Shadowrun
Shadowrun Play => Character creation and critique => Topic started by: Chalkarts on <09-13-18/0911:14>
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In the Rigger chapter of the CRB it talks about getting your drone hacked and controlled.
Can a technomancer hack drones, if so can they control drones or vehicles with their sprites somehow?
Is a Technomancer grease monkey who loves machines and becoming one with them a possible thing?
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Of course technos can hack drones. They can hack anything they can get their hands / wireless signals on.
Sprites also can hack drones. But controlling them is another matter. Unless Kill Code changed this dynamic somehow, no sprite has any of the skills necessary for controlling drones. Pilot Groundcraft, Pilot Watercraft, Gunnery, and Sneaking are the only skills that are even defaultable, so sprites flat-out can't pilot aircraft or walkers, and shouldn't bother trying to control the others. And there's a very good chance the GM would say sprites can't default on any meatspace skills, period.
(A sprite can use its E-War skill for meatspace perception with a drone, though. But that's about it. Unless Kill Code says otherwise.)
But of course, a Machine Sprite is still a rigger's best friend. Or worst enemy, depending 8)
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But of course, a Machine Sprite is still a rigger's best friend. Or worst enemy, depending 8)
I haven’t taken the deep dive into decker or technomancy yet, the matrix rules seem daunting to me.
What do machine sprites do for/to riggers?
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They have the Diagnostics power, which says it helps you use/repair a device. Some consider 'piloting/firing' a drone/weapon as 'using'. I wouldn't bet on your GM allowing that overpowered trick though.
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They have the Diagnostics power, which says it helps you use/repair a device. Some consider 'piloting/firing' a drone/weapon as 'using'. I wouldn't bet on your GM allowing that overpowered trick though.
You seem to know a lot about the TMancer,
Mind if I pester you via this thread until I get these guys figured out?
Also,
When I try to picture a technomancer I also go to the autistic kid in alphas that can see and manipulate the internet. Close?
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Unfortunately there's not much I know of them, but feel free to ask questions and I'll see what I can do.
Never saw that though, but yeah, that's probably a lot like how you can imagine how a TM does things.
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Is a Technomancer grease monkey who loves machines and becoming one with them a possible thing?
Absolutely possible.
Whether or not they are effective depends on several factors, including what House Rules are used.
Technomancers have an Echo (kind of like Metamagic for Mages, if that helps you grasp it) called Mind over Machine in the core book, or MMRI in Data Trails. They are essentially the same thing, so I'm not sure it matters which one you pick.
This Echo replicates the Control Rig cyberware.
With Kill Code, it introduced Resonance Streams. One of which is the Machinist. It's special ability is to make the Technomancer's Living Persona function like a RCC.
Until Errata, it isn't clear if that is a neutered RCC, or not. The Techno probably needs the 8 point One with the Matrix quality introduced in the same book to make real use of the ability.
It is relatively easy to replicate a Rigger with a Technomancer.
How effective it is, will depend on your table.
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Another drone question.
Is it possible to customize drones with things like gas canisters and strobe lights and laser sights? I want to make a drone rigger that blankets the enemy in distraction and negative modifiers.
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Laser sights can be modded onto weapons. As for the other stuff: Try taping a flashpak to it and command that wirelessly.
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Like they said, this is an area where there's a decent chance house rules will significantly impact things. For example, my GM decided to nerf Diagnostics by making it only last a very short while (I don't recall if it was all the way down to just 1 combat turn, or a little bit more than that).
You should be able to count on using Gremlins against other riggers to force glitches, though.
Overall, TMs have the potential to become monsters at whatever technologically-focused stuff they do, once they rack up enough karma. They just can't pass off drone command to their sprites. (And essence loss amounts to a soft ban on rigger staples like cerebral boosters, since it costs you your resonance.)
Also, TMs are pretty MAD, so it's hard to make one that starts out being good at rigging and other Matrix stuff. They need high Res for their sprites and CFs, at least 3 high mental attributes for their living personas, and lots of skills already. Adding in hardware (TMs need it, but tend to skimp on it at CharGen), gunnery, piloting, and whatever amount of sneaking on top of that? Something's gotta give - at least in the beginning.
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Also, TMs are pretty MAD, so it's hard to make one that starts out being good at rigging and other Matrix stuff. They need high Res for their sprites and CFs, at least 3 high mental attributes for their living personas, and lots of skills already. Adding in hardware (TMs need it, but tend to skimp on it at CharGen), gunnery, piloting, and whatever amount of sneaking on top of that? Something's gotta give - at least in the beginning.
Given that info I think I just might try to make a normal unaugmented Technomancer.
I just have to figure out how they work.
And how he’d keep himself alive.
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Basically like a decker, but trading in their programs for matrix spells and spirits.
The most common TM survival strategy is to focus everything on being a Matrix specialist, and avoiding as much meatspace trouble as (meta)humanly possible.
You can also have a drone or two on autopilot to help protect your meat body when things get loud.
Or, now that Kill Code is out, you can sacrifice some essence/resonance to get cyberware like skillwires, and eventually get it back by being a cyberadept.
Edit: You could also be more of a "Petnomancer" - let your sprites do most of the heavy VR lifting instead of you. The main problem with that is that none of your sprites have the software skill, so they can't disarm any databombs for you. And since you can't share Marks, that means you'd still need your own high hacking skill. (And you always need the computer skill to spam Matrix perception. And E-War is good to have so you can hide once someone spots you while running silent, etc.)
- But that said, you could still maybe get away with < 6 ranks in those skills and just teamwork with a sprite for the important stuff. Assuming Kill Code hasn't disallowed it.
Edit 2: It's important to note that errata gives TMs a 3rd free skill and 2 more CFs, so that helps a little. (Chummer already accounts for this.)
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Basically like a decker, but trading in their programs for matrix spells and spirits.
The most common TM survival strategy is to focus everything on being a Matrix specialist, and avoiding as much meatspace trouble as (meta)humanly possible.
You can also have a drone or two on autopilot to help protect your meat body when things get loud.
Or, now that Kill Code is out, you can sacrifice some essence/resonance to get cyberware like skillwires, and eventually get it back by being a cyberadept.
Edit: You could also be more of a "Petnomancer" - let your sprites do most of the heavy VR lifting instead of you. The main problem with that is that none of your sprites have the software skill, so they can't disarm any databombs for you. And since you can't share Marks, that means you'd still need your own high hacking skill. (And you always need the computer skill to spam Matrix perception. And E-War is good to have so you can hide once someone spots you while running silent, etc.)
- But that said, you could still maybe get away with < 6 ranks in those skills and just teamwork with a sprite for the important stuff. Assuming Kill Code hasn't disallowed it.
Edit 2: It's important to note that errata gives TMs an extra skill and 2 CFs. (Chummer already accounts for this.)
Is a decker just better than a tm?
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As with street sam vs adept, it's all just trade-offs that largely amount to the same thing.
Do you like synergy with 'ware and switching high Sleaze out for high Firewall, and Fork for Wrapper, etc with impunity?
Or do you like creating your own team of hacking assistants and just Puppeteering devices into doing what you want?
Do you want matrix damage (which takes hours to repair) to mostly go to your 200,000¥ + deck, which becomes a useless expensive brick if you take too much abuse?
Or do you want all matrix damage to go directly to you, as well as fade damage from your matrix magic, but be able to slap a stim patch and maybe keep on trucking until the end of the encounter?
Just trade your preferred pros and cons.
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Just trade your preferred pros and cons.
I feel like Deckers can do better in meat space because of ware. Every way that look at TMs, they always look squishy.
Maybe a Troll TM would be ok lol
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It's a hacker. Unless the team's been caught in an ambush, the hacker shouldn't be spraying or dodging any lead anyway.
More useful to brick enemy guns and do battlefield control. Don't be in your secondary role when you could be in your primary.
(Machine Sprites' Gremlins power can make guns glitch, or even critically glitch... which can make 'em explode, or at least jam)
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It's a hacker. Unless the team's been caught in an ambush, the hacker shouldn't be spraying or dodging any lead anyway.
More useful to brick enemy guns and do battlefield control. Don't be in your secondary role when you could be in your primary.
(Machine Sprites' Gremlins power can make guns glitch, or even critically glitch... which makes 'em explode 8) )
How viable would it be to take abilities at priority B and make it a super stealthy acrobatic spider man grease man type that hangs out on the ceiling silently bricking everything? A Ninjamancer
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lol
There's the skillwire / cyberadept route.
But either way, "B&E hacker" is probably more common than you'd expect. Infiltration helps to get that sweet, sweet direct connection.
I haven't built one, but I expect you'd need to sacrifice a fair degree of your primary dicepools to make it work.
(B&E is surprisingly skill-heavy on its own. Plus, it goes off of AGI, and needs other attributes to be high enough for a decent physical limit, since AGI doesn't affect your limit at all.)
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lol
There's the skillwire / cyberadept route
Cyberadept?
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Uses cyberware that is augmented with technomancy.
Kill Code has some things to make it a viable character.
With me, I've created a couple of different archetypes of technomancer.
Juice-o-Mancer: A drug focused technomancer who slots different kinds of drugs like they were programs. Pretty much very heavy on body/will/logic to help with addiction tests, but also picks up prototype transhuman to boost their resistance to being addicted even further with drug resistance bioware. It does however have the issue of making the drugs have a shorter run time.
Face-O-Mancer: Uses the interpretation with Machine Sprites that 'using' and item means using it. But basically runs a machine sprite in some fancy armor to boost their social skills to the max. But for the most part when drek hits the fan, the get the heck out of dodge.
Anthromancer: Uses a single Anthroform drone rather than the multiple drones of a rigger. A bit clunky at first since you can't jump into the bot, but there are ways. Uses the drone to replace them self in meat space, while they stay away.
Ninjamancer: Uses hide action to remain hidden in the matrix, the complex forms likewise help keep it hidden as it begins to uses resonance spike from its hiding spot.
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Ninjamancer: Uses hide action to remain hidden in the matrix, the complex forms likewise help keep it hidden as it begins to uses resonance spike from its hiding spot.
I just call that one a "Technomancer" lol
Except you gotta keep in mind that dealing matrix damage makes devices spark out and stuff. Even if the fact that it's not an [Attack] action means no warning message gets sent, they'll still know what's happening when their gear suddenly starts to fry.
Edit: But of course, Resonance Spike is crap anyway. You're so much better off just letting a Fault Sprite deal all of your matrix damage for you.
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I've made a technorigger, and have to say its pretty fun, but I have a bit of bias on playstyles.
* Use 'remote control' rather than the echo or jumping in, because with machine sprites to add limits, and it giving +2 handling, there's not much reason to spend the karma and submersions when there's much cooler ones.
* I used Nartaki EECAA, if I had to do it again, I'd probably of done Human DECAB and forget the RCC or get one of the cheaper ones, especially with Kill code.
* Get Narco, cerebral/cerebellum boost, and some reaction enhancers and grow that stat.
* Having a low resonance isn't an issue, due to how you can 'cast' up to resonance x3 and absorb it as physical. With Otaku to technomancer, (Groveler), (Shielding from sprites), there's almost no way you're gonna take drain that matters, especially when you get..
* FFF and skinlink echo.
* Skills A allows me to have everything I want from hacking, to stealth groups or even face ones. Its been a blast.
* Surprisingly, redundancy has been pretty helpful for me recently, lot of enemy deckers seem to wanna data-spike me or the drones.
Hope that helps.
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Machine Sprites adding Limits, is that under the assumption Diagnostics is allowed to work on any device?
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More useful to brick enemy guns and do battlefield control. Don't be in your secondary role when you could be in your primary.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess you've never played a Decker.
Anyone who has knows that hacking in Combat is an utter waste of time. First, enemies - just like Runners - rarely have their gear Wireless On. Even if they do, the Action Economy to do anything useful (prior to Kill Code) is too high. Kill Code introduced some new options, but since they are just as punishing against PCs, it is even more likely that no one will be Wireless On.
Not only is it simpler, for all involved, to never have anything Wireless On, it is also the best way to deal with the Matrix during combat.
the only winning move is not to play
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More useful to brick enemy guns and do battlefield control. Don't be in your secondary role when you could be in your primary.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess you've never played a Decker.
Anyone who has knows that hacking in Combat is an utter waste of time. First, enemies - just like Runners - rarely have their gear Wireless On. Even if they do, the Action Economy to do anything useful (prior to Kill Code) is too high. Kill Code introduced some new options, but since they are just as punishing against PCs, it is even more likely that no one will be Wireless On.
Not only is it simpler, for all involved, to never have anything Wireless On, it is also the best way to deal with the Matrix during combat.
the only winning move is not to play
Lol. That was some of the things I said a long time ago. The matrix world is unbelievably slow while the meat world is fast. Mostly because so many actions are needed to do anything in the matrix, and they're all complex actions, while the meat world does similar actions as free or simple actions.
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I remember how one of my players would burn through Edge: He'd hack all commlinks of enemies for 2 marks, Trace Icon on all of them, make AROs out of them and pass those to the other players. Then fire was opened through walls and windows. Wiped out an entire gang in a big building in the first Pass this way. The Edge was required to not tip them off with a failed Sleaze attempt.
