The Shadowrun Situation

[Rawbeard]

Shit, now I want to play SR5. Thanks guys, no really.

[TheFlatline]

My experience with SR5 is one session long, and it was fairly fun, due to GM skipping most of the hacking rules (including OS) and despite the team doing stupid-stupid things.

Well, I guess I'll go back to my futile search of SR4 online game.

SR5 is in it's essence SR4 with some weird fuckerated shit added in, like success caps and matrix bonuses for your laser pointer and shit.

SR4 was mostly solid except for a few specific areas: Rigging (did they ever even *do* rigging right in 4th?), the Matrix (no big surprise it's always been a mess), and I want to say spirit summoning was completely whacked out bonkers broken beyond belief.

Otherwise it's pretty goddamn solid and fun to play.

[JonSetanta]

Shit, now I want to play SR5. Thanks guys, no really.

That makes two of us.

I like how the d6s pass on a 5 or 6 rather than reroll on 6 like in older editions. That always confused me before.



I'd love for someone to run a hacker campaign.
Normally my eyes glaze over when I read matrix rules in SR, I stuck to playing my full-body cyborg street samurai while we have 1 to 0 hackers in the group, but if everyone were to be a hacker.... well... that makes things interesting, I'd probably be forced to finally learn the rules for such things.

[vagrant]

I never got the complaint that hacking was hard in 4th, or even 3rd. In 3rd it simply required rules-mastery for what was basically an entirely separate game system and was unplayable outside of solo session, but solid and functional beyond the whole failing at being a co-operative roleplaying game thing. In 4th, there were just enough rules for you to function, with the handwave of 'If you've got admin access to a node, it's your bitch and nothing can touch you' (aside from roving IC, wild sprites, and secspiders natch) which sped up gameplay immensely, since a player with admin access can just take his own initiative instead of asking for permission and rolling for every single fucking thing.

Yes, even with ditching extended tests, SR5 still managed to make Matrix shit take longer than 4th.

[NineInchNall]

I like how the d6s pass on a 5 or 6 rather than reroll on 6 like in older editions. That always confused me before.

6s still explode if you use edge. I'm pretty sure the whole exploding dice thing adds a negligible increase to expected hits, though. The only reason I can see using edge before the roll is to remove the limit for things that would normally cost money (i.e., spirit summoning) for increased limits.

[Username17]

I like how the d6s pass on a 5 or 6 rather than reroll on 6 like in older editions. That always confused me before.

6s still explode if you use edge. I'm pretty sure the whole exploding dice thing adds a negligible increase to expected hits, though. The only reason I can see using edge before the roll is to remove the limit for things that would normally cost money (i.e., spirit summoning) for increased limits.

Exploding sixes raise the expected hits per die from 1/3 to 2/5. It is worth an average of 1 hit at a dicepool of 15.

Note that rerolling failures is better in almost every way, so people normally use Edge for that. It brings the expected hits per die to 5/9, and while it doesn't come with a pile of extra dice, it does come with you actually getting to see the damn roll and knowing whether you need more hits or not.

-Username17

[Aryxbez]

now I want to play SR5. Thanks guys, no really.

I'm sorry to hear that, what about our discussion of 5th edition has desired you to play what is, a similar and inferior game to its 4th edition?

[Longes]

Yes, even with ditching extended tests, SR5 still managed to make Matrix shit take longer than 4th.

I'd actually love to make a comparison runs with someone, to see how the rules differ.

[NineInchNall]

Note that rerolling failures is better in almost every way, so people normally use Edge for that. It brings the expected hits per die to 5/9, and while it doesn't come with a pile of extra dice, it does come with you actually getting to see the damn roll and knowing whether you need more hits or not.

-Username17

That's what I suspected, but I didn't want to say anything without first doing the math. Good to know my intuitions don't suck.

[Longes]

I must say - I love SR5's technomancer picture. That guy is so high right now. SR4 technomancer was just that poorly detailed dude.

[Username17]

Yes, even with ditching extended tests, SR5 still managed to make Matrix shit take longer than 4th.

I'd actually love to make a comparison runs with someone, to see how the rules differ.

