I've been listening to "Last of the Breed" by Dos Gringos and that got me to thinking about Cowboy and Tiny (Hardwired & Dogfight respectively).

I'd love to make a rigger character based of that archetype, but I'm hitting a major snag. Since cyberpunk assumes you can replace lost limbs with chrome, there's no flaw representing someone confined to a wheelchair or suffering the type of neural damage that makes DNI impossible.

Anyone got any ideas?

Also, for a skill set (not his total skills) I'm thinking Pilot/Aero&Air, Sensors, EW, and Gunnery. Does that sound right?

-NR

person in wheelchair: this one is really hard to represent. probably your best bet is to have really low physical attributes in general. alternately, you *could* take the infirm quality. of course, you could also choose to buy an implanted bomb as your only cyber and have it set to go off 'as soon as the game starts' and you would probably have a better character as a result.

neural damage: simsense vertigo is probably your best bet. you could add in stuff like scorched or sensitive neural structure, but simsense vertigo is definitely the closest fit. the rest of it is just roleplaying out negative quality.

I had a hacker/rigger at my table who did this by just having a Strength 1, Agility 1 character who always goes around inside an armored PMV and rigged to his drone network when he can't just play matrix overwatch.

I've had fun playing merry hell with him at times when his ride has got a bit chewed up or disabled with an EMP grenade (til he hardened the bastard). Still, he works well as part of the team, despite disabilities. We just explained away the low attrs not being fixed with cyber as some kind of awakened neuromuscular disease that he's never been able to afford/find a cure to.

you used to be able to take a quality for being whatever-palegic in sr3. The justification was that sometimes the neural damage was too much for replacement. But yeah, with medtech where it is in shadowrun, that was always kinda weak sauce, and if you weren't a physical character, those BPs were pretty attractive. WAY to many parapalegic riggers and deckers were created than would make any sense.

I'd take a look at those rules to get ideas on what kind of penalties to give someone who choose to be quadrepeligic. I wouldn't give them any BP for that choice, but If they had convincing RP reasons why they didn't get cloned or cyber limbs to fix things, and they played it out even with the penalties, they'd get bonus karma for RP.

Theres a wheelchair in arsenal if I recall correctly. Asides from that low stats and RP works, or a more extreme form of the infirm negative quality

a more extreme version of infirm?

what are you, crazy or something? it already makes you completely unable to make so many tests that it starts off ridiculous. you realise you can't make perception checks, disguise checks, swim checks, climb checks, jump checks, etc when you are infirm? i mean, i'm fine with no jump checks for mr. paraplegic, but you honestly expect me to believe he's gonna be unable to put on theatric makeup, or that he's going to be completely incapable of noticing concealed weapons because his legs don't work?

no. absolutely not. the infirm quality is garbage. dig a hole, bury it there, and never go back, because that level of suck is sure to create a horrible background count and grow some kind of toxic spirit.

what you *might* consider is a more *specific* version of infirm. ie incompetence qualities. it makes far more sense that you can't buy jumping skills even with karma for someone who can't use their legs, than it does to decide that it costs them extra to buy jumping skills anyways, imo. the fact that it comes with the added bonus of not leaving you completely incapable of doing all kinds of basic tasks that nobody should be incapable at doing *all* of is just gravy.

Someone could hack up a Negative Quality that basically states that the person's body will automatically reject most forms of augmentation / implantation. There's mention of such a thing in Virtual Realities 2.0 (the "Things To Come" discussion).

Really, sometimes I think we could use more NQs in the BBB.

My bad on infirm, I'd only ever skimmed it before and not realised quite the extent it went to.

Oh. I saw the title of this thread and just assumed it was about me. My mistake.

I just wanted to note that this made me spit pepsi out of my nose.