Human

Body 4
Agility 3
Reaction 3
Strength 3
Charisma 2
Intuition 5
Logic 5
Willpower 5

Allergy, Common/Mild
SINner, Criminal
Incompetent
Hung Out to Dry [COM]

Cracking 4
Electronics 3
Firearms 3
Influence 1
Mechanic 2
Dodge 4
Heavy Weapons 4
Gunnery 3
Pilot Aerospace 2
Pilot Aircraft 2
Perception 4
Armorer 4
Demolitions 4
Medicine 1


I am creating a character that is going to be joining up with an ongoing Shadowrun and I am attempting to create a Drone Rigger, but I lack experience with the Shadowrun system and was looking for some further advice. Above is some of what I have built so far. I intend my role at the moment to be one of a armed combatant who accompanies my team on a run more often than sitting somewhere safe operation drones by remote. I was planning on wielding a shotgun and creating a sort of sensor network out of my drones to keep track of enemy movement, scout and basically provide added eyes for the team.

My questions are these. Is this a good role for drones one of surveillance and reconnaissance or should I use them for something else? Is the build I have the best for a rigger who also wants to be decent at combat? Will I be able to fill a hacker role or should I not concern myself? What is the best gear to kit myself out with? There is a lot of gear to choose from and I'm finding myself uncertain as to where to begin with it and am not sure what the basics are for the role I wish to perform. Also I want to be the teams go to guy for the creation of gear and explosives how would one achieve such a goal?

Those are the questions I have for now. I'm sure I'll come up with some later, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

My first character was a hacker-rigger. He started as a hacker, and grew into a rigger. The best thing I can do is suggest specialties, as they make a HUGE difference.

Specialize Hacking for Exploit. Stealth is a trap, as +2 dice doesn't help Thresholds for breaking in.
Specialize Computer for Analyze.
Specialize Electronic Warfare for Scan(those threshold 4's can be bitchhy) or Cryptology - and pick up a Math SPU while you're at it.
Specialize Pilot Ground - you didn't have this on your list so get it - for Wheeled. Its just so good.
Get Infiltration - you didn't have this one either - as you need it to sneak past sensors in vehicles. While in a vehicle, Infiltrate is also capped by Pilot, so specialize it for Vehicles, because specs don't actually change the level of a skill, only give a dice pool bonus.
For your others, Remote Controlled or Jumped In is also a good spec.
Specialize Gunnery for Ballistic. It covers ALL your bullet-based bases.
Specialize Dodge for Ranged
Drop heavy weapons, as you don't need it in a vehicle, because Gunnery.
Specialize Perception for Sensor or for Opposed(in the case of people trying to hide from you).
Specializations are -expensive- in BPgen. Do it once play begins, if you can use karmagen, or if your GM is generous enough to hand out some Twenty Question's karma, like mine does.

Good, cheap, cost-effective ware to think about:
PuSHeD
Math SPU
Attention Co-Processor. Its bigger brother, the Reception Enhancer, helps both Sensor and Matrix Perception tests too.
Control Rig
Hot-Sim capabilities (whether external module or internal comm)
Simrig: for the tacnet channels
Trauma Damper+ a good biofeedback filter: Practically makes you immune to hotsim biofeedack, since its halved and rolled to soak twice, the -1 makes you not really care. Little pricy, though.
Platelet factories give nice protection against Dumpshock, and combo nicely with trauma dampers.
Reality Filter: Underrated, and usually worthless. +1 response is a big deal for a rigger though.

Avoid: Control Rig Boosters. Its a trap. An extra pass is worth more than a few dice on Pilot, which you don't use most of the time you want to get stuff done, and wasting a ton of essence on a nanohive.

Drone roles:
YES! Drones are -fantastic- at surveillance. However, get the Arsenal errata if you want to use custom sensor loadouts. This WILL save you millions of headaches. Literally.
If you want a drone network for defense, you want a Tactical AR Soft(unwired). Warning: complicated sensor rules ahead.
Combat drones ARE good. The best ones have built-in Weapon Mounts. (Doberman, Steel Lynx, Rotodrone, LEBD-1, Crimson Samurai) to name a few. Ammunition bills can run up, though. 250 round belts of expensive specialty ammo can be expensive.

A hacker/Rigger is definitely possible, but you may find yourself running out of money at the start, even with the Born Rich quality, which you will want.
If you want to make explosives, you want the arsenal chapter on demolitions and chemistry. Also, pick up the Chemistry active skill.

If you want to be a hacker AND a rigger at the start, you need to cut down the fat as much as possible, and figure exactly what you need. Programs and Vehicles can both be expensive. Starting with all the hacking programs at 6(and 5bp for restricted gear, to get response 6, to actaully run that system 6...) is arond 80k. When your Shops are 10k each(armorer, hardware, automotive mechanic, aeronautic mechanic), and customizing your drones can easily add 5-15K per drone, and you still need a Team Van, and you need a High lifestyle so you have even MORE money to spend on toys....

