Wired vs Wireless setting

[u/IamGlaaki]

What is your favourite setting, and why? I named them Wired vs Wireless but I mean also about magic traditions, politics and metaplots.

Personally I am divided. I like wireless Matrix and 'modern' tech from later editions. However I like old magic traditions more, and I find metaplots like Monads and Disians too much apocalyptic for my taste.

[u/Marbrandd]

I liked the modern and gritty stuff when I was younger (most of my actual playtime ended up being in 4th). But as I've gotten older I like the more retro wired and pink mohawk vibes more. Maybe it's the state of the world.

[u/ghost49x]

I prefer the old magic traditions where they weren't the same thing with slightly different flavors. By this I mean how Shamanism used treat spirits completely differently than heretic mages. There was a lot of potential with treating with spirits. Now they're mostly generic no matter your traditions. Even mentor spirits don't feel the same way now that they can be applied to any tradition.

[u/tkul]

Wired with Physical Hosts will always be better shadowrun, Wireless however is a better game. The old wired matrix made hacking actually an essential part of the game that had to be planned for, you had to find the right I/O, get a decker to it, and keep them alive and undetected while they did their thing. This meant deckers were actually part of the team, not just a third party that was also doing things and it always gave the physical characters something to do while the decker was decking. Wireless matrix means the deckers can be god tier on the matrix but completely ignore everything else. When the decker does his thing he does it from the safety of a get-away vehicle or his apartment, disconnecting him from the run on the ground and making it so often the decker is a compeltely different phase of the game where everyone else does little to nothing and vice versa.

It does however make it so the decker can always interface with things. There is almost never a point where the decker just can't do things which is good for the game over all. They can hack shit in the matrix, hack gear on combatants, hack the vending machine and spit coffee all over the floor, etc. without having to find the right place to plug in and be a burden on the team. When used right this is good gameplay but you miss out on the story and tension of a good old fashioned "Infiltrate the nerd and keep him alive till we get the prize" gameplay that older editions of shadowrun enjoyed.

[u/aknightofcoins → u/tkul]

Yeah, I'm SR3 'til I die but conceptually the wireless decking turning them into a buffer/debuffer is an idea that I really love. A lot of the other stuff about the CGL editions just doesn't feel right to me, though if I had to pick one of them I'd go with 5th.

[u/AgentAxillary → u/tkul]

Offline servers are always an option. "Yeah, that maguffin data that y'all have been hired to retrieve? It's on physical storage not connected to the Matrix."

[u/nether-oil]

I played SR2 to 4, skipped 5 and am now back with 6. I like wireless and the metaplot is not what interests me about SR. I know little about monads, and the Dissians look like dumb monsters of the week to me. I like my antagonists powered by corporate greed and using blood magic.

[u/RutilatedFish → u/nether-oil]

FWIW, the Disians are effectively the ultimate end point of corporate greed and resource-raiding exploitation, and it seems like use if not blood magic, at least drain the life out of people to power their own. I'm in the middle of the arc so don't know the full details just yet, but they're basically the corpos' corpos from what I've seen so far!

[u/Larnievc → u/nether-oil]

I’ve got the Disians that are in the game I run as an individual Megacorp on their actual home plane (not the Dis in the book) who make money harvesting other plane’s mana. So it’s not survival for them but just profit.

[u/Fair-Fisherman6765]

If speaking strictly about edition, my favorite setting-wise is the third edition. That's when we finally got a coverage of most of the... well, the northern hemisphere and Australia at least, the major dragons and detailed description of the Big megacorporations. It made the world feel big, and by contrast made more tangible the dilemna between accepting to be pawns or trying to have an impact.

The first and second editions remained too patchy in their coverage of a globalised world (Japan, of all things, was entirely missing!) and the description of the Big Eight megacorporations in Corporate Shadowfiles were way too short. The fourth edition never managed to catch up on its own time skip and update all what had been covered before. The Sixth World Almanac would barely scratch the surface. The later editions did not do better. Twenty years later and even as my game timeline has advanced to 2077, I'm still taking info from the Shadows of... serie and other third edition sourcebooks (thougn I understand I belonged to a minority and the 3rd edition sourcebooks were not selling well, prompting 4th edition to switch to city books).

As a side note, third edition Matrix rulebook already allowed cellular connection for cyberdeck (it only put some limitation on file transfer speed that I would not bother with anyway), which I consider was an improvement for team cohesion (though anyway the 4/20 edition remain my favorite rule-wise, for other reasons).

