By the time I started in SR there were drones. But were these always in Shadowrun? Because they have an impact in that they can be used in That Way, to push towards a serious imbalance between threatening and threat-to-self (I'm looking at you too snipers ). What was this like before? Or was there a before? When did things change?

There were always drones. First Edition rigger has some drones. They are BIGGER drones though, none of this microdrone stuff you see today. Things changed with third edition. Second was really a abrasive polish applied to first.

The big problem with drones is Sniper Drone Wars. Beyond that, the cost and lack of generality of drones usually takes care of things; a well-equipped, well-prepared Rigger may be essentially invulnerable (but remember how nasty Dump Shock is for Riggers!), but to do anything useful they have to leave a very sizable investment hanging out in the open, and one that isn't usually terribly survivable without the Rigger in direct control to give Control Pool use.

SDW is one of those problems like Monkeyright and Watcherball that makes perfect in-game sense, but will destroy any game that uses them. Our (very unpleasant) solution is to just pretend no one thinks of it.

~J

So they did show up with the first Rigger then.

We didn't do much with drones at the start, we kept things relatively basic/core.

How were they in play? Was "Captain's Chair" new with R3, or I guess what I mean was it a new thing to be running a swarm of them? If this was new how did drones factor into the battlefield before? Not so autonomous I'd assume.

That's what really puts a bug up my butt about Captain's Chair.

Really, the whole option for running "cold" rather than "hot" doesn't sit well with me.

If I recall, our group rigger would usually run maybe one drone at a time and the "getaway rv" I think captain's chair mode came along in either Rigger 2 or 3, which had somewhat more intelligent drones along with the idea of running an army from your couch. Wasn't usually a problem in my games, the money limit usually limited the number of drones along. Modifying the hell out of your ride took a lot of loot, at least for the mods we made.

Edit: And, what's with the "really old people" crack? You say something else and I'm gonna have to go get my cane and whack some sense into you, sonny!

Oh and Kage, what is "Monkeyright"? I hadn't heard that term before and Search only gives one other reference, which is you talking about the recent SR video game.

Heck, my first character in SR1 was Speed Wraith, a former MCT rigger. I clearly recall a using a pair of rotodrones with SMGs mounted on them in addition to my Nightsky

Bring it, it'll be no match for my aircraft-aluminum walker.

When I was born there was a Texan in the Whitehouse and his last name didn't start with a 'B'.

Yeah, but Captain's Chair sucks. A dozen drones firing at a target with, say, MMGs (good standard loadout because of the Strato-9) sounds impressive, but they're all throwing very small numbers of dice in SEG, which is a loss for them because base human SIG is 6; a Strato-9 throws two dice straight up plus another two bonus dice from SEG for a sad total of four dice, and doesn't even have armor so any actual attack against them will damage or destroy them. If that happens you may not be out a Rigger, but the Rigger is out ~30k¥ per. Even if you equip them with 'Softs, that only brings their dice for attack up to 6, at the price of all of the Cargo space they have left. The numbers for ground drones are only slightly more forgiving, considering that now you have the problem of bringing them all to bear and ensuring that their escape doesn't get cut off. So on and soforth.

On the other hand, you can just have a well-designed Rigger riding the drone directly (well, remotely, you know what I mean), in which case 14-15 dice on attack isn't hard (6 Gunnery, 6 CP, 2-3 SEG), you still have the option to drop down to 12 to take advantage of manual gunnery, you're only firing one salvo (so much friendlier on specialty rounds like EX-EX/AP/AV), and you actually get to dodge (with a pool that can easily be in the low teens and at a TN of 2, and that is independent of Combat Pool) instead of just praying the enemy botches.

Riggers are certainly a military-level element in a street-level-game, but Captain's Chair isn't how they get there.

Regarding Monkeyright, it's the answer to why essentially all low-to-mid-level software isn't available for free to everyone. It's all because oh look a three headed monkey.

~J

'scuse me but i have some term questions:
Sniper Drone Wars?
Monkeywright?
Watcherball?
What's behind those terms?

Hehe, OK.

Watcherball - Watchers are those really easy to create basic level spirits. You can create an army of them very easily. IIRC because of how SR3 melee rules works (aiding rules I think) they were next to unstoppable in astral combat. You could overrun places with these massive swarms of Watchers.

Sniper Drone Wars - Put a sniper rifle in a cheap drone. Lurk. Fire! Repeat. Now imagine both sides of a "combat" doing this.

There are a few game-breaking situations that I've encountered that have demanded short names for ease of reference, chiefly so we can chide other players when they risk unleashing their wrath.

Monkeyright is explained above: in short, despite the fact that copy protection is futile, somehow there's a market for expensive software in Shadowrun. You either live with that (the monkey provides perfect protection against wide distribution) or you make a very different game (with respect to Deckers and the Matrix) which requires significant rebalancing of the current system.

