How disruptive to the flow of play is Matrix stuff? In a lot of cyberpunk games (notably Shadowrun) it’s like running a whole combat scene with usually just one player and the rest of the group just sits around waiting. And yeah, you can multi-task and have the hacker working in Matrix while everyone else does something else, but that can get to be confusing and stressful on the GM.
So again, how disruptive or quick are Matrix scenes? Personal anecdotes preferred over having only read the book or watched/listened to actual plays.
I’ll let others speak to this!
I’d be happy to hear from the game creator too. I’m sure you’ve run the game numerous times
In my limited experience, the level of disruption is dependent on you (as the MC) and your Hacker. The more flavor you throw at what the system looks like and how your Hacker interacts with the details of that system, the longer it takes. The less familiar your Hacker is with the general infrastructure of a matrix system, and therefore what they’re attempting to accomplish, the longer it takes.
So much of these PBTA games excel when you hop between PCs and give different people a chance to shine in the spotlight, so in the case of Hacking in The Sprawl, you can describe the general look of a system, have your Hacker make a Login/Cowboy Console roll, and then hop over to what another PC is doing. Once that’s done, come back to them and figure out what they’re in there to do and let them interact with the appropriate node, then back to another PC. Because a Matrix system is usually divided into these individual nodes, it’s easy to hit the pacing beats by jumping back and forth without it feeling too herky jerky.
I think the one element that is taking practice for me is being able to visualize and describe a system’s various nodes in some sort of matrix-y way. That is to say, “what does a building security node look like in a given system and how do much detail to I describe that in?” From what I’ve gathered here, some folks get colorful with it and others seem to take a more mechanical approach to it and I haven’t quite found my sweet spot with that just yet.
Haha, it’s true!
My intention is that it should be no harder than any other split party situation.
I usually cut between players every move or two regardless of where they are in the fictional world. Cutting between Matrix action and physical action is no different in my mind than cutting between two players engaged in combat or conversation with different people.
The trick with Matrix action is in the mission design. It’s easy to paint yourself into a corner where the rest of the team is waiting for the Hacker to do the thing in the Matrix. In that case, I sometimes use Matrix misses to push physical complications to get both “groups” active.
A lot of this has to do with the individual group’s culture around spotlight time. I like relatively quick cuts to involve most of the group regularly. If you look at the game Adam is running on Roll20, he will sometimes play scenes with one or two team members for long periods before cutting away, especially in the Legwork Phase.
Brandon Fincher one thing I liked about the new Ghost in the Shell is how the holographic displays in the city looked: you might expect those graphics to look better in a world where individual projections of people could look like flawless copies. However, because we are watching a representation of reality anyway (I.e. A movie) the relatively low quality of the holograms signals to the viewer that these are representations of a representation, not a representation of reality.
This is the trick to Matrix descriptions. You have to both describe what the corp wants the users to see, but also show the player that this is a digital representation of reality, not reality itself.
Maybe slightly tangential, but I was thinking about this a lot over the weekend!
I’m actually watching Adam’s game right now. He’s an amazing GM and I really enjoy the games he runs.
I think I need to give in and buy The Sprawl so I can actually read the rules myself. I’ve kinda been putting it off because from the reference sheets and a few reviews, it looks more complicated than perhaps it really is.
Colin Spears The reference sheets are probably enough if you are prepared to do a lot of thinking, puzzling and reverse engineering of play principles yourself, but the book explains everything on those sheets in a lot more detail.
There are sections on spotlight management covering this question, in fact. (Which is not at all to say that it’s not a valid and important question!)
Adam runs a great game, but he runs it much harder from the MC side than I do. In particular, he is slightly more aggressive with clocks and much more cagey with information.
(His corporate fuckery and cyberpunk colour are top-notch!)
CAVEAT RELEVANT TO THIS DISCUSSION: I haven’t watched the episode where Adam has a Hacker in play yet.
Yeah, I figured the book would go into better detail, I just have been disappointed by the excessive subsystems a lot of cyberpunk games feel they need to give hacking. At first glance I was worried The Sprawl would fall into that same pit trap, so I have been hesitant to pick it up until I am reasonably sure I wouldn’t be disappointed again.
