(Shadowrun) Perfect Crime Matrix Rules [WIP]

[Chamomile]

Either all enemies have to be hackable or the process of making yourself unhackable has to bone you so hard that the hacker has already effectively contributed to combat as a debuffer.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Hacking does not, however, have to be of the form, "[...] and now I have root access to your brain!", right?

[Grek]

I honestly think the TacNet idea is the way to go. The focus however, should not be on the party's TacNet, but on the Corporate and especially the Police TacNets. Surveillance systems need to be huge, omnipresent and powerful. You should not be able to draw a gun anywhere in Seattle without a dozen monitoring noting down the the make and model of your weapon, your appearance, weight, how many bullets you fired and what you had for breakfast that morning. Without appropriate (or appropriately spoofed) credentials on the gun's RFID tag, security will be on you like fleas on a dog. Without someone to scrub the records afterward, you still get caught as soon as someone reports the crime. Making your gun hackable doesn't make it shoot more accurately or fire bigger bullets, it lets you continue to own it without having SWAT constantly breathing down your neck.

[Lokathor]

Hacking does not, however, have to be of the form, "[...] and now I have root access to your brain!", right?

"Firewall --" has to be a worse situation for you than "Firewall 1", or people will just use Drop-out.
So using no tech at all has to be a bad plan for you.
Which means that some sort of "hacking thing" has to work on luddites.

[Username17]

You should not be able to draw a gun anywhere in Seattle without a dozen monitoring noting down the the make and model of your weapon, your appearance, weight, how many bullets you fired and what you had for breakfast that morning.

That's completely incompatible with the hacker being an optional member of the team, isn't it? If the non-hacking Street Samurai can't even go outside without a hacker team mate running overwatch, you've failed to support some key archetypes.

Hacking does not, however, have to be of the form, "[...] and now I have root access to your brain!", right?

Theoretically? No it does not. In actually practice, almost certainly does.

Basically everything Heisenberg wrote on this chapter can be tossed in the circular file, because none of it makes any difference or sense until you've nailed down the Nash equilibrium of why people do whatever it is that they do that exposes them to hackattacks given the knowledge that hackattacks exist and are at least as effective as a moderately skilled person firing an SMG at you. Because if they aren't as good as an SMG, then hackers won't use them, and if people don't do whatever it is that they need to do in order to expose them to hackattacks, then hackers can't use them.

If the combat hacker cannot or will not use their hack attacks, then hack attacks do not, in effect, exist. And then your entire subsection on Matrix Combat is a waste of ink if you print it and a waste of time to read in any case.

Now the easiest design space to work from is that hackattacks require only that the target be in line of sight of the hacker. This is solid because that is something that the enemy is going to do, if for no other reason than to shoot their own guns. If it requires that they do anything on top of that - such as turn on a direct neural interface in the middle of combat, then you're on extremely thin ice. It is, after all, entirely possible to kill someone with half a brick in a sock, so it's rather difficult to explain why someone would take some tangential action that allows them to be murdered through the internet before they had finished running over to the hacker and bludgeoning them to death with a piece of masonry.

Now if you take a step back, you could validate the hacker as a character without providing any hackattacks at all. There was a recent episode of Almost Human where an overwatch hacker spent an entire facility assault creating holographic duplicates of the hero in order to make enemies miss with bullets. If you rethink the Hacker entirely as an archetype that takes their hacking actions in combat to give buffs to the other characters, then you don't need to be targeting enemies at all. And once you've done that, any concerns about whether enemies are hackable or not simply vanish. It's not compatible with Shadowrun's concept of attack programs and black IC and shit, but it's a possible design space.

Practically speaking, I am openly contemptuous of peoples' abilities to make combat hackers that can't hack naked brains and have that work in a cyberpunk RPG. Not because it's theoretically impossible, but because it's so exceedingly difficult and requires so many layers of Wine In Front of Me thinking that I honestly just don't think anyone who wants to do it is actually capable of doing it. People who are smart enough to even get half way through that design process are smart enough to not try.

-Username17

[Grek]

You should not be able to draw a gun anywhere in Seattle without a dozen monitoring noting down the the make and model of your weapon, your appearance, weight, how many bullets you fired and what you had for breakfast that morning.

That's completely incompatible with the hacker being an optional member of the team, isn't it? If the non-hacking Street Samurai can't even go outside without a hacker team mate running overwatch, you've failed to support some key archetypes.

Not so! Street Samurai have a few options that don't involve hacking a hacker on the team:

1. Improvised/Primitive Weapons. As sophisticated as recognition software is, automatic systems still have to deal with the issue of false alarms. The vast majority of people using a tire iron or carrying a baseball bat are not using these objects to assault people. As a result, alerts about these items just get ignored by the police unless an actual crime is reported by an actual person. No witness means no report, and no report means no crime.

2. Learn a Traditional Martial Art. Hands and feet are so ubiquitous that they don't get tracked at all, even if there's an APB for a boxer with cyberfists tearing through the city. A similar issue occurs with weapons that are very uncommon or very primitive - the security system was never designed to understand that it needs to be concerned about a man who dresses as a bat and throws boomerangs at people and simply fails to report anything amiss.

3. Steal Authorization. If the SIN on your ID says that you're an Ares Security Officer and that you're authorized to fire guns inside the Ares compound, no alarms go off when you do so. Getting an ID like that likely involves kidnapping and possibly several other felonies, but once you do so, you can get away with as much gunfire as you like with someone else taking the blame until you've made your getaway to a country without extradition.

[TiaC]

How well would it work to say that in almost any location, there will be some machinery that could be hacked into being dangerous? Therefore, dropping out just makes the hacker turn the world on you instead. The obvious example is cars, getting run over will seriously crimp your style even if you are a major badass.

[Username17]

How well would it work to say that in almost any location, there will be some machinery that could be hacked into being dangerous? Therefore, dropping out just makes the hacker turn the world on you instead. The obvious example is cars, getting run over will seriously crimp your style even if you are a major badass.

The game doesn't take place on a space station, it takes place on Earth. Specifically, it takes place on a near future Earth where a bunch of regions and people have acquired magic and gone neo-primitive. So considering that you may in fact be called upon to assault a compound that is literally a big stone temple full of jaguar shapeshifters, that option isn't even on the table.

-Username17

[Nath]

How well would it work to say that in almost any location, there will be some machinery that could be hacked into being dangerous? Therefore, dropping out just makes the hacker turn the world on you instead. The obvious example is cars, getting run over will seriously crimp your style even if you are a major badass.

The game doesn't take place on a space station, it takes place on Earth. Specifically, it takes place on a near future Earth where a bunch of regions and people have acquired magic and gone neo-primitive. So considering that you may in fact be called upon to assault a compound that is literally a big stone temple full of jaguar shapeshifters, that option isn't even on the table.

Well, as far as the quality of game design goes, the big stone temple is not much worse to hacker than Background rating can be to magical characters, entrance scanners to cybered and armed characters, and narrow corridors to rigger.

Well, that is to say, heavy background count, omnipresent scanners and the very nature of riggers do make the game unplayable, so GM actively removes them. Dunno about big stone temples. I just mean, people may not rise the playability bar higher when redesigning the hacker archetype concept than the bar actually is for other archetype.

[Cyberzombie]

"Firewall --" has to be a worse situation for you than "Firewall 1", or people will just use Drop-out.
So using no tech at all has to be a bad plan for you.
Which means that some sort of "hacking thing" has to work on luddites.

Well not really. Your basic use of technology against luddites should be taking advantage of all the awesome shit technology lets you do that they don't have access to. Cyberware, smartguns, etc. It's just a natural fact that less advanced peoples have a disadvantage against more advanced. So if your group wants to eschew modern technology and use the equivalent of flintlocks, then that should be its own drawback. So one side has drones, smartguns, optic camouflage and wired reflexes and the other doesn't.

The real problem has always been avoiding the problem of people turning off their wireless, because you need a tangible gain of having your wired reflexes hooked into your commlink with wireless turned on. And I think the solution there lies in teamwork elements. You'd basically need to retool the combat system so that there's a lot of problematic issues that wireless Tacnets solve. Like you've got these teammates dodging/moving at ridiculously fast speeds with wired reflexes, and the potential for friendly fire, especially in a tight area like a corridor is probably pretty high. Having something that auto-disengages your gun from firing if it would hit an ally would be something people would want to take advantage of. And even if you're a mage not using a gun, it's nice to have something wireless to relay to your friends where you are and what you're going to do so they don't shoot you in the back. Simple IFF functions would be nice too, so that your security can tell who is an employee versus who is an intruder and would require wireless connectivity to a corporate mainframe.

Having a Tacnet that keeps everyone in sync would be a huge advantage in warfare and needs to be treated as such, so people keep their wireless functionality on for a bunch of bonuses.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Now if you take a step back, you could validate the hacker as a character without providing any hackattacks at all. There was a recent episode of Almost Human where an overwatch hacker spent an entire facility assault creating holographic duplicates of the hero in order to make enemies miss with bullets. If you rethink the Hacker entirely as an archetype that takes their hacking actions in combat to give buffs to the other characters, then you don't need to be targeting enemies at all. And once you've done that, any concerns about whether enemies are hackable or not simply vanish. It's not compatible with Shadowrun's concept of attack programs and black IC and shit, but it's a possible design space.

This is what I was suggesting.

