GURPS Shadowrun

[CousinX]

Originally Posted by Crakkerjakk

See, the problem in my SR world is that everything and their mother has a computer in it. I don't want to design elaborate (or even slightly complex) networks that you need to get through to get someone's gun to eject it's magazine. I just want you to be able to make a roll and have that happen.

And that totally works, especially for something as simple as "hack into that guy's Smartgun and make it eject the mag" ... call it Breach, Jedi Trick, or just a modified Hacking roll, it's a one-shot-one-kill hacking scenario. Even by the Pyramid Netrunning rules, it'd be two rolls at most: Breach (or Spoof) to defeat the smartgun's onboard security (which, if this is a common trick, all good smartguns are going to have), and then if the GM ruled it wasn't a total gimme, Control to drop the clip. Unless there's some good reason that a smartgun is being monitored for tampering by an outside computer, that's it.

For more complex hacking scenarios, you can stir in more rules complexity as desired. Say you want it to be more difficult to hack into the guns of the Elite Arasaka Security Response Squad ... you can either give the hacker an abstract penalty to his roll (the approach from Action 2), or you can elaborate on the in-setting details (e.g., the squad has a command vehicle which does monitor their smartguns, as well routes communication and synchronizes their tactical HUD readouts, so the hacker has to take out the command vehicle first ... or, he could hack in and insinuate false info into the tactical computer, trick the squad into shooting at each other, etc). The Pyramid rules are for those who prefer the latter approach.

Which way is better? The one that sells more PDFs, of course! Just to be safe, it's best to have both on hand... :)

EDIT: It occurred to me that I should mention, I wrote that article... I'm not saying any of this from a "don't be dissing my article, dog!" kind of place, but from the standpoint that the rules were designed to do exactly what you're saying -- provide building blocks for more detailed hacking, to whatever degree of detail you want!

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Crakkerjakk

See, the problem in my SR world is that everything and their mother has a computer in it. I don't want to design elaborate (or even slightly complex) networks that you need to get through to get someone's gun to eject it's magazine. I just want you to be able to make a roll and have that happen.

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?

.....and yes, I know they did it (or at least hacking somebody's cybereyes during a firefight) on Ghost in the Shell:Stand Alone Complex. It didn't make sense there either.

It's the sort of thing that made me push the eject button of SR4e in the middle of reading the new corebook There were several other issues of course such as the new treatment of mages and shamans but this was important enough all by itself.

I mean if a fictional archetype doesn't work out as a character concept in group, tabletop play for a number of very good reasons you don't lower the IQ of everyone in the setting to try and patch that.

[Godogma]

Exactly! I hate SR4 precisely because its so ****ing STUPID! Plus the fact the setting isn't even remotely technologically sustainable. How is the Matrix which is setup so much heavier on resources than our net somehow mysteriously so much bandwidth less intensive? Hell, there are times when my net is slow and I have 6mb downstream.

Every wireless service I've ever seen is prone to dropouts due to heavy weather, doesn't have even half the bandwidth of the comparable hard line infrastructure and how the hell you hack a closed system is beyond me. Much less hacking a Smartgun system or someone's cyber eyes.

[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.

[Godogma]

I ignore the wireless matrix crap and stick to 3e, whether or not the new players like it or not I base it in real world technology and even in 70 years from now I highly doubt that anyone will be able to rewrite someone's meat brain, we've been studying the human mind and how its put together for as long as people have been willing to cut into a corpse to see how it works. EDIT: And I doubt it'll jump that much in 60-70 years either, we still don't understand much chemically speaking and all brain surgery is a calculated risk.

Or that you'll be able to amplify the signal enough to work the matrix without giving anyone with the remotest electrical sensitivity fits where they can't sleep etc; since wireless broadband does that now (was on the news about a town in Scotland) as well as scrambling their creativity and a host of other documented problems that started when they covered the town in high yield wireless network capability.

Wireless connectivity to the point where you can actually run the Matrix has always required REALLY hard core hardware, and enough skill to be able to make up for the fact you aren't well connected; even Dodger had problems doing it and he had a stolen military satellite up-link at the time. Otherwise you had to run a basic icon instead of a personality and didn't actually experience it, you shopped or browsed just like regular people do today. EDIT: So it didn't fit the established system or setting when they did the rewrite either.

Combat decking is a whole different matter, you have to have enough EDIT: cyberware/hardware/skill that isn't for decking to keep up with the street samurai at least until you reach your insertion point into the closed network for their defense and the skill to keep yourself alive and perhaps multitask at the same time to keep an eye on your meat bod unless someone is tasked with watching over you (usually a necessity).

The super virus didn't bring down all the military infrastructure, merely that which WAS connected through the network (which was MOST of it and since the virus was able to break encryption it got any of it that was able to be connected to through secure channels from the machines that were already infected).

