Never heard of those games. Sounds like fun though!
The three Fantasy Flight Games (ffg) based upon the Star Wars universe are probably the most advanced TTRPGs available, in my estimation easily outpacing D20 games like Dungeons and Dragons, and Pathfinder. They use very different dice called “narrative dice” that are not complicated to learn, but without effort you can’t make any sense of them. Instead of numbers on your D6, D8, and D12, they have very different symbols that represent different kinds of success and failure, and you roll a bunch of these dice all at once. You create the “dice pool” as it is called by training skills, choosing an opportune moment, etc.
There are six primary dice: D6, D8 and D12, each positive and negative, each a different color so you can easily tell what’s what, and you can have as many of a given type as the situation requires in a pool.
Each positive die has a different mixture between blank, success, advantage and triumph; and each negative die has a mixture between blank, failure, disadvantage and disaster. Opposite rolls like success and failure cancel each other. So five advantages and three disadvantage sums to two advantage.
So if you have a high dexterity, you might roll 4D8 green to hit with a weapon , or some of those D8 could be D12 if you’re trained with that kind of weapon, and you roll negative purple D8’s for each level of difficulty, and add in bonus D6 positive and negative for cover, surprise, various other buffs.
What this does is force the player to always be looking at how to create any sort of advantage in anything they do, rather than stand in the open and shoot.
Simultaneously, the dice often deliver mixed results, such that you succeed and fail in different ways at the same time, and the player describes narratively what this result looks like. So “oh I missed but I hit the flower pot which explodes and throws shards in the target’s eyes” is a normal result from a failure with several advantages or a triumph. Comic results are also quite common. Super-success from rolling a triumph can happen even when failing, and failure can happen even when rolling a powerful dice pool against an easy difficulty.
Amidst all this are elaborate but easy to navigate rules with exotic outcomes. So for example a smallish ship with half dozen players can have the pilot shooting and evading, adding bonus difficulty dice for their ship to be hit in combat, while the copilot contributes a “stay on target” bonus die to everyone shooting from their ship, a couple players shooting from turrets, a couple “slicing” the opponent ship’s computer trying to shut down their shields which removes their opponents bonus dice, and the protagonists have droids running about rolling to reduce stress on the ship which results in extra dice in everyone’s pools. The most powerful dice are the larger, the D12s generally come from training up to 5 levels in the relevant skills.
It sounds much more complex than it is and the game moves faster, and with more tight simulation than Pathfinder, despite simpler rules. The ffg narrative dice are really an unheralded gaming breakthrough as compared to the more common D20 rule sets. All dice rolling is super fast when using the online rollers designed for the game at places like Roll20.
Since the game is set in the Star Wars universe, it comes with the largest stock world of any gaming system, including many hundreds of ships, weapons, mods to ships and weapons, skills, skill trees, etc.—literally many hundreds of times the detail and choices of something like SC. So put that WhisperJet mod on your jumpboots. You won’t regret it.
So back to hacking gameplay, or in the SW universe, what is called “slicing”.
As with SC, in SWTTRPG, you want to start with a superior ship as the basis for superior slicing of other ships. My choice is the modified Jedi Sojourner, since it checks all the right boxes. Right size, good speed and agility, fast hyperdrive, 4 hard points for lots of modifications, and especially long range sensors. Ranges in space go: close, short, medium, long and extreme. Almost no size 4 craft (what you want for an adventure party) have anything past short range sensors. Fighters have close range sensors. Sensor range determines your slicing range, so long range sensors on an adventure party size ship is a huge boon. The Sojourner has long range sensors.
Add a pseudo-cloak which reduces the range you can be sensed by 2. Add Nightshadow Coating which reduces that range again by 1. Now, Capital class ships with extreme range sensors can’t see you until short range, which gives you two bands, medium and long; where you can slice them from where they can’t see you. If you add sensor baffles and shunts, you can even go unnoticed at short range. This is for sneaky little fucks only.
As many players can slice at once as you like and will be rolling 1D8 for each point of intelligence, replaced by 1D12 for each point of computer skill they have trained, and they will get bonus dice (6 sided is weaker than skill dice) for things like slicing mods in your computer. The dice pool gets 1D8 purple for each difficulty level, D6 for bonuses, and sometimes D12 (which can lead to disaster) for skill users on the opponent’s side. Slicing a ship with security mods and a very skilled operator is thus very likely to result in failure and perhaps a disaster.
Failures in the slice check will be noted by the target unless you have rare and special skills trained. These are expensive to train and not all characters have skill trees that can access them. Successes will allow you to invade the computer and shut down the number of systems as you have successes—weapons, shields, navigation, comms, etc. Advantages will allow very specific kinds of results like the period of time any given system will be shut down. Triumphs will allow unusual success imagined by the player but moderated by the game master, like shutting off systems not normally accessible, like the simulated gravity or life support in the target. Disasters will bounce back and do some kind of harm to the slicer or their ship, as determined by the game master. Thus, when slicing an alert, currently operated ship with a user, unless you’re okay with being noticed, you should only have very skilled users slicing. If your target is in dock or you’re in the middle of a battle, you can have relatively unskilled players slicing. This is a key observation that determines how smart players will act.
So the differences here between SC and SW are important. SC doesn’t use skills much and all of them are very late developments in the game. When wondering how SC might enable hacking, the first question to ask is, will there be a mini-game or trainable skill involved? CIG is adding fitness skills for speed, endurance, etc. One wonders whether there will be trainable skills for hacking, or mini-games like pinging that can be practiced.
IMHO, CIG should go all in on hacking. They have deliberately put off Electronic Warfare after teasing it. So where do they want to go? Seems to me there’s a great deal they could choose to do. The sky is the limit. Hopefully they’ll take a page from the SWTTRPG and deliver more than they promised years ago when they talked about spoofing ships’ signatures. How cool would it be if highly specialized ships could shut down target ships’ systems?
