What route would you take to build a support mage with a possible side-track into rigging?

Fix-Spell, Diagonse-Spell. < = those will be very handy and important, if they are at high enough force to beat Vehicle/Drone OR.
Inhabitation / Possession (i forget which) Spirits to put into the Drones.

I'd assume a remote-control rigger - forgoing the control rig, etc.

I'd also get "analyze device", and a good sustaining focus for it. Cast on your own commlink, it should provide it's bonus dice to ALL remote-control actions you take.

Vehicle Masking is also a good possibility.

A Possession tradition (Voodoo, etc) could also be an interesting route to take - stick spirits into your drones, boosting the drones' stats, and let the good times roll.

A mystic adept can be good, Improved Ability is nice - a lot of applicable skills are not technically "combat skills" and are thus pretty cheap.

And you can put together/control a medic drone to assist in that healing role.



-k

One interesting way to go would be a "rigger" who relies on autonomous drones, and focuses on using lots of Sustained spells. So you summon a spirit (which can go with the team and do stuff), buff the rest of the team until they glow, and then hang out in the van and issue orders to autonomous drones while sucking down a huge sustaining penalty.

And don't forget, some of those buffs can go on the Drones. Reinforce, for example.

Interesting, I'll pitch it to the player, he kind of already wanted a van, and we might need a rigger so I'll suggest it. He can still take the fix/heal spells to fulfill his healing roles, and grab a med-bot to support helping the group.

But a Spirit with First aid into a Drone that can do it. Give Drone Rating 6 MediPack. Teamwork!

Now this is my topic
Getting the Analyze spell to work will, as I recall, require about six hits to accomplish anything - this can be a strain to somebody with a side career. I've tried it

A whole lot Manipulation and Illusion spells are physical ones, so drones are viable targets. These spells can also often support team members in their roles. Our sniper just wiped a Yakuza Squad while being invisible.
Quite a few manipulation spells are handy for drones. You don't need Reinforce - Armor works very well, too, since drones don't take stun damage - and the GM might get upset about a drone's armor exceeding its limits (stacking Reinforce atop of a maximised armor). It thus increases the hardened armor. Deflection is the next spell I'll personally take up, I'm kinda playing the same kind of character.
Illusion spells also work nice sometimes. Mask is a little less specified than Vehicle Mask, at the cost of +1 drain - you can disguise a humanoid drone as a person with either.

I'm directly aiming at the "sustaining multiple spells" route. A drone kitted out with mechanical arms and additional armor and imbued with Deflection, Mask and Sound Aura (my favorite) spells can serioulsy wreak havoc.

While rigging anyway, the character could use Mage Sight cables or the like to be dragged by his drones, making himself less vulnerable.

On the side, get one or two drones with a medkit or even a Valkyrie module. Possibly even consider an enhanced rigger cocoon - you'll dictate a lot of the conditions and modifiers for healing tests this way, keeping dice you might lose in the heat of combat. A decent pilot, rating 6 medkit, the right autosoft and the fuzzy logic modification and you get a quite competent surgeon, either for teamwork tests or as a standalone (might patch you up in times of need).

Consider spending a point of essence. A cerebral booster grants a big buff to the logic attribute, useful for Medicine tests and, in some traditions, drain resistance. If so, grab a partial cyberlimb with a nanite hive on the way.

After reading this thread, I have a few questions that have come to mind.

If a Mage/Rigger is a possession tradition how would these examples work?
Assume in all cases a drone is possessed by a spirit.

Case 1: Would the pilot or the spirit be in control of the movement of the drone?
Case 2: If in combat, would you use the spirit or the pilot + autosoft abilities?
Case 3: How about for perception, would it be two checks, one for the spirit to see if it noticed and one roll for the drone/rigger?
Case 4: Could the spirit be ordered to possess and passively protect the drone allowing the drone to be operated normally?

Not really a case for this one… How hard would it be to prepare a drone to be a vessel?

I’m sure there are more cases so any other input would be welcome.

Thanks,
-D

For a new character where would you start this build? We are mostly limiting to the base rulebook as a sub-shadowrunner turning into shadowrunner group.

Oh. I used "Arsenal", "Bodytech", "Street Magic" and "Unwired" to some extent to get what I wanted.
"Arsenal" provides a great deal of options for drones.

