The spirit of this game is to always say yes, but I find that I have a lot of trouble with this when it come to one of my players.

He plays a slicer. Worse, he plays an over optimized slicer with 5 Intellect and 4 Computers plus Slicer talents to minimize difficulties and remove setback dice. And he insists that the whole galaxy should be set up like Watch_Dogs. He wants to slice enemy ships and vent their oxygen to space in a single round. I've explained to him that Star Wars technology is usually analog and that systems are disconnected from each other because it's all meant to last for centuries and be easily repaired because the galaxy is so huge and dirty and dangerous, but he isn't getting it. I also don't want to crush his character or turn this into a battle of wills.

How have some other GMs handled this issue?

Just tell him ''you can't slice x system from long distance, you'd need direct access to the main computer'' or ''you can't do that''

The best technician in the world can't make a calculator make him a cup of coffee.

You have to just lay down the law at times and say 'Me GM, you not.', besides, no one would be dumb enough to build airlocks that could have that done to them. There would be all manner of non networked hard fail safes in place. Plus all sort of back up systems to prevent ship wide depressurization. That would be a Formidable task likely to be countered quickly.

Alternatively, make him make multiple checks to do a single task of that magnitude. And upgrade plenty of those difficulty die. And failure at any point leads to a lockout.

Yeah. "To do that, you'll have to get on board the ship first." Simple enough. And, depending on ship size, there would be multiple systems he'd have to get through to vent atmosphere for the entire ship. Not to mention what precautions he'd have to take not to run out of air himself

Well i can see a slicer destabelizing some ship subsystems like radars sensors, guns, engines for a limited amount of time, before the backup routines jump in or the enemy crew is doing their part to suvive the battle. These guys will probably take care of hijacked or disabled systems by doing manual reboots or redirecting subroutines to make further attack on the device harder.
Any ship subsystem that is necessary to keep the ship in in one piece, flyable and the passengers alive should not be allowed to be remotely sliced, if at all.

If the player doesn t gets it maybe explain that as soon as they would encounter an imperial ship they would be hard troubled. You would have to expect dedicated astromechs with slicing abilitys outmatching any human by far.

In general: you are the gm. It is your world. Just explain to player that he just can ' t mix different worlds like watch dogs and starwars together. There isn't any reference for the described abilitys in the movies. Maybe explain it by todays level of technology: even the best hacker on board of a missile cruiser or submarine will be unable to access or even shut down the enemys systems. He may disrupt their sensors, comms, targeting but everything else would require direct access or a backdoor to the systems. Installing such backdoor requires huge amounts of ressources and large operations that took place long before the actual battle.
Now if you extrapolate this onto starwars: of course technology has advanced and maybe much more devices are connected and even some ships have holonet access. But at the same time you would expect sequrity measures to be also improved. This is star wars, not the matrix.


By the way if he enjoys this so much there is an awesome roleplaying rule set for matrix out there. Its called " there is no spoon" really great for a few sessions. Maybe this is a solution if the player doesn' t get it.

Rather than just thwarting him, you might always turn the tables and have an NPC slicer infect your PC's deck with whatever passes for Zeus or Melissa viruses in the Outer Rim.

Have 'Neo' spend a few rounds fighting off a nasty bit of code that's trying to wipe his ship's computer. A few formidable difficulties will slow him up a bit. Even use the opportunity to create his own personal slicer nemesis NPC who dogs the party at every turn. Your best form of defence after all...

Well I've read Switchblade Honey by Warren Ellis where that particular idea originates from and his slicer had to be off his head on drugs to pull that stunt off!

But he does mention watchdogs so I'd reply that yes you could try but unless you had someone get aboard that ship and plant devices so you could pull that stunt off the best you can do is set off their internal safeties and effectively lock the ship down.

Note he can still try but unless he's also a star ship mechanic/engineer he won't have a clue about how to successfully pull that off.

Now had he used the example of using a version of Orac in the hands of his Avon-like character aided by a Villa type character whose genuinely scared sh**less because he's been forced to sneak aboard that ship and introduce devices allowing the internal safeties to be bypassed then I'd probably give him a few boost dice for using the right examples but Watchdog?

Nope he's strictly land bound and dependent on the fact his enemies aren't as tech savvy as he is and being Star Wars and he's trying that Warren Ellis conceived stunt well they aren't dumb and last I heard Storm troopers body armour should have life support in case someone exposes them to the vacuum of space...

