[X] My Assistant

[CanRay]

Which pisses Bull and FastJack off to no end, let me tell you!

[suoq]

Everyone *is* becoming a hacker. You can easily get to about 75%. The specialized stuff and the maxed skills is that last 25%, at vastly increasing cost.

Help me through this so that I can understand.

My assumption is that your table, like season 4 of missions, is not using Piracy. If you are using piracy then, yes, everyone at your table probably *is* becoming a hacker or, more likely, has an mook to do their hacking for them. That seems to be a logical consequence of the piracy rules.

I'm looking at a baseline of a skill of 4 in the Cracking and Electronics group. So that's (10+10+15+20)*2=110 karma. Even just a 3 in both groups is 70 karma. Clearly I'm looking at a different baseline than you if everyone is becoming a hackerat your tables. What is the minimum skillset for being a hacker in your opinion?

For software, since rating 3 is a huge price break, I want to go there. That's 1500Y per program but with a 4 in the skill, that's still only 7 dice. That doesn't seem like a hacker to me. It's affordable, but it doesn't seem to do much. I want those three extra dice that running a rating 6 software will bring. Unfortunately, that's 6 grand per software package. Armor, biofeedback, some form of attack, decrypt, defuse, eccm, exploit, sniffer, stealth, track. = 60 grand worth of software and that's not counting mute, optimize, and a dang good commlink.

As I said, I'm missing something. I don't see HOW people are becoming hackers. What do these hackers have for a dice pool and how did they get it?

Edit: Should not attempt to do math in my head.

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

Help me through this so that I can understand.

My assumption is that your table, like season 4 of missions, is not using Piracy. If you are using piracy then, yes, everyone at your table probably *is* becoming a hacker or, more likely, has an mook to do their hacking for them. That seems to be a logical consequence of the piracy rules.

I'm looking at a baseline of a skill of 4 in the Cracking and Electronics group. So that's (10+10+15+20)*2=90 karma. Clearly I'm looking at a different baseline than you if everyone is becomeing a hacker at your tables. What is the minimum skillset for being a hacker in your opinion?

For software, since rating 3 is a huge price break, I want to go there. That's 1500Y per program but with a 4 in the skill, that's still only 7 dice. That doesn't seem like a hacker to me. It's affordable, but it doesn't seem to do much. I want those three extra dice that running a rating 6 software will bring. Unfortunately, that's 6 grand per software package. Armor, biofeedback, some form of attack, decrypt, defuse, eccm, exploit, sniffer, stealth, track. = 60 grand worth of software and that's not counting mute, optimize, and a dang good commlink.

As I said, I'm missing something. I don't see HOW people are becoming hackers. What do these hackers have for a dice pool and how did they get it?

I like your baseline... At our table, we control that by using the Optional Rules. When you use Logic + Skill, and Cap hits by program rating, you see a sharp decline in the "everyone is becoming a Hacker" Syndrome. This has worked wonders for our table.