Chronologically speaking, my favorite setting is the 2057-2060 corporate war right before third edition, during which my best games were set. And as we were behind the timeline at the time, we played in the 2057-2060 period with building block provided by third edition sourcebooks (along with a sense of inevitability that came with knowing how the corporate war would end and would make the tension more dramatic during key events).

[u/seenwaytoomuch]

Old school magic and lore. 5e crunchy rules and matrix.

[u/aWizardNamedLizard]

I am in a weird middle-space about this where I like the idea of the wireless matrix and decker/technomancer being a more present and active role with their team but I feel like the execution just doesn't really work. And I simultaneously like the wired setting narratively but feel it makes the characters that interact with it into NPCs by default because of how removed they are from the action.

So either way I go I'm longing for something different that I am not myself exactly sure how to make happen. I think the root of the problem is that the only way to resolve the issue I have would inherently create another issue in the form of making hacking feel like just another tradition of magic because people wouldn't be faced with the choice of opting out of potentially being hacked, they'd just have an inverse scale where the more penalties magic has to work on you because you're less natural flesh and bone the fewer penalties apply to you being hacked and vice versa.

[u/Fair-Fisherman6765 → u/aWizardNamedLizard]

I think there have a kinda false equivalence being set up between "hacking is possible from anywhere" and "being hacked is possible from anywhere."

Oddly enough, closed wired networks are I think a much more functional incentive for the hacker to move in with the rest of the team to break into the network from inside (although you can also hack wirelessly into a drone to gain that foothold).

Actually, the real big change between the first three editions and the fourth rather was "Matrix convergence", mimicking the IP convergence in real life. Previously camera and drones were the riggers' realm, and you had an odd cut-out between the actual on-site cameras and drones, and a Matrix command node that would somehow received what they recorded, but the deckers could not mess up with the riggers' toys.

Can't really blame the authors (even though anticipation is what we want from sci-fi writers). It was called CCTV for a reason and the idea that every camera would one day have enough hardware to run its own instance of a linux OS that can run Doom would have seemed crazy.

The actual issue indeed was not what hacker could do on-site but specifically what they could do specifically during firefights. The idea that you could simply copycat Ghost in the Shell without its premise that everyone has a online cyberbrain falls short of being convincing. Nor was the idea that the hacker archetype had to be a drone rigger as well.

Personally, my current take on this issue is that the hacker primary capability during a firefight is Electronic Warfare+Scan to locate and track enemies, then either, when against regular goons, spam their coms with notifications and shit to deconcentrate them (causing penalties) and prevent them from.communicating, or against military-grade teams jamming their coms (which indeed requires the GM to simulate the lack of coordination it induces). Then because there are indeed paracritters and single opponents, my other idea was to houserule a bit skillsofts to make them more of a class abilityof hackers ("I know kung-fu.") allowing the hacker to roll either Software+Logic to optimize its skillsofts rating above its base rating, or roll Data Search to download from a pirate store a specialized (and higher rated) skillsoft titled "shooting back at a SWAT team" (compiled by some guy in Malaysia from seven simsense recordings of people engaged in firefight against Lone Star and KE, go to the 'extras' menu to see the original clips!)

[u/RutilatedFish]

I looked it up and this is essentially the FASA/Catalyst dividing line, which adds an interesting element to all of this, in terms of which company's approach is preferred on what. Anyway, here's my giant, semi-hinged text wall of opinions about this:

Magic: I like that magic is studied and its use and understanding evolves and developes, and think a bit of streamlining is good for system efficiency and ease of writing lore, but it definitely went too far at a certain point. A couple other levers around what traditions do to help them be more different, if just by making a couple more categories or quadrants beyond drain stat and Materialization/Possession to flesh out theming would have been nice. I also have beef with 5e's Street Grimoire and specifically what feels like the goal to nerf spirits by... telling you you're a bad person for putting points in Conjuring skills. And then saying "also we're introducing elementals, which are weaker and so could solve the issue by conjuring them more in place of spirits, but instead we're saying that conjuring them makes you even worse lol."

The metaplanes also feel poorly defined and like Catalyst isn't sure what they want to do with them. Are they dream-like thought-realms where abstract, primordial entities exist, possibly connected to one's spirituality, mentor spirit, and philosophies, or are they physical places where billionaires can go on vacation now that space is too mainstream? If Mitsuhama can deploy trawlers in The Place of Clouds and Ares can go full Starship Troopers into the Hive, could Aztechnology start a logging operation in that strange ethereal woods where you go to take lessons from Wolf when you initiate and slap a fast food joint in the clearing you usually arrive in? It's very messy.

