Quite simply; Does every runner team need a Rigger?

The reason I ask is simple. Just recently a new game has started in which I am playing. My original concepts were a Troll Gangers whos job was the muscle or Wiccan mage. However, being a push over and having my GM argue that Riggers were hugely important now I have ended up playing the Rigger. Problem is I am not keen on the idea no matter how much I try to make out I am or try to get into character. So, as stated above, I ask does every runner team need a Rigger?

If you don't want to play one don't play one.

Riggers are in fact not as necessary as they were in 3rd ed. Back then you had to be either suicidal or heavily, heavily optimized for driving to ever have a hope of going against a guy with a VCR, if you didn't have one. Nowadays... not as much. The Hacker can get himself a few drones and handle that aspect of a rigger's job now; back in the old days that wasn't possible.

Also the rigging rules are at best incomplete, and in many cases entirely absent from the books, much like the hacking rules. So if you do plan on being a rigger, plan on bringing your GM many headaches as you try to figure out together how to shoot a gun by remote, or drive a car, or what the Matrix attributes of your vehicle are and why they're important, etc.

oh, most of the rules are actually there. you might have to go looking for them, but they're there. somewhere. sometimes unclear, mind you, but nowhere near as unclear as the rest of the matrix rules.

but yeah, you don't really *need* a rigger. can be handy to have one around, certainly, but it isn't really required in any way.

No, but I hope you have someplace good to hide when things escalate.

The truth is riggers are a specialty character and that makes them extremly handy in certain situations. It really depends on the GM. If he likes them, or if he is knowledgeable about them then you will find alot of stuff for them to be doing and probably a few situations where they are indespensable. If your GM doesn't like them or doesn't know the rules for them really well then you will find that they will be less neccassary, though still handy.

I think it was a mistake for your GM to try and get you to play one, becuase a good GM will have an NPC fill in the roles in his adventures when something is needed and none of the npc's hjave it. The adventures and game overall should be about the players abilities though, and thw GM should customize the runs for your characters.

Persanal tastes aside, realisticly in the world of shadowrun every team should have a rigger\hacker and a mage in order to be fully versatile as a team. All the corps have to have defenses for those characters after all. However, a team can get by without those things if they are innovative and well versed in the world and rules of the game. There is usually a way around the things that a hacker\rigger or mage would be dealing with if you had one, or a subsitution tech for the issue at hand that is available to anyone.
Thats my 2 cents...
Sorry for the horrable spelling

Rigging is less about operation and more about augmentation in 4th edition. Vehicles are all capable of autopiloting, so actually jumping into a vehicle is mostly a matter of optimizing its operation if you're capable of it.

Teams don't need riggers. Otherwise the minimum group would be a Face, a Mage, a killer and a Rigger. You can make alternative arrangements for insertion and getaway.

When you get right down to it, a team doesn't need a face, either. Not a dedicated one, as long as one or more members has some decent social skills.

At base, you need:
-People who can break and enter,
-People who can hack,
-People who can kill,
-Enough warm bodies to be in as many places at once as your plans call for.

And a hacker. Oh, nevermind. So would an optimum team be a hacker, a mage, a sam, and a social/combat adept?

Optimum smallest team, yes. Especially since with a proper investment of money, the hacker can also run double duty as a drone rigger who relies on high-level pilot and autosofts to get the job done.

Our group has never had a rigger as none of us have ever had the desire to play one. They can certainly be very handy, but its not strictly necessary. That being said, there's nothing wrong with your GM saying "Sure your Contact Rigger will provide you assistance, but it will cost X nuyen."

Our group frequently hires out some extra help from character types that we don't have covered, a good GM will let you do the same. Just don't get too upset when the rigger npc says that he wants a cut of the profits, or learn to survive without a rigger.

A GM should never force (or even imply) a player to play a certain type of character since in the end its all about fun and having to play a character you don't like is counter-intuitive to having fun. I certainly always encourage my players to try different character types, but I never require them to.

Well, let's go over some of the Archetypes a bit:

Hacker: With good contacts or a GM NPC you're group doesn't need a player hacker. A good hacker contact can get you most information you need about something, a great contact can get the security system shut down in a two block radius for you (But you'll owe them a few favors for it). Until the full rules for the wireless matrix and hacking come out, either of the two options may be best.

