[Orpho]

It's also almost mandatory for mancers to take infusion firewall to boost their commlink's firewall to ungodly levels, to be on par with some corporate hosts. Its a nice balancing act since a TM can't protect their team's gear with sleaze, so the crazy high firewall is a nice trade off.

So if a 'mancer on a street-level campaign started off with a Renraku Sensei (Device Rating 3), he would need to roll Software + Resonance [3], in their case with a pool of 8 dice, and would increase the firewall on the Renraku by the number of hits scored, up to a total Firewall of 6, with any extra successes ignored.
And Infusion of Firewall has a drain of L+1 , so the technomancer would resist a drain of 4 with a Resonance + Willpower, in his case again with 8 dice. Assuming he didn't get 5 or more hits on their 8 dice on the Software roll earlier, the damage from drain will be Stun.

Have I got that right? Again, just making sure I understand how a technomancer would go about upping his team's matrix defenses on their gear.

[DeathStrobe]

It's also almost mandatory for mancers to take infusion firewall to boost their commlink's firewall to ungodly levels, to be on par with some corporate hosts. Its a nice balancing act since a TM can't protect their team's gear with sleaze, so the crazy high firewall is a nice trade off.

So if a 'mancer on a street-level campaign started off with a Renraku Sensei (Device Rating 3), he would need to roll Software + Resonance [3], in their case with a pool of 8 dice, and would increase the firewall on the Renraku by the number of hits scored, up to a total Firewall of 6, with any extra successes ignored.
And Infusion of Firewall has a drain of L+1 , so the technomancer would resist a drain of 4 with a Resonance + Willpower, in his case again with 8 dice. Assuming he didn't get 5 or more hits on their 8 dice on the Software roll earlier, the damage from drain will be Stun.

Have I got that right? Again, just making sure I understand how a technomancer would go about upping his team's matrix defenses on their gear.

Yeah, that all looks correct. But since you're threading at level 3, and it appears your resonance is 5, you won't be able to take physical fading since your hits are capped at 3.

Also the infusion complex form has a small caveat that the level has to be at or over the attribute being affected. So if we were threading on a rating 6 commlink, you'll have to threat at level 6 and risk physical fading if you score over 5 hits, but the good thing will be that if you succeed and not knock yourself out, you'll have a very powerful firewall. Like wise if one of your team mates has a better device, it might be better to slave everyone's gear to that commlink or RCC or deck, and then infuse that.

[Orpho]

. Like wise if one of your team mates has a better device, it might be better to slave everyone's gear to that commlink or RCC or deck, and then infuse that.

Although then you'd have to use their Will on the defense roll rather than yours, right? So you still wouldn't want to do that for the troll sam with a Will 1 and a device rating 6 (say).

[DeathStrobe]

. Like wise if one of your team mates has a better device, it might be better to slave everyone's gear to that commlink or RCC or deck, and then infuse that.

Although then you'd have to use their Will on the defense roll rather than yours, right? So you still wouldn't want to do that for the troll sam with a Will 1 and a device rating 6 (say).

Which ever gives you more dice. If you can infuse the firewall of his commlink up to 12, then he'd have 13 dice to defend everyone's stuff. So if you have a rating 3 comm and 5 will/int then you'd have 11 dice. So it may be better to let the troll protect everyone's gear. But that's a big maybe sometimes.

[ChromWolf]

Necroing the thread just a little bit, because I had a quasi-related question.....

I get that Personas subsume the device, which clearly complicates slaving.  I also get you can only have one persona.  But here's a twist to the OPs question:  rather than a deck and a commlink, can a decker (post chargen and with enough cash--say, a nasty spider NPC I have in mind) have a master deck and a slave deck?

My goal here is to have a primary deck he runs high firewall and data processing on, and a slaved deck with high attack and sleaze.  The decker would operate out of the master deck out of necessity, since I'm fairly certain in my research a slaved device ceases to be slaved when it is being subsumed by a persona), and the slave deck would devote its program allotment to running agents for the decker.

Is this even possible?  What are the hangups if so?

[DeathStrobe]

Necroing the thread just a little bit, because I had a quasi-related question.....