[Heisenberg]

Ok, Lokathor, I don't think you actually have anything to contribute at this point. I have concluded you are basically just trolling. If he is not trolling, his goals are just so fundamentally incompatible with mine that he has absolutely nothing to offer. I want hackers to be able to hack technology, but not unaugmented brains. He wants...I don't fucking know. Or care. But it does not mesh with what I'm trying for here.

So basically, for hackers to be able to be useful in combat, the setting either needs hackers to be able to hack people without cyberware, for everyone to have cyberware by default, or for bonuses you get by using hackable cyberware to be so uber that everyone wants it.

Since Heisenberg hates the first since he doesn't like the flavour and carrot/stick cyberware can be easily fucked up as shown by SR5, how would you need to change the setting so that everyone has cyber?

Ok, here's the thing. In SR4/5, Cyberware (and technology in GENERAL) is ALREADY so uber that everyone wants it (except mages that care about their essence, and even they want the tech that doesn't go in their bodies). But in SR4/5, you also have the bullshit option of just "disabling" the option to make your shit hackable, at basically no cost. My solution is to remove that option, and pretend it never existed, because it is bullshit, and stupid.

Which brings us to the real dichotomy: which is that either Hackers can hack any opponent regardless of how luddite, or you balance the Hacker archetype on the assumption that they have no offensive actions to take in combat.

I think this real dichotomy is actually a false dichotomy.

I think that a model can be created where if you have a technological power source (modern guns, cyberware, sensory gadgets, vehicle, what have you, a tacnet) it (and therefore you) can be hacked, but if you don't, then you can't, but you're giving up on all of the benefits of all of the above.

Magicians being immune to the hacking-based hackattacks of deckers does not make deckers completely nonviable since deckers are still contributing a lot to the party in a non-combat role. But that same excuse doesn't fucking work for deckers not being able to hack anyone in combat, ever.

It's kind of like in D&D if you have magical buffs and/or magic items you are vulnerable to dispel magic/disjunction, but if you don't then you're not. Kind of. This isn't a perfect analogy.

The most succinct declaration of design intent I can think of: I just want to make hacking someone's cybereyes like in Ghost in the Shell or turning the safety on someoen's gun into the on position and locking it there a fucking thing you can do with one action. (Add to that: I don't want hackers to be able to hack unaugmented human brains.)

Basically, I don't want to expand the role of what hackers/deckers do. I want them to be able to ACTUALLY do what they are constantly described in doing in the flavortext of SR4, better and faster. So much so that the team decker can actually turn off an enemy's cybereyes in a single combat turn with a good roll, and that if you encounter an enemy team, you might actually consider spraying some lead at the enemy decker instead of the enemy mage.

Any matrix system that doesn't acknowledge and answer this core problem isn't even worth reading. It can't work, so I don't see why I or anyone else should waste their times reading through it with a fine comb to figure out how it doesn't.

Yes, of course as someone who hasn't read it you are the most qualified to declare that it isn't worth reading. Asshole.

I only know a little about the whole hacking cavemen carrot/stick dichotomy so I apologize for probably covering very well trodden ground. But why is it not feasible to make a binary separation of the equipment into two camps.
1: Very shitty and unhackable: I.E. Machete's, AK's, Plate Male
2: Good and hackable: I.E. Lightsabers, any modern firearm, any modern armor.

If you just made a large, uniform, mechanical difference between how good weapons and armor are that were made before and after chips started getting put in everything it seems like that would work at least on casual observation.

This is basically what I'm going for, only instead of the difference being large, uniform, and mechanical it's large, eclectic, and variable.

But basically my intention is that unless you are using like pre-2050s tech, everything you are using is hackable. And pre-2050s tech does not include any of the cool shit in the Shadowrun gear chapter, like smartlinked guns, rigger-controlled vehicles, and

It is a little irritating at this point that this topic is being discussed, in extremis, in the abstract, when I have provided a text for consideration. I recognize that my text is in an early state and still cleaves very closely to SR4 (which it won't as much later on its life), but I still feel like it is there and no one has actually read it and commented on its particulars. (I know Lokathor in particular made a fucking point of not reading it, which is one reason I'm not reading his posts anymore at this stage). But I am not going to get worked up into a rage about it at this point, because the theoretical/abstract/high level discussion is still pretty entertaining and fruitful.

Now the easiest design space to work from is that hackattacks require only that the target be in line of sight of the hacker. This is solid because that is something that the enemy is going to do, if for no other reason than to shoot their own guns. If it requires that they do anything on top of that - such as turn on a direct neural interface in the middle of combat, then you're on extremely thin ice. It is, after all, entirely possible to kill someone with half a brick in a sock, so it's rather difficult to explain why someone would take some tangential action that allows them to be murdered through the internet before they had finished running over to the hacker and bludgeoning them to death with a piece of masonry.

