Shadowrun 20th Anniversary's cover.

After setting up our parameters in the previous post, we start the run here.

I actually ran this one a couple of times, because it took me a bit to fully internalize the rules. My main mistake was assuming I was familiar with them already and only reading them superficially to “refresh my memory”. This made me get some crucial basic facts wrong, causing my first run to be really fast but incorrect.

So I made an additional run where I tracked the die rolls accurately and got detected in one of the hacks. Then I read the rules outside of the Matrix chapter more closely and made another one where I spent Edge more wisely and accomplished all goals without being detected. I’m referring to these as the loud and silent runs. They are recorded below as a single account with notes on how they diverge.

Diff-merging Timelines

Our hacker enters the building with is team. They get past the reception as usual, receiving temporary badges. Once inside, he feels a “sudden” need to go to the bathroom, and locks himself inside a stall. He spends a couple of turns scanning for the badge’s wireless signal, and finds it.

He then tries to hack into the badge, still using AR because it’s a fragging’ badge. He succeeds quickly. As expected the badge can’t do a lot, but it knows how to talk to the security server and now so does the hacker.

Our hacker then switches to VR and goes hot, after bracing himself so he doesn’t fall down in the stall. He tries to get himself security-level access because he knows from examining the badge that user-level accounts do nothing in this server.

This is where our timelines diverge. In the loud run, he gets in but also gets detected. The server issues a restricted alert against his persona, triggers the Blackout ice, and pings the guards. Restricted alert means the server’s Firewall increases by +4 against the hacker.

The hacker and the IC go into cybercombat, with the hacker winning initiative. Cybercombat here resembles the SR1 version a bit, though the exact things you roll are different. With the expenditure of a couple points of Edge, our hacker manages to destroy the ice at the start of the second combat turn, without suffering any trauma to his brain meats. Still, in this timeline the guards are suspicious of the team.

In the silent run, luckier rolls let the hacker in without being detected.

In both, the hacker manages to disable the camera and alarm, letting the team move into the records room. While they perform a physical search for hard copies, our hacker jacks into the secret isolated server and goes into hot sim VR again. He manages to get in undetected, though in the silent run he has to spend the Edge he didn’t spend in combat to do so.

I rule that finding the files requires no tests, as this is only a single node and the existing data search rules are for searching the Matrix.

Still in the records room, our hacker decides to be daring and hack the office network in search of those drainable accounts. This network has a wireless signal covering the whole office and is quite visible, so he gets right to it.

At first, our decker easily hacks himself a user account. From there he runs a data search on the network’s user directory to find the one who has access to the bank accounts, and then attempts to gain access to it. I give this a low Threshold because it’s a small intranet.

Finding the accountant’s profile, the hacker attempts to hack into it. That’s like starting from scratch, this time going for a security account. Again the hacker manages to get in undetected, and again in the silent run he needs to spend Edge to do this.

Draining the account requires no additional rolls. And since our hacker retained his account at the security server, unlocking the back door requires no rolls either. Of course, in the loud timeline there’s a very high chance that they’re doing this during a firefight, as the guards are extra-suspicious and would have known to check the records room…

The loud run that had cybercombat and an alert took 31 minutes. The silent one took 17.

Run Analysis and Impressions

This system is my personal favorite so far, and I had to actively keep myself from adding little cool bits that kept appearing in my imagination, because I’d otherwise would have found myself running an entire solo adventure, controlling the whole team and imagining dialogue in my head.

Having “my” character be present with the group certainly helped stir the imagination, because he wasn’t sitting pretty at home. I had to think about how he navigated the physical site with the rest of the group, and from where he’d jack into VR to avoid suspicion, and so on.

I do love that the system was very fast compared to the other ones so far, but I wonder how much of that is down to the design of the target nodes. I’d love to hear about how people design their own adventures.

We can see how Shadowrun’s system still favors silent runs here. Cybercombat against even a single instance of ICE takes a while to resolve, and the more of it there is the longer the run will take. Careless hackers could easily find themselves having to deal with multiple ICE cubes at once, perhaps even in different hosts, and that will drastically lower their chances of success. More advanced rules let hackers run their own agent programs, which helps fighting the icy hordes but makes things take more real time to solve.

That said, let’s see how our sample runs here fit with the physical team’s.

If we again assume the physical part of the run takes 50 minutes for a perfectly stealthy team and 90 minutes with a firefight on the way out, then it’s also possible to correlate our diverging runs to each of these scenarios. The perfectly sneaky run would mean a perfectly sneaky hack. The loud run would almost certainly be caused by that alert we got, unless our talker was amazing at their job.

So, in the more common silent/silent and loud/loud scenarios, our hacker took up around 25% of the total session time, which is pretty close to ideal in a four-player party. In an anomalous loud hack/silent run scenario, they take up a little under half the run time. And in a silent hack/loud run situation, they take around 15% of the time hacking the objectives and can spend the rest of their spotlight time helping out in physical combat.