Rework skills soft proposal
Ported from another thread in GP&C

Rather than a skill soft chip. Have a skill socket that can be boosted with skill checks from a cybertechnician, or a machine that you can pay more than a player to do this if no player is around. These boosts to skills falloff over time but crucially max out at an equivalent of a Gold level of soft. There is no longer an instant ability to swap in technical skills as needed, there is a target ability to the action that is equivalent to hiring someone and a cost to using them.

And programmatically it could potentially be fairly easy to implement. As assets are already in place.

This is something that I believe will be HIGHLY healthy for the game if it is addressed, as one of the biggest problems that technical characters have early on in their carreer is that literally no one will every hire them unless they are god tier networkers, which 90% of newbies are not.

This doesn't resolve the perceived issue with skillsofts.

Also skillsofts are pretty much totally fine the way they are right now.

If you want to pay 50K for someone to stick a TV to your wall instead of paying a technician 2K to do it, who's winning here, and who's losing?

Bobby Baddazz the supersolo can't slap a skillsoft in and be good at all the technical skills. That's fundamentally not how skills work in this game.

If you want to be a halfass solo slash part-time carpet installer, then that's your character's identity. You're not a god solo. You're not a good carpet installer.

The skillsoft itself, as well as the chips don't contribute to the perceived problem, because there isn't a perceived problem to be had. If you want to have a vast collection of extremely expensive chips and sit in your apartment and not contribute to RP of the game writ large, then you're going to find yourself not getting a hell of a lot of RP. It's a self-correcting issue.

Specialists always trump generalists when it comes to these kinds of things. If the complaint is that you have to tread water for 6-12 months or more before you're useful at a skill, well, then yes, I totally agree with you. I think that's a core mechanic of SD that needs to be reviewed. That's not a shortcoming of a very flawed piece of cyberware.

Which is that, installing a TV is the least of your abilities with that skill soft, and all of those other abilities, a security tech could do instead of you.

To use your analogue It's 32k to install unlimited Hubs, cameras, televisions, secure containers, scan your tech for leaks, and so on... And all of this is something that you could be using that 32k to sponsor a novice in actually learning their craft and providing them RP.

Wouldn't it be a good chance for deckers, who from the gameplay side we could handwave as uploading basic knowledge from the grid, to have some use outside of current limitations as well as a source of more consistent income? Cyberneticists and cybertechnicians aren't hurting there and I think it'd make more sense for a third party to update this kind of knowledge.

To elaborate more on a potential specific implementation,

You take the currently existing skill soft, you slot it into the device, then you get blasted with knowledge from your skill socket, and this knowledge fades over the course of the next 30 minutes-5 hours depending on the quality of the check.

This is just one of many many possible implementations. I am trying to avoid specifying expect implementations in my ideas because that tends to result in Mirage looking at me like I'm insane.

Also, by definition, Cybertechnicians are computer scientists and syncretize with decking very well...

We're talking about people who already have substantial assigned experience in stats, even stats which aren't core to the solo archetype. These people also tend to have substantial money for the highest level skillsofts.

So, no, maybe they can't be the best but it's really not right to say they can't even be good.

What I really question is whether the perception that, since these individuals do their own work, nobody else can do work for anyone else, is accurate.

That camnet won't stay there for long, but you're missing the forest for the trees with that reference. I never mentioned setting up camnets, and taking this outside of it's intended environment is not taking away from the point. Which I mentioned in the other thread.

If you are not able to hire the best for security tech in specific, there is no point in NOT using a skill soft to setup that network, because a lowmid to even high mid end tech, will not have the ability to match you.

But how about for ripper docs?

How about any other flat non-competitive checked skill in the game that is technical?

And that simply 'more UE good' is pretty much the guiding principle for most of these technical skills and that it's not at all cooperative competition friendly.

My point was simply this: the game is designed from a low level with a lot of these technical skills that it's a simple matter of more = better in X way. The game, essentially tells you to go fuck yourself and grind UE for most of the technical skills because you're competing 1:1 against someone else's UE in a very simplistic manner (as opposed to a competing skill check system that's robust and nuanced, such as combat.) The game design pushes you to use better techs and more skilled players in almost every area (not all- which you've pointed out).

That's a problem with the way these skills work and their very non-interactive way they work when competing with others. Not a problem with the skillsoft itself. I've used skillsofts extensively, for extended periods of time. I've been the person with hundreds of thousands of chyen in chips just sitting around on the off chance that they're needed randomly. Unless you're doing really, really basic stuff such as moving a painting or blanking a node or something, you always want a proper tech for the job. And yes, people can, and do die (somewhat often in the right circles) with hundreds of thousands of chyen slotted in their head. Don't discount that.

