QUOTE (The Jake @ Jan 13 2010, 09:55 PM)
This isn't a straight up comparison on which is better. Just curious which do you prefer to play and why?
I'll go first. I love TMs but I find the cost too exorbitant to play and more ineffectual in combat than almost any starting magicians. That and the fact I love to create malware means Hackers get my vote.
- J.
Getting us back onto the original topic..... TM for me all the way. They don't just break the Matrix, and they're not as squishy as everyone thinks, nor do they need cyber to keep up with the rest of the team. In fact, a good example. My first group that I played SR4 with I tried a TM cause I'd always been fascinated with deckers and mages/shamans in SR3 but never got to play a decker because the group as a whole was very against them, and I never got to play the shaman because my first character (street sam) survived until just before SR4 came out and it was decided to break up group till after the release. So I made a TM, a magical hacker basically, and ended up rolling over the group as a whole. Granted, the other 5 players weren't exactly experienced SR players (and 3 of them used the example character templates from the core), and the GM let me do all kinds of In Character stuff before we started so long as it didn't involve doing a run or trying to spend karma I didn't have, so I compiled and registered a sprite of each type until they had about 6-12 tasks each, but still.
To start us off, the GM ran On the Run, and aside from being in the stuffer shack (where I mostly tried to use my one IP to move or attack while having a sprite try to hack enemy cyberware), I pretty much dominated every situation. As an elf and TM I had the highest charisma, so even with my 1 negotiation I was the default face. I was of course the Matrix specialist so anything involving technology was left to me, including data searches (which I usually left to a sprite). In combat, I only had 1 IP but I had a doberman drone (which comes with an LMG or lighter weapon free) that I had a machine sprite in with the single task of "protect us with me as your priority" and so with its 3 IP and LMG it dominated combat for me, the only area I didn't dominate was magic, but we didn't have any kind of mage. We may have had a phys ad but I forget (this group only did the one pre-made adventure before falling apart, probably because of the TM dominating everything), so despite my lack of dominance in that realm, no one else had anything there either. I never went into VR, I did all my hacking via AR or via sprites. Will a TM ever be able to perform in combat like a full dedicated street sam? No, because the TM isn't set for that role (though if they want to, they can come close with a few grades of submersion and the Biowire and Acceleration echoes). But that doesn't mean that the hacker can also be a combat role while the TM has to go diving under a table. The TM might dive under a table while hacking in AR while their drones (run by sprites or themselves) protect them.