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404GoonNotFound posted:Good News: There's a new Shadowrun video game game in development! Literally just hire Eidos and say "You know Deus Ex 3, could you remake it but with trolls and dwarves?"
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Oct 14, 2011 00:13
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Magic Rabbit Hat posted:Second, how do you handle 'loot'? I mean the, 'I pulled this gun off the CorpSec guy we gunned down, how much do I get for it?' kind of loot. My players are all big D20 players and tend to spend a lot of time rifling through bodies for anything worth even a few credits. I've been lead to believe that's not a thing in Shadowrun, could anyone explain why? This may be the hardest thing to get your players to stop as it's a particularly aggressive D&D-ism that doesn't really exist elsewhere. Runners aren't just random-rear end common criminals. They're big thing is that they're semi-professional criminals for sale. Stealing a gun means a few things. First off, it's a hell of a lot easier to track you. Guns are tagged to hell and back. They also tend to grab your biometrics when you use them. The more poo poo that traces you back to a crime scene the worst - remember, you're supposed to be anonymous. Besides, the black market is the first place the corps are going to look. Secondly, it means you can't be trusted. Who's going to hire a guy who screws up a mission just to steal like some two-bit thief? Unless your mission is to steal something, grabbing the merch could screw up whatever job the Johnson actually wants you to be doing, which comes back to haunt you hard. It's as unprofessional as it gets. Third, who are you stealing from? You grab a few chips to sell off easy and find out you've taken from one of the Triads and your life is about to become one billion times harder, and not in the cool "Oh good more adventures" way. Fourthly, the answer could easily be "You can't sell this back. It's hot, tagged, low quality merch. Who the hell is going to bother buying this and risk cleaning it for the smallest profit imaginable?" I get that D&D assumes you can just easily sell more or less anything, but there's an actual assumed economy in Shadowrun, and pawning off a dead corpsec's gun isn't going to get you poo poo. What fence or pawn store owner is going to buy that? And lastly, it just isn't the style. Cyberpunk has been characterized as style over substance, and searching a dude's pockets for two nuyen is as unstylish as it gets. The best advice is to just tell your players that this isn't D&D. Stop rifling through people's pockets, goddamn. It's not how the game or the genre works. It's just kinda dumb.
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Jul 31, 2012 03:53
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Technomancers tend to fall behind Hackers except, usually, in That One Thing He Does Best. They're sort of very specialized hackers. You WILL want splat books though. Technomancers have two main strengths from what I recall. They can super, super specialize in something (like stealth) (use stealth), and they can compile sprites. Sprites are more or less their way of having versatility, and from what I recall the common role of a Technomancer is Throw Sprites At It Until It Works. The Machine Sprite for example is sort of a "rigger as backup." Take all this with some salt as I've never made a hacker and go only by what I've read elsewhere. Also, again working on memory, adepts are great for a lot of things, but cybered adepts are the way to go. Dropping a point or two of Magic and Essence is worth it.
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Sep 22, 2012 00:19
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Bigass Moth posted:Not much beyond eyes and ears. Bio is where it's at. Eyes and ears always struck me as being terrible when you could easily get earbuds, glasses, and/or contacts. Anyways, it depends on what kind of adept you are. Most benefit from bio, but some non-shooty adepts (face adepts, rigger adepts, etc) can typically afford to give themselves a singly super cybered arm with amazing agility and just use that to gun dudes down and not worry too much about their own agility.
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Sep 27, 2012 14:30
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FortMan posted:And as the Sixth World begins, Catalyst announce new edition of Shadowrun: Oh, but you missed the far better announcement. quote:In development by Cliffhanger Productions, Shadowrun Online brings the universe to a full cross-platform MMO experience for iOS, PC, Mac, Linux and Ouya
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Dec 21, 2012 11:29
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Rockopolis posted:That bad, huh? Hey, give people time! This isn't always the fastest moving thread! Also, to help you...uh...well, I know nothing about hacking so hopefully someone else will come along!
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Feb 6, 2013 13:41
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I generally understood that adept/hacker wasn't that great a mix because there's little connection between them. Adept simply doesn't have much if anything that helps hacking. Edit: Unless you go for something very specific like Mind Over Matter! Really, adept is less then useful unless you're already planning a 'ware light build. ProfessorCirno fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Mar 2, 2013 |
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Mar 2, 2013 00:38
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It's more that even just that one point of Magic costs a lot if you're going gungho with the 'ware.
