Hi there.

I'm a GM for a group of 4 players. I want to get individual characters even more involved with the game and one idea I had for our resident slicer would be his ability to hack into things.

Now yes, I know he could just do a dice roll to see if he succeeds or fails, but I want to actually put more pressure on him in the process and make it a little more interactive so my question is..

...Is there some sort of iPad hacking game, or lock picking game that exists where you can increase or decrease the difficulty of the challenge.

I'm thinking something like the lock picking in Skyrim or Elderscolls Online or even KOTOR style.

I know it's a bit of a far out question, just curious if anything may spring up.

Check out the old WEG 1st edition adventure modules. They almost all had a little puzzle or minigame, usually made of paper cut outs, that the players had to solve.

For slicing a little tweaking and window dressing of "Survivor" from Return to Zork seems like it might work.

You could make him do like, 5 Sudokus in 2 minutes (idk how hard that is). Personally I wouldn't enjoy your implementation of any sort of hacking game, but then again, I would appreciate actually playing Sabaac, so to each his own.

I don't know about a separate game, but you could have the slicer make 1 roll to get into the system, another roll or two to avoid tripping security traps and a roll to accomplish the goal (finding info, disabling cameras or whatever). That way it is more interesting than a single die roll which seems to be your goal. Also, come up with interesting things for rolling advantage/threat. For example, if the slicer failed the "avoid tripping security" roll, but had some advantage he would notice that he triggered security and could have a chance to try to shut it down. Whatever you do I would not make it overly long because while the slicing is going on the other players are just hanging out with nothing much to do.

You could make him do like, 5 Sudokus in 2 minutes (idk how hard that is). Personally I wouldn't enjoy your implementation of any sort of hacking game, but then again, I would appreciate actually playing Sabaac, so to each his own.

Crisis on Cloud City actually came with a deck...

A concept that occurs to me is something like hacking a computer system in Shadowrun 2nd edition; the GM sets up a little flowchart in advance (each point in the chart represents a node of access). Big computer systems could bog the game way down (it would turn into "sit back and wait for the hacker to do his thing" for the rest of the party), but a smaller system map AND having something else going on to distract the rest of the party could make for a fun encounter.

Hi there.

I'm a GM for a group of 4 players. I want to get individual characters even more involved with the game and one idea I had for our resident slicer would be his ability to hack into things.

Now yes, I know he could just do a dice roll to see if he succeeds or fails, but I want to actually put more pressure on him in the process and make it a little more interactive so my question is..

...Is there some sort of iPad hacking game, or lock picking game that exists where you can increase or decrease the difficulty of the challenge.

I'm thinking something like the lock picking in Skyrim or Elderscolls Online or even KOTOR style.

I know it's a bit of a far out question, just curious if anything may spring up.

I will caution you that this isn't necessarily a good idea. Make sure your players are ok with this. Why? It's simple really, sometimes players don't want to be hampered by something that they might not be very good at in the real world. For example I'm not some super smooth womanizing person in real life, but one of my characters I played in an older D&D game was. I'd really hate it if my GM made me have to come up with some sort of line every time I wanted to charm someone.

Thanks guys for some suggestions and feedback.

I'm just trying to find little interactive elements I may be able to apply to the game other than pure dice rolls, so for example if they receive a data pad message, I'll hand one of the guys a mock up on my ipad of a datapad skin with the message written on it, same with maps that are accessed via a successful hack etc. and then create a dropbox with files for all to access later.

Touching on Daniel's feedback, I actually love it when my mates get involve, I want them to chat to me as if they were that character, even if it's the stupidiest pick up line you may have ever heard, but you get a successful roll on it, it still passes no matter how corney it may be. I have a love of improv so I try to adapt my NPCs to any situation that may occure, voices/accents

In saying that, my mate who is playing a slicer is a programer irl and I did find this little treat that may do the job - http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/134007

Give him a sudoku to do?

The KOTOR game has a few puzzles like that: find the missing prime number, determine the exponent pattern, etc. for some reason my favourite is this one (or something like it):

1 > 11 > 21 > 1211 > 3112 > 132112 > 311322 ... Find the next two numbers

(Answer: 232122 > 421311)

Thanks guys for some suggestions and feedback.

I'm just trying to find little interactive elements I may be able to apply to the game other than pure dice rolls, so for example if they receive a data pad message, I'll hand one of the guys a mock up on my ipad of a datapad skin with the message written on it, same with maps that are accessed via a successful hack etc. and then create a dropbox with files for all to access later.

Touching on Daniel's feedback, I actually love it when my mates get involve, I want them to chat to me as if they were that character, even if it's the stupidiest pick up line you may have ever heard, but you get a successful roll on it, it still passes no matter how corney it may be. I have a love of improv so I try to adapt my NPCs to any situation that may occure, voices/accents

In saying that, my mate who is playing a slicer is a programer irl and I did find this little treat that may do the job - http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/134007

Thats cute.

Here's a link explaining Survivor

Short end, Wizard A moves like a Knight in Chess, the other hops around where ever he wants. Each time time Wizard A moves, the space he occupied becomes a pit. Wizard A wins by reducing the board to only 2 squares (the one he occupies and the one Wizard B occupies) Wizard B wins by blocking Wizard A's movement until Wizard A has nowhere to move (but with there still being more then two available squares on the board).

So you could translate this to hacking by doing something like:

*roll roll*

"Ok, success... you're into the system, but this guy is going old school and using a security script to lock down data nodes, you'll need to stop that if you want the time you need to download the Death Star plans."

This board represents available nodes. This Piece (Wizard A) represents the Admin defending the system's Intrusion Prevention script, locking down nodes as it goes. This Piece (Wizard B) represents your "Spike" program, that temporarily locks him out of nodes. If he locks down all the nodes except the one your Spike is in and the one his IPscript is in, he'll be able to lock you out, and maybe even back-slice your system. But if you can use your Spike to box him in and leave several nodes open, you can download the plans off those remaining nodes without giving away your digital position.

As someone who's beaten RtZ, the Wizard A side of things is the hardest, while Wizard B is fairly easy. So giving him that side of the board will provide that all important appearance of balance, even though the odds are heavily stacked in the players favor.