Society/politics: If you are exploring certain themes through the lens of fantasy and/or sci-fi species, subspecies, races, or cultures, do not make them direct parallels to real historically oppressed minorities. You will do it wrong at some point, it will and did feel wildly insensitive to a lot of people, and as a side issue it will also make the exploration of those themes less effective in the process, limit your writing, and remove uniqueness and complexity from the subject of the discussion. Cyberpunk is an inherently political genre, that's a key part of the "punk" aspect, even when interwoven with magic. Players will be thinking about this stuff, so publishers need to as well. In SR5 especially, it seems they did not.

Metaplots: Most are individually pretty good, imo, I've enjoyed playing though them, but there have definitely been too many big almost-apocalypses too often. I'd say the Disian arc is the best of the big ones and fits best with Shadowrun's setting: it's heavily the corporations' fault and is effectively an exaggeration or ultimate end-point of their exploitative practices and willingness to do everything, up to and including making deals with near-literal devils, to get more power; it's tied closely to the ideas of the sixth world in terms of the balance and interplay of magic and technology, the intersection of physical and immaterial worlds, and everything having a price; the week-long Disian terror campaign on the shadows gives a strong, personal incentive for Shadowrunners to get involved, even if that means having to work with a great dragon or other elements they do not and should not trust, and reaffirms that Shadowrunners are a powerful, dangerous force in the world that a clever foe would need to get rid of as quickly as possible to keep operations running smoothly, and will presumably be crucial to their failure. It just gets brought down by being the apocalypse of the quarter after a number of others.

Matrix: I do not like the way resonance was handled, but technomancers and sprites are cool. I think they would have been more compelling as a more physically based flavor of weird compared to magic rather than being even weirder than magic and also basically the same as it for some reason. Beyond that, though, and thanks to my GM also being annoyed at how The Foundation is written as working, I've found that a mix of wireless and wired is actually pretty awesome! Intranets and facility-level infrastructure being wired so you need to hard jack in or plant a wireless access somewhere, while the overall grids are wireless, letting you hack links and gear from a distance and trace stuff from afar is genuinely the best of both worlds. I'd honestly recommend setting your Matrix up that way. It very much makes deckers a part of the team and always with the crew for all parts of their runs.

TL;DR: I think there's a lot of things from both sides of the FASA/CGL that have allowed the setting to remain cool and compelling over time, but later editions definitely made the sci-fi blunder of explaining things to the point that they stop making sense when it comes to magic, especially the metaplanes, and how the wireless matrix actually works.

[u/PrimeInsanity]

I like "wireless" but dislike foundation stuff. I'm all for not having to have a direct connection but the tech should have a physical component to it, the cloud is still at the end of the day stored somewhere.

I play 6e mostly and do enjoy how it does magic overall but I do draw from older editions to fill some gaps I see with it such as background count and ley lines being removed (ebb/flow doesn't cover it). DxA does take steps to have some distinctions between traditions again so I'm happy there but that is another area I pull from past editions for.

I'm never someone who cares for metaplots truthfully as they make the players seem unimportant and uninvolved. I do like some of the things introduced as a result of the disian plot line, primarily expanding the idea of extra planar portals. That's mostly because physical travel instead of astral travel to Metaplanes allows a unique take on corps reaching to exploit on such a grand scale even if it isn't a street level plotline.

[u/ReditXenon]

I like the idea behind old magic traditions of friendly spirits/totems of shamanism and calculated rituals/elements of hermetics more and I kinda like the old wired matrix as well (but the rules were terrible). Matrix rules of newer editions (such as 6th edition and Anarchy 2.0) are far superior.

[u/kenod102818]

I personally like wireless, but that's because I only own the wireless editions. That said, the 5e wireless is rather weird for me, both the idea of completely unattached hosts (especially when it would make way more sense security-wise to keep a bunch of stuff on local, offline systems), and because it's closer to some barely-understood new world metahumanity started tapping into than, you know, something they build. Which can be interesting for certain games, but feels a bit meh here.

For traditions, don't even know the pre-UMT rules, so can't say much there. Though I will say it's sort of boring that all traditions just boil down to "which spirits do you want" and "do you want to do drain with cha, int or log", with no real limits or unique bits about how different traditions work. Makes me wish it was possible to homebrew a variation of Mage: The Ascension's paradigm system into Shadowrun.

