled computer device capable of hacking things with the right programs which means a whole new name is called for and by new name we mean old name) so who even knows what this will mean for the thrilling world of cyberhacking the datahighways of 20X6. Probably something involving shitloads of dice, is my guess. Keep in mind this is the edition that is going to both simplify character creation, and give you even more gear porn, as if those weren't mutually exclusive. ProfessorCirno posted:As far as hacking things goes, I think quite frankly the sidebar should say the opposite. Turning the connection in your gear or ware is seen as dangerous, crazy, and illegal - the kind of stuff only Runners do. Most corpsec, cops, or not knowing any better gangbangers will not only have their stuff running, but also spawning the occasional advertisement. Just as in the real world, most people trust their firewalls, no matter how crappy or out of date they are and are really, really bad at following security protocol. The only people who do are crazy black ops elite assholes like military special forces, high-grade organized crime assassins... and runners. Of course, if you're seen with guns not responding to ID requests for their serial number and registration, better hope they can't ID you by he footage because that's a serious crime in itself! 
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Apr 3, 2013 01:15
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Zereth posted:Yeah that doesn't sound good to me. "We miss cyberdecks! Let's bring them back, to perform the same role commlinks already do!" is not a sign of good design. This actually doesn't seem to hard to do, at least the cyberdecks part. Just get rid of the simrig. If you want your brain connected to the Matrix, you must wired your deck into your head. Commlinks are for non-hackers who have to use AR gloves and glasses with tiny speakers on the arms or contacts and earbuds. If you want to actually immerse yourself in the Matrix, with all the benefits that come with it, you either need a deck that can be plugged into your head, or you need one that's just flat out installed INTO your head, with outer decks probably being more powerful and able to pack more stuff inside, but inner decks being more secure and leaving your hands free so to speak. This, incidentally, also brings smartlink back into the realm of samurai only, rather then something that everyone just packs on their guns. This also means that people who want to give BTL or even just simsense a try are gonna need to plug their brain in. But honestly, the population very intentionally giving up some of their humanity just for entertainment reasons and getting a lovely, cheap plug installed into their head feels rather "cyberpunk" to me. Hell, it means white collar corp workers are probably mandated to get a datajack to ensure efficiency with computer usage, which again, ties into Shadowpunk pretty drat well - corporations forcing their employees to dehumanize themselves for the sake of higher profits. Which then turns to them using that datajack to use simsense and try to experience a better life then they have, hearing about simsense that's "better then life." In this thread we loving solve all of Shadowrun's problems, apparently.
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Apr 3, 2013 01:48
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I have a house rule idea for matrix that I would like some critique on how it would work out. It's inspired by the distance-based bonus describe in the 5e blog post and combining it with buy hits rule. I assume computer in 4e is still pretty linear and dumb even with fuzzy logic on an agent. So such straight forward interaction between computer shouldn't have any luck involvement other than human error, and for simplification sake, the hacker will stick with the hits he have from buying hits (I.E. 14 dice = 3 hits) which he will stick with this for the rest of the mission. The opposition would also be tweaked to be based on rating, and the hacker will automatically be successful when their hits >= rating (I.E. R3 will be hackable successfully with 3 hits). To account for human error, I would make the hacker make a dice roll to make sure no glitch or zero hits are rolled (zero hits = waste more turns). To be fair to the hacker, on the pre-mission scouting of their target company, I will provide the general idea of what ratings are to be expected in the company (I.E. R3 for most computer/lock, R5 for a important computer that the hacker need to stole infomation from.) Now for the hacker to successfully hack beyond R3 beside spending edge and buy hits with the total dice pool, this is where the distance-based bonus comes in: The closer the hacker is to the hacking target, the more bonus dices he gets for his dice pool. The distant are modify by the signal rating of your device. So 5 signal would mean interval of 5 meters for each bonus dice. The bonus are as below using 5 signal as example: - Stand 5 meter/signal from target = 6 bonus dice - Stand 10 meter/signal from target = 5 bonus dice and so on... but one special bonus for decker: - Stand next to target and jack in with deck = 8 bonus dice So for our hacker to hack a R5 with his 14 dice pool, he would need to reach within 5 meters from the target to get the 6 bonus dice to boost his 14 dice pool to 20 dices and buy 5 hits for the hacking to be successful. This is assuming he's signal rating is 5. The only time when the hacker have to roll dice is when he's dealing with human element like matrix rolls against another human hacker enemy or true AI race. Gear-wise, it shouldn't be a problem which rating he start with since the difficult should progress linearly as long as the mission reward money and difficulties is adjusted correctly and he would need to get 4 more dices to really make a difference for each one hacking skill. If there's more than one hacker in the team, the adjusted reward money in theory should let the weaker hacker catches up pretty quickly. As for piracy software, I would play up the bad side of it much more harshly. Current idea is like making him roll twice or more for checking his glitch/zero roll as mention before due to additional software outdated/error on top of human error. So this is the basis of it. The pro of this house rule would makes hacking really straightforward and fast pace. What do you think?