In the entire history of mankind, not one person has ever made a full writeup of even a simple opposed hack for SR4 or SR5. Not one person. Ever. When people try, even people who are paid to do so, they fall short of the challenge and cut out more than half of die rolls and stop before the hack is over. They tried to do an official writeup of a matrix fight for SR4, and ended up skipping more than half the steps, exceeding their word count by five hundred percent, and ending the writeup with the combat less than one tenth finished.

The human mind simply cannot contain the insanity and the minutiae that is SR4 or SR5 hacking. It simply cannot be done. Even ridiculously reductionist scenarios are simply too die roll intensive for human beings to handle. And it gets much, much worse when you make anything even remotely realistic as a scenario, because the workload increases exponentially the moment you introduce a scenario more complex than a naked technomancer versus a vending machine with some IC on it.

The whole concept of "everything is an icon" is simply incompatible with tracking individual die rolls and actions for each icon. Jesus fuck, if there is a data store that doesn't have a fucking index that tells you which file has the world domination plan on it, you have to find it by analyzing each file until you find it - at a minimum of one roll per file. How many files are on the data store? Ten thousand? Forty million? More? It's a fucking corporate data store, with evil secret plans and a whole lot of Elf porn hidden somewhere on it, and it's all labeled something stupid like "afternoon_meeting_minutes_5-7-2071.xsp".

It isn't that one rule or another is bad or that there are broken loops you can exploit or something. It's that the rules are fundamentally zoomed in to a level of granularity that is physically impossible for humans to handle at an actual gaming table. The Matrix mini-game as written cannot be played and cannot be fixed. You have to kill it with fire and start over with a new system which is far less granular and doesn't ask you to interact with individual programs or devices.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

I never got the complaint that hacking was hard in 4th, or even 3rd. In 3rd it simply required rules-mastery for what was basically an entirely separate game system and was unplayable outside of solo session, but solid and functional beyond the whole failing at being a co-operative roleplaying game thing. In 4th, there were just enough rules for you to function, with the handwave of 'If you've got admin access to a node, it's your bitch and nothing can touch you' (aside from roving IC, wild sprites, and secspiders natch) which sped up gameplay immensely, since a player with admin access can just take his own initiative instead of asking for permission and rolling for every single fucking thing.

Yes, even with ditching extended tests, SR5 still managed to make Matrix shit take longer than 4th.

3rd still used the VR dungeon simulation analogy. I want to say that at one point they had a rule where hot sim VR (the only way to fly) was like 3 or 5 times faster than meatspace. Might have been 2nd ed. I want to say it was. So hacker goes 5 times (including multiple initiative passes because fuck hot sim VR adds extra init passes) and then meatspace goes once.

Even as granular and slow as 3rd ed matrix was (I actually found a homebrew windows program that let me enter in Matrix grids & nodes and PC stats and I'd set the hacker on his VR journey on my laptop while the rest of the room played, and aside from timing issues it was oddly appropriate), it still was at least an order of magnitude or two less granular than SR 4 or 5 because you operated at a "node" level, where the node was essentially a dungeon room and it contained a monster (IC) and sometimes some loot. You'd roll to pick the lock (operate the node) or open a locked door (traverse to another node) and there was a weird security count thing and IC that activated and blah blah blah. But the basics were there: You had a bunch of apps/spells, a monster, and a room.

If you want to see how fucking stupid SR4's matrix paradigm is, realize that they define the wireless matrix as a complete full mesh. What that *actually* means is that every icon in the matrix has a 1-to-1 connection with every other icon in the matrix. Think about that for a second. That means that if you have 100 icons in the matrix, you have 9.3x10^157 connections. And each icon represents a device that is actually connected to the matrix, and needs to communicate with the matrix, which means that you need a routing table that big.

In the world of SR, I cannot even begin to calculate how psychotically large the amount of connections that exist are. Humans don't have the math to comprehend such numbers. Routing tables to keep track of who is who would grow exponentially every time you added another icon, because you have a direct, one way connection to every other icon on the planet.

Then they go and introduce signal strength, which breaks the full mesh paradigm, but let's say that there's a full mesh within your signal range. Awesome. That REALLY complicates the fuck out of things. Because now every icon needs a routing table that is more than a phone book. Each icon needs to know what the next most efficient hop is. Hop count isn't even a metric that is used anymore, so everything is link-state. Latency, bandwidth, hop count, preferred weighted pathways, all this shit exists in a routing table. Even with default routs pumping up through the commlink and then on to the local access point like a normal hierarchical architecture would suggest isn't bulletproof because someone somewhere could decide that your laser pointer (which is by requirement matrix-active for some fucking reason) suddenly is the best hop for piping Superbowl 127 to the rest of the world. Which either means your signal is fuckerated or every matrix-capable device made has unlimited bandwidth and unlimited routing and processing power. Which eliminates the need for mainframes and shit but that's another story.

Thing is, all of this shit actually *matters* in the Matrix minigame, because it specifically invokes rules where you use the nature of the connectivity of the Matrix to hack shit: Line of sight is actually a thing, and yet not a thing that you have to take care of.

Frank's right. The matrix rules are a flaming ball of shit that doesn't even approach functionality. It can't even fucking fake it. It's an example of the game devs wanting to have the technobabble actually mean something other than set dressing, but not knowing thing one about the subject.

[Longes]

And in SR5 Matrix got even more magical, by magically knowing who owns the device (there is a big thread on Shadowgrid where people argue if your shit is tied to your comlink, your SIN or just to you) and magically repairing bricked cybernetics without the need for surgery.

[Longes]

An interesting question came up.

SR5 book says that corps own all/most of the gear its workers/guards have. How does this interract with the rest of Matrix rules? What would Chunk the Guard do when his smartgun is marked? What is "the Corporation" for the purposes of owning something?

[John Magnum]

That means that if you have 100 icons in the matrix, you have 9.3x10^157 connections.

What the shitting fuck? Even if the connections are one way, the complete graph on 100 vertices has 9,900 edges, not $TEXAS. The number of edges is quadratic with the number of icons, not exponential.

[RadiantPhoenix]

That means that if you have 100 icons in the matrix, you have 9.3x10^157 connections.

What the shitting fuck? Even if the connections are one way, the complete graph on 100 vertices has 9,900 edges, not $TEXAS. The number of edges is quadratic with the number of icons, not exponential.

Actually, 9.3x10^157 is a result of factorial growth, not exponential.

[John Magnum]

Wow, you're right. That's even more horrifyingly off.

[Rawbeard]

now I want to play SR5. Thanks guys, no really.

I'm sorry to hear that, what about our discussion of 5th edition has desired you to play what is, a similar and inferior game to its 4th edition?

I want to set this game on fire in a way that others know to stay the fuck away. Holy crap, this is so horrible...

[TheFlatline]

That means that if you have 100 icons in the matrix, you have 9.3x10^157 connections.

What the shitting fuck? Even if the connections are one way, the complete graph on 100 vertices has 9,900 edges, not $TEXAS. The number of edges is quadratic with the number of icons, not exponential.

Actually, 9.3x10^157 is a result of factorial growth, not exponential.

Shit I was doing math too late you're right. I was doing multiplication instead of addition.

I know better than that.

Okay, so only 10,000 connections for 100 icons. Which in SR terms is like what, a team of 5 runners? It's still bonkers.

[Neurosis]

whoops

[Neurosis]

I like how the d6s pass on a 5 or 6 rather than reroll on 6 like in older editions. That always confused me before.

Dude/bro, it has been that way since SR4 in like two thousand fucking three or something. This is not a goddamn innovation of SR5.

You forgot the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth set of character creation points!

Special attribute points, attribute points. skill points, skill group points! Yay!

... I'm seriously considering selling my brand new hard copy of SR5. 'Cause I don't even see how this is at all a functional system, let alone a usable book.

It makes me want to itch my scalp with buckshot.

Yes, even with ditching extended tests, SR5 still managed to make Matrix shit take longer than 4th.

I'd actually love to make a comparison runs with someone, to see how the rules differ.