I get that Personas subsume the device, which clearly complicates slaving.  I also get you can only have one persona.  But here's a twist to the OPs question:  rather than a deck and a commlink, can a decker (post chargen and with enough cash--say, a nasty spider NPC I have in mind) have a master deck and a slave deck?

My goal here is to have a primary deck he runs high firewall and data processing on, and a slaved deck with high attack and sleaze.  The decker would operate out of the master deck out of necessity, since I'm fairly certain in my research a slaved device ceases to be slaved when it is being subsumed by a persona), and the slave deck would devote its program allotment to running agents for the decker.

Is this even possible?  What are the hangups if so?

The hangup is that it will probably cost you over a million nuyen. But seeing how this is a NPC, I guess that doesn't really matter. The other problem is the level of cheese that comes with that. Say you give him 2 Fairlight Excalibur, and one has encrypt so will give 10 firewall. That's kind of really hard to get past... And then the other will have 9 attack. That'll pretty much murder a hacker. I wouldn't recommend it...if you want to make him impossible to hack you can actually make this worse. You can say he's a G-man and is slaved to a rating 12 host, with a 15 firewall. This way if your PC's kill him, they don't instantly have two 800k cyber decks, at the very least.

[ChromWolf]

The hangup is that it will probably cost you over a million nuyen. But seeing how this is a NPC, I guess that doesn't really matter. The other problem is the level of cheese that comes with that. Say you give him 2 Fairlight Excalibur, and one has encrypt so will give 10 firewall. That's kind of really hard to get past... And then the other will have 9 attack. That'll pretty much murder a hacker. I wouldn't recommend it...if you want to make him impossible to hack you can actually make this worse. You can say he's a G-man and is slaved to a rating 12 host, with a 15 firewall. This way if your PC's kill him, they don't instantly have two 800k cyber decks, at the very least.

I'll be the first to admit I have a habit of going overboard without realizing it as a means of preventing from the get-go any brilliant player ideas I hadn't anticipated...  But I was thinking giving him his own host would be a bit brutal, and since I'm still creating him as a character, I have to at least *attempt* to follow character creation rules.  XD  I had admittedly planned to fudge his "starting" nuyen a bit, saying he's been working as a spider for a while.  He's definitely meant to challenge the Technomancer in the party, who's sort of had free reign to do as he pleases thus far (I'll leave out the details why, in the event said players actually manage to find this forum).

Not giving the group two cyberdecks as loot is definitely a good thing, so the Host slaving is an option, but what are the limitations of using agents, programs, cybercombat, etc. from within the host versus without?  I mean, I can also run IC (which gets REALLY deadly), but my goal is to have the ability to target the Technomancer PC and muss 'im up a bit, maybe send his agents to hang out on the smartguns of various encounter NPCs the party goes up against in case the technomancer tries to disable their weaponry, and so on.  Is that better served by a stand-alone spider with two decks, or a spider from within a host?

[DeathStrobe]

The hangup is that it will probably cost you over a million nuyen. But seeing how this is a NPC, I guess that doesn't really matter. The other problem is the level of cheese that comes with that. Say you give him 2 Fairlight Excalibur, and one has encrypt so will give 10 firewall. That's kind of really hard to get past... And then the other will have 9 attack. That'll pretty much murder a hacker. I wouldn't recommend it...if you want to make him impossible to hack you can actually make this worse. You can say he's a G-man and is slaved to a rating 12 host, with a 15 firewall. This way if your PC's kill him, they don't instantly have two 800k cyber decks, at the very least.

I'll be the first to admit I have a habit of going overboard without realizing it as a means of preventing from the get-go any brilliant player ideas I hadn't anticipated...  But I was thinking giving him his own host would be a bit brutal, and since I'm still creating him as a character, I have to at least *attempt* to follow character creation rules.  XD  I had admittedly planned to fudge his "starting" nuyen a bit, saying he's been working as a spider for a while.  He's definitely meant to challenge the Technomancer in the party, who's sort of had free reign to do as he pleases thus far (I'll leave out the details why, in the event said players actually manage to find this forum).

