Root Cause Analysis

Hacking rules in RPGs have a poor reputation and they deserve it. They’re too complex, and they break the flow of the game. Out of frustration, you’ll hear of many groups cutting them out or having an NPC hacker handle it all.

Hacking Rules are often a mechanical sub-system that only one player ever interacts with. They aren’t the only type of rules of which that is true, but hackers are different. The rules separate them from the rest of the team in:

1. Time
2. Space
3. Complexity

Speed of Light, Speed of Meat

Computers process information much faster than humans do. Better hackers work faster too. So it is natural that hacker characters will take more actions than other characters will in the same time.

But the logical consequences of a situation don’t always make for good gameplay. It isn’t much fun, as a player, to be waiting around while the hacker is working.

Cyberpunks Don’t WFH

Odds are that, if you’ve been hacked, it happened remotely. Real life criminals don’t like to take on more risk than necessary and neither do PCs. If it’s safer and easier to do a job remotely, they’ll do it that way.

This usually involves splitting the party, something that is proverbially not to be done. It isn’t too fair to the PCs who are in direct danger and doesn’t build a good atmosphere at the table. Every time the GM says “The guards rake you with gunfire” and the hacker chirps in: “Not me, I’m in my van”, drives the wedge a little further.

Dining Adventurers Problem

Virtual reality promises a second world, as rich and detailed as the first. If an RPG has rules for interacting with the physical world it will likely have an equal number for interacting with the virtual world. The physical world will have rooms, doors, guards, and other NPCs, each with their own stats.

The virtual world will have nodes, servers, firewalls, and ICE. The combat and stealth can be just as detailed as in the physical world. But the rules complexity will belong to the hacker alone.

The GM may feel it an un-even portion when they are creating a virtual world for just the hacker and a physical world for the rest of the party.

Solutions

How can these problems be avoided?

Live and in-person

Put it into your background and rules that (almost) all serious hacking requires (more or less) direct, physical access to the target network. Maybe it’s because of latency, maybe it’s to avoid detection on intermediary nodes. This puts the hacker in the same risks as the rest of the party, and (hopefully) prevents them sitting things out in the van.

Simplify, Simplify, Simplify

When there’s a gun-fight, the whole party is involved. If a cyber-fight is as complex as a gun-fight, it’s going to drag. Make it simpler.

When the hacker takes on the security system, they take on the whole thing at once. Get it over and done with, and get on to the next thing.

No Mechanics At All

If you can avoid the whole cyber-space/virtual-reality thing, maybe just skip it? Much hacking in real life involves finding passwords, social engineering, or applying tools made by others.

Just say:

• The decoder will finish in 60 minutes, you need to keep it hidden the whole time.
• Your contact knows the password, but it’s only valid until midnight tonight.
• Biometrics will let anyone who works there to enter. How can you get that to work in your favor?

The challenge of hacking the target can be handled with the same rules as govern the rest of play.

This approach is endorsed by the Cyberpunk: Hardwired supplement, but it might not fit every game.

All Together Now

Well, if you want the game to be about hacking, why not have every player play a hacker?

Go all in on every detail of cyberspace. Have a whole bestiary of ICE and viruses. Build out the dungeon-network to every node. Find different roles to fill, ways for players to differentiate their characters within the party and work together.

And then have some loose, simplified for what goes on in meatspace. If someone gets shot, they die, probably.