How to make Shadowrun less bad

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Tue Mar 25, 2014 5:04 pm

My own Shadowrun Experience is highly limited and mainly with SR4, but here are some random thoughts on fixing SR:

1. Make chargen suck less. The methodology of "you get a bunch of points, you use those points to buy passes and coupons. The passes let you spend your points on specific psuedo-restricted options, the coupons give you different forms of discounts on spending your remaining points" is overly complicated and highly problematic for balance. You could go pure point buy, or you could go pure class archetype and either would be better. Heck, random fucking rolling on a set of charts would probably be better overall.

2. Have some fucking discipline about your dicepools. Rolling more than 20 d6s is just not something which can happen on the surface of most gametables. If your pools ever get bigger than that, even in the most extreme cases, you should just come out and say the game requires electronic die rolling programs.

3. Use common subsystems whereever possible. There is zero fucking reason for Melee and Gun combat to be handled fundamentally differently at the mechanical level in a game with magical kung-fu-masters. There's zero fucking reason to have skills which overlap, except one's better. There's zero fucking reason why Elves can be Orc posers but Orc can't be Elf posers. In fact there's zero fucking reason why those are individual drawbacks instead of a single versatile "Poses as other metatype" drawback.

Heisenberg · Post by **Heisenberg** » Tue Mar 25, 2014 5:27 pm

I am still working on this [the title of this thread] (by which I mean this). Other projects have forced me to go off the grid for a while, as has life in general, but SRPC

This thread is kind of silly because a lot of people who admit up front that they don't play shadowrun/don't know anything about it are trying to offer suggestions how to fix it. This kind of thing requires some seriously nuanced experience with the game to even approach.

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Tue Mar 25, 2014 5:46 pm

Well, are we talking about fixing Shadowrun while keeping it basically similar, or making the system significantly different while keeping the same setting?

Because if it's the latter, you could do something with the Combat Source / Strategic Source approach. A character gets one of each, plus tertiary capabilities like skills.

Example Combat Sources:
* Cyberwear
* Direct Magic (short term, combat oriented)
* Technomancy
* Adept Powers
* Being a Lucky Bastard? (if you want to support the non-magic non-cyber types)

Example Strategic Sources:
* Face / Well Connected
* Hacking
* Ritual Magic

Rigging could fall into either category, depending on whether you see drones used more to shoot the fuck out of people or go scouting.

In the examples above, the excuse for "why not all of the above" could be that for Combat Sources, they all demand your essence in different ways (being a lucky bastard needs a clean essence slate, let's say). And for the Strategic Sources, they all take enough time to learn/develop that a starting character only has one of them. And could even learn more if they felt like it, why not? But probably will improve their existing field instead.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Tue Mar 25, 2014 6:17 pm

Heisenberg wrote:This kind of thing requires some seriously nuanced experience with the game to even approach.

Blow me Cranston. My experience is in designing game systems that are fun for humans. This is a dice pool based cyberpunk game, it's not special. I don't need to know the names of every author-wank immortal elf in SR to design one. If anything just using general experience and not tapping into grognardism seems advantageous for Shadowrun design because it means you would never even consider designing a separate hacking minigame that took place in an alternate world that was coterminous with the normal world that one member of the party spent all their time in.

On a separate topic I think it would be a setting improvement for Shadowrun if magic, hacking, shooting guns and punchfighting were all assumed parts of every character. Everyone could focus more on some things than others but I would like if Mages could use guns and Street Samurai could use scrolls and both could use computers.

Heisenberg · Post by **Heisenberg** » Tue Mar 25, 2014 6:28 pm

You are an idiot.

Everyone could focus more on some things than others but I would like if Mages could use guns and Street Samurai could use scrolls and both could use computers.

Shadowrun is a classless sytem. Mages CAN use guns, mages and street samurai CAN use computers, but Street Samurai can't use scrolls because there are no SCROLLS in the Shadowrun setting which you would know if you even played Shadowrun before declaring how it should work...you fucking idiot.

Seerow · Post by **Seerow** » Tue Mar 25, 2014 6:44 pm

Heisenberg wrote:I am still working on this [the title of this thread] (by which I mean this). Other projects have forced me to go off the grid for a while, as has life in general, but SRPC

This thread is kind of silly because a lot of people who admit up front that they don't play shadowrun/don't know anything about it are trying to offer suggestions how to fix it. This kind of thing requires some seriously nuanced experience with the game to even approach.

