[Shadowrun] The "stay @ home" hacker discussion

[kzt]

Didn't they need a physical way into the system because the system wasn't connected to the outside world?

That's called an "air-gap". In the real world air-gaps don't work. Ok, in theory they work adequately, but once you leave the land of theory you'll find that they pretty much don't actually exist in the real world. There are just all too many reasons for this, ranging from important people don't want to have 6 different PCs and 6 different printers on their desks to connect to the 5 different sensitive computer systems to things like the need to have alerts from bad things on your really sensitive networks get delivered to people who can do something about them.

[deaddmwalking]

People keep suggesting a social hacker. That seems much more counter to expectations than 'physical hacking'. Biometrics are a thing, as are physical vaults that require two simultaneous key turns... Maybe in the future you have to be in your designated workstation in order to access the network. Hacking becomes a combination of fooling the physical biometrics while doing your other hacking related stuff... But as far as a separate dungeon where you fight Black IC all by your lonesome... that has to go.

[Stahlseele]

The Stay at home Decker started to work in SR3 already and it only got worse.
I have no idea how the idea of "lol wifi! lol always on DRM!" was supposed to help with that.

[silva]

Stahl, I think the idea of "lol wifi!" was to make the decker into another kind of mage, only swapping arcano-babble for techno-babble.

[Stahlseele]

i thought that's what otaku were there for?
and later on the technomancers.

[nockermensch]

You know, I've been avoiding this thread because I just don't Shadowrun, but by the title I initially thought that the first post would be something like:

"Aztechnology has blessed me with a 7,300¥ job at home!" Click here to learn the weird trick a single mom hacker discovered to get your financial freedom!

So yeah, I'm kind of disappointed.

[Stahlseele]

not hard to understand either.
perfectly viable expectation there. especially here.

[Concise Locket]

People keep suggesting a social hacker. That seems much more counter to expectations than 'physical hacking'. Biometrics are a thing, as are physical vaults that require two simultaneous key turns... Maybe in the future you have to be in your designated workstation in order to access the network. Hacking becomes a combination of fooling the physical biometrics while doing your other hacking related stuff...

Fooling biometrics with stolen prints, a doctored iris scan, a stolen blood sample, etc. are all perfectly viable options. Determining what systems are in place and developing or stealing keys to bypass them are perfectly fun and viable options to Tron shenanigans and they give everyone in the party an option to participate in the process. Pulling the file from the corporate database into your laptop (after sneaking past, killing, or fooling the guards) should either be automatically successful or one easy roll if you want to make it dramatic.

[Heisenberg]

If a hacker WANTS to stay at home...whatever. I think it's kind of stupid, but it should be a mechanically supported concept. There should also be things you can't do from home, faraday cages, wireless negating paint, what-have-you. Sometimes, the hacker needs to be in the field because a secure mainframe is disconnected from the Matrix and offline.

That said, the hacker that goes along with the team and hacks enemy equipment on the fly is a concept that the game of Shadowrun NEEDS to support better than it has in SR4/SR4A and is in SR5.

No more digital dungeon crawls, no more competing with mages.

In SR4 it's already totally possible to build a Face/Hacker hybrid. Heck you can be an adept and get adept boosts to both. But some of us actually like, or even LOVE, digital dungeon crawls. I am one such person.

[TheFlatline]

If a hacker WANTS to stay at home...whatever. I think it's kind of stupid, but it should be a mechanically supported concept. There should also be things you can't do from home, faraday cages, wireless negating paint, what-have-you. Sometimes, the hacker needs to be in the field because a secure mainframe is disconnected from the Matrix and offline.

SR's always been this way though. The point is that you really can't tell when a system is going to be hooked up to the Matrix.

Strangely enough in SR4 there's more of a reason to be a stay-at-home hacker due to the wireless matrix and having VR capabilities over essentially cellular signal: Even if a network is isolated, the Street Sammy can patch you in over the commlink and get you access. Faraday cages and wifi blocking paint can generally be overcome with the 2070's equivalent of a long network cable.

The problems with a stay-at-home hacker is basically a mechanical problem in that there's just not enough interesting shit to do in game.

[Username17]

The Stay at home Decker started to work in SR3 already and it only got worse.
I have no idea how the idea of "lol wifi! lol always on DRM!" was supposed to help with that.

