[madmarvin]

what limits do you put on deckers in your games, can they cause thor shots, fake purchase/delivery orders, etc. what is the extreme of decking for you all..

to me a great decker should pretty much be able to find and then, procure through faking work orders, bill payments, purchase orders, etc. almost any time of gear...
legal gear should be pretty easy,
security much more restricted,
what about milspec gear? do you allow them to have it fall off the back of a truck? through editing manifest, rerouting deliveries?
what if any custom rules do you use, i think the difficulty should be based off the availability. or its at least a good palce to start.

[Michael Chandra]

That kind of thing requires more than just a simple hack, since you need intel and face a Host and whatnot. I'd make a run out of that.

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

I suspect your post is coming from a place of "this is what I want to do with my decker, and I want to show your support to my GM to encourage him to allow me to do these kinds of things".  So I'll reply as if I were a GM addressing a player making this argument to me. Do keep in mind however that I'm friendly to Deckers.. moreso than to magical and technomancer PCs.  I play one too, and have a soft spot for the archetype that does things "the hard way" without magic/resonance...

As a general rule, hacking in SR5 is about short term results. Marks don't persist through your own reboots, and while you can force a target device (but not a host) to reboot you can't affect it beyond that reboot (without hacking it again). Causing a persistent effect in the game world is mainly possible via plot rather than matrix actions.  For example hacking a site can destroy digital evidence of your team's trespass on a site because those devices are what generates the data in the first place (cameras, door access logs, etc).  OTOH destroying that evidence some weeks or months after the fact is more complicated because by then the data has been archived in offline storage, and just deleting them from a host just results in the files being restored later by administrators.

So with this paradigm for SR5 in mind, when you ask "can I use hacking to get milspec armor" the answer is going to boil down to WHY you want it.  If Mr Johnson is hiring you to steal and deliver said armor, then the answer is "Yes".  If it's because you want the armor for yourself, then the answer becomes more complicated.

1) Why do you even want it in the first place?  You do realize you're playing Shadowrun, not Mechwarrior right? But assuming you're content with gathering the Notoriety and Public Awareness involved in using milspec gear..

2) If you want to use the hacking rules to bypass the regular equipment acquisition rules... I'd be skeptical about it.  About as skeptical as if you wanted to use cybercombat in place of pistols to shoot your gun in combat.  Skeptical, but I wouldn't be completely close-minded about it. One of the main concerns would be that if you can get gear just by hacking hosts, what's to stop you from going nuts and delivering yourself a LAV?

3) Dealing specifically with milspec issues... that's the kind of stuff that a sane decker should be unwilling to do out of a sense of self-preservation. Military hosts begin in the double digit Host Ratings. It'd be easier to shoot your way into a military installation and physically steal the gear than successfully hacking a military host...  And I WOULD make you hack a military host to affect a shipping manifest or the like.  Because if you just hack the U-CALL-WE-HAUL rinkydink host and alter shipping orders, they'll just get fixed anyway when checked against the military's order in the military host.

4) assuming you're successful, have yourself a heaping load of Public Awareness to go along with it. A. Heaping. Load.  Maybe the best way to dissuade the next hack from delivering a LAV might be that you get 1 point of P.A. for every 1 point in the gear's restricted rating.  Successfully hijacking a military shipment is the kind of thing that national security services get right on investigating.  Good luck with the rest of your short shadowrunning career.

[madmarvin]

love the response, and the non obvious reasons to not do it.
but actually i am the GM, and i have always found the fluff between what it absolutely possible vs how deckers are actually used to be a vast gulf, and wanted to get others opinions.

i am used to having long played characters, with high triple digit karma in my group. so what can normally be done vs whats possible...... prime runners are the guys stories get told about.

[Reaver]

They talked a bit about some of the things you are mentioning in your OP in the 4e matrix and lifestyle books. If you wanted, you could adapt some of that to 5e if you so choose.

Basically, it said that for some things, (such as lifestyle, or components of lifestyles) a hacker could spoof some things for a limited time, but eventually the system auto-corrects itself after a certain amount of time due to how interconnected all the databases are; and the fact a hacker could never hope to hack them all.)
It also listed the dangers of doing so: From losing the SIN that everything is attached to, all the way up to a demo charged "knock" on the door in the middle of the night by a full HTR team of police/security...

As for spoofing/editing/hacking for some equipment to "magically fall off a truck" in front of the players, well, that is a great set up for a shadowrun, and not something that can be solved by a few hacked electrons from a couch

[PiXeL01]

Making purchases I’d say would require a foundation run at least.

[SunRunner]

Another way to think of things is past a certain point real people get involved and things have physical cut outs to stop deckers. Take mil spec gear, it has physical security guards, it can ONLY be delivered to certain pre registered destinations. These destinations are things like Military bases and a few registered private contractors secured ware houses. The meat security knows that and any shipping destination that shows up out of this range gets flagged and military electronic warfare gets called in. If you want an idea what these guys look like, they are the matrix equivalent of Trolls in heavy mil spec armor packing gauss rifles and GOD either looks the other way or gets involved on these guys side when the fireworks start. Look up 4E books like War and such where they talk about military grade cyber decks that make Fairlight Paladins look like cheap kiddie toys. I am talking all matrix attributes in the double digits and military grade programs at that level. And I know your thinking about all the black bag ops and stuff that happens off the books. Guess what those guys show up to the warehouse as Captain/Colonel Johnson with a legitimate requisition order so when the order is physically doubled check by a person directly calling another person to verify the release and that yes these suits of mil spec armor have been requisitioned by Alpha company of the 555th infantry brigade it all checks out. Certain warehouses have real guys driving fork lifts and dont load rigged trucks for this reason. Also when this stuff gets moved it gets armed escorts because of how valuable it is.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

And things get double- and quadruple-checked at every stage of the game.  "Is this the thing we want?  Is this the address we want?  is this the client we want?"  While I absolutely do not prevent such a heist from taking place, it is absolutely a full-bore shadowrun with multiple, even dozens, of hackers involved, because of many things that need to be set up and maintained.  Add in that even just setting up the false corporation doing the purchasing is going to require multiple 'runs, because that's getting not just triple-checked, but physically checked.

I can think of several ways to do this sort of thing, but even the 'easiest' one is going to involve hacking the Host of the closest military site with the gear you want, to plant ID information in that limited site to assist the intrusion of the entire team.  Then it's a variety of cons and hacks -- planting authorization to check out the piece of gear, planting a reason for it to be checked out, the face checking it out, the mage modifying the memory of the quartermaster to make him not remember that he checked the thing out, hacking the quartermaster system to erase that part of the log, hacking time in a shop to disassemble the thing, the gunbunnies and/or rigger taking the thing apart, hacking the shipping to send 'parts' out to places -- and then redirecting those shipments several times to 'lose the tracking'.

And that'd be just for something limited in size, like a single Thunderstruck gauss rifle or one suit of milspec armor.

Getting multiples would start out by putting together a company that'd be authorized to buy the things, going through the verification from the manufacturer (including a physical visit from an inspection team), all that.  Essentially, you'd need an organization to pull it off ... sounds like organized crime, doesn't it?  If/when you get a hold of milspec gear, there's a good chance that that's where it came from.  Another potential source would be a recently (and possibly violently) defunct military organization, such as a merc group.

But yes, you can do a lot (including, possibly, generating a Thor shot) through the Matrix.  It's my belief that the decker is the most dangerous person in the group, and always have been.  But like with all the other options, you can't get everything you want just by manipulating the Matrix.

Sorry.