Hacking is very important and integral to the cyverpunk genre and unfortunately no one in my game really wanted to play a hacker. Buying the services of one ever mission is a little trite and annoying tbh so does anyone have advice om how to handle a hackerless group?
Hacking is very important and integral to the cyverpunk genre and unfortunately no one in my game really wanted to…
Hacking is very important and integral to the cyverpunk genre and unfortunately no one in my game really wanted to…
Just a question, but is it annoying if they keep hiring somone that is a contact? An NPC that specifically doesn’t want to be tied down as a member of their “crew” but is still available most of the time?
Someone that maybe one time out of three is doing something else, so they have to go with their second choice, but still doesn’t feel like “NPC of the week” rotating in and out without much in the way of personality or development.
Just brainstorming, this may still not be what you want in your group.
Something in your imaginary world/story is only as trite/annoying as you make it. The way I see it is, give one of them hacking ability, drop hacking as a requirement, or make your npc hacker not trite.
It sounds like your players don’t find hacking that integral/interesting. So why put a spotlight on something they don’t care about?
Let them hire an NPC crew member or whatever, and just handle it off-screen going forward. Things players find boring shouldn’t be recurring plot points, after all.
There are 8 million stories in the naked city. If they aren’t interested in the ones that involve hacking, tell one of the other ones.
imgs.xkcd.com
As this is a PtBA game, The GM and the players BOTH have a right to explore the things they find interesting about the genre further. Just let your players know that you want to explore Hacking more and you are going to work some more of the Hacker flavor into the game to see how it goes.
You don’t have to force the players to do any actual hacking to make it happen either. They can still help you fill in blanks/flavor and there can be plenty of mission hooks or NPCs that revolve around hacking, just like there can be for violence, being sneaky, fast talking, etc.
Tell your players what you want more of. But don’t force it on them. It will end in tears.
Other people have asked this, but who is annoyed at having to buy hacking services each mission? You or your players?
If nobody wants to play one, then clearly hacking isn’t a particularly important part of the genre as far as the players are concerned… they’re more interested in other aspects.
So what part do you want hacking to play? The players aren’t doing any hacking, so any hacker has to be an NPC. Potentially that’s an employer or an agent of an employer – a hacker who needs the PCs to carry out the meat-space parts of an operation. Or potentially it’s someone the PCs bring in to cover a gap in their skills on a particular job.
But in all those cases, it’s not something you want to overdo. The players have clearly indicated that they’re not interested in being hackers – so you don’t want to keep bringing in some recurring NPC who’s participating in every mission as an equal (or superior) to the PCs…
Just a thought, but if you want to explore hacking, maybe make the hackers the clients? You can still make hacking-centric missions, but the players don’t have to do any hacking. It’s a win-win.
You’ll probably want to hand wave or custom move the actual net-diving to avoid a self-licking ice cream cone scenario.
Justin Phillips Now I’m picturing a Hacker trapping a bunch of people in a hallway and murdering them remotely. 😉