I know exactly what you mean. FWIW, this and drawn out planning/legwork sessions were two of the main drivers that pushed me to write the game.
Hamish Cameron One thing that helped my understanding of what a matrix system should look like was re-listening to the +1 Forward episode you were on. It helped me to think of the system as a whole with a conceptualized theme (in that case, a sci-fi bee hive) and not to put so much emphasis on trying to think of how a humanoid would interface with a security system in a way that made had to make fictional sense. If I’m understanding correctly, all of the system flavor is just there for decoration and shouldn’t necessarily conform to any sort of real world standards. Maybe a Security Subsystem looks like a floating hamburger. Describe it as such and make your Hacker aware that they’re looking at a security sub system, describe the top of the bun flipping up and images from camera feeds appearing beneath the bun and let them make their rolls. Am I doing that right?
Colin Spears If you haven’t already listened to it, here’s a link to a very short actual play that Hamish Cameron did on a podcast. It’s a one-on-one with the host who plays a hacker in the example.
gauntlet-rpg.com – The Sprawl
That should give you a brief example of the simplicity involved in running a Matrix operation.
Brandon Fincher yeah, that’s exactly right.
I’m a big fan of the “the Matrix can look like anything so let’s go wild” style, a la Shadowrun or Snow Crash.
Even though I’m sure it’s more likely that everything would look like a modular google site or geocities.
Hamish Cameron That’s really interesting to read your thoughts on how Adam is running The Sprawl. I’ve watched every episode so far (with the exception of the latest one that just got upped to YouTube last night) and it’s been super inspiring. Seeing that you feel he’s being “cagey” with the info is particularly enlightening, as I tend to be that way too, and much like Adam, it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. I’ve also found I’ve been making my missions way too complicated and that’s something I’m working on, but I digress.
Being that I admire Adam’s GM style greatly, I was very excited to see that Dave rolled up a Hacker as I’m really looking forward to seeing how Adam handles that.
Brandon Fincher I love complicated missions, but in my experience, they only work if you’re relatively free with the information (if not the motivations behind the scenes). However, you have to give the players material to take action, and the quicker you do that, the quicker you get to the action.
My read on the first arc was that some of the gear grinding was about information flow. As a designer, my main takeaway so far has been “how can I explain this better in my next game”.
(I’m also keen to see how Adam rolls with a Hacker. Hopefully I can catch up this week and watch live on Friday. I love the show.)
Abstracting matrix incursions into only one or two rolls kept it from gumming up the works during legwork for my game.
Mission design is definitely critical to this (as Hamish said), though. Set the mission up so that the matrix and are two keys to the same launch sequence that have to be done simultaneously – or create obstacles that require physical intervention during the matrix run (i.e. a physical attack that must be warded off during the run, or a matrix obstacles that have to be navigated via physical action.)
If you’re really struggling, you can opt for a “the whole world is wireless” approach and let Hackers use their decks to abuse/manipulate more or less any electronics within LOS.
I think that’s a fairly realistic bend to the fiction, and gives Hackers a ton of meatspace play (hacking cyberware, hacking traffic signals, hacking lights, etc.)
I bought it and I’m reading the PDF now. I’m definitely feeling much more confident about the Matrix rules now and I’m psyched about this game now. Thanks everyone for the great information and advice.
Side note, I’m noticing every mention of Melt ICE has 7+ instead of 10+, I assume that’s a typo?
Nope, there are several moves where multiple results apply. Mix it Up is another.
It basically means, on a hit (7+) X happens, if you roll between 7-9 there’s a negative consequence as well. It’s just a slightly different rendering of a standard PbtA notation.
I favour the multitasking approach… but it may help to not think of it as multitasking. You’re not running two scenes at once – you’re running one scene where the participants may not all be physically together, but are all in constant communication.
So that might be the hacker providing Matrix overwatch for the infiltrator by messing with building security nodes. And it might be the infiltrator with a bag full of relay devices, building a virtual bridge to get the hacker access to physically isolated parts of the network. Ideally, it’s both… each character taking actions supporting the other just as if they were both in the same room.
You can’t always run things that smoothly, of course, where everything is one distributed scene. But it does make things more manageable to think of things that way.