Hello all.

I am a new shadowrun GM. I had a situation I was not prepared for at all this week. Our technomancer has recently begun to use drones and rigging.

She got into a car's trunk and using a skinlink tried to wrest control from the rigger piloting the car. I did not know how to do an "opposed control" situation. Then once she had control of the car she tried to use it to run someone over and later do some fancy driving. Now when in vr and "possesing" a vehicle, or maybe the term is dropped in. What does she use for attacks and special manuvers? Would a "dropped in" tecnomancer use say ground vehicles to control the car? does she get any bonus for being dropped in other than increased initiative passes? Please clarify and thanks in advance

Rigger Hacking a Node with a Rigger already in it scenario.

Find the Node

Hack, use Exploit

Once in you can use Cybercombat to kick the other Hacker out and gain sole control.
Or, gain enough privileges on the system to kick the other Hacker out by using the admin account. (Did you Exploit to gain an Admin account?)
Or ignore the other persona and try controlling vehicle with multiple riggers.

Now let's take a look at what happens should you end up with a vehicle node with 2 Riggers active in it. First, I don't think there's anything that prevents this. Second, we want to avoid it being exploited. So in my opinion the following can occur.

Drone/Vehicle has 3 IP
TM jumped in VR has 3 IP
Hacker jumped in has 3 IP

Depending on who goes first...

TM Jumped in and Drone acts
Hacker Jumped in and Drone acts
Tm Jumped in and Drone acts
Hacker Jumped in, but the drone has run out of actions(Remember about not allowing exploits!), so now the Hacker has to do something else besides make actions as the Drone/Vehicle.

For what to use for skills controlling vehicles while rigged, see SR4 FAQ Rigging

A drone does not possess an innate number of Actions.

An Autonomously Acting drone gets three actions.

A Jumped In Rigger in a Drone may have up to five but will have at least three.

I'm pretty sure only one Rigger may be Jumped In at any one time.

I was reading the mechanics Tiger Eyes put up for the Netcat/Slamm-O contest short story in SR4A earlier today. I'm pretty sure she said that a Jumped In Rigger had total control of the vehicle, as soon as the sec-rigger Jumped In Netcat and Slamm-O lost all ability to control the drone.

I think you would have to log a Jumped In rigger out of the Node before you could take control of it from him.

Back to the OP.

This assumes that the vehicle had Complete Skinlink or that the TM had the Skinlink Echo.

It further assumes that the rigger piloting the car is not doing so in captains chair mode.

The sequence of events is then.

Hack Node

Oust Rigger.

There are a number of ways you could do that. Nuke him, Attack him, BlackX him. If you went for admin you could declare an alert against him and then log him out or you could just crash the node.

That last one probably isn't recommended.

You might be able to Intercept Traffic to 'Jump In' as a hitcher and then use Spoof to issue commands.

In that case the drone would get as many actions as both characters combined but it's move would be fixed so each action would be smaller than usual.

I might in this case be inclined to run the conflict as an opposed test with the number of net hits gained by the winner being used as the results of a Crash Test.

The technomancer shouldn't get any skinlink in the trunk. Normal skinlink just has one contact at the driver seat. There is an extended skinlink mod to cover the whole car, but even with this one the trunk should not be linked. Especially if the car is intended to be used to abduct people: it would be as locking them in and giving them the keys.

If he has the Skinlink echo he only has to be able to touch the vehicle. It need not possess any Skinlink hardware of its own.

I'd like to know the reference for this.

I wish I could supply a conclusive one. I'm just paraphrasing Tiger Eyes.

The text of the short story at the start of the new Matrix chapter indicates that when the security rigger jumps in to the drone Netcat ceases to be able to use Command to control it.

It makes sense though. When a vehicle with Rigger Adaptation receives a Jump In command it is going to lock out any other user from controlling it and it sure isn't going to accept another Jump In command from a different Access ID.

You can certainly set a drone's account privileges to limit the Jump In action to one particular Admin Account.

I'm not questioning the logic of limiting to a single Jumped In Rigger. I just don't recall anything mechanically that makes it the case. It isn't a a subscription limit because you can subscribe to a lot of stuff. In a story it could just much be by the riggers knocking each other out of being jumped in by Hacking + Exploit as the case of only one person can be Jumped In at a time. Account restrictions are just that, restrictions someone chose to have in place, not a universal hard limit. From my perspective I don't really need a hard and fast single Jumped In Rigger limit. The thing I do want to avoid are teams of PC riggers all jumping into a single drone and suddenly having a 15 IP rotodrone of raining lead death. So I do want to limit the IPs if the drone/vehicle regardless of the number of riggers stuffed inside of it. I can handle multiple riggers doing opposed vehicle control test much easier then (Riggers X N) IP drones.

Edit: Note that even a single jumped in rigger limit could still be subject to Spoof.

This is all I have.

Thanks Crizh. Wish I could find more then that myself.

To be honest I don't agree with what Tiger Eyes has to say there. I don't see any evidence to support it in the rules.

However I am inclined to say that a device with Rigger Adaptation is only capable of supporting one Jumped In rigger at a time as both a practical and a security measure.

A Hacker would still be able to Command a Drone that a Rigger was Jumped In to but would be foolish to do so. The Rigger is just going to declare an Alert on your ass. Much better to get admin and declare an Alert on his ass...

Fear my search-fu.

"A jumped-in rigger overrides any other control of the drone, including by its Pilot." p. 246, WWLOMTRAPT

Ahh, in the section on Hacking and Spoofing, rats.

Looked every-bloody-where else....

How do you understand that "control"? Does it include any drone activity, or only the physical actions taken by Control Device? The real question: can a hacker try to hack his way into the drone to kick the rigger out, then jump in?

Yes.

The example at the start of the Matrix Chapter is clear on that.