There was a thread about making Hacking in tg rpg's less sucky that got archived. It had some lively discussion but got sidetracked by questions of realism. I think the question is a good one and I'd love to hear how other people have tackled this problem, particularly in a cyberpunk setting.

For myself, I was part of a group that played Fate Core in a cyberpunk setting. We found that just having everyone have a "Cyber" stress track and a Cyber skill was good enough for most things. We also made it a bit harder to inflict damage to the stress track and used it more in the vein of social combat. That being said you could use it to inflict advantages pretty easily so most of the fights turned into this strangely enjoyable hybrid of Syndicate and Ghost Recon.

We based your "Cyber" stress track off of the PC's Resources skill, with the reasoning being that it takes someone with a lot of money to have really good equipment.

It lead to a couple really interesting fights between these poor-as-hell but skilled underground cyber criminals facing off against well funded but not very skilled corporate InfoSec.

We enjoyed it because it didn't break the flow of the game because all the rolls were the same for everyone.Playing like this also opened up another avenue of attack making someone with a more support oriented PC be relevant in actual combat, while also letting people contribute to the the non-combat parts of the game.

How do you handle hacking TG? How do you make crunch support fluff?