5th edition, Chapter by Chapter

[Orca]

None of this is going to matter unless, of course, your feeble attempt to try and ruin CGL's chances of getting the license renewed succeeds.

This thread isn't an attempt to replace SR4. It's a look at what a replacement for SR4 might look like, which might (p<0.01 IMO, but we can hope) inspire future writers for SR, but which is more likely to inspire house rules.

It's been pointed out that the current edition of SR is getting long in the tooth anyway. The core supplements are already printed, new ones are getting ever more obscure. Is there some reason you think that whoever's holding the licence in a years time - even CGL - wouldn't be considering producing a new edition?

[duo31]

Mute the troll and move on.

I like this idea of simplifying combat. Tell me more. I'm thinking of running a game myself and am looking for pitfalls/house rules to make things go smoothly.

[Kaelik]

Mute the troll and move on.

I like this idea of simplifying combat. Tell me more. I'm thinking of running a game myself and am looking for pitfalls/house rules to make things go smoothly.

No, merciless destruction of trolls is the best part of the gaming den.

[Lich-Loved]

I can how holograms might fit into the hacker shtik. I just can't bring myself to support the brain hacking thing. If we need a decker, a street sam and and a mage as iconics and all iconics need something unique to do all the time, we break it up like this:

Decker:
* hacking for paydata
* bypassing security
* rigging drones
* dealing with opposing hackers
* legwork - electronic

Street Sam:
* stabbing people
* intimidation/negotiation/face
* infiltration/perception
* legwork - physical

Mage:
* melting faces
* dealing with enemy mages/spirits/magical warding
* negotiation/intimidation/face
* legwork - spiritual

If the big concern about hackers being riggers are that they do too much, don't forget that an enemy hacker can down the drones since they are not being actively defended by the hacker (he is rigging them). So the hacker can *either* rig or handle the enemy hacker, not both unless he wants his drones to dog-brain it all the time. I just do not see a need for brain hacking to make hackers relevant; it looks like they have plenty to do.

[kzt]

The decker as a dedicated character was kind of cool in 1989. Attempting to rewrite much of the entire game to empower the decker so you don't have to abandon the feel of Tron and Mr. Mechanical Typewriter's idea of computers in 2010 is absurd. Tron is as dead as disco, can't we just move on?

[Username17]

Decker:
* hacking for paydata
* bypassing security
* rigging drones
* dealing with opposing hackers
* legwork - electronic

If Hackers are required to only deal with technology, they still need something to do if the enemy goes low tech. The Mage becomes more powerful if the enemy doesn't have any spell defense. The Street Samurai becomes more powerful if the enemy has no reflex enhancers. But over and above the fact that both archetypes improve when the enemy does not invest in defenses against them, both archetypes have something to do!

Now if you insist on not letting them do holo hacking or direct brain hacking, or anything else to affect unwired opponents, that pretty much leaves them doing some kind of buff detail. That's certainly excusable: you could have them providing Bardish Inspiring Music style bonuses by monitoring peoples' tacnets somehow. They could be the guy who sits in the van and looks at everyone's gun cams and coordinates. That's very conceivable and it has a lot of fictional relevance. The real question is: Is it any fun? And I think the answer is probably no.

The decker as a dedicated character was kind of cool in 1989. Attempting to rewrite much of the entire game to empower the decker so you don't have to abandon the feel of Tron and Mr. Mechanical Typewriter's idea of computers in 2010 is absurd. Tron is as dead as disco, can't we just move on?

The short answer is: No. We can't.

The Hacker a a dedicated character is pretty much a given in every ensemble near-future crime story of modern cinema. From Lyle in The Italian Job to the Malloy brothers in Oceans 11 to Lucius Fox in The Dark Knight, having a character whose job it is to hack networks with computers is a staple of the genre. So the question is not "do we need a Hacker character?" because the answer to that is yes. The question is merely and completely what that character is supposed to do to justify their existence.