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More useful to brick enemy guns and do battlefield control. Don't be in your secondary role when you could be in your primary.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess you've never played a Decker.
Anyone who has knows that hacking in Combat is an utter waste of time. First, enemies - just like Runners - rarely have their gear Wireless On. Even if they do, the Action Economy to do anything useful (prior to Kill Code) is too high. Kill Code introduced some new options, but since they are just as punishing against PCs, it is even more likely that no one will be Wireless On.
Not only is it simpler, for all involved, to never have anything Wireless On, it is also the best way to deal with the Matrix during combat.
the only winning move is not to play
You have a point about the action economy, but it seems a little harsh for a GM to always have wireless turned off for NPC's, even during combat. Not everybody should always be expecting a Decker/TM to be around and opposing them. Are you just talking weapons, or does that include commlinks? Any decent team needs communication, and that includes security guards. Also, a rigger certainly wouldn't have their RCC's wireless turned off during combat.
It would make more sense to have any organized resistance be using a PAN as opposed to having wireless off all the time. Then if somebody got hacked they would report it via commlink and the others may shut their wireless off in response. Always-off just seems like a GM kludge to avoid the risk, which is fine at times, but shouldn't be the default. Hackers need something to do in combat, when they don't have other things to do like hacking doors and such.
If you are facing a wireless-disabled team then there should be some other hacking related activity that is an option. Lock the doors on the HRT team's vehicle as you're leaving so they can't get back in it to pursue you. Set off false alarms for distractions, make commlinks go haywire, there should be some possibilities.
Obviously this isn't your fault, the player picks from the options they are presented with. But I would hope that a GM would give you some options in that situation. I'm certainly going to try to do so for my players.
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More useful to brick enemy guns and do battlefield control. Don't be in your secondary role when you could be in your primary.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess you've never played a Decker.
Anyone who has knows that hacking in Combat is an utter waste of time. First, enemies - just like Runners - rarely have their gear Wireless On. Even if they do, the Action Economy to do anything useful (prior to Kill Code) is too high. Kill Code introduced some new options, but since they are just as punishing against PCs, it is even more likely that no one will be Wireless On.
Not only is it simpler, for all involved, to never have anything Wireless On, it is also the best way to deal with the Matrix during combat.
the only winning move is not to play
I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess you forgot we're talking about Technos (which is my favorite thing to play, btw).
A Techno can just Puppeteer things into doing what they want with a single action. Plus, a TM with Overclocking can sometimes get that 4th pass in VR. If they're on Psyche, they'd get it almost half the time. More than half if they also went the cerebral booster route.
But extra, quicker options aside, you left out the part where I said "unless you're caught in an ambush." Meaning, you should be able to hack all the things beforehand. And if that isn't the case, then yeah, action economy isn't on your side so much, even as a TM.
I'd rather not touch the wireless-on-or-not thing, because that's already been debated ad nauseam - repeatedly. Not much sense going through it all here, too.
But again, bricking and sabotaging guns isn't the only relevant hacking option. There's also battlefield control, since the lore says practically everything is wireless and hackable.
And if the enemy is anything other than gangers, then they probably have their own matrix specialist, so it's still useful to be online to deal with that. Even if they don't have one, drones are fairly cheap and common; there could very well be one or two of those you can use Confuse Pilot on (which doesn't even require any marks).
- Speaking of which, since the thread was specifically about TechnoRiggers, the Machinist Stream for sure allows Target Device as an option. Since everything in the 6th world is wireless-on by default, it's a pretty good bet that enemies will still be carrying something that's wireless, which you can use to give your shooters bonus dice. (net hits -> bonus dice for every gun on your PAN to shoot at that device)
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There is that blurb of text in the CRB about how your clothes can tell you when they are dirty and need to be washed. I keep having this image of a post-run conversation among team members where everybody is recalling the pivotal things they did during the fight. I can just imagine it getting around the the TM and he's like, "I tricked all their clothes into saying they are clean. These guys are going to be walking around for days wondering what smells..."
That's actually something the TM in my group would probably try to do. Or maybe replacing the music files on their commlinks with smooth jazz.
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I’ve drifted from the technorigger idea and am leaning towards a hardcore technomancer slicer. All about convincing security systems to look left at 6:15, and I’m not sure thing hat I want his meatspace usefulness to be. Maybe a dwarf.