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Heists

Heists have four kinds of actions, two for defence, two for offence. Generally, the group doing the heist will be doing Sneak and Flee actions, and the group defending the goal will be doing Chase and Patrol actions.

Setup

When setting up for a Heist both sides generate a Disposition. The attacker must roll a skill based on their entrance into the situation. The leader rolls one of: Con, Stealthy, Empathy, Hacking, Strategy, Tactics, or Inconspicuous. Other skills obviously might applt, depending on the plan the attackers are using, but these will probably be the most common. Take the groups total pool on this test, as will as all of their successes, and that is their disposition.

The leader can obviously get help from the rest of the team for the disposition roll, with those people helping with their role's skill. Often a primary actor will roll Con or Tactics, and then the decker will assist with Hacking, and then an infiltrator will use Stealthy to get access to the building, and so on.

The defence side will roll their own disposition roll, most commonly this is going to be a Tactics roll by a leader or a Device Rating roll for devices as defences. The defenders also add +1D for every person sneaking into the building. (If the attacker is officially invited, or is not entering the defended area - typically the building or Host - then they are not counted for this addition). Defences also add their pool to the disposition.

For the purposes of Disposition, Drones count as additional infiltrators.

Sequence of Play

The GM should draw a basic region map. This will typically be a pretty simple graph with bubbles and lines between them, representing zones. Use tokens to represent guards and PCs. Certain actions will care about being being in the same regions, most often stealing things. If the action does care about a region, the defender needs to specify the region the action takes place in. Whereas the attacker always acts in a region where they have people, drones, spirits, sprites, or anything else.

Depending on the defender, they script one to three actions per volley (three volleys per exchange). The actions must split evenly between Matrix, Astral, and Physical - although if the defender doesn't have defences on a plane, they cannot script for that plane. For example, if the defender is a street gang without an awakened member, they script two actions, not three, and skip the Astral action. A common situation will be there being no matrix attacker, and so the defence can use Detect Anomoly using cameras with impunity.

The Actions

Sneak

Patrol

Trap: Traps are a special action. Any action can be specified as a trap, although only one every other volley. Which ever side wins the conflict roll doubles their disposition gains.

Assense (Astral): This is the act of doing a search through the Astral for ongoing threats.

Detect Anomaly (Physical/Matrix): This is the most common roll for patrolling. This action rolls the Observation of guards, typically the Spider or patrolling on the ground, or cameras. This is mostly time spent looking for unexpected things. This is not about finding people, but noticing doors left open, dust scuffed, or things slighly out of place.

IC Patrol (Matrix): The most common matrix defence. This is using patrol IC to search for threats, rather than the more dangerous forms.

Control Device (Matrix): This allows Drones or Cameras to perform a physical action that's within its capability (for example, a camera can't shoot someone).

Schmooze (Physical): This is the action of making it hard for people to move around by throwing up social static.

Static (Matrix): This makes it hard to move through the host - just because of general difficulty from an active Spider.

Scan Feeds (Matrix): In most Hosts or sites with a Matrix presence, there's an Agent checking the security logs for anomalies, and this action is just the Spider checking the logs and updates from that Agent.

Chase

Chase actions are for actively trying to hunt down the members of the heist team. In order to script a chase action, the attacker must have successfully performed a Detect Anomaly or planted a Trap inside an action that generates disposition.

Flee

Alert Fatigue (Matrix): This is the act of sending minor events that tend to confuse an Agent. This action is the act of sending enough of these it's almost impossible to usefully find the real information.

Disposition

The attacker's goal is for this to not be a different kind of conflict. Therefore, running out of dispositon immediately causes a different conflict. Most often, it's going to be Range and Cover, as the split up PCs scramble to finish the job, or just get the hell out, while under fire. However, if, for some reason, there's a lot of people in the same room, it might suddenly be a Fight. On a Con, you might get a chance to talk your way out with a Duel of Wits. But remember, the PCs were caught, they can't definitely talk their way out of all kinds of heists. Also - they have no chance of finishing the job qietly now.

The Defender's goal is for the status quo to remain, so their disposition is more for scoring bonus points. Every quarter of the defender's disposition removed by the attacker gives them an extra. Sample extras are: