Working with the Hacking Rules Options

[Carny]

I and my group are fairly new to SR in general. (I played a short campaign of SR3, and played some SR/Earthdawn stuff back in the day) We've been playing SR4 a lot, lately.

After that play, we found a couple things to be true:

1) The Hacking rules don't seem to fit too well with the rest of the game system. One example is the fact that Hacking is a Logic skill, but Logic never comes into play during the actual use of the hacking tasks. The same is true of Cybercombat.

2) We felt that taking the stats out of the equation opened the doors to a lot of abuses. Some of that was reinforced by things seen on these forums.

So, we are thinking about house-ruling the following:

For any computer-related, hacking or cybercombat task, the appropriate stat is added to the dice pool. For nodes or other things without stats, the first rating mentioned for a task is doubled.

Example: In VR, A hacker with Logic 4, a Cybercombat skill of 5, and an Attack 4 program attacks a Blackhammer IC on a node with System 5, Response 4, and Firewall 4. The hacker's commlink has a system rating of 6.

The hacker would roll 15d (4 for Logic, 5 for Cybercombat, and 4 for the Attack program, 2 for VR), while the IC would roll 12d (8 for Response x2, 4 for Firewall)

Maximum successes on any roll = system (or resonance)

Taking the above example, the maximum successes for the hacker would be 6, due to his commlink's system rating. The maximum successes for the IC would be 5, due to the system rating of the node.