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Technomancer feedback for a new book!
Yue:
Hi! I haven't introduced myself, but I'm Amy Veeres, a freelancer with Catalyst. I've written some stuff for Chrome Flesh and a new book in the 10 ______s series, but this thread is about something you'll see from me either late this year or early next, a book entirely about Technomancers!
So yeah, Technomancer supplement! I'm doing it with Dylan Stangel, the guy that wrote the TM rules in Data Trails, so don't worry, it's not "Oh god, they're letting the new girl go nuts, we're doomed." As an additional measure, this thread exists. I don't want it to just be my and his perspective.
What I'm looking for is all the feedback and suggestions you have on Technomancers. Positive, negative, neutral, personal attacks on devs and their writing, whatever you want. Maybe not that last one, but you get the idea. Tell me what works, what doesn't, what you miss, what you want gone, and I'll go through all of this and keep it in mind as I'm developing this book.
I'm not gonna make any promises that every single idea will be incorporated, but I'll read this regularly and keep as much in mind as possible. It would help if you explained why you want this or that, so that I get where you're coming from.
Herr Brackhaus:
The following are my opinions of what I think would make technomancers more attractive and more playable.
1. Skinlink should be a base ability, not an Echo.
Reasoning: For 70 nuyen a technomancer can buy a set of trodes and get the ability to create a direct connection. Requiring a submersion and an Echo is too much for too little, and is in my opinion nowhere near balanced
2. Fade values are far too high for what you get.
Reasoning: Puppeteer is a great example where other abilities can achieve the same thing for less; coupled with the fact that technomancers take Matrix damage as stun/physical damage, and fade values make for one unconscious technomancer very quickly
3. Emulating programs should be a single echo, not one echo per program. Comparatively, a Decker spends less than 5k nuyen and has access to every single program available, while a technomancer would need to spend hundreds of karma to achieve the same thing. Technmancers should not be deckers, but not having access to certain programs (Browse in particular) for their living persona and/or having to use a deck (or commlink with a program module bow) is again nowhere near balanced from a mechanical perspective.
4. If changing the above is unfeasible, consider making technomancer so uniquely distinct from deckers that they don't at all fit the format for what most people consider to be a "magician of the Matrix).
Reasoning: technomancers are supposed to be intuitive users of the Matrix, but unfer current rules it is nearly impossible to make a technomancer accomplish some of the same things a Decker can. They went from being the Swiss army knife of the Matrix in SR4 to being an Aspected TechnoMagician in SR5, and they are hard to build well, hard to play well, and personally, I feel they don't really have a lot going for them currently. They're just kind of meh, in my opinion, because they are either discount hackers, or sprite commanders.
5. Please, please, PLEASE bring back streams and paragons, and explore the deep resonance and dissonance in more detail. More background on Pax and her quest to create dissonance pools would be awesome, but more info on the realms in general would be most excellent.
Triskavanski:
Following up on Herr's things.
1) While I never specifically thought about it, I pretty much do agree with the skin link being something more of a base ability of a technomancer, rather than an echo. Pretty much for the same reasons.
1a/3) Further more Echo's should be something actually powerful, not something that gives a slight nudge. A +1 in a matrix attribute is hardly something to write home about. But in the corebook, that is what we've got. Most of the things in there only give a slight nudge to the technomancers growth. Looking to the thing that is closest to technomancers we've got mages, who have the ability to completely rework the fabrics of reality and rules of their magic. With the centering metamagic, they start with a slight nudge to their ability to resist drain, that much is true. However, the important part is that they don't have to ever take that metamagic again. And now every time they submerge, they get another die for their drain tests.
Thats what the Technomancer's enhanced abilities should be giving him. Something like 1/2 submersion grade - minimum +1 to that particular echo's matrix attribute. The same is with the program, as it too quickly becomes too little too late with it. Also, they shouldn't have two echos that do the same thing.