The more hacking actions have physical ranges and line of sight requirements, the more the hacker is encouraged to actually go on adventures. WiFi is obviously a more conducive model for the hacker who actually goes on adventures than the dial-up modem of 1st edition. Like, so obviously that I am legitimately puzzled why you would even say that.

-Username17

[Cyberzombie]

The problems with a stay-at-home hacker is basically a mechanical problem in that there's just not enough interesting shit to do in game.

Given that cybersecurity in Shadowrun can actually kill you, and your average corporation has tons of cybered goons you can debuff, there's plenty for the stay at home hacker to do.

The main important argument against the stay at home hacker isn't a PC problem, but rather an NPC problem. Mainly the idea that spiders are dirt cheap. Not because hackers don't need to be paid much, but because they can be everywhere. The spiders you hire for your Tokyo facility can theoretically easily jump over to Seattle or New York or wherever you actually need them.

[Stahlseele]

@Frank
Yes, physical ranges and line of sight requirements would do that.
HOW DOES WIFI GIVE YOU THESE?
Wifi is just another form of connection.
If something had been breakable before wifi by staying at home, how does making it wireless change that so it can not be done by staying at home using wireless instead of the cable you would need otherwise?
If something had to have the decker go there and jack in, how does the wifi stuff make it not worse by having a drone hover in reception distance and repeating the signal across the city so he can now do it from home again?

[name_here]

WiFi allows the hacker to run around shooting guys while also hacking, and it more closely associates geography with network shape.

That's called an "air-gap". In the real world air-gaps don't work. Ok, in theory they work adequately, but once you leave the land of theory you'll find that they pretty much don't actually exist in the real world. There are just all too many reasons for this, ranging from important people don't want to have 6 different PCs and 6 different printers on their desks to connect to the 5 different sensitive computer systems to things like the need to have alerts from bad things on your really sensitive networks get delivered to people who can do something about them.

They totally exist. Oh, they don't really exist in the civilian world, but the sorts of faraday-cage rooms with isolated networks Frank keeps talking about are called Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, and the US government and intelligence/defense contractors have a bunch of them. If security is important enough, people will put up with a lot of inconvenience.

While they won't be all that common, they'll be really valuable targets.

[Stahlseele]

So how does that make the stay at home decker go away then?
Your carrot is:
you can run around and shoot at stuff and be shot at and do other stuff your character is no good at and that you probably have no desire to do anyway!
Your stick is:
you don't get to do the physical world combat maxigame, you don't get to do the social combat magical tea party minigame that you probably have no desire to do anyway.

And you are not less but more effective, because going full VR instead of AR gives bigger bonus to stuff you actually want to do. If you did not actually want to do these things, then why would you try and put up with the horrible matrix rules in the first place?

[TheFlatline]

The problems with a stay-at-home hacker is basically a mechanical problem in that there's just not enough interesting shit to do in game.

Given that cybersecurity in Shadowrun can actually kill you, and your average corporation has tons of cybered goons you can debuff, there's plenty for the stay at home hacker to do.

The main important argument against the stay at home hacker isn't a PC problem, but rather an NPC problem. Mainly the idea that spiders are dirt cheap. Not because hackers don't need to be paid much, but because they can be everywhere. The spiders you hire for your Tokyo facility can theoretically easily jump over to Seattle or New York or wherever you actually need them.

Have you played Shadowrun?

Yeah, during the *actual* run there's stuff to do. Assuming that the target is a drooling idiot when it comes to allowing outside access into secure networks. And debuffing cybered goons is more of a 5th edition (and sort of 4th edition) thing, so I'm not even going to grace that with more than an acknowledgement because it's an abortion.

But pick up any general SR adventure, or play a fucking couple sessions: The legwork portion of the game frequently takes up more time than the actual run. The setup is crucial to any good heist story. Hell sometimes in movies the heist is like the last 15 minutes and you have 90 minutes of legwork and buildup.

So during that legwork/buildup you're fucking sitting there masturbating while the rest of the party is out doing shit. And that's not conjecture, that's experience born from every single fucking game I've ever run with a hacker that thinks "I'll just sit in the basement at home in my underwear and it'll be AWESOME". That's the dude that gets bored and distracts the group and brings up other shit or asks two or three other people to have a smoke break mid-game because they aren't doing anything until the last 25% of the adventure. And of course no stay-at-home hacker PC is going to want to go out and do the legwork, because combat or negotiations or something may happen that your one-trick-pony can't deal with and that's no fun.

Even when you fucking take the time to explain this very carefully people like you figure "Oh he's gotta be talking out his ass there's PLENTY to do." And then they sit there bored as fuck.

And before you get into "oh you can just go hack something while the group is doing something else" fuck that. That basically means the GM gets to run two separate, tangential, concurrent games: one for the entire party, and a one-on-one game with Mr Precious Unique Snowflake over here who is too good to go adventuring with everyone else. And you have to do it in such a way as to keep everyone engaged. The one time I did that I actually recruited another GM to just babysit the fucking decker and it *still* was too much work that is entirely solved by leaving the goddamn basement and putting a couple points into Pistols.

[Cyberzombie]

So during that legwork/buildup you're fucking sitting there masturbating while the rest of the party is out doing shit. And that's not conjecture, that's experience born from every single fucking game I've ever run with a hacker that thinks "I'll just sit in the basement at home in my underwear and it'll be AWESOME".

Well yes, during the legwork phase you should probably leave the basement, but there's no real reason you can't... I always assumed the stay at home hacker means hacking during the actual run, not some guy too paranoid to ever leave his home.

I didn't figure anyone would actually play that kind of character, because you're right, it is boring.

And of course no stay-at-home hacker PC is going to want to go out and do the legwork, because combat or negotiations or something may happen that your one-trick-pony can't deal with and that's no fun.

Staying at home during a run is about being safe from gunfire so you can run full VR. The hacker probably lacks skills like dodge or firearms. It doesn't necessarily mean he's going to lack skills that help information gathering.

[Stahlseele]

Legwork is also something the stay at home decker can do fairly well.
Why would you need to meet contacts in person?
That's why phones were invented. And later on the innerwebs.

[TheFlatline]

Legwork is also something the stay at home decker can do fairly well.
Why would you need to meet contacts in person?
That's why phones were invented. And later on the innerwebs.

So why have a party then? The stay-at-home hacker can do everything before and during a run.

Again, it's a toss up between designing an entire game around a single character concept or "spread your fucking points around and join the rest of the game".

If you *really* want to play a stay-at-home hacker, go play Uplink.

[MisterDee]

It took me exactly two sessions of Shadowrun (4) to decide I will never play Shadowrun again unless there are no hackers in the group.

That the hacker was the stay-at-home variety was just the spermy icing on the shit cake.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

I've been involved in a few Shadowrun games, and they've all had the houserule "No PC Deckers. The GM wants to run one campaign, not two."

[Cyberzombie]

I've been involved in a few Shadowrun games, and they've all had the houserule "No PC Deckers. The GM wants to run one campaign, not two."

That's true of most games, because the hacking in SR sucks. The stay at home hacker isn't the problem. It's the vast amount of rolls it takes to get anything done. whether he's sitting in your bedroom hacking or hacking while part of a run, he has to go through three steps, each of which has rolls associated with it.

1. Locate whatever node it is he needs to in order to do what he wants.
2. Get access to the node, possibly fighting IC/spiders on the way.
3. Actually take the action to make the node do what he wants.

That's way too many actions and dice thrown to achieve something like hacking open a door lock or fooling someone's cybereyes.

The first thing is cut the number of dice down. Hacking something simple like a camera needs to be, at best, a single opposed test that abstracts all three steps. IC should go from being independent entities to traps that get sprung on you for failure.

That's how you make hacking playable. It's not really a problem if the hacker happens to be sitting outside in a van or if he's running and gunning like the rest of the team.

[Dogbert]

Yeah, the Matrix as a separate world is bad for group cohesion, at least as far as vanilla SR games are concerned, it has to go.

Now, the "stay@home hacker" as an -Operator- for the team, THAT is something I can get behind. Someone who, being safely away from danger, can invest all of their resources in being the best at support tasks because that's their only job (yet they work -with- the group and are technically in the same place). I have lots of fun playing operator, but then I know it's not for everyone.