And that stuff, for reasons of playability, needs to be interesting on a round-by-round basis, needs to be done physically with the rest of the team, and needs to apply in every type of mission. It's perfectly OK for The Rundown to not have a Hacker character while running around the backwoods of Amazonia. But the Shadowrun game needs to still provide something for the Hacker character to do, because he's a permanent player character and you aren't swapping him out for other characters during specialty missions. Similarly, it's totally OK for Lyle to do all his hacking from a lap top in a baggage claim room across town in The Italian Job - because it's a movie, and the action is totally fine cutting back to him every time he does something important. But that's not OK in a role playing game, because splitting the party equals failure.

We don't need or even want Hackers to be crawling through special dungeons where individual rooms are specific I/O ports and data stores. That shit is tedious. But they do need to be doing virtual combat in the same time frame and in the same areas as the Mage is blasting spirits and the Street Samurai is stabbing fools. That is actually something we need. Because that is how we reconcile our need to have a "hacker character" be on the team with our need to have the game run smoothly without anyone wandering off to go play Smash Brothers while the hacking mini-game is or is not happening.

-Username17

[Crissa]

I would think that without technology, you don't have communication at the level a hacker should be able to provide. Basically, they should always be able to flank or see ahead of someone who isn't playing with wireless defenses and jamming signals and devices.

They wander around in cyberspace finding the IO ports and ordering fake pizzas to flush out the badguys and shit like that. They have a near unlimited source of allies that are solid and don't even know they're allies - much like the Mage and their spirits, tho the spirits know who the Mage is, obviously.

-Crissa

[RandomCasualty2]

If Hackers are required to only deal with technology, they still need something to do if the enemy goes low tech. The Mage becomes more powerful if the enemy doesn't have any spell defense. The Street Samurai becomes more powerful if the enemy has no reflex enhancers. But over and above the fact that both archetypes improve when the enemy does not invest in defenses against them, both archetypes have something to do!

Well technology is an advantage. You can totally decide to shield yourself from hacking by not using any tech, just like you can shield yourself from banishing by not using any spirits, but you're nerfing yourself by doing that and I really can't see too many people actively making that choice.

And seriously you are. Not using any kind of cyberware is going to make them swiss cheese against any decent street sam. Unless you're infiltrating a rare cabal of physical adepts or something, that's a huge disadvantage to your security force.

I mean you'd seriously pretty much have to be an idiot to run without any cyberware. At the very least, your threat in combat would be pretty laughable to someone who did use a good amount of cyberware.

Now if you insist on not letting them do holo hacking or direct brain hacking, or anything else to affect unwired opponents, that pretty much leaves them doing some kind of buff detail. That's certainly excusable: you could have them providing Bardish Inspiring Music style bonuses by monitoring peoples' tacnets somehow. They could be the guy who sits in the van and looks at everyone's gun cams and coordinates. That's very conceivable and it has a lot of fictional relevance. The real question is: Is it any fun? And I think the answer is probably no.

I mean this stuff would definitely be a good side role. But again I think you're treating it as a single classed game too much. There is nothing stopping a hacker from seriously picking up a gun and shooting people and I'm not sure why you're approaching this with a D&D 4E mindset of single class-ism. Everyone is perfectly okay with locksmith not helping if there aren't any locks. I'm not sure why it isn't equally okay for computer to do nothing if there's no computers.

[kzt]

All combat is broken in SR4. My personal belief is that the developer never fired a gun in his life and also never participated in a contact sport or a real fight after elementary school. Combat in SR4 is essentially based on comic books and batman the TV show by someone who has no idea what they don't know and had no interest in learning.

Ever seen Collateral? The scene where Tom Cruise blows away two gang-bangers in maybe 2 seconds, drawing and shooting them both multiple times? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmKR6evZRQQ Anyone who isn't physically impaired and not terrified of guns can learn to do that in a month or two even if they never fired a gun before. Really, no kidding. It just requires a few weeks of professional instruction, a lot of practice and about 4-6,000 rounds of practice ammo. I'm talking a month or two of 40 hour weeks on a range, but it's completely doable without having people implant shit in your nervous system.

That being said, if you get to hand-to-hand range with a drawn knife against a guy with a holstered gun the smart money bets on the guy with the knife. You can stab and slash really fast, but not in Sr4.

As I said above, the whole combat system is totally screwed up. The "basic mechanics" are salvageable, but all the subsystems are fairly worthless and need to be rewritten, probably from scratch. The fact that going into prone supported with a rifle reduces your chance to hit with the rifle suggests something is really broken at a basic level.

If melee combat isn't as interesting as ranged combat, nor as balanced, then something is seriously lacking.

Comparing shooting a rim-fire rifle, handgun, shotgun, or high powered rifle; to swinging a machete, flitting a hand-blade, kneecapping with a baseball bat, or swinging a shinai/bokken; they're 'about' the same level of complexity.

However, the melee weapon needs less time to be accurate; and is actually faster than the ranged option.

You can seriously raise a cleaver up and down, with force enough to split a coconut, more times, and faster than you can squeeze off five slugs out of a pump shotgun.

The fact that SR has melee as slower is mind-shockingly boggling. I'm guessing that arm-chair fighters and arm-chair gun user got that to occur.

A system where melee is faster, and does damage based more on locations* struck by the weapon , than weapon used.

[Gelare]

My personal belief is that the developer never fired a gun in his life and also never participated in a contact sport or a real fight after elementary school. Combat in SR4 is essentially based on comic books and batman the TV show by someone who has no idea what they don't know and had no interest in learning.

There is absolutely nothing in that quote which supports your claim that "All combat is broken in SR4.". Nothing at all.

[TavishArtair]

It has a lot to do with the old "write what you know" adage, however. If you don't understand combat on even the most basic level of experience, it will be hard to model even a fictional version of that using a system. You can do it, but it means you have to find some other jumping off point for your writing.

[Username17]

Ever seen Collateral? The scene where Tom Cruise blows away two gang-bangers in maybe 2 seconds, drawing and shooting them both multiple times? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmKR6evZRQQ Anyone who isn't physically impaired and not terrified of guns can learn to do that in a month or two even if they never fired a gun before.

I'm gong to call bullshit on that. Not because it isn't true, but because it has absolutely nothing whatever to do with real combats. We have real police statistics and now even live war footage to draw upon, and while individual deadly bullets really are fired and strike their targets in literal split seconds - the reality is that the combats last a fuck of a lot longer than that. Real gun battles take minutes, not seconds. And even at close range, even trained police officers miss with a substantial majority of their bullets.

The speed at which you can draw and fire a gun is fascinating, but real combat situations are nothing like a firing range and aren't even very much like a high noon shootout. Real combats have a tendency to look like This, not some romantic stab fest where everyone gets their licks in less than 3 seconds from the start gun.

The 3 second combat round is way too short to generate realistic results. A better combat round would be 12 or even 20 seconds.

-Username17

[Murtak]

None of this is going to matter unless, of course, your feeble attempt to try and ruin CGL's chances of getting the license renewed succeeds.

1. I am probably going to use parts of this for my 4E houserules.
2. This board, and especially Frank, have previously produced complete games.
3. If Frank is indeed attempting to fuck over CGL his attempt seems to be succeeding, and thus anything but feeble, neh?

Thanks for the laugh though. I was tempted to put you on ignore immediately, but I think you are going to be fun. Welcome to the den!

[RandomCasualty2]

Frank's right about firefights. The battles in sci-fi, modern RPGs are far too clean. Way too few rounds are expended and they're over way too quickly. I've always felt like there should definitely be some randomness in the amount of bullets you fire off if you don't take an aim action.

If you're just doing a quick snap shot, as is the case with most fire fights that don't involve sniping, chances are you're going to be firing a lot. There isn't a clean RPG style instant update where you know if your round hit or not, it's much more like playing an FPS online where you're not sure if your first hit necessarily killed the guy, so you're going to actually fire several.

As stated earlier, recoil needs to be less of an issue and bullets need to be used way more liberally.

You shouldn't be deciding how many bullets you fire at the start of your turn. Honestly you shouldn't really know until after your turn is over, as you're just laying down lots of fire at people. If you want to specifically conserve ammo, that should actually give you some kind of penalty to your combat actions.

