7-113: Illuminator – Mallory’s Cabin

It’s an interesting question, how much abstraction or detail to apply or require in a situation like this, where Oliver knows a lot more about cracking TL9 Dominion computer systems than you or I.

My general approach is, you can always say, ‘Oliver tries to break into the computer using his computer skills’ and we leave the resolution up to the dice and situational modifiers and I may (‘he uses some of the tools in his backpack to bypass the fingerprint scanner’) or may not (‘he succeeds’) add some colourful narrative.  However, I think if you can supply more detail about obvious weaknesses, the task may be more likely to succeed.  eg:  ‘You mentioned a loom of wires running between the computers, is there a way Oliver can intercept data travelling across that?’; ‘As Oliver has physical access to the computer, can he put it into safe mode or something and bypass the security?’

My thinking is, the Dominion is an oppressive state and they take security seriously, if it was easy to hack into their computer systems people would do it all the time, and while Oliver is a lot more computer savvy than most people, busting into a computer system is intentionally a difficult thing to do.  Also, this is the Vizierate, so it’s more like breaking into a CIA agent’s laptop than helping your brother-in-law recover their windows password. So the highly abstracted approach can work but the player giving suggestions on specific ways to address the problem is an opportunity for the player to be creative and the GM to reward that creativity with a better success chance.  

Oliver notices that the wiring loom is a multi-purpose connector model.  It has several spare plugs for different connector types.  Oliver can plug his PDA or Laptop into one of those and if he succeeds on Computer Programming, may be able to patch himself into the system.

This is, of course, not without risk of detection if he screws it up.