[belaran]

Hi all,

I recently tossed a mean decker build to one of my PCs, and I was wondering if this set up was even (remotely) legal, or if I somehow missed a piece of rule forbidding this.

So here what I did: a decker with 3 slots of program bought and run 3 rating 6 agents. Assuming all the agents teamworks with him on Data Spike or Hack On Fly, this "little gang" would had, each 3d to his pool (by buying hits) and +1 to the Attack or Sleaze limit, turning the overall bonuses to 12d and +3 to the Limit.

AFAIK, in terms of rules, this flies. One could argue, however, that the 3 agents running on the same the device should NOT increase the limit of the device (but rather reduce, I would even agree to reduce DP by the number of Agents, but for simplicity sake, it is probably better to not house rule that).

Is there anything I missed making this set up illegal ?

[Jack_Spade]

There is the argument that you can't run the same program twice on your rig, but you can still make this work with the Nixdorf Secretary comlink that sports an R3 agent. You'll need to mod either attack or sleaze on to them and add a sleaze or attack dongle for full functionality. That increases the price to about 8000 per helper, but that's still pretty cheap for +1 die +1 Limit.

[belaran]

Well, the "can't run twice" program rules is probably aimed more at avoiding Hammer * 3 = > +6DV to Matrix Damage. That being said, it is a good point. It's not far fetch to think that a deck can only run one Agent.

[ShadowcatX]

You're half way to hack a stack, where the decker becomes irrelevant and players just carry stacks of decks with agents and tell the agents to hack whatever needs hacked. Eventually one agent will get lucky.

[belaran]

Not really, don't forget that Agent has Persona which means Overwatch.  If my players would be stupid enough to implement something as ridiculous I would make GOD run into them after 2 minutes "oups, your agent has try to hack a DR7 commlink and utterly failed, and it has rack up his OS score..".

Also, bear in mind, that Agent are allowed to perform "one matrix action" on behalf of the user. So, even if it seems logical for anybody knowing anything about (actual) software, it is possible to program an Agent to say: "Matrix Perception on Device, if DR < X, then Hack, Hack, Steal and Reboot".

So, IMHO, making Decker or Technomancer irrelevant by a smart use of agents is more of a rooky / bad GM issue than anything else. Obviosly a skilled (meta)human being or an IA, can be far more efficient.

Actually I did not intend that as a way to replace a Decker, especially because, as a GM, I consider Agent to be as dumb as Drone, so they can't really do anything smart unless someone instruct them. And I would not allow a non-decker character asking his agent to "hack something" for him/her.

(well, unless, this is how the group has decided to  the lack of decker. But I would still strongly limit this use case).

No, the intend here was to provide a new/interesting opponent for my decker player. As a GM I don't think I would allow such build to a player,but when it comes to the matrix, don't forget that the Megas always cheats !