Teh Riggar N00b plz, AKA: Oh my god, so many acronyms Options

[Dissonance]

Heh. Well, I've got Rigger 3 coming to my doorstep in approximately two days ago, as Rigging in general is just freaking awesome. It combines my love of fast things with things that can shoot. I've only got just a slight issue with all of it. That being that I've got no damn clue what to do with all the stuff. The info in SR3 seems a bit.. well... Difficult to understand in one sitting, to say the least. Given that everything is so situational that the TN for even the most basic tests could have at the very least 10 modifiers.

To simplify, are there any good.. like.. Rigging handbooks/tests/tutorials out there that could help me get my feet wet? Also, if I were to make one, would I want to go for vehicle rigging or drone rigging at first? Both seem equally scary as hell.

PS: 5 Essence and 300 kay for a VCR3? Cripes. Cyberzombie plz.

[Ancient History]

High-grade cyberware is the rigger's friend.

Seriously, what's your problem? Rigging a vehicle and a few drones at the same time, or a security system, or a gang of heavily-modified trolls or what? Ve need more informatcia to proceede!

Although I do warn you against trying to rig a missle.

[Dissonance]

Heh. I guess my problem is that I only know a very small part of the game. I'm a relative nooblar, and the only thing I know really well is decking, basic firearms use, as well as most basic spellcasting/summoning/banishing. Rigging has a whole slew of stuff I just don't know anything about, and for some reason, it's not wanting to sink in, like it's some kind of mental block stopping me from learning how to do crap. I'm looking for something like a Rigger FAQ or Walkthrough or something.

Heh, it's like being back in school all over again.

[Lilt]

Well, for a start most starting characters (AFAIK) would go for a VCR2 over a 3, possibly upgrading 3 in the future once the cash is really flowing. Apart from that all you really need is a datajack and you're set cyber-wise (although I think some people were saying that a VCR implant includes a datajack). For the rest of your gear you might want to consider a main vehicle (a big van is the usual route), a few drones (The steel-lynx and LS-Strato 9 are the most powerful that starting characters can get) for combat purposes, and some remote control gear with electronic warfare equipment. The Battletac IVIS system is nice if you can afford it (but you probably can't).

[spotlite]

honestly, the best advice I ever got for rigging was to take the time and if necessary the expense to photocopy/scan in all the tables and put them in a semblance of order that makes sense to you. You'll end up with about 10 pages, which you can stick in plastic wallets or laminate and use as reference. All you have to do then is know which test applies to which situation, which is not that hard as they all have linking names like 'accelleration test modifiers' and so on.

and make SURE to read the opening chapters of the rigger book thoroughly, most of it is in game info which everyone agrees was extremely useful in seeing how the various bits of kit and rules interact. Its a good book, you won't regret buying it. If you have problems taking it all in, just read the bits you're interested in and ignore all the optional rules for the time being, regardless of how freakin' kewl they are (in my opinion anyway. Gotta love EDs...)

[Dissonance]

Kay. It's all just a whole lot of crap to digest in one sitting. I haven't even gotten Rigger 3 yet, so I'm not really decided on which way I wanna go yet. That, and I don't actually OWN Man and Machine. I ask my buddy what some stuff does, or check NSRCG to see what it does. So a lot of the crap out there confuses me as to what it even is.

Also, should I go toward the drone route or the car route? Or, at least, which would be easier at first? And I should fix my own stuff too, and not have to rely on some greasy guy named Vito to bang the dents out of my cars? Model my crap after the sample characters in SR3?

Also, someone told me you could supercharge a dodge scoot into breaking the sound barrier. Is that true?

[sable twilight]

[spotlite]

Dissonance - one thing: there is no 'right' way.

For ease of play, obviously sticking with one vehicle is the way to go, maybe take some appropriate BR skills. Your rigger gear compensates reasonably for any skill deficiency on a specific vehicle most times.

But you should consider the type of character that most appeals, and by the sounds of it, thats a souped up hotrod bike or car loaded with guns (you won't get many) and tasty electronics. That's cool. That can be an exhilarating character to play. If that's what you feel comfortable with do it. If you take some other vehicle skills as well, then if you want to pick up a drone or ten later you can. I'd buy yourself a spotter drone though - they're cheap and indispensible.

hth.

EDIT: and there are types of missle you can rig, and torpedoes as well, There is an autocut off within a few seconds before impact so you avoid dumpshock - it just shunts you back to captains chair.

[Dissonance]

Ah. I could get a nice pickup truck, or something like a Westwind. And become.. Er...

STEVE RACER.

Of course, this would involve painting a giant five on the hood of the car, and getting a monogramed shirt. Actually, aircraft might be a good idea. We've got some trade zone issues. There's something like 13 different nations right close to each other, and border crossing is a real pain in the ass. Go go smuggling! Well, I'll wait it out, look at Rigger 3, and end up stuffing a propeller up a Steel Lynx's tailpipe so mages can't levitate it.

[hobgoblin]

full on vehicle combat may be nasty but drones use the normal combat rules, just replace character movement stat with the drones acceleration (this actualy work with any other vehicle to).

its insanely fun having the car act as a oversized drone (stuff in a remote control unit) and haveing it open doors, provide cover fire and god knows what else if drek hits the fan :silly:

[Moonstone Spider]

I'd say find out the following first:

See if the GM plays using the optional MIJI rules. That allows riggers to attack each other's networks and steal control of each other's drones, which can either make you rich or put you in the poorhouse in a few combat turns.

See if the GM allows custom designed vehicles. A lot of the best stuff (Such as most of the robotic options) is never used in the R3 vehicles, in truth most of them are rather generic and boring.

Remember that your VCR does a lot, not only does it reduce all your TNs by it's rating, it acts like wired reflexes giving you more reaction and initiative die when rigging. However most of a VCR's bonuses don't apply when handling multiple vehicles at once, Since Reaction is the most important attribute for riggers, a reaction booster is the other cyberware that will help you most.

Buy extra armor for your vehicles at startup. As much as you can afford to have on your main vehicle. Unless the opposition has a AV weapons, every point of vehicle armor counts as 2 points vs. their weaponry, and using the Vehicle damage rules if you have just 5 points of vehicular armor every single SMG, Pistol, and Rifle (aside from Snipers) are about as useful as throwing a tomato.

You can do tons of fun stuff with mechanical arms. One of my favorite drones is a Condor Mini-Blimp with Strength 6 Mechanical arms and Ruthenium polymers. It can do anything a shadowrunner can do, and it can fly up there to do it. Who needs Grappling hooks when it can carry a rope up and tie it? For that matter who needs a sniper when it can carry a rifle and have a nearly-invisible sniper hovering 50 meters above the ground where no sniper could possible be?

[Dissonance]

Wow. Ruth and sniper rifle. This is the kind of crap that I should learn. I mean, that's really clever.

Can I rig a Felix the Synthcat to have a heavy pistol pop out of its spine?

I didn't know what MIJI was until just now, and I've got the feeling that the majority of GMs I deal with on an irregular basis don't, either. I need to find me a stable online GM and a stable running team. All this constant switching around can't be good for my heart. Heh.

[Moonstone Spider]

Most people don't play with the MIJI rules, they turn a rigger into a decker, in the sense that everybody else sits around for 5 minutes while the GM handles a rigger-only battle.

Also to improve mechanical arms even more, you can add any piece of cyberware except strength/Quickness boosters to them (My blimp has a Smartlink 2). And they can have strength up to 10 times the drone's body. You can imagine the power of maxed-out cyberarms holding a katana, or equipped with spurs.

I don't know who Felix the Synthcat is but you can purchase a popup microturret capable of holding any weapon up to the size of an assault rifle for any drone with 1 or more body, but check to make sure you have enough CF. Availability is a bit wonky on turrets so get your GM to houserule on them (Some versions of R3, including mine, have a turret availability in the 200s range!)

[Dissonance]

Seriously? Just one body can hold it? Oh. Felix the Synthcat is a drone from Sprawl Survival. It's a mechanical pet. There's also stuff like vaccuum cleaners and robotic butlers.

[moosegod]

Felix might be able to carry it.

Unfortunately, SSG is in my room, not here.

[Lantzer]

I'd looked into the possibility once. I _think_ my result was that Felix could mount an external firmpoint, but not anything better.

At any rate, I couldn't get a petbot to carry anything concealed at the time.

Now that street-cleaning drone... I want a few of those...

[Lilt]

Sadly a synthcat can't be mounted with any form of weaponary. That would require a Cargo rating of at-least 1, the synthcat has no internal space left with Cargo 0, although you could be creative by replacing its teeth with sharp ones that include a poison resevoir.

[Dissonance]

Aw. Damn. Well, how about making a bike or scooter break the sound barrier? And if I do that, are there any weird rules? Like... Roll body to prevent my skin from flying off?

[lodestar]

My best word of advice for a sarting rigger is to be cautious starting out. Contrary to what many might say, a rigger is at his best in the get away where drones and vehicles on overwatch can stay hidden until they need to be used in a more proactive manner. Most corps and security outfits like Lonestar can dish out some heavy duty firepower when it comes to armed response if they think they're going up against an army of drones. Secondly drones perform incredibly poor against most types of spirits so don't tip your hand until you know what an opposing mage or shaman is up to. In particular a spirit's accident power can be devastating against vehicles. Dumpshock is particularly nasty for a rigger so an entire drone network can be taken out with one lucky hit. While drones might be relatively cheap goodies you kit them out with particularly aren't, especially if you aren't able to recover a damaged one. While drones are a big combat multiplier be careful with them! You can always replace your runner buddies but its expensive to replace your babies. ;)

[Dissonance]

True. Friggin spirits. Of course, that's why you make friends with the gal with 10 charisma with ubar banish power numbah one. Heh.

So, a coupla steel lynxes are good to start with... But shouldn't I get some of the floating kind, too? Like, for the bastards that wanna levitate my stuff.

Also, someone once told me that there's some kind of software that lets you use a drone as a spotter for your other stuff. This person told me that this was also absurdly expensive. Can I get any details on this, as I lack Rigger 3. For now.

Also, are mortars fun? They look fun.

[Moonstone Spider]

Spirits really aren't that big a deal if you're rigged. Your VCR reduces the TN for a crash test by double it's rating (combat situation) AND the rigger can throw in Control Pool die, so a VCR3 rigger with a TN of 12 can throw 12 die with TN 6 and almost certainly make it out okay. Also don't tell the mages, but you can do nasty things to spirits with drones. In games a while back we houseruled that pistol-sized weapons count as .5 turret space (Reasonable since a rifle takes up 1 and no information is given for smaller weapons) so I put a miniturret on a UAV and put 4 Tazers on it, as soon as a spirit materialized to cause me trouble it pretty much had a 100% chance of dying (Yeah, Tazers are really short-ranged but UAVs are quite fast.)

Honestly I'd suggest you don't get Steel Lynxes right off. The fact is if you take the Stratos-9 (On-Board MMG) and Steel Lynx drones (Armor 9, any non-AV weapon requires power 20+ to have any chance of inflicting damage) you'll be game-breakingly powerful compared to most other Archetypes. And then people will call you a munchkin, aside from which the GM will be forced to send Tanks after you.

Here's a few of the drones I think are particularly useful on a Shadowrun:

Citroen Brouillard
Smoke Screens can be incredibly useful when you want to escape pursuit, keep the camera from seeing you, or just stop that pesky mage from levitating your stuff. . .

GM Doberman
Kind of the Steel Lynx light, it gives you good firepower and defense without making the Street Samurai cry from weapon envy or causing people to call you a munchkin. And at 10,000Y less you can buy three of them for the price of 1 steel lynx.

Condor Series Miniblimp:
Just because I like blimps. And because with suncell it runs forever, it's got such a high sig only godlike sensors can detect it, and with mechanical arms you can cause no end of trouble opening windows at 40 stories up and such.

Stratos-9
This falls in the same catagory as the Steel Lynx, much too powerful, especially since it comes with a weapon bigger than anybody is allowed to have at Chargen. However it's also one of the few drones with sensor 5 and when you want to spy on something that's hard to beat. See if your GM will give you a price break on it if you trade in the MMG for a more reasonable Ingram Valiant.