2) The Fade values. Like Puppeteer in Herr's example, with its +4 fade value, so you can control 1 action. While Mages have the ability to control as many actions as they want or until their target beaks free with a -1 drain value, coupled with drain dice resistance, give mages the ability to do a lot more. Especially since 95% of the matrix actions are complex actions, and the only ones that are simple actions are pretty weak. I'm not even sure what matrix actions are free actions.
IMO You should want to have a Technomancer in your team because he can do stuff a Decker can't. But you don't want the technomancer to exactly replace a decker either. They should be able to help cover some of the stuff a decker, but ultimately they've got a lot more tools than deckers, but for things outside of what a Decker would normally do. Like complex forms that they can use in the physical world, such as my "The One" complex form that gives a technomancer a slightly better ability to avoid danger by reading and calculating bullet paths by sort of hacking into the smart gun systems. A technomancer should be able to do pretty much everything in Ghost in the Shell, as far as hacking someone's cybereyes in the middle of combat to make him disappear. Or hacking every camera and cybereye within a certain distance to cover his face.
Lastly.. And this is really really important.
Technomancer stuff shouldn't be ambiguous. Like for example Resonance Veil. What exactly /can/ you do with this? Well that depends on the GM and what he's willing to allow happen. Same with Editor and Puppeteer. Even the CF that increases noise is fairly ambigious on how long it lasts.
ProfessorCirno:
Hello Amy! I've always been kinda interested in Technos (I was a bit of an Otaku fan in 3rd) but felt that they tended to sorta fall flat; SR5 is sadly no difference. Rather then list a bunch of demands, I'm just sorta going to categorize where I feel their current strengths and weaknesses are, mostly in comparison to Deckers.
Weaknesses
Price of Entry
- In order to make a Techno with all the bells and whistles, the current cost is significantly higher then that of a Decker. Deckers and Technos both need high resources/resonance and skills, but while Deckers only need good logic and intuition, Deckers need all four mental stats. Likewise, Technos have Techno-only skills they need on top of normal hacking abilities!
- Resources A will get you not just a real good deck, it can also buy you lots of OTHER good stuff too! Resonance on the other hand scales up your technomancer abilities...but not much else. It is possible to ignore Resonance, sprites, and CFs, and just go "classic Otaku" style, but I personally think doing this misses out on why you'd want to make a technomancer to begin with!
- The decker specific "goodies" are mostly programs, but programs are really good. Consider that a program to upgrade Sleaze costs a handful of nuyen, whereas a technomancer has to spend an entire submission on it! Likewise, a Rating 6 Agent is a must-have and costs one immediate payment of nuyen, while sprites need to be created each time and potentially hurt you whenever you do it.
- Deckers can make up for lower physical stats with 'ware (the decker I last played made good use of a single expenditure of muscle 'ware to keep him actually mobile!) while technomancers are strongly shooed away from using 'ware...which unfortunately cuts down their ability to dump physical stats the way a decker might.
- A Decker can by default hardlink into a device to access a host, bypassing the huge firewall - which is great! It helps incentivize deckers to be on-premise and with the group, rather then just nap in the back, and keeps them in the action. Unfortunately, Technos can't do that...unless they spend a fairly good chunk of karma on one of their submissions.
Versatility
- A Techno can never protect their buddies' gear (or their own, in fact) the same way a Decker can.
- Use of 'ware gives Deckers a large variety of options Technos don't otherwise have. The Decker I mentioned playing had a pimped out cyberarm with a hidden holster for his gun; if he couldn't hack it, he could shoot it. Deckers can also side-line as Riggers - or at least have some drones on command - with far more ease then Technos can. Technos are basically always going to be doing one thing: hackin'. Deckers can add other stuff to their resume.
Cost of Upgrade
- Simply put, a Decker can upgrade themselves using both nuyen and karma; a Techno can only use karma. Nuyen after a certain point is all but worthless to a Techno, unless they want to save up and retire, but where's the fun in that? ;)
Cost of Ability Usage
- Techno fading numbers are absolutely insane. Puppeteer is a really cool ability - the best technos have, probably - but it costs more then twice flat out mind control does in stun damage. CFs are rarely used when even the smallest one is going to knock you out of commission.
Strengths
Versatility
- Most CFs are bad, but there are two or three that are so awesome they almost make up for the bad ones. Everyone knows how versatile Puppeteer is. Resonance Veil can also be extremely potent depending on your GM.
- Likewise, there's no Gremlins ability for Deckers. A fault sprite can wreck havoc that Deckers could never dream of.
- Assuming your GM is ok with it, machine sprites and Diagnostics is the best "buffing" ability in the game.
- Depending on how you build your stats, Technos can choose to always have their entire ASDF be high, rather then one high, two middling, and one low. This will likely become far more useful in deep runs into the Foundation, where you can't change out your deck.
Cost of Upgrade
- Buying a new deck out of chargen is beyond expensive; I've found it only seems to happen when the GM gives you a mission with a new deck as part of the payout. For Technomancers, it is relatively easier to save up enough karma to either upgrade a stat point or to gain a stat increasing submission.
So as it stands, Technos have a small number of abilities that are awesome, but they're almost all Matrix-only, cost way too much, and depend somewhat heavily on GMs being lenient. In workhorse mode, they fall behind Deckers rather badly. Worse yet, technos seem to lack some of the more basic necessities that Deckers get immediately. Because they can't use nuyen to upgrade themselves, this leads to them eternally falling behind; the longer the game goes on, the greater the lead between the two. While mechanically technos can be compared to mages, they lack the huge array of spells, only effect the Matrix, have nothing similar to foci, their sprites are more limited, and their drain/fading significantly more severe.
Marcus:
Something needs to be done to improve techno viability at creation. As it stands now the only techno build that is viable is the Sprite Summoner build.
There has been a lot of threads on this topic, between the character review section and several long threads on house rules to fix technos, many of which were simply 5th updates of previous edition material. Given that the class is both very multi-attribute dependent, and requires it's own priority for resonance, means it's at significant disadvantage in terms of resources as everyone has pointed out. This is further complicated by the fact that like Mages, technos can't really afford to lose essence. So something needs to be done to expand the basic power set to address the viability issue.
The place to start in my opinion is CFs. For example the Smartlink CF, As you know, I'm sure, we had this back in 4th, and it was very helpful in most basic sense of increasing initial character viability. More CFs that can assist the Techno's in the meat world directly are critical steps in the right direction. CF are costed as spells, but they don't have anything like the utility of spells, and that really needs to change. A CF that allows a Techno to simulate an echo while it's sustained would be ideal, but something to address those issues is needed.
Clarification on Techno's relationship to Icons, and connecting to devices is also an area that really needs to be looked at. There has been some debate over whether Techno's are able to use Icons, or even maintaining connections to devices. The debate was based upon the wording in the SR5 core, and even I had to agree that it was confusing. While I do think the touch-link thing fairly clearly shows that they can, the mechanics of that are not very clear, and need to be specified.
Drones and Technos also need to be clarified, the biggest question I had when i looked at this was can sprites pilot drones? If not, then can we get a new type of sprite that does? A rigger Techno would be a great alternative that's very difficult to do under RAW, some support would go a long way to fixing that. Also I personally would like clarification upon what happens when you diagnostic a drone? Does it add to the whole system or A specific subsystem etc?
Finally I'd really like to suggest that some kind of Foci icons perhaps somehow linked in with wireless bonuses would be my suggestion. They could easily be based upon echos or sprite powers, or be like sustaining foci to keep up CFs. The fact that only one build is viable needs to be addressed, the ability to sustain certain powers; particularly diagnostic (for its bonus die to equipment use) could open up plenty of other paths. They also really need to be an avenue for techno's to spend money on, as it's basically completely lacking right now.
Thanks for taking time to listen Amy. Good luck with the book.
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