To elaborate: Nickel is used to improve the corrosion resistance of iron alloys. It is one of three common alloy components (chromium and molybdenum being the others). Let those munchkin allergy takers feel the pain, they brought it upon themselves! You should never fail to educate your players

Yes, surgical steel is a nearly-guranteed candidate since that one needs to be stainless.

Here's one, a variant on the Covert Ops specialist. I only used the basic rulebook (no Street Magic stuff). Apologies in advance if it's not min/maxed enough for some of you.




Not fantastic in combat (especially given the negative qualities), but using a smartlinked pistol gives 9 dice, more with Attribute Boost: Agility; not too shabby. Infiltration is 9 dice off the bat, not counting the Attribute Boost and spells, while other Stealth skills are at 6 dice. Health and Illusion spells are both at 8 dice, Drain pool is 7 dice, Perception is at 6 (+3 for visual/aural with the right gear). Hardware and other Electronics skills are only at 6 dice, but can be boosted with an Improved Logic spell.

A mystic adept involves a lot of compromises, especially if you want to give them skills in other areas besides magic. This character is not fantastic in their area, but he/she is competent, can meaningfully help out in a combat situation, and has a fair amount of breadth. Finally, perhaps more than any other type of character, there's so many places to spend your hard-earned karma

DS

EDIT: I forgot the negative qualities!

Glad you like it. By the way, I forgot to list the negative qualities! I edited the previous post.

DS

...I say write off. Like Otaku, TMs make better NPCs than PCs

Yeah, I'm afraid I wrote them off ages ago.


Also, the reason you should have a drone rigger who isn't a technomancer is because it's generally a lot more versatile to make a one man army Drone Rigger/Samurai, Rigger/Hacker/Adept or even a one many army Drone Rigger/Hermetic Summoner who provides Astral, Matrix AND meat overwatch via watchers and other low spirits and drones from the comfort of his van. After all, both disciplines benefit from decent logic scores for drain and repairing/customizing your toys and you can easily fit in a Control Rig and Skillwire 3 (for your repair skills) for under an essence point.

Well I did a mystic adept, I may as well take a crack at a technomancer

I think the problem comes from only being able to make 1 or 2 effective versions of it and both are so munchy and underperform something awful in other areas.

Well here goes. A limitation I found particularly annoying was the maximum number of Complex Forms equal to Logic x2 at chargen. This character is also very highly focused (more than I prefer), both in attributes (Technomancers need good mental stats for their personas) and the complex forms eat up a lot of the BP, so there's less for skills. On the plus side, I think it can give a regular hacker a definite run for the money, and they don't need much gear to do it - and they can get Sprites on top of that, too.

(As an aside, I don't buy the bit about Fault Sprites, and others, being useless - IMHO because of the nature of computers, if the Technomancer can perceive something in the Matrix, he can pass that information on to his sprites so they don't need their own perception checks. It does mean they can't go off on their own attacking stuff, though, the Technomancer - or another persona/agent that the Sprite is listening to - has to be in the same node.)



9-10 dice base on most Matrix tests while in VR (Technomancers get a +2 on Matrix tests in VR), which can be bumped up with Threading if the need arises (with 8 dice for Threading). 9 dice on Tasking tests. His effective persona has a Firewall, System, and Response of 5 (Response 6 in VR), a Signal of 3, and an inherent Biofeedback filter of 4. He also isn't limited in the number of Complex Forms that he can run at once, unlike a Hacker.

Cybercombat is at 9 dice, with 13 for defense (16 with a Full Defense action), and 10 dice to resist damage (12 if the +2 bonus applies - it's not very clear whether this counts as a "full-VR Matrix test"), 9 (11?) against Black attacks.

I didn't really dip into the whole drone aspect, though he does have the Command Form. And outside of the Matrix, he definitely needs help from friends. 7 dice with a smartlinked pistol in combat isn't going to get very far, but at least he's got 7. On the other hand, he can deal with electronics pretty well, especially with the help of a Sprite or two. High mental stats also make it relatively easy to branch out, as well, if he wants to learn some Biotech or Social skills, for example.

All in all, he came out better than I expected, given all the flak on the forums against TMs - so maybe I goofed up somewhere

Well I don't have a lot of playing experience, so I'll take your word for it about the Infirm.

Or simply do not go out in the first place. Play the spider in the center of the web, unfortunately that role is often reserved for GM PCs.

Basically, all the group incompetences are worthless. Take individual Incompetences instead for greater flexibility and point return.

Even a Spider benefits from Perception, which is also a Physical skill.

...my Salish character Jill (#87) from 2nd ed. was basically that. Her weapon of choice back then was the Walther 2100 with APDS. She had a high Firearms (specialised in the Walther), stealth (with Concentration in hiding) skills, and Quickness. Usually needed only one shot to do the job. Was also pretty dangerous with blades as well. Basically she was designed as a swift and silent death dealing machine (my first character to have the then "new" Synaptic Accelerator and reflex Recorder bioware).

...there is nothing in the errata or FAQ saying otherwise. Now I will give you that a Super Warhawk may not work unless the character is a Troll as that 10.5" barrel is nearly the length of the average human forearm. In any event, this is a GM call and sample characters are not subject to houserules.