Table 7-7, Additional Starship and Vehicle Actions, has a listing for slicing into an enemy's systems.

It references using "powerful shipboard computers" to "disrupt the systems" of an enemy vehicle. Successes reduce a target's Defense in one zone, Advantage can inflict Strain, and Triumph can disable a weapon system for 1 round.

So there is clear precedent for a Slicer to weaken and harm the enemy, but it would likely take an awful lot of Success and Triumph to do something as devastating as opening an airlock (and as others have said, that really wouldn't make much sense in-universe).

Now the big question, in my mind, is this: Does the party in your game have access to "powerful shipboard computers" and other advanced gear for slicing at range, or are they just using hand-held slicing tools that often need a direct connection?

I'm reasonably sure the Imperials are wise to the ol 'slice the airlock control' move.

I have a special laugh for players who try to pull this gimmick of deciding how my game world works. It sort of starts with a my eyebrows raising slightly and my lips drawing back a little like a chimpanzee about to go for your throat. This is accompanied by a kind of slight snort, which builds intoa sort of throaty cackle. If they're really trying it on it might turn into full-on derisory bellows.

Occasionally I even point at the player whilst I'm doing this.

Copied from the other thread on main page, but it applies.

Good to keep in mind in our Hubris about ourselves we have been using networked computers on a personal/commercial scale for 25ish years? Computers period for maybe 70 years at best? The Republic is at least a thousand years old and has used them that long, and really they've been in use much longer I am sure. So a lot of this slicing mind set is based on our perspective of computers and networks, which is really in its infancy.

Republic was about 25,000 years old by the time the clone wars arrived. So at least up to Windows 9 by then.

All excellent suggestions. Thanks everyone for taking the time to reply. A lot of these things hadn't even occurred to me.

More food for thought. Check out Clone Wars Season 5 Episode 7 ("A Test of Strength") for an example of a ship venting its atmosphere. It was done not by rupturing the airlock, not by some innate "atmo-venting" fire-fighting function as you might find in a different sci-fi universe. I would venture to say that Star Wars ships do not appear to have that kind of functionality, rather fighting fires with more conventional means like automatic or hand-held extinguishers.

That is why you'd have such a jury-rigged (and difficulty, and complicated) situation. Atmosphere-venting capabilities would be a pretty specialized system on a Star Wars ship.

I agree with those who say just be firm as the GM and say "Star Wars technology doesn't work like that."

The nearest I've come was a player who is searching the Galaxy for members of a specific family. They'll arrive on a planet and say "I'd like to search the computers to see if anyone of this name lives around here."

I figured, on some planets, like Ord Mantell, there probably were some kind of central computers you could hack into that might give you information on residents.

On Tatooine, probably not.

The Order 66 podcast handled a question once about a Slicer who wanted to slice the systems of an Imperial Star Destroyer and take it over remotely.

The main advice was "Forget it!", but they did elaborate and offer the thought that, if this was really your player's life's ambition, you could make it the basis of an adventure or even a series of adventures, or even a campaign.

It could require a lot of preparation to get everything in place to accomplish such a massive hack. You'd have to infect a lot of different systems with programs that could help you, you'd need to get people in place in specific locations, perhaps droids going undercover, etc etc.

I'd tell your player the same kind of thing. "No, you can't vent the air of that whole ship remotely with one Computers check. If you want to do that kind of thing, you'd need to make preparations and accomplish a series of goals successfully."

You could even do it as a 'skill challenge'.

Have the player make a series of increasingly difficult Computers checks. Describe the results of each one. If they roll 3 success before they roll 3 failures, they succeed at something audacious. Maybe not totally venting the air, but maybe shutting down the engines or something incredible.

We don't want our players to be invincible superpowered beings, but we DO want them to feel like they're an awesome hero of the game!

If slicing was as powerful as some players seem to think it is, then if R2D2 were a PC, he'd have vented the atmosphere from multiple sections of the Death Star and had it dump fuel, stranding it in space...

Just have a NPC slicer hack into the PCs ship and vent him into space and then see if he thinks that is fair. I believe that whatever a PC can do, then a NPC can do it too.

Also ask your player how he is going to hack into an enemy ship, they are not set up to receive signals like that from each other. The subspace radios may be able to talk to each other, but the radios cannot "talk" to any other part of the ship.

Good luck with your player. If he keeps being that insistent on how he should be able to do stuff like in Watchdogs, then hand him the game controller and tell him to have fun.