A system’s look and feel depends upon the Constraints placed upon that sector by the people who designed it. Thus, the intruding character tends to find herself, as the saying goes, trapped in a world she never made. Logging into the system, our hacker gets cast as a hero in some outrageous action scenario of the Storyteller’s choice.

For obvious reasons, she starts off at a disadvantage – no weapons, no armor, perhaps one or two useful tools, probably dressed in the clothes on her back, and perhaps (in a really vicious system) not even that much. The hacker’s limited dice pool (see Opening the Window in the Hacking Rules section above) reflects the innate disadvantage of an intruding visitor in a hostile system.