Gonna play this in a game soon. I'd like to know what you might have done different, and why.

http://www.geocities.com/starmage21/docs/d...dronerigger.xls

btw, the sheets a little crowded. It looks better if you look at it in print preview.

just a note, you may have better luck getting response if you had the character in a format other than an excel spreadsheet, due to security concerns.

FWIW You might get a better response if you post the actual stats here, rather than requiring folk to download your file.

As for the stats themselves: I would be cautious about leaving any attributes at 1. It's bound to come back and bite you in the arse.
An agility of 5 seems rather wasted, and I would put it in reaction instead.

You need to specify which kind of tool kit you've bought, and putting a silencer on a hand gun firing ex-ex ammo is somewhat self defeating, depending on your GM. Whether you need multiple copies of your autosofts for seperate drones is another GM call. I would be inclined to put in any vision augmentation (perception mods) you can fit in your eyes, as they can be very useful. Personally I never bother paying for multiple months of lifestyle in advance, as you ought to make enough to live on from running, and depending on how evil your gm is, you may need to abandon your lifestyle anyway.

I disagree with the idea of not leaving attributes at 1, especially for mundanes like this char, since they don't have to blow karma on initiating and binding foci. An attribute score of 3 is rarely appreciably better than a score of 1 when you're stuck defaulting to begin with. It's nice to have a chance to score a hit at all, true, but that 1 or 2 dice simply isn't going to come through often enough to warrant 10 or 20 bp. I'd much rather see him leave Charisma at 1 and maybe pick up first impression. Then he could just spend his first 10 karma on bumping up charisma to 2 and picking up Etiquette. It's very cost effective and you really only have to survive 1 or two runs without dying due to your lack of manners to get there. Heck, I wouldn't even mind seeing him drop strength to 1 and picking stealth skill group either. He could even ditch his Tres Chic clothing for just plain old Chic and afford a Chameleon suit to go along with his 5 agility and newfound infiltration dice.

It doesn't pay for multiple copies of auto softs, but as far as I can tell he has payed for multiple pilots and multiple firewalls, you may have I haven't checked the math but I'm assuming not due to the other portions of the software category are only purchased once. And personally that is how I'd do it, you pay for a pilot for each drone(possibly each type) and a firewall for each drone but autosofts are copyable.

CHA 1? Everyone is going to hate you.

The AGI seemed a little high. But overall, it seems like a pretty well thought out character, good job.

You might want to get a "dummy" commlink. I know that's be suggested a number of times on these boards.

As a rule you may want to consider a fake ID ("Fake SIN") and tie it to a fake commlink. Your combat commlink should be rock solid but who cares if the fake commlink throws spam all over your Image Link. You only turn it on when in high sec areas or doing legit activity.

Although I haven't read the char-sheet (Yeah I'm one of those people who doesn't completely trust my anti-viral software to catch everything.) the Ex-Series of ammo does use some tiny ammount of explosives to create improved fragmentation as per Fields of Fire, but we aren't told exactly how loud of a bang they really make.

Personally I treat the Ex-Series of Ammo as being unsilencable.

If you wait a bit for your team's hacker to crack the software in your main commlink you can use pirated copies in your fake commlink.

Hmmm.. that also means my hacker's new litmus test for who is a shaowrunner needs to include exploiting into their commlink and looking for cracked copies of OS and firewall...

Yeah, but do you really trust that your team's Decker might not code a back-door into your system, "Just in case?"

Naw, its far safer either learn to crack your own software, or if your DM allows it, buy an Agent to do the cracking for you. (Of course, I imagine that many wouldn't allow Agents to do that.)

Barring either of those two, I'd pay money and go through a contact who had an invested interest in being perceived as honest, then going through a second contact to check your system out. It might not be fool-proof, but its better then asking a co-worker to to do it for you for free.

Yeah, all of the trust that holding the code to activate Black Hammer wielding Agents and sticking your sim-module into Hot Mode can buy.

As for the link being in your head, well in my opinion, that just makes it harder to manually turn it off once DNI controls have been cut-off, but hey, as long as your character is willing to put his life in the Decker's hands then it'd be a good way to get free copies, provided of course that the Decker even agrees to give away his valuable time in the first place.

There is no way to turn off DNI control though. That would just be retarded. It's hardwired to your nervous system. Why the hell would any manufacturer make that even possible?

perhaps a better explanation would be that a hacker could subvery the DNI connection, block it off within the commlink, reroute the commands, fool the commlink into thinking the commands are just to be passed through to some phony commcode, etc.

while i agree you couldn't actually turn them off, i can certainly see ways to achieve the same effect.

on a side note, having a rating 4 pilot does more than just one die... and getting one more die on just about every single test you do is no small matter either. first off, it allows you to use higher rating autosofts... that's one more die there. secondly, it allows you to use *more* autosofts compared to the amount those autosofts slow you down (that is, depending on which line you prefer, at either 2 or 3 programs, a rating 3 pilot has it's response degrade, whereas a rating 4 pilot can handle 1 more).

so don't think of a rating 4 pilot as one more die to all tests only (though it is worth it, anyways). remember that it allows you to run that clearsight program so that you're not stuck with just sensor rating on sensor tests. remember that it allows you to run that extra targetting autosoft so you can use both parts of the ares alpha. remember that it might allow you to run an ECCM program to keep your drone under your command. and so on.

I don't have any recollection of the whole "explosive ammo is loud" thing having any basis in canon material. Basically, ask your GM if that's the case, and if he says no, stick with the explosive.

I'm pretty sure that the cycling of a gun's action is going to be louder than the faint "pop" of a few grains of explosive buried in a 125-250 grain pistol slug, especially if that "pop" is ocurring inside someone's torso... ignoring entirely the "crack" of the sonic boom that the supersonic hunk of lead made on it's way to the target. The "bang" of a pistol casing full of gunpowder is certainly going to be a hell of a lot louder.

I treat explosive ammo as the jacked-up frangible ammo of the Shadowrun world. Works pretty well for me.

My logic for suggesting that EX-explosive ammo does go bang stems from the fact that it has an AP modifier as well as a damage modifier. While it is true that the sound of a gun cycling, and the crack of the bullet travelling through the air, and the charge that propells the ammo in the first place are factors, presumably the character has a silencer for a reason, and adding any more extraneous noise is surely a bad thing.

We view the Ex and EX-EX as small simple HEAT rounds. They do have an experimental rifle round now that does the same thing. The Round hits and the explosive core explodes and shoves the metal core deeper into the target.

That's where I imagine the -1 AP comes from.