NPC Hacker Problem, We all know what this is... Options

[The Jake]

OK I'm sure at one point or another, you've hit the problem where you need a hacker, none of your players wants to play one and you have the icky situation of how you deal with it.

Do you use an NPC and completely eliminate the situation or use an NPC and try not to trivialise it - and if so, how?

My last campaign I had a few methods (quote this from another post) but I felt like I finally had the process to a point where it worked well

We has a PC AI in my last campaign. He used another PC's PAN initially - the AI had Rootkit and wasn't detected until it took temporary control over the PAN, including the other PC's wired reflexes and skillwires, scaring the crap out of the other player! Haha. Eventually it moved into a dedicated commlink they carried around and *eventually* moved into human looking, bipedal drone and could move amoung metahumanity with relative ease. This actually worked a treat. If you use an AI NPC I think it could work well.

We also had an NPC human hacker on call, but I didn't want the players to use him for every random hacking job (the AI player turned up sporadically). So I made it so the NPC hacker would happily schedule jobs weeks in advance, preferred to work 9-5 only (was a family man basically and his family didn't know what he was doing, but they didn't know that). He would only do jobs over the Matrix and never face to face. OH and if you called outside hours it would be very sketchy if he'd answer the commlink or not (I'd roll 50/50). If he did, he would pillage them on his fee (triple hourly rate, two hour minimum - more if the caller pissed him off or it was interrupting family time). He was a very competent and skilled hacker but I made sure the PCs would bleed financially if they ever called on him. It really made them think "how badly do we need him? is there another way?".

I had an alternative they could use too. Their alternative NPC hacker was an young elf party animal with a shaky rep and drug habit (read: tempo). She was as skilled, but much cheaper, usually drop whatever she was doing for a job, but she was not always reliable (read: known for being high on a job, or just plain "forgetting"). They never used her in the end.

My purpose for this thread is to see how others have dealt with this challenge?

Cheers

- J.