GURPS Shadowrun

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Could you explain _why_ you want this? I would strongly expect all the PCs are going to tell you that _their_ gun doesn't have a wireless connection to the net. Why are NPCs supposed to be so much stupider?

First, I'm pulling a lot of inspiration from this fan supplement. So that may answer some of your questions.

You have a variety of conflicting problems in SR.

First, in all the setting fluff (and we want mechanics designed such that the world described in the setting fluff naturally falls out of them) everyone and their mother has a datajack, and the most hard-core teams are wired to the gills. These teams also frequently have a skinny guy with about 10 more datajacks than anyone else and a deck tagging along physically with an assault rifle.

Second, a world without wireless connectivity feels dated and weird to new players, or people who aren't going for an "old-school" cyberpunk game.

If you actually use the SR 4E rules, the problem is your elite teams aren't wired to the gills with interlinking combat networks, because the threat from hackers is too great. Instead, you get neo-luddite teams where the wireless connectivity on every single peice of gear is dug out with a dikoted combat knife.

So, here's the goals.

a) Create a wireless matrix, because anything else feels weird to a lot of players.
b) Ensure that the hacker is a valued member of a shadowrunning team that can't just sit at home.
c) Ensure that the mechanics make it a better idea to be wired up than to not.

There's a variety of ways to achieve these goals. The guy who wrote that fan supplement, Frank Trollman, has an approach I like.

In the very first matrix crash, one super-virus brought the world to it's knees. Including all the air-gapped databases, research centers, defense sites, etc. So we have established that way back in 2029, air-gaps are no longer a viable defense against what computers can do.

Why is this? Who knows. But in SR it's been that way for a while, it's just a fact of life. The explanation I'm going with is that in SR by 2070 or so, it is trivially easy to effect changes in electronic media at a distance. That means even if you have no wireless capability whatsoever, if there's a computer in a piece of gear I can tell that computer what to do.

Now, given this, what defense do you have? Well, since not networking your devices is no longer a defense, the second-best defense is to link all the devices together and have them protected by the baddest, scariest, blackest firewall/security/hacker-go-away software you can find.

Now at this point you can say, "Option A, walk around with no computers on you at all and sacrifice all the sweet bonuses they provide. Option B, walk around with the must cutting edge tech to defend from the big bad hackers and get all kinds of sweet bonii from targeting computers, skill chips, etc. My work here is done."

Personally, I don't like the fact that option A is still an option. So in my SR (and in Frank's fan supplement) not only is it trivially easy to effect changes in electronic media at a distance, the brain is just another form of electronic media. What does this mean? If you don't run some software to defend your brain from it, any script kiddie with the latest end_your_****.exe downloaded from a pirate site can tell your brain to turn itself off. And it will.

Now, the defense against this is pretty simple. You wire the same computer protecting your gear from being hacked into your mind, and protect your mind with the same firewall you're using on your gun. Also, since signals can be jammed and you love your precious brain-meats, you don't just trust that link to a wireless connection that can be jammed. You actually drill a hole in your head and hard-wire your brain to the thing preventing people from implanting their ad jingles in your head at will.

The end result? People constantly connected to an electronic world. Everyone who can afford one getting a datajack to prevent some malicious hacker from rewriting their mind. Those who CAN'T afford a datajack and computer to run a firewall for their mind being crazy (and justifiably) paranoid and constructing improvised faraday cages in the decrepit house they're squatting in to keep out the mind control rays. And the decker running along with all the rest of the near super-powered (be it magic or cyber) bad-asses on the team, subverting pretty much anything mechanical and fighting off enemy deckers attempting to do the same, and occasionally shooting mind-control rays at people.

Mechanically, I want the hacker's domain to be more concentrated on the machine side of things, so while it's relatively easy to Black Hammer someone's brain into a pulp or lock them into an involuntary RAS Override, actually rewriting their personality, scanning their brain for information, etc is both difficult and time consuming, leaving it for something that can be done by a skilled hacker to a individual with no defenses, but is near impossible while trying to get around a firewall. Thus, if you can physically restrain someone, disconnect their brain from their deck, and have about a week, you can do some seriously scary **** to their mind. But then, the exact same thing is true for mages or skilled interrogaters.