In the entire history of mankind, not one person has ever made a full writeup of even a simple opposed hack for SR4 or SR5. Not one person. Ever. When people try, even people who are paid to do so, they fall short of the challenge and cut out more than half of die rolls and stop before the hack is over. They tried to do an official writeup of a matrix fight for SR4, and ended up skipping more than half the steps, exceeding their word count by five hundred percent, and ending the writeup with the combat less than one tenth finished.

The human mind simply cannot contain the insanity and the minutiae that is SR4 or SR5 hacking. It simply cannot be done. Even ridiculously reductionist scenarios are simply too die roll intensive for human beings to handle. And it gets much, much worse when you make anything even remotely realistic as a scenario, because the workload increases exponentially the moment you introduce a scenario more complex than a naked technomancer versus a vending machine with some IC on it.

The whole concept of "everything is an icon" is simply incompatible with tracking individual die rolls and actions for each icon. Jesus fuck, if there is a data store that doesn't have a fucking index that tells you which file has the world domination plan on it, you have to find it by analyzing each file until you find it - at a minimum of one roll per file. How many files are on the data store? Ten thousand? Forty million? More? It's a fucking corporate data store, with evil secret plans and a whole lot of Elf porn hidden somewhere on it, and it's all labeled something stupid like "afternoon_meeting_minutes_5-7-2071.xsp".

It isn't that one rule or another is bad or that there are broken loops you can exploit or something. It's that the rules are fundamentally zoomed in to a level of granularity that is physically impossible for humans to handle at an actual gaming table. The Matrix mini-game as written cannot be played and cannot be fixed. You have to kill it with fire and start over with a new system which is far less granular and doesn't ask you to interact with individual programs or devices.

-Username17

This is my new favorite post, man. Too bad it's too long to sig. It's hyperbole, in my opinion, but it's AMUSING hyperbole, and there's a grain of truth there too.

[JonSetanta]

Dude/bro, it has been that way since SR4 in like two thousand fucking three or something. This is not a goddamn innovation of SR5.

I haven't played since the late 90s.

[Longes]

More SR5 fun!

When you jump into a vehicle, you add the Rating of your Control Rig to both the Handling and Speed of whatever vehicle you just jumped into. If you check page 202, you have a chart that converts the Speed ratings of vehicles into Walk and Run rates.

So let's say you have a Suzuki Mirage, which is Speed 6. That's a run rate of 320 meters per turn, which is about 400 km/h. Now that's a pretty fast bike. But then you jump into it with your Rating 3 Control Rig, and suddenly it's Speed 9. You now have a Run Rate of 2,560 meters per turn, which is something like 3300 km/h.

Simply by jumping into the vehicle, you have increased its top speed by 8 times and have exceeded speed of sound by three times.

EDIT: and if you add a spirit with Movement power, then you can break speed of light.

[Fuchs]

So let's say you have a Suzuki Mirage, which is Speed 6. That's a run rate of 320 meters per turn, which is about 400 km/h. Now that's a pretty fast bike. But then you jump into it with your Rating 3 Control Rig, and suddenly it's Speed 9. You now have a Run Rate of 2,560 meters per turn, which is something like 3300 km/h.

Did they stop using speeds like "80/120", and went to something like "4/6" for vehicles? And forgot to tell the one writing the rigger rules, so he thought he'd end up with a rigged speed of "83"?

[Longes]

So let's say you have a Suzuki Mirage, which is Speed 6. That's a run rate of 320 meters per turn, which is about 400 km/h. Now that's a pretty fast bike. But then you jump into it with your Rating 3 Control Rig, and suddenly it's Speed 9. You now have a Run Rate of 2,560 meters per turn, which is something like 3300 km/h.

Did they stop using speeds like "80/120", and went to something like "4/6" for vehicles? And forgot to tell the one writing the rigger rules, so he thought he'd end up with a rigged speed of "83"?

Vehicles have Speed attribute. They also have a table that converts Speed into meters per turn. No, I don't know why they didn't use mpt instead of Speed attribute. Speed attribute is linear, but Speed->mpt is exponential. Speed 6 is 160mpt, Speed 9 is 1280mpt.