Hi,

Can someone explain how credit sticks work in the SW universe?

I imagine there are two types of them: disposable and personal.

Personal work more or less like our debit cards, they're linked with a bank account and might be useless on the worlds without a holonet access.

Disposable ones are used for carrying around and have fixed amount on them - they're futuristic banknotes and can be coded, but usually aren't.

Now, the books and wookiepedia say that it is very, very difficult, almost impossible to hack credsticks - so what difficulty would you give it? 5 red dice? 5 purple? My group's slicer (currently - 6 int, 5 computers) would really like to know.

What are your ideas about that?

Difficulty 5 sounds right (you don't want to make your entire game about credit fraud, right?).

Upgrade difficulty once for personal (non-disposable) accounts.

Upgrade twice for "gold" accounts.

Upgrade three times for "platinum" accounts.

Despair indicates back tracing (your man bought Defensive Slicing, right?), difficulty / operator skill based on what kind of account you're cracking (you can bet the bank will put their best people on the case when you slice a Moff's platinum account). Give 'em Boosts if the Slicer generated Threat.

If they generate Threat at all, they may leave evidence that can be discovered after the fact.

Discovery leads to new Obligations if a rapid response unit doesn't reach them in time for an arrest.

When players in a past d20 game started attempting credchip hacking, I had some typical failures (translated to disadvantages, threats, general failures, in EotE):

Credchip broken or account blocked. It becomes worthless.

Authorities alerted to location of your hacking terminal.

Using a personal terminal to hack?Trying to hack your own credchip to add more funds? Authorities alerted and now know your name (Obligation).

The owner of the stolen credchip later gets alerted to who was attempting the hack. He himself is a person to be feared (crimelord, mercenary leader, Imperial agent, etc).

Re-reading the OP, I guess I really didn't answer your question.

Yes I would agree there are permanent (debit card) and non-permanent versions (cash). Call them Credsticks and Credchips perhaps. Having both explains what we see in the movies. It isn't just debit cards, but cold hard cash being seen (Han flipping a coin, Han receiving large crates of creds).

Credsticks are the debit cards that would be the common things hacked.

Credchips would be just cash. I suppose if you wish to put some more tech in them they could have electronic serial numbers and possibly even GPS for tracking? Then, a hacker might unlock credchips in order to make them safer to use. Authorities couldn't find out their origin with electronic serial numbers removed.

Wookiepedia probably has something more in depth to say.

Excellent suggestions, especially Col.Orange - thanks!

Difficulty 5 sounds right (you don't want to make your entire game about credit fraud, right?).

The problem is difficulty 5 is not particularly difficult. Not only can it be done with a single die given that the purples can all roll blanks, but given enough rolls, everyone can do it, and at 1 roll/minute, do it pretty quickly. So I don't think it is a task that is appropriate for a single roll.

Maybe passing off a chip as if it had a couple extra credits on it could be done like that and maybe done in a variety of ways with social engineering allowing diplo or what have you, but for anything else I would treat it similar to counterfeiting or hacking a bank today. It would require days, weeks or months of effort and probably be an entire adventure in itself. Otherwise every two-bit slicer in existence with a half-decent deck would have all the credits in the galaxy.

I like Col. Orange and Sturn's comments, I'd also suggest that the dice be mostly red, or the difficulty start out at least RRPPP. A single despair should ruin the credit stick, and that should be a pretty likely outcome to tampering, no matter how good the players are.

I thought that sort of thing was unhackable?

Is anything really unhackable?

I would also add in setback dice to account for remote access, the holonet security surrounding the financial databases, and for trying to forge financial serial numbers on the sticks. All of these feel like situations that make the task difficult, but able to be circumvented by Talents.

Also, I'd say the amount plays a factor in the difficulty. Changing a digit is one thing and could get missed, moving a decimal point a couple spaces left or right is another matter entirely,

I thought that sort of thing was unhackable?

Yes, but...

Difficulty 5 sounds right (you don't want to make your entire game about credit fraud, right?).

The problem is difficulty 5 is not particularly difficult. Not only can it be done with a single die given that the purples can all roll blanks, but given enough rolls, everyone can do it, and at 1 roll/minute, do it pretty quickly. So I don't think it is a task that is appropriate for a single roll.

Difficulty 5 should be VERY difficult. If it's not, something's out of place. My recommendation: don't allow players to attempt a non-combat test that they have already failed unless circumstances change.

Will they get frustrated the first couple times you do this? Yes, Probably. Mine did too. But it's also improved our role-play, and decreased roll-play.

Think of it this way; the dice don't have to just determine outcomes, they can retroactively determine circumstances that the players were unaware of (after all, who's to know?). If they fail, maybe the relevant account has been emptied, or even locked down. Or they simply are unable to figure out the code and give up in frustration. They can't try again (their character is convinced of the futility) unless they get some other clue. Maybe they obtain the owner's datapad, and he doesn't bother to lock his profile down, so they get some possible passwords.