Rigger: Riggers for hire are out there, and are detailed in Runner Havens particularly the Seattle side. Aside from that, most groups won't need the getaway to be a rigger anymore. Many didn't need them in the first place if they were able to specialize in stealth, knew the orc underground, or would use the sewers every so often (Fun for the party and the GM!)

Mage: Again, street mages for hire will get you some protection at a cost, but not having a mage in your party isn't a terrible thing. When you're going against mundanes, they can be brutal. When you're trying to sneak into a corp security barn that has watcher spirits or anything on the astral, you might as well tie christmas lights to your camo suit and trail the cord behind you, because that mage and any foci will light up like the 4th in the astral unless they're initiated or are spending all their complex actions wiping their astral signature clean.

Face: A face is an asset, and not exactly a necessary one. As long as you have someone with some social skills who's not going to get you in drek with the Johnson, you should be good. Remember, this guy was looking for someone to get a job done, you're not trying to talk someone into something against their will here. If they thought you were good enough to contact, you're more than halfway through to getting your next mission already.

Back to the original question though. A Rigger isn't exactly needed in 4th edition, mainly due to the wireless matrix. As detailed in the arguement...I mean "thread" on Riggers vs Pilots, a Rigger can have quite a bit of control over their charges that a "pilot" wont (someone using just the wireless to connect, using the Pilot program of the vehicle or drone). However, it's not that big of a problem for most Shadowrunners. Just learn to deal with not having the smoothest ride. ie try not to be in a situation where you're being chased and if you do, dive for the nearest manhole cover or the Redmond Barrens.

Of all the archetypes the players don't need to have, Rigger and Hacker are the two easiest (in a metagame sense) to replace with hired help. Neither needs to be boots on the ground, necessarily, so the Ref doesn't have to portray their presence and remember to make them do stuff so much, and where they are in the firefight etc. Your killer and your mage and your Face kinda do.

It will depend on your campaign whether you need to have a PC Face. Contacts, good ones, are *expensive*. But that's true of mosdt archetypes I guess.

First off (relying to the general Q)

No, not every group needs a rigger. Especially under the 4th Ed rules.

Second

As several others have said, no one should be forced into playing any character. Playing an RPG is all about having fun. As long as the character is meshable with the game the GM is running, he should be allowed to played. So what if there are two other adepts already in the group. If you want to be an adept as well, be an adept.

Now, sometimes the GM has a specific flavor he is trying to play. Say he want's all the characters to be elves so he can play run some sort of Tir background story he has cooked up; that's different. But to say "You, you need to play a rigger!" Nope. I am not going to play a character I don't want to play. You wnat me to play an elf, fine, I can play an elf and be jsut about anything.

Now, I (as a GM) have always had a standing rule that if a player's character dies or gets retired, the next character he plays has to be something different. Ie. I don't wnat you to jsut erase the name off the character sheet and resume play as a clone of the frst guy. There needs to be some significant changes. But, I never really had a problem with that occuring. Players usually had a host of other things that spurred them wanting to play somehting different anyway.

Finally, if he insists you to play a rigger, then I would challenge you to re-define the term "rigger." If he jsut means "have a driving skill and a vehicle" fine. You should still be able to make pretty much anything you wnat out of hte guy. Anyone can drive.

Vlad

You really need to think outside archetypes is what you need to do. Just cause my Missions character has a VCR doesn't mean he can't do other things. In fact, he makes a pretty good spec-ops/infiltration character and is the only team member with heavy weapons skill. Our face doubles as a hacker, and the muscle in our group is pretty well rounded as well. Hell I believe the mage is the closest to an "archetype" we have, and she's discovered the fun of spirits, and plays up differently than most of the mages I've played with.

Gotta think outside the "class" mentality and get used to the skill set.

Don't underestimate Riggers. Sure they are no longer necessary for the getaway, but the small army they can field is only topped by the mage with spirits. For 20k/ea you can fully outfit a steel lynx with sensors/pilot/mingun, etc. Not to mention their mobile surveillance in the form of flyspys, kanmushi, skimmers, and eyes-in-the-sky. They can also acts as backup hacker, which is absurdly useful in SR4.

Still, if you don't enjoy playing the character, you should just tell your GM that.

Example: right now in a ganger campaign I'm in we have a troll character with Pilot(Groundcraft) and wired reflexes manual-driving a tricked-out truck with a ram plate and various gunmounts. Back in SR3 this guy would've been pretty much instantly killed, but now he's not, and he's really more optimized for the whole Sam thing. Then you let the Hacker invest some of his extra cash on drones. That may be right up your alley, if you don't want to play a Rigger but your GM is insisting on a getaway driver.

having your sammy double up as a rigger is one of the most efficient ways to get a rigger character, since sammies already have a high IP and Reaction. It just means a few more skills needed.

Aye, I did not mean to imply that Riggers were not useful, frankly, I think all of the archetypes are useful to have. Its just not an absolute requirement that you have a Rigger is all. Still though, as others have pointed out, if you really do feel the need to be a "Rigger" there are a number of ways to cover the archetype without being a full-blown Rigger. In fact, one of the nice things about SR4 (been awhile since I played SR3 so not sure about its rules) is that most of the archetypes can be effectively dabbled in without going full out. Techno (though not an archetype per se) and Mage are about the only archetypes that don't dabble well. But your sammie can buy programs and agents to help out with Hacking while your Hacker can buy a few drones or get some weap skills, etc.

A lot of people seem to think that the Face deals primarily with the Johnson (fnarr, fnarr). But the Face should also be the one doing social engineering: there are secrets to uncover and subordinates to suborn. A well-rounded Face (as opposed to "a guy who can roll an arbitrarily large number of dice in a social skill test", aka pornomancer) and a hacker, played cleverly, should be able to get most jobs done.

EDIT: The point is that the GM needs to provide challenges -- but challenges that can be met by the players. You may need to hire NPCs, or have a Fixer do that, in order to be successful.

Lets get away from these banal conventions of archetypical steriotypes. Shadowrun now has the greatest degree of flexibility it ever has when it comes to the eligibility of characters to cross train in several skill sets that were at one time considered to be the real of one archetype or the other. The only limitations really lie in Magic, Resonance and Essence. Other than that we have a clean playing field.

What I would do is simply let yourself sit on the "rigger" skills you gave the character at creation. Now spend your Karma/Essence on doing something else. You could always give the character a magic rating and say that the character is in unwitting burnout never having known it was a magic user. One point of magic won't kill you. Or start jamming in some Wired Reflexes and the like and pump up your combat abilities. Just because he started a rigger doesnt mean he can't have a lateral career shift right?

A shadowrunner team needs a range of capability, rather than specifical archetypes. For example, riggers provide unmatched firepower, excellect 'mundane' spying capability, and some hacking capability, but if your team has a sniper, an invunerable troll with a huge machine gun, and a some hacking capability somewhere else, you're covered.

Franktrollman made a list that I think's pretty cool, let me see if I can find it

You'll make your plans based on the talent you have.
In my first group, we had an awesome rigger but no one ever wanted to deal with a decker. Hey, it was SR2, can you blame us? Riggers were universally felt to be 100% indispensable, and deckers were highly 'meh.' In another group, deckers got all kinds of love and that group couldn't imagine doing anything without a decker. Meanwhile, they didn't have a rigger and didn't see what they'd be all that good for.
It's a pretty good system, none of the character types are necessary, but depending on the talent you have you might end up with very different plans, but IMO you don't need anything.
And I'm not just talking about a GM writing missions specifically for the group, if the run isn't on rails then any group, played intelligently and to their own strengths, should be able to find a way of doing things. No doubt a (for example) rigger would be highly useful here and there, but as long as whatever you play instead is useful in their own areas, there will still be ways getting the job done.
More areas of expertise equals more options, and more options is always a good thing, but whether your options are A, B, and C, or C, D, and E, the game will still work well.
YMMV

Pretty much exactly how our last run went down. We faked some IDs, hacked the facility's personnel DB and had the street sam be "hired" as janitorial staff, and went into the facility as "auditors". While the face & the hacker kept the corp personnel distracted with the "audit", the "janitor" swiped the goods we were after (and replaced them with some mock-ups we had made, based on the schematics we had hacked from their network) and delivered it to the remainder of the team who had replaced the local garbage pickup. The hacker wiped their traces on the way out. Not a shot was fired, and nobody got hurt - we were long gone before they found out stuff was even missing.

