I'm running my new campagin and my rigger player is concerned that the rigger can't do much. Without dusting off the MIJI rules, what can a rigger do? By my understanding the rigger is great at combat, surveilance and uh, DRIVING. The archertypeal "sits his meatbod in the battlewagon all run" really limits player interaction. If there isn't a car chase every session, whats a rigger to do? Nearly any corpsec badge will put two and two together and reach Shadowrunners! if there is an unfamilar Steel Lynx driving down the hallway, so my player imagines even physical intrusion is a loosing bet. What can I do to keep the rigger engaged?

depends on the rigger. The rigger-isc person in my campaign has made a wonderful driving platform to have meetings in forr the team. The drones are f*ng great for additional combat platforms, ramming, eves dropping, etc. The list goes on. A friend of mine made a list of top 20 uses for a drone. number 11 was using the largest drone you have, makes a damn good battery ram. I dont remember the other 19 of them.


The limits are based on their imageination.


dog

Your rigger and hacker can be the same thing in SR4 due to skill groups. You can even have your TM as a rigger if you want. VCR does not a rigger make.

make him go out on the run with the rest of the group with his gadgets, if he doesnt spend all his time in VR, he can contribute alot. Riggers can control thier toys through AR now.

Combat. Driving. Surveillance, which I'll go into more detail about.

Surveillance with small drones. Spiderdrones are good for this, as are tiny rotodrones.

Well, this particular player has some concerns that a rigger should be an NPC because he feels the rigger is left out of the 'roleplaying' aspect. Hovering outside will do that. It didn't help that the first mission I ran was from the quickstart guide (playing SR3) and that doesn't have much for the rigger to do. If its not a car chase or a fire fight he thinks he'll just be watching the rest of the team play.

This Player pitched the idea of a rigger/face with corp contacts. We really haven't delved to deeply into any of the PCs backgrounds yet.

I believe the key skills he has are car/vthrust/rotocraft all at 5 and a VCR-2,
Stats B:3 Q:4 S:3 C:5 I:5 W:5 and some social skills.

Look into drones that he can send along with the infiltration crew and handwave away the oddity of getting a signal through 100 yards of reinforced concrete structure.

A well-build rigger can go inside with the rest of the team and handle technology. He´ll likely need a bit of protection by the teams samurai.

One drone network can stand guard outside and secure a means of exit. Command chair mode will be sufficient most of the time, and most facilities will not run broadband-jammers due to complains of neighboring facilities.

Espionage drones are the best candidate for first entering a secured room. Their loss is somewhat more acceptable than the loss of a team member. It helps giving him a role in combat if information relay is handled by the rules. That needs players who are able to disregard information their characters don´t have while deciding how to act. If you have a group of that kind, the rigger will often be asked for directions.

Just have the team do a run against a facility with a sec rigger. They will really want their own rigger then.

And send drones against the team, they'll like to have a rigger who can jam or attempt to take them over.

Counter surveillance.

Riggers are also the characters who usually have the biggest/most facilities. This guy could be the group's quartermaster, storing the gear and issuing what's appropriate for each run.

If his social skills are decent, he could also serve as equipment-procurement guy, a couple of smuggler contacts for him to get what's needed, whereas other face-types would be more of the information-gathering/job-hunters.

I always liked the idea of the "eye in the sky" character who relays tactical information in real-time, but it's kind of redundant for the player in an RPG because usually, every player can hear the GM. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who had done this and made it fun for the player.

I enjoy playing my Rigger. YMMV.

~J

if you find the rigger is too limited, you can have him expand into decking. there are problems with trying to rig and deck, mostly related to the fact that rigging and decking, as of SR3, are based on completely divergent technologies that catch fire if they're not kept seperated. if you don't like that, you might consider this list of homebrew equipment and operations; they're designed to make rigging and decking compatible by adding to the existing rules, rather than changing them.

