From [flashlife request] at [kpc.com] Fri Sep 17 02:32:35 1993 Received: by mailbox.kpc.com (4.1/kpc-930604) id AA00374; Fri, 17 Sep 93 02:32:31 PDT Date: Fri, 17 Sep 93 02:32:31 PDT Message-Id: <[9309170932 AA 00374] at [mailbox.kpc.com]> Errors-To: [c d r] at [kpc.com] From: [f--h--e] at [kpc.com] Reply-To: [f--h--e] at [kpc.com] Errors-To: [flashlife request] at [kpc.com] Subject: Flashlife V3 #13 To: [f--h--e] at [kpc.com] Status: R From: Carl Rigney (moderator) <[flashlife request] at [kpc.com]> Flashlife Fri, 17 Sep, 1993 Volume 3 : Issue 13 Today's topics: Re: Fixing Shadowrun Magic (Carl Rigney) Re: Bits and Bobs (Philip Marlowe) Books for cyberpunk refs (Earl Hubbell) A sketchy new netrunning system (Chris Siebenmann) Urban Tradition (Carl Rigney) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 3 Jun 93 01:55:00 PDT From: [c d r] at [kpc.com] (Carl Rigney) Subject: Re: Fixing Shadowrun Magic > that magic only affects living things and only in 'natural' ways. I've thought about doing this, although it conflicts with the other magical paradigm that *everything* is alive. Shadowrun as written draws a line between Natural and Manmade, but my tendency (especially in City Shadows) is to reject that and accept urban magic with ties to technology. Its not just trees and houses that have spirits, but guns and cars as well. The Matrix is just the Awakened Internet (and thank you to Mary Kuhner and Jon Yamato for that idea), and ICE are the spirits of the Matrix. Deckers are just a very specialized breed of mage, in this worldview. > Infravision .... spells are out, but that's fine because > biological infravision is pretty bogus anyway. Bogus? As opposed to, say, magic? One approach I'd considered was to toss all combat spells, a more extreme one was to throw away all the physical spells. In City Shadows I might do both since it doesn't have any magic that you could prove was magic, it's set very early in the Awakening (c. 2020). So Magic would still be useful for detection, illusion & strengthening or weakening things, but the idea of mages as fire support would be clubbed to death again. > Hermetic mages have a bit more of a problem in that elementals > are pretty physical. Elementals are very useful without manifestation for physical attack, they can still aid sorcery and do assorted other useful things. > Instead of Conjure [any spirit] 4 or Conjure [any elemental] 5, > it's Conjure Urban Spirits 2/Hearth Spirits 4/Bordellos 6, or > Conjure Earth Elementals 3/Concrete 5/Roads 7. Or whatever. I don't think I care too much for that - a lot of the distinctions seem purely human invention. On the other hand, I've considered having mages have to buy elementals like spells, i.e. if you want to summon a force 6 fire elemental you pay 6 karma and go through a process much like learning a spell, and after that you can conjure it in the usual manner. Its the same fire elemental each time. If you burn it for auto-successes, its GONE. For good. You can also teach other mages the Names you know, but I doubt that'd happen much since if someone else has it conjured you can't conjure it. It makes mages even bigger karma sponges than they are now and adds to the bookkeeping, but if you want to make elementals rarer it should do the trick. -- Carl Rigney [c d r] at [kpc.com] "Life is the essence of change, blood is the essence of life, magic is the essence of blood, change is the essence of magic." -------------------------- Date: Thu, 3 Jun 93 11:16:25 BST From: Philip Marlowe <[A J Beckett] at [lut.ac.uk]> Subject: Re: Bits and Bobs In Flashlife #12 someone suggested that flechette rounds should be treated like shotgun rounds since they have poor penetration. Now forgive me if Im wrong, but I thought that the whole point of flechette rounds were that they had GOOD penetration, in the same way that a discarding sabot round (such as fired by tanks) does. This is because such a round consists of a very sharp, very dense `spike` of metal, usually made from tungsten carbide (or something like that). Of course, I could be wrong. On another note, is this new system dangerous or what? I like it, because it encourges players to THINK a bit more, rather than leap into the fray in their usual blood lusting way. Some of the changes annoy me though. For example, in SR1, you could put reactive triggers on pistols. Now the rules say you simply pull the trigger twice, UNLESS it a revolver. This makes very little sense to me, because even I could pull a trigger twice in a short space of time. Now