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General Jenga Tower

Ekofisk

SOC-10
I'm toying with the idea of having the players use a stacking block game (i.e. Jenga) to represent a hacking attempt on a complex computer network with multiple security layers. You would remove a block every time you failed a skill check (or remove a block for each point you missed by). Has anyone tried this? Any thoughts or suggestions?

There are games like this out there: Dread
Has anyone here played this or similar?

Thanks
 
To what end? If they fail often enough, the tower collapses and ... I guess they go home?

Is it to communicate how close they are to failure (vs the big flashing "you have 3 tries left to enter your password")?
 
Would those games be Intrusion Attempt and Android: Netrunner?

Yes, I can see where cards might well be a better choice and more widely available if I could use a standard deck of playing cards.
What if ( just spitballing numbers) there was a 6 by 6 array of face down cards with the idea being to find 3 aces before 3 kings turn up? Skill checks would allow you to ignore the effect of finding a bad card.
Or ... drawing cards to beat a displayed poker hand? The referee would have to stack the deck in advance (which is kind of what they do anyway).
 
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To what end? If they fail often enough, the tower collapses and ... I guess they go home?

Is it to communicate how close they are to failure (vs the big flashing "you have 3 tries left to enter your password")?
If the tower is shaky, the infiltrators can decide whether to back off the attempt and come back later, or keep pushing. Once the tower falls, the mission is a failure.
Defensive security knows exactly what is going on, and taking emergency measures to combat the intruders. Presumably counter hackers are tracing a physical location, and a goon squad is grabbing their persuaders and heading out.

That said, I'm not enamored of the idea, it is a player dex test rather than a character skill test.
 
I haven't done Jenga. In a mega-dungeon game I once saw a player-facing math puzzle used to represent cracking a combination safe. As GM I once ran a GM v player chess match on the side, against a player I knew played chess. Speed chess rules, and the penalty for player losing was missing out on a reward not mission failure. And this represented... a chess match with a ghost from a published adventure for D&D, so wasn't too abstract.

In both cases I came out thinking I or the other GM just pulled it off, but also thinking one was plenty, and in character is better. So I haven't tried to repeat either shtick. With Jenga for hacking my advice is maybe once, and it might be fun. If your group enjoys it for a change you'll pull it off, if they don't you won't.

Possibly you're thinking of a mini-game because Traveller doesn't have good hacking rules, at least when judged as a mini-game or subsystem. I don't really have a solution for that. What I had to learn GMing Traveller after starting with other systems was I needed more depth and a greater number of challenges to my adventures. That way any one challenge can be blown through pretty quickly with a good roll, and we'll still have a full session. If the denouement is supposed to be hacking but you're worried about just rolling Computers once, you might need more obstacles in the way beforehand. Those could include gaining physical access to the terminal, learning a filename or project they're looking for, learning a password to make the hacking roll easier, disabling the alarms beforehand, etc. Unless you've already got that, in which case carry on.
 
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