So with reading a few threads on riggers here, and the insight offered into the world of making SR4 riggers and how they're actually playable, I decided to sit down and make a rigger. Spiffy. Because I was wholly unfamiliar with the ware, skills or gear types that Riggers need, it obviously took me a long ass time to get one together.

So rigger is done, put together how I want. He's not the meanest rigger out there, but that was intentional. I want room to grow. The conundrum came when I wanted specific drones and vehicles. Now I made the vehicle I needed by tweaking and using some fluff leeway, but I'm stuck on drones.

The character's main selection of drones would be small, mini or micro ground drones, with a couple aerial drones for support, but none save the KE P4 drone have any speed ratings that the character would prefer. I'd pop on speed enhancements or whatever, but I run into the issue of that only being 20% increase, and certainly not where I'd like it. So I shrugged, said "no biggie" and figured I'd just build one from scratch where I want them.

But... I can't. There's no rules to do that, unless I'm completely blind. I'm aiming for miniature, in-line wheeled drones (mini-cycles, I guess you could say) that keep up with the character when he's patrolling. Hell, even speed ratings of 100 would be fine with me (doesn't have to do the 200ish speed of racing bikes).

So, how do I do this? If I'm just blind and missed a section, toss me a page reference and I'll leave ya be.

there are no rules for designing drones in SR4.

there were never even plans to make rules to design drones in SR4, as far as i know.

your best bet is to either:

1) eyeball it

2) create it in SR3, then do your best to convert it to SR4.

...I'm thinking of stating up Stonemason's Floater Bot (of course as an Aeon design).

See, and that's just crazy to me. Assuming that players are never going to want to create their own stuff is pretty silly in my book.

So much for quick and dirty, now I'm gonna have to figure this out from scratch. Fun times.

Your not the only one. The sad part is that I can find no one who works on the game that can see that, with no plan to change or work on it.

I have noticed the rules of SR4, while far from lackluster, do seem kinda incomplete. I presume future books will be made. Rigger4 or something... Arn't they?

I just fail to see the problem. I, and others I have played with, have been making our own drones since SR1. There are enough examples to use as guidelines for pretty much any idea we have come up, and it is quite easy to just eyeball the appropriate stats for exactly what you have in mind. This doesn't necessarily mean only the-best-of-the-best drones, with top-of-the-line everything, but also household appliance drones and industrial machines of all kinds. I just don't feel the need for step-by-step rules for designing drones or vehicles.

Last I heard, no Rigger 4 which is just fine with me. Rigger 3R was crunchy and delicious but presented a huge barrier to entry for most neophyte players, it also made rigger combat/anything so freaking complex that the game ground to a halt whenever the rigger wanted to do anything (this inbetween the game grinding to a halt when the decker wanted to do something, and when the mage wanted to astrally snipe someone).

*shrugs*

I understand that there are people who want hardcoded game mechanics like scratch built drone rules but I agree with Fortune. I don't consider the rules incomplete, I think they're just open ended.

I must admit though, if I had a hardcore, experienced player who just loved crawling through rules minutae, I might be more inclined to support a Rigger 4. As I have a bunch of new roleplayers to break in I'm relieved that I don't have to say "Hey! You know all those rigger specifics rules you had to memorize, in addition to all the other basic rules? Yeah, now you get a WHOLE BOOK OF RULES TO LEARN! Isn't that fun? Hey! Where are you going?"

I can understand that someone from someone who played from the ground up could easily fill any holes yourself. Even I would feel competent in eyeballing rules, indeed, one of my players has invented little flying grenade drones who fly around with their little propellers and blow shit up. He doesn't mind losing all the money he spends on em...

But for folk just getting into the family don't quite know all that stuff. A friend of mine pointed out that they omitted 'Chummer' from the slang table. It is just so inherently shadowrun that you'd think people would know already, but a lot of people have never heard of SR and need to have someone explain to them that you call people 'Chummer'.

Ya know? New people need drone rules. And I think they will get some Rigger4? Anyone? Is this a horrible rumor I am starting? Tell me there is a Rigger 4 out there somewhere in the works.

