I'm a relatively new Shadowrun GM, and I'm GMing a group of even more green Shadowrun players.

My players have completed a couple of low-difficulty Shadowruns. They've gotten their feet wet, they're getting more comfortable with the rules. My player group consists of a Face, Special Ops athletics/gun guy (No Cyberware), Crow Shaman, and a Rigger.

They have no hacker. They've mostly delt with NPC hackers to help them along when they've occasionally needed it.

I want to show them what an ENEMY hacker can do to them, preferably in the middle of a fight.

I've thought of having an enemy hack the smartlinks on their guns (they use glasses with smartlinks, since they don't have cyberware), being attacked on the road in their car, and having the car hijacked wirelessly, and a few other things.

However, I'm hoping some other GMs out there can give me some more ideas. Keep in mind however they get hacked the group doesn't have a hacker to defend themselves, and they're a new group, so I don't want to kill them. Just challenge them and expose them to enemy hacking.

Thanks in advance!

(I'm sure Unwired has ideas for me, but I don't have the PDF, I'm waiting for the print version)

If they don't have a hacker, then it's best to just treat this sort of thing as a plot device.

Also, in my experience as a hacker (with only one character in only a handful of games), hacking equipment during firefights was completely impractical due to the time it took. It made sense for the character since he was a kid, didn't own a gun, etc., so he didn't have much else to do except stand up and be a target.

Somewhere on this site (or Knasser's or somebody's) there's an example of how this stuff plays out. You have to take time to scan the area for your opponent's PAN, which may be hidden. Then you have to hack on the fly, which is the hardest way to do it, and then you have to get a high enough level of access to the device to actually do what you want.

I had two occasions where I tried this:

a) on foot, behind cover, in a firefight that lasted only a handful of actual rounds; never got into anyone's gun
b) hot sim in a car, trying to drive and hack a pursuing armed HTR vehicle; gained access, but was never able to do anything other than rebooting their system (bought time).

So, I think this sort of thing works great in fiction and as a plot device, but not well in the real world.

I'm sure someone will correct me, though.

EDIT: Ok, just noticed that you're me. =)

A hacker joining in a firefight from AR is meh at best. Unless they have some cyber to speed them up in the meat world. However a Hacker tagging along a with a group of CORP SEC or police forces while in full VR can wreck a teams day if they dont have anyone to engage him in. cybercombat..

A hacker can do alot more than mess up targeting bonuses that come along with a smartgun. A smart hacker can cause the players clips to eject in the middle of a firefight the the smartgun effects the gun just as much as it does the targeting display. They can disrupt team communications, or edit team communications. (this is where as a GM you have to have them play with character knowledge not player knowledge or even pull one of the players aside and tell coach him in what he needs to say to the rest of the team while in private. If the players have drones they can sieze control the drones and turn them against the players. Have a hacker hack one of the players comlinks and get all the characters personal information. IE where he lives his bank info..etc etc. It will give the players a whole knew look on why they need to invest in comlink security.

If a character has image links in his smartglasses or goggles edit can do things with that as well. from blacking the glasses out to creating illusions once again edit.. The list goes on and on. just be creative. Remember a Hacker doesnt always have to be in the meat world to assist his team. they can scan an area from full VR also. and can track his team he is assisting thru their comlinks and scan the area around them. Ohh another thing if the team is using comlinks to communicate the hacker can give all their tactics being planned to the corp sec team etc etc.

Damnit they know our every move!

Oh well, depends on the hacker, the setting and the node to be hacked. I do not want to go into the rules for it to much now, but it works out.

People have gear and implants that use WIFI, AR and have RFIDs. Anyone with smartguns, tech goggles or cybereyes? Perfect. You can try to hack the stuff / go straight for the PAN or you can use dirty tricks.

The PAN... some one will most probably have a badly secured comlink (often the case with people that don't use it that much for their "work"), go for that one. This might make the characters spend more money on it in the future even if they aren't hackers or riggers. If they do have a teamnetwork of somesort, the weakest link in that chain is the way to get all the others as well.

So what do you do with that... tap their communication, track them, know their every move. Hack their equipment and implants and shut them down, so they are blind, deaf, limp or even unarmed there is much you can do there.

If you want to get dirty without too much work, just try to get to the functionality of their RFIDs, make the equipment try to upgrade their software out of line or shut down the spam filters. Most goggles, shades, glases have AR imagelinks builtin... those are perfect for some commercial spam (works perfectly with cybereyes as well). Anyone using smartgun funktionality will have something like that.