I know that the only revolver in the game is `quite` powerful, and it should have a limitation, but it already has a couple, in that its hard to conceal, and holds a massive six (count `em) bullets. AND another thing, I like the idea of preprep times for spells, its another thing that makes people think before they act. Ho hum, maybe in SR3. I dont think that magic should be limited to living things, but it should be harder to affect inanimate objects (like street sams, ha ha). Also, while there is no biological precedent for natural thermographic vision, it is possible by magic because, well, its magic isn`t it? Because of the plethora of sourcebooks for the specialist, it is now quite difficult to involve everyone in a campaign. For example, when shadowtech came out, cybergrunts went `oh goody, now i can be twice as good as i was before with almost no limitations`. Similarly with magic. Meanwhile, in GMsville Arizona, I was wondering how to make the average security guard (3 in most stats) any kind of challenge at all, considering how he`d be dead four times over before he can say eek!. On the flipside, if you boost the npcs, some poor player with a fairly `real world` character is gonna suffer real bad. Anyway, I`m not sure what I was trying to say here, but hopefully its been thought provoking. Marlowe. -------------------------- Date: Wed, 23 Jun 93 09:48:57 PDT From: [e--l] at [alumni.cco.caltech.edu] (Earl Hubbell) Subject: Books for cyberpunk refs _The Prize_ looks pretty good so far - the oil trusts work as fairly good models - since they were the original nasty megacorps... -Earl -------------------------- Date: Mon, 5 Jul 1993 14:55:27 -0400 From: Chris Siebenmann <[c k s] at [hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu]> Subject: A sketchy new netrunning system I've decided to write up my sketchy thoughts on a makeover of Shadowrun netrunning, since it's unlikely I'll be able to finish and test them any time soon. Standard cautions apply, and yes, this is deliberately a very abstracted system. I like abstracted systems. Okay, first step: throw out the existing rules (clunk). They stink. They don't match what it looks like in the literature. They make you act like a made-over AD&D dungeon crawl. So, you gots yer deck. It's gonna be one of two types: - a dreck deck that clips your wings, ancient tech only suitably for kiddies. - a good deck, lets you be all that you can be. Sometimes you find a really shit hot deck, one that really helps you, gives you an extra boost. Watch out; those decks have strings attached. Usually they're experimental, often they're one-shots, built for specific things. The military is fond of domain-specific decks. Mechanically, decks simply have a hacking pool maximum; any given deck only lets you use so many dice from your hacking pool. Clearly you want a deck that's good enough to let you use it all. Exceptional decks give you some extra dice. If you want to quantify how much a deck costs, instead of just saying that deckers have a good enough deck, then I'd use a sliding scale. Next, you need your programs. There's three sorts of programs: - storebought junk. They're for simps who can't code, and you're not a simp, are you? - your programs. You've written them, you've traded for them, you've stolen them. You know them inside and out. They're part of you, now. - that shit-hot piece of software you got from the Swede. You don't even have to do anything; it does it all for you. This can, of course, be a problem if what it does isn't exactly what you want. See 'Burning Chrome' for details. Deckers don't have any of the first sort (unless they really want to), automatically (no cost) have everything they need of the second sort, and the third sort is damn rare -- model them as having their own hacking pool that they use instead of yours. It's a hacking pool vs hacking pool contest of some sort to rein one in. You may have noticed that we're ignoring decks and programs in this system; the only thing that's important is you, the decker. This is deliberate. You have a hacking pool; call it something like computer skill plus reaction. I haven't worked this out in detail; I said this is fuzzy. We've got a decker. Now we need something to deck. Throw out the system maps with all those funny symbols FASA likes sticking in their modules; they're dreck, overly complicated and not worth the effort. Get a pencil and a piece of paper. Start drawing circles; each 'system' is a circle. Once you're inside a circle, you have free run of the