I once hit someone with a slot socketed, and they fled, and in the process, my character made something like 100K in 30 seconds. That's pretty balanced, IMHO.

TL;DR, Skill check game design problem, not cyberware problem.

After all, all that UE expenditure doesn't matter as long as you have a skillsoft and money. /s

We agree 100% on this. I don't like the way most technical skills work. I've been kinda vocal on this point in XOOC, and to an extent, on the boards as well. I think there's a lot of room for improvement, but sadly, they don't get quite the time and attention that other things get because 'timmy twoscalpels installed my brain chip today' isn't exactly riveting plot for anyone involved. I kinda see technical skills as a minigame/hobby thing as they are implemented today in SD. To that extent, I think outside very select career paths, playing PURELY TECHNICAL characters is a huge mistake and you're isolating yourself from a lot of potential RP in doing so. That's just my personal opinion.

You can invest VERY modest amounts of UE into the requisite stats and be able to do all of that with a skillsoft.

I think that's the biggest thing that we're disagreeing on. You can't slap 2-300 UE into a stat that's used for skill X and slot a skillsoft and be good at it. You need a seriously large UE investment into the supporting stats and substats to really squeeze the juice out of a skillsoft. And even in those circumstances, again, you're spending a very large amount of money to solve an issue that you could solve much cheaper, and in ways that would probably generate more RP. That, like most things in the game is a weighted risk:reward calculation everyone has to do when deciding if they want to try and branch out via a skillsoft.

I'd just like to say also, you know, as a general guiding principle for most things in this game, at least the way that I play it, is that there's always bigger fish. If someone is squashing your XXYYZZ biz, deal with it ICly. That's not always a simple or easy task to surmount, but it'll lead to a lot of RP and character development along the way. I get that it's kind of a cop-out answer, but I think we all have our own set of biases here and they're not really shifting based on the conversation so far.

There were a lot of points made here, so I'm not going to go over all of them. If someone is this obviously using a lot of skillsofts like this, why not plot to steal them all for yourself and make use of them? Seduce or RP your way into their "super secret base" and kill them with some friends.

Skillsofts can even be used to give fledgling techie characters a taste of what they'll be like at mid-level. This is a really fun plot and a way to hook up a low level technical character.

I kind of get where Rhea's coming from, but Rhea is only focusing on all the negative aspects. There are TONS of positives coming out of skillsofts.

Skillsofts are a necessary function of a small pool of active and available characters, most of whom come and go, in a game that has a huge variety of (often very niche) skills.

Characters whose entire skillset only functions in service to other characters are always going to have issues, regardless if skillsofts existed or not.

There isn't the player base to support high-activity engagement amongst a huge variety of niche skills, and this means players have to make decisions about building characters that are realistic approaches to a world that emulates a bustling population, but does not actually have one. Outside a small minority of roles it's largely going to be up to the players to be the drivers of their roleplay and their engagement with other characters, rather than relying the coded mechanics underlying those characters.

I think one of the OPs ideas was that they degrade over time and you can't swap them. That seems to be a pretty nice balance between helping out a small world population and allowing people to dabble as a midbee while still leaving spaces for people who actually spend UE in those areas to have a chance to ply their skills.

More interaction is good. Skill softs reduce interaction in nearly every case.

While I think it would be interesting to consider potential tweaks to skillsofts, Rhea, I respectfully disagree with the assessment that there is nothing to do but hang around and bar RP for non-combat, technical specialists. One does not have to wait for plot to find them, or for others to engage them. Any and all PCs can generate plots at any time. If there are things you wish to see in the world then that can be an opportunity of something to pursue. It likely won't happen overnight, but it's about the journey, not the end goal.

I suppose the aspect of skillsofts that feels most "unbalanced" to me is the fact that combat characters can easily slot in a non-combat skillsoft and can attempt to do work with that skill, albeit not having the best @stats. As for non-combat characters? It's nigh impossible to even attempt to engage in combat with a combat skillsoft without the 'soft popping out of its socket. I know that this popping-out behavior allows chars to have a chance to steal skillsofts from other characters by engaging them in a fight. However, tech skillsofts don't seem to "pop out" of the socket when its owner is engaging in a technical task. Maybe the combat skillsofts could be "stickier", as they are designed to be used in an actual fight.

People only get cams setup once in a while, furniture installed, or bodies ripped for chrome once in a while.

I totally get the frustration with wanting more action but in that case, skillsofts help solve your problem because they'll enable you to do more money making activities too.