[wizard_of_ozzy]

Name: Joshua Tiller
Alias: Grey
Race:  Caucasian
Sex: Male
Nationality: UCAS
Lifestyle: Low 3 months
Karma Spent: XXXXX
Physical Description: 5'6" 120lb (1.67m 54 kilos), 16yrs of age Black hair, brown eyes.
Personality/background
Short version:Boy has crazy dad. Boy runs away from home. Boy finds a new dad. New dad get's murdered. Boy seeks vengeance.

Long Version:Joshua Tiller was born the second son (Jake was Joshua's 4 year older brother) to Markus and Debra Tiller, an upper-middle class family in Renton District of Seattle. Strong supporters of the Humanis Policlub, the Tillers hated anything that wasn't a mundane Human. What they didn't know was that their first born Jake was beginning to develop magical talents. In late October of '65 when Joshua was nine, Markus and Debra returned home from a wine tasting party (read: drunken gathering) with similarly minded friends, to find Jake entertaining Joshua in the living room with a light show using his limited powers. Correctly summarizing that Jake was a mage, their fear quickly turned to anger. That anger lead to Markus beating Jake. The young mage panicked and before anyone knew what was happening, he had launched a small fireball at his father, missed and hit his mother instead. Debra died but Markus' rage only grew stronger. The beating continued and soon Jake was as still as his mother. Joshua didn't know what to do, and went to hide in the house's garage. When he got their, the doors to his family's Ford Spiral opened and the car started. A funny thing since he needed a commlink and his father's fingerprints to do that, none of which he had. The car's interface asked Joshua were he wanted to go. All he said was "Away". And away it took him. All the way to Redmond. Eventually the car stopped in the middle of the night in the Redmond streets, it had simply turned off. It was no place for a scared nine year old to be but luckily he had stopped in front of a large garage that happened to be the home and workplace of a dwarf mechanic and "retired" riggger named Roberto del Colmillo. Roberto went outside to investigate the new car that appeared in front of his car and was surprised to see a small human child huddled up in the passenger's seat of the car. After convincing Joshua that he was harmless, the boy slowly told Roberto what had happened earlier that night. The mechanic got to working on the Ford, removing all GPS trackers and security devices that might be used to find it's current location. Knowing that a broken home with a psychopathic father was no place for a child, Roberto decided to adopt the human boy (years later when Joshua asked him why he did it, Roberto replied that Joshua reminded him of his own son that had died during the second Crash). After that, all was well (or as well as could be expected) and Joshua lived happily with his new father and helped out around the shop along with his father's best friend, another dwarf mechanic named Sharon Bradly. A year ago he returned home from a quick grocery run to find all the cars in the garage (including his old Ford Spiral) stolen and his father slumped over in his office, with a brand new bullet hole in his head. Now he's trying to get enough money, contacts, and information to find his father's killer and bring him to justice.

Attributes

Body	Agility	Reaction	Strength
3	2	4	2
Charisma	Intuition	Logic	Willpower
3	5	5	4
Edge	Magic/Resonance	Essence	Initiative
2	5	6	9

Positive Qualities
Technomancer 5BP
Natural Hardening 10BP
Bilingual 5BP
Paragon 5BP
Negative Qualities
SINner +5BP
Big Regret +5BP (Not saving his brother's life)
Dependents +5BP (Pet bulldog named Jeff)
Spirit Bane, Toxic +10BP
Allergy, Pollutants, Mild +10BP

Active Skills

Skill Group

Electronics 3

Skills

Hacking 4

Compiling 4

Register 4

Electronic Warfare 1

Gunnery 2

Pilot Aircraft 3

Pilot Groundcraft 3

Knowledge Skills ( [Logic + Intuition] x 3 free points)

Drone Designs	5
Corporate Matrix Security Procedures	5
Suburb Security Procedures	3
Local Junk Yards	3
Vegetable Gardening	2
Gob Rap	2

Language Skills

English	N
Spanish	N
Japanese	5
Cantonese	5

Cyber/Bioware

Cyberware	Essence	Cost	Notes
XXXXX	XXXXX	XXXXX¥	XXXXX

Complex Forms

Form

Analyze 5

Command 5

Shield 5

Stealth 5

Exploit 5

Spoof 5

Disarm 5

Smartlink 0

Gear (50,000¥)

Urban Explorer Jumpsuit 6/6	500¥
Helmet 2/1	100¥
Fake SIN (4)	4000¥
Respirator (6)	150¥
Survival Kit	100¥
Goggles (6) Storage device, Low Light, Flare Compensation, Thermographic, Ultrasound, Vision Magnification	1150¥
Portable satellite

500¥

Vehicles
Rover 2068 w/Rigger Black Box, satellite uplink and extreme environment mod (toxic zones)

Handling	Accel	Speed	Pilot	Body	Armor	Sensor	Availability	Cost
+2	20/35	140	2	13	10	2	6	28,500¥