system it represents. Where one circle touches or overlaps another, that's a connection (draw lines if you want to avoid trying to make everything touch at the right spots). Where one circle is entirely inside another one, you gotta get into the second system before you can get at the first one. We'll generously assume you're a competent decker, and you've done all the competent decker stuff, like human engineering and dumpster diving and so on. Play it out if you and the GM feel like it; it could make an interesting mini-adventure. The GM can give you bonuses for especially clever stuff or good ideas. This leaves two ways into a system: you can sweet talk the security, or you can kick it in the nuts. Sweet talking is a lot slower, but you have to really blow it to make noise, and if you succeed, you're in clean. Kicking the security in the nuts is fast, but it makes lots of noise; better hope you can finish what you're here for before someone comes to take a look. Mechanics of this I haven't figured out exactly; call it something like an unresisted test vs actual 'combat' (really an opposed skill test with trimmings, your hacking pool against the security's dice rating; the classification of the system determines the relevant target numbers). When you sweet talk, your successes add up slowly until you get enough. If you flub, alerts go off -- how badly you have to flub depends on the system security rating; call it an index of how many turns in a row you can keep trying without a single success that turn. Once you're in, you're in; you have full regular access to that system. If you want privileged access, find the privileged access subsystem (GMs: feel free to not draw all the privileged access subsystems; just bump the security ratings a bit and wing it), and bang away. A lot of systems are pretty trivial to get in; the GM should adopt some sort of autosuccess rule to keep the rolling down. Raiding the local Stuffer Shack's systems for information shouldn't take dice rolling for your average competent PC decker. - cks -------------------------- Date: Fri, 17 Sep 93 02:16:33 PDT From: [c d r] at [kpc.com] (Carl Rigney) Subject: Urban Tradition Earl and I recently spent 10 hours discussing Shadowrun & Champions & campaigns, much of which he really should write up for Flashlife. For example, we concluded that domesticated plants are easier to harvest (e.g. grain spirits rather than dryads), but that a certain number of sacrifices are useful for improving yields, whether they be Combine accidents or Horned King ceremonies. Likewise the bloodiness of Shadowrun society feeds the city spirits and keeps things from collapsing entirely. An interesting suggestion based on my idea that "magical fetishes/foci/talismans aren't effective if you buy them" is that money acts as a circuit breaker for magic. That's why corporations hire Shadowrunners instead of using their own security people - you pay the Shadowrun team and any spirits of vengeance go after them, not you. That's why welching on payment is such a bad idea. (Not paying them at all is bad; cheating them is OK as long as some money exchanges hands.) Further ideas for the urban tradition, like pennies over the eyes of someone you've killed to keep their spirit in. Of course, pennies are hard to find in 2040. Earl brought up a point from Sacks' _The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat_ that people with Tourette's syndrome seem to have faster reflexes, and when they take their medication it slows them down. Combining that with pattern recognition suggested miltech smartguns where you load them with the pictures of everyone who *don't* want to shoot, and then you can just wave the gun at a crowd and everyone who isn't a friend gets shot. Not something you'd want to have active all the time, of course. I like his idea of genetic algorithms for software where there is NO standard software anymore - once you start using it it starts adapting to fit you. This is why a deck is useless to anyone but its owner (and explains why people don't shoot deckers and sell their half-megayen decks), and you can't salvage cyberware. You also can't remove most cyberware and re-use it, because it becomes too adapted to the user. (Or possibly you can, the same way you could transplant an eco-system, but you would expect massive die-offs as things get used to their new environment.) Yeah, it means that debugging is even more of a royal pain than it is today. -------------------------- End of Flashlife **************************