Okay then. If he's still going for healer, you'd want the CrashCart AutoDoc. Medidrone above all else. Swap the internal medkit for a better one somehow and you're good to go.
The most basic of the spells mentioned above are still available with only the core rulebook.

Sounds like the player has it in his head to do a troll mage. Any thoughts, ideas, suggestions?

Whack him over the head with a hardcover SR Book?

Don't tempt me. Is there any way to make it work? I know trolls have a rough time due to their lowered stat caps.

Not as a Support Mage/Rigger.
Use a Dorf for that.
under SR3, the best thing you could do with magic trolls was Adept close combat monstrosities or high force armor spell tank trolls . .
But that does not work nearly as well anymore under SR4, and it did not work well under SR3 either. Trolls and Magic both eat up too many points.
Well, the new de-errataed karma generation system might lessen these problems a bit, but that would not be really fair for the other players then.
You need logic for the tech/healing stuff. Trolls lose 2 points of Logic.
You need charisma for certain traditions as the Drain-Stat. Trolls lose 2 points of charisma.
You need Willpower for Drain/Dumpshock-Resistance. Dorfs get one more point in Willpower.
You need agility for most weapon-skills. Trolls lose one point of agility.
Dorfs only have to deal with all the little jokes, small gags, short plays on words and miniscule mean stuff that makes them the butt of all jokes.
And they are slower in the running department. But they can hide behind smaller stuff and as a Troll you generally are a high profile (both literally and figuratively) target.

I'll have to express this to him. Hopefully he will figure it out.

If he ain't too stubborn, he will.

Else, he will end up with a character that seems to be able to do many things, but, ultimately, can't do anything at all . .

My suggestion is to start with the Support Mage aspect, and expand into support rigging.

I dunno, I don't think troll hurts that badly. You don't need overly crazy amounts of drain resist, because most of the good sustained spells are low drain. You can use an Intuition tradition, which trolls are only -1 at. You don't need logic to rig. You probably do want to be a runty troll with only 5 strength and body, granted.

Roger, I just want to make sure he is in a good position. We are all kinda new so as long as it's viable I wouldn't mind. I'll look into a switch over tradition.

Actually now that I look at it the street shaman premade in the book is a troll.

Err . . don't EVER think the PreMades in the Books are worth anything . .
They usually can't do what they are meant to do . .

Shamanism is the WORST tradition choice for Trolls. Period. Charisma is their worst stat.

If you only care about Numbers, certainly.
I have had, and have seen, some pretty interesting, and entertaining, Shaman Trolls in my time, though.

If I wanted to play a priest-ish Troll, I'd probably pick an Intuition tradition. Bhuddist would be interesting (Big, strong, durable .... pacifist?). An Egyptian heka would also be fun to play, I should imagine. Or maybe the Goddess path of Wicca, that could also be good.

I'd think that hermetics and chaos mages go better with the rigger theme, though. First Aid and Medicine are also based on logic. Without the additional possibilities from the other books to tweak numbers a bit this might get difficult.
Of course, only going about numbers of dice is kind of lame. A character should have some kind of flair. Yet, a rigger/mage combination quickly eats up build points, a lot of them. That's two fields of expertise the chartacter wants to excel in, one using a lot of magic attributes and the other one in need of some cyberware, which is difficult to combine.

Some spirit powers (physical ones) also mix well with drones, e.g. Movement (drones have typically a low body stat) and Concealment.
Possession spirits, though, just override the drone pilot and only have access to mechanically moving parts. That can be something of a waste, I'd say.

And Manipulation spells (and the better Illussions) do quite a bit of drain. +1 or +2 is entirely common.

Did the player consider skills from the Mechanics group? These will cost even more points but add nicely to a high logic attribute. If not, skillwires may be in order to do some basic mechanicaol work on your own drones, or maybe a drone that can do it itself altogether. In this field, a glitch hopefully isn't as deadly as in combat, so no Edge on skillwire tests are not so dangerous.

Hey, I even went as far to create a rigger/mystic adept My character needs to be carefully balanced or will definitively be utterly incompetent, though.

I think he is looking at it as an addition to his support role. Start off support mage then get some rigging stuff later to say help with his first aid. We will sit down and discuss it on friday at our character building session. I plan to allow stuff from other books after we start but we are starting sub 400bp and "learning" the game. Should be interesting. I think he's a "unique flower" player, need to break him of that or teach him to focus his unique into a real flower not a multicolored rainbow.