I had a small issue in the last session I ran. The team broke into a house to kidnap the occupant, but the home security system was triggered first. The hacker hacked into the security system to send a false alarm code. This involved:
1. Exploiting the firewall.
2. Crashing the IC that detected him.
3. Analysing the icons to find the back-to-base relay.
4. Spoofing the false alarm code.

Given the hacker is working at lightning-speed, the rest of the team were busy dragging the target back to the car while this was going on. This episode quickly became boring for the other players. It was clear that the hacker was going to succeed after several rounds of combat with the IC. It was just going to take about 10 minutes of me and the hacker taking turns rolling dice. I ended up just saying "you succeed."

How do you handle a situation where a hacker or a magician is in solo combat without boring the other players?

It just happens sometimes. Its kind of one of the problems of shadowrun, where it has 3 different "worlds" that all exist at once. At the same time, that is one of the coolest parts of shadowrun too.

Sometimes you might need to throw a random kink like a Lone Star patrol they have to talk their way out of or some go gangs that are in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I also just wave my hands sometimes if its pretty obvious its going to be a success just for the sake of time and such.

The rest of the players should keep themselves entertained by feeding the GM peeled grapes and lavishing him with scented oils.

Obviously.


(For real though, once you're got the 'trix rules down, you can breeze through them just like any other single person combat scenario. The problem is that the rules are hell of hard to decipher the first few times.)

Or use an NPC hacker.

Le plus se change, rien ne se change plus.

What you want to say is :

"Plus ça change et plus c'est la même chose."

What you said is :

"The more is changing it self, nothing isn't changing more"

Wich, amazingly, have much more sense translated back

Pardon my French.

One GM I played with went on describing what the icon/IC combat looked like if you were an observer in the matrix. He made the hacker of the team describe his icon and "weapon"/attacks when he joined the group (samurai with a katana) and played off of that. I found I really didn't mind the wait as his story telling was quite entertaining and you could really picture what it looked like for the hacker in VR.

For a better example than my fumbling words can give, read Happy Trails (page 20 SR4A).

Food for thought.

If a PC wants to drive casualy to the other side of the Sprawl, would you have him roll for each and every manoeuver he has to do? Probably not.
You'll just handwave this. If he wants to do it fast, you'll have him roll one (or a few) driving test to see how fast he manages to do it or if he has a problem along the way.

It's the same with a hacker doing a uninteresting hack he has a high chance of suceeding.

You have the hacker exploit the firewall, find out that there is IC combat, consider that IC does not stand a chance against the hacker and say "you win", say "after a few seconds you find the correct node", and let them spoof the command. Two rolls of Exploit (player knows correct number of dice), one roll of Spoof (player knows correct number of dice). Done.

I love that the hacking rules are so bad that the 75% of the recommendations for what to do with them is 'not use them'


Awesome.

You could also use the SR3 alternative hacking rules from the Matrix book. They're cumbersome, but at least they work.

Or relegate hacking to a contact.

Not really, just saying it's a long process that usually just involves one character while the rest sit around and you already know the outcome. In cases like that, don't use them. Just like with Blade's example of driving across town (outside of a combat scenario). You wouldn't have the driver roll every move, because you know the outcome.

I find the hacking rules work rather well when they're fully utilized, but you don't need to utilize them in absolutely every situation.

Just to point out that the fact that it takes forever is one of the problems, I would be surprised that if just one of your players gets jumped by muggers, you just hand wave that combat?

If there's only one PC involved and the fight is mundane uncybered mugger vs. a street sam... yeah I just might. And as I suggested in my first post, giving colorful descriptions of a Hacker's actions in the Matrix can make it interesting for the other players who aren't directly involved if you'd rather not handwave the scene.

Yes I've already handwaved some combats, spell castings, astral plane trip, negociations...
But I agree that the Matrix rules are too cumbersome for small hacks and I think a rule for handling these would be interesting (I have an houserule for that).

And when things are important or interesting enough to be played, I use the full rulesets and make it interesting enough for everyone to pay attention to what's happening.

For rather routine hacks, I do a lot of hand-waving for the sake of keeping the narrative cinematic. As previously mentioned, describing the iconography helps keep the other players from getting super bored. Usually, the hacker also has to deal with the rest of the team hassling them for an update via the team network while the hack is in progress.

Then again, I'm running a very roleplay-heavy, rules-light game at the moment. It doesn't help that all of my players keep circumventing every single fight I set up for them by either sneaking around or talking their way out.

you could also just ask the hacker to spoof more often. the "all-clear" would come from the owner's commlink, right? and the hacker just needs a matrix perception to get the AID, right?

so you take that authorised, AID, spoof the "not a real emergency" command, and there you go. 2 rolls.

if you don't need to take extended control of something, and you have access to someone's AID who could give an order to the device, why on earth are you bothering to spend so much time hacking it when you can spoof it and as an added benefit, not leave anything useful in the target's logs that could be used to trace you?

i'm going to have to chalk this one up to a lack of knowledge about the matrix rules for this one. it could have been handled in 2 rolls (both of which are probably trivial difficulty to succeed if you're a skilled hacker), and if your other players can't wait for 2 rolls, then how do you handle things when it's someone else's turn in combat?

I don't necessarily handwave things, but I do use a lot of buy successes for mediocre systems, or when the hacker isn't pressed for time. Instead of rolling against every icon, for example, I'll buy them their generic knowledge of what they see and what it does. Every now and then I'll have 'em roll anyway, sometimes to keep 'em on their toes, sometimes because of the stealthed agent.

Yes, the cool thing about SR is the matrix meets cyber/physical meets magic. In my circle of friends, that's the major draw to the SR universe.

But, that's also the cause of the major issues at the table. I never really thought about it this way until reading through this thread. As a GM, one of the common tips are to keep the group together. No matter what game you play, when you only have one GM, once the group splits up, you run into time management problems that get worse the longer other players are not active in the game.

With SR, the scene is someone set up to force certain players to split up. Your example shows the hacker doing his own thing that no one else can participate in. The rules might be straightforward, but just the matter of rolling a series of dice to completion can be monotonous. And the players involved get bored because its just a matter of time. The players not involved feel even worse.

This can happen with magic as well. In both instances, magic and matrix, the characters are physically with the group (which is why it doesn't feel like the group is split up) but they really are split up until their action is complete. I think at the table, its a little more acceptable when players are split up and something happens to them, i.e. combat. The ones not involved don't usually complain about that or get bored, even though they may be out of the action just as long.

As to handling it, well, the only way I know how is to handwave it or create a quicker subsystem to reduce the amount of dice needing to be rolled. Unfortunately, the hacker may end up feeling a little short-changed. Maybe not, but you need to be aware of it.

I know that we no longer allow hacker PCs at the table after trying many different options and house rules to speed the matrix player up. That took us close to two years to finally give up.

Now, I love the rules in SR4A and the stuff in Unwired. It just doesn't translate to fast resolution at the game table.

When I create runs for my group I try very hard to gear anything Matrix related as either A). A couple of quick rolls or B). Something that can be done while the rest of the team is preoccupied with something else. For example, I make Hacking most security systems rather difficult, while Hacking individual security nodes much easier. This way the Hacker doesn't try and Hack a whole system sitting in the comfort of the teams van outside while the rest of the team goes in, but instead goes in with the team and hacks each security node as they come upon it. This can make for some fun and tense moments if a security team has the group pinned down while the Hacker is doing Matrix Combat to try and force a security door open so they can escape.

Many things about Hacking in SR4 (and even previous editions for that matter) don't make much sense to me. Like being able to Hack entire security systems from the equivalent of a souped up cell phone. Hacking a single security camera? Sure. Hacking a Maglock door? Why not. Hacking the whole system? Not likely in my game. I don't care how advanced computing gets. A system the size of a cell phone will never have the equivalent computing power of even a desktop computer let alone a server farm or mainframe.

It also makes little sense for an entire security network to be wireless anyway. The security risks in a wireless system far outweigh any benefits over a hardwired system, IMO.

Hacking has always been one of the most common tropes in cyberpunk settings, yet its something that SR has just never gotten quite right. It has improved a bit with each new edition, but just never quite fit with the rest of the system.

Those two are probably the most accurate answers.

I've found that I generally pre-roll the device's Analyse + Firewall test and use that to work out how many rolls the hacker gets before he's detected. I think, in future, I'll encourage the hacker to ignore the IC and just get to the target. That'd be more exciting anyway. "Will the hacker stop the alarm before he's dumped/traced? Find out, after these messages!"

Thank you everyone for all of your ideas!