Now I'm morbidly curious: is it actually not possible to hack someone's gun or cyberarm in EotM? Can you only hack their brain meats? Is Drop Out still a thing in EotM?

If someone's gun, or smart goggles, or cyberarm, or whatever piece of technology can be wirelessly hacked (from line of sight or otherwise) in EotM what is the in-game reasoning why they can't just disable wireless and set hacking to off? The out of game reasoning is that having that option is bullshit and stupid obviously, but some people think in-game reasoning is vital.

Well not really. Your basic use of technology against luddites should be taking advantage of all the awesome shit technology lets you do that they don't have access to. Cyberware, smartguns, etc. It's just a natural fact that less advanced peoples have a disadvantage against more advanced. So if your group wants to eschew modern technology and use the equivalent of flintlocks, then that should be its own drawback. So one side has drones, smartguns, optic camouflage and wired reflexes and the other doesn't.

I agree. That's all.

[deaddmwalking]

Basically, I don't want to expand the role of what hackers/deckers do. I want them to be able to ACTUALLY do what they are constantly described in doing in the flavortext of SR4, better and faster. So much so that the team decker can actually turn off an enemy's cybereyes in a single combat turn with a good roll, and that if you encounter an enemy team, you might actually consider spraying some lead at the enemy decker instead of the enemy mage.

If deckers can disable your cyber eyes, people won't want cybereyes.

My normal unaugmented eyes work and can't be hacked.

How much better do cyber-eyes have to be before I choose to risk blindness before I choose to use 'old technology'. The answer is going to vary between players, but for most people, it's alot.

If I don't get 2x chance of hitting (or more), I'm going to keep using my eyes (unless the penalty for being blind is insignificant).

[Heisenberg]

The thing is, the benefits of cybereyes are kind of abstract and variable. They include a lot of intangibles. It's hard to calculate the benefit of things like thermographic vision and ultrasound; seeing in the dark and seeing through walls are extremely useful situationally, but they're hard to pin a value on. Smartlink gives you +2 dice to attack, so that's pretty nice. But some things are way more intangible or situation-dependent even than seeing in the dark or seeing through walls, like image link (being able to display a map of the area in your field of view) or eye recording units (being able to record something it is useful to record without packing or using a video camera/smartphone). Cybereyes can do a lot and it's very hard to say if, taken cumulatively, it adds up to doubling the chance of hitting. But I'd say it's probably close.

DDMW: let me rephrase your statement somewhat by doing some noun replacement.

If deckers can disable your vehicles, people won't want vehicles.

Still agree?

If deckers can disable your guns, people won't want vehicles.

What about now?

How much better is driving a car to walking to where you need to go? How much better is shooting someone with a gun than using a muscle-powered weapon like a bow or trying to close to melee to hit someone with a sword?

[deaddmwalking]

Your noun replacement doesn't work.

If you disable my eyes, I can't see.

If you disable my car, I can still walk.

As long as I have a reliable replacement (although admittedly less convenient) they are sufficiently dissimilar to make the comparison meaningless.

Now, if I have augmented goggles and you can disable them, but I can remove them and see normally, we'd be at rough equivalency. But of course, who cares of the Hacker disables my goggles if I can remove them and still function at 80% efficiency?

I don't think you need to allow 'luddite hacking', but I also don't think your offensive hacker is a good idea.

Players will accept some 'debuffs' that they can't avoid. If you magically blind me, I'm going to have to accept it, because the only way to protect myself would be to deliberately blind myself. But I don't have to accept hacker based debuffs if I can simply avoid them by not having cybergear.

Think of it this way. My fully augmented cyberbody is 100%. My hacked cyberbody is 0%. My unhackable and unagumented natural body is 50%.

How much time do I have to be at 100% to accept the time I am at 0% as a fair trade? You might think that 50/50 is the right balance, because on average, I'm just as effective as my unagumented natural body. You'd be wrong. Not being able to act at all is worse then being able to act but being of limited effectiveness.

Now, if I have an option to use non-integrated gear that gets me up to 80% effectiveness but hacking it takes me down to 50% rather than 0%, I'm going to eat that up and demand seconds.

[Username17]

If deckers can disable your cyber eyes, people won't want cybereyes.

My normal unaugmented eyes work and can't be hacked.

How much better do cyber-eyes have to be before I choose to risk blindness before I choose to use 'old technology'. The answer is going to vary between players, but for most people, it's alot.

If I don't get 2x chance of hitting (or more), I'm going to keep using my eyes (unless the penalty for being blind is insignificant).

Not only that, but if hacking the cybereyes isn't a viable combat action equivalent in effectiveness to shooting real bullets at people, then the hacking might as well not exist. And if the threat of hacking the cybereyes is enough that players don't get them, then the hacking might as well not exist. It's a virtually impossible design challenge. And when you make it dependent on individual devices, the challenge becomes essentially impossible.