Why do you need drone creation rules? Long term playing (well, over 3 years) doesn't make a difference in eyeballing SR4 drones and assigning appropriate stats to any new drones you might like to use.

The Powers-That-Be have specifically stated that they have no plans on putting out a Rigger 4 book.

I see what you're saying about playing from the ground up and having a point of reference for approaching SR. But I still think that Rigger 3 intimidated the hell out of brand new players (and me) and that makes me reluctant to clamor for a Rigger 4.

I'm still hurt by the omission of "chummer" but like "decker" I think it adds an interesting RP technique for differentiating between old school runners and 2070 runners. All the people who used "chummer" way back in 2050 are all old people now (by runner standards) and either retired, dead, or doing something else. But you're right, if it was completely new players coming to the game they'd miss that whole facet of SR history.

New people need drone rules, but I don't think they need a whole book of them.

Hey all my first post here

I'm new to Shadow run, just started with SR4, but being a responsible GM I have hunted down, almost every ridiculous lead for info on the setting. Being that I have been Rp'ing for like 18 years, I would say I don't need Rules to make new drones. Take a frame of an existing one, tweak it to what you need, and draw a cool picture of what it looks like. Run it by the Gm who is the final arbiter of all things custom, and game unbalancing and roll with it.

Welcome to Dumpshock. It's always a good sign when new people agree with me.

So here's my thing. I'm an OCD weirdo with a penchant for hammering out characters and design ideas, but I need at the bare minimum, templates to work from. Modifying existing designs is one thing. Having a chasis and engine option and then building from there (within the limits of the chosen equipment) is something else entirely to me. When I eyeball it, I see that Mini-drones can't go over 70 on their speed... except this one Knight Errant drone which inexplicably does 180, with no information as to why. I have no idea if they sacrificed weapon room for engine space, sig or anything. It drives me more than a little batty not really understanding *how* they got this one drone to be almost 300% faster than any other item in it's class. And in all of it's other stats, it's pretty much as good or better than the other drones. It's a *huge* step from the others, and I can't figure out within the rules how the hell they did it.

Does that make more sense on my conundrum?

Honestly, VEHICLE creation rules that cover both drones and vehicles really should have been included. Granted, rarely is a shadowrunner going to build a whole new car (probably why they left those rules out), but building a brand new microdrone or mini-drone wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility. Sure, it doesn't have the sleek, mass produced look, but it *functions* with what the runner would want, and for someone like myself, who gets very detailed in the creation process of vehicles (I'm the official starship creator for our D20 Starwars game, for instance), at least guidelines for building from scratch would have been nice.

So Fortune, the short answer is that by "eyeballing it" I can't have what I want with no solid reason why, whereas with detailed rules, at least I could provide a reason. "Because this engine and this chasis are incompatible and you just *can't* have a Mach 1 mini-drone!"

As one of my coworkers is fond of saying, "Logic is just a way of being wrong with more confidence." Likewise with vehicle design rules. With the eyeballing it method the Mach 5 car (by that I mean a regular car which can actually go at Mach 5, not Speed Racer's car) is obviously stupid and wrong.

With the inevitable flaws and loopholes in any complex vehicle design system it becomes defensibly legal.

See, the problem is you're comparing the eyeballing method with a perfect vehicle design system, which would be infinitely superior. Once you start comparing the eyeballing method with a realistic vehicle design system it becomes an incredibly complex system which culminates in the GM eyeballing it to make sure you can't raped the design system into submission.

The other reason they make me the ship-builder is because I *don't* loophole something into Twinkville, Munchkinstate, USA. I want to be able to build reasonable vehicles from scratch that are true to the SR universe and rules system. As it stands now, creating *anything* from scratch is now GM Fiat and house rule territory. I don't mind house rules, it just sucks I have to use them to do something as simple as creating a small wheeled mechanical thing, or a gun, or anything. *shrug*

Why start with the KE pursuit drone and mod it's speed if you want a faster drone? I think it can take additional mod slots.

And you don't really need rules to add any drone you want.

Then again, I have to admit I liked GURPS Vehicles.