There's a good reason a new thread was made rather than posting in yours.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Tue Mar 25, 2014 6:53 pm

Shadowrun is a classless sytem. Mages CAN use guns, mages and street samurai CAN use computers, but Street Samurai can't use scrolls because there are no SCROLLS

Well that's adorable. Ok listen closely. I know Mages can do the things the other archetypes can do, and that the other archetypes cannot in return do the things that Mages do. But if you notice you might see that there's an asymmetry there. So a Mage can just go to a store and buy a cyberdeck and start hacking, even if not very well but a Street Samurai cannot, with only mild expense of time or money, get the things required to perform some basic magics.

To address this would require some changes to the setting and that seems wise because role protecting only a single classes abilities is a stupid idea. A potential solution would be to put things into the setting that would allow people to use limited magics with a simple purchase or acquisition. These could be things like scrolls or spellbooks, magic weapons or wands, elder sigils or charms.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Mar 25, 2014 7:01 pm

Josh_Kablack wrote: 1. Make chargen suck less. The methodology of "you get a bunch of points, you use those points to buy passes and coupons. The passes let you spend your points on specific psuedo-restricted options, the coupons give you different forms of discounts on spending your remaining points" is overly complicated and highly problematic for balance. You could go pure point buy, or you could go pure class archetype and either would be better. Heck, random fucking rolling on a set of charts would probably be better overall.

The best chargen system Shadowrun ever had was the optional pointbuy system in 2nd edition. You got 100 points, skills cost 1 point, attributes cost 2, resources were bought off a chart, and if you wanted to be a mage you had to throw down a big pile of points up front, but it came with all the magic attribute and spells. That was reasonably fast, for the period. It's still too clunky of course, because equipment purchasing. But since then the movement has been to give more points that are individually smaller. That is fucking bullshit and needs to stop. At least it isn't the latest MechWarrior abortion, where they no-shit give you over a thousand fucking points.

But basically you're running a stat + skill dicepool game so you need people to have distinct piles of stuff. Really honestly, I don't think anyone has come up with a better solution than White Wolf (yes, I know). You get a pile of attributes, you get a pile of skills, you get however many piles of other stuff, you buy all that shit in order, and at the end you have a small and manageable pile of freebie points to buy things in different categories. It's fast enough and it delivers characters who are in fact capable of rolling with the homies.

Where the hammer really has to come down though is gear. A lot more stuff needs to be abstracted and approximated. Literally nothing you can buy during chargen should cost 1¥ or even 50¥.

2. Have some fucking discipline about your dicepools. Rolling more than 20 d6s is just not something which can happen on the surface of most gametables. If your pools ever get bigger than that, even in the most extreme cases, you should just come out and say the game requires electronic die rolling programs.

You know what? If something isn't rolled that often, it genuinely isn't that much of an imposition to roll twelve dice twice. It's seriously not the end of the world as long as the number you're carrying over between rolls is a single digit integer like "3" or "5" and not trying to total up all the pips on all the dice. Rolling 24 die dice pools really isn't something you want to do all the time, but it's not terribad to do it from time to time.

If anything, my complaint goes the other way: the game gets kind of stupid at dicepools of 1 and 2. Stats should seriously start at 3 and not 1. It creates more design space for there to be dogs and eagles and shit.

3. Use common subsystems whereever possible. There is zero fucking reason for Melee and Gun combat to be handled fundamentally differently at the mechanical level in a game with magical kung-fu-masters. There's zero fucking reason to have skills which overlap, except one's better. There's zero fucking reason why Elves can be Orc posers but Orc can't be Elf posers. In fact there's zero fucking reason why those are individual drawbacks instead of a single versatile "Poses as other metatype" drawback.

Agreed. Many things are complicated simply because they were created separately and kept separate because of legacy. That needs to be streamlined and overhauled. The basic action resolution system works great, you'd better have a damn good reason to use some fiddly subsystem instead.

-Username17

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Tue Mar 25, 2014 8:03 pm

I don't know about earlier editions, but since in 4E at least you're not allowed to keep more than a fairly small amount of money past char-gen, you could just have that be your total money, and 'buy' stuff like cyberwear with some kind of much less granular resource system.

Like:
1) You get X number of packages (varies between characters).
2) A cyberwear package gives you one [awesome] piece of gear, two [good] pieces, or four [basic] pieces.
3) Ditto for the other types of packages (weapons/armor, decking gear, drones, vehicle, etc).
4) Then with your fairly small amount of starting nuyen, you can buy minor stuff (which should still probably be less granular than individual rolls of duct tape).

