Nash Equilibria and Matrices, Your targets are not stupid. Options

[FrankTrollman]

There is a time and a place for nonsensical adventuring, and it is called Dungeons and Dragons. How does a room full of top predators stay alive and successfully breeding new generations for hundreds if years inside a locked tomb in the middle of the desert? Who cares!? Let's kill them and take their stuff. Stuff which they have, for no reason.

But in games with a "grittier" feel, there is a desire for the world to make some sense. If you're breaking into a building full of monsters and locked doors, someone actually built that building. They also had some well-paid architect go through and design the fire escapes, the locking mechanisms, the floor plan. And you had someone actually put all the monsters there. And they didn't ust put duck-rabbits all over the place in order to fight adventurers and drop loot, they put magical animals in specific locations for use as guards, research subects, and pets. They do not have wandering monsters wandering around their homes and offices because that would cause their employees to get killed. That would be bad.

Nash Equilibrium

The basic concept of Nash Equilibrium is that if you are in conflict with others it is best for you to use your best strategies. Sounds non-controversial, right? Well, the second part about Nash Equilibrium can best be summated with the "Wine in front of me" argument from The Princess Bride - because the people you are in conflict with know that you are going to want to use your best strategies. And you know that they are going to use their best strategies, and they know that you know and all that.

But the third part of Nash Eqilibrium is that your "best" strategy depends upon what your opponents are doing. And your opponet's best strategy depends upon what you are doing. That attacks and defenses evolve, and do so extremely quickly, to maximize the effectiveness of their offenses and defenses against their opponents.

Your Opponents Are Not Static
It is all well and good to plan the perfect heist, the killer crime, the ultimate attack. But the fact is that you are not the only tactician in the world. Other people are also inventing, also perceiving and closing weaknesses, and if you wait long enough your attack will be decidedly less than ultimate. Shaka Zulu did some amazing strategic and tactical innovations right up until he met with gun toting Europeans coming the other way.

So regardless of how the world is described, if there is an exploitable weakness in it which is fixable in a manner which is affordable and simple, that weakness will not last long. If a problem has an easily presentable solution, that problem will be solved. And soon.

Which means that if the game world depends upon the players exploiting some weakness over and over again in order to accomplish things, the solution to that problem cannot be "easy", or the world is inherently unstable. The entire campaign has a very perceivable end which wil approach very very soon.

Budgets are not infinite
A lone nut can, on occassion, stand on the upper story of a book depository and shoot a very important man in the face. This is generally quite difficult because powerfl individuals have people going around looking for guys with firearms and axes to grind. Given enough of these people, they would find all the lone nuts, but as is they merely catch most of them. Vulnerabilities which are sufficiently expensive to solve 100% of the time are not going to be solved 100% of the time.

A really useful fact for the game world is that if security that is good enough to keep out all of the rabble and merely challenging for the player characters happens to be the economical choice based on costs and projected losses - it is reasonable to expect security which is challenging and exciting every time you run into it.

Computer Security
Modern day covert ops teams don't bring computer hackers with them. The reason is multifarious; from the fact that may hackers can do their thing from home, to the fact that most hackers work at least as well on their own, to the fact that hackers tend to not be super good at a lot of "covert ops" style tasks. But the really important part is that computer security that is essentially unbeatable by anyone who does not have your password or physical access to your computer in their laboratory is extremely easy to come by.

Noone has ever hacked a z/OS server and they probably never will. NetBSD is essentially impenetrable, and is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Using the "sneaker net" - that is putting a physical lack of connection between the outside world your data, carrying flash drives with the tranmissable data to networked machines and keeping the secure data in a place which is actually secure - has been shown to be essentially unhackable under any circumsyances.

Nash Equilibrium in the Modern Day
What this means is that the Nash Equilibrium has already been reached in the modern world using realistic computer standards of 2007. Actually secure data cannot be hacked and Navy Seals don't bring hackers on covert missions. Not even into hostile office buildings.

And what that means is that any system which falls back on any of the core assumptions we make about modern computer security - will inevitably result in a Nash Equilibrium which maps to our present experience: covert operations teams don't even bother having a Computer Specialist. And while you could run a game like that quite easily, the Shadowrun conceit is that the team has Dodger, Sally Tsung, and Ghost Who Walks on it. And for that conceit to hold, the Nash Equilibrium has to include computer specialists as its endstage.

Nash Equilibrium in the Shadowrn Future
So here's the important parts: it can't be simple or cheap to keep out a matrix specialist, or people would do that. That means that the air gap, even the sneaker net, can't work. But it's more than that. The cheapest alternative of all of course is simply not having a computer, which means that you're down to one of three possibilities:

1. People gain benefits from computers which are so astoundingly awesome that they would genuinely be willing to accept the vulnerability of potential hacking anyway.
2. Not having computers makes you more vulnerable to hacking.
3. You have some sort of crazy ace that I don't even know.

But in order to make the game work, you are going to have to encode one of those into actual rules. Seriously.

-Frank