I really don't mind GM discretion rulings on custom anything, because that is what it always comes down too. The point of rule set for Custom [Vehicle, Spells, Items, Classes] etc is ostensibly balance. I have personally broken every custom rule set that I have cared to put my mind to breaking (even Feng Shui! Bastion of Template). So to me this makes most of the rules of that type pointless. Not only do they fail to reduce work for the GM they create work for the player. The players still have to get a concept and power scale approved (because you can almost certainly blow past whats good for the table by RAW), then they have to go beat the rules in to submission to get what they want. I'm much rather but have a conversation with everyone about what we want have in our game for 10 minuets and stat it in 5 minuets, and be done in 15.

Honestly, having actual rules for designing your own vehicles was a horrible mistake in previous editions. Staring into the void of the vehicle creation rules long enough allowed you to create quite affordable tanks (start it as a civilian tractor and then supercharge the engines, armor, and weapons just like the Soviets). Any chart is going to have edge cases, and the Rigger 2 and Rigger 3 rules were no exceptions.

A vehicle design system is never going to be as good as a human mind in catching potential problems. Which means that ultimately any system is going to require the game master to come in and fix things. At which point you might as well just skip the part where you cube a bunch of numbers and add them together and just have the game master ad hoc it from the beginning.

If I were to contribute to a Motor Pool book for 4th edition (which I shan't), I would make a list that simply had a lot of common chassis types on it and gave lists of the equipment and cost required to build them. But people would still want to make versions that were faster and louder or slower and more heavily armored or whatever and the game master would always have to interpolate data points.

-Frank

Thanks frank that's a much more intelligible version of what I was going for.

Another note is that also lets you get the fluff you want. I remember reading somewhere on DS that someone made a super stealthy pirate ship in SR3 a sail boat because signature was derived from power plant, and sail was the smallest. Without commenting on how much fun they had with that boat, I sure don't imagine my cyber-pirates sailing, and suspect that they got forced in substandard fluff as a consequence of rules.

It is argued above that a design system for vehicles was left out because it created too much complexity and ended up requiring the GM's perusal anyway. So, why was a system for creating new spells and foci included? Don't the same issues apply there?

actually, i wouldn't describe those as rules for designing new spells at all. truthfully, they gave you a basic spell, listed a few mods, and turned it loose.

ultimately, you still just make up a spell, and the GM approves it or not. there is no real system to designing the spell, just a system that lists a few specific drain code modifiers, which is completely different.

As Jaid is saying, spell design is a whole lot less complex than vehicle design (which is kinda contrary to how it'd be in real life I'd think... mechanical stuff is pretty much very well known and has been for a long ass time).

The issue with the KE drone is a few things. First, it's horribly expensive for a ground drone(relatively speaking, of course). Second, it's a security drone, which automatically makes it suspect in the PC's hands. My GM wouldn't be likely to allow me to have a drone that compares with the KE security drone that deploys road strips to stop vehicles. I'm looking for something that's in the 100-120 speed range, and can even sacrifice armor to do it or something to do it. As I mentioned, I'll wing it, I just didn't want to have to do so.

And Frank, as you well know, anytime you provide rules for *anything* someone is going to come along and twink it to the ultimate on one end or the other. Just look at the character builds that get posted on Dumpshock. You can't avoid that in any system with rules, honestly. Restrictions could have been put in place for a vehicle design system, and I honestly wish that one had been created for SR4. That said, no sense in cryin' over what might have been and never will be, so off I go to start putting up drone designs.

I am no frank, but I'm on his side of the fence for this one. First you are right. Core rules don't get special unabusable status. To me the big difference between core rules, and custom what-have-you rules is that core rules set a base line. Saying "I have a pistol skill of 7!" is meaningless out of context. The core rules of SR4 establish such a skill rating as legendary, both with fluff and with what the mechanics allow one to do with that many dice. At the end of the day you can ask for much from from formal rules than such a context. Custom items are in IMO qualitatively different than they do not establish context.

I'd say they do have context though. Because of existing items, you can make comparisons and interpretatoins. Technically that was already done with skill/attribute levels, but it's done by devs instead of players, and they just write out the results. A speed of 10 vs a speed of 100 is easy to understand. Same thing with body, armor or any of the other items. It's a really easy thing to interpret what one rating means compared to the other ratings. The context is provided by the setting.