It adds up really fast. The best thing you can do if you want to do both hacking and rigging well is to figure out exactly what you need to roll to cover all bases, and trim as much fast as you can.

If I were your GM, the first thing I'd think when I saw this list of Qualities is that you were looking for free points. An allergy is practically penalty-free and uninteresting to keep bringing up; Incompetence, well-chosen, doesn't hinder a character's effectiveness; Hung Out to Dry gives you a bunch of points and saves you having to come up with Contacts, which you won't really need because the rest of the group has them. None of that may be a problem! Your GM might not care, you might not care, I certainly don't care. Just pointing it out.


You might consider dropping this and paying someone else to do the work, if you're short on points, depending on the character's background.


There are three different ways to control drones in SR4: you can jump into the drone, leaving your body a sack of potatoes, and "be" the drone. That's obviously not going to work that well for you if you're going to be running around on the ground with a shotgun. The second method is to use the Command program to tell each drone what to do each action; the problem with this is that every Command action requires a Complex action, so you can end up wasting half of your turns, plus it still would help to be in full VR, and then you're a sack of potatoes.

So the third way is to let the drones use their Pilot to fly about and do stuff. You still have the option of jumping into them or Commanding them, but mostly they do their own thing on their own initiative. For a dude on the ground with a shotgun, it seems like this is what you want. [edit: Although Commanding from AR isn't a bad idea, either; others can probably advise you better: I typically jump in.]


I don't know if you play video games, but imagine if you could be playing an FPS and an RTS at the same time: you were one guy, on the ground, with a squad, but at any time, you could get the view around the corner, or from directly above, or of the 10 blocks surrounding you. Drones are excellent for giving you, and anyone you're sharing information with, knowledge of the conditions around you. If I were a shadowrunner, even if I were the mage I'd have some drones with me: they're very useful tools.

That said, there's a lot more they can do, absolutely. They can transport people, if they're large enough. They can get equipment into places people can't get. They can be very carefully directed to very specific locations. They can even be made virtually impossible to hack, by removing their wireless links and letting them only act autonomously. And, probably most importantly, you can bolt giant guns to them and blow people away from the comfort of your wherever. Of all the tools in Shadowrun, a blimp with an unbelievably good Sensor and a sniper rifle mounted to it ranks among the most useful and most pleasant to use.

A Large drone has a Sensor Signal of 4, but if you upgrade to Improved Sensor Array, that Signal becomes a 5. With the same Signal on your radio and its, this thing can be 4 kilometers straight up, and with Suncell, it can just stay there for quite a while. A sniper rifle with barrel extension can fire up to 1.65 kilometers; it can get chilly at 4km, so I like to talk to the GM and see if I can buy an "Ares Desert Strike," but substituting mid-troposphere adaptation for desert. Go ahead, throw open Google Earth, go to Seattle, and zoom until your "Eye alt" is 4 kilometers [2.5 miles]. That's your field of view. Now zoom in until your Eye alt is 1.65 kilometers [1 mile]: that's your field of fire. Zoom in until your Eye alt is 150 meters [500 feet]: that's something like your zoom with Optical Magnification 3 from maximum altitude. And that's with a sniper rifle: assault cannons have similar ranges, and many missiles will let you get another few kilometers further away and still kill people with impunity! And it's awful hard to see a blimp two and a half miles in the sky. At night.

Rotordrones or wheeled/tracked drones with automatic weapons are excellent at fire support, and even a small drone with a machine pistol bolted to it makes for cheap suppressive fire.

Let's not forget the very small Fly-Spy, which you can fill a neighborhood or facility with and have a constant overlay of all the information on the battlefield. Install Ultrawideband Radar and you can even use them to see through walls. Imagine, in real life, the tactical advantage of having an overlay over each enemy in the battlefield, even behind cover or walls or a mile away from you.


What's "best," in this context? Most effective at what? Killing people and not getting killed? Or fitting the concept you have for the character? Or being fun? Or being realistic? Every player, and every group, has different goals, so it's hard to know if a character will achieve your goals without knowing what your goals are, you know?


With that Cracking skill group, you're just a few fistfuls of nuyen away from buying the programs you'd need to be pretty decent. It's something you can do further down the road, if it doesn't fit your character concept for him to already have it.

For the stuff like Armorer, I would suggest getting a set of utility drones with mechanical arms, decent Pilot, Profession autosofts, proper tools, and Fuzzy Logic.

They are likely to be able to amass a far larger dice pool than you can afford to, using just nuyen which is a lot cheaper than increasing your own skills.

Even for medical skills - a fully kitted out Evo Orderly is probably to be better at First Aid than most runners you're likely to encounter.