Not giving the group two cyberdecks as loot is definitely a good thing, so the Host slaving is an option, but what are the limitations of using agents, programs, cybercombat, etc. from within the host versus without?  I mean, I can also run IC (which gets REALLY deadly), but my goal is to have the ability to target the Technomancer PC and muss 'im up a bit, maybe send his agents to hang out on the smartguns of various encounter NPCs the party goes up against in case the technomancer tries to disable their weaponry, and so on.  Is that better served by a stand-alone spider with two decks, or a spider from within a host?

Well, IC can only exist in a host. So I guess the advantage of 2 decks is that he'd have access to 2 agents. That could be kind of interesting. I don't know man, you should compare DP of this spider and your TM and maybe do a few rolls and see who comes out ahead. My assumption is the spider, since the TM's Matrix stats are capped at their mental stats while the spider won't have that problem.

[ChromWolf]

Maybe that's the clincher--multiple agents, vs. only one per deck.

SR5 p. 243 says you can only run one program of any type on your deck.  SR5 p. 246 says Agents are autonomous programs.  However, the second sentence in the paragraph describing agents says, "Each agent occupies one program slot on your deck", implying you can have more than one (though I imagine that any programs your agent(s) run would also fill that limit).  So, maybe the question I should be asking is, which is true--only one agent per deck, or multiple?

With your discussion of deadliness of the NPC Decker, DeathStrobe, I started rethinking just how I wanted to build this character.  I was already thinking it would be nice to also have some backup for him, and maybe give him a Technomancer girlfriend to help him do the things that he can't do to the TM PC--sniff out Res signatures, and so on....  But then it occurred to me; if I'm already building the Decker and/or Technomancer as Prime Runner NPCs, and there're two of them to the TM's one (no other hacker types in the party), maybe I should just cool things down a bit and just run standard built NPCs, following all the economic rules for building characters. 

I realize now we're starting to get into things less related to the original thread, but briefly:  I think I'll make the decker into a Technomancer, who will instead have a decker girlfriend.  The technomancer will serve as a much better nemesis to the TM PC, but won't be on his own either thanks to the decker NPC.  I'm not sure I'll give them a Host as well, as that seems to really be breaching that cheese zone....  Maybe for the "end battle" kind of thing.  An NPC hacker duo needs a place to crash.  ...er..  hang.  ....er...  you know what I mean. 

[DeathStrobe]

A dissonance technomancer might be a good nemesis. They're a bit more powerful. Most of the rules of Unwired should translate over to SR5 if you want to read up more on dissonance technomancer.

I guess you could run two different agents at different ratings...maybe...I don't know. I'd just limit it to one agent at a time. It might get silly if a decker can have an army of agents. But then again TMs can have armies of sprites. I don't know. I'd have to think about that more.

[Kanly]

The  "you can only run one program of any type on your deck" part only means that you can't run 2 of the same type. So no stacking Virtual Machines and Encryptions ((

[olg707]

I like the idea of a counter NPC, that can really drive stories. Being a Technomancer is great because no on really knows all the capabilities of TMs.

Looking over the thread, I wanted to throw in my own ¥0.02 about some of the assumptions used.
Using any two persona-providing devices as a user such as [A) Two Cyberdecks or B) a Commlink + Cyberdeck] would not work, since you can only have one persona at a time.

A second device could be used in the scenario of an Agent running on a Cyberdeck, as an agent has a persona and would operate on its own. This Cyberdeck could be a slave in your pan, and could be commanded to take actions.

[ChromWolf]

I like the idea of a counter NPC, that can really drive stories. Being a Technomancer is great because no on really knows all the capabilities of TMs.

Well, the TM PC does....  which is what scares me, LOL.  Still, with all the shenanigans he's gotten away with, it's time for a nemesis.  >:}

A second device could be used in the scenario of an Agent running on a Cyberdeck, as an agent has a persona and would operate on its own. This Cyberdeck could be a slave in your pan, and could be commanded to take actions.

I think I'll prep for this, but....  I dunno if I'll actually spring it, since (generally speaking) anything I do, the players should also be able to do.  That, and if the nemesis will be a TM, and the decker will be his girlfriend, that's already 2 against 1.  Having 2+agent against 1 might be too much unless they're on the defensive, and even then.  Now, if the TM PC wanders into the TM's host.......  that's a completely different story.  >:}