Shadowrun 5th Edition's cover.

For this post we’ll be taking a look at Shadowrun 5th Edition, originally published in 2013. The book we’re looking at is the Master Index Edition published in 2016, which is largely the same but incorporates some errata and includes an index of supplementary material.

I’ll confess I have some reluctance to tackle this specific system, because its return to expensive cyberdecks was part of what made me kinda stop paying attention to Shadowrun at all. But I’ll read it with as open a mind as I can manage and give its rules a fair shake just like I gave all the others.

One thing I notice is that they have switched back to the more “conversational” style employed by SR1, which makes it much harder for me to understand the rules. It’s more of a problem here than it was in SR 1 because there are a lot more rules and concepts they’re trying to get across.

Setting Overview

Visually, the Shadowrun 5th Edition Matrix is a complete return to The Full Gibson Experience. An infinite black plane criss-crossed by shimmering silver lines, upon which swim thousands and thousands of icons representing small connected devices and users. Way up above in the sky float the giant geometric shapes of corporate hosts.

Descriptions focus almost entirely on the visual, with the technical bits boiling down to “it’s everywhere” and “no one fully knows how it works”. “Civilians” still use commlinks like they did in 4th edition, and “smart” devices that are currently online around them show up as icons in augmented reality. The descriptions we get for the uses of augmented reality here are actually pretty good and evocative. However, it’s not the main event. It seems that any time someone would use a web browser for something in the real world, they go into full VR instead.

If this Matrix has any basis in reality, it would be on the popular perception people had of the Internet in 2013, and the fears they had for its future. Cloud computing is a concept that looms large here despite not being explicitly named. A Matrix host is a location that doesn’t have a 1-to-1 correspondence to a single physical device. In other words, the reason they’re all up in the sky and visible from anywhere in the world is because they’re all in the cloud. Access to cloud services also tends to be the explanation for why certain devices gain mechanical bonuses when they’re online.

The Matrix is split into Grids. When you connect to the Matrix you are in whatever local grid services your physical location. Big Corps have private global grids where all their stuff lives. You can access stuff that’s in other grids without going there, but for the best connectivity you’ll want to grid-hop, which requires some hacking if you’re lacking credentials.

The “fears” part comes into play when the book says the Matrix is almost entirely locked down and under the control of the megacorps. Those everyday civilian uses are allowed, provided people pay their fees or consent to getting bombarded with ads. The entire Matrix is watched over by the Grid Overwatch Division, an organization composed of law enforcement and corporate specialists whose job is to sniff out and eliminate any and all hacker activity.

“Hacker” here is an umbrella term that covers both deckers and technomancers. Deckers use cyberdecks, devices which are a little bigger than commlinks and have extra hardware that lets them be used for hacking. Technomancers still use their quantum-bullshit-powered brains (and I still think they’re cool).

Cyberdecks are back to being super-expensive, with prices comparable to those of SR1. The cheapest deck costs the same as an armored cargo truck, the starter used by our sample character costs a bit more than a luxury sports car, and the best one costs the same as a couple of light military vehicles. Fortunately it appears they no longer require much in the way of optional hardware enhancements, and programs tend to be much cheaper, but still the price of a deck is once again the main thing making “decker” an exclusive specialist niche.

Mechanics Overview

Devices have Matrix Attributes that dictate their base capabilities. All of them have a Device Rating that represents their general robustness, a Firewall attribute that is used for defensive rolls, and a Data Processing attribute that gets used for searches and other generally lawful operations. Cyberdecks have two others, Attack and Sleaze, which are used for hacking. Hosts have also have these so that they can fight back against hackers. The full array is abbreviated as “ASDF”.

Most devices, including hosts, have “static” attributes, but cyberdecks have an “attribute array” of four numbers that can be allocated dynamically between those last four values. Their device rating is still static and cannot be changed.

