VERA HACK

Jason decided it was time to retire Fil. I decided Fil had to go out in style. After all, he's the longest surviving character in our game.

Knowing that Fil has been desperately looking for Vera Blue, I decided to use her reappearance as a plot point. I'll save you the details, but suffice it to say that she came back as a mindless combat cyborg. Make that an extremely pissed off mindless combat cyborg.

By this point in time, the players had a good idea how to disable these combat cyborgs and also what happens if they are disabled: they have a self-annihilate mechanism with a 30 second delay.

Knowing that Fil has done brain diving before, I was banking on Fil jacking into Vera and disabling the mechanism. Thus I came up with the VERA HACK.

Save Vera Blue or get blown to smithereens, but get this, in REAL TIME. Now THAT'S going out in style!

Originally I had a convoluted flow chart with program dumps and ICE attacks, but Pete and I ran a timing run on it and it ran over a minute and a half. I kept pruning it down until I got what we have on the left. Pete and I timed that one out between 25 and 45 seconds.

Slim, but possible.

When we got to that moment in the game, we all took a breather. Anybody who needed a smoke took one. Then I laid out the rules:

Fil jacks in so fast, he has no time to slot programs. I knew what his usual choices for B&E and attack programs were, so I had each figured out (as a percentile). Before the hack, I snagged his character from him and said, "Quick! Pick a program!" for each mode. The chart at the left shows what he picked. (Keep in mind, Fil's been around a while. Those hacking values take into account NASTY security measures....)
Fil could use luck points to add 5 seconds (he didn't know how many he had). He used none.
Two sets of percentile dice could be used. He used one.
Since I wanted to leave some suspense, each security measure was revealed only if the previous one was overcome. This was done with another sheet of paper on top of the chart. Jason could pick someone to move the paper for him. He chose Jeremy.

Some other interesting notes: I demanded the room be quiet, however, I did play a loop of a heartbeat in the background. (Jason didn't notice. Oh well...) Also, at the point Fil reached Vera's actual mind (marked by the asterisk), I softly called out, "Fil... is that you?"

Well, Fil succedded in saving Vera, himself, and the surrounding buildings. Then he picked up Vera, whisked her off to his safehouse for recovery, and retired Fil in the process.

Oh, by the way, he made the hack in 15 seconds.