Speaking of combat, another thing SR needs badly... size modifiers. It's really crazy that shooting at a van is the same difficulty as shooting at a house cat.

[Murtak]

Similarly, it's totally OK for Lyle to do all his hacking from a lap top in a baggage claim room across town in The Italian Job - because it's a movie, and the action is totally fine cutting back to him every time he does something important. But that's not OK in a role playing game, because splitting the party equals failure.

I disagree. I would certainly prefer for deckers to run along with the party, but all the same, hacking corp security or the traffic grid from home while the team is trying to shake pursuit is a staple of the genre. We do need to make sure the decker is not shackled to his desk. Merely making hacking faster should do that. But having a decker hear his party scream at him to hack the fucking door already because it takes him the same two or three actions it takes security to shoot them is awesome, and should not be regarded as failure.

[spasheridan]

melee vs ranged is always a tough nut to crack in a sci-fi RPG.

First, we want to play characters who can shoot things in the face, even if that thing is a big set of claws. If a barghast can slaughter any ranged specialist by closing into melee the ranged specialist will be sad.

Also, we want to play characters who slice and dice with laser katana's. If a ranged monster (security guard with a shotgun) can just unload at pointblank on any fool with a sword and drop him with both barrels we will be sad.

How do we get both of these concepts in one rule set?

I think the standard balance in a future game is:

Ranged combat is better then melee combat, guns kill. You get more shots off than attempts at stabbing, you can carry anything from a hold out pistol to a minigun, and a minigun is a lot better than any laser katana you can get your hands on. And then there are grenades...

Where melee combat gets "balanced" is situational. Melee weapons are silent, so they have stealth. Melee SHOULD stop ranged attacks - you really shouldn't be able to fire a rifle at a guy trying to stab you, but maybe a pistol, and it should probably be some opposed shooting vs fighting check instead of a standard shoot / dodge check. Melee weapons (or just fists) should be easier to smuggle into places than a gun, so you can bring them into high security places. And melee weapons don't need to reload.

I honestly don't think that a sci-fi game should try and make the gun character equal to the melee character, for the same reason that modern armies use these crazy expensive guns instead of big knives - range advantage is huge, and that small guy with a gun can kill a big guy with a knife. But the melee idea should be important - close quarters scenarios, bug hunts, stealth assassinations, bar room brawls - melee combat shines in those scenarios and the rest of the game range combat shines.

[baduin]

The difference between decker and rigger made a lot of sense when the Internet access depended on being physically connected to a cable. Since now the Internet is wireless, the equipment of a decker and a rigger are essentially the same. There is a slight difference in the skill-set, but a rigger would have to be able to prevent his bots from being hacked - and so he must be at least a part-time decker.

The reason why neither decker nor rigger can remain back home is pretty obvious - the previous discussion established that any important target building will be a Faraday cage. It will have a corporate wireless Intranet inside, but from outside you will be able to access only some servers physically connected to the Internet. In addition, the farther away you are, the greater is the time lag and the risk of losing communication or being detected.

It seems also rather firmly established that the various "alternative" methods of connecting brain to the Internet do not make much sense. Either you have a datajack and you are good but vulnerable, or you try to make do with an iPad and you are pathetic, but secure.

Finally, Shadowrun started as SF, but it was 1980'ies SF. The reality has a way of overtaking older ideas. The Shadowrun combat is essentially elite Urban Warfare and building clearance. It is now a well established kind of opeations.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/25024933/Mili ... an-Terrain

And I cannot imagine a near-future or elite modern urbat combat team without spy micro-drones,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3571261.stm

or IED inspection robot

http://www.iedrobot.com/marcbot/marcbotindex.htm

or a swarm of cockroach-like microdrones to rapidly inspect a building

http://gizmodo.com/381313/morphing-micr ... eps-us-out

http://www.google.pl/images?hl=pl&rls=c ... CCYQsAQwAw

And such micro-drones, differently from larger Predators, are commanded by soldiers present on the spot.

