Great White Games/Pinnacle Entertainment Group

[shinryu]

One situation that comes up in some genres (particularly i think in the hacking context, but possibly in other situations) is one where the level of the equipment you have (crappy radio shack my first cyberdeck vs. ono-sendai semi-autonomous military grade forcible internet colonoscopy version 12-2)
matters as much or more than the skill of the character using it. Depending on the setting, I've seen one or two ways that this has been handled in Savage, using Hacking as the generic example:

1) You're literally only as good as e.g. the worse of your Hacking Skill or the computer's die type. Not a bad way to handle things but might overly penalize good hackers with bad equipment.

2) Flat bonus or penalty to hacking skill based on equipment. Arguably the canonical way to do it, but does make a powerful piece of equipment very powerful. Also, hard to gradate the power curve; +4 is way better than +2 is obviously much better than -1, even.

I had a thought, however: if the equipment operates with its own die rating, what if the character was allowed to make assistance rolls to aid its operation? Essentially, you make a Hacking roll, and then add however many bonuses for success to the roll the equipment makes (assuming it generally operates as an Extra). While this does require an extra roll, unfortunately, it allows a good hacker to improve on bad gear or for good gear to make up for a mediocre user. It also allows gear to operate on its own if that's appropriate so the hacker can decide to do other things (say, run a drone) or have multiple characters "assist" one system's action. One question I would have is how much better/worse someone using this system would do vs. a Wild Card using the standard system (e.g., an Extra's skill roll plus some variable bonus vs. a straight Wild Card skill roll). I could probably simulate this but I'd be interested to see if anyone else had any idea how that played out (paging Zadmar).

Thoughts?

[Cryonic]

[GranFalloon]

I think the hacker should get a bonus based on how lousy his equipment is. Really, which is cooler, hacking into the pentagon from a supercomputer or from a Speak N' Spell?

WELCOME. MISTER. PRESIDENT.
SPELL. "LAUNCH."

[shinryu]