Yeah. I'd say once you get past the setting rules and conventions that are immediately applicable to SINless players the world starts getting fuzzier and more inconsistent, but if we're being honest it's fuzzy, inconsistent, or outright incomplete pretty much everywhere, although I generally feel the community has a more solid grasp of the setting and rules than Catalyst does and with enough googling for old discussions and the absolutely beautiful times the literal author of a book shows up to explain mechanics that somehow didn't make it into the book one can get a pretty solid understanding of how it's supposed to work.
Although even there it can be fuzzy, like for example I'm still not sure how sensors at security checkpoints should be written since RAW you can like have a sensor able to clearly detect and image literally every piece of metal or cyberware out to 5-15 meters (depending on what type of sensor you're talking about) that fits inside a pen, a pair of glasses, a bee-sized drone, or hypothetically even contact lenses, so you could hypothetically have a MAD scanner inside every single door and light fixture in a building for pretty minimal expense (or at least fitted to every single security guard), which makes some narrative sense but is absolute bullshit from a gameplay perspective where you want the party to solve puzzles cleanly and not just sit for several hours while the decker makes literally hundreds of hack on the fly and control device tests to let the party sneak through a building, so I usually just consolidate it into a single device at formal security checkpoints because I don't want to make a hundred defense rolls either (and often just treat opposed roles as threshold tests if they're not too narratively important).
Thankfully, the vague and inconsistent rules seem to have contributed to a culture that's way more accepting of "the GM can literally just arbitrarily declare rulings on nearly any situation" than something like D&D which in my experience was notorious for rules lawyering players trying to twist the system to breaking.
Don't the sensors use their rating as a perception to detect? So yea a cheap low rating MAD to keep out obvious cyberware users but also its a great chance to use some fast talking "Oh of course the scanner picked up my state of the art headware, I couldn't do my job as a corp security assessor without it, don't worry about the cyberspur it's been disabled but havn't had the spare nuyen to get it removed"
I totally agree about the community having a better head for the game than Catalyst, but Ima be honest with you while I love the world & lore actually playing/gming the game kinda gets me depressed with how close it is to actual society just without the cool shit.
Don’t the sensors use their rating as a perception to detect?
They use their rating as the limit on a perception+INT or electronic warfare+INT test*, which opens up a whole other can of worms to where a normal quality camera (or any other kind of sensor) physically cannot detect someone most of the time if they have a sneak pool of 9 or more without the GM ruling that "no, you can't sneak through open ground that's covered from multiple angles by security cameras regardless of how well you roll on a sneak test"**.
* Now what's actually making those tests is another question altogether: if its the sensor array itself it'd be something like sensor rating x 2 for the dice pool; if it's an agent program it's either agent rating -1 or agent rating x 2 (because RAW agents don't have perception or ewar skills, but it makes narrative sense for one created to watch sensor grids to have it), a pilot program would be pilot rating + clearsight or ewar autosofts, and a security guard would be rolling the normal perception or ewar checks.
** Unless there's some enabling conditions like a ruthenium polymer coating on your armor or at least a chameleon suit.
I've gone and researched this entirely too many times and the best I've gotten is pretty much "tailor the narrative description to suit gameplay needs and minimize excessive dice rolling."
Now from a player perspective I jam sensors in absolutely everything, especially drones because if there's anything I've learned as a GM it's that GMs absolutely love it when you ask them to describe in meticulous detail the cyberware and weapon loadouts of literally every single person nearby, and the more pointless dice rolling you can make the more fun it is for everyone! (Or more accurately, to cover my ass and give a clear narrative impetus to spoil ambushes and any other unwelcome surprises with the implicit understanding that superfluous details don't matter and don't warrant lots of rolls.)
but Ima be honest with you while I love the world & lore actually playing/gming the game kinda gets me depressed with how close it is to actual society just without the cool shit.
Yeah. I kind of work around that as a GM by following one golden rule: the lazier and more absurd whatever description or plot point I'm giving is, the more it becomes both realistic and fantastical at the same time.
We think about SINs about some block-chain type thing (fridge logic) with track records that aren't just controlled by 1 corp, explain why you don't issue them non stop. It is in the best interest of the corps to keep the system going as they are able to control people (and have quite a bit of back up SINs in their private suit cases).
