Hacking Lockpicking to Unlock Hacking
I never liked lockpicking in Dungeons & Dragons or its many descendants. If the characters are willing and able to simply knock down the door or bust open the treasure chest, the consequence of lockpicking is so low stakes that it is at risk of being hand-waived. If they aren’t willing to do so, then the consequences are high enough to cause areas in the dungeon to become inaccessible as a result of a failed test to pick a locked door. In most of my games, I resorted to just giving players an option: either bust down the door and make noise (potentially alerting others to their presence) or pick the lock but take more time. A simple tradeoff, but with no chance of failure. If they chose to pick the lock, I tracked how much time passed. Locked doors slowly became a vestigial component of my games.
Just when I had given up on interesting lockpicking rules, I discovered an elegant ruleset to handle it. In Errant by Ava Islam (itself the spawn of these rules from Telecanter), each lock requires a specific combination of actions: either twist, tap or turn, none of which are used consecutively. The would-be locksmith tries to guess the correct combination one action at a time. When they first pick a wrong action, it causes the lock to fill stiff. If a wrong action is performed on a stiff lock, the lock is jammed. This is where the rules really took me in. In his blogpost on good traps (and elsewhere), Chris McDowall suggests the three pillars for running a good game are Information, Choice and Consequence. Here, when the lock feels stiff, it provides the player with information: the previous action was incorrect. And this is useful information, allowing a clever player to better guess what action to choose next. Choosing the next action is just one type of choice the player has. The player may also choose to stop lockpicking and try again later (just as valid a choice as retreating in combat). If they can practice with a similar lock with a fresh start, maybe they can come back and solve it (n.b., all locks of the same type are opened by the same combination). The consequence is now properly signposted that, if the character picks a second wrong action, the door jamming and becoming unopenable feels justified. All of this is packed into an easy-to-explain and easy-to-use mini-game that breathes new life into lockpicking, making it the tense, dramatic activity it should be.
Here is a small addition to those rules to integrate it more fully into a rule system with stat-based d20 tests. This twist adds a new dimension to the above rules, but, for some, this may be overcomplicating an elegant mechanic. My goal is for characters with a higher Dexterity to have better odds at picking a lock than their low Dexterity counterparts. I dreamed up a few ways to accomplish this, but many made an absolute mess with the core twist-tap-turn simplicity. I decided the best place to jigger with these rules is at the outset. When a character chooses the first action to perform, unless they’ve dealt with similar locks in the past, they are going in blind, making a complete guess. My idea is to have the wannabe burglar make a moderate Dexterity test at the onset, with the following results:
On a full success, you learn the first correct action.
On a partial success, you eliminate one option for the first action as incorrect.
On a failure, you have no clue as to the first action.
On a critical success, the lock opens immediately.
On a critical failure, the lock jams immediately.
I have hacked Errant’s lockpicking rules to create a similar system for hacking. Prismatic Wasteland is a far-future post-post-apocalyptic setting and is just as likely to have computer terminals to hack as it has locks to pick. As anyone who has played video games in the Fallout franchise can attest, hacking and lockpicking can easily coexist within a setting. Hacking also opens up a lot of ideas beyond locked areas: you could hack into a terminal to power-down certain security systems, to reprogram robots, to read hidden information, etc. It also provides a new character archetype, the hacker—not quite a thief and not quite a wizard. I envision Hackerman from Kung Fury.
Hacking requires access to a terminal connected to the relevant network and selecting the correct hacking actions in the correct order. These actions are crack, hack and smack. Cracking representing brute forcing to obtain the passwords. Hacking represents using coding wizardry to bypass various security. Smacking represents giving the computer terminal a good smack—this sometimes works! Each terminal requires three actions to access, and no action is ever used consecutively. Upon selecting the wrong action, the terminal gives an error message. If the wrong action is chosen after the error message appears, the terminal locks down and cannot be accessed. Before hacking, the character makes a moderate Intelligence test:
On a full success, you learn the first correct action.
On a partial success, you eliminate one option for the first action as incorrect.
On a failure, you have no clue as to the first action.
On a critical success, you immediately gain access.*
On a critical failure, the terminal locks down immediately.
* Typically, this means the password was “password123” or something of that ilk.
