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[StealthSigma]

This is something that has explicitly bothered me after reading this thread. I'm looking for insightful feedback, not aggressive feedback, about the concerns that I have based on my perceptions.

From what I understand, in SR3 Riggers used to have their own rule set and could really only affect each other. They were safe from Deckers. In moving to SR4, rules were essentially condensed into one of three major categories, meat space, magical, and matrix. As such, Rigger then got lumped into the same rule set as dedicated Deckers. The comforting factor is that vehicle or drone which a Rigger is jumped into is immune to hacking. I've also been lead to believe there are two types of riggers, the drone rigger and the vehicle rigger. If you're of the vehicle rigger (who can drive anything on the planet), this thread isn't for you. You can already move into other roles easily enough. This is to express my concerns over a drone rigger.

First, I thought I should describe my definition of a Drone Rigger. A Drone Rigger fulfills other roles in the team through his drones. He provides combat ability through his drones. He provides first aid through his drones. A Drone Rigger can fulfill any role through which you can get an Activesoft. That is the basis for my definition of the Drone Rigger. Add onto this an ability to effectively drive vehicles.

Second, I consider a core competent character to be able to fulfill it's archetype without reliance on other PCs or NPCs and without positive or negative qualities. This is very important. If a character needs to take negative qualities to fulfill its core competency, something is wrong with the archetype. The negative qualities I view as a way to offset positive qualities as well as pull in some more BP to use on ancillary skills, contacts, or edge.

This leads to my first major concern. The Drone Rigger is extremely vulnerable to Deckers due to combining both Archetypes into the same rules and allowing them to affect each other. This means that unless the Drone Rigger only brings one drone into an area and is constantly jumped into it, his armada of drones is vulnerable to any individual with the ability to hack. This in turn leads to a Drone Rigger being required to actively defend his drones, or rely on the drones firewall which can eventually be breached by a Decker. Even worse, the Drone Rigger could be reliant on having a dedicated Decker in the team to deal with other Deckers so the Drone Rigger doesn't have to. Chances are the dedicated Decker is likely to be more skilled than the Drone Rigger and it will very likely be a losing battle for the Drone Rigger.

My second major concern with Drone Riggers compared to other archetypes is their overall cost. You already know that with so many drones, Activesofts, vehicles, and augmentations you will be running a high bill at character creation. I tend to assume that Drone Riggers will run very close to the 250,000:nuyen: limit on character creation. Can you fit a core competent rigger in 350 BP? All the appropriate stats, skills, contacts, and edge? Compare this to about any other archetype. So you spend 250,000:nuyen: on augments for your street sammy. Are you at risk of having large portions of that cost being nullified, stolen, or destroyed by one single archetype? Even if you spend 250,000:nuyen: on materials for your magician, do you have to ever worry about permanent losing those spells because of what another character does? Even so, you will probably find that you can easily fulfill the core competency of most other archetypes within 350BP.

My third major concern. Due to my second major concern, it causes using non-humans to be a detriment to fulfilling the Drone Rigger's core competency. Dwarf is the only metatype which provides any bonuses that are useful to rigging, which is just +1 willpower. The other meta-types do not provide any meaningful contribution to the archetype. So you're hurting yourself by limiting the BP which you have to fulfill your core competency. This leads to Trolls, Elves, and Orks being highly undesirable towards Drone Rigger, which humans being the best suited for the archetype. I tend to view races in an open ended character creation to be a style opportunity, where any race should be capable of performing the archetype good from character creation. Due to concern #2, I don't see a Drone Rigger as an archetype that is open to every race.

My fourth major concern. The juggling act you have to do between skills and gear in order to fulfill your core competency. If you want to repair your drones, you either have the mechanic skills yourself, get a skill wire with activesofts, get drones with the activesofts, or take the drones in to an NPC for repair. The 1st option is the most expensive, BP wise, but it doesn't eat into your resources. The 2nd and 3rd options eat into your resources, thus limiting your drone pool variety. The 4th option requires you to spend BP on a contact. Options 2-4 likely will cost similar in BP. Now to make sure I fully articulate why I see this as a problem. You have to juggle these options to meet your core competency. This isn't deciding how you want to deal with repairing your drones, this becomes a matter of fitting your core competency in 350BP + 250,000:nuyen: in resources. This is completely ignoring the detriment of my third concern.

My fifth major concern. To make a core competent Drone Rigger you should not need to take In Debt or Born Rich just to make sure you can cover your costs.

All of these concerns together lead me to a conclusion that the Drone Rigger is not a self-sufficient archetype within the constraints of a run as well has having huge weaknesses that make up for their versatility and power. In turn, when compared to other archetypes the Drone Rigger requires a much higher upfront investment, both in BP and nuyen than other mundane archetypes, and is at best on comparable BP/nuyen investments as awakened characters, which are considerably less vulnerable than the Drone Rigger. The rules changes to lump everything into one of a few categories has lead to opening up the Drone Rigger to considerable weakness without adequately providing some compensation to mitigate that weakness, or make the build cheaper. The only way for a Rigger to mitigate the risk from hackers or other riggers is to utilize one drone and constantly be jumped into it.