Asking for feedback yet again!

Asking for feedback yet again!

Asking for feedback yet again! (What’s the point of having an awesome community if not to bombard them with design feedback requests!)

Took all the wonderful responses in the previous topic about cyberscapes, and tried to put together something robust/solid but not overwhelming. It creates a new “zone” of play, but only adds one new Move.

I posted what I have written so far. This has probably been the hardest topic of FBH, I spend most of the week hammering away at it, trying to shape it into something that wasn’t too thin or too in-depth.

If you guys have a moment to spare, I’d love to hear your feedback. Specifically:

– The overall design/fiction of the SectorNet and the gridscapes.

– The Breaching mechanics.

Obviously, this is still very much unedited first draft, beware of terrible grammar and run-on sentences.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/tsulme0u5fos2rp/SectorNet%20Preview.docx?dl=0

27 thoughts on “Asking for feedback yet again!”

  4. Damn I wish that well.

    “On the other hand, closing off access between two scapes is a lot easier.”

    How would I do this? I’m being chased by a faction’s SysOp and want to escape without jacking out. I skip across the border of the Scape and want to close/crash the door behind me…

  5. Jesse R , Hm, yeah, I’d need to expand on that (I think I just ended that sentence before going to bed one night and never came back to it).

    Basically; creating a permanent connection between two scapes requires admin rights in both, but closing down a connection requires admin rights in either of the two (and is a common security protocol in the event of sustained attacks/sieges).

    So you’re being chased, you Breach a cheap-o backwater gridscape on your circuitous route, then close out all connections except the one you’re taking. Your pursuer has to go around through other scapes. Kinda like being chased down an alley and toppling boxes/trash bins.

    Pierre Savoie That’s cool, I’m totally not forcing anyone to read the drafts :). I’m just putting them out there for feedback, hoping folks will catch things that I missed or ask questions about things that seemed obvious to me (I’m too close to the project, and there will be things that are obvious in my head that need clarification).

  6. Sean Gomes I like. But if I’m a technocrat can I use my Program skill to inject a logic bomb of sorts that can sever the connection?

  7. Oh yes absolutely! Very clever, actually:

    You can Breach a crappy/poorly defended intermediary scape in preparation for your “real” Breach. Since a successful Breach counts as an Access from within, you can set up a Program with the appropriate logic. And even a partial success won’t cause undue hardship, since you’re Breaching the local noodle-place across the street from the bank you’re actually targeting.

  9. Yep. Each would require a separate Breach or Access (so ever increasing chance of something going wrong), but yeah, you could create a minefield of program booby-traps

  13. Jesse R Let’s just say any opportunity to run amok and sow damage and confusion amongst his foes is generally welcome. So once he realizes he can do something like that…

  15. Look good so far. I am not sure if I adapt the word “scape” (probably stick with Grid), but the basic ideas sound really nice.

    I am looking forward to the rules implementation, a custom moves for “illicit virtual actions” would fit quite fine without bloating the system.

    I am especially interested in how different types of ICE are translated into threats. Rembering some discussions about cinematic fights and how you need to overcome certain threats before you can even try to “Launch Assault”, I am eager to learn more on how to translate it to a different arena, ie. the cyberspace.

  16. Looks OK. I will note that you should have one more way to access a “Scape”: An Augmented Reality unit. Different from a VR unit, an AR system maps the Scape onto the real world around you, plus all the click bait and visual ads from competing companies and retailers. (And not a few memetic virus attacks and hacks.)

    Also, you have to deal with the light speed lag. A user on Tim’s Moon in orbit around Horton’s Hold will have a 3 second lag on all accesses to scapes on planet. That makes attacks harder and requires uploading semiautonomous apps to do the work for you.

    And remember, no matter what, you never leave your head, your programs run from your deck, and traveling through the scapes is more like clicking links than actual traveling.

  17. John Reiher I purposefully didn’t include the AR stuff from Shadowrun because I felt it was a bit “cake and eat it too” kinda deal. The distinct In-or-Out of the gridscape appealed to me for that. I may reconsider after a few playtests/feedbacks

    I’m purposefully hand-waving intra-system communications lag in all forms. However, I’ll add a side-bar about how GMs can use distance-lag, gravatic distortion, signal degradation, etc to bolster the fiction behind their GM Moves.

    I’m probably not going to use the term “deck” (even though the system does draw heavily from that well) but yeah, unless your character is an AI (more about that coming soon), you still inhabit your own body.

  18. Thanks Sean! Fully understand your reasoning there. I would point out that if we succeed in creating AIs, they will be stuck in there housings just like we’re stuck in our skulls: AIs will be as much hardware as they are software. They won’t be able to upload the petabytes of data to anything other than identical and empty units. And that would clone them, not move them.

  19. Canon for UW, per the Technocrat, already says AIs can move system to system and don’t clone 🙂

    Sean, I LOVE the scapes being different from the “real world.” Give me the guy on a cyber run needing his body to be protected by the crew.

  20. Yep, as Alfred Rudzki said, it’s already established (through the Technocrat’s AI companion Skill) that AI are able to transplant themselves (but not copy themselves).

    I was inspired by popular Space Opera AIs like Cortana, EDI, Legion (all Geth, really), as well as Jarvis from Iron Man.

  21. Well, what the skill says is Your AI can only be in one system at a time. And I take that to mean one compatible system. If HAL runs on IBM hardware with Windows OS, it’s not going to run on Sun System hardware running Linux.

    And being a person who has worked with computers since 1977, AIs are hardware as much as they are software. And you need compatible hardware and OS for the AI to “move” from one to the other. And AIs are going to be like people, they have petabytes of data to move, so it’s not going to happen very quickly or simply.

  23. John Reiher sounds like 1977 logic. We have tons of transportable interpreted languages now that aren’t dependent on the hardware. An AI written in Go would run on any machine with a Go interpreter installed.

  25. Aaron Griffin It’s 2010s logic as well. If you want your AI to run nice and slowly, run him through an interpreter. Want it to run fast, recompile it for the new architecture. Running in native is always faster than through an interpreter. In fact running hardware’s assembly or even binary commands is even faster.

    There are a few assumptions about who is creating the AI. It’s more than likely the AI would be the result of other AIs creating the seed gestalt that will grow into the full blown new AI. The AI would write itself as it grew and expanded. And it won’t write itself in Go or any other language. It will write itself in binary commands because it wants to be as fast as possible, which is not through human readable languages.

    AIs written in human readable languages will be the slowest things compared to their native code brethren.

    AIs are not run on general purpose computers, they are run on specialized hardware that emulates human neural structure. A GP computer can’t compete. It does mean that when the AI adds new hardware, it will either make sure the hardware is compatible or it will craft a special bit of itself to run natively on that new hardware.

    AIs will be as complex as human minds. And neither are easily transportable to a new bit of hardware without a lot of work. Each AI will have a unique hardware setup based on it’s own needs, that makes it very hard to move it to a new setup without a lot of work on the AI’s part.

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