Shadowrun 5th Edition's cover.

We set our parameters in the last post, so let’s do the actual run in this one.

Run Summary

Our decker enters with her team, and they get past the reception as usual. This time I decide to do things a little bit differently and go for spoofing peripheral devices over trying to control them from inside the host. This seems to be the correct way to do it in SR5, judging from the examples in the Matrix chapter. The Control Device action is only used for things that would require a conventional skill test if done in the physical world, like shooting a turret’s gun.

First, the camera. It’s visible both in the real and in the Matrix, since running silent would harm its functionality. Ms. Decker always prefers to use the “quiet” Hack on the Fly action, since that’s her specialty. The camera and other devices are tied to the office’s host, so they use the host’s ratings instead of their own to resist. But when Ms. Decker places a mark on a device, she automatically places a mark on the host as well.

She manages to place a mark on the camera, and therefore on the host. This means she can dispense with silent running from this point on, since the Patrol IC can’t tell the mark she has right now was illegally obtained and will no longer try to raise an alarm. She uses a Spoof action on the camera, disabling it. Our tally sits at 6. We do not want it to reach 40.

Ms. Decker knows there is an alarm, but it’s not immediately visible as an icon on the Matrix. Unlike the camera, the alarm is running silent. A Matrix Perception action reveals that there is indeed a hidden icon nearby. A couple more attempts at it reveal the alarm’s icon. None of these perception tests accrues Overwatch, since they’re not tied to the “illegal” attributes.

She tries to mark the alarm, but fails! I spend 1 Edge to roll an additional 2 dice (her Edge score) on this, and get 2 extra hits. From what I understand, a tie here isn’t a victory for either side, so ms. Decker still fails to mark the alarm but the system does not detect her. Whew! The next attempt succeeds, but both sides roll really well. The spoof attempt succeeds handily. Our tally sits at 17 after all of that.

Ms. Decker disconnects from the host at this point since she needs to move with the physical team. But since she does not reboot her deck, all of the marks she placed remain on the host. Her Overwatch Tally also stays at 17.

The team enters the records room and begins the physical search. Ms. Decker spots a physical jackpoint here and uses that. She’s inside the host again, and now she is able to see all of its remaining files and devices automatically since none of them are silent. This includes the evidence she’s after, which is only accessible from this jackpoint.

Downloading a file is automatic, but it requires a mark on it first. She manages to mark and download the evidence, and then decides to go for the money. I rule that this will require marking the account file and then editing it to transfer the money. The marking goes smoothly, the editing runs into a tied test first, succeeding on the second attempt. Fortunately only the marking accrued Overwatch, which at this point sits at 23.

Finally, still jacked into that physical access point, Ms. Decker attempts to mark and spoof the exit door to unlock it. The marking succeeds, and the spoofing gives me a bit of stress as again the first attempt ties and the second one succeeds. Good rolls all around here, so our final Overwatch tally is a dangerous 37.

Our hacker has time to safely jack out, and the team gets to walk away through the now-unlocked door. All mission goals have been accomplished. She waits until they’re out to reboot her deck, since that would erase all of her marks.

Total time: 31 minutes.

Analysis

31 minutes is something I consider fast, comparable to CP 2020 and CP RED. It’s also about as easy to slice up into manageable chunks as CP RED’s and SR 4’s runs were.

However this was a near-perfect run, with our decker remaining undetected throughout the whole thing despite a couple of close calls. If we had been detected at any point there would have been cybercombat and things would have taken longer.

Unlike most of the other games we’ve looked at so far, it’s impossible to simply kill all the ice, since each one a hacker destroys is just going to be relaunched at the start of the next turn. The occasional assurances by the book that you can rely on brute force alone to smash through a host ring a bit hollow, since that seems like it leads to combat sooner even with good rolls from the hacker.

Had she activated the host’s ice, Ms. Decker would need to spend actions to hide instead of just attacking. That Patrol IC would be trying to find her every turn and she’d take a universal -2 dice penalty for silent running. I could see this maybe doubling our run time, but I’m not going to count that as an official timing. It’s just a guesstimate.

Even with this near-perfect run, we ended up with a tally of 37. With even slightly better rolls from the host in a couple of places we’d have hit 40. This wouldn’t have meant instant death since we’re inside a host, but it still would have placed 3 marks on Ms. Decker at once, and let the host see her and start activating IC. She sure hopes the team doesn’t get into a firefight on the way out, because if she has to do anything else Matrix-related to help then she is definitely going to draw the ire of Overwatch.