I have an AI player who scoots around in a drone to interface with the meat world, when not secure in his home server. In a recent fight his drone got blasted into itty-bitty tiny pieces and fell a couple of stories. After the session he told me he had to burn edge to stay alive. I was astounded at this and he started pointing about node destruction, and AI's. Personally I thought he would only have a major dose of dumpshock as he gets kicked out of the drone, burning edge on a lucky shot seems kind of rough. I tried reading about AI's, Nodes, and joy riding in drones to figure out what is really going on. It is really confusing what is and isn't a node as it's not well defined plus Unwired reads like a text book (and that is not a good thing). Any ideas on what would be the best solution, or did I miss the obvious when going through the book.

WELL...

IF you just used the drone from your home-node, it would be dump-shock (which AI's don't get).

But if you moved into the drone (which is much more reliable) you could get destroyed. But don't listen to me... this is NOT RAW. Through some kind of internet-magic AI's reconstruct (like you thought) in their home-node... even when destroyed somewhere else. (And even without any kind of connection between those two points.)

I am not sure if that is the rule as INTENDED though.

If i were in your shoes i would just state the RAW to your gm, but then take his ruling. I myself LOVE AI's... but i too think they should run risk of being wounded/destroyed if they have no matrix-escape route. But i also think: to get to that point the drone REALLY has to be completely fucked up... all in all you could just hide in one small compononent (likely the comlink).

But yeah... falling down a house might do the trick *g*.

EDIT: Oh wait... YOU are the GM *g*. Well, just turn everything around, that i said: Let him burn the edge. (Even if it is not RAW)

Could he not have used a free action to disconnect from the drone and go back to his home server?

The use of that free action would come *after* getting shot, correct? I would think he has to somehow know the drone is about to get destroyed and leave before he got hit in order to use that option.

so the drone got 1 shotted?
14 or so boxes of unsoaked damage after armor reduction?

I've been annoyed at this too. Here's how it works:


When a regular VRing meat-hacker Jumps Into a drone, they're sitting somewhere in a remote location, body off in VR, riding a Signal and a Subscription into a drone, which they control remotely.
Yes, they're remote controling it. Unless they happen to, say, be driving through VR while physically inside a truck, car, or other vehicle. Which you can do. But the point is, a remote hacker doesn't have to be physically inside a remote drone, because they're connecting and controlling to it through a Subscription and Mutual Signal Range.

It works the same way for AI riggers. People just assume 'herp derp, i'm rigging a robot, CLEARLY that means i'm physically on the node because i'm an ai and its a robot.'
Nope! Thats not how it works. AI riggers can remotely rig too, and have almost all the same benefits as meatriggers. The only difference is that they are Subscribing from a remote commlink, where in the meatrigger's case, the remote commlink would have a brain attached to it - ai's done have brains, so they can't get dumpshocked either.

Now, you CAN ride around, physically Loaded and Running (remember AI's count as a running program, and so count against the processor load) on a drone node. This is very inadvisable, because if your drone gets fragged, you die. Unless you absolutely can't get a wireless signal, don't do it. If your player was actually running on the drones hardware when it blew up, then yeah, he's going to have to burn an edge. If he was just connecting remotely, nope, no problem.
If so, welp. In the future, stick a smartlinked holdout in your drones boot and rig it from there. Hope that helps.

But yeah. If you apply the same logic/reasoning for this situation to a metahuman rigger, you're basically going 'you're riggign a drone. It blew up. Congratulations.... you're dead. No, no, not dumpshock, you're dead. Just dead.' The AI Hand Of God rule is there, basically, for blowing up the AI's home node when they're physically on it. AI's have all the rights and priviledges of other matrix users - they can send icons and avatars into nodes they connect to, they don't -have- to load themselves onto new nodes like agents sent off into the matrix. They have that capability, but nothing forces them to use it.