You can also subscribe those guys PANcodes to spam they "don't deserve" or even better, let your agent do that (every Hacker will have one or more agents sooner or later). The possibilities are somewhat limitless... you might as well hack their sorroundings, have commercial drones spam them, lock down or crash elevators...what ever...

Ofcause I assume, that their Matrix security isn't that good, as they don't have a hacker and are somewhat fresh.

Combat hacking, by which I mean using it in some form of a weapon, is scetchy at best.

Your players may feel like you pulled a fast one over when they found out that they could have skinlinked their guns and not had them hacked, and so on.

Well unless drones are involved. Those have to be wireless to work with the rigger and hence can be hacked.

Hackers are more about gethering info, making sure the camera doesn't see them, hacking that lone star officer that's trying to check their ID out. Stuff like that.

It's a bit risky but I'd be tempted to show them what a hacker can do for runners by having a situation where two teams are doing operations in a building at the same time (not entirely weird as runners might well hit during some fortuitus time, like a changing of the guard, other runners therefore would be prone to hitting at the same time.)

The other team would be able to glide through the corp. The hacker setting cameras to loop as they pass, opening an elevator and locked door, and having a guards comlink tell them that a disturbance was detected on the other side of the compound. That's what hackers are about. The player team would probalby just plow into combat.

Or maybe the teams could bump into each other, and, having different objectives, decide to work together. Then they could see the stuff the Hacker is doing.

Given the DNS stuff out right now, and exploit out in the wild, just arrived in my mail this afternoon. I think, you can pull a lot of stuff from real life.
Imagine if all their devices didn't think they belonged to the characters. What would happen? What would happen if the links get switched up?

If you want them to be hacked in combat, the hacker needs to be fast. Hot sim VR fast. So 3 IPs. If you have augmentation, give him a simsense booster for 4 IPs. You don't have Unwired, but if you did, you could use the Simsense Accelerator commlink modification to provide a 5th IP (yes, it's an exception to the BBB rules on IPs.)

Are your team using Hidden mode on their commlinks? That makes it very difficult for a hacker to pinpoint, but it can be done. Once they get the AID of a team commlink, then make sure you know what the runners have attached to their commlink. Do they run the smartlink connected to just the glasses? Or are the glasses connected to the commlink (for AR)? If it's the latter, then the smartlink is part of the runner's Personal Area Network, and once that's compromised, then the hacker can access it (no, the glasses/smartlink is NOT another node - so it's just one exploit).

Edit is your friend. Scramble the image link in their glasses. Edit their user account to require a password, then crash the OS so they have to reboot, and when they do, they won't know the password, so they can't use their commlink (or the attatched image link, communication system, smartlink, etc.)

Command is also a good utility. Command + Hacking against Firewall + System - and if the hack succeeds, your smartlink ejects your clip.

Also, if you Encrypt their smartlink feed, then they won't be able to interpret the data without a password (that you [as the hacker] have).

Once you have their AID OR have invaded their commlink (i'm not sure on this as I don't have a rulebook handy) then you can run a Trace and triangulate the commlink's exact position.

It's largely the same with a car. Find the car's node with a Sniffer Program. Hack + Exploit against Pilot/System + Firewall, and you're in. Command + Hacking will allow you to send orders to the car, so you can tell it to suddenly handbrake in the middle of a highway, or encrypt the vehicle controls so that the runners can't steer and then have the car's Pilot drive them whereever you like (including off a pier/to the nearest lone star station)

My hacker has 4 IPs and rolls an average of 19 dice for hacking tests (although we use Logic + Hacking/Computer with hits capped by program rating), so I could probably do it pretty easily.

Great ideas all, thanks!

The Rigger has a few drones, but they're mostly non-combat types (so far). If the Rigger decides to use them for something, I think I'll probably go after those, and then perhaps have the hacker get into the Rigger's Commlink to monitor/shutdown their communications.

From there, if the hacker goes undiscovered, I think it'll be time to eject the clips from their guns and password protect their Commlinks or their smartgun systems so that they can't use them anymore, even after a reboot.

That way after the ambush is over, they'll need to go through the pain and hassle of undoing the damage the hacker did, which could be quite humorous, and will flex their cyber-muscles a little bit, which is pretty much what I want them to do.

Taking away their Commlinks and electronic enhancements and forcing them into a brief firefight in that condition should go a long ways towards making them feel vulnerable and naked, without being completely helpless.

Hopefully they don't think I'm a cruel GM.