Sniper Drone Wars: few things make more sense than a sniper rifle mounted on a high-Sensor, high-Signature, comparatively inexpensive miniblimp. Unfortunately, this applies to everyone, and since we believe everyone has more fun in a game where characters don't take D damage seconds before the sound of the gunshot can reach them after walking out the door, somehow no one thinks about doing this. There must be some reason; maybe swamp gas.

Watcher Attack Pack (which I mistakenly called Watcherball, as it's been too long): the Friends in Melee rules are of debatable merit, but when you can summon six friends essentially for free on short notice to give you -4 TN and your opponent +4 TN, the fact that you're the only one on the team who can actually do damage no longer matters. The WAP permits anyone who can summon Watchers and can either personally engage in astral combat or can summon something with actual power that can to eat anything astral.

~J

... reflecting the light of Venus. Or as I had it play out SEATAC (or whatever local airport) kept a sharp, highly advanced, handwavium powered radar eye on things in the sky. Officially because these airborne items were a collision menance to [legal] air traffic. EDIT: If it had a very high sig, such that a small bird would give, a jet-drone was immediately dispatched to have the bogy terminated. A complete lack of tweeting of birds within 100 miles of downtown Seatle seemed to fit the setting.

P.S. The swarms worked way better with cheaper drone options. Definitely better against low sig targets. Although I thought there was a way to juice up that Rotodrone better than that? Must just be time corroding my memory.

I had a SR1 (later converted into 2nd edition) mage paramedic with an MCT Rotordone (with a Manhunter on it), which I carried around in my pick-up. My GM was angry over it because: "if you want to have drones, you should have made a rigger." I showed him the line about drones being a popular hobby, etc. IIRC the Rigger Black Book had construction and cargo transprotation drones, which were awesome when converted into combat vehicles..

Dwight: You know I have both the Rigger Black Book and Rigger 2, They're packed right now but I could dig them out after the move and lend them to you.

I was more interested in how it played out at the table and I'm not looking to play SR1/SR2 (I keep hearing strange stories about a mythical beast called the Skill Web ). If the underlying problem had always existed at the table and in what form. Really I think it wasn't as bad in SR3 as SR4 but only because it took a hardy, determined soul to crack open and dig through Rigger 3 to use them. Better rules through obstrufication!

Well, you can get another few points of Pilot (and consequently raise the limit on the Autosoft), but level 3 (Stratos come with 2) costs ¥25,000, nearly as much as a whole new Strato. You can get cheaper with a custom design (the player, not the character; as noted, "custom" new vehicles are supposed to be mass-production models despite the fact that the player designed it) because you can apply the low Chassis multiplier, but I don't have any custom combat rotodrones on file, which probably means I wasn't able to make a significant improvement beyond the cheesy "roll encryption into the base design for the low multiplier". Beyond the kinetic dart (which still works best with a Rigger, and can be reusable; that's another of those breakers), I don't remember any real way to make a cheap drone that was mobile enough to take on shadowruns and still useful for semiautonomous offense (designing ones for defense is easy, as you don't risk getting cut off and being forced to abandon the drone there).

~J

They weren't "gotta haves" at my table back in the early days, but boy were they helpful. Drones were, in general, really not something that anyone outside of a dedicated rigger really had the time to mess with during action scenes and weren't quite so prolific. That was just at our games though, no clue whether other folks had more 'modern' issues or not.

Skill web: you start at point a and for every dot you pass, you loose two dice.

In 1st and 2nd ed, another stumbling block was the cost of sensors, ecm, and eccm, and there was something else in rigger 2 (OCD I think, no thats not it!! ). Those costs coulld make your toaster drone of body one cost over 100K.

"Befer yuu scare all dem youngins with yer tails of 100k, remind them we paid 250k fer a limo, 100k for sports car."

And some of the published adventures paid in the hundreds of thousands. If not in direct pay, in gear AFTER fencing fees.

Yeah, and befo da great depression of 4th ed starting character could have 1 million nuyen to boot. too. Damned dragunz and them pointy eared dandelion eaters, now wherez my medicine...........

At my table, drones made a huge splash. I was running a combat mage then. One of my friends had a Street Samurai armed with an Ingram Smartgun and a Predator II. Another buddy, though, he brought out the black book and had the flying drones with machine guns, so way more damage than anyone else. Of course, this was back in the day when adepts could buy automatic successes as a power, so game balance was not always perfect with each supliment.

AFE

The really cool thing about strato drones was that they came fully armed and loaded, and were perfectly legal. And they were cheaper than buying an illegal MMG and the 200 rounds of ammo.

Hey! Who you calling old?

Bet none of you could meaningfully answer the question: "Where were you when JFK was shot?"

