From flashlife-request@kpc.com Fri Sep 17 02:32:35 1993
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Date: Fri, 17 Sep 93 02:32:31 PDT
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Subject: Flashlife   V3 #13
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From: Carl Rigney (moderator) <flashlife-request@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)

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Date: Thu, 3 Jun 93 01:55:00 PDT
From: cdr@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
cdr@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@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: earl@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 <cks@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: cdr@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.



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End of Flashlife
**************************

