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Combat Hacking for the Unprepared

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Sat, 2016-01-30 00:30

eaton

Combat Hacking for the Unprepared

I've been running a couple of one-shots recently, specifically for new players. Mind the WMD is generally pretty cool, but especially in the first firefight it can easily leave Elis, the hacker, with nothing to do while everyone else has their gunfight. It's my impression that anything requiring an Intrusion test is just too time consuming for combat time unless you're running a highly optimized character — a multitasking informorph with brute force attacks, etc. This is compounded by the fact that less experienced players are unlikely to spend time on Intrusions *before* visiting a new location, just in case they need backdoors. So, for the new folks in these one-shots I'm trying to put together a short list of things your hacker can do in combat that don't require long-term task actions or pre-existing backdoors. So far, I've got:

Mesh-spam hostiles using an unopposed Infosec Test (they can filter it out easily, but it's good for a round or two of distraction)
With a "public" guest access to ship/habitat network, mess with doors, lights, PA systems, etc using a Subversion Test (EP 259).
Jam hostiles' mesh communication using an Interfacing Test (EP 262)

AFAIK, none of these things require actual Intrusion attempts. Failing on the subversion test might draw active countermeasures, and using a complex action to upgrade your access privileges might be a good use of your first round or two of combat, but other than that it seems to check out. Am I missing anything?

Sat, 2016-01-30 02:26

MrWigggles MrWigggles's picture

Not sure how you can jam

Not sure how you can jam someone else Mesh inserts without jamming everyone mesh inserts in a given area. Its a cell phone/wifi radio thing. You can't really just target one cell phone, without getting access the phone itself. I dont think messing with light levels or opening and closing doors will do much of anything. Though I suppose this would depend on the level of professional training they have. In particular with Dont Mind the WMD, that group attacking the ship wouldnt be distracted by lights, or closing doors. Denial of Service attacks have rules though. Although its worded toward attacking an Infomorph. I dont see why you couldnt do it to a physical morph. It just wouldnt matter as much. From what I can see, it would basically just knock out a persons use of TacNet, prevent them from communicating with their team wirelessly. I dont think it would really distract them, as their Muse would stop it from popping up on their intropics. Now the wording does suggest you can DoS individual items? So maybe you can DoS a gun and knock out its Smart Gun System? Maybe some of its other mods?

Sat, 2016-01-30 02:39

Trappedinwikipedia Trappedinwikipedia's picture

If each side is using

If each side is using different frequencies it would be possible to selectively jam, though this would make it easier to overcome the jamming. To be honest, I haven't found that anything bad happens if you house rule hacking to be 10x faster than usual. That makes standard intrusion take 1 minute -reductions, and brute force hacking 2 action turns. Most physical combats are over in a matter of moments anyway, so multiple combat rounds is still meaningfully long, and combat hacking isn't super powerful on an action per action basis anyway. I found no problems using this, and it does a lot to solve the "hacker turn" problem the game suffers from during intrusion tests. I haven't experimented with this yet, but I think making hacking 20x faster than normal would be fine as well.

Sat, 2016-01-30 02:57

MrWigggles MrWigggles's picture

I dont think that can really

I dont think that can really with. With the theory crating about combat hacking already done would still work with making combat faster. So instead of getting combat hacking down to 2 turns, you could hack into someone Pan in fractional turns. (Rounded up to one turn).

Sat, 2016-01-30 06:21

Trappedinwikipedia Trappedinwikipedia's picture

I don't really have a problem

I don't really have a problem with launching brute force hacks with a simple action. (With max possible time reduction it'd be .6 seconds to attempt a brute force hack, which I'm willing to round to a simple action). Ultimately, combat hacking is just worse than just shooting people in many situations, as it has a worse action economy by far.

Sat, 2016-01-30 10:49

SquireNed

I handled this in the game I

I handled this in the game I was working on by just making all hacking times based on simple action turns (except data transfer, but we don't have the Mesh to help out our 2090's cyberpunks). This harmed no balance at all, and actually made hacking feasible as a character role because you didn't have to spend an entire combat focused on it (as a player or as a character). On the other hand, connectivity penalties meant that someone trying to hack in remotely takes at least twice as long and has a lower chance of making it in undetected.

Sat, 2016-01-30 11:29

eaton

RE: Selective Jamming

Looks like the EP Core Book is pretty explicit: you can selectively jam devices as long as you've scanned them and have the equivalent of a MAC address to target. From EP, page 262:

Quote:
Radio jamming does not require any special equipment other than a standard wireless device, such as an ecto or mesh inserts. Jamming can be selective or universal. Selective jamming targets a particular device or set of devices. In order to selectively jam, the character must have scanned the target device(s) (p. 251). Universal devices target all radio-equipped devices indiscriminately. Jamming simply requires a Complex Action and an Interfacing Test. If successful, affected devices within range have their radio communications disrupted— they are cut off from the mesh and may not commu- nicate wirelessly. Wired devices are unaffected. Devices equipped with AIs will automatically attempt to overcome jamming, which requires a Complex Action (transhuman users may also do the same). In this case, a Variable Opposed Test is made between the jammer and defender. If the jammer wins, all communications are blocked; if the defender wins, they are unaffected. If both parties succeed, the defender’s communications are impacted but not completely cut off. The gamemaster decides how much information the defender can get through and how this situation affects mesh use.

I'll have to think about how I approach the collapse of combat time. We've been playing it very, very tough for almost a year now in my main campaign: the hacker infomorph knows that it requires pre-run softening of the target via advance intrusions and backdoors. I think if I start emphasizing the option to use "public access" on local mesh networks with straight subversion tests, he'll have a lot of his favorite tricks available in realtime combat even without prep. That still leaves actually breaking into peoples' mesh inserts and other firewall penetration tasks as time consuming actions, which feels like it makes sense. Going to try rolling it out in our next couple of missions and report back on how the change feels.

Mon, 2016-02-01 03:21

Chase

The List

Actually, I've made lists of hacker appropriate actions, with page numbers to boot. Here's the list of non-subversion (No combat hacking) ones. Book acronyms are EP for the core rulebook and TH for Transhuman. Quick Actions: -Actively Monitoring a PAN (EP. 253) Complex Actions: -Detecting Stealthed Signals: -30 Interfacing test, opposed when vs. active stealthing (EP. 251) -Actively Stealthing Signals (EP. 252) -(Device) DOS Attacks: Infosec test, opposed when vs. active monitor (TH. 147) -(Infomorph) DOS Attacks: Infosec test, opposed vs. Infomorph. (TH. 149) -Radio Jamming: Targeted/Universal/Radar. Complex Action and successful Interfacing Test, (EP. 262) -Breaking Radio Jamming: Variable (Interfacing?) Opposed Test (EP. 262) -Toggling In/Out of Simulspace (EP. 262) -(Infomorph) Plug-in a Narcoalgorithm (TH. 149) If you're looking to stick with the rules instead of tossing in houserules and such, the device DDOS is probably going to be your most interesting tool for your player (And you). Go ahead and give him the glitch chances for Minimal Processing Environments and Overloaded Systems, as well as set more than 1 turn for reboots. Start out simple, letting them get the hang of it. First step for the player will always be getting their target's Mesh ID. They could potentially do this ahead of time or in the moment. Rules aren't defined very well here for combat, but if they're monitoring the local mesh nodes, they probably won't have a hard time finding enemy nodes, and normally I'd suggest just giving it to them. If you want to make it a bit harder, you can have their enemies passively stealthing their signals, forcing the player to make an interface check and a complex action to find it. Ramp up difficulty further by actively stealthing with an opponent's muse, and even more with an opponent hacker. Alternatively or even additionally if you want to be really mean you can have an opponent throw down some jamming (Yes it can be targeted) that they have to fight through. Second part for the player is the more meaty bit that will force your hacker to make choices. DDOS attacks don't have to be kept up, and while most of the time they don't hit hard unless you're making MOS 60+, they are annoying. DDOSing Mesh Inserts would screw with that opponent's muse running on them, making them less effectual (Drop speed and aptitudes) and if you wanted to give the hacker a little more oomph, treat the programs running as users that can glitch too (Smartlink, Tacnet, etc). The player however will have to choose if they want to gamble with not actively modifying their attack and DDOSing additional targets, or maintaining the DDOS on that one and getting to actively roll against the additional attempts to redirect or block the traffic. Remember your defenders can distribute traffic when they have local to a wider mesh, giving them +10 on their opposed roll each turn the DDOS is maintained. Once your player is comfortable with that, consider putting enemy hackers on the opponent's side that can switch between defending their side, and attacking your players. This could force your hacker to have to decide between spending their turn trying to stealth signals and DDOS/Jam. Outside of this stuff try and get your hacker into some other elements that could be used in combat. Trying to get the most out of local spimes with active perception checks, maybe toss some that they can connect to with additional or non-visual sensor arrays that can tell them more about the enemy or even show them where hidden ones are. Controlling robots is kind of a related skillset, but also themes well with the hacker archetype. Anyways, hope that helps, good luck to you and your group, and pass on a friendly wave to your hacker from me!

