Hey all,

Looking for advice on how to keep Riggers and Hackers in the game. I will admit I don't do a very good job of remembering to include ways to make them shine in my missions. Any advice?

I will try to sum up the usual responses, and I am certain other posters will go into more detail.

In 4th Edition, Riggers are to some degree Hackers.
Hackers in 4th Edition work on the same time scale and are almost always presented with targets. That security drone? camera? guard's rifle? All of them are hackable.

BlueMax

"3PO, shut down all the trash compactors on the detention level! Do you copy? Shut down all the trash compactors on the detention level!"

Physical devices operable via the Matrix are a great way to give your hacker/rigger something important to do while everyone else is knee-deep in trouble.

Most enemies also tend to carry hackable electronics as BlueMax says, but they also tend (if they're not stupid) to run in hidden mode, so finding them can take too long if you have to start scanning them down once combat's already begun. (Corollary: if your hacker's got nothing to do at the moment, they should scan for hidden nodes )

Hackers can also help behind the scenes with social situations, tracking down key information and feeding it to the face on the fly.

Hackers can also do a lot of "leg"work when preparing for a run, but over-emphasizing this can bog down the game for everyone else as your hacker infiltrates the 12th corporate database in a row looking for data....

Riggers are also best at surveillance. High-altitude "blimp" drones are pretty much ubiquitous in the 2070's so no one is going to think twice if one is floating up in the air over a neighbourhood for awhile. It might be suspicious if its just sitting there apparently doing nothing, but just throw on some random ads on its exterior display and everyone will think it's just another company drone.

Walking away with a chunk of unexpected pay-data makes your hacker seem like a high-roller in clutch mode.
Vehicle chases are a way to make your rigger seem like an utter bad-ass and hero of the day.

Attack choppers, high load out drones in a sensitive situation, critical device barriers/hazards, rice-rocket ninjas, on the fly data/surveillance clean-up,
decryption/sniffing as a timer, sec spiders with a vendetta...
It's like having an indoor combat scenario for your CQC guy, you have to throw them a bone sometimes.

My campaign is very Street level, so it gets hard to give them high security systems to crash, etc...

In my games, which are pretty street level, my wife plays the hacker in our group and she's a wiz at data searching. She's always the one asking questions about things, which can get pretty annoying, but with her character on the matrix all the time I can easily have her make her data search checks to see what her character would actually know or be able to find out out about a person or corp, or group.

She also likes to spam the badguys comlinks with troll porn during fights to distract them. In the past she's also hacked control systems to use flow control gates in the sewers and has tried to hack street lights to let them get through trafic quicker. Hacking comlinks is also a great way to eavesdrop and track people.

Even in a street level campaign, there is plenty for a hacker to do. The TM in the street level campaign I am running has had a few moments of bad-assery. In one situation the group was ambushed in a scrap yard, she hacked a nearby crane, and started dropping junked out cars on the hit squad. It pulled the groups collective irons out of the fire, as they were having a hard time dealing with opposition up to that point.

i just had a conversation with my players about how if they are playing support characters (rigs, decks, B&E'ers, jackotrades) to make sure they come up with ways to make there characters useful. otherwise, the combats end up going with plan A.x (plan A: guns ablazing through the front door).

i won't hold the hands of my support players, telling them or you should rig that drone, or don't forget to matrix search, did you do your surveillance today, etc. however my players are well seasoned veterans, so i do rely on them to know the capabilities of their characters.

On the other hand, the opportunity for them to be useful is your responsibility. If you had a group of gun bunnies and made two out of every three sessions focus on social challenges, some folks would be feeling pretty useless. Similar situation here - while it's up to the players to be creative and take advantage of whatever resources are at hand, it's not particularly fair if the GM sets the game in the Ozarks and meets every Scan check with "And all you find is comm silence... again".

Guess my point here is that there's only so much that players can do - those drones have to be there for them to rig, there has to be some sort of question that can be answered by the matrix search, there has to be the occasional op that requires surveillance of the target in order for them to have something to watch, etc...

Yes, the key is to make sure that hackers are useful not just to themselves but to the whole group. You can emphasize how the hacker can open doors, override enemy drones, slow down pursuing vehicles, glitch enemy cyberware, confuse targeting sensors and trackers, conceal stolen data, cover data trails, find legwork info and a million other things that will make the gun bunnies' lives so much easier. The opportunity has to be there though.