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Mar 2, 2013 02:53
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Swags posted:This is old fashioned, yes, since I've personally seen someone hack into another person's network with his iPhone. Which is the big problem and the big disconnect. As fond as I am of super-80's alternate future stuff, the fact is, its barely alternate "future" at this point. Gibson-esque cyberpunk is dying fast, if not already dead. What's the color of a tv turned to a dead channel? I think the best way to do it is what 4e did - main core book assumes current timeline wifi and all, splat (that ideally comes soon after) converts it to an older timeline.
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Mar 3, 2013 13:42
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Bigass Moth posted:I was never a matrix guy, but taking away cyberdecks was as about as anti-Shadowrun as you could get other than combining Mages and Shamans into one class. The line developers since SR2 have not done a great job of keeping Shadowrun in the mold it was intended to represent, but that's just my opinion. You aren't really catching the problem though. I can't speak for mages and shamans, but how do you keep "alternate future" alongside "everything is analogue and wired?" Plugging decks into big megacomputers is cool to me because I grew up in the 90's and everyone thought the internet would become this bizarre virtual reality that you literally plug into with your brain. Like, check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9kFBcFPpe8 This was loving RADICAL when it first premiered. But it isn't really that radical anymore. We don't even use the word radical anymore. So I guess my challenge is this: how do you keep the "core" of Shadowrun while also not falling into a "for the old fans only" niche? How do you remain sci-fi enough to continue getting new fans if your alternate future game uses long discarded technology? Or to put it another way, a question I think a lot of cyberpunk has been asking itself: how do you keep the genre relevant? Now, interestingly enough, the devs have already said that cyberdecks and "deckers" will indeed be making a return - just retooled to work with the wireless matrix. How precisely it will work hasn't been revealed yet, so wait and see, I guess. Edit: Seriously check this video out Edit 2: Jesus loving christ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkzF56tGYSg ProfessorCirno fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Mar 4, 2013 |
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Mar 4, 2013 00:46
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The actual relevant Matrix stuff they've saidquote:Okay, let me be clear on one thing right off the bat: This is going to take more than one post to cover everything going on with the Matrix. And one more video for the road on the note of the 90's! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLlj_GeKniA
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Mar 4, 2013 01:44
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I think the two main goals are 1) make hacking NOT be an extended minigame for one player while everyone else sits on their hands or goes out for pizza, which is something that has plagued Shadowrun since forever, 2) make hacking easy to understand and not be a massive confusing slog, and 3) utilize the sort of "open endedness" of hacking to make hackers less "throw dice at The Computer to get The Files" and more "play with the environment around you because if everything is connected and you control that connection, poo poo's going to get crazy." Admittingly part of that might be wishful thinking on my behalf. I just want Watch Dogs: Tabletop Edition. Really though he's right in that hacking/decking has long been the most problematic part of the game, to the point where decker/hacker NPCs are easily the most common KIND of NPC. It's needlessly long, very needlessly complex, and ninety nine times out of a hundred all it equates to is "receive the MacGuffin." Hopefully they'll change it so that anyone could potentially make a decker, the rest of the party doesn't have to sit around and wait for "the decker game" to occur, and you can actually mess around and do coo"l poo poo in a firefight or out in the universe to tilt the odds in your favor so hacking feels like it contributes more then "Retrieve plot device. ProfessorCirno fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Mar 4, 2013 |
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Mar 4, 2013 02:22
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I think it'd be easier just to ask the player "Ok, so you want to take the In Debt negative quality to gain that cash? No karma gain or cost to buy out, just the money upfront, and whatever mishaps might come with it being a negative quality until it's paid off." Because otherwise it sounds like the player is just being dumb and cheeky and found a "cool loophole" or whatever.
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Mar 6, 2013 14:58
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Young Freud posted:Also, Erased sounds like being protected from on high, which means your guardian angel will cover your rear end if it gets detected It's exactly that. Erased outright states you keep whatever data would be useful or that you want to keep. Don't make this some horrible Wick-ian "punish people for their advantages" bullshit.
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Mar 11, 2013 04:51
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If the armor rules made any sense at all I would agree with you. As it stands the cyberlimb armor rules are so hilariously hosed that the best way around it is to just dedclare them null and void.
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Mar 11, 2013 13:50
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The general problem is that cyberlimb rules are already kinda messy even before you hit armor benefits, with poo poo like cyberhands, it's just that armor benefits are the worst bits of all for how they stack while not actually making any sense at all. The easy solution would probably just be only allowing cybertorsos to take it. The easiest solution would be saying "Just take Dermal Plating you rear end in a top hat, christ."
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Mar 11, 2013 16:34
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I don't know what any of this poo poo means. My understanding of the "personalities" is more or less limited to the in character blurbs from the actual game books of SR4.' What is a Harlequin or a Nexus or a Ghostwhatever.
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Mar 17, 2013 13:06
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I actually really like the users from my perspective of just reading the actual game books and not the novels or whatever, and I rather liked seeing stuff happen "in-world" through the game books like NetCat revealing herself as a technomancer. I guess if you're into the fiction it's just that but more so, but the enjoyment of the JackPoint users for me is how these different personalities help shape the actual game mechanics or in-game fluff, not how they act in a long story. Like a full book of these guys would, I think, probably make me get a bit tired of them, whereas short snippets of them freaking out because poo poo is going down in Hong Kong and suddenly one of them is a technomancer and another is openly betraying her is fun. Probably because they're short snippets, they never outstay their welcome - they're clipped and to the point while letting their personalities shine. At most you get the fluff parts of book as it would be given by then, but again, this adds flavor of "some hardened veteran of the streets is tellin' me this poo poo." I guess I think making big changes to the individual users is too much for my tastes. I know it's kinda dumb, but from my perspective taking them and turning them into actual in-universe movers and shakers ruins it a bit.
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Mar 18, 2013 08:24
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Melee essentially has four problems. 1) It's pretty drat hard to reach enemies sometimes because movement is hosed. Guns and magic can just shoot from afar. 2) Dodging melee attacks uses skill + attribute, dodging guns or magic is just attribute 3) Melee for whatever unfathomable reason can only attack as a complex. This fucks you over hardcore. It means you are even if just because of this half as strong as a gun dude is. 4) They an still shoot you in melee. I mean, the penalty to using a gun in melee is -3 which can be pretty dang bad, but it's not like being in their face has completely shut them down or anything. Most of these are all generally pretty easy to solve. Give melee more and better ways to reach the good guys - adept powers or leg 'ware that seriously improves their mobility. Just loving decide if dodging is skill + attribute or just attribute. Let "not a gun" attack as much as "a gun" does. 4 honestly isn't even that big of a problem, it's sort of the turd cherry on top of the sundae. Incidentally, unrelated to all this, I've read in a few places that the author of The Way of the Adept intended the "way" qualities to be free, something you just get as part of being an adept, because adepts are pretty weak. How much would this screw up - or fix - balance?
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Mar 20, 2013 13:12
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Martello posted:I think melee combat should be weak. quote:As far as adepts are concerned, I haven't seen them to be weak at all. Man, make up your mind. Incidentally if a game not only makes "cool martial artist" an archtype, but makes it two different archtypes, one of which outright costs you points for the ability to take it, no, it should not be weaker just because. Edit: Incidentally... Kai Tave posted:Shadowrun is a game that sort of tries to come across as all slick cyberpunk black ops mercenaries and stuff but no, it's a crazy-rear end action movie. I know Seattle is the vague "canon" place to do runs at, but has anyone played an SR game that took place in LA? From what I remember, LA running is suppose to be less professionals in black trenchcoats and mirror shades, and more Saints Row the 7th, where police video of runs in action are televised and runners are half criminal, half superstar. ProfessorCirno fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Mar 21, 2013 |
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Mar 21, 2013 01:38
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I mean, if the game at any point of time noted gun superiority it wouldn't really be a problem. But not only is it never stated, the game - yes, even in 4e - likes to very, very often go on and on about how kickass non-gun adepts and non-gun street sammies are. I mean poo poo, we have explicit names for street sammies that divide them into gunbunnies, gillettes, and razorbois - they wouldn't do that if they were trying to tell you "Hey, doing use melee." Unless of course this is all meant to bizarrely be some sort of giant trap to fool players who dare...listen to the fluff, I guess?