So you have to tag gear with an extra field that might not get used after char-gen (or have a separate set of lists), and that's a little bit of extra space used, but I think it would be worth it.

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Tue Mar 25, 2014 8:12 pm

deanruel87 wrote:
Shadowrun is a classless sytem. Mages CAN use guns, mages and street samurai CAN use computers, but Street Samurai can't use scrolls because there are no SCROLLS
Well that's adorable. Ok listen closely. I know Mages can do the things the other archetypes can do, and that the other archetypes cannot in return do the things that Mages do.

Looks like an easily adopted HR, just give everyone the Mage or Mystic Adept Quality?

Seerow · Post by **Seerow** » Tue Mar 25, 2014 8:52 pm

The best chargen system Shadowrun ever had was the optional pointbuy system in 2nd edition. You got 100 points, skills cost 1 point, attributes cost 2, resources were bought off a chart, and if you wanted to be a mage you had to throw down a big pile of points up front, but it came with all the magic attribute and spells. That was reasonably fast, for the period. It's still too clunky of course, because equipment purchasing. But since then the movement has been to give more points that are individually smaller. That is fucking bullshit and needs to stop. At least it isn't the latest MechWarrior abortion, where they no-shit give you over a thousand fucking points.

Some sort of hybrid class/point system might work? Pick your race and archetype (and possibly secondary archetype for the 'strategic'/noncombat skills). You get a bunch of stuff prepackaged based on that, and get a handful of points (like 20-30ish) to flesh out the rest (pick up/improve skills/attributes, get special qualities, increase whatever base resource comes from your archetype, etc). Combined with some streamlining of equipment purchasing you could have 10-15 minute character generation easily.

You could probably make some sort of optional rule for custom archetypes if you want, that works more like the traditional point buy for people who want that, but it wouldn't be necessary.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Tue Mar 25, 2014 9:05 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
The best chargen system Shadowrun ever had was the optional pointbuy system in 2nd edition. You got 100 points, skills cost 1 point, attributes cost 2, resources were bought off a chart, and if you wanted to be a mage you had to throw down a big pile of points up front, but it came with all the magic attribute and spells. That was reasonably fast, for the period. It's still too clunky of course, because equipment purchasing. But since then the movement has been to give more points that are individually smaller. That is fucking bullshit and needs to stop. At least it isn't the latest MechWarrior abortion, where they no-shit give you over a thousand fucking points.

But basically you're running a stat + skill dicepool game so you need people to have distinct piles of stuff. Really honestly, I don't think anyone has come up with a better solution than White Wolf (yes, I know). You get a pile of attributes, you get a pile of skills, you get however many piles of other stuff, you buy all that shit in order, and at the end you have a small and manageable pile of freebie points to buy things in different categories. It's fast enough and it delivers characters who are in fact capable of rolling with the homies.

Yeah, you could go White Wolf and it would be an improvement. The issue is that you'd have a tough time matching that to an advancement scheme which kept some sort of parity between PCs in an ongoing game.

Personally, I'd probably attempt something a lot closer to Feng Shui -- Here are your basic archetypes in the game, pick one and make a couple of quick choices (like metatype, knowledge skills, which attribute gets a bonus, and if you want to switch one combat skill for an alternate) and you're good to go. Except that I'd also include a "Freelancer" archetype, which would be the build-your-own-archetype kit and probably involve something like White Wolf where you went through each pile in turn to buy things. This seems to be the way that characters have always been presented in SR books, but never actually realized due to designers who can't follow their own chargen rules.

Where the hammer really has to come down though is gear. A lot more stuff needs to be abstracted and approximated. Literally nothing you can buy during chargen should cost 1¥ or even 50¥.

Agreed.
I'm not even entirely sure that gear should be measured in direct currency units and might not be better served by some more abstract wealth system.

I mean, the availability/legality codes are already half of an alternate wealth and purchase system, it might be okay to conflate those into lifestyle. Something along the lines of "I pay $1,000 a month to be in the middle class, this means that I either have already or can borrow a car or a cell phone or a leatherman tool from or anything else of price/availability/legality/code XYZ from someone on like 5 minutes notice."