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Apr 3, 2013 03:12
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ProfessorCirno posted:
Skirmish rules, I'm telling ya'! Other things to fix: cut/remove most of the bioware from the game. Bioware makes sense as something runners should be stealing out of R&D labs for big corp paychecks, but the availability in 4ed undercuts the image and world I think you want to present. Fidel Cuckstro fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Apr 3, 2013 |
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Apr 3, 2013 04:45
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ProfessorCirno posted:As far as hacking things goes, I think quite frankly the sidebar should say the opposite. Turning the connection in your gear or ware is seen as dangerous, crazy, and illegal - the kind of stuff only Runners do. Most corpsec, cops, or not knowing any better gangbangers will not only have their stuff running, but also spawning the occasional advertisement. Just as in the real world, most people trust their firewalls, no matter how crappy or out of date they are and are really, really bad at following security protocol. This is exactly what my group does, along with other tweaks. The dudes who turn off wifi and all that are the dudes like us who know exactly how useless a firewall is when a hacker decides 'this guy's going down', even high ranking corp members and all trust their wares to keep them secure. The times when we get the 'oh, nope, can't get into his eye, the wifi is off' are rare and appropriately make us go 'aw, poo poo, this guy knows what he's doing, we gotta regroup'. Basically I'd happily trade silly cyber-adventures for being a badass combat hacker who makes peoples' eyes and guns explode. My most recent best moment playing the hacker (and I do legitimately enjoy that role in SR) was piggybacking some harmless AR ad streaming to everyone in the floor of the building we were on and making the cute cartoon Aztec warrior turn into a screaming demon monster threatening to tear out the head of security's heart, making him look like he's having some kind of terrible breakdown and blinding him to what the rest of the gang was up to. Also totally agree with Cirno, Decks are actually awesome and in old Shadowrun, when not making me a useless rear end in a top hat who had to spend the campaign in his apartment like the true nerdlord, totally were one of the most perfect examples of the cyberpunk idea of humanity becoming something that gets cast aside easily for usually minimal gain in the name of progress. poo poo yea the board of directors makes every rear end in a top hat past team leader in the chain of command get a jack, if you want to advance and get that sweet paycheck and company car you show the corporation that their need to be sure you can more easily send in your time sheets are above such bush league concerns as 'your humanity'.
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Apr 3, 2013 06:07
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DeclaredYuppie posted:Skirmish rules, I'm telling ya'! I like the dichotomy of the cyber/bioware divide in principle and I think it's one I'd like to retain, especially since popular science-fiction has embraced the idea of "human augmentation" in a multitude of varieties beyond "stick robot parts in people." The fundamental approach I'd take is: 1). Cyberware is relatively inexpensive at a base grade and provides a lot of bang for your buck, but is Essence heavy. It's also much easier to find, and today's cutting edge chrome become's tomorrow's off-the-rack special pretty quickly. 2). Bioware is more expensive and less overtly powerful but less Essence intense. It's also more subtle, for those that care...even high-grade cyberware gets noticeable past a certain point but bioware can mean that even a normal looking person is packing some powerful augs and only in-depth scans or really good mages can tell. But the numbers in SR4 are sort of all over the place. You've got cyberware which is way overcosted and underpowered (cyberlimbs, for example) while really potent bioware is actually not all that expensive or hard to get out of the box (muscle toner, synthecardium) and so yeah, it's kind of all over the place and an optimizer's playground of stepping around lovely trap choices and bleh. And of course this also plays in to how the interaction between mages/adepts and 'ware went from "this is a bad idea and will ruin your magic and lead you into being a burnout" to "you'd be dumb not to do this," but that may be because a whole other set of numbers is hosed, so.
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Apr 3, 2013 06:50
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Tippis posted:<grumpy old man> Not true. You just didn't realize at the time because there wasn't an internet full of nerds able to crossreference their broken poo poo against each other at a moment's notice, but now you have to pay for magic you don't use if you're gonna be combining two sources but before magic was at 6 almost for free. If you didn't have two essence worth of cyberware back in SR2 I don't know what the hell you were doing but it sure wasn't building a combat monster.
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Apr 3, 2013 07:07
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Settling character power is relatively easy, adjust the chargen system to be more module. For newbie groups you'd have low chargen, more powerful groups have more karma to start - but, frankly, all of that is missing the point. The point behind "most people are running CYBER INTERNET EXPLOROR" isn't to say they're super easy to hack, it's to say that they are hackable. It says nothing about the strength of their firewall, merely that the rely on it. The best way to not get hacked is to not hook up to the drat internet. But that's pretty extreme, even in MODERN times, much less a future where wifi access is well and truly ubiquitous. It's when you hit a super defensive Renraku zero point zone with red samurai guarding the place that has top corp secrets that you need to do more then just "hack the system."
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Apr 3, 2013 07:20
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That's aproblem... at that point the difficulty in hacking jumps from, "This is stupid easy," to, "It is literally impossible," right when you need it most. A gun guy can pull out the expensive ammunition, a wizard can initiate twenty times until he can cast spells on the moon, but a hacker coming face to face with someone who flipped the little switch on their glasses to turn off the goddamn advertisements? That is a hacker who is double boned. He can type all the programs he wants and none of them are gonna do poo poo. Personally, I would make every piece of equipment extremely reliant on always on internet access. Smartlinks, for example, let you do super accurate gunplay because they have access to the ballistics database at CERN, collect atmospheric data from the weather chamber, are reviewing the floor plans downloaded from city hall, and are collecting data from an additional thirty sources scattered about the room ranging from security cameras to the partially digested datachip from the sandwich your victim ate a few hours back. And if you turn off the wireless access of your gun, you gain security but you lose the bonus of all of your gun mods. Go far enough, slave everything to the 'net and just give big ole' penalties to all checks with any equipment that isn't talking to professional databases around the world simply because that's so goddamn useful. Cybereyes which don't do a certain amount of their visual rendering in a server farm downtown WORK, but you can't fit a good graphics card in an eye socket, much less a solid digital to nerve conversion program, so it's a -3 to all perception checks while you're peering through those grainy black and white snowy poo poo vision if you want to run with your equipment off the net. Boom, now every team needs a hacker running overwatch. Now fix the matrix rules so you don't have nodes, you have programs which cover bandwidth over a fixed area (makes sense? Hell no! Who gives a poo poo) and maybe make firewalls actual domes to protect those inside from hackers outside. Bam, hacking in combat, plus if I get a hacker up in your face hard enough he can get bonuses to hacking (ignore a level of protection) which solves the 'van' problem.