Watcher Attack Packs: Ah, yes, those were the fun days. Watchers could have a force greater than 1, so they could pack a punch. I saw one guy astrally attack a dragon with six watchers, six elementals, and his ally spirit. That dragon got ground to hamburger in no time flat.

Drones: Drones have always been there, it's just that the rules to support them weren't always that great. There really weren't vehicles rules in SR1, and the hideous maneuver score of SR2-3 may be among the worst game mechanics ever written.

As far as Captain's Chair goes: combine it with Battletac IVIS and a well-designed force, and you were unstoppable.

2 words. Indirect Fire. I still get chills up and down my spine when I hear that phrase. I had a player buy 4 Strato 9's, and replaced the MMGs with Armtech MGL-12s. It scared me more when he started asking about AWS Multi Launchers.

Like I said, that only became scary when you had Batttletac IVIS and the other thingy, plus a tactical computer is you could afford it. Use blimps and minidrones as forward observers, then blast the hell out of them with mortar fire and missile artillery. If you really wanted to go for scary, mount an anti-ship missile for extreme damage potential.

At an extra ¥25,000 per drone (plus ¥35,000 if you wanted FDDM), I should hope so. I'll be honest, I've never actually been in a position where I've tried to use them instead of just buying another pair of drones or something along those lines.

~J

Of course I cannot, as you know it was a matter of national security.

And Cain, the next time I ask for another 6 round magazine Cain, lets make it snappy. OK?

/me mutters something about useless italian weaponry
//what I wouldnt have given to take an Ares that day.

As the guys have said, SR 1, & early SR 2, really only used drones in a basic way - that being surviellance/spotter or combat backup/decoy to the main vehicle threat. As far as I can remember there was no Captain's Chair mode, but you could operate several drones out of one remote control deck, albeit you could only directly control one whilst the others were on autopilot. You could also operate drones via the RCD without a VCR but then that was the same as going Tortoise mode in the Matrix and nobody really ever bothered with that.

Overall, in gameplay the drones weren't used as much. They were kind of new and overlooked in their potential (a bit like Astral projection recconoitering) until the arrival of Rigger Black Book, Fields of Fire and Corporate Security Handbook. The foremost of these really only unleased a few more drone options gearwise but did bring across the messafe that a rigger shouldn't underestimate the usefulness of drones. It was really the old layout with in character decker/Matrix post comments that brought over the little tricks and worldview of how drones could interact with running. Fields of Fire really brought out the military applications of drone warfare and that is when many GMs really started to take drones seriously - as did the players. It was also thye advent of indirect fire and linked weaponry via BattleTac systems which were to be later polished by Rigger 2. Corporate Security Handbook is the one often overlooked, but for the GM it really pointed out in a practical way on how drones could be used to beef up building/static site security. More geared towards traditional B&E raid shadowrunning territory than the FoF military outlook/battlefield role, it also introduced the concept of the building security rigger AKA the "Spider".

Towards the end of SR 2 era (circa 2058) - a la Renraku: Shutdown, and the emergence of SR 3 (which practically included Rigger 2 as a separate "new" chapter), drones really became the force du jour, for riggers to play with. hideously complex rules asde, they took the wireless world and technical advances and ran with them logically and effectively. This was the advent of when rigging drones became more favourable to many players than rigging a vehicle. The swarm of drones tactic had become a very nasty, and affordable, animal.

Since then things have steadilly advanced to SR 4 and all the fun therein of wireless AR networks. (I recently noticed that the old datajack port link for vehicles was an early version of AR.) Drone have become more organic and complex. Rigging and Decking have effectively become one. And from what I've gatherd, it's almost impossible to start a character with their own aircraft these days.

I thought each dot added 2 to the target number... granted it's been a long time since I played SR2

I too remember the dots adding to the target number.
From the original BBB
"Count the circles passed, with each circle increasing the target number +2."

All the drone stuff was there from 1e just in a less polished and less options form. You want a sneaky small drone your only choice may be the spider drone. You could "turbo" charge an electric engine *snicker* etc. And the 1e skill web you could be so sneaky as to build a car to hide behind (you could default any still to another skill, they fixed that in 2e by saying you cant go beyond an attribute, but trying to do it in 1e was just nutts the target numbers were crazy high)

And for the record each dot adds +2 to the TN. To get from stealth to B/R car was something like 15 dots

[edit] I played with plenty of riggers in SR2, there only problem was that before rigger 2 the terms used were wrong and the enhancements you could add to vehicles had no basis in real life. Like you wouldn't push more air (ie a turbo) into an electric engine to make it go faster, you would add a capacitor. Thats the one I remember best. Electric engines don't work like combustion engines or cpus.

If Luke can fire "Turbo Lasers" why can't I have a Turbo motor?

Because we still don't have lightsabers... duh!

Point Tete!

IIRC, you supercharged an electric engine by adding superconducting components.

Lots of good stuff folks! Thanks everyone.