You need to create a hacking action that is worth using in combat for each device, while simultaneously providing risk adverse players a carrot for using each and every hackable device such that the Nash equilibrium is that the players use all those devices in combat situations even though they open them up to hacking attacks that are at least as effective as having fucking grenades thrown at you.

It's absurd. What's actually going to happen is that anything which is perceived to be a liability due to the potentiality of hacking will not be used, and anything which is perceived to not be a liability due to hacking potentials is pretty much by definition something that players can live with being hacked. Which means in turn that while those things will be used, hacking them isn't worth your fucking time as evidenced by the fact that players have already logically deduced that having them hacked is less bad than getting shot at.

Bottom line: the Nash equilibrium of the entire carrot model is that there's nothing to hack that's worth hacking in combat so the combat hacker archetype is fucking dead before you actually design one fucking thing. And it's a really long wade through a whole fuck tonne of minutiae to figure out which pile all the devices belong in (those that aren't worth hacking and those that aren't worth installing because the risk of hacking would be too high), but since all roads lead to "the hacker character is fucking useless" I don't care to even read your manuscript if you can't first explain how you've solved this problem.

Because let's be honest: I threw down this gauntlet by explaining the paradox in 2007, and no one has been able to solve this particular catch 22. It's not solvable. This entire line of design thought is a dead end because it can't fucking work. The authors of SR5 set out to "prove Frank wrong" by making a carrot system that worked... and they failed. Just like every single other person has failed, and will continue to fail, because it's ridiculously absurdly difficult.

-Username17

[Ice9]

One thing, for cybereyes specifically, is that (in SR4, at least), there's very little advantage in them over glasses/goggles. The latter are less noticeable (or even for goggles, not more noticeable), don't eat up essence, and if someone hacks them you just take them off and keep going. Or switch to another that was previously turned off, because they're not very expensive.

Sure, Cybereyes can mount more points of enhancements, but considering that glasses have enough for Vision Enhancement + Smartlink + Flash Protection + Something, goggles have more, and you can switch between multiple pairs as needed, there doesn't seem to be anything worth the hassle for cybereyes.


Edit: It seems like you could have a "rock paper scissors" type deal if you just made cyberwear/drones effective to the point that they completely faceroll luddites (including magic). Then you'd have "hacker defeats cyber, cyber defeats magic, magic defeats hacker".

I'm not sure if this is really a desirable solution, because it means that if you have a street sam and an adept in the party, then either:
A) The street sam frequently gets hacked, annoying that player.
B) The adept is basically pathetic compared to the street sam, annoying that player.

[Heisenberg]

@ddmw:

And what about the gun example? In a setting where guns can be hacked (and remain the pinnacle of personal weapons tech), would you not use a gun?

***

And if the threat of hacking the cybereyes is enough that players don't get them, then the hacking might as well not exist

This assumption presumes that hackers will only target players. What about the things and people that players fight?

The authors of SR5 set out to "prove Frank wrong" by making a carrot system that worked... and they failed.

They failed because the carrot was a set of incredibly finnicky and minute wireless bonuses you got for turning hacking on with your technology. The carrot should just be using modern/future technology taken as a whole. That's a much bigger, juicier carrot. All modern guns should be hackable, and so forth.

***

Gonna repeat this because I think it got lost in the shuffle.

Now I'm morbidly curious: is it actually not possible to hack someone's gun or cyberarm in EotM? Can you only hack their brain meats? Is Drop Out still a thing in EotM?

If someone's gun, or smart goggles, or cyberarm, or whatever piece of technology can be wirelessly hacked (from line of sight or otherwise) in EotM what is the in-game reasoning why they can't just disable wireless and set hacking to off? The out of game reasoning is that having that option is bullshit and stupid obviously, but some people think in-game reasoning is vital.

I admit that I asked earlier to stop discussing EotM but I am very curious about this particular eventuality. Because a lot of the people advocating EotM where hackers can hack fucking brains also seem very averse to the idea of hackers hacking equipment/'ware, which seems insanely bizarre to me.

One thing, for cybereyes specifically, is that (in SR4, at least), there's very little advantage in them over glasses/goggles. The latter are less noticeable (or even for goggles, not more noticeable), don't eat up essence, and if someone hacks them you just take them off and keep going. Or switch to another that was previously turned off, because they're not very expensive.

Sure, Cybereyes can mount more points of enhancements, but considering that glasses have enough for Vision Enhancement + Smartlink + Flash Protection + Something, goggles have more, and you can switch between multiple pairs as needed, there doesn't seem to be anything worth the hassle for cybereyes.

