4e Hacking

Hacking in the current edition has a problem. Although it works, not many players use it. In short, it requires patience. The time scale for hacking is much longer than combat and that means it’s ineffective in a crisis. Because of that, it’s not a skill players fall back on.

I don’t have a good idea of what I want to do yet. I have the intuition that I want to do something like where I’m going with social conflict where the hacker picks conditions to put on the hacked system. Instead of trying to take control of the system, the player uses their skill to either gain from the system or limit it’s use.

I don’t have a full idea of what that’s going to look like yet but I have some ideas. The two conditions I’m thinking of are as follows.

Information – The hacker can get information on what is happening on the system or what happened in the past. I’m almost thinking that I’d like two separate conditions, one for current monitoring and another for reading what happened in the past just to make them distinct but that may not be needed.

Complication – This takes a lot of forms but the thought is that the hacker does something to make the system harder to use. This could include making it harder to use sensors or aim weapons. The hacker would put an impairment on using a skill that would be used on that system. Again, I’m trying to figure out if this should be multiple different conditions or just one.

I would like to have more so I’ll keep working on this and try to expand it. There’s still the problem of time scales. I might have to relent on that, maybe changing the framework of hacking. I’m not sure about that. Playtesting might illuminate that.