I apply this idea to basically any noncombat check. If you succeed, congrats! But if you fail, your character doesn't know that the dice were unkind, just that they failed, and there is rarely any evidence that a second attempt would do any better.

I thought that sort of thing was unhackable?

If you believe that, then I'm your long-lost aunt who happens to be a Hapan noblewoman and needs your help to fund the recovery of incredibly valuable Jedi artifacts. Oh, and I've also got some Alderaanian real estate you may be interested in.

The EU [before Disney starts cuting down] supports credits being carried in a couple of ways.

1. The first and more common seems to be credit chips. These are like coins with particular values.

2. There are also the sticks that seem to work like debit cards.

I'd say that the sticks are hackable with some difficulty. The real credits, which are the real prefered credit on the Rim probably are not hackable. You might be able to counterfit some though...

I actually just finished reading Scoundrels, which deals with this at some length. That book mentions that hacking credits is doable, and the skill of the slicer relates to how much money you get out of the credits. They also say, though, that even the best slicers are only able to get a little less than 1% of the money on the chit. So it's doable, but only the chits with absurd amounts on them are really worth slicing (they say that they can get about 800,000 credits out of 163 million credits worth of chits without the proper owner).

I actually just finished reading Scoundrels, which deals with this at some length. That book mentions that hacking credits is doable, and the skill of the slicer relates to how much money you get out of the credits. They also say, though, that even the best slicers are only able to get a little less than 1% of the money on the chit. So it's doable, but only the chits with absurd amounts on them are really worth slicing (they say that they can get about 800,000 credits out of 163 million credits worth of chits without the proper owner).

I recall that in Scoundrels, works out to slightly under half a percent, 0.49%, or 0.5% for nice round numbers. Myself, I'd set the difficulty at formidable or impossible. A very accomplished slicer could do it regularly, but it's still very time consuming and risky without the right equipment to anonymize and prevent back tracing of the transaction, or the shell game of moving the money through various accounts to hide the trail before settling in a final account.

Successes might add 0.10% each after the first.

Advantages would decrease time needed to slice or lengthen the time before a tracer alerts local authorities to shens.

A Triumph would guarantee not being traced, perhaps triggering physical damage to the server after your transaction was complete.

1 Threat would reduce the take by half as you had to dump money in throw away accounts to get the tracer off your trail.

2+ Threat would leave behind hasty evidence of your slice that can be tied back to you given enough time, perhaps reusing an account you thought you hadn't used before. The more threat, the worse off you are.

Failures would loose all the cash, alert the authorities, and reduce local authority response time by half for each failure starting since login. (1hr -> 30min -> 15min -> 7min -> 3min)

Despair, just as you thought you were scott free, someone else piggybacking your signal swipes the cash out from under you and zaps your system, just as the local authorities knock down your door and an inspector cooly says "Fingers caught in the cookie jar? Take her!" hopefully there is a nearby window to jump out and a airspeeder awaiting below...

Boost dice for creative slicing and high quality tools.

Setback dice for things like weather conditions causing interference, sunspots, shoddy neighborhood holonet connections.

Challenge dice upgrades for slicing during combat or while rushed, substandard equipment, lack of prep time to create decoys on other systems or prepare suficcient amount of dummy accounts, etc.

Eh, maybe it's a cop out, but I treat them somewhat like modern-day gift cards. They have a set credit value imprinted upon creation from the bank, that value can be reduced, but never increased. And there's no sort of security measure put in place to prevent identity theft. They're also untraceable.

I'm going to rule that you can only slice a credstick/chip once, no matter if you fail or succeed.

Difficulty 5 should be VERY difficult. If it's not, something's out of place. My recommendation: don't allow players to attempt a non-combat test that they have already failed unless circumstances change.

3 yellow (3 int, 2 slicing, use destiny) is 2.5 successes on average with a 23% for a triumph. This is a stock character who just stepped off the production line and didn't even bother putting XP into a slicer tree!

5 purple is 2.5 failures on average.

Difficulty 5 is... around 50% for a n00b character. It is NOT difficult.

A slicer with 150 XP spent in the slicer tree and cybernetic INT bonus and 5 ranks in slicing will have 5 yellow and a green, almost always succeed, and usually have at least 1 triumph.

Practically, how are you going to hack one?

If it requires a direct interface, i.e. touching it, yes, I'd make it very hard.

I would not allow it remotely. I haven't seen anything showing that they operate wirelessly or with an RFID signal. I wouldn't incorporate technology like modern magnetic readers that can be used to steal credit card info from a few feet away. I would treat them more like a USB thumb drive that is plugged into the relevant computer and accessed when funds are exchanged.

It's almost certainly an easier undertaking to rob a bank than to remotely fudge with what is effectively a dollar in another format.

occam's razor

If you could do it, why doesn't everyone do it?

here are a few reasons:

1. Hard to do, only the best slicers in the Galaxy with top of the line equipment should be able to do it

2. Poor return on costs to do it.

3. Can be done, but difficult to not leave trace of tampering

4. Would you want the entire Empire, and Banking clan wanting to kill you and your associations?

5. Simple economics. SHort term gains at the cost of ruining the economy.

6. Easier things to counterfeit and make a profit on

you are much better off just trying to counterfeit a legitimate rare item and trying to find a buyer then bothering with credit chips

More complications.

