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.

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.