Reddit reviews The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones-Confronting A New Age of Threat

A default assumption is that every team will contain a warrior so supreme that they got their name from the ability to defeat entire gangs, which usually have more firepower than the local police department, solo.

Runners go out of their way to make themselves as distinctive as possible and never bother to wear masks on runs because the idea of you getting hunted down in a sprawl is a laughable impossibility even if you make it easy on someone. We can't find people in modern cities using modern databases that are arguably set up better than SRs, forget about a sprawl with a population the size of all of California using 12 different databases in a setting where sifting through data is significantly harder than in real life.

My boss is ex-navy (and a shadowrun player, he enjoys riggers, the poor guy) who pointed out that Kane is the most realistic runner of the Jackpointers in that by going to the scale he goes to he can trivially snipe at anyone he wants to with no one ever having any ability to retaliate. Kane could go anywhere he wants to in the world, not just 'hellholes' because the scope of where he could be is impossible to search. You will not find Kane essentially ever. Like I will reiterate that Kane is his favorite because in his real world expert opinion "he is the most realistic" because if your a super criminal a good way to mask your presence is to force your opposition to search the entire god damn ocean for you.

Runners in setting are seen as supremely badass anti-heroes and counter cultural icons. While a given PC may not live up to this, the default assumption for SR was always that if you had talent and wanted to actually stick it to the man, the shadows were a great place to do that.

These are heavily established setting elements that are reiterated pretty constantly and they don't become less true because reality is unrealistic and it feels more real to do the less real thing and pretend that modern society is remotely secure.

A book I recommend to anyone who thinks Pink Mohawk is unrealistic and Black Trenchcoat is realistic is "The future of Violence" which, along with pretty much any experience in any security related field, should dispel that notion right quick. The short version is: as technology improves and cities become more dense and more interconnected, violence and extreme crimes become easier to commit with complete anonymity, not harder, because things like surveillance states don't actually scale well at all and the technology for defeating attacks pretty much always lags behind. SR actually was crazy ahead of the curve back in the day for accidently predicting this when it went out of its way to make "That guy with the rocket launcher shooting at cops" a viable PC pregen that was seen as so basic they made it twice for two different metatypes. If anything, its a wonder the game doesn't point out and run with the ramifications that smartgun platforms and common weapons that come from an entirely black market controlled supply chain completely trivialize anonymous high profile mass shootings and murder. Forget about assassination drones.

Though that of course doesn't service a fun game, which is ultimately the primary concern for any RPG setting, and its a bit bleak and too real to think about.

Furthermore if you don't want to play that way a really simple way to ensure that is to just ask that no one makes a street samurai, who strongly color how a team views violence. Without a samurai (or buff focused mage able to get crazy soaks) teams merely will be 'rather durable' rather than 'gods of war' and combat becomes slow enough its not generally a viable plan A. But, again, remember that one of the CRB story sections literally had plan A be "Drive up right next to the target and have the adept leap out of a car while half naked covered in lightning to punch a ton of spirits out on a crowded street" and this was presented as a fine plan. There are people in setting unarguably capable of pulling stuff that seems a bit much off.

Submission Statement: In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Benjamin Wittes about both volumes of the Mueller Report.

Benjamin Wittes is a legal journalist who focuses on issues of national security and law. He is a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he is the Research Director in Public Law. Benjamin is also the co-founder of Lawfare, a blog devoted to discussion of U.S. national security choices, and a cohost of the Rational Security podcast. His books include The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones—Confronting A New Age of Threat (coauthored with Gabriella Blum), Detention and Denial: The Case for Candor after Guantánamo,  and Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror.