My Shadowrun group has a reasonably typical composition: "face", technomancer, rigger, mage, adept, and street samurai. The problem I have is making sure that the technomancer can use her skills without spending a long time on matrix-only stuff and potentially putting a roadblock in front of important parts of the adventure.
For example, perhaps the party have to infiltrate an office building. It would obviously be very useful to have the technomancer hack into it and take control of some or all of the systems. However, what our technomancer ends up doing is putting the adventure on hold while she hacks into the building's systems, usually involving an extended test over several hours. I don't blame her for this — this is how the rules work, as I understand them, and it's a totally sensible thing to do. But it's still problematic.
How do I make such an endeavor interesting? I don't want to spend 30 minutes playing out an encounter between the technomancer and the security systems, but neither do I want to give the technomancer access to everything without a challenge.
Basically, I want a middle ground between "just fake a couple of rolls and give the technomancer security access" and "spend 30 minutes on technomancer stuff that nobody else is interested in". How can I run this so everyone feels included and challenged?
Best Answer
N.B. I'm not particularly familiar with the hacking rules of Shadowrun. However, this is a general response on how you might structure your game for a more cinematic experience.
Try designing your missions so that the hacking and the rest of the job run in parallel. For example, the ultimate goal is to steal a piece of prototype hardware from deep inside a heavily secured compound. As the runners are breaking in, have the hacker attempt to disable certain security systems, open doors, misdirect guards, etc. The runners can get pinned down at a troublesome door, and while they're in a caught in a firefight the hacker can attempt to open the door, providing an escape route; the success or failure of the hacker's rolls should determine how long it takes for the door to be opened.
Make sure that as you're letting the active team progress through the mission, you're also cutting back to the hacker to give him something to do. While the runners are dealing with problems in realspace, the hacker should be dealing with problems in cyberspace, and the two spaces should be able to affect each other. Just as the hacker can open the security door, the runners can set-up physical patch lines allowing the hacker to move from system to system. This is the sort of thing you see in movies and television all the time.
Of course, all this might require lightening up on the hacking rules. Make the assumption that the hacker is able to gain initial access to the compound's systems, and any checks he makes are to actually make things happen. Forgo the tedious setup bits, and just focus on the in-the-moment actions that can keep the story flowing.