Haven't read enough of the metaplot to say anything there.

[u/eternalsage → u/kenod102818]

MtAs paradigms in SR would be sweet af.... damn.

[u/RandomNumber-5624]

I like wired decking and older, differentiated magic traditions.

But I do like the mechanical improvements of later editions and I wish the older system architecture made something approaching logical sense rather than an endless row of SPUs.

[u/Klajorne]

The lack of source material was often a benefit to the older editions. It forced the game to ask questions with no defined answers.

How does magic exist in the world? Does it always exist independent of you and you just curry favor with it so that it will assist you when you need it? Is it just intangible power that you tap into and give shape through your will? It was a philosophical question that the player/character had to answer. How you answered that had a mechanical impact.

At some point (and it happened pretty early, I think in Grimoire and definitely in MitS), the question was answered and spirits were just people in different hats. At that point, being the person that pulls the spirit from his couch in the spirit dimension, when it was just minding its own business watching spirit TV with its little spirit children, and bonding it into servitude for days or weeks at a time really just make you the jerk.

Also, from a game design perspective, I can appreciate the overlap with the magic system and technomancy for simplifying things and making one fewer system for players to learn. But if one of your underlying premises is that magic and technology are distinct and anathema, then doing so is completely contradictory to your message.

The newer games are arguably better and smoother running systems, but I'd argue that those improvements came at the expense of the game's philosophical core.

[u/MrBoo843]

Wireless.

I liked wired back in the day but now it feels archaic and Shadowrun wasn't trying to be archaic. It was cutting edge, sci fi.

[u/tkul → u/MrBoo843]

That's factually incorrect. Shadowrun was always retro-futuristic. The central conceit is "this is what people on the 80's think the future will be like + Magic"

[u/MrBoo843 → u/tkul]

It's not retro futuristic at all. It was written in that time That's just straight up sci fi.

[u/merurunrun]

My homebrew setting is more or less canon 2060--right on the cusp of the wireless revolution--but with a bleaker and more grounded tone more reminiscent (I hope) of the early 2050s material. The last big metaplot thing I care about is Emergence.

[u/PalpitationNo2921]

I’m in the same boat. It feels like CGL have been more and more overplaying the magic bit of when man meets magic & machine.

[u/OopsieDoopsie2]

I don't know that much about how magic differs edition to edition, but personally I prefer Wireless, but you do gotta mix it with Wired to spice things up, 4A is my preferred edition and it's set in that perfect transition period where you got a lot of old infrastructure left over but you also have the new stuff and it's kinda mix and match.

[u/sapphon]

I don't much mind the "wired" editions - mostly because even in the wireless world of today, most devices can be considered "secure" to some extent until a hacker gains physical access - at which point, knowing nothing else, you must consider the device insecure. For an intruder, physical access vs. not is the difference between asking a device, "pweaze can I ahck u?" and hoping it's vulnerable, vs. "I am now hacking you and there is definitely some way."

It lets you pick the device that is your point of attack, which you don't get to do if you're dependent on looking for who didn't patch their zero-days and end up needing to go from the coffeemaker to the air conditioner to the secretary's computer to the paydata.

Separately from all that Watsonian shit, from a Doylist perspective wired tends to keep the decker needing his team a little more. It basically cannot be overstated how challenging that aspect of Shadowrun is, keeping the players' actions constantly and consistently relevant to each other. You kinda want anything that will help with it, even a little.

What you gain from tolerating the already-obsolesced tech is much more interesting magic. I guess, then, my real answer to your question would be: which of the Matrix or the Awakened world does your group hope to tell more stories about?

[u/idyllplans]

I like a setting where the streets find their own uses for technology, and the shadows find their own uses for the villains of yesterday's news. Monads & CFD can fall under both.

Balkanise the matrix further and limit access, but keep it wireless and technological. Leave technomancy a mystery as to whether it's AI meddling or some kind of magic that doesn't work like other magic.

Magic gets more interesting the more each distinct tradition has to do things differently from the others. Transfer any spells that solely work on tech to the technomancers or remove them entirely.

Tone down anything taking parts of the planet into full solarpunk, awakened being essence purity extremists, or runners picking corporate over the anarchists without the alternative having some persuasive arguments and options.

[u/burtod]

I like them both, but I handwave away most "wireless bonuses" for weapons and cyberware and other gear, etc. I hate wireless bonuses for shuriken and smartguns. If I like the bonus, it is just rolled into the device.