Author Topic: Hacking DFRPG: The Cyberpunk Heist  (Read 3390 times)

Offline admiralducksauce

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Hacking DFRPG: The Cyberpunk Heist
« on: September 09, 2011, 09:31:43 PM »
Hey all,

I'm posting this here rather than rpg.net because 1) You guys know DFRPG and that's the game I have, 2) I don't want to wade through 27 posts of "use Leverage! Use Strands of Fate!  Use fucking Exalted!" and 3) I don't know how I do it or what I did in the past, but either I'm on more people's ignore lists than I think or my posts are forum poison.  :)

I have it in my head that I want to tinker with DFRPG and present it to my brother to run a "cyberpunk heist" game.  He got Deus Ex and so has sneaky transhumans on the brain.  I'd appreciate any comments on the following ramblings.  Please keep in mind my tabletop group is usually 4 people with a sometimes 5th, I like "Up To Your Waist" as a starting power level (7 refresh/25 skill points/Great cap), and only have SotC and DFRPG (although Diaspora's SRD is somewhat known to me).  I'm also not even touching the cyberpunk/augmentation stuff yet; this is primarily heist-focused.

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How do we want to divide up different heist roles or niches?  We’ll assume a 4-5 player party, so we should have, say, 4 main roles with 2 additional roles that could be useful but a 4-person team should be able to get through.  Leverage has the Hacker, Hitter, Grifter, Thief, and Mastermind.  Even then, the Mastermind is more of a metagame-level role, so let’s ignore that and map the Leverage roles onto their Deus Ex “pillars”: Hacking, Combat, Social, and Stealth.

Spycraft’s classes map okay: Fixer, Soldier, Faceman, Pointman, Wheelman, Snoop.

Wheelman is cool but honestly the driving part of things happens around the heist except for very specific heists.  Likewise, Soldiering is good to have as a backup but it’s typically not the initial plan.

Fixer: casing the target, knowing people, getting gear
Soldier: combat, tactics, physicality
Faceman: social engineering, infiltration, disguise
Pointman: analogous to Mastermind.  The “leader” role.
Snoop: intrusion, stealth, hacking

The Leverage breakdown is better, so let's use that.  Assign existing DFRPG skills (26 in total) to each role:

Hacker
Craftsmanship
Scholarship
Investigation

Hitter
Athletics
Endurance
Fists
Guns
Might
Weapons

Grifter
Contacts
Deceit
Empathy
Intimidation
Performance
Presence
Rapport

Thief
Burglary
Stealth

N/A (or at least not central to the heist theme)
Alertness
Conviction
Discipline
Driving
Investigation
Lore
Resources
Survival

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Next step: How much of a default DFRPG 7-refresh / Great-skill-cap / 25 skill points / “Up to Your Waist” character build do these roles take up?  You can make a passable Hacker/Thief, especially if you use Stunts to strategically remove the need for certain skills.

+4: Scholarship, Burglary
+3: Investigation, Stealth
+2: Craftmanship, Athletics
All you need is the Cat Burglar stunt and you really don’t need Stealth at all.  And Athletics would be good for the Thief, but it’s VITAL to a non-stunted Hitter for ranged defense so it goes in that column.

Meanwhile, a Grifter or Hitter’s skillset is going to consume their highest skill picks all by themselves.

+4: Rapport, Deceit
+3: Empathy, Presence
+2: Intimidation, Contacts, Performance

I think if you had four skills to cover a role’s responsiblities (with a fifth as a “nice-to-have” or an easily stunted-away option), it would allow enough crosstraining that people wouldn’t feel pigeonholed nor would it allow too many jacks-of-all-trades.  Let’s look at the Hitter, and what he’d use each skill for primarily:
Athletics -> Defense
Endurance -> Physical Stress
Fists -> Melee Attack, Melee Defense
Guns -> Ranged Attack
Might -> Grappling Attack
Weapons -> Attack, Ranged Attack, Melee Defense

Despite thinking of fighter-types as strong, we can put Might in the “nice to have but not essential” category.  That leaves us with making a hitter tougher, defending against incoming attacks, and making attacks on others across a variety of ranges and with various implements.

