How should I go about having a hacker repair his cyberdeck? Should it be a Hit the Streets roll, or does he just get to exchange cred to fix it (by the cred / tech repair rules)?
How should I go about having a hacker repair his cyberdeck?
How should I go about having a hacker repair his cyberdeck?
Is the Hacker fixing their cyberdeck going to be interesting? Could something go wrong? If not, just have them spend the cred and move on.
Chris Stone-Bush
I hear that a lot but I don´t think it applies to PbtA games. A move is triggered by something the character does. Whether or not it was interesting before is beside the point. After the move is triggered it automatically becomes interesting (especially on a 6-).
Yeah I would roll a hit the street to see if he can find a contact that is willing to do the work, and then pay the cred. A failure would cause him to run across another hacker hes wronged, or perhaps a fixer, who has some secondary motives.
Horst Wurst Well, if the hacker can’t get his deck fixed due to a bad roll (which is probably guaranteed because it’s keyed on Style), is that interesting? Is it interesting for a hacker to just not have access to their defining thing?
Cami S
A 6- doesn’t necessarily mean the thing the PC wants is not happening. It just opens up the situation for the MC to make a move, advance a clock or otherwise complicate the PCs life. Of course the Hacker should get a chance to get her deck fixed. But maybe the deal draws unwanted attention. Maybe the part is inferior and the deck gets a + unreliable tag. These are all interesting consequences of a failed roll.
My problem with the whole “Say yes or roll the dice” thing is it’s not part of the rules. It’s from Dogs in Vineyard where a conflict means rolling shittons of dice for half an hour. Obviously you want to make that about something meaningful. But in PbtA games the move structure propels the story forward regardless of the stakes.
Failure doesn’t inherently mean they don’t get their thing fixed..it might just mean something terrible or ugly comes out of it:
-The tech who fixes it installs a bug on it that activates a trace for a specific corp.
-The notify a gang they crossed, and they get ambushed on the way out.
-The demand you do a job for them as a price of fixing it instead of money.
Riley Crowder, the second two of those are things that come out of a 7-9 anyway. So a hacker with =0 style is hedging a 83.3% chance of any of those happening any time their deck needs repairs. It seems like it would be foolish not to take Expert: Breadboard as the very first advance at those odds.
Horst Wurst adding +unreliable is a good way to get a decker to drop 8-cred on a new deck ASAP I guess… Sorta like adding the +unreliable tag to a killer’s gun.
It also comes down to what’s interesting. If you want every major repair to be a difficulty, then make them roll…if you don’t then just toss money at the problem, and let them have it get fixed. Keep in mind if they get along they can help each other, and a player with more style might go with them to negotiate.
If a move is triggered, then yes. You have to follow through with it. I’m just not sure that a move is triggered here. But I could be wrong.
The tech who fixes it installs a chip. Next time the character gets some paydata the tech ends up selling it first and it has no value.
Chris Stone-Bush I think you hit on something interesting here:
Does hit the street = I need to buy something?
Are the only entities offering goods and services Contacts?
If you go to future Amazon.com and have an assault rifle delivered to your flat does that mean you should roll hit the streets?
I feel like the answer is no…
Reading the Gear chapter again, I was wrong. Acquiring gear is usually a Hit the Streets move to get what you need from a contact. 1 credit is fair price for replacement cyberdeck parts and it’s 8 credits if you want a brand new military grade one.
I would assume a decker already has a contact to get these parts from, otherwise they wouldn’t be a very good decker. 😛
I disagree with Omari Brooks though. If the decker uses “future Amazon.com” to order gear, I would absolutely have them make a Hit the Streets roll, even though they are’t literally out hitting the streets. The 7-9 options would then represent things like increased prices, shipping delays, and the purchase sending up red flags on someone’s radar.
Chris Stone-Bush
Not gonna lie sounds like you are remixing Hit the Street into a really cool custom move on the fly but still ignoring the triggering condition.
Unless you treat “future amazon.com – Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more” like a regular Contact?
Anyway I’m curious to hear the fictional framing for the extra [intel] or [gear] on a roll of 10+ from an online order if you care to share.
Future Amazon probably isn’t a place that a runner gets anything except their ultrasoy flavor nutrient paste energy bars and RFID tagged underwear from.
Matt Petruzzelli Hey play it how you want in your game!
I’m just saying if a Hacker says the want to order some basic restricted gear online (and will hack in to erase any identifying info from their customer database) I’m not going to tell them sorry but you have to Hit the Streets instead.
I just mean Future Amazon is a legit channel for legit stuff. Future Dark Web would be restricted stuff and probably an online version of hit the street.
I feel like ‘your deck don’t work no more’ is a soft move. Spend +gear to replace the flux capacitor, spend time to monkey around with the chips connections, talk to a contact etc. If you ignore the problem, keep attacking ice or whatever then the MC makes a hard move….it’s super broke. Buy or steal a new one, repair this one for a major favour/credit. Either way I would make the resolution urgent and important as Cami S points out this is kind of what usually makes the Hacker interesting so I would only fuck with that if there was buy in from the player.