I'm still interested in your rules, but they'll definitely need tweaking if you're basing them out of SR4 - they simply don't fit any envisioning of cyberpunk that makes any technological sense and one of the most fun parts of a cyberpunk game is seeing all the what ifs... technological feasibility is a big part of enjoying that sort of thing in my experience.

EDIT: No offense to your vision of course, or insult to you intended. Merely my humble opinions on the matter backed up with a few real world facts.

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by CousinX

And that totally works, especially for something as simple as "hack into that guy's Smartgun and make it eject the mag" ... call it Breach, Jedi Trick, or just a modified Hacking roll, it's a one-shot-one-kill hacking scenario. Even by the Pyramid Netrunning rules, it'd be two rolls at most: Breach (or Spoof) to defeat the smartgun's onboard security (which, if this is a common trick, all good smartguns are going to have), and then if the GM ruled it wasn't a total gimme, Control to drop the clip. Unless there's some good reason that a smartgun is being monitored for tampering by an outside computer, that's it.

For more complex hacking scenarios, you can stir in more rules complexity as desired. Say you want it to be more difficult to hack into the guns of the Elite Arasaka Security Response Squad ... you can either give the hacker an abstract penalty to his roll (the approach from Action 2), or you can elaborate on the in-setting details (e.g., the squad has a command vehicle which does monitor their smartguns, as well routes communication and synchronizes their tactical HUD readouts, so the hacker has to take out the command vehicle first ... or, he could hack in and insinuate false info into the tactical computer, trick the squad into shooting at each other, etc). The Pyramid rules are for those who prefer the latter approach.

Which way is better? The one that sells more PDFs, of course! Just to be safe, it's best to have both on hand... :)

EDIT: It occurred to me that I should mention, I wrote that article... I'm not saying any of this from a "don't be dissing my article, dog!" kind of place, but from the standpoint that the rules were designed to do exactly what you're saying -- provide building blocks for more detailed hacking, to whatever degree of detail you want!

No worries, I didn't take it that way.

Basically, I want a middle ground. Something more complex that gives the hackers more options than "I rolled Computer Hacking and succeeded," but doesn't require as much prep work on my part to vary difficulty levels of the hack.

I want to give hackers a buncha approaches, so that the ewar specialized guy can hack into a system one way, while the hacking focused guy can get in another, but without me having to come up with conditional logic trees of programs that will trigger the next program. I want all the mini-game of hacking to be on the player's side, so that they have the fun of choosing which programs to use, but all I have to do is decide how high their opponent's resistance roll is.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Godogma

I ignore the wireless matrix crap and stick to 3e, whether or not the new players like it or not I base it in real world technology and even in 70 years from now I highly doubt that anyone will be able to rewrite someone's meat brain, we've been studying the human mind and how its put together for as long as people have been willing to cut into a corpse to see how it works. EDIT: And I doubt it'll jump that much in 60-70 years either, we still don't understand much chemically speaking and all brain surgery is a calculated risk.

Isn't SR a fantasy game with canonical mind control magic?

[Godogma]

That's magic, not technology. If you want to control someone's brain in SR use magic (and I don't remember to what extent that was possible) but by UT terms I believe brain rewriting via technology and all of that is out of the stated TL for SR in any case unless of course the person has a neural interface and you've got a very expensive machine directly attached to it - and doesn't have a basis in the setting like vibroblades and monomolecular space crystal etc.

EDIT: And at TL 9 most of the equipment is the size of a large room and over 100k.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Godogma

That's magic, not technology.

What's the difference? Can't the principles overlap? Isn't mechanistic magic just another technology anyway?

It's not like cyberspace netrunning is at all hard science fiction anyway. The entire concept is ridiculous.

[Godogma]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

What's the difference? Can't the principles overlap? Isn't mechanistic magic just another technology anyway?

It's not like cyberspace netrunning is at all hard science fiction anyway. The entire concept is ridiculous.

*shrug* Look at it how you like, but personally I would say "next setting" if the GM brought up a setting that's essentially SR4 but with even more weird technobabble like being able to wirelessly rewrite someone's brain unless they installed a "firewall" and datajack. Or opt out if everyone else was enthused with playing it.

EDIT: Neural interfaces aren't actually all that scifi, and its only a step or two to saying Virtual World via the net here I come! Granted those are some pretty giant steps, but the neural interface technology already exists in rudimentary form. One of my roommate's aunts has some sort of neurological disorder and her doctor gave her a computer with clamps and electrodes that basically was operated via brainwaves and neural activity - nearly impossible to play Starcraft with, but it worked for the games it was designed for... Neat toy for the time, now its probably a hell of a lot more advanced.