If we use Stunts to pare down our skill picks, we can make a Hitter pretty efficiently:
+4: Weapons, Guns
+3: Endurance, Might
Shot on the Run (dodge trapping moved to Guns), Anything Goes (never forced by circumstance to be unarmed, thus removing the need for Fists entirely).

Perhaps even using a Stunt to increase the range of thrown weapons and taking a Footwork-analog stunt for Weapons could let us ignore Guns entirely.  Or use Fists, take a high Athletics, and use a Stunt to use thrown weapons off Athletics.

Hmm.

Actually, 6 skills seems to be the sweet spot here, not 4.  A few Stunts in the right place can really remove the need for so many skills, which frees you up to cross-train.  Or you can take the full gamut of that role’s skills and use your Stunts to further increase your capabilities.  With that said, I’ve never liked the whole “when do I roll Rapport/when is it Empathy/when should it Presence” muddle.  Let’s combine a few of those, and we’ll need to expand the Thief and Hacker’s skillsets so they’re comparable to the Hitter and Grifter.  By the same token, we should pare down the skills that aren’t central to the heist theme.  Lore, for example, is out of here.  The mental stress skills aren’t as important when there aren’t psychic powers going around, although they might be useful for cyberwear’s stress on the mind if we go that route.  If we do drop mental stress, let’s call social stress Composure like in Diaspora.

---

And that's where I am.  I'm wondering if I'm making some serious errors in my assumptions so far, and if you guys have any suggestions about where and how to branch out the thievery and hacking portions of the roles.  Or if I'm really missing some interesting heist roles that should be considered.

Offline admiralducksauce

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Re: Hacking DFRPG: The Cyberpunk Heist
« Reply #1 on: September 11, 2011, 05:14:25 PM »
After some more thinking (and throwing out lots of ideas), here's a somewhat-modified skill list broken down by "heist role":

Guile: social engineering, deception, persuasion, manipulation.  Social attack.
Cover: As in “cover identity”.  Blending into a crowd, disguise, forgery, acting, declarations relating to the fictitious cover’s backstory.  Situational attack or defense.
Presence: Expand to include influencing/inciting crowds, that way we can mostly ignore Performance.
Empathy
Intimidation

Close Combat: unarmed and armed melee attack and defense.
Ranged Combat: Maps nicely to Guns with the throwing aspect of Weapons.  Ranged attack only, dependent on weapons at hand.
Agility: Maps roughly to Athletics, but I like following a naming convention like Endurance and Might.
Endurance
Might: May allow Might to complement melee weapon value damage in order to increase its utility.  That might also be better moved to a Stunt, though.

Stealth: Ambush, Avoiding Detection, Shadowing
Burglary: Casing the Joint, Lockpicking, Pickpocketing, Safecracking, Disabling/Bypassing Security.  A Stunt that moved pickpocketing to Guile would be a good one.  Although the original DFRPG rules put picking pockets under Deceit, since we’re combining Deceit and Rapport, I feel picking pockets should be under Burglary along with the other “thievery” type trappings.
Cover: The trappings of blending, disguise, and forgery are useful to a Thief who wants to simply walk through certain security procedures.
Agility: Climbing and acrobatics are important for Thieves who rely on unorthodox routes to their targets or who need a speedy egress.