2. Have some fucking discipline about your dicepools. Rolling more than 20 d6s is just not something which can happen on the surface of most gametables. If your pools ever get bigger than that, even in the most extreme cases, you should just come out and say the game requires electronic die rolling programs.
You know what? If something isn't rolled that often, it genuinely isn't that much of an imposition to roll twelve dice twice. It's seriously not the end of the world as long as the number you're carrying over between rolls is a single digit integer like "3" or "5" and not trying to total up all the pips on all the dice. Rolling 24 die dice pools really isn't something you want to do all the time, but it's not terribad to do it from time to time.

I still say there's a point where the physical action of rolling that many dice becomes disruptive to the gaming environment, and the repeat roll and carry gets really game slowing whenever multiple rerolls are needed. That threshold is probably higher than 20 dice. Upon reflection, I think I'd set it to 36, because you can do that by rolling everything in the plastic cube. Beyond that, I'd want to weigh how badly automatic successes or forced averages would muck with the properties of dicepool systems.

If anything, my complaint goes the other way: the game gets kind of stupid at dicepools of 1 and 2. Stats should seriously start at 3 and not 1. It creates more design space for there to be dogs and eagles and shit.

Also true.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Mar 25, 2014 9:46 pm

Ultimately, you're going to need some sort of character advancement points. It's a skill-based system and not a level based system, so people will want to be able to buy up their piloting or their firearms abilities separately. What this means is that your cost scale for freebie points has to be defined no matter what you do - so you may as well give people a pile of them at chargen for customization.

The usual pitfalls are to make the chargen points scale differently than the advancement points (White Wolf), or to make the chargen points too small and fiddly (Eclipse Phase). But it doesn't have to be like that. You could just give people a set of chargen points to buy a few customization advancements during chargen, and then give people more of those points when they advance.

Feng Shui archetypes would be bad for a game like this, because there is as far as I know no way to satisfactorily advance Feng Shui archetypes. And a cyberpunk fantasy heartbreaker would want to support long campaigns. Some of my longest campaigns have been Shadowrun campaigns.

-Username17

Seerow · Post by **Seerow** » Tue Mar 25, 2014 10:34 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Ultimately, you're going to need some sort of character advancement points. It's a skill-based system and not a level based system, so people will want to be able to buy up their piloting or their firearms abilities separately. What this means is that your cost scale for freebie points has to be defined no matter what you do - so you may as well give people a pile of them at chargen for customization.

The usual pitfalls are to make the chargen points scale differently than the advancement points (White Wolf), or to make the chargen points too small and fiddly (Eclipse Phase). But it doesn't have to be like that. You could just give people a set of chargen points to buy a few customization advancements during chargen, and then give people more of those points when they advance.

Feng Shui archetypes would be bad for a game like this, because there is as far as I know no way to satisfactorily advance Feng Shui archetypes. And a cyberpunk fantasy heartbreaker would want to support long campaigns. Some of my longest campaigns have been Shadowrun campaigns.

-Username17

I'm not sure why you're confident you can't have an archetype setup work alongside traditional skill advancement.

That's literally an issue of design. Basically the archetype defines your power source (Magic/Technomancy/Cyber), and gives you a chunk of abilities/skills relevant to the archetype, and a handful of points to customize things from there. Those points end up being the same points that get rewarded for advancement.

It's basically just point buy with a bunch of prechosen points to make character generation faster, while leaving enough customization open to let characters feel different.

Schleiermacher · Post by **Schleiermacher** » Tue Mar 25, 2014 11:35 pm

Well, in Feng Shui spesifically, the issue is that some archetypes get role-protected abilities that, while perfectly fine when advancement is rigidly controlled, break when it turns into a free-for-all. For example, Big Bruisers are pretty much balanced with Old Masters (a highly-skilled but frail archetype) out of the box. However, the Big Bruiser spends much less to get a Martial Arts score on par with an Old Master, turning him into an uber-combatant, than the Old Master would have to spend to get strength and toughness comparable to the Bruiser (and in RAW Feng Shui he simply can't, because the BB's signature schtick "Ich bin ein Bruiser" can't be bought through advancement.)

Scrivener · Post by **Scrivener** » Wed Mar 26, 2014 3:40 am

I've had a few SR thoughts banging around and have a couple of ideas.

1- Hacking, I know this is one of those impossible to fix easily issues, but why not treat it like magic. Have programs instead of spells, the programs cost karma/build points just like spells, and cause "feedback" instead of drain.

