[Snack Happy]

Another question one of the characters in our group got an agent placed on his system so it takes up part of his system and he has system 1 and response 1 so what happens to his commlink?

[FastJack]

His Response drops to 0 and he can't run any other programs on the 'link. If he's a hacker, his Initiative isn't boosted by his Commlink any more.

Basically, his commlink is now just a phone/music player/credstick. He can't even run the most basic of programs. I should also point out that when the Agent's off the 'link, he'll be just as hampered if he runs any program on the Commlink.

[Kontact]

Agents even need their own copies of programs to run, so they'll eat up even more processing power.

You want Armor for yourself and Armor for your IC, then that's two separate programs at once.
This is really why hackers will build Clusters.  Clustering 4 nodes of the same strength will let you run 2x as many programs.

[Waratah]

I thought that when you overloaded the system with programs and connections, the resulting decrease in response affected everything. sort of like you end up hanging the system.

Also, when you connect to a system does everything then run at the response of that system?

So if you have a response 4 commlink but then connect to a response 2 network, does that slow everything down to rating 2?
It made sense to me that it did but wanted to confirm.

[Dakka]

Response degradation affects your matrix initiative but not much else.  Program rating limits are based on system, you can only run programs with a max rating of your System and every System programs running reduces your response by 1.  System rating is limited by the BASE Response of a device, not its modified response for running too much stuff.  If you get your response down to 0 your icon would be frozen and you would need a restart.

Connecting to a system does not affect your devices Response attribute, but if you load copies of your agents into that node to act independently then those agents WOULD have a response = the system they are running on. 

[Waratah]

Ok.
I might house rule that differently as it seemed to make sense to me that everything got worse the slower the response was, both on the commlink and when connecting to a network.
Gave the feel that when you have a high end commlink it feels sluggish and unresponsive on a slow network, but when you suddenly connect to that hidden high tech node with great response, there's a real sense of speed and freedom.
Same for the commlink, running an excessive number of programs impacts the response and as a result the effectiveness of the system, the OS runs slower, programs take longer to process and so on.

Meh.
Will see how it plays out.

Thanks.