Like Sturn and Skie have said, and as these things are supposedly tamperproof, any net Failures should wreck the chip.

Unless Threat are also generated, the bank doesn't know that the error was due to criminal activity - it could just be wear and tear, accidental damage, environmental problems.

I'd also say the attempt takes an hour. Maybe knock 10 minutes off of that per advantage.

I thought people may have been insisting on a few too many Challenge dice but - unless my maths is suspect (yeah, there's a decent likelihood of that) - even 5 red only gives a 35.28% chance of generating any Despair.

[100 * (1 - ((11/12)^5)]

Dbuntu: I like that Skie's temporary/disposable vs. personal account hardware have different, Star Wars universe names (chips and sticks, respectively) - thanks for finding that out for us.

I wouldn't let any of this be done without access to the credit chip or stick itself. The Star Wars universe doesn't do wireless.

(SIDE NOTE: Look at how powerful a tool this is we're using - more than a dozen players dissecting and solving a problem before it ever hits the table. Great stuff.)

Looking at Wookiepedia for names, it has:

Credit Chips (aka Credit Sticks): The debit cards of Star Wars. It notes the first appearance of such in a short story in Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina (1995). Wasn't the term being used long before then? Or am I thinking of just, "credits". from Episode IV?

Credcoins: Credits in the form of coins, hard currency. It notes their first appearance as Episode IV. Apparently this is what Han flipped through the air to the bartender.

Note: Qui-Gonn offers Watto, "20,000 Republic dataries". What the heck is a datary? Nothing on Wookiepedia. I guess we have to assume it's just the name given to coins minted by the Republic and it make things simple 1 Datary = 1 Credit. So then what are they called under the Empire?

If I was going to allow hacking a credit chit, I'd make it an adventure. I like the idea of hard currency. Han was loading quite a few crates in A New Hope.

This leads to hover-train robberies, bank frigate robberies, etc.

Now, if a credit was to be hacked here's how I would do it.

The chits themselves are high impossible tk hack. This is one of the reasons why the intergalactic banking clan on muun has been able to make one currency standard for the majority of the galaxy. If it was feasible everyone in the criminal side of the galaxy would be doing it. So, hacking is more akin to forging, really. The muuns (with imperial supervision) manufacture the chits. They have special computers that program the value of the chits. Acquiring blank chits is easy enough. The computer to program them? That where the adventure truly begins. The players would have to fly to muunilist, sneak down to the planet, infiltrate a banking clan installation, avoid all imperial entanglements and monitoring devices and the hardest part, sneak away with one of these programming computers. Now these computers are not terriblely large. In fact they can only work on one chit at a time. This may seem inefficient, but really is a secirity feature. Since most muuns are employed by the banking clan, most work at programming these chits. Once the party has acquired and escaped they also have to have access to the holonet. If a chit is not done properly, it will self destruct -frying the internal circutry.

This would make it a grande scheme.. the danger and the payoff are equally large.

I personally still make all my transactions in wupi wupi, especially for the consumption or raw amphibious snacks.

I think someone mentioned it elsewhere, but forging/hacking a credit chit would not hang on a single roll. It would need to be a complex string of tasks, all at daunting difficulty in order to pull it off.

That having been said, a Skulduggery proficiency of 2 with a stat of 3, has 1 green 2 yellow vs. RRPPP. Without boost or setback dice, the chance of success on a single roll is 31.9%. Over 2 rolls, the chance of continued success drops to 10%, and on 3 rolls it's now down to about 3%. This does not include Threat/Advantage/Despair/Triumph chances... but in terms of raw success/failure it's pretty slim, actually...

I think someone mentioned it elsewhere, but forging/hacking a credit chit would not hang on a single roll. It would need to be a complex string of tasks, all at daunting difficulty in order to pull it off.

That having been said, a Skulduggery proficiency of 2 with a stat of 3, has 1 green 2 yellow vs. RRPPP. Without boost or setback dice, the chance of success on a single roll is 31.9%. Over 2 rolls, the chance of continued success drops to 10%, and on 3 rolls it's now down to about 3%. This does not include Threat/Advantage/Despair/Triumph chances... but in terms of raw success/failure it's pretty slim, actually...

3% is still thousands of times more profitable than MMO gold farming. My character would totally set up jawa sweat shops for infinite credits.

Note: Qui-Gonn offers Watto, "20,000 Republic dataries". What the heck is a datary? Nothing on Wookiepedia. I guess we have to assume it's just the name given to coins minted by the Republic and it make things simple 1 Datary = 1 Credit. So then what are they called under the Empire?

From Wookieepedia:

The Galactic Credit Standard , simply called a credit or abbreviated to cred , colloquially referred to as Republic Dataries , and later known as the Imperial Credit , was the main currency in use in the galaxy since the time of the Galactic Republic.