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Mar 22, 2013 00:31
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Not only does Adept not fix any of those five problems with melee that were listed earlier, it's overall seen as one of the weakest archetype - so much so that the overwhelming advice I've seen pretty much everywhere has been "be a cybered adept if you want to be an adept." Or, if you want, you can mosey on down to the Shadowrun PBP going on that Super Rad is running and look at my character then Davin's character. One of us is an adept. One of us does everything the first person does, but better, and ALSO works as a face. Those are not the same characters. 'Ware in 4e just gives you an incredible amount of bang for your buck. Adept powers in contrast give you incredibly little outside of very, VERY specific areas - and even then, you're best off augmenting your adept powers with...well, augmentations. The adept powers for melee combat aren't bad per say, they just fail to solve any of the actual problems.
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Mar 22, 2013 01:53
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Super Rad posted:See I think the confusion is between the Adept archetype (which is indeed rather weak) and the concept of just tacking on Adept to another archetype for the purpose of boosting that archetype (i.e. Gunslinger Adept, Hacker Adept, etc). Right, but I think this isn't a good thing. I mean, "gun bunny" is an RPing idea and a min-maxing idea. "Mage" and "shaman" are RPing ideas - but if you make a wizard who focuses on spells, or a shaman that focuses on spirits, neither one is going to suffer from it. The Face isn't even really an archtype anymore because of how easy it is to combine it with something else. Same with hackers - which from what I've seen leads to a lot of hackers being riggers, and vice versa. These are all RPing ideas and archtypes that are sorta engrained in Shadowrun (change "decker" for "hacker"), but only the classic "physical adept" or the more melee based razorboi/gillete doesn't work. The fluff of the game paints adepts as almost all being non-cybered. Like, that's the whole point of the adept - they're the non-cybered fightin' dude. It just really doesn't carry true mechanically.
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Mar 22, 2013 07:15
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Just cover the most aggregious things that make the math go rotten. Empathy software and the little bonzai buddies are the two that readily come to my mind. Oh, and establish early on just how hardcore worried people need to be about security - a group coming in with rock and roll runners and getting tagged for not collecting their casings will see some conflict. If you got IRC there's a few places you can ask about stuff too.
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Mar 27, 2013 08:20
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Bigass Moth posted:I never understood why Cyberlimb rules are so obtuse, and I hope the implement a very simple fix. Because that takes out pretty much the actual point of having a Cyberlimb, which is that they're supposed to be better then human limbs. I mean I know "make a dude with little to no combat stats then pump up a super mega cyberarm" is pretty cheesy, but that's literally the point of the cyberarm. If a cyberarm is just "your arm but cyber" then it loses a lot of what makes players get them and pretty much just leaves cyberarms as nothing more then a spurs delivery system. Case in point, Eclipse Phase actually does have more then just "your arm but cyber" in that "Cyberlimb +" is an option - it's your arm, but with slighty better stats. With cyberlimbs I feel like the easiest approach is to start with just "your arm but cyber" and then allow one of it's potential modules to be "increase x stat by 1." Then, I dunno, make it cost a lot of slots or just give cyberlimbs not a lot of slots so it doesn't break. If you're still worried about uberarms, give it a cap that's below the augmented super best - the best samurais don't just have a single arm, their whole dang body is made of 'ware. Edit: this post - and this part - were written when Tippis was writing his own response For rules light Shadowrun I feel like "Literally Leverage with one extra option for Magic" works, but I also agree that rules light isn't for all games, including Shadowrun. I mean, I think EP's chargen could be shortened but I'm not sure it needs to be "rules lite." It just needs to be EP instead of Shadowrun In Space - if one of your main themes are disposable and changeable bodies, then be sure the dang rules make bodies disposable and easily changed, dammit! My problem with SR4's chargen - not having really played the other editions - is that it suffers less due to chargen itself and more due to the whole system being kinda janky. I feel with Shadowrun they made the system without ever actually thinking about what kind of gameplay they wanted to push for. Like, take the whole thing about melee that we talked about earlier - melee being a poo poo choice for losers is rather explicitly not supposed to happen in Shadowrun, where two of the classical archetypes are built entirely around swinging a katana or punchin' dudes. I mean, Shadowrun's core book is vaguely infamous for the sample characters being absolute garbage. It's kinda clear the developers had no to little idea how their own system actually worked. I think what developers need to do, before they actually start developing, is decide early on how certain things are going to work. If you want cool dudes who are made of either magic or 'ware that punch and/or chop other dudes, then before you even write the mechanics you need to decide how that works. A lot of Shadowrun's systems, and I'm looking at you hacking, appear to have been written without any attention paid whatsoever to how it actually plays out. And this is what kills me in chargen - the chargen is really hosed up and BP is a mess, sure, but a lot of the hosed up -ness about it comes from trying to manipulate a frankly unwilling system into doing poo poo it's supposed to do. It's long been my opinion that the worst forms of chargen are ones where you have to wrestle the system itself into making the character you want - and SR4 suffers kinda hard from this. Or to put it another way... I'm fine with light crunch chargen and mechanics. I'm fine with heavy crunch chargen and mechanics. What I hate is unintuitive chargen and mechanics. Making a character must always - always - be one of the easiest parts of the game, because it is the first boundary every player must jump over.