[Murtak]

The reason why neither decker nor rigger can remain back home is pretty obvious - the previous discussion established that any important target building will be a Faraday cage. It will have a corporate wireless Intranet inside, but from outside you will be able to access only some servers physically connected to the Internet.

Established, bullshit. As previously "established" by me, shielding facilities is bullshit and in most cases futile.

As for decker/rigger overlap, both work with machines. So does everyone else in the entire world. Seriously, what overlap? Skill overlap: zero. Cyberware overlap: zero. Attribute overlap: some. "Slight difference" indeed. Hacking drones? Riggers can drive vehicles they sit in. Drones are common, but not the only thing riggers do.

So we are down to "riggers = deckers so they can prevent their drones from being hacked". But they can not protect drone B while they are jumped into drone A, can they?

So basically "riggers=deckers" is bullshit. They have as much or as little overlap as any two other shticks and the benefits can be reduced to "it would presumably be harder to kick a competent decker out of the drone he is currently jumped into".

[Crissa]

I think the idea of a nonmelee ranged guy should only be for NPCs.

PCs have their iconic weapon, sure, but they're a shadowrunner first and formost.

Just like decker and rigger are two side of the same coin.

-Crissa

[Murtak]

Are you saying PCs should automatically be proficient on both ranged and melee weapons? That PCs archetypes should not include combat specialists? Something else? I can't tell from your post.

And damn it, deckers and riggers are not "two sides of the same coin". Not anymore than mages and faces. Or samurai and riggers. Or burglars and deckers.

[Crissa]

If you allow faces with no combat or sharpshooters with no melee, they hav the same problem as the decker vs goblins in Frank's example.

-Crissa

[Murtak]

And speaking for myself, I am fine with that. As long as being proficient with a weapon (or a couple of weapons) is cheap enough, 99.999% of all characters will be. Even at the ridiculously overpriced regular costs, having an agility of 3 and buying a skill of 3, a gun and smartlinked goggles will run you under 13 BP and get you to a dicepool of 8, which is definitely enough to fire a shotgun at people and expect to hit. I am not against giving someone the tools for a situation, but expecting every character to be able to contribute in all situations, even when the player is not interested in that situation is bullshit.

I fully expect any and all sample characters to have some sort of combat shtick, but if the player wants to skimp on less than 5% of his BP pool to be useless in combat - let them. Similarly, I don't care about the decker being useless in combat when he has not invested in a combat skill. Whether that skill is holograms or pistols is a matter of preference, and that is good for the game. I do care about being forced to sit at home. I care about decking happening on a different timescale. Combat? Fuck combat. If anyone can get a decent combat shtick for not too many build points the issue is solved. We don't exactly check whether everyone can open locks, drive a fast vehicle, infiltrate a building, search data or influence NPCs, much less whether they can do so using their favorite mechanics, do we?

[RandomCasualty2]

You do need some kind of matrix security such that hackers can't complete the entire run solely through the matrix. That is, the type of hacking in your game has to actually encourage the entire team to break in, as opposed to just sit at home. A lone hacker sitting in a van is basically untraceable and completely safe from anything other than matrix attacks.

So why would this dude leave the safety of his house and put himself in the line of fire? That's the first question you need to answer.

Right now, the way they accomplish that is wifi blocking. Stuff in faraday cages or copper paint can basically force the team to go inside. The problem however is that it also begs the question of why you wouldn't just paint cameras with that stuff as standard fare? It's not very expensive, and you can basically create unhackable security.

Worse still, it's pretty much cheaper to wrap your cameras in anti-wifi crap than it is to pay profession matrix security staff. And that's the problem with wifi blocking. Once you can basically block wifi whenever you want, the hacker becomes useless.

Now, I don't feel like the answer to this is making hackers good at stuff outside the matrix. The answer should rather be to fix the problem and create the sort of hack rich environments where hackers would be useful.

First I would say toss out wifi blocking entirely. The wifi waves of the future use some kind of radical wave tech that isn't blocked by matter at all, other than maybe some kind of super secure bunker under 20 ft of concrete. Switch to a new paradigm... with the following principles.


