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So, hacking is the winner, let’s talk about it. This dive admittedly won’t be quite as deep on the mechanical side. It’s more vibes, but they’re cool hacker-y vibes. Here’s the entire set of rules for hacking in the most up to date version of the book:

As you can see, it’s not the longest block of hacking rules in the biz by a longshot. You just kind of do whatever you want with it, but that’s entirely by design, and not at all unprecedented in TTRPG design. It might seem like a little bit of a cop out at a glance, but it works very well at the table. Let’s explore it.

In non-futuristic genres, this style of mechanic would be called “soft magic”. To explain that, we first have to know what “hard magic” systems are. This is the type of magic that many of you will be familiar with from systems like D&D or Pathfinder, where there’s a big list of very specific spells. They do exactly what they say they do in their paragraph-long descriptions, and leave only a little bit of room for creative uses. This is fine for what those games are, but they can get to be a lot to keep track of, and many players can be put off by the sheer volume of text. We all know a traditional fantasy player who never plays a spellcaster because of the reading homework it’d require.

Instead of this approach, many systems opt for “soft magic”, where characters don’t know any specific spells, but simply state “I would like to use magic to solve this problem”. There is typically a list of example effects, but those aren’t usually the only things you can do, and creativity is encouraged. There is then sometimes a list of consequences for failure, though other times “you fail and waste your turn/time” is enough. Typically there is also a specific limit placed on direct damage amounts, but not usually on other types of harm. The open nature of this style does mean that your mileage as a mage player may vary depending on the judgement of your GM, but that still happens even in games with dense rulebooks.

Anyway, why am I yapping about magic in this post about a sci-fi game? Well, in the wise words of Arthur C. Clarke, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Thus, when designing advanced fictional technology for a game, the overall mechanics design process is pretty much the same as designing spells. The only other TTRPGs I’ve played where hacking was front-and-center were Cyberpunk RED and Lancer. I knew I didn’t want to pull from their hacking rules for BTH, since they’re so long they’d be over half of our little zine rulebook. Knowing I needed something smaller, I looked to the plethora of other fantasy games using softer magic systems, and settled on a version of that approach. 

Ultimately, I want you to be able to do most of the things that V can do in Cyberpunk 2077, without requiring players to have a list of all of those things memorized, or requiring any specific genre knowledge. I also didn’t want hackers to only fall into the “guy in the chair” archetype, so I limited the range of standard hacking to about 30 meters, forcing them to actually get out there with the rest of the party. The job of the chair jockey is better served by NPCs when the plot demands it.

The fantasy of the Technician class is very similar to that of a wizard or sorcerer. Anyone can pick up a hackdeck (magic wand) and start uploading viruses (casting spells), but Technicians do it best. To balance how useful this is, the actual ability of hacking to directly kill enemies is pretty weak at just 1d5 damage. It has its time and place, able to bypass armor and do double damage to most robots, but it’s still worse than most guns. Additionally, GMs have the ability to throw in a few completely analog challenges, such as non-electronic locks on doors, to prevent hacking being the answer to every problem. The advantage and disadvantage system then gives the warden the simple tool that they need to simulate easy/hard firewalls by just dialing the difficulty up and down. Like any other skill in Panic Engine games, the warden should only call for rolls in situations where failure would be interesting.

As a game developer, going for the soft magic approach requires a lot of trust in your audience. When you cast fireball in D&D, there’s rarely a discussion; everything in the circle takes a bunch of damage and we move on. With BTH’s hacking, there’s a bit of negotiation that can occur. A player might ask, “can I hack all the guards at once and blind them?”, and it’s up to the warden to tone down those big requests without just crushing the suggestion altogether. A good warden might say this player could blind one guard to create an opening, spend a few minutes crafting a virus that can blind all of the guards but only for one round, or hack something else in the room to create a more mundane distraction. A good player will accept these compromises as reasonable suggestions that keep their power in line with the non-hacker PCs. It might sound like a big ask, but if you’ve got a rad group of friends, the creativity and badassery you’ll come up with will be more memorable than any list of pre-built spells anyone could possibly write.

And that’s hacking! Ask me questions in the comments, vote in the poll below for the next deep dive, and keep boosting the game on social media and sharing with your friends so we can get funded!