I've been leafing through the Runner's Companion, and noticed something interesting:

Pixies can be pretty effective.

A few of the ideas I came up with:

Power Puff: A pixie shaman gets +2 to both willpower and charisma, and a free point of magic. The concealment power and flight ability are nice, too. The low body might make soaking drain a bit tricky, but with a willpower of 7, it might not be such a big issue. The restriction to deltaware is not such a big deal for magicians, who will benefit from the reduced essence cost anyway.

Sneaky monkey: A pixie adept specialized in infiltration is a scary thought indeed. Miniscule size, innate flight, concealment, and huge bonuses to agility make for a character that is nearly impossible to see, yet capable of using such silent weapons as a DMSO squirtgun or taser with the same effectiveness as any other character. Of course, there's a good chance that the pixie could simply sneak up on a guard and stab him in the thigh with a hypo of anasthetic, knocking him out safely and silently.

And, my favorite of the lot:

Super Sentai: A pixie rigger sounds pretty silly - the quadruple cost of delta cyber combined with the negation of magical ability appears be a deal-killer. However, while rigging, the pixie's small size and fragility become a non-issue, while the large bonuses to reaction and agility are very useful indeed.

Furthermore, pixies' small size means that they can actually use most drones as vehicles. A pixie rigging a troll-sized anthroform drone from inside the drone itself will have huge strength, tremendous toughness, incredible armor-plating, and, if I read some of the rigger min-maxing threads right, up to five initiative passes.

In other words, you have a character with all the power of a cyberzombie. However, unlike (most) cyberzombies, the pixie can leave its' body entirely, allowing it to easily pass through security checkpoints (who's going to look at a control rig?), or even escape from dangerous situations in some sort of rocket-powered ejector seat.

my first reaction after reading the thread title, was writing something about trolls being able to stuff them where the sun doesn't shine . . now not so much any more O.o
if you can get a dart-rifle in that size, they would make the perfect assassin too, as they can get up to anywhere to shoot their darts with venom from.

Tricky?
Now that's understatement...good luck getting decent armor with softmaxed BOD 2, even with all the stuff from Arsenal and magical help.


But besides that, yes, you're totally right, they can really excell at spellslinging, rigging and especially stealth.
However, just keep in mind what anybody here on DS would say if he saw a character of another race build with BOD2.
That evens out a lot of the advantages pixies get.

Yeah, pixies are really powerful, if you don't plan on getting hit. I don't know how exactly I would go about making any sort of pixie character, but it could be fun.

Also, so you know, everything is limited to four IPs, nothing can have more. Nitpicking, I know. It's a weakness.

Unwired introduced options for hackers and technomancers that explicitly state that they allow the character to exceed the "four passes" cap spelled out in the basic rules.

Since we're nit-picking, Matrix IP can go as high as 5 with the right stuff from Unwired. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Edit: Damn! Just beaten. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Not everything. There are, however, other issues with going that route.

Quicker than you though! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Oh, my bad. I haven't read Unwired yet.

Having more than 5 passes seems kinda silly, but whatever. I doubt any of my PC hackers will live long enough! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

The fifth pass was basically to stop adept hackers from typing faster than a mundane hacker could think.

also, the pixie magician doesn't get a free point of magic. if they buy the magician quality, they start at 1 just like everyone else.

Pixies are the classic glass cannon archtype. They have a lot of power and ability and can excel at many things, but they always have to be aware that they can be taken out handily by things that would only be moderately threatening to tougher characters.

It's actually a lot easier than you think to take out a small target. The transportation specialist in my game is keenly aware of this: he's lost something like twelve thousand nuyen in microdrones.

I'll give you a hint. It starts with an "a" and ends with "rea of affect."

"I hit the target"

"Which one?"

"All of them."

This is why I like the idea of a rigger so much.

All you need to do is put the pixie rigger inside an armored cylinder - it would only need to be about 6" in diameter x 20" in length, smaller than many rockets.

Put the armored cylinder inside a small but heavily armored drone.

Having a body of 2 is no big deal if you're walking around inside a suit of troll-sized power armor that's rated against anything short of a tac-nuke.

Could you put pixie cyborgs in smaller drones? I don't think RAW says anything about it either way, but logically that barbie-doll brain should have no problem fitting in just about anything.

to bad it has no effect what so ever on data searches...

There fixed the quote for you.

Having it protected from the outside, still leaves it vulnerable to the armor taking damage from full auto fire, explosives, and crash tests. Crashes would be the worst, because the armor value wouldn't help the Pixie out.

Pixie adept hackers/riggers are all kinds of awesome. I might even work one out to replace the Technomancer idea I was planning for an offline Shadowrun game I'm occasionally playing in.

Did everyone forget the uneducated flaw that they come with for free?

SR4, 83, "Characters with the Uneducated quality are considered “unaware� in Technical, Academic Knowledge, and Professional Knowledge skills they do not possess (see Skill Ratings, p. 106), and they may not default on skill tests for those skills."
...
"Additionally, the Karma cost for learning new skills or improving existing ones in these categories is twice normal (including at character creation), and the character may never learn skill groups belonging to these categories."

For those who forgot, technical skills important to riggers/hackers are, armorer, all the mechanics, computer, cyber combat, cybertech, data search, demolitions, e warfare, hacking, hardware, medicine, and software. Paying DOUBLE for all of these skills will kill you. Especially since you can't pick up skill groups. Not to mention no defaulting on anything you don't know about, and GMs can make you roll for tests that other people don't have to.

That's why you make the pixie a Technomancer. Resonance skills are not effected by Uneducated. This may require plying your GM with alcohol and pizza.

There are two ways to accomplish this, the RAW legal way and the not-insane way.

RAW-legal: Take some essence loss at chargen. For a pixie, this can be accomplished three ways; you can the Genetic Heritage Quality - which costs essence according to the devs - this should be possible if your GM is very drunk and you have a really good story about being born in a corporate research lab; you can take the Mysterious Implant Quality and convince your GM to give you something that costs essence, this should be possible with a good story and sufficient alcohol; or you can take the Addiction Quality at Burnout level. Your second step really depends on your GM. Both interpretations are valid, since the rules don't actually cover this situation. With a plyable GM, you can now simply take the Technomancer Quality and buy up your Resonance; with a stickler GM you will have to take the Latent Technomancer Quality and wait to awaken to the Resonance in game - if you have to go the Latent route, you don't need to take the Essence Loss at chargen, but it can speed things up. With this method, you also need to convince your GM that your Pixie doesn't lose the Sapience Power along with all of the other magical powers it possesses. The Devs say that it doesn't, but by RAW it does. It is just a small unforseen problem with the way the Critter Powers system interacts with the Magic Rating system.

The Lot-Quite-Legal way is to convince your GM that the prohibition of having Magic and Ressonance at the same time only applies to characters with Awakened Qualities, and does not apply to those with natural Magic Ratings

No, they forsaw the pixie being really good as a non-physical character because of her low physical stats and limited her? Say it isn't so!

Of course you can always buy off the flaw for 20BP which means that it certainly isn't undoable.

But still, the pixie suddenly seems like a very fun character to develop.

Actually, their agility, reaction, and intuition bonuses mean that Pixies also make great samurai, assuming that you can get the deltaware or talk your GM into using the Crome Critters optional rule. A Pixie can effectively be faster and more accurate than any other race, excepting characters who spam the attribute max increasing Qualities and geneware.

I might point out that a hold-out pistol is the pixie eqivalent of a shotgun. You wouldn't be doing much damage.

Buying off uneducated for 20BP is totally worth it.