Good point about the use of “contact” in the trigger Omari Brooks. Unless the hacker has a preferred seller on FutureAmazon.com they’re going to, I don’t know if this move would trigger.
If the hacker was just browsing FutureAmazon.com, I would probably make the MC move “Tell them the consequences and ask” (or the equivalent, as I don’t have my book handy). I doubt FutureAmazon.com is a safe website, so the consequences could be advancing a Corp clock as the hacker pings someone’s radar; getting crappy gear; having to pay more than fair price, etc.
As for getting extra [intel] or [gear] on a 10+ roll, sellers can toss extra parts they don’t need into the box (I’ve had this happen before) or the communication with the seller could reveal more about what’s going on.
Chris Stone-Bush
Nice touch with the extra parts in the box for [gear]!
Ultimately I understand where people are coming from making players roll when they go shopping/solicit services but somethings seem like they would not warrant negative attention in most cyberpunk universes nor require a special Contact to procure (like most of the sample goods in the “Other Equipment” section of the rule book for example). Even things like ammo are probably readily in supply and legal to buy, unless the gun shops we have today all disappeared for some reason.
I always envision the player characters as competent professionals who know how to stay off the radar when completing mundane tasks.
This talk has inspired me to create a mission about a mysterious online order that shows up unexpectedly on the runners’ door step…
If it’s a corporate run world then the corps probably probably stopped selling everybody the advanced weaponry that would be turned against them.
If they did sell you those smart guns then they probably have a hard wired friend-or-foe chip that prevents you from shooting agents of that corporation. Fun times in corporate dystopia.
Matt Petruzzelli just playing devils advocate here. Not if the bullets are made by a medtech consortium, they probably offer an anonymous purchasers bulk discount.
Also, I imagine there are a number of smaller corps and subsidiaries that are quite willing to cut corners to price out the competition. I doubt other peoples safety is a major concern for most of the corporations that manufacture guns and bullets.
I would guess that the majority of the criminal underworld would actively seek out the sort of guns that don’t shut down when pointed at certain security forces. This would mean less profits for companies that include that stuff, not to mention the higher price tag on manufacture.
That’s not to say that the really big corps might not include a Trojan in some hardware to keep their elite special forces alive but it couldn’t be a common tactic or it would lose all impact.
I wouldn’t advertise that my corporate security could remotely disable my products 😀
Fair comment but look at how long it takes hackers to break modern security measures and hardware today. How long would it take before someone opens up the operating system, realises what is in there and either releases a patch, lets the community know or worse, starts selling IFF chips so other people can’t be hit by those guns either?
Daniel Steadman
Yeah the minute some runner sneaks up behind security with a gun that doesn’t shoot, they will retreat to safety and start investigating & spreading the word. It might keep a corp safe for a couple of days and then anyone looking to buy a gun is going to be on the lookout for similar measures.
Some corp looking to profit will pour more resources into their own defense; just sell regular weapons rather than spending the effort to negate all offense at it’s source.
Flip side is a corp making weapons that are extra effective at targeting their rivals…
That’s not to say that some development wonk might not think it’s a great idea and sell it to their board that guns that cannot target their own forces is a great idea. Corporations absorb the loss on terrible ideas all the time. I just can’t see the practice becoming widespread. Could be a fun story element though.
Then I doubt the corps are selling the good guns on Future Amazon. It’s not a very dystopian future if the Constitution is more than a decorative historical relic.
Matt Petruzzelli Yeah only the basics are being sold on Future Amazon, of course those basics are above and beyond of what we would consider “basic” in 2016.
This is an old thread but i’m bringing it back because I don’t understand the assumptions some of you are making:
The rules say ” To recover spent points of Hardening and Firewall, and damaged ratings in Stealth and Processor, you’ll need some time and some Cred.
A character with the Tech move Expert: Breadboarder can spend a few hours and one Cred worth of parts to restore a deck to the ratings it had at the start of the last run, minus one. The last point will cost an additional Cred and a few more hours.”
There’s no indication that there should be a roll in this chapter, but the Assets chapter does suggest replacement parts for a cyberdeck cost 1 Cred with a Hit The Street roll.
This tells me that a Hacker without Tech Expert: Breadboarder can get his deck fixed but it should involve a contact, require a Hit The Streets roll and perhaps be more expensive than 1 or even 2 Cred.
What I landed on was a Hit The Streets roll, an expenditure of 2 Cred to restore it to ratings minus one and an expenditure of 2 Cred for the final rating point. Cost for a full repair can be lowered by 1 or 2 Cred in exchange for cyberware tags (the Tech used faulty or second hand parts, or rushed the job) or tags might be added if the Hit The Streets roll doesn’t go well.
Hamish Cameron how do YOU handle this?
I guess I’m stuck between just letting it happen because cyberdeck repairs aren’t that interesting and making it tough because the Tech has a move for this that I don’t want to invalidate.