Drones
BusyBuddy(modified for dog grooming)
Shiwase Kanmushi x2
Ferret RPD-1X x2

Size	Accel	Speed	Pilot	Body	Armor	Sensor	Availability	Cost
Small	5/15	15	1	2	0	2	2	2,500¥
Microdrone	2/10	10	3	0	0	8	1	1,000¥ x2
Small	10/20	60	3	1	2	3	8	3,000¥ x2

Contacts

Contact		C/L
Mechanic (Sharon Bradly)	2/4
Forensics Expert (Kelly Huebert - A friend of his adopted father)	3/1

Stream

Dronomancer

Paragon: Daedalus

Advantage

+2 dice to Hardware Tests, +1 die for Machine sprites

Disadvantage

Technomancers who follow Daedalus tend to interact with the machines on which they are working in an even more subconscious manner than usual. As a result, modifications they make are geared towards someone with their talents and worldview, rather than something that is intuitive to a mundane user or even a non-Daedalus technomancer. Devices built or modified by such technomancers have a more arcane user interface, imposing a –2 modifier on anyone who wants to legitimately use it Build Point totals:  400 Using the 20th Anniversary core rule book, Unwired, Arsenal, Augmentation, and the Runner's Companion.

[XelosUchiha]

I still don't know enough about Technomancers in 4th ed to give a full opinion but I think it looks good, like a fun character

I like the idea of just sitting into the van and using Technomancy to jump from drone to drone. Can the new Technomancers control multiple drones at once like the old-school riggers can?

[baronspam]

Some thoughts on complex forms- You have a bunch in the 3 range.  Most consider this a poor use of points.  You can thread a complex form to 3 on the fly and with average rolling resist all of the fading from it.  Most people suggest to take fewer complex forms, and max the levels of the ones you take. Analyse, command, exploit, stealth, shield are all critical.  You might also want spoof and disarm.  Take them at 5.  Level 3 you can pull out of thin air.

Dump anything you have related to matrix combat.  You DO NOT want to do matrix combat.  Technomancers die in matrix combat.  If you are hacking thread your steath up as high as you can get it and use your now higher exploit to get in before they find you.  If you do run into IC that is what sprites are for.  A fault, paladin, or tank sprite should do the fighting while you use your shield (threaded if need be), do what you came to do, and get the heck out.  Matrix combat is for hackers, suckers, and dead technomancers.  Break up the cracking skill group and get rid of the matrix combat skill.  Use the points to get some more Hacking.  Drop Electronic Warfare to 1 to start with and get some more Hacking.  The only possible skill you should have that is higher than your Hacking might be Gunnery, and that is if you are a drone specialist.

I would also break up the tasking skill group.  Unless your campaign is going to feature a dissonance technomancer cult as the main villains the number of times that you will have to decompile an enemy sprite will be so rare that it just isn't worth spending the build points on.  If the situation does come up, you will find a fault sprite does an excellent job of decompiling the brute force way.  I would emphasize Compiling as your main tasking skill, and if short on points (and it always seems that technomancers are short on points) drop registering to 1 and raise it with karma.

Your armor choice is more than you can wear without having encumberance penalties.  See if there is any way you can scrape up another point of body.  I personally would drop your agility and raise your body.  You don't have any offensive skills that will call on agility.  When using gunnery on a drone or vehicle you will be using command+gunnery.

[wizard_of_ozzy]

@Baronspam: Thanks for the info! I'll be working on those things you mentioned.
@XelosUchiha: Yeah, I like the idea of sitting in a big van and doing some surveillance work similar to how you see FBI and police do it on TV.

[kirk]

Recommend dropping the sprites. They're much cheaper to produce during play, even compiling and registering. That'll free some more points.

The general recommendation around here is to pick a stream and a paragon.  Pick the stream based on your fading stat. Speaking of which...

Either your logic or your intuition is your fading stat. Consider hard capping it (to 6), but only if you've got the points. The other one can be set at 4.  Make your body 3 (or 1 if you dare). Odd body is good: physical damage track is 8 + half of body, rounded up.  Same principle for willpower, except it's also your living persona (aka bionode)'s firewall. That said, only another TM can hack your bionode. Some here will say you can and should reduce your agility and reaction, I'm mixed about it myself.

You have too many CFs. You can have a total of double your logic. You have 12.  You need six at rating six if you can: Exploit, Command, Stealth, Analyze, Disarm, Spoof. The thing to remember when deciding on forms is "how high do you need it to be?" If rating 5 is plenty (for example, data bomb) then don't bother -- you can thread it on the fly for very low risk.  The ones you pick up are going to be those you want to use at rating 8, 9, or more. The higher the base the less threading you need, and threading above your resonance risks physical damage from the fading test.

You need compile to have sprites. You need register to have registered sprites. Do not get decompile, it's a waste. Since you only need two, pay for them separately instead of as a group, it's cheaper. Also, you want this higher -- level 4. The higher it is, the more tasks you're likely to get (or higher sprite you'll get to work with).  The two at level 4 is 32, only 12 more than you already spent.