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[url=http://eclipsephase.com/complete-guide-hacking-ep]The Complete Guide to Hacking in EP[/url]

Sun, 2016-02-07 19:24

eaton

Ran the one-shot, explosions

Ran the one-shot, explosions were made, WMDs were captured. Good times were had by all. Chase, your list of Complex Actions ended up matching up nearly 1:1 with the stuff that the person playing the hacker attempted to pull off. In particular, stealthing outgoing signals so Firewall could be kept in the loop during the negotiation with Xu on her ship. The one other thing that he tried that didn't appear on the list was working with a second player to triangulate hostiles using Interfacing tests against their mesh gear, even though cameras were down. It left me scratching my head a bit but they made the Interfacing (-30) difficulty roll and got a one-time snapshot of several hostiles' locations before they were officially sighted. All in all, I think this approach works really well, and it's convinced me that the hacking system "as written" is way less broken and frustrating than I'd thought. The only things penalized by the time-consuming Task Actions are *intrusion attempts* against servers that are network-accessible but give the player no default guest access. From that, I am going to continue assuming that most mesh-accessible devices *do* give some form of guest access so that users can do things like search for information, query online help, and so on. That leaves open the possibility of subversion actions (with varying levels of difficulty based on the security of the server) in combat-time, making combat hacking much much MUCH more useful.

Sun, 2016-02-07 22:48

#10

Chase

Glad to hear we were thinking

Glad to hear we were thinking along the same lines! Your hacker's work to triangulate positions actually matches up with two things that immediately come to mind. One is the "voice" that most devices have that will help you to locate it, give you instructions on use/care, condition of the device, and when and how to repair it (EP. 299). The other is the Radio Motion Detection software found in PO. 156 for [Low] which would have allowed your hacker to get the enemy's positions in a manner pretty similar to what he was going for. I'm liking your assumption of guest access, it really does make combat hacking much easier and is a good way to support a player running that type of character without houseruling and keeping the security of important targets as strong as they're supposed to be in a post-Fall world. Thanks for the followup!

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[url=http://eclipsephase.com/complete-guide-hacking-ep]The Complete Guide to Hacking in EP[/url]

Tue, 2016-02-09 01:48

#11

MrWigggles MrWigggles's picture

Most places would defiantly

Most places would defiantly have guest passes. Though I would wager that PANs dont have guess access. Unless you're considering seeing their public profile as a guess access?

Wed, 2016-02-10 00:42

#12

eaton

PAN vs Infrastructure

No, I've been treating the PAN as hardened, with no access for external users without a legit intrusion attempt. The systems I'm going to be giving them Guest access to are things like relay nodes on the local station mesh, infrastructure that monitors or controls lighting and doors, emergency services, basic social network connectivity, free or low-cost local storage and backup, publicly accessible sensor feeds, etc. That, combined with signal jamming and monitoring, gives them a lot of interesting toys to play with, and still requires some (potentially) tricky Infosec rolls. If they fail a subversion attempt on those guest accounts, active countermeasures will probably kick in and they'll either be booted from the regional mesh or have to tangle with a low level security AI.

Wed, 2016-02-10 10:13

#13

uwtartarus uwtartarus's picture

My gun and smart-tux don't

My gun and smart-tux don't need to have Guest accesses, leave the PAN to a closed networking through the Basic Mesh Inserts, which don't need Guest Accesses either, unless I have a ghostrider module carrying someone else.

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Exhuman, and Humanitarian.