Pratt and Whitney Sundowner
It's cheap, it's fast, and if you've got some good chemistry skills/connections it can really hand a lot of people their own heads fast by deploying clouds of nerve gas, knockout gas, Gasoline (And then toss an match on that incoming street gang for instant barbecue) or even laughing gas if you want to, you know, get some laughs. It's just fun to play with a chemical delivery system.

Ares Guardian
It's somewhat pricey but it's got an ungodly armor 12 and sensors 4 to boot. Add in it's mini-turret and you've got a nice T-Bird drone.

Renraku Arachnoid Minidrone/Kanmushi Crawler
It looks like a spider and can go anywhere a spider can? You simply can't top these when it comes to spying on people.


Incidentally I play with a group online every sunday at 7:30PM EST, Terraghis usually wants more people in his games than we have so I'm sure you could fit in somewhere.

[Lilt]

For areal stuff most people choose the Lone Star Strato-9 although many say that it's too powerful for what it does (IIRC by canon you do get the MMG with it).

Another of my fave drones is the Ferret RPD-IV, it has Pilot 3 and sensors 4 so it can largely act on its own, and it's cheap at only 18k. Its weakness is that it's slow but a level or two of engine customization can fix that. Wifh 4CF and 50 load you can stick 5pts of armor and a pop-up microturret on it and still have 20kg and 3cf for other toys.

If you really do want a stealthy floater I'd recommend a mini-blimp, go for the expencive one (with 2 more pts of armor) as it has loads more cargo space for toys and a better pilot. (and is faster, and has a larger battery capacity) Sadly you can only fit 1 mechanical arm on, and only on the expencive one taking up the full CF, but you could make a mini-blimp from scratch with two on.

The ares guardian is nice, but I've recently learnt that it's been eratted to availability 11, making it out-of-bounds for starting characters by the standard (avail 8 max) rules.

The Northrup Yellowjacket and Wasp are interesting choices. They are normal helicopters but can doubble as areal support or automated drop-off units for when your street-sam needs on top of a building. The yellowjacket F has a micro-turret that you can put to good use with a sniper rifle or HMG. We've house-ruled that sniper rifles have the 1.5 weapon value, 2 for the barett, rather than the 1 listed for rifles. If it shoots HMG rounds from a longer barell then why shouldn't it have the same (or higher) weapon value?

[Dissonance]

Whoa. Big words. But definately a thread I'm gonna save for later. This is the goodness of stuff that is good. Drones are fun, especially ones that make shooting things easy and fun. I'll have to not get the uber stuff, though. Lest I make it a little too easy on myself.

But for my next trick, I need some transportation. Now, I've heard that the armor rules are a little bit schtooped, in that you can blow up cars too easily. So armor isn't really my thing right now. I want speed. I want something that can break, like, 1000 meters per turn or something, because sometimes a little bit of excessive speed is good for a guy.

[Accel]

Considering favorites (and since my main character is a rigger I know what I'm talking about) I'd like to throw in the most versatile drone ever:

Buy yourself some MCT-Nissan Roto-Drones!

They are cheap, they are sturdy (at least, for a drone) and they are highly configurable.

I use two of these as the cavalry, added a microturret, some armour, smart-integration, recoil-adjustment, and thermographic to the sensors and put a smart drum-fed AS-7 (the little man's Panther!) with an underbarrel infrared flashlight in each of them.

I configured another Roto-Drone as rapid-escape vehicle, tuning the engine to max load and adding a multi-cable winch, when one job required a very fast exfiltration of other team-member from "hostile territory". Its much better than ultralights are, because of it's L/T-Profile and ease of use (if everybody wears climbing harnesses, it's a matter of seconds)

It might even serve as recon platform, retrans/C3I unit, though I prefer the LDSD-41 blimp over a Roto-Drone in these functions, despite it's high price tag.

[lodestar]

I was talking more about your drones when in captains chair mode. A single spirit can make a mess of a group of drones. (Especially if the GM is nasty enough to make the drones run into each other.) Not to mention a spirit's movement power...

Lastly watch out for a shaman using a spirit's search power, It really sucks having someone find your meatform when you're concentrating on rigging.