Loving this system! I'll be starting a game soon, and I had a question. Is there a reason why stealth and hacking both have difficulty checks that start at 5? Why don't they start at 7 like other defenses? It seems like this would make it easier to keep track of, and all it would require is subtracting 2 from the security level/network level guidelines. But I'm not sure if I'm just missing something about how I should be thinking about these are different from other types of defenses.
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Short answer: because they just are. Long answer: working in increments of five and adding up to ten to it on the fly is easier than calculating from 7 from a psychological game design standpoint, and security/network level is more likely to be on the fly than a dedicated NPC or character is. The math is not fundamentally different.