Hello all.

I'm trying to wrap my head around building a decent Rigger/Hacker and I'm a little baffled.

I'm thinking of a human prodigy in micro/mini-drone design as well as progromer of AI for Drones. I also want the ability to hack cyberware via drones. I am under the impression that heavy skills is more important then the Attribute for someone that plans on being remotely stationed. Then of course a lot of money to get thedrone army underway.

What impants are needed to get the most versitile / secure use of ones drones?
These are the ones I believe fit this bill:
Comlink
Datajack
Control Rig
Sim Mod with Hot Sm
Smartlink
Reaction Enhancers


What programs do I need to use a Drone with the ability tap into someone's cyberware?
Sniffer
Decrypt
Spoof
Stealth
Firewall

Pilot
Clearsight
Targeting
Electronic Warfare Autosoft


So what am i missing... or just plain not getting

Reaction Enhancers are not necessary except for meat body piloting. You will be using the response of the vehicle or your commlink (whichever is lower) when you are piloting via jumped-in VR. So you will need to bump the response on your vehicles/drones.



Note that hacking cyberware is going to be extremely difficult. But you will likely need Scan (to find the signals) and Exploit (to hack into them). If ever you are going on the offensive, you should probably have an Armor Program, also don't forget Bio-Feedback filter for when a drone gets shot so that you don't take too much damage. ECCM, so you are not jammed and have your signal cut out from underneath you (another one to be be copied for each drone).


Pilot is seperate per vehicle, and all vehicles come with some form of. Clearsight, Defense, and Electronic Warfare purchase one copy of each and rip them for each drone. Targeting you will likely need seperate for each weapon/weapon mount configuration. Maneuver and Pilot both are unique per type of drone.

Without a book, and off the top of my head there's some starters.

first of all don't assume that skills are more important than stats. Stats are just as important because they add to your DP. Stats cost more to raise with Karma, so most people spend max BP's on stats.
second don't assume you can be "remote stationed" all the time. plenty of things can interfere with your ability to remotely hack something which means physical skills are just as important, esp. infiltration and at least one combat skill.
third don't get the commlink implanted as this makes it more difficult to upgrade.
Fourth, hacking someone's cyberware should be excedingly difficult. Most of the older stuff is still DNI not wireless, and that is still the option of choice for many/most runners (it's just safer to not be vulnerable.) Also, the signal rating for most cyber is 0 meaning you have to be within a couple of meters to hack it.
Fourth, instead of r enhancers, synaptic accelerator- more expensive but less essence.
good luck

Hacking cyberware with drones is functionally impossible, as all cyberware has a 'switch off the wireless' button which is going to be pressed.

A lot of cyberware needs to talk to other cyberware, to your brain or to your PAN. Even someone security-minded, with their PAN skinlinked and all that, still has a wireless commlink at the center. That commlink may have Firewall 6 and some badass ICE running a rating 6 Analyze and Black Hammer, but that just means "hard to hack", not "impossible to hack".

Or they're operating in autistic mode, and thus missing out on the +1 to +3 bonus on darn near everything that you get from being linked up in AR and can't receive communications.

Point A)

I said functionally impossible, not actually impossible. At the point where you have to hack into his hidden commlink, then hack into his DNI, and THEN hack into something that does something, and all of those are running agents waving attack programs its pretty much not worth it anymore and you may as well just shot him.

Point B) Maybe if the guy is a moron. But there are better ways to set up your pan


But as weaverpoint outlines, yeah, you really need to nail down the actual way the matrix works. Its different from group to group, and is integral to your function!

One very very important thing is to get your GM to lock down the rules you will be using. You are right that if you are playing an optimized Rigger/Hacker attributes are virtually meaningless. Rigger use drone attributes, and hackers just need skills and programs. Many groups don't like this and use a house rule matrix tests to require a attributes somehow, usually capping hits by logic. If everyone in your group is new to the game, I HIGHLY suggest that you run a test scene where you hack something before the campaign start. I promise you will find you forgot something major, or that you hate some part of the rules and want to change it.