I personally like electronics at 4 - both computer and software show up in some of your hacking tasks, and hardware is also useful. Note that's personal preference, unlike some of the preceding.

On your drones, take a few minutes to look at the arsenal build rules -- don't forget to check the errata. A popular combination is to put a satellite uplink on all your work drones as well as one with you. That gives you a 400 km range. There are a few other very useful things, depending on what you want them to do for you. Lots of advice throughout this forum, just search drone modification and read what you find.

[baronspam]

I really, really like the shield CF from Unwired in addition to the list that Kirk gave.  It makes you very hard to hit in matrix combat.  With a 5 or 6 shield (and you should have your CFs as high as your resonance, the question is can  you find the 25 points for the 6 resonance) plus some threading you can damn near ignore IC or a spider, at least for a short time, finish what you need to do(or compile a sprite, or disarm their attack program, etc) and then make a quick retreat.

[UmaroVI]

Personally, I prefer relying on Mute and Paladin sprites for that. Shield isn't a terrible waste or anything, I've just never had the points to spare on it when making a technomancer.

[baronspam]

Personally, I prefer relying on Mute and Paladin sprites for that. Shield isn't a terrible waste or anything, I've just never had the points to spare on it when making a technomancer.

I agree that a Paladin sprite is a beautiful thing when it comes to keeping the badguys busy, but the thing I like about shield is that is always there.  The sprite is already fighting the IC, and the spider shows up?  Shield.  The sprite has used its last task, and things go sideways?  Shield.  The alarms are going off and its going to take a while to find the right file?  Shield.  Its like putting on the bullet proof vest before walking into the hot zone.  You hope you don't need it, but you are really glad its there if you do.

I do know what you mean about points being tight on a technomancer, however.  They have to be the tightest starting build at 400 build points.  Its one hard decision after another when you put one of these guys together.  Even finding enough points to be good as a hacker and still have drone skills is a challenge.  They suck in meatspace right out of chargen and they take alot of karma to really hit their full potential.  I suppose the eventual rewards are worth it.  With a boatload of karma they are the gods of the matrix.  But right out of the box they are hard to build and can be up a creek in an adventure without much matrix activity.

[wizard_of_ozzy]

Thanks to everybody for the great input, I really learned a lot! I took what everyone said into consideration and I really like how my character turned out.

[dysfunction]

forget about taking active skills for your complex forms, you can always default to your logic ability,
also, become a singularitian and base your fading on logic
take type o systems and get bio essence reduced by 50%, take cyberware, and make sure its under your bioware for it to be reduced by 50% - for a total reduction of only 1 essence you can get stacked.
 genetic optimization and cerebral boosters you can start with a logic of 10 - thats a total of 20 complex forms
 take genetic heritage for the free cerebral boosters
take resonance bond with a free sprite that has the credit ability for a free $100,000 each month
either have that same sprite have bioware echo or spend the 15 karma and pick it up, then thread any active soft skill you may need in meatspace.

jump in a drone, and you get to use all your matrix stats while running around in your drone since it counts as matrix environments
replace the arms of the medium drone your in with cyber arms and mod the crap out of them, because you are now richer than snot.

consider yourself an ultimate badass in both physical and virtual - easily kick the snot out of any street sam.

[JustADude]

Holy crap-monkeys... Dysfunction, dude, you just made me almost spray soda all over my monitor.

That's just insane that you can get as many Hacking dice defaulting to Logic 10 as you can with a Specialty and a 7-point skill.

However... good luck getting a GM to approve the Resonance Bond (Credit) angle... with 100,000¥ a month to play with, you could fund the whole team and still retire to a Luxury Lifestyle in 10 years without ever making a penny of profit on your 'runs.

[Ympulse]

That's just insane.

Dys, I'm not saying that this is the case for all GMs, but I personally would disallow that setup at my table. But kudos for the build, never thought about optimizing that hard for a Techno.

[UmaroVI]

Actually, you cannot default to Logic. You default to Complex Form - 1, if the skill is usable untrained.

Why buy Hacking when you can default to Logic?

For tests in the Matrix, a program or Matrix attribute is substituted for your regular attributes (Attributes in the Matrix, p.226, SR4A); when defaulting on Hacking, Computer, or most other skills in the Matrix, you default to (program rating – 1), not the normal linked attribute.

Grandma Moses has Computer 0 and Edit 6, and wants to touch up an old hologram of her late husband and the slitch he was banging. This is normally a Computer + Edit (2) Test, but since Grandma doesn’t have Computer her Skill defaults to Edit – 1, so she rolls 5 dice on the test.

[dysfunction]

same page you just quoted, only its in the optional rule box.
talks about using attributes the same way that spell casters use them.

your net hits are limited to complex form raiting, but a dice pool of 15 sure beats a dice pool of 7.
and statistically, and threshold-wise, a solid 5 beats a potential 7 in my books.