Good observation. Actually, I've been aware of this and SRPC will fix it when I get to the gear chapter. Since cybereyes have an essence cost and goggles/glasses don't, cybereyes will be explicitly and clearly better than the no-essence-cost-option.

[Username17]

I put Heisenberg on my ignore list. If he ever comes up with an idea that isn't stupid, could someone point it out?

-Username17

[Heisenberg]

*Sigh*

This is starting to feel distinctly childish. I have just asked Frank a few direct questions, could someone point that out to him, please? If not, fine. I'd be pleasantly surprised if his answers lead to productive discussion.

Edit1: I'd Ignore Frank, but that would basically be disabling around 40% of the posts on this forum.

Edit2: Taking a break again, going to do a bit of actual work on the game, be back most likely around next Monday or next Thursday.

[Sashi]

And what about the gun example? In a setting where guns can be hacked (and remain the pinnacle of personal weapons tech), would you not use a gun?

This is a non-issue because you can throw guns away. Therefore I carry around my super-wiz cybergun with thermal imaging and auto-targeting hooked up to smartgoggles to fight cyber samurai and mages, then I pull out my AK-47 and blast holes in the Decker.

It's not even that costly because by definition the weapons that proof against hackers are cheap.

[JesterZero]

You might not like Lokathor constantly comparing your material to EOTM, but his initial question has still never been addressed: how does this work? Because until there's some sort of plausible ingame explanation for that, then all the handwaving around technology actually makes it more magic than magic. Why do my eyeballs HAVE to be connected to Twitter? Why does my spine HAVE to talk to Google?

The cyberware / bioware dichotomy also came up earlier. So my cybereyes with lowlight vision can be hacked, but my catseyes can't? My wired reflexes can be hacked but my synaptic accelerator can't? That's just like SR4, except bioware is the new skinlink. If I'm a semi-competent criminal in that world, that just means that for most if not all of the shadowruns, the Biosam can be on my team, and the Cybersam can't. If for no other reason than hiring the Biosam doesn't require me to also hire Matrix Guy and split the payout more ways.

[Lokathor]

Ok, Lokathor, I don't think you actually have anything to contribute at this point. I have concluded you are basically just trolling. If he is not trolling, his goals are just so fundamentally incompatible with mine that he has absolutely nothing to offer. I want hackers to be able to hack technology, but not unaugmented brains. He wants...I don't fucking know. Or care. But it does not mesh with what I'm trying for here.

My goals are: You have to make in-game justifications for the mechanical decisions you make. If the justifications lead to a world that doesn't make sense, start over. Example, you've said that cyberware can be hacked "just cause". That doesn't make sense. There's no reason for the software to have any wireless interaction with the world, so either there's no explanation at all (which is bullshit) or you have to make up some explanation like "high density signal" or something where the hacker can just decide to change what the software is on a target device as soon as the device has a computer chip at all. And then when you make up stuff, you have to explain the limits too. Example, the entire magic system is made up, so there's literally a list of 9 things that spellcasting can never do in shadowrun even if you make up your own spells (Street Magic p159-160), and there's also lots of in-setting explanation about how the mana plane interacts with the world so that the Players and GM have some guidance about what's going on and how to handle a situation that the rules don't directly cover.

in SR4/5, you also have the bullshit option of just "disabling" the option to make your shit hackable, at basically no cost. My solution is to remove that option, and pretend it never existed, because it is bullshit, and stupid.

That doesn't make sense though. If you want hacking to always work on devices, you need to explain what super special powers (that don't exist yet) these hackers have that lets them hack stuff despite the target not having wifi in the first place. Also, does it work through walls? What about thick walls? What about walls with wifi blocking paint? What about a faraday cage? does it work from really far away? These are things that need to be known.

I know Lokathor in particular made a fucking point of not reading it, which is one reason I'm not reading his posts anymore at this stage

I didn't read it at first, until you posted the second part about software and ratings and all that. Then you misused the term "open source" so intensely that I went back and read the whole thing.

Here's a question that pertains to your specific rules: Even if I have a bunch of wireless cybergear (like an idiot), why can't I turn down the Signal rating on all of my stuff to 0 and prevent anyone beyond 5m from being able to "Brick Device" any of my devices? Can I do that, or can I not do that? In the real world, I can overclock or underclock a CPU, I can disable a firewall, I can turn down the power to an antenna. So it seems like I should be able to turn down my character's cyberware antenna power too. If I can't, why not?

Now I'm morbidly curious: is it actually not possible to hack someone's gun or cyberarm in EotM? Can you only hack their brain meats? Is Drop Out still a thing in EotM?

You know for someone who's all about reading stuff you don't seem to have read it I guess.

Well, you can give them a seizure. You can shove them into VR and they have to make a special roll to break out of it. There's no program written that hacks a specific piece of cyberware though, nor one that goes after a smartlink gun.

