Cyber Hero - Hacking

[Jkeown]

So the last two days, I've been typing like a mad fool. Bringing Cyber Hero up to 6th Edition from 20 years ago. I'm at 38 pages and 14,353 words. I've a way to go....

 

I really want to include some kind of netrunning Tron-like action, with Powers as programs.  I could just translate the existing ones, but I'm keen to hear new methods... any thoughts?

[lou_tennant]

Interesting.

 

A personal project I have been working on is a more accurate conversion of characters from ICE's Cyberspace and also a HERO equivalent of the character generation/creation process from Cyberspace. I have been using my copy of CyberHERO 4th as a partial reference for this.

 

Still relatively early days (and I am looking at 5er rather than 6th) but I could be interested in helping out if there is anything useful I can offer,

 

I had been thinking about Net-running as I wasn't sure I liked either CyberHERO nor Cyberspace ways of doing it enough to go with them as they were. I did come across this; Kazei 5 netrunning, on the web and thought that I might take bits from this and the other two and work something out.

 

One of the key tasks that I knew I would need to tackle was building the cyberware and equipment to support the genre, I was going to ask on here today if anyone had done this already for 5er and would mind sharing the HD file(s) with me and/or uploading for everyone's benefit.

[BlueCloud2k2]

I've always had my players describe what they want to do, make a skill check, and for every 1 point they make by they can write a program that mimics 10 active points of mental powers.

 

sort of an RSR in reverse.

[Jkeown]

Thanks for the replies.

 

As it happens, I'm also using Cyber Hero for this purpose. I've done about 25000 words since March 2nd. I could share it if such a thing is desired. I'm not sure about copyrights on such old materials, however. I think 70 pages of conversions is a bit more than "Fair Use"

 

Some of the net programs are little more than an evocative name followed by "RKA DoT" or "Entangle" at this point.

[IndianaJoe3]

I wonder if a more minimalist approach to netrunning might be appropriate? I know that detailed hacking scenes (and rules) are a staple of the genre, but they run the risk of most of the group sitting around bored while the decker does his thing, and the decker being bored while the rest of the action occurs. Maybe it's best to have the hacking resolved with a few minutes of die-rolling, and let the hacker save enough points to be useful off-line as well.

[Rhodri]

I wonder if a more minimalist approach to netrunning might be appropriate? I know that detailed hacking scenes (and rules) are a staple of the genre, but they run the risk of most of the group sitting around bored while the decker does his thing, and the decker being bored while the rest of the action occurs. Maybe it's best to have the hacking resolved with a few minutes of die-rolling, and let the hacker save enough points to be useful off-line as well.

 

My group found this playing Shadowrun.  We started off playing the netrunning rules as written, but quickly gave up and abstracted it down to a few skill rolls when it became clear it was very boring for everyone but the hacker.

[BlueCloud2k2]

We also had this problem. And none of my players wanted to the invest the points for Netrunning. So I changed it to my each 1 point you make your skill check by equals 10 AP worth of mental powers you can use against the computer system in question.

[Susano]

Kazei 5 from BlackWyrm Games has rules for cyberspace and cyberhacking. The core concept is that most people have wireless devices and/or cyberbrains (used to control cyberware), so you hit them with software programs over the wireless LAN and try to hack or control their computers and cyberbrains. So, deckers are like mentalists in the setting (espers are energy projectors, cyborgs are bricks, street samurai are martial artists, and so on).