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Apr 3, 2013 07:48
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On the other hand, if you flat out NEED a hacker, there, on your team, to actually use any of your shiny toys, what happens if nobody wants to play one? I think I'd make it so you don't lose everything for turning off wireless. You go from +4 to +2 if you turn off the various database lookup crap on your smartlink, so you haven't just wasted your money on it if you need to go dark. Or you can still see, but you lose the handy Deus Ex HR style highlighting of significant things and have to make decisions the old fashioned way, that sort of thing. Maybe you could pay out the nose to lower the penalty here, and also make combat items like the smartlink very illegal very quickly.
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Apr 3, 2013 08:39
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Zereth posted:On the other hand, if you flat out NEED a hacker, there, on your team, to actually use any of your shiny toys, what happens if nobody wants to play one? Hacker becomes a support role. If no one wants to play one, go nuts and use nothing but 20th century guns. No smartlink bonus, no internet disconnect penalty. Or you could get fancy stuff for a bonus that leaves you vulnerable to attack, or you could get fancy stuff and rely on a hacker to protect you. No one is forcing you to track the humidity when you shoot people. Still, I'd say the penalty for disabling a device should be larger than the bonus for using it. So if you have a smartlinked gun, but turn off the connection, there's a lag between trigger pull and fire because it's searching for the server... net -2. Then runners can choose between excellent, technonogically vulnerable equipment or standard, reliable equipment. Are they confident their hacker will protect them, or that enemy hackers will never so much as spot them? Then go nuts with the in-flight bullet trajectory modification ammunition fired from a weight redistributing Rubik gun that shifts its frame to compensate for recoil. Planning on kicking in the front door of mitsuhama and you know their hackers will shut you down? Just fire balls of lead at them out of a goddamn revolver. Alternatively, make all the best bonuses not in the hands of PCs. NPC skillwired soldiers all have access to Firearms 5 and Gymnastics 5 as long as they're inside the corporate setup, their guns have all the best addons and their social interactions get bonuses because just by glancing at people they get the background information and their myspace page. A hacker on the team could disable a target's skill wire connection, dropping them down to their natural skill--which, for the vast majority of guards, would be 1 or 0... why learn a skill that is being piped into you by a machine? Meanwhile, PCs are actually all hardened killers so they rely less on a support network, and are thus less vulnerable to hackers. Basically there needs to be a reason to have a hacker on a team. Personally I love ubiquitous computing as a reason but a different one might work fine. Mystic Mongol fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Apr 3, 2013 |
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Apr 3, 2013 08:44
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My solution was to separate field hacking from the dudes capable of coding hacking software. Guys in the field use AR to locate vulnerable targets and direct their hacking software towards those targets, while continuing to do whatever else they were doing, pretty much how the breaching mechanic in the last Syndicate game operated. PCs can get software skills if they want to code their own custom software during downtime, otherwise they have to buy it or have a contact they're tight enough with to provide it for free. Meanwhile, field hacking attempts are nothing more than a contest between your hardware/software vs the security of the target. The job of the PC is simply to prioritize hacking targets based on what his rig tells him is potentially vulnerable. It basically removes the specialized hacker as a PC archetype, but I never really cared about that because nobody in my group ever wanted to play one anyway. This way at least hacking remains in the game as an option, but nobody feels poo poo on if security is too tight to make use of it, because it's never the only thing a character can do. It's just one tool in the arsenal that occasionally provides a cool bonus. And there would be some benefit to having coding skill if a player still wanted to invest in it, because their software would be free, if time consuming to create, and it would become obsolete less quickly than "off the shelf" hacking software.
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Apr 3, 2013 10:23
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I think I prefer hackers as wireless wizards who can affect all technology. If you can just turn off their access, then their archetype evaporates the moment you face competent opposition. There should be countermeasures, but you should have to pay for them, and hackers should be able to overcome them, just like with magic.