DS

Sad to say that in all the years I've played SR, we've only ever had one run go down that well. Even then, the run ended up with two curbstomped bystanders, capped off by half of a Bellevue hotel's 12th floor exploding. (the sam tweaked out a bit procuring our disguises and disposable vehicle) Still amazed that we didn't kill ourselves rigging explosive seating in a conference room when none of us had Demolitions

As for actually being on topic: Does an SR4 runner team /need/ a rigger? Depends on the group, for the most part, but the rules have cracked the whole thing wide open as far as who can be the rigger. Hell, even had one campaign (quite short-lived, sadly) where the team's best driver was our Mage - without it being a 'he's the only one who can drive' situation. A few BP/karma and some thrown around properly can easily fill the 'rigger' role without actually having a rigger. Hell, I think the team who has more than one person at least decently competant at everything they need is at a serious advantage over the team where a stray narcoject dart can hose your entire escape plan.

Thanks to everyones input.

With a little thought and some useful working of the books available to me I managed to make myself a Arms Dealer character. The basis being I used to be a high flying, rich and powerful arms dealer secretly sanctioned by the Tir. However eventually they decided I was no longer needed and had me criminalised. So I went into exile, to seattle, where I am now trying to make my way back up the ladder again.

I am part face, part sam, part rigger and its really working. My social skills and charisma our top notch with some help from being an elf, as is my agility due to being and elf as well as muscle replacement. I found that I had a concept I liked and could work in a control rig as well as Vehicle skills. I am enjoying it because it means I can be creative, playing with and modifying drones, vehicles and weapons whilst also being able to impliment them on runs. I can do this without being held back in the van but rather being out, on foot, offering fire support and a little intimidation to boot. Not to mention field armour or weapons repair.

So again thanks for the input guys. Really helped me find away around the archetype "Rigger" to fit into a roll that allows me to cover that area whilst playing a character I wish to play.

In my mind optimum is 4 mages, with one primarily just a mage, one a charisma summoner and a face, the others able to do the shoot bit well, with the rig and hack stuff between them. The die pools are not quite so high, but they can all stunball or shoot your ass.

While I agree that anyone can do anything now, I do have a hard time seeing mages being decent at hacking rigging enough to get the jobs where they will never see (i.e. no combat spells) an opponent. One security rigger could toast the whole team one member at a time. If you are dabbling, but doing well enough to live up to professional standards in what is probably going to amount to another profession, you must be uber elite or your GM is wayyy to kind.

Now as to the post, no archetype is nessecary.

However, as to everyone elses posts, a rigger is by no means as limited as most of you think. Yes, your Hacker can hack some drones to try to be a rigger, but he can't match the versatility that any other character has.... and as a matter of fact, nowadays riggers are more likely to be more optimal than a hacker. (Enjoy hacking a currently rigged building with 5 rigger in it... and thats just the start.)

Being new to SR, I can't answer your question - however, I can tell you that our group's rigger (myself, natch) has come in handy on every run we've done so far. Transportation and driving into combat (I can be a little bit deranged sometime [that's another subject entirely, though]) have been my main roles. It does mix well with the Face role, though, which I am also. 21 dice for social checks and 18 for driving a ground vehicle are my main rolls.

Our old 3E game almost always had a Rigger as a secondary task for either the Decker, or one groups Face was the Rigger when runs got cooking. He had butt all personal combat skills and once got his butt handed to him by a 15 year old hooker, but in his Van with his Rigger Board, or surrounded by the big menacing types as a Face, he was fine and dandy.

I don't know 4e intimately. I've got most of the books, but have been less than enchanted by 4e, so I don't know how things have changed. It may be that your DM is similarly stuck in 3e mindset? That would make more sense if he thinks a Rigger is really all that and a bag of chips. They were in 3e, but from the looks of 4e and from the other comments here, they seem like a nice bonus, but not a needed slot.


Isshia

Riggers not needed.

Operators of Vehicles and Drones are.