Tech: Knowing, breaking, building, and fixing technological items from smartphones to security drones.  Yes, it devalues Craftsmanship... maybe we don’t need to break these up?  But if we don’t, does it move too many weird trappings of Craftmanship into the realm of the Hacker?  All with one skill, the Hacker can fix a car, build a house, and weld plate steel onto a semi truck and make an A-Team tank.  That’s in addition to their more reasonable roles of Declaring facts about security systems, creating gadgets, defeating alarms, and so on.  Hmmm.  Some of those are Burglary trappings.  Should we just have any Hacker worth his salt have a Burglary rating or a Stunt that moves the security system trappings to Craftsmanship?
Investigation: The Surveillance trapping is paramount for a hacker.
Scholarship: The research and exposition trappings are useful, but overall, “computer use” is too vital a part of the genre to lump into Scholarship.  Scholarship can cover “normal” or “intended” computer use, but we need to break “hacking” into more skills.
Intrusion: Represents the hacker’s ability to access and then move within a system undetected.
Hacking Movement, Hacking Stealth, Hacking Initiative
Crypto: The hacker’s skill at taking down protected systems or reinforcing his or her own.
Hacking Defense, Hacking Attack

After some thought, I think I'd want to use 3 stress tracks:
Physical: just as in DFRPG, Endurance determines the length.
Composure: Without psychic powers and wizards, I don't feel the need to have a separate mental track.  I'm toying with the idea of a Resolve skill to handle this stress track, since I don't want Discipline and Conviction, and I think Presence might work better for my next idea:
Reputation: Reputation is an odd duck.  Whereas Composure damage affects you regardless of whether you're in a cover identity or just down at the mall, damage to Reputation affects your ability to get jobs.  It's how professional the world of fixers and clients thinks you are.  A Reputation consequence might be "Botched the Parsons Job", and a Compel on that might be only getting paid half what you're worth, or maybe the client tries to backstab you because you "Blew Your Cover".  I'm not sure what skill should determine this track, but maybe Presence?

Offline noclue

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Re: Hacking DFRPG: The Cyberpunk Heist
« Reply #2 on: September 11, 2011, 05:32:03 PM »
Looks like you have things pretty well in hand. I'm interested to hear how it plays.

Offline admiralducksauce

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Re: Hacking DFRPG: The Cyberpunk Heist
« Reply #3 on: September 14, 2011, 04:13:30 AM »
The Mastermind
The Mastemind’s role is to act as a Declaration and Maneuver machine.  They act, from a certain POV, as a direct adversary to the GM’s plotting.  The Mastermind wants the plan to go smoothly, they want to have an answer for each monkey wrench.  Their reputation and the reputations of their team are on the line, after all.  Skills that allow a broad range of knowledge or that are focused on making Declarations help a Mastermind, but in the end, the Mastermind will probably have a secondary role to play (Ford in Leverage often acts as a secondary Grifter).

Empathy: Reading people is perhaps the Mastermind’s primary purpose.  People are chaotic, but a good Mastermind can predict that chaos and stay one step ahead.
Scholarship: Scholarship includes a broad range of knowledge ripe for Declarations.
Alertness: The Mastermind can’t plan for things he doesn’t notice.
Investigation: The flipside to Alertness; it’s easier to plan for things when you spot them before they blow up in your face.
Burglary: The overall Burglary skill is not as important as it is for the Thief, but the Casing trapping is valuable.  A Stunt that moved Casing to another skill would be perfect for a Mastermind.
Contacts: Part of smoothing over a rough heist is knowing the right people, whether it’s a friendly security guard working the night shift at your target or a trustworthy fixer.

Offline admiralducksauce

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Re: Hacking DFRPG: The Cyberpunk Heist
« Reply #4 on: September 14, 2011, 04:14:53 AM »
Augmentations
An rpg.net poster commented that this may end up looking more like Diaspora than Dresden.  Could be.  But it’s too easy for me to look at nearly any typical cyberware-based ability and find a pretty easy analogue in Dresden powers (assuming they’re not simpler to handle as stunts or Aspects).  Let’s take the augs in Deus Ex: Human Revolution:

Social Enhancer: The pheremones sound an awful lot like Incite Emotion to me.
Radar: Supernatural Sense, if that.  This might even be considered just a “player aid” and discounted entirely, like Noise Feedback and Cones of Vision.
Mark & Track: Another Supernatural Sense.
Capture and Domination:  I would simply call these skill checks, although a cyberware-based Stunt allowing a skill swap to hack might make sense.  Use Guile to “persuade” the turrets and so on.
Typhoon Explosive System:  OK, this one IS a little tricky, but the result is a zone-effect explosion that doesn’t harm the user.  It’s a lot like a single rote spell.  In any case, the effects can certainly be modeled.  The actual stats can wait.
Arm Augmentations:  All these are basically Strength powers or combat Stunts.
Eye Augmentations:  Supernatural Senses.  The “Broad Sense” upgrades work well to simulate a suite of enhanced senses.

All in all, simply using the existing Powers as they are can cover a great deal of your typical cybernetic augmentations.  And for anything else, hell, there's the Custom Powers Thread.  I can make up a points cost if something's truly off the wall.
« Last Edit: September 14, 2011, 04:21:54 AM by admiralducksauce »

Offline admiralducksauce

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Re: Hacking DFRPG: The Cyberpunk Heist
« Reply #5 on: September 14, 2011, 04:16:38 AM »
Blackhattery
I’m torn when it comes to hacking.  My thoughts lean in two directions - one way is to use a Diaspora-style minigame, while the other idea is to compare hacking to DFRPG thaumaturgy.

The Neuromancer
The hacking-as-ritual route seems like it would be easier.  GM chooses a difficulty to do a thing, and the hacker makes declarations, gets help from his team through maneuvers, and even sustains consequences if need be, then rolls against the difficulty.

Let’s say the Hacker has to get fake identities for the Grifter onto a corporate office’s servers so the Grifter can walk through the automated security checkpoint.  The difficulty of 12* is higher than the Hacker wants to attempt without gathering some help first.

The Thief is in the building, and through a series of Stealth and Burglary rolls finds a logged-in workstation.  She plugs the Hacker into the corporation’s network remotely, Maneuvering the “Remote Access” aspect for the Hacker.

Next, the Grifter actually lets herself run afoul of the checkpoint.  When the guards come out and ask to see her ID, she hems and haws, convincing them that she knew she had her badge on her not 10 minutes ago!  Where could it be!  A successful Guile Maneuver places “Distracted Guards” on the scene.

The Hacker considers his choices.  Even with the 2 free invocations, he doesn’t like his chances, even after setting aside some FATE Points to invoke his own Aspects.  He takes a Mild Composure consequence, “Sweating Bullets”, and despite being flustered at the surprisingly secure corporate systems, trades in that consequence for a +2 to his roll on top of all the other help he’s garnered.  His roll succeeds and the Grifter’s false credentials pop up on the guards’ checkpoint terminal just in time.

*I’m picking something high just for the example, I don’t know how to gauge this yet.  I’ll admit that’s a shortcoming of this approach.

Shall We Play a Game?
My other idea is the “minigame” approach; to run hacking like combat.  You’d have a zone map of the network - maybe this map would persist during the heist and represent the target network, with zones like “Security Cameras” and “MacGuffin Files” and “Predator Drone”.  The hacker would move to and fro, engaging these targets in exchanges like combat, applying consequences, maneuvers, and Taking them Out as normal.

Or maybe the map would represent states; “Secure”, “Detected”, “Access”, “Deleted”, and so on.  The various target systems would be pieces on the map and the encounter would play out closer to Diaspora’s social combat, with the hacker trying to move pieces to certain states and avoid being moved to the “Detected” zone.

And just like physical combat, where you wouldn’t necessarily lay out a zone map just so the Hitter can take down a lone guard, you needn’t bring out the map just to hack a camera so the Thief can get by.

My original quibble with this method was that the rest of the team doesn’t play much of a role, but I realized they can still create helpful Aspects in the same way as the Neuromancer approach.

