Hacking. Say I want to include it in a game that's not about cyberworlds and gizmogadgets, but it's got them in there. Say it's post-Civil War marvel comics and the hackers are SHIELD agents or whatever. That kind of micromuckery. And it doesn't need to be real, just verisimilar.
What are the fundamental bases I need covered? Talking resources, tech, time.
What kind of approach do you want to take? Do you want to have a whole "hacking minigame" like Shadowrun and some other cyberpunk games, or are you just looking for an abstracted mechanic?
Tech is probably fairly simple. Generally speaking, as long as you can send commands to the remote computer, you're good. The only time a ton of computing power would actually benefit you is if you're trying to brute-force crack some encryption or something like that. Resources would mostly be knowledge, like knowing about vulnerabilities in the target system(s). Possibly contacts, too; the "social engineering" angle would give the non-tech-savvy players/characters something to do if you wanted a more involved hacking game. And as for time, well, that's usually abstracted in most games, and for good reason, because the usual way it seems to work in real life is you spend a long time staring at the source code until inspiration hits.
In this last case, rolling a skill vs. a difficulty works as well as any other thing. You could handle it sort of like a combat, where "hitting" represents making some progress on the problem and a "critical hit" represents a breakthrough, and once the target is out of "HP," you've gotten in. Another option is to do something like Dresden FATE's Thaumaturgy, where you do that same basic idea only with needed shifts (or successes or whatever if you're using a dicepool system) and once you've added up enough, you get in.
Thanks, sparkle. That's taken care of my main concerns.
Unrelated question: anybody know some nonfiction books on bureaucracy?
I think the real "how not to do it" on hacking is the infamous decking system from Shadowrun, where a designated decker deals with computer defenses by interacting with their personifications in a virtual world, while the rest of the group sits around (because they are locked out of the action by nature of the system). It's an interesting concept, but it leads to solo adventures the rest of the group can't see or interact with.
In a sufficiently high-tech world, you could get around this issue and have hacking be something that's done on the fly. Maybe your hacker's initial action is to "get into the system" and this is a delicate action that consumes a certain amount of time, like cracking a safe. Then, once you're "in", you can run around with the rest of the action heroes, occasionally sending a wireless command to the system-- whenever you need to turn off cameras, sabotage security robots, set off an alarm, whatever. Maybe these commands need to be done with subtlety and finesse to avoid alerting the system to your presence (which would "kick you out of the system" and/or alert countermeasures to your physical location, etc.), and each subsequent action makes it a little bit harder to continue to evade notice.
It's nothing at all like real hacking and is clearly the action movie version, but that amount of streamlining might help move the action along and keep your hacker character an active participant who doesn't just deal with computer code.