The fluff to rationalize the strangeness of this would be something to the effect of As viruses and automated threats became more effective and dangerous antivirus and firewall systems have similarly improved. Every mass market "script" virus is protected against in minutes due to constantly pushing updates. Deckers have to take care to produce their own attack programs, decide what goals are most worth their time, constantly update the program, and in order to bypass modern antivirus software Deckers must modify their code on the fly for every target." So you spend karma to have your virus (significant effort to make and maintain) that has one effect, just like spells, you can't have your cyberdeck run scripts and win via botnet, and with a quick one liner about everyone getting a datajack at birth you can effect anyone, preventing dropout.

I'm not sure what you resist with, how you calculate feedback (drain) or how ICE can help you. It would take away from the unique feel of deckers, but at least they wouldn't be relegated to "don't play a decker" or "everyone else watch TV for a half hour".

2- Cyberware can be worse that natural limbs, that irks me. If you want to play a street Sam Troll with a robot arm, your robot arm shouldn't be a liability. I get there is an issue of just allowing cyberarms to be a +1 STR or what have you, but it takes away cool iconic actions when it is more efficient to be strong than to have a cyberarm.

3- Skill wire feels odd. The inability to use edge on wired skills seems like an awkward work around. Would it break the game to have a black market "TruSkill" for rating x 25,000 nuyen game breaking? It's a full build point more per skill rating.

wotmaniac · Post by **wotmaniac** » Wed Mar 26, 2014 4:16 am

@ skill-based advancement + archetype advancement:
So, what would be wrong with picking an archetype, that archetype has a list of "favored skills" (or whatever), and those favored skills simply cost less to advance?
It wouldn't be the first time it's been done.

(I must admit, up front, that I haven't actually played either SR or FS, so please excuse the ignorance -- I'm just speaking in terms of generic design space)

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Wed Mar 26, 2014 4:26 am

To really offer protection of roles you need to do something like make magic incompatible with tech. Maybe not quite Harry Dresden level incompatible, but that idea. You can't use computers or electronics. You could push it to the 5/12ths of Heaven level and have computers directly interfere with magic, etc.

The other approach is not worry about BS like that and just allow people to pick and choose abilities. If everyone ends up playing a magician with a gun and comlink full of hacking tools that's fine.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Wed Mar 26, 2014 4:30 am

What would it take to quick fix SR4?

Stats
-Collapse Strength into Body.
Combat
-Collapse firearms into one skill

Magic
-Separate magic into multiple skills
-Rejigger the cost of adept stuff
-Change the way magic is resisted?

Armor
-Half of soak is automatic, ignored by AP weapons? I think Frank already wrote about this.
-After Sundown does it this way: "a character with an armor rating can buy a number of hits on soak tests equal to their armor rating at the rate of 1 hit per three dice. So a character with 2 Armor against an attack could set aside 3 soak dice for one automatic hit or 6 soak dice for 2 automatic hits." can that be jammed into SR4e? Adjusting numbers for armor and weapons afterwards.

Equipment
-Collapsed into kits that add dice to skills?

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Wed Mar 26, 2014 4:43 am

Combat: Firearms one skill. Close combat made simpler/faster and more effective. Simplification by removing stupid complexity/special cases like the shotgun rules and also hacking up the autofire rules in some way. Ideally longer turns too, as the 3 second turns cause combat to run far faster than it should, which causes other sillyness.

Magic. I'm not sure on how we don't produce at best the equiv of the D&D caster problem, where they can't do too much at the start and are often overshadowed by the non-casters but as they gain experience they gain power massively faster then mundanes. Making it more expensive up front seems likely to produce that, so I think we need to do more.

Overcasting is a huge part of this in SR, block that and the power issue would seem to be much reduced.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Wed Mar 26, 2014 5:15 am

FrankTrollman wrote:
The usual pitfalls are to make the chargen points scale differently than the advancement points (White Wolf), or to make the chargen points too small and fiddly (Eclipse Phase). But it doesn't have to be like that. You could just give people a set of chargen points to buy a few customization advancements during chargen, and then give people more of those points when they advance.

I had a WW storyteller who used to give out "cool points" during his games. He quipped that these were freebie points from chargen. Which I guess was supposed to make them more valuable. We asked how we use those when we don't have enough to spend to fully buy one anything. He didn't know. So I went reading.

At least in Vampire, freebie point buy-ups had one and only one relation to the running game. Freebie points = xp multiplier to buy a new dot.

So if you were a vampire disciplines cost the new level x5 xp to advance. It also cost 5 freebie points to buy another dot in a discipline.