Instead of having user accounts, each icon, device or host has a single owner that has full control over it, and it might accept marks from other users on to grant them more limited levels of access. An example is a social network host lets users register by placing a mark. More marks means more access, and the limit is three. The owner counts as having four.

Hacking a device means placing uninvited marks on it, and using the access those grant to perform Matrix actions that get you closer to your goal. Different actions require a different number of marks to attempt, and unless those marks are legitimate most of them still require hacking tests to perform and might fail. They’re opposed by the host’s rating and its ASDF attributes.

Hacking actions use either the Attack or Sleaze attributes. Attack actions are “loud” and alert the host that it’s being attacked when successful; when they fail, they cause Matrix damage to the hacker. Sleaze actions are “silent” and don’t increase the hacker’s visibility when successful; when they fail, the host becomes aware of the hacker, places a mark on them, usually triggers IC.

With both types of action, successes on the target’s resistance rolls increase the hacker’s Overwatch Tally, even when the hacker wins the contest. When this tally hits 40, GOD’s eye is upon the hacker. They take a boatload of damage, get forcibly ejected from the Matrix, and their physical location is instantly traced. In other words, game over1. If inside a host when this happens, they’re “merely” instantly detected and have 3 marks placed on them at once, which makes all the host’s IC extra effective against them. And you bet all that IC will be activated at once.

Rebooting your cyberdeck resets Overwatch Tally to 0, but it also erases all marks you’ve placed, so while you’ll usually reboot right after a run is finished you’ll need to wait a bit longer if you still need those marks.

IC fights using the host’s rating and ASDF attributes. Some variants try to place additional marks on the hacker, while some attack either the hacker’s deck, their brain, or both at the same time. The more marks IC has on the hacker, the greater the damage they do. It’s possible for the hacker to spend actions removing these marks, but this ironically is also an illegal action and accrues Overwatch. It also doesn’t make the host or the IC forget about the hacker, it just makes enemy attacks less effective.

Matrix perception works a bit differently than in the past. Most icons in close proximity (and there are several ways to define this) are automatically visible and identifiable unless they’re running silent, which means they require a Matrix perception test to notice. Running silent gives a penalty to all of that icon’s rolls, so the hacker is usually the only one running silent during a run, and that only when necessary.

Run Parameters

We’ll be using the sample decker from the core book, a dwarf lady. She has a Hermes Chariot starter deck with a device rating of 2 and an ASDF of 5-4-4-2 (which is dynamic, as mentioned before). She has a few programs that help with cybercombat but her specialty is still stealth, with an effective skill of 9 for that approach.

It looks like our host design philosophy is The Full Gibson once again. A given location will have a single host that takes care of all of its business and is connected to the wider Matrix, only this time it represents a set of servers in the cloud instead of a mainframe. Nevertheless it is considered to be at the same physical location as the office.

There are rules incentives to being in close physical proximity to your target, and our hacker lacks the accessory that would let us ignore those rules (a Satellite Link), so she will be joining the physical team and hacking from the inside.

This is a private business, so we’ll give the host a rating of 4 according to the guidelines on page 247. Its ASDF ratings are 5-4-6-7, which gives us the “surprisingly high security” requirement. Cameras, alarms, and door locks are Rating 3. The alarm is running silent.

For IC, it runs Patrol at all times. When it detects an intruder it launches Killer, followed by Track. When it detects unauthorized access to the buried evidence it launches Sparky. As usual, whenever one of these is destroyed it’s immediately relaunched at the start of the next combat turn.

The file containing our target evidence would normally be archived and thus impossible to access without some social engineering, but we can cheat a bit here and assume there’s a physical jack point in the records room that allows access to the files.

With all this in place, we’ll see how our decker does next post.

  1. Petty rant time: Many Shadowrun GMs love the idea of omniscient and omnipotent organizations that stand ever ready to squash players, and I guess GOD made it in either because of their demands or because some of SR5’s writers were ascended GMs themselves. ↩