Hacking has turned out to be much more important than I originally thought it would when I first put together Psi-Wars back in Iteration 1. If you watch Star Wars, or even most Space Opera out there, Hackers don't play much of a role. After all, Space Opera is action where square-jawed heroes punch evil warlords in the jaw and rescue the scantily clad damsel; the pallid nerds who hide from the sun in their basement while hacking even corporations is something more appropriate to Cyberpunk.
But I should have known better. "Slicer" is a major concept in pretty much every Star Wars RPG I've come across, and indeed I'm pretty sure the term comes from the extended universe, and if you pay attention, there's actually a ton of hacking being done in the Star Wars films, it's just generally by robots. I had originally pushed that concept onto robots, but in practice, I find that it becomes pretty central to the action. Because all security systems are controlled by a computer, the easiest way to bypass systems is to find a terminal and just hack the systems (open the door, disable the cameras, etc). This makes the hacking robot much too important to leave to just an NPC, and much too interesting to deny to players. So, we need hackers.
There's another problem with hacking, which is what made me reluctant to give it much of a treatment: a lot of RPGs that have hacking in them treat it as an entire subgame. You must invest a ton of resources and time into hacking, and whenever hacking comes up, it takes a big chunk of the game. I definitely didn't want that: Psi-Wars is a game about space knights dueling, not about a deep exploration of cyberspace that takes an hour. Fortunately, Action handles this nicely: you just spend an hour and roll Computer Hacking; done. The only problem with this is we lose some individualization: all hackers have high levels of hacking and everything else (nerdy computer, mischievous anarchist, calculating criminal). GURPS Cyberpunk (at least as per Pyramid) gets around this with techniques, but those techniques assume the sort of deep investment in cyberspace that I want to avoid. So I came up with something else: inspired by the magic perks, I thought we could spice up the gameplay with some player-activated perks. Rather than worry about a ton of details, we just have our base system, and the player can introduce complexity via little bonuses that, ideally, don't take up too much time.
So, where do we get our hackers? Do we have a hacker template? That feels a bit big for me. The Spy could certainly be a hacker, but that's just one of the spies many skills. So, instead, a skillset feels more reasonable to me, especially if we slather it over something like the Criminal Sidekick Template that I put up on Patreon awhile ago. This left me thinking about Skillsets, as I've been exploring them as an optional set of power-ups, but the more I mess with them, the more it feels like they should be more like the 50-point cross-class templates from Dungeon Fantasy than the Skillsets of Action. The Action Skillsets are just a slightly chunkier way to build a character. You can do that, but it tends to blur niche, which isn't necessarily a problem (and not something I worry about in Psi-Wars) and I find that the general thrust of Psi-Wars tends indelibly towards a sort of specialization: if you're psychic, you could easily invest 100+ points in psychic powers; if you're a space knight, you could easily invest 100+ points in your force swordsmanship. Couldn't skillsets work in a similar way? So I'm going to try an approach of a "50 point" lens, where there's 25 points of minimum investment and 25 additional discretionary points, to allow a little more variety among the characters, and to create a list of things a player might invest in, if they want to dump another 50 points into a particular skillset specialization.
Of course, all of this was inspired by the Undercity Noir adventure, as we have at least one Hacker in the mix (and, I noticed, a lot of NPC hackers as sysads). Thus, I wanted to get this out sooner than later.
The biggest change made to gear and the hacking rules is the removal of "superior" hacking gear that grants a bonus. As I worked on the rules (especially using the surprisingly superior Thinking Machine rules which I had previously unfairly dismissed) I noticed that the typical computer that players would hack would ultimately be mainframes, which meant you need a pretty powerful machine to even attempt to hack. This also eliminates one of my complaints with UT, which is that money can buy skill and character traits. Now, your ability to hack is determined entirely by skill, not the wealth necessary to buy superior hacking hardware.
- The slightly updated hacking rules are found here
- The hacker gear is found here
- The Hacker skillset is going to be a Backer Exclusive for now, with a bonus "Mechanic" sidekick template.
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