Yeah. I'd say once you get past the setting rules and conventions that are immediately applicable to SINless players the world starts getting fuzzier and more inconsistent, but if we're being honest it's fuzzy, inconsistent, or outright incomplete pretty much everywhere, although I generally feel the community has a more solid grasp of the setting and rules than Catalyst does and with enough googling for old discussions and the absolutely beautiful times the literal author of a book shows up to explain mechanics that somehow didn't make it into the book one can get a pretty solid understanding of how it's supposed to work.
Although even there it can be fuzzy, like for example I'm still not sure how sensors at security checkpoints should be written since RAW you can like have a sensor able to clearly detect and image literally every piece of metal or cyberware out to 5-15 meters (depending on what type of sensor you're talking about) that fits inside a pen, a pair of glasses, a bee-sized drone, or hypothetically even contact lenses, so you could hypothetically have a MAD scanner inside every single door and light fixture in a building for pretty minimal expense (or at least fitted to every single security guard), which makes some narrative sense but is absolute bullshit from a gameplay perspective where you want the party to solve puzzles cleanly and not just sit for several hours while the decker makes literally hundreds of hack on the fly and control device tests to let the party sneak through a building, so I usually just consolidate it into a single device at formal security checkpoints because I don't want to make a hundred defense rolls either (and often just treat opposed roles as threshold tests if they're not too narratively important).
Thankfully, the vague and inconsistent rules seem to have contributed to a culture that's way more accepting of "the GM can literally just arbitrarily declare rulings on nearly any situation" than something like D&D which in my experience was notorious for rules lawyering players trying to twist the system to breaking.
Don't the sensors use their rating as a perception to detect? So yea a cheap low rating MAD to keep out obvious cyberware users but also its a great chance to use some fast talking "Oh of course the scanner picked up my state of the art headware, I couldn't do my job as a corp security assessor without it, don't worry about the cyberspur it's been disabled but havn't had the spare nuyen to get it removed"
I totally agree about the community having a better head for the game than Catalyst, but Ima be honest with you while I love the world & lore actually playing/gming the game kinda gets me depressed with how close it is to actual society just without the cool shit.
They use their rating as the limit on a perception+INT or electronic warfare+INT test*, which opens up a whole other can of worms to where a normal quality camera (or any other kind of sensor) physically cannot detect someone most of the time if they have a sneak pool of 9 or more without the GM ruling that "no, you can't sneak through open ground that's covered from multiple angles by security cameras regardless of how well you roll on a sneak test"**.
* Now what's actually making those tests is another question altogether: if its the sensor array itself it'd be something like sensor rating x 2 for the dice pool; if it's an agent program it's either agent rating -1 or agent rating x 2 (because RAW agents don't have perception or ewar skills, but it makes narrative sense for one created to watch sensor grids to have it), a pilot program would be pilot rating + clearsight or ewar autosofts, and a security guard would be rolling the normal perception or ewar checks.
** Unless there's some enabling conditions like a ruthenium polymer coating on your armor or at least a chameleon suit.
I've gone and researched this entirely too many times and the best I've gotten is pretty much "tailor the narrative description to suit gameplay needs and minimize excessive dice rolling."
Now from a player perspective I jam sensors in absolutely everything, especially drones because if there's anything I've learned as a GM it's that GMs absolutely love it when you ask them to describe in meticulous detail the cyberware and weapon loadouts of literally every single person nearby, and the more pointless dice rolling you can make the more fun it is for everyone! (Or more accurately, to cover my ass and give a clear narrative impetus to spoil ambushes and any other unwelcome surprises with the implicit understanding that superfluous details don't matter and don't warrant lots of rolls.)
Yeah. I kind of work around that as a GM by following one golden rule: the lazier and more absurd whatever description or plot point I'm giving is, the more it becomes both realistic and fantastical at the same time.
We think about SINs about some block-chain type thing (fridge logic) with track records that aren't just controlled by 1 corp, explain why you don't issue them non stop. It is in the best interest of the corps to keep the system going as they are able to control people (and have quite a bit of back up SINs in their private suit cases).