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Apr 3, 2013 11:05
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Well like DeclaredYuppie said earlier, all you have to do is gin up some handwavey bullshit about how hackers can spoof a remote reactivation signal from the tech's manufacturer/owner that even hardcore awesome badasses can't ever completely block off to let them try and start loving with their poo poo, like do you think the corporations would ever truly let even guys like the Red Samurai get away with not having some kind of back door into their systems so Renraku could monitor them? So the hacker simply has to figure out how to crack that back door access, which might be harder than "push button, explode guns" or whatever but in theory fighting a bunch of Red Samurai would also be harder for the mages and shootymans of the group too, and "more difficult" isn't "impossible." Truly wireless kit should be the provenance of either older tech, which is comparatively not as good, or custom-made stuff which is both expensive and runs the risk of degrading over time and getting you flagged as a super-suspicious dude if you go through some sort of security checkpoint that flags you as being in possession of non-wireless enabled implants.
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Apr 3, 2013 11:44
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High powered hackers could get nano-receiver grenades that they toss that forms on gear to re-active poo poo that's turned off.
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Apr 3, 2013 11:48
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Kai Tave posted:Well like DeclaredYuppie said earlier, all you have to do is gin up some handwavey bullshit about how hackers can spoof a remote reactivation signal from the tech's manufacturer/owner that even hardcore awesome badasses can't ever completely block off to let them try and start loving with their poo poo, like do you think the corporations would ever truly let even guys like the Red Samurai get away with not having some kind of back door into their systems so Renraku could monitor them? So the hacker simply has to figure out how to crack that back door access, which might be harder than "push button, explode guns" or whatever but in theory fighting a bunch of Red Samurai would also be harder for the mages and shootymans of the group too, and "more difficult" isn't "impossible." Case in point both Gun Heaven books note that a whole lot of the guns in the catalogues - especially those used for top military or corpsec - are linked to constantly trace back details on how/when/where it was used and how it held up for "field research." As I said, the problem has always been GMs - and then the game itself as it's increasingly written by those GMs - assuming everyone thinks and acts as Runners do in order to follow the line of "If the PCs do something big, do it back to them! To punish them!" This of course is ignoring that Runners are explicitly the batshit crazy ingenious criminals that manage to live long enough to continue doing it, mostly by doing things that nobody sane would do - and thus nobody expects. I mean to use an example listed long ago, welding a loving minigun onto your car door is 100% in line with how riggers are typically portrayed - they're hyper obsessive devotees who customize their vehicles into only barely road legal monstrosities, armed with a bunch of robutts that are half the time normal drones repurposed into death bots. It is also something nobody in their right mind would ever, ever do.
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Apr 3, 2013 12:10
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Of course some people think that they can skip all that "getting your implants hacked" business by getting bioware. Bioware is the new hotness in personal augmentation, and best of all you can't hack it. Watch some rear end in a top hat with a commlink try and turn your muscle toner off, right? But like always, whenever someone thinks they've come up with some great new foolproof protection scheme hackers learn to adapt to it, and the more difficult it supposedly is to crack the quicker they rise to the challenge. Which is how a single gangly orc nerd left an entire Ares Firewatch team dead on the ground by releasing a synthesized hormone into the ventilation system that caused their synthecardium augmentations to go into arrhythmic seizures that led to cardiac arrest.
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Apr 3, 2013 12:16
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Actually, I feel like bioware being unhackable would be good, with the caveat that they need to severely weaken the effects of bioware and/or make it substantially more expensive. Bioware should be much more essence lite and unhackable at the cost of being way more expensive and way less efficient then cyber. Set it up as trade offs, you know? Right now bioware is kinda more expensive and is generally better with essence but is also way more powerful then cyber in a lot of things. There's no real trade off, if you can have "a thing" in bioware or "a thing" in cyberware, unless it's initiative boosters, you'd generally be a fool not to take the bioware.
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Apr 3, 2013 12:52
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