Well, you know, you're right about A -- nobody but a really super-great hacker or initiated Technomancer should be finding it easy enough to really go around hacking cyberware (although I don't envision most people having 3 agents just for defense). Easier to shoot someone, sure, but what if you don't want to shoot him? What if you just want his image link from the cyberware scanner to not display that the "janitor" going into the building has wired-2 and aluminum bone lacing? Bad example, probably, but the point is that sometimes I might want to do something other than "incapacitate/kill Guard X". And of course the idea is usually not to use hacking as a Control Actions spell or something like that, but to be able to (a) feed in false info or (b) force the other guys to shut off some ware. Most of the time you're better off locking/unlocking doors, suppressing alarms, controlling the building lights/sprinklers/foam/stun gas/machineguns

I really don't see people in general using old-fashioned mobile phones duct taped to gimped commlinks, or whatever the spoiler thing said, but then I also don't see other things like slaving a dozen commlinks all running copies that you made for free of the same Agent and Firewall (but somehow they all have different flaws, so hacking one doesn't get you past the others), or any of the other things like that which are, to me, game-breaking silliness.

Anything that can be skinlinked should be, anything that doesn't absolutely need wireless functionality should have it off (and the wireless programmed to come back on at a preset time, or manual switching if that's feasible), you should have decent firewall (and ICE) on your commlink, regularly spoof your ID, use anonymizers, be in hidden mode unless you have to broadcast ID (and then, obviously use a good fake). That's pretty much it, I think.

I have no problem with it being hard or even unlikely, but in the realm of posibility is not asking too much. Also this is exactly what I'm thinking of for when hacking someones cyberware will be used at its best... then the question is why not just use magic as it would be easier for this type of thing... well, I don't want to be a mage since I always play mage types.

Also I thought I read that Attributes are not factored into dice pools that use Programs which makes Attributes rather second rate for the Hacker/Rigger... correct?

The concept I have is also not neccessarily to be used against hardcore runners... I mean taking advantage of some street level go-ganger thats sporting his "heavy" gear and using him as a ploy or some rent-a-cop's cyber eyes over-ridden to see what i need him to see... has some pretty good uses I think.

I guess the issue that i'm having it that the book needs a clearly defined set of steps to use a Drone as well as Hacking

Preface to my post: I can save readers alot of time by saying that you can ignore this entire thing and if you just hash out expectations with your GM before the game you can save yourself a lot of grief. But the matrix rules are so opaque that anything I say may work completely differently in your game.



This is all good advice, and I think the key differentiator between us is that in my opinion, the bad guys do that too. If someone cares enough to have armed criminals steal it/shoot it/examine it the own should, imho ymmv, care enough to protect it. All my comments follow logically from this point. If you disagree on that key assumption (that security personnel will secure their systems with the same intelligence and flexibility as players) then my points are not going to be agreed on.



Well, the specific question was 'hack cyberware' not 'hack the MAD thing' and again that is actually a pretty difficult task because you have to hack it on the fly.. and why doesn't it just have a monitor like a conventional security thing today and wires? Same for the doors (I'm assuming at this junction the rules for bypassing locks are supposed to do something) and the defensive systems in arsenal have 'drones on rails' for the specific reason they are harder to hack. Why wouldn't the lights, sprinklers, foam, stun gas and machineguns also use wires? The game specifically says that wired is a good idea as it harder to hack. Argh.

So your example really doesn't working in light of your comments in paragraph 3. The cyberware scanner doesn't need wireless connectivity except to get atabase updates, which I imagine it does at 3 am when no-one uses the facility, so it doesn't have it turned on, or just has a wired connection. So that entire example is not something you can do, unless you assume that the bad guys are morons. Unless you crash his cybereyes and run past in the confusion. But then you could toss in a thermal smoke grenade and run past in the confusion.



You don't really have to have dozens of commlinks ironically, as soon as you install cyber or whatever you tend to end up with loads of computing power because each component is a device.

You don't particularly need to do do my layered setup though (despite that being what I do when I play a mage in a conventional game, because AR doesn' help spellcasting, and the sat phone allows me to stay connected), and the agents are just gravy on the fact that every item in that change might spot the attack and reboot itself severing the connection. However, even a very elementry setup gets the same effect.

Scenario: just one agent running analyze and attack slows things down pretty hardcore. It actually makes any layered defense hacker proof i'm pretty sure, because I think in a setup like wireless -> Commlink (R3 with 3 programs loaded) ---- Skinlink --> DNI, you actually need your persona to be in the commlink node to run the exploit to the DNI, and that would exceed the response of the commlink (5 programs, stealth, exploit, agent, analyze, attack loaded), leading to terminal slowness/crash.

Unless you get the max rating commlink that you can at Chargen. That should do for a while.



It gives you a bonus for Reaction attribute (which can increase your initative), AND gives an extra IP.