Eh? I mean, sure they're completely different technologies, but aside from the woefully misguided Riggers and the Matrix ruling on P28, Matrix, what makes them catch fire if mixed?

~J

mainly the fact that you can't easily flip back and forth between them, or use one in conjunction with the other (decking over your rigger network, rigging over your Matrix connection, using crypto from one on the other, etcetera). and the rules for the one point at which they converge--controlling a drone or CCSS via a cyberdeck--are incomplete, unclear, and uses terms that don't exist anywhere else in the game.

I glanced over the list, but I didn't see anything regarding encryption. For now I'll have to punt on deeper thoughts about the list, as I've got a circuit that isn't designing itself.

~J

oh, i didn't do anything with encryption in that. that was gonna be a submission for SOTA:65, so changing the rules would have likely been out of the question. i'm just saying what i would do with encryption.

Fair enough. Any thoughts on what you'd do with it?

~J

Wasn't there a piece of hardware in either The Matrix, Cannon Companion, Man and Machine, or Rigger 3 that was to be used to make it possible to control rigged vehicles through your deck? (I'm nowhere near my third edition stuff, sorry to be so vague)

Its in Rigger 3, p. 95 System-Control Rig Emulator.

The problem with decking is my player I Rabidly opposed have a PC decker. I think a decker killed his father once, or something. He thinks deckers are all but unplayable. (This player has significantly more RP and SR experince than I do, but almost exclusively in SR2. Of course I also can't order him to play something he dosen't want to.)

Even if the rigger doesn’t take his meat (and in SR4 there is still no compelling reason why he should, although your mention of MIJI makes me assume your talking SR3) he can still interact with the team plenty, he has a physical presence in the form of his drones which should all include audio capability so he can chat with the other players,

During the legwork faze of the run he is more involved than a pure Sammy and could take skills or contacts to do non rigger tasks at times.

During the physical insertion phase of the run he should be able to insert several small drones with the party (except on the rare occasion that there is strong jamming) the steal lynx drone for example is highly effective combat machine (1-1 more than a mach for a starting Sammy)

Buy mediating coms and tracking party positions, as well as being the most frequent user of small unit tactics the rigger although not present in the meat is able to role play at every section of an insertion, even in 2 places simultaneously.


If your rigger is built as a vehicle rigger, without drones, communications gear or the SMUT skill then he is in trouble, having chosen to focus only on one aspect of a riggers activities you can hardly complain that you don’t get a lot of action during the game.


Combining rigger with another concept is also a good idea but in SR3 I would not recommend Decker, riggers are one of the most cash intensive archetypes in the game, the other is the Decker, finding both to the point of usefulness is almost imposable. Just the cost of drones and programs is excessive, even if you house rull a deck that combines the 2 without much increases in cost.

Maybe the issue is more about overspecialization than riggers.

Riggerdeckers are more feasible than you think. Sure they're pricey as all hell, but no other archetype has the power to command the fees that Riggers and Deckers do (Mages come close).

~J

Yea, I'm Using SR3, and I think the biggest problem was that I was running the quickstart mission, and its rigger light. I think I've resoved that problem. This weeks mission has many chances for the rigger to rig. I'm currently concerned about his 2 Ares Guardians. 12 Vehicle armor and a Turreted MMG? So nothing short of arming the bad guys with AV ammo or RPGs will do the Job? That seems a bit out of order.

Remember that he still needs to get the MMG separately—the drone just comes with the turret.

Apart from that, you're discovering why I say Riggers have awe-inspiring fee-commanding power. Just keep the Ares Sentinel P in mind.

~J

During most of our team operations we have a Condor on a high orbit over the operation zone sending a continuous aerial view down to the team on a tight beam. This view is sent into the team leader's Orientation System and/or Tactical Computer. Constantly updated visual feed across all the available electromagnetic spectra gives a hellava bonus to the team even without the Tactical Computer.

The other trick we used was to equip a few of our helo drones with a set of grips and stirrups to enable a fast extraction of our snipers/rooftop observers.