1. Wifi can be used to easily jam any electronics that aren't accepting wifi connections.

If you turn off your wifi, you may stop a hacker from stealing data files or controlling your cyber arm, but he can still short it out and cause it to be useless rather easily. It won't cause permanent damage, but he can basically shut your tech down without effort. A short circuited maglock opens the door, a shorted camera stops transmitting and so on. This is basically a hacker AoE if he wants it to be, where he can shut down basically all non-wifi tech in his signal range. He can also be selective, so for instance, just shutting down non-wifi cameras. So it's basically stupid to have something non-wifi that you care about, because the hacker can just choose to jam all non-wifi wired cyberware or whatever and there's nothing you can do about it. That means it definitely pays to have stuff be wifi with security. Even just having it be wifi and unsecured will actually be slower for the hacker to penetrate since he must then enter the node individually.

Wifi jamming in this way has the drawback of making you fairly easy to pinpoint. People can basically trace your commlink within a minute or two and track where you are exactly. Of course, given that you can do this with any commlink, you can totally just drop off an expendable link and leave it behind when you're jamming, making it a poor substitute for real security.

2. You can't stop the signal
Wireless signals cannot be blocked. Period. Short of destroying the transmitting device, the signals will go a specific signal range and there's jack shit anyone can do about it.

3. Main matrix nexuses/gateways are near unhackable but don't contain any data.

Basically this means that you have to show up in person generally to hack any worthwhile system. Because basically while the main processor has a great deal of protection, you can totally hack individual devices if you're in signal range. So hacking a security camera or a maglock is very possible and makes on-site hacking the norm, not the exception.

Under this setup, matrix nexuses would not handle actual data. They are solely security machines that regulate incoming matrix communications, like a router on crack. Basically the explanation is that if they used them for other processes, like corporate work, it'd compromise security. Every program you run on that thing introduces new exploits, so the safest thing to do is just have it run security and routing code and make the security rock solid. So the nexuses actually don't store any data, aside from maybe occasional backups.

Actual data is secured on various non-wifi data servers that a hacker has to actually manually plug into the data server with a wire (to bypass the nexus). This generally requires his teammates get him to the room the data server is in, then cover him while he hacks it. You could also get a teammate to run in and hook up a wireless transmitting device to the data server to let the hacker remotely connect from somewhere else. But in any case, you have to get up close and personal to that data server. Since it's non-wifi you could always jam it, but that wouldn't actually do you a heck of a lot of good as far as recovering the data.

If an actual matrix nexus needs to be destroyed for some reason, it's generally done so with explosives, not hacking.

[Murtak]

A lone hacker sitting in a van is basically untraceable and completely safe from anything other than matrix attacks.

Why would he be untraceable?

So why would this dude leave the safety of his house and put himself in the line of fire?

Because fewer matrix actions = less chance of detection = less chance of getting your brain fried. Going along with the team lets him enter the matrix right where he needs to be.

Right now, the way they accomplish that is wifi blocking. Stuff in faraday cages or copper paint can basically force the team to go inside. The problem however is that it also begs the question of why you wouldn't just paint cameras with that stuff as standard fare? It's not very expensive, and you can basically create unhackable security.

Wireless cameras are bullshit anyways. If they don't transmit to a monitored location they are not very useful. Shielded buildings are not useless, but are damn hard ti realize (and definitely not cheap). Remember, a single microdrone, some wire and two repeaters and you just fucked up the building's shielding. Also most buildings are easy to get into as a person, legitimately or not. For shielding to actually work you need to keep everyone and everything out of the shielded area, or at least to scrutinize everything passing in. That virtually rules out large facilities and facilities frequented by a large number of people.

Seriously, wifi blocking is bullshit as a security measure. It is fine to stop vandalism, and corps will do it, but it is nothing but the matrix equivalent of chain-link wire.

[Fuchs]

My group has a decker NPC, and infiltrating a building to grant him access to hack by setting up transmitters is what the runners do at times.