So I asked if we could spend freebies to lower the multiplier cost by 1. So 1 freebie made the next discipline dot cost new level x4 instead of x5. If we managed to accumulate 5 freebies and spent them all we could just buy the new dot.

The storyteller said "hell yes!" and that became one of the most frequently used house rules in our WW games.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Wed Mar 26, 2014 5:19 am

Scrivener wrote:I've had a few SR thoughts banging around and have a couple of ideas.

1- Hacking, I know this is one of those impossible to fix easily issues, but why not treat it like magic. Have programs instead of spells, the programs cost karma/build points just like spells, and cause "feedback" instead of drain.

That helps the hacking mechanics, but it still doesn't address the elephant in the room that Frank likes to bring up: Why hack in a firefight when you can pull a trigger?

And you know what? Frank's dead on. I NPC out hackers in SR not specifically because the hacking rules suck (they do, but I can houserule those into something not quite shitty), but because super dedicated hacker PCs lead to bored as fuck players until they're given a unique snowflake task to do. Mages have role protection and relevancy built into them. Hackers have to get a treat from the GM like they're fucking dogs.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Wed Mar 26, 2014 5:20 am

Changing combat time to 6 seconds sounds good.

Now how about the "Super speed as extra actions slows down play so it doesnt feel speedy" problem? I think it was in the drunken review thread that the idea of "Super Speed=you get automatic successes" came up. How would that work for SR4e?

*Ah found it:
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=145478

The list of "Things 5e should be, written 4 years ago"

Scrivener · Post by **Scrivener** » Wed Mar 26, 2014 5:51 am

TheFlatline wrote:
Scrivener wrote:I've had a few SR thoughts banging around and have a couple of ideas.

1- Hacking, I know this is one of those impossible to fix easily issues, but why not treat it like magic. Have programs instead of spells, the programs cost karma/build points just like spells, and cause "feedback" instead of drain.
That helps the hacking mechanics, but it still doesn't address the elephant in the room that Frank likes to bring up: Why hack in a firefight when you can pull a trigger?

And you know what? Frank's dead on. I NPC out hackers in SR not specifically because the hacking rules suck (they do, but I can houserule those into something not quite shitty), but because super dedicated hacker PCs lead to bored as fuck players until they're given a unique snowflake task to do. Mages have role protection and relevancy built into them. Hackers have to get a treat from the GM like they're fucking dogs.

Allow them to apply hefty debuffs, like shut off people's eyes, or scrambling the smart gun's friend or foe identifiers?

Or allow significant utility, like hack all recordings and people watching so you look different or appear not to be there (illusion/invisiblility)?

Or let hackers flat out attempt to fry someone's brain and do direct damage?

Basically allow a hacker to solve problems like a Mage, only doing so via tech. So while it's harder for a Mage to not show up on camera a hacker has a harder time not showing up on meat eyes, a Mage has less options against drones, a hacker has less options against meat sacks.

It might be a complete non-starter, but the idea was not to limit deckers to unlocking doors, but letting them use "viruses" the exact same way mages use spells.

Cyberzombie · Post by **Cyberzombie** » Wed Mar 26, 2014 8:07 am

TheFlatline wrote: That helps the hacking mechanics, but it still doesn't address the elephant in the room that Frank likes to bring up: Why hack in a firefight when you can pull a trigger?

I'm still not convinced this is a huge deal. Every hacker character I know in SR has carried a gun, so I don't think the intention is that you have this hacker who is 100% a keyboard monkey and nothing else.

That's not to say I don't think hacking in combat shouldn't happen, it's just that a hacker shouldn't be 100% using computer skill all the time. It's not a bad thing if sometimes he just whips out an Ares predator and shoots someone. I think if you're trying to kill someone, a gun should be the go-to choice. That's what guns were made for and if it works better than a computer, I don't take issue with that.

But that's not to say you've got no options for using a computer to help out in a fire fight:

1. Information denial: Those security guys your street samurai is shooting have biomonitors and likely some kind of TacNet going. You drop one, and someone is going to know about it. The hacker can be doing some action to suppress a potential alert. Now obviously you need to make hacking a lot easier to do than several rolls just to locate a hidden node or decode someone's wireless communications.

2. Group debuff: Most people imagine hacking a device as shutting a device off. But it can be more impairing. Imagine if a hacker could potentially blast a group's AR interfaces to cause them to be temporarily stunned or blinded. Since everyone in the SRverse runs AR, that's going to be something quite useful.

3. Drones: Drones are badass, and there's really no reason for an SR4 hacker not to be running them.