[belaran]

Despite all the fluff about how the matrix or host can look like, I still have a hard time coming up, on the fly, with a nice, cool looking paradigm for the host (or the grid) my PCs are hacking. Especially, that nowdays, the matrix rendering needs to be somewhat AR compatible...

How do you do it ? What kind of rendering you either designed or ran into that you found awesome ?

[Herr Brackhaus]

It helps to keep a handful of "stock" paradigms on hand, and these can be just like the real world such as an office building for a host providing data processing for a host, or a military base complete with checkpoints guarded by MPs (firewall and IC, respectively) for a secure installation.

For the more esoteric locations I use a lot of inspiration from movies, basically.

[belaran]

It helps to keep a handful of "stock" paradigms on hand,...

In fact this is exactly what I want to get out of this thread - so please share yours !

[farothel]

not the best books, but in Tom Clancy's Netforce you have descriptions of VR 'landscapes'.  You might want to check those out.

[belaran]

Cool, I'll check this out indeed. However, I'm more into "proven solutions" meaning I would love GM to share VR landscape they did use (and worked) with their PCs, along on how they render their actions.

My goals would ultimetly to be able to build a dozen "predefined" VR landscape I could use for anything (and share them of course), but also may be extract from the example some kind of best practices/rules on building such environement...

[Herr Brackhaus]

Honestly, I tend to leave VR much like the real world unless the players are doing deep dives into the Foundation, in part to avoid having to come up with a ton of information for just the one player. So as mentioned, office buildings, farms, traffic systems, a busy street, a small shop, and so on and so on.

For examples of Foundation paradigms, check this thread which I started for the same reason (but for Foundations rather than VR in general): http://forums.shadowruntabletop.com/index.php?topic=20899.msg374860#msg374860

[belaran]

Well, first of all, thanks for the link to the Foundation Worlds, it's a pretty awesome. I'll try to contribute my (only for now) run into the foundation (a sort of Rogue Traderish universe, that worked pretty well).

My goals is to achieve the same thing here, with regular VR/AR, which is a bit more difficult, because of the nature of it (as to cohabits with AR somehow, and ideally be realistic enough to see "people works within this host" - while not being to mundane or boring for my PCs).

[farothel]

I've worked out a couple of things for one of my characters who had a reality filter (4th edition), so that I had my own landscape instead of the one that the host provided (at least, it looked like that to me).
As my character's nickname was black panther and I had a panther as my standard persona (think Bagheera from jungle book), I had my VR scape looking like a jungle, where wolves were IC, prey animals were different kind of files and doing a search was sniffing out one of these animals.  Trees were mostly decorative, except for firewalls, which were represented by thorn bushes.  A hole in the firewall was a gap in the bushes where I could sneak in.  I didn't have much more than that as the game stopped, but it can be a start.

If your character has a reality filter (I'm not sure if it exists in 5th) let him come up with something for his character.

[belaran]

Hum, that is an interesting take - having the PCs designed the VR sort of speak.