this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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In High technology setting, the hacking skill is incredibly powerful, and a shortcut in many investigation scenarios. By hacking the CCTV camera, I could see that Joe did it, by checkin [insert social media] I know were the evil gad guys live.

Either you go old shadowrun-style with a whole mini game where decker can be killed by AI but it's pretty heavy and weird, or you end-up with 3 success on my roll and give a lot of info for just one roll.

What are your trick/house-rules to prevent that ? And how would you actually protect from panopticon. Especially looking how stupid people are in today's real world

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[–] SamuraiBeandog 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Have degrees of success that require multiple escalating rolls. You can describe it as penetrating layers of security. Layer one has a relatively easy difficulty but only gets you basic info. It lets the player feel like their skill is useful but lets you tune how much you want to give them. You can even let them make additional attempts to break through each layer but this takes time, e.g. each attempt is a week of game time. You can also have legwork decrease difficulties to give the rest of the party something to do, e.g. talking to/threatening/kidnapping employees for passwords.

I also highly encourage what other comments have said about physical access. Physically breaking into the relevant building and accessing the system from there bypasses some of the layers, and specific physical targets bypass even more, e.g. plugging into the executive's computer on the top floor gets you straight to the deepest layer.