Why are you jizzing so hard over Smartlink anyway? It's a +2 to hit. That's all it does. That's nice, but it's not the end of the day if you have to drop your smartgun and use a normal gun. A street sam can easily throw down like 14 to 18 dice, the loss of a +2 isn't gonna make you suddenly useless.

If someone's gun, or smart goggles, or cyberarm, or whatever piece of technology can be wirelessly hacked (from line of sight or otherwise) in EotM what is the in-game reasoning why they can't just disable wireless and set hacking to off? The out of game reasoning is that having that option is bullshit and stupid obviously, but some people think in-game reasoning is vital.

Because in EotM there is "high density signal" which lets you just read and write data within a device from afar ("device" here includes "your brain"). So if a person has their Signal set to 0 then their devices aren't in Handshake so you can't form a Connection so you can't use Crash on them. However, Blackhammer has a range of Signal (LOS), so you'll still get wireless seizure beams sent in your direction. Your electronics will be pretty safe though.

And what about the gun example? In a setting where guns can be hacked (and remain the pinnacle of personal weapons tech), would you not use a gun?

Because it's only +2!

This assumption presumes that hackers will only target players. What about the things and people that players fight?

Hopefully the NPC opposition is as smart as the PCs are. If all your enemies are just making stupid decisions then the game becomes not very fun. They can make stupid decisions some of the time, but not all the time.

I admit that I asked earlier to stop discussing EotM but I am very curious about this particular eventuality. Because a lot of the people advocating EotM where hackers can hack fucking brains also seem very averse to the idea of hackers hacking equipment/'ware, which seems insanely bizarre to me.

It's not about what we want or don't want, it's about what a rational actor would do in a given situation. If there's guns, you're gonna wear armored jackets. If there's enemy hackers, you're gonna get IC / Agents to help your computer defend itself. If there's wireless hacking that requires handshake range (as yours does), and you don't care about your wireless offense because you're shooting guns and spells instead, then you'll turn your wireless range all the way down and the enemy will be sad that you're not in Handshake range any more and you'll laugh.

EotM "solves" this part of the process by then saying "okay, but even within Signal range, you can still try to shoot seizure beams if you have LOS, so their brains are still vulnerable even if their devices are not, and hackers still have a thing they can do", assuming that killing dudes is even what the hacker would be doing. Usually they'd be doing higher priority tasks like opening doors and misdirecting reinforcements with false data and stealing the pay data and so on. Cause anyone can kill a dude.

[deaddmwalking]

@ddmw:

And what about the gun example? In a setting where guns can be hacked (and remain the pinnacle of personal weapons tech), would you not use a gun?

Of course I'd use a gun. I'd carry a half-dozen guns if I could. I'd also carry a Katana. Unless the hacker can hack all of my weapons simultaneously, I drop my SMG and pull my Street Special, or I grab my AK-47 from the truck. The big difference between hacking cyberwear and other items is that I can drop carried equipment. Cybergear may be objectively better than any carried items, but as soon as you account for the fact that you can't discard it when it becomes useless, those advantages cease to exist.

From an in-game perspective, every time you're going on a run, you're risking your life. Are you going to take the super-expensive awesome tech that can't survive being dropped or are you going to take something simple and reliable? Since your life is on the line, you go with what is reliable. If you don't believe me, talk to any American soldier who served in Vietnam and dealt with 'failure to extract'. The admittedly anecdotal evidence is people would prefer to have the more reliable AK-47 than the prone to jamming M16. You know, since your life depends on the weapon continuing to function.

And if the threat of hacking the cybereyes is enough that players don't get them, then the hacking might as well not exist

This assumption presumes that hackers will only target players. What about the things and people that players fight?

I'm glad you brought this up, because I was meaning to. From the player perspective, I've already explained why I won't use cyberware that I can't easily discard if I can't trust it to work when I need it most. It doesn't make sense in-game or out-of-game. It's not human nature and it just doesn't work. But if I'm playing a hacker, sure, I absolutely would love the option to knock opponents out of the game because their cyberware is vulnerable to my attacks. You know what you call it when you include monsters that have a specific weakness that one of your players can deliver?

That my friend, is a pity monster.

You're going to include enemies that rather than using sound tactics employed by the PCs instead deliberately create a vulnerability for the PCs to exploit.

You might have players that enjoy defeating those kinds of opponents. But some players are self-aware enough to realize that you're not really setting up 'challenges'. You're just soft-balling the opposition to make the character feel better about his choices.

From a design perspective, that's a bad idea. From a GM perspective, if your player creates a character under these rules and you want to make him feel useful, pity monsters are an unfortunate necessity. Since you're the designer, think twice, then think twice more before you make 'the GM should include opponents that use sub-optimal strategies to make the PC feel like they're contributing in a meaningful way' a core part of your game.

At that point, you might as well allow plain-brain hacking because you're just creating excuses for your PC to be able to affect the outcomes of the encounter. Or just rule that everyone has cyberware. Maybe it's implanted at birth like others have suggested.

But since you don't like the flavor of that, you have to accept that some enemies are unhackable. And if some enemies can't be hacked, the Decker can't contribute to those encounters in this way. If the enemies are smart, and Deckers are as common as they're posited to be in Shadowrun, smart enemies will ensure they don't use that equipment. Ultimately, either hacking is really effective, so people don't make themselves vulnerable to it, or hacking isn't effective and the hacker doesn't bother and uses something that can work.

You really can't have it both ways, simultaneously.

They failed because the carrot was a set of incredibly finnicky and minute wireless bonuses you got for turning hacking on with your technology. The carrot should just be using modern/future technology taken as a whole. That's a much bigger, juicier carrot. All modern guns should be hackable, and so forth.

So let's talk about this. In 'real life', I could conceivably get an ultra-modern electro-magnetic super-sonic firing rail gun that fires an aluminum slug capable of taking out a tank by incredible velocity alone. Sounds pretty good, right? That's your 'ultra-modern' weapon. If I need to kill someone, it could be nice to have one of those.

But if that weapon won't work if the opponent has a hacker, I'll use something else.

An AK-47 is a real weapon that can't be hacked. It's purely mechanical. It's also capable of killing a person. I don't know how many people exactly, but it apparently ranks as the firearm with the most kills, and probably by a fair margin.

That's the fundamental issue. If my super-tech goes from 'super' to 'worthless', I won't use it as long as I have a weapon available that is 'decent'. Your best case scenario is that I use a weapon that is super-awesome, and then as soon as it gets compromised, I use a slightly less effective weapon. Basically, you're giving me free license to steam-roll any encounter that doesn't have a Decker and then making Decker fights 'back to normal'.

Ultimately, that just adds a step that makes either Deckers completely required and their contribution is essentially meaningless (it's just like a heal-bot cleric - they have one action they can do in combat and if they don't, you get a TPK) or nobody uses equipment that can be disabled and Deckers are useless. Basically, you're creating a problem so that the Decker can solve it.

If you're playing a Decker, it's not satisfying either way. In the first case, it is a pity monster so you can feel effective, in the second case, you don't actually have any agency because you have a set script you must follow in combat - that's a role better relegated to an NPC.

Good observation. Actually, I've been aware of this and SRPC will fix it when I get to the gear chapter. Since cybereyes have an essence cost and goggles/glasses don't, cybereyes will be explicitly and clearly better than the no-essence-cost-option.

HOW?

Here's the thing. There is real technology that is pretty much as advanced as anything you'll see in Shadowrun (or at least a Hollywood version of it set in the 'modern' world). Any equipment that is even REMOTELY close to cyberware in terms of functionality is better than a permanently installed component that is unreliable. If I can get cyber eyes that can see through walls, why can't I get a pair of goggles that do the same?

You have to have a valid in-game justification for why cyberware works better and so far, there hasn't been one. I don't think there CAN be one. If you say 'it's a game, and I want Hackers to have something to do', well, that's going to do badly with a huge section of the player base.

Take a step back. You want to make this work. People other than Frank are saying 'whoa, fella, this doesn't work'.

You can of course ignore this feedback, but it's not just some imaginary objection. This whole concept is a dead-end. Even if there were a way to balance cyberware in a way that made it desirable enough to opt for even knowing sometimes you'd lose the advantage completely, that's a very SUBJECTIVE determination. If you get the balance right for SOME tables where it works as intended, there are definitely going to be tables where you're just wasting your time. It's a big enough project that you don't want to spend a ton of time on stuff that adds nothing to the majority of games. It's just a section of rules that will be RIGHTFULLY disregarded. People will write reviews and point out that it was a waste of ink and time because either Hackers would be effective so nobody is vulnerable or Hackers wouldn't be effective, so Deckers never use those attacks and throw grenades instead.

If an attack is effective, people will spend time and resources to make themselves resistant. If the cost is simply 'be slightly less effective that you otherwise would be, but you're completely immune', that is the optimal solution and that is what you will see happen - on both sides of the screen.

[Cyberzombie]

I find the whole brain hacking thing very unsatisfying, since it really kills the whole flavor of a hacker. At that point you're basically just playing a mage. The whole point of the hacker is to interact with technology.

Why not just say a hacker can remotely access any device through the same kind of technical sorcery that would otherwise let him hack a brain? I mean if you're okay with someone remotely hacking a brain, which doesn't have wireless, why can't you just remotely hack a cyberarm that has the wireless turned off? Doesn't that fix the problem?