Unbeatable locks?, How to make certain areas inaccessible? Options

[FriendoftheDork]

Hey I have a question concerning my Barrens game. Basically, I noticed that even with a maglock rating 6 lock and rating 4 anti-tamper system the team's thief managed to pick it easly using his log+hardware and basic hardware tools.

OK, this meant I had to cut the session short as I had not intended for them to enter a certain underground lair :vegm: at this point in time.

The reason why I want to deny access to at least some parts of this facility is because I don't want the PCs to get too much valuable equipment too fast.

I want to include gun emplacements in order to scare the PCs into not tripping the alarm, but I don't want them to actually fire as that would probably kill the poor bastards.

But additionally, I want either certain doors or perhaps elevators to be inaccessible without special knowledge or special equipment (which will require money or contacts to get). Is there any way to do this without throwing the rules out? And more importantly, without giving the PCs the feeling of being railroaded like in many computer games (like DC 99 locks in NWN2).

Please answer quickly, as I need this before tomorrow. Note that the PCs have very little gear, for example no hacking programs (or hardly any programs at all). Also, the facility is 30y old so no wireless at all and I'm not sure if they can even jack in as they have no datajack or deck. Should a modern Sim-module do the trick?

[Rotbart van Dain...]

A cardboard reading 'Plot Device - Please do not enter' will do just fine and provide great entertainment to your players.

[The Jopp]

Ok, a small suggestions then.

They have found an old security checkpoint in the basement of a former corporate building. The now abandoned building is now the home for several squatters and other unfortunate folks.

The basement contains the R&D for the corp in question and the dead rent-a-cop was just hired to watch over the building until they could move everything thing out in a clandestine fashion. Unfortunately the corporation went bankrupt just a few days before they were supposed to clear it out and someone decided that the R&D department should not be known to the public or the new owners, so they put the entire basement on lockdown status.

This unfortunately sealed the guard inside and he unfortunately starved to death and since he was working this job on the side he became just another missing persons case. (Personal information should be available on the old credstick)

There is a fine layer of dust on everything.

Inside the locked door they come into an old storage area (no reception here, this is the back door). Inside they find a large stash filled with old tech junk (it’s 30 years old…) mainly ventilation spare parts and maintenance gear. They can find various technical tool kits but not much else.

They also find a small recreational lounge for the employees and a working arcade machine (for some reason the power is still working…hmm…). They also find a stash of freeze dried food and some canned food (some is edible, but how will they know).

After this they realize that the other doors they find are of a much sturdier quality and only accept voiceprint indentification or palmprint access in combination with a maglock.

As a home it’s much safer than the street but who knows, someone might still own the place…and the power is working…and a secondary silent alarm might have told someone that someone had entered the building…

So, no guns, nothing horrible unless they become stupid.

[Aaron]

Guards
Hardwired cameras
Patrolling drones or spirits
Entrance looks like every other cruddy building in the neighborhood
Entrance hidden behind stack of ED books
Hardwired gun emplacements
Lock requires passkey*
Any of the above

*This might give you some time, as the team has to make a run to get a copy of the passkey.

[Rione]

What about making the lock inaccessible from the outside? There are plenty of doors now that simply have no handle or lock from the outside, and the only way to get through them is to have someone unlock and open it from the inside.

Then, of course, you could put a lovely little doorbell next to it. /evillaugh

Otherwise, you can use actual physical means to block the door. For example, a few years ago, my house was almost broken into. Almost. The only thing that stopped the person from getting in was the fact that our sliding patio door was blocked from opening by... a dowel. All fancy-shmancy locking mechanisms, and we were protected by a dowel, which when in place prevents the door from sliding open.

Besides, who'd ever suspect that the reason a door isn't opening is because the Evil Overlord put a chair under the handle?

[Clyde]

Biometric maglock. Authorization can't be hotwired and it could take the hacker a while to find the fingerprint/voiceprint database.

Not mentioned in the rules is the timelock (like at fast food joints and convenience stores). Timelocks will only open at a specified time - useful if your R&D team only changes shifts at certain hours.

A lock might be rigged up to an RFID scanner - which is currently switched off. There need be no physical guts to access (unless you used a blowtorch).

Another deal is being honest with your players - I hadn't meant for you to open this door just yet.

