>>96245190
so i checked out a bunch of rulesets, the lightweight ones (hard wired island, the sprawl) don't have enough chrome, there's nothing to chew on. the heavy ones (CPR, cities without number) end up turning it into an abstract boardgame, and in a bad way. it's kinda like with combat rules - at the core it's people trading numbers until one drops, but what makes a fight cool isn't in the rules, but in the shit you pull off because of context: ambushes, improvised weapons, environment stuff. cyberspace should be the same way, should let players get creative.

ideal would be something like CPR (with all the apps, gear, lingo) boiled down to just 3 stages: 1) recon (figuring out what the system is, what protections it has) 2) access (remote exploits, social engineering, physical infiltration) 3) exploration/exploitation (actually doing something, exfil, chaos, whatever). each part should be a plot point, not a mini game. all the prep that goes into it - the gear, the scripts, the social angles, those should matter. with separate "quickhacks" (like cy_borg has) for handling IoT junk on the move: locks, cams, implants, etc.

the real issue - most players and gms just don't know how to run or play out a hack. everyone's seen a vault heist in a movie, but almost nobody has an intuitive model of what a hack looks like step by step, what meaningful decisions they can make. so the whole thing gets either dumbed down or abstracted. what's missing is the scaffolding, enough shape so people can improvise inside it.