Offline Pbartender

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Re: Hacking DFRPG: The Cyberpunk Heist
« Reply #6 on: September 14, 2011, 02:40:59 PM »
Shall We Play a Game?
My other idea is the “minigame” approach; to run hacking like combat.  You’d have a zone map of the network - maybe this map would persist during the heist and represent the target network, with zones like “Security Cameras” and “MacGuffin Files” and “Predator Drone”.  The hacker would move to and fro, engaging these targets in exchanges like combat, applying consequences, maneuvers, and Taking them Out as normal.

Or maybe the map would represent states; “Secure”, “Detected”, “Access”, “Deleted”, and so on.  The various target systems would be pieces on the map and the encounter would play out closer to Diaspora’s social combat, with the hacker trying to move pieces to certain states and avoid being moved to the “Detected” zone.

And just like physical combat, where you wouldn’t necessarily lay out a zone map just so the Hitter can take down a lone guard, you needn’t bring out the map just to hack a camera so the Thief can get by.

My original quibble with this method was that the rest of the team doesn’t play much of a role, but I realized they can still create helpful Aspects in the same way as the Neuromancer approach.

Or, for really involved hacks...

Greetings, Programs! All players enter the Network, and temporarily play as anthropomorphic programs, with equivalent skills and abilities as their usual characters, set loose to do a job by the Hacker.  The environment they're working in reflects the Network that they're infiltrating, and any NPCs they represent the other programs they might run into.

Offline admiralducksauce

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Re: Hacking DFRPG: The Cyberpunk Heist
« Reply #7 on: September 14, 2011, 02:58:15 PM »
Or, for really involved hacks...

Greetings, Programs! All players enter the Network, and temporarily play as anthropomorphic programs, with equivalent skills and abilities as their usual characters, set loose to do a job by the Hacker.  The environment they're working in reflects the Network that they're infiltrating, and any NPCs they represent the other programs they might run into.

I think for a setting making a higher-level tech assumption, like one where everyone has at least some presence on the net/grid/shape/web/matrix or indeed exists naturally in an infomorphic state, that this can be a neat change of pace.  Depending on your tech assumptions, the PCs could be risking more (their infomorphic selves are their True selves, their memories and knowledge and skills) or less (they're still "meat enough" to where the net can't truly damage you).

Offline Pbartender

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Re: Hacking DFRPG: The Cyberpunk Heist
« Reply #8 on: September 14, 2011, 04:56:13 PM »
I think for a setting making a higher-level tech assumption, like one where everyone has at least some presence on the net/grid/shape/web/matrix or indeed exists naturally in an infomorphic state, that this can be a neat change of pace.  Depending on your tech assumptions, the PCs could be risking more (their infomorphic selves are their True selves, their memories and knowledge and skills) or less (they're still "meat enough" to where the net can't truly damage you).

Oh, I wasn't even suggesting that the characters themselves are being transported into the net, but that whoever is the Hacker is activating a suite of programs that act as characters.  Think more along the lines of the beginning of the movie, when Flynn sends Clu in to steal some files...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQwKV7lCzEI

FLYNN: Okay, Clu, tonight we check everything in the right-hand column...  Come on, come on...  Where are you?  Clu.
CLU: Yes, sir.
FLYYN: Clu, we don't have much time to find that file. This is top priority.
CLU: Yes, sir. I know, sir,
FLYNN: This just isn't correcting my bank statement or phone bill problem, okay - this is a must.
CLU: I understand, sir.
FLYNN: I wrote you.
CLU: Yes, sir.
FLYNN: I taught you everything I know about this system.
CLU: Thank you, sir, but I'm not sure...
FLYNN: No buts, Clu, that's for users.  Now, you're the best program that's ever been written.  You're dogged and relentless, remember?
CLU: Let me at 'em!
FLYNN: That's the spirit.  Now, keep that tank rolling, and I'll try to cover you from this end...  Go.

Offline admiralducksauce

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Re: Hacking DFRPG: The Cyberpunk Heist
« Reply #9 on: September 14, 2011, 05:12:19 PM »
Oh, I got it.  Yes, that makes more sense given your example (and your clever subtitle).