I GM for a group of four players. The party consists of a shaman, a rigger, an adept and a Decker and I think we stumbled upon one of the most common problems in Shadowrun, the problem of decking taking an eternity. I run a heavily modified version of Splintered State and at the Moment we are at the "Threading the Needle" scene. In other words the big run on Brackhaven Investmens to steal some data.
My players have quite a few ideas how to pull this off and are in the middle of their preparations and since the decker had quite a lot of tasks to perform we schedueled a decker session. That worked out rather well but showed us how long decking can take. The decker and I agree that these extra sessions should be kept to a minimum after all rpgs are a group experience. On the other hand he does not want to hog huge amounts of time. He feels bad about it even though the other players tell him that they don't mind. So I had the idea of simplifying hacking in the interesst of time. The problem here is that he really likes the complex rulesystem for decking and shadowrun and I can't blame him since I appreciate it myself. Additionally he likes these complex runs with a lot of preparation and the possibility of going full stealth because of it.
So our problem is that we have to find a way to keep the decking complex and interesting but make it work much faster since it is a huge time sink.
We are all new to the shadowrun system so I guess we are going to get faster with time and we use roll20 so we have options to accelerate but only so much. How do you manage to keep decking interesting, crunchy and speedy?
Disclaimer: I have read How do you make hacking useful without excluding other players? but must admit that the ideas, as far as I see it, either do not solve the problem or ignore at least one of the wishes of my players. I know this is a very difficult question but maybe someone has a good answer for it.
Best Answer
Here are a few things I do as a GM to help speed up hacking.
Don't roll for the easy stuff
Has the Decker proven he can hack all the easy things? Are a bunch of cameras slaved to a cheesy host? Let them get the marks. Maybe the host's strength lies elsewhere, like IC or their security spider.
This doesn't just include getting marks. Maybe you can assume they're pretty well hidden and just roll a die for an edge test every now and then. Maybe assume the host thinks everything is normal and only worry about the Patrol IC finding the player when the security has gone up.
Pre-roll your dice
If you trust the player (you SHOULD trust the player), let them pre-roll some of their common things. A couple of Matrix Perception tests, a few Hack On The Fly...they can do these while the other players are going. This DOES have the side-effect of making failures known ahead of time, and the player might look at those rolls and try to change what they're going to do...but it comes back to trust. I ask my player to roll them and provide them in the order they were rolled.
Remember, it's not the only time sink
I've seen 3 minutes of combat take up 2-3 hour sessions by players who've done this for a while. Right now the Decker might be getting their time, but soon enough the others will, too. And they may want to hear about the fun the decker is having, what the host looks like, and more. Maybe invite them over to just hang out if you want to do a solo Decker session.