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Mar 31, 2013 15:03
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DeclaredYuppie posted:For Shadowrun at least, it might just make the most sense to drop the whole of capacity and buying cyberlimbs independently, and make the whole cyber-system about buying things that "upgrade" you (nebulously defining that as either more general enhancements like a +1 to strength or having a cyber-weapon available to you). Make all the costs in essence and nuyen, and at the end simply suggest to players a general description of your cyber-ness to your player's body. 5.5 essence might mean light, generally unobtrusive wiring through a part of the body or a single cyber-hand. 4 Essence might mean light wiring/connections through your torso and limbs, a partly augmented torso or a set of cyberlimbs. 2 suggests etc etc etc. See, I actually think that's too abstract for how I see Shadowrun. Shadowrun IS a crunchy game, always has been and always will be - it's a game of big shopping catelogues and lots of upgrades to your character, be it in how you riggers customizes their car, how the gunbunny customizes their guns, or how the samurai customizes themselves. I don't think you can change that. But you can try to change how the rules work - or, at least, making them actually work.
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Apr 2, 2013 00:32
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Rockopolis posted:There doesn't seem to be an Interrogation skill, it seems to be a specialization of Intimidate. Cybered mystic works great, cybered mage works less great, cybered mystic adept is, I think, a really big mistake. You're splitting your magic three ways now. There's simply not a whole lot of adept powers that can't be replicated with magic. Mystic Adept is more for "I want to make this adept, and supplement him with some magic" rather then "I want to go half and half" - it's for characters that don't put a lot of their magic in spellcasting, just enough to get their buffs going. If you want to be a magical sneaky dude, not only is that do-able, it's really easy. Mage is almost perfectly suited for it! I'd say look at your adept abilities and see which ones can't come from spells, then ask how important you are. Also Encephalon and PuSHeD (what a dumb name) exist for hackers, as hacking does not use Logic when you use it, but does benefit from things that "improve Logic linked skills."
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Apr 2, 2013 00:36
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Do Flashback, Math CPU, and Sleep Regulator add a whole lot? I've never seen the benefit of getting the datajack and all that, unless your character is an actual 40+ year old former decker. Overall I've never actually seen a hacker mage. I've seen a small handful of hacker adepts (based almost purely on Mind Over Matter) because adepts take more easily to cyber, but, as I've understood it, mages tend to hurt more from cyber unless they're a Logic based school and can use bioware to increase their Logic, letting them drop one point of essence. Usually I just see hacker/riggers who ride inside a drone and only jump out to hack things. Incidentally, having read through it fully, hacking is vaguely easy so long as you follow one very important rule: NEVER ENGAGE IN CYBERCOMBAT. Go in, roll Exploit+Hacking (without Logic), have a good stealth program, leave. Cybercombat is where things get bizarre and terrible.
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Apr 2, 2013 01:41
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Rockopolis posted:
nooooooooo
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Apr 2, 2013 03:12
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Mendrian posted:This actually hits on the head my primary problem with the hacking minigame. The only part of the hacking minigame that is interesting is the part you want to avoid at all costs. Rolling for hacking is otherwise incredibly boring with no tension whatsoever. Well, I guess if you consider the minuscule chance you'll be detected a form of tension, I would be wrong. Different strokes I guess. For me, hacking is interesting when it has an effect on the game and the world. Dicking around in some bizarre TOTALLY NOT AN MMORPG style thing so I can open a door isn't interesting. On the other hand, when the team is pinned down by a troll with the biggest machine gun he can carry, being able to not literally grab hold of his gun and have it eject all it's ammo - or even just momentarily shut it down so the team can advance on him - is way more interesting. Likewise, being in CYBER MATRIX COMBAT doesn't do anything for me. At all. But editing the buildings' cameras to make it look like our team is on the other side of the compound when poo poo starts to go down, or, in the middle of a chase scene, hacking into one of the vehicles and sent it turning sideways to block the others? I love it. I guess to put it another way, I like hacking as it appears in stuff like Watch Dogs. No metaphysical ~*~enter the Matrix~*~ stuff, but sure as hell not "realistic" either. Also, I think the cybercombat and such works in a single player game, definately. But my examples are all stuff that involves the party being there too, whereas plugging yourself into the internet and and fighting some dude inside the tubes mostly involves...well, just you.
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Apr 2, 2013 03:40
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AIGHT. Check it Rock, here's my vague advice going down your sheet in order. I dunno what books you have but I'm assuming any book that could be potentially needed. I'm not gonna make a character for you, just consider this my sorta starting point I guess. 1) Yo stats look ugly. If you're a human it seems almost criminal to have 2 edge. That's your big bonus! Get more edge, ya dang human! And all 3's are generally not a good idea. Look at your character and their skills and what they do - some of those stats should be raised, others lowered to 2 (never go 1!). 2) Have some fun with your qualities! You don't need to go all in with negative qualities (no but really consider it) but at least consider a mentor spirit or something. No but really consider negative qualities. 3) Skills! Again, BP works best with specialization - I advise taking either 1 or 4 in things. Grab perception. The Stealth skill group is also good - at the very least get infiltration as a skill. 4) Spells. Increase Reflexes. Grab it. Love it. You're gonna be using this a lot. In fact, you're never gonna turn it off - cast it at Force 3 and only touch it if you hit a ward or need to hide your astral. Also consider another offensive power, probably an elemental one, so you can deal with drones or such. 5) Gear. This part will be long. First off, lose the weapons. Lose them. Why do you have those? You can't shoot that gun. You can't shank with that knife. A pool of 2 means you're just as likely to stab yourself! No, get rid of the weapon. You have no weapon skills. You have magic skill. Use magic. Second, your armor is...confusing. Now, still running with the "all books" thought, grab form fitting body armor (all of it), whatever regular armor beyond that you want, and patch in the left overs with SecureTech PPP stuff. Of course, if you don't have all books, then probably just stick with the lined coat. You have no infiltration! Why do you have that chameleon suit? Third, your commlink. Grab a second one. Make it a really crappy one. This is going to be your "I'm just a normal dude, yessirree!" commlink. You can also replace a lot of your other stuff with just a simrig. You also want some vision/audio augmentation. Get glasses and earbuds and load them up with perception/hearing stuff. My usual layout for ALL characters is rank 2 earbuds with spacial recognition and enhanced hearing, glasses with ultrasound and vision enhancement, contacts with flare compensation and smartlink, but you don't need the smartlink. Skinlink all of those. Fourth, why do you have no foci? First off, Force 3 sustaining. Get it. Use it with Increase Reflexes. No arguements. Also, strongly consider a good power focus. 6) Please don't list literally all your skills. Only list what you have points in.
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Apr 2, 2013 05:27
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I mean in my super ideal version you could make a hacker who just hacks but there'd also be options for when you want to HACK THE GIBSON in VR, it just depends on what needs to be done or what the party makes. In fact, spur of inspiration, I think it's really possible. Just remove "Matrix Initiative" from being it's own thing, and have it work kinda similar to Astral. If a decker is in full VR, their VR persona is traveling with you. The vast majority of places, the VR layout would probably be boring and completely identical to the normal layout of the building. While the AR hacker is there in meat, the VR hacker is in the room in his persona, with penalties and advantages that go with it. Hell, it's even easier when you get into the idea of wireless. It's...ok, forgive the anime reference, but I've long felt Dennou Coil could just be "SR4 but not punk-y" and I'm going to draw inspiration from that. In Dennou Coil, you have the full AR mesh similar to SR4, where most of the cyberworld is literally just overlaid onto the real one. So in most places, walls and floors and ceilings and such are the same, and cyber objects unless programmed otherwise follow the same rules. Not everything has an overlay for somewhat obvious reasons, so you get situations where a person drops a bag onto a cyberpet and the pet just clips through it because the bag has no cyber-counterpart. This goes for people to - everyone has a cyber-persona, but it isn't some big rainbow dragon with a thousand dicks, it's just them, overlaid onto their normal, real body self. This all works because there aren't, like, multiple companies and such that govern different IPs, everything is run by what is more or less half government agency, half private company. WHICH loving FITS RIGHT INTO SHADOWRUN, JUST SAYING. Anyways blah blah plot happens and some characters' consciousness becomes detached from their real body and instead connects to their cyberbody, which in turn becomes disconnected from their meat, causing their consciousness and cyberbody to leave their actual body behind, existing purely in the cyber-version of the world. That is how I'm suddenly picturing VR. You don't travel into the bizarre 90's NEW WAVE world in most places, because corps are almost by definition boring, and VR IS the same thing as AR. With a catch: there are places in VR hidden in the data that have no correspondence with the real world. And that's where you get your trippy cyber-world rainbow dicks and whatever. This means a hacker could leave their body behind completely and go on runs with maybe no worries of physically dying, except for when you get into Black ICE and worms and sprites and all that other stuff. And to again draw from Dennou Coil you could make a hacker that never once leaves his body to go into the VR only areas, but has programs and modified cyber-pets and poo poo that can do it for them. And if a room has no VR superzone then your meat hacker and your non-meat hacker would roughly work the same way, since you are moving with the group like you would normally, but with different threats to you if you're in VR. And to again again draw from Dennou Coil it even flat out has the equivalent of technomancers and how they differ from hackers. Does. Does this even make sense?
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Apr 2, 2013 06:40
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DeclaredYuppie posted:I think Cirno is saying basically drop the pretext that the matrix is a realm for alternate adventure, while keeping the tropes (?) of VR and projected self and so on. I could see it as an alternative. Right. I'm saying that somewhat broadly you'd have AR hacking which is Watch Dogs stuff, and you have the option for the full VR hacking for players who really want to do that but is not a necessity. It was more me thinking on how to have the two of those as two separate options rather then mashing them into the same thing. Also, for technomancers, I actually really like the concept, and think they could work in the same way magic worked pre-4e: they'd be the shaman to the hacker's hermetic mage. Hackers handle things on their own with their own programs, technomnacers use sprites and have a few small Complex Forms that can work similar to programs. 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.
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Apr 2, 2013 14:06
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Bigass Moth posted:I don't know why they removed that magic in the matrix penalty you speak of. I remember it well, and it made clear lines between the "classes" which no longer exist. I'd wager that's exactly why. Which, at least to me, DOES make sense - the whole point of a non-class based game is that, while there are archetypes, they aren't rigidly enforced classes. quote:As for bioware, it has never made sense. There have been practically no advancements in bioware tech since the early 2050s, yet the benefits you get for some of the ware have always been far better than even the best cyber at the time. I guess the real problem is that cyberware has gotten less useful since there haven't been any worthwhile additions in a long time either, and bioware is so much more essence-friendly and in some cases flat out monetarily cheaper. When is the last time you saw someone not playing a street slime game take Muscle Replacement? Right, like I said, right now bioware is a bit more expensive but is often vastly more powerful on top of being less essence costing. It's hyper efficient. And I think bioware should be the opposite - very inefficient, costing more then cyberware on top of being weaker. Bioware is what you take when you do not want to lose any more essence then needed, or if you want upgrades that cannot be hacked. I see Bioware's niche as being meant for people who are squeemish for whatever reason - be they mage, adept, technomancer, or just any ol' non-sammy - about loosing essence, but don't entirely mind dropping a point or two of it for some upgrades. The way I'm sorta mentally picturing is it that people who go for cyber go all loving in for cyber. They're sammies or hackers or, poo poo, sammy/hacker combos, the ones who have that one point of essence left over, and just that one point. The people who go for no 'ware at all are your adepts, technomancers, or mages, the guys who want all the essence in the world. For those that sit somewhere in the middle, or for those in that second group who think it's worth the cost, there's bioware.
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Apr 3, 2013 14:11
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