did he use edge? if not why did his badluck proc?

he's loitering in an area in the middle of the night and a busy body didn't call lonestar? driveby traffic didn't see him? it's the middle of the night...

once again, it's the middle of the night, the motion sensors outside the house would probably turn on when he got close enough to get a signal feed, and again the busy body, who says the securty has to extend outside the house? drop it to a signal 1, or 2

um not have his VCR linked to his comm, turn off the wireless system.
a Rigger is a hacker after all. throw some IC into his comm, it looks to me like you just let htem have everything.

In a matter of speaking... yes. When he opened up with the suppression into the parking lot (with the busy city street behind the bad guys). I had him roll edge (and the 1d6 for possible unluck, and also not counting this as one of his own edge rolls) to see what kind off effect his spray of bullets would have to the city/people beyond the 10-15 meters involved in the combat.

Between his stealth rolls and chameleon suit he was never in much danger of actually being spotted. Part of the reason he went alone...

And once again, the character is nigh on invisible... I'm also not feeling as someone new to GMing SR4 that I should be forced off the bat to drop signal ratings, increase firewalls/IC ratings, or just to, in general, raise the difficulty on the fly of a shadowrun mission, for fairly standard 400bp characters with no Karma...

Again, I'm just trying to learn from this to start getting my own adventures together for my group... and to make sure we're running the rules correctly. We also like the idea of submitting our results for the SRMs.

That said, the example I used was with a riggger... but I'm more curious into what all a hacker should be able to do when trying to hack into someone else's comlink.

What rolls they need to make to hack into someone's comlink and what rolls are needed to turn off someone else's cyberware.... or to change the IFF on their smartgun to list themselves as a friend? How fast can they do these things?

Honestly that feels a little like you are just trying to insult me... but hey, to each their own.

In reality, when the hacker attempted to spoof the command to turn off the Control Rig via the comlink it (as best we could find in the book) was an extended test. He made his first attempt and made some successes, but not enough. The Rigger rolled his chance to detect and did in fact detect the hacker. They they rolled an opposed test as the rigger attempted to terminate the hacker's connection... and the Rigger won that roll.

In the same encounter 1 PC died, 1 PC lost a $50,000 vehicle, drones, and god knows what else... and is basically a rigger with no gear now... and the 2nd vehicle got it's roof chopped open, which nearly ended in the death of the PC hacker who was in the back seat jacked in hot.

So before you make comments about how I "let them just have everything." Either ask for the full story or just keep comments like that to yourself.

I'm really just trying to get some answers about what game mechanics we may have done wrong so we can improve... not looking for a critique on how we play from you.

kk, thx.

So, he didn't choose to use Edge, but rather you enforced the test arbitrarily. Doesn't sounds quite right to me.

I have no problem with a hacker being good at what he does... I just wanted to make sure that we are "doing it right"

So pretty please... does someone have a good "flow chart" or something that has a good listing of "common hacker activities" showing:

If you want to hack a comlink, first do A> Next if B then C, if not then D... etc.

If you want to spoof a command roll X+Y and system will roll D+E against stealth to detect you, both are extended blah blah tests.

Hackers just seem to have a TON of dice rolls attached to them, and several rules spanning many pages in the rulebooks... has anyone made up a "guide to SR4 hackers" full of these kinds of cheat sheets or something?

That's a little touchy. I think Djinni was trying to be helpful to you.

In regards to your initial questions. I don't see anything wrong with the hacker having his way with the house. If this hacker is someone you expect to be infiltrating corporate systems, then a regular house ought to be a fairly easy challenge.

As regards the drones, You don't say what sort of security drone they are, but the device ratings table in SR4, pg. 214 advises a rating of 3-4 for drones, typically.

Before he can do anything, he needs to succeed in identifying the drone nodes. If they are in hidden mode, then he may need to make an extended Logic + Electronic Warfare (4) roll. That's probably a pretty safe bet given the time scales involved, but worth mentioning seeing as you're asking for general guidance. There's still the chance the player could glitch it or run out of attempts.

But anyway, assuming that the hacker is probing (the slow approach) which you say he is, then it's a Hacking + Exploit test with a threshold of System + Firewall, which should be around 6-8 for a security drone. Assuming your hacker has around is using full VR and has around 12 dice in the pool and , then it's going to take a couple of hours per drone. In order to issue commands to the drones, he could have spoofed instructions from their commanding persona (SR4, pg. 221), or added himself as the commanding persona which, is what he did in this case. I would say you require admin or security level access which is +6 or +3 to threshold. This might be a point of contention so I'm interested to hear what other GM's think. But if it does require this level of access then you can add another hour or two onto the time taken per drone.

The house I have given my opinion on.

Shutting down the rigger's commlink. I'm assuming from the way that you wrote this that the hacker located the rigger's commlink through its traffic with the drone using Electronic Warfare + Scan (4) to locate the node, followed by Electronic Warfare + Sniffer (3) test. Now some GMs would want you to decrypt that traffic, though I would think sniffing it would be enough to identify the node. At the other end, some GMs would have let him just scan for the rigger's comm in the first place. There are different ways of doing things and I don't have enough detail from you to say exactly what should have been rolled. From the sounds of it, this is my best guess. To spoof a command, the hacker needs to make a matrix perception test opposed by the comms System + Firewall (again you might say that sniffing the packets had accomplished this if you wish). You'd then follow this with the spoof attempt which is again opposed.

However, I would not allow you to shut down the commlink or control rig with a spoof attempt. This violates what I see as the spirit of the rules where in order to crash / kill an OS, you need to defeat it in cyber combat. It also denies a defending hacker (or rigger in this case) the opportunity to defend it. In order to shut it down, I would actually ask the hacker to either access it properly (hack the node with admin privileges) or attack it in cyber combat. Doing otherwise is going to result in some skewing in the hacker's favour.

Now this is all my take on it, and hacking is an ill-defined area. I'm very interested to hear other GM's comments on this.

You should also take a look at Serbitars extremely helpful guide to the matrix which is in his sig, I think.

-K.