-k

Yep. Totally agreed. Isn't that what drone riggers are for, anyway? Have your mechanical buddies do the work for you?
An Evo Orderly with an advanced valkyrie module may even be able to reduce those situational penalties First Aid tests run into very quickly: Circumstances like being on an opne road instead of a squeaky clean hospital. They are encased, after all.
Drones are very versatile. They don't just look and shoot. Get creative there!

That would be a Tacnet, see Unwired for details


If you want to be a decent combatant, you will most likely need a second IP. At which point it gets really complicated to pay for everything...

Heavy Weapons 4... leave that to the samurai. Get Gunnery 4 (Ballistic +2) and Firearms 4 instead.

How will you spend your ressources? What kind of implants will you get?

Oh yes, multiple Initiative Passes are important for any active combattant and even more for a rigger. If you really want to walk in right behind your drones, you possibly can't jumb into every single one as almost nobody is walking around while in full VR. So you either have to trust their innate pilot programs or direct them via the command program via AR - which will make every action a complex action, so you'll need a lot of those.
A commlink optimized for the command program (see "Unwired", chapter on hardware) adds an extra die. Having a command program rating 6 with Optimization rating 3 and Ergonomic lets you run it on almost any node if you lose your prime commlink. Personally, I do the same with Encrypt.
A tacnet is definetely the way to go for a drone rigger.

If you don't want to add in anything fancy like adept or technomancer, don't be afraid to lose some of your essence. There are some pieces of 'ware that basically can make a decent warrior out of anybody with normally average stats, like Muscle Toner & Augmentation, good old Suprathyroid Gland and some way of bone lacing and internal armor, be it cyber- or bioware.
I don't think nanohives are that bad - there's still the riggerfoot, kind of a classic. A nanohive alone will burn your essence, but if installed into a (partial) cyberlimb, it's affordable. There are other nanites like Neocortical ones, which will help you a lot with those mechanical skills in the downtime. You may also add in an injector in said limb.

As posted before, lay some of those tertiary skills out to drones, at least partially. Ask your GM whether he will allow you teamwork tests on extended technical tests or not, but really, why wouldn't he/she?

Personally, I use drones and other hardware as a modular system and try to keep it cheap. Yes, this means some of the drones' attributes will be below perfection, but on the other hand now you can afford to lose one. Tacnets are great in this regard, use pirated software and you can get an overall boost for cheap.

This is possible to pull off. Its extremely difficult, and only one archetype in the game can do it, but its possible.
Basically, you need a submerged technomancer with Mesh Reality(multiprocessing comes first), and Macro.(mesh reality specifically lets you use macro for Cybercombat). You can make up the penalty for fighting physically with a tacnet. The More than Metahuman quality is basically necessary, because you're going to be exposing yourself to many potential sources of dumpshock, just by being logged into drones which can potentially be destroyed. The key is actually Multiprocessing, which lets you simultaneously be in multiple nodes at once, and more specifically only adds half SKILL to your pools - while leaving all your other bonuses(hotsim, tacnet, pushed, full rating of the relevant program, a threaded Command Response,Firewall, etc) intact. It also opens the door to multi-jump-in rigging. Its counter-intuitive, but its not specifically prohibited under normal circumstances.
Then you need a source of extra initiative passes. You need to boost your physical(due to mesh reality's restrictive clause), as well as your matrix passes(so you have more total actions). Biowire+Acceleration is possible, but adds two MORE echo requirements - as does Advanced Overclocking. Drugs are a good middle ground, and a Simsense Booster can get you to 4 matrix, which is good, since you're going to want a control rig.

Basically the only way to actually do it is play karmagen, and have a -very- generous GM who lets you take echos and submerge in creation.

For NPC's, however.....
I've often considered making an incredibly freaky technomancer bounty hunter themed after a hound master. His theme is a whole pack of sprite-inhabited cyberdogs(doberman), with their own names, personalities, habits and mannerisms (they act lifelike, whine in areas of jamming, and get lonely and mope when out of Signal range). He has an eyeband, and the whole pack tends to communicate through an eye laser system, so his targets have no advanced wi-fi based warning. He does exactly what modular man suggests: sends in the dogs, and then mops up himself. Perhaps a few Entertainment System Falcon's or Clockwork Owls thrown in there. But basically, taking the unexpected: a howling, slavering rabid pack of wolves, and throwing it into an urban environment, cyberpunk style.
I mean, really, who expects the hounds to have gecko grips.

I've read about an adept with magic 6 using "Heightened Concentration" to negate that -6 penalty, but I may be in error thinking that's all you need...
Oh, and I definitely like that hound master, great idea.

Heightened Concentration to negate the -6 'real world' vr penalty is hilarious. It does prevent you from using it to offset other penalties, though.

.. in fact, I think I have a skeleton build on the forums somewhere