All Rules | Downtime Rules

Digital Persona

Source Tech Revolution pg. 70
While hacking into a computer, you navigate and manipulate its systems through a persona, which is your anchor in that digital world. The persona’s simply a bundle of code through which you act, though you can give it a sensory signature that others perceive when interacting with it. However, your persona is also a target through which others can attack you, track your location, and expel you from the digital space.
Persona Health: Countermeasures might attack your persona, degrading its performance or even using the persona to attack you and your equipment more directly. Your persona’s overall health is measured by Connection Points (CP), with lost CP representing damage that impairs performance and connectivity. Your digital persona has a maximum number of CP equal to 12 + 2 × your Computers ranks. You can restore lost CP with the repair action (page 72), and you replenish all lost CP when you spend 1 Resolve Point and take 10 minutes to recover Stamina Points.
Your persona malfunctions as it loses CP. When your persona’s current CP is at or below 75% of its maximum, randomly select one of your three Computers subskills and apply a –2 penalty to your checks with that subskill. When your persona’s CP is at or below 50% of its maximum, apply that –2 penalty to your checks with the other two subskills. Increase the penalty to –3 when your persona’s CP falls to or below 25% of its maximum.
If its CP total ever drops to 0, your persona disintegrates, and you and any support hackers linked to your persona are immediately ejected from the encounter and can’t rejoin until you’ve restored your persona’s current CP to 1 or higher.
Configuring a Persona: When you begin a hacking encounter, you configure your persona, assigning a circumstance modifier between –3 and +3 to each of the three subskills: Deceive, Hack, and Process. The sum of these modifiers can’t exceed your number of Computers ranks divided by 3. If you have your own computer (Core Rulebook 213), you can harness its power to enhance your persona, in which case the three circumstance modifiers’ sum above can’t exceed your computer’s tier.
In addition, you decide whether your persona will act independently or will aid an allied hacker’s persona, establishing whether you are a lead hacker or support hacker.
Lead Hacker: This hacker can perform a major action and a minor action during each phase (action types appear on page 72). In turn, they are vulnerable to countermeasures’ effects. At least one lead hacker must be present to begin a hacking encounter, and any number of lead hackers can participate.
Support Hacker: This hacker’s persona is connected to that of an allied lead hacker. Support hackers are rarely affected directly by countermeasures and can make greater use of non-Computers skills, but they can perform only one minor action each turn. If their lead hacker leaves the encounter, any connected support hackers also leave the encounter.

Archives of Nethys

All Rules | Downtime Rules

Digital Persona