You can also have this place be empty, maybe describe the ruins of all kinds of beautiful toys gutted by fire or corroded into junk by caustic gasses, but there's a hint that there are similar facilities not too far away. . . .

[Backgammon]

[toturi]

If you do not want DC99 locked doors(which pisses me off in NWN2 as well), remember that SR has degrees of successes or hits. So the more hits, the better the overall result. Say 1 hit opens the lock, 2 hits opens the lock silently, 3 hits opens the door silently and bypasses the alarm etc.

The problem I see is that what you want to do is essentially railroading, except that there are multiple rails. The ways into the "hidden rooms" are fixed by you and you do not want the PCs bypassing your fixed ways. How you want to resolve this is up to you because you are in the best position to judge whether your players will feel if they were railroaded or not.

[deek]

I have to agree with toturi...while I don't think "railroading" has to always have a negative connotation, and while you say you don't want to railroad, that is exactly what you are doing.

As a GM, you can't (and shouldn't, IMO) control what the players do, the vast majority of the time. You put a door there that had a lock that could be passed...and the players passed it...

If you didn't want them to get past the door, you shouldn't have put a door there:) Or you could have welded it shut, concrete blocks behind it, etc, etc...or used a suggestion above about additional security on it. But I just shake my head when you put a maglock on a door, regardless of how strong, and then the rest of your session falls apart because the players opened the door...

Sorry, for being blunt, but why did you even put the door there in the first place? Coudl have been something concealed or simply not there at all...don't penalize your players for lack of planning or not wanting them to go someplace "yet".

And if all else fails, just tell the players the truth and say you are not ready for them to go there...if they are good players and trust you, they'll let it slide:)

[Backgammon]

[FriendoftheDork]

Thanks for all the replies. Hmm, lots of possible solutions here, but most of them seem to indicate that I make biometric locks and similar impossibly to bypass with hardwiring... I didn't get this impression from the rules but I'll check them out.

As for the reason why the thief managed to bypass the lock, he had 8 dice and even used his 6 edge a few times (like on the anti-tamper system). Basically he manged this with just a few rolls (less than 4) and didn't glitch once. Yeah he was lucky.

And I didn't say I would never railroad, just that i don't want to make it obvious to the players.


Ok since I haven't mentioned it yet here are a few facts about the facility:

1. It is located in the Barrens, in some tunnels that are linked to the sewers and the PCs squatter home. The heavy steel door was behind a regular wooden one to avoid too much suspicion.

2. It was owned by the Renraku corporation, but it was abandoned 30 years ago for some reason. The people knowing about it are probably dead now, and the corp itself has forgot all about it.

3. The personell in the facility didn't know who they worked for, they were just hired for securiy and research. They're probably all dead by now, except perhaps some freak occurrances.

4. Tech is old, but has some nice security. Staionary automated drones, alarm systems, laser tripwires, locks of different kinds. The PCs should be able to bypass most of these by getting access to passwords etc that can be found inside.

5. There may still be a danger inside (virus, dangerous magic, malfunctioning "smart" security system (or even a mad AI), critters etc.

The facility has more than one level. I want the lower levels to be inaccessible without very good hacker equipment or some such the PCs don't currently have. They might be able to live in the upper level with relative comfort but still be unable to fully explore the entire comlex.

[2bit]

If you haven't actually opened the door yet, I think the killbox (man trap) is a good idea, if it fits your location.

Since the hardware in this installation is 30 years old, you can say that the electronics design is foreign to your thief (who is young, correct?) and make it arbitrarily more difficult for them. If they can't figure out the design, you can make them work to find a Knowsoft about the make/model of the locks inside the facility, which, being pre-crash knowledge, can be arbitrarily rare.

That depends on your acceptance, of course, that old tech can be more difficult to bypass by virtue of its not being in use any longer.

Biometrics, by the book, are pretty secure - for no other reason than it checks a remote database for authentication. When that remote database is in a system off the matrix (especially behind your door) it becomes pretty darn secure. If your team has no hacking progs like you say, go with biometrics or make up something that works similarly.

[eidolon]

[Ravor]

Well it may not be what you want to do, but considering that anything they find would be 2040ish tech then rule that the 'loot' they find is all extremely outdated and worth maybe pennies on the dollars if the Runners can even find anyone who will pay them for it.

However, they can look "retro-cool" with their non-smartlinked Predator I and the cased ammo they found in their new Bat-Cave.

At least until the A.I. that evolved from the Virus which ate the Internet discovers the party...

[mattvo28]

I think a combination of things is the way to go. A one trick solution isn't the best in this case.

An idea:
Make the door look impossing; a nice lock will get you far but enough explosives can get around most locked doors. So stress to them that this door seems very solid (think bulkhead/blast door from Star Wars, or in a DnD game I played recently they had two huge Adamantine double doors...kind of kept us out) with a complex lock.

They will probably want to attempt to pick the lock (whether electronic or manual) so you can attempt to add a few layers of security on to it (the passcard/biometric works, but given time it could be bypassed).

So beyond the door I'd use the Man Trap idea with sentry guns on alert (the alarm has already been tripped). Of course this makes one wonder how they'd know about the sentry guns, you could do this by having a security monitor feed playing on a terminal (this of course makes hacking a option to disengage the security alert, this can be defeated by not making the security system on the same network) or the classic red lights flashing in the hallway to indicate the alert has been tripped, but not necessarily by the runners that could have happened back when they sealed they "vault."

Hope this helps...
Matt

[Backgammon]

[FriendoftheDork]

[Ravor]

Well its been forever since I've read the Arc Shutdown plot, but if I'm remembering correctly I think Deus was born from the shards of another A.I..

What I was thinking about is that the lab was studying the virus that destroyed the Internet in 2029, part of the results of the research allowed Big R to create Blackhammer, but when the lab was abandoned a researcher forgot to turn off the mainframe that was running the actual virus itself.

A few years later the virus gained total access to the facility when a group of Shadowrunners were hired to break into the lab and steal some paydata. For whatever reason the Decker decided to log into the virus mainframe at the same time as the rest of the lab's computer systems (I'd go with pure laziness, he didn't want to have to Jack Out multiple times and didn't know which computer actaully housed the paydata.), the Virus killed the Decker and also triggered a full alert which managed to kill all but one of the remaining Runners...

And since the lab was totally off the grid, the virus stayed there and at some point in time it evolved into a full-blown A.I., driven to madness by the dictates of its core viral code, to devour everything and everyone, if it were to escape into the Matrix at large, then enter Crash 3.0 and who knows what once it discovers Dues's experiments, or maybe even the group trying to create A.I.s in Hong Kong...

[Backgammon]

I dont think the AI route is the best.
A) it's cliche
B) there is not nearly enough processing power in that lab to evolve an AI. Probably barely enough for a low-level SK. It's just impossible to have an AI. You could of course have a damaged SK controlling central security with the goal of "kill everything in sight". But that's not an AI, and shouldn't be.

[mfb]

just don't have any outside access. if someone wants to get in, they have to ring the doorbell and wait for someone inside to open up.

if you want to make it normally accessible from the outside, but keep the runners out, combine a hidden biometric measure along with the regular lock. if someone opens the lock without looking into a particular crevice (which contains a concealed retina scanner), a 10cm-thick door slams down, which can only be opened from the inside.

[Moon-Hawk]

Do your players hang out on Dumpshock? If so, you could just put up a sign that says "Beware of the Drop Bears" and they'll run away screaming. :-D

[2bit]

[Moon-Hawk]

The important part is that boiling oil be dumped on them. :-D

[MaxHunter]

Just as the PCs have spent edge and used the right skills to open the unlockable door, then you should let them have something before slamming their entry shut with a more unlockable door.

Let them explore the first level of the facility where nothing really important can be found, pick the katana from an old office, etc, before they found the really closed door for the next level. Yes, that door they need hacking programs to get into.

You could even fill the first level of the complex with -very vague- clues of the horrible things that happened many years ago. Just dust and some cryptic papers, yes, paper would do...

Listen very carefully to your players conjectures about what might have happened that left this facility so ghastly empty and forgotten. Sure you can make it up from there.

Cheers,

Max

[Moon-Hawk]

I really like MaxHunter's idea. You don't have to redo any of your previous planning, just shift it all by one floor and add something spooky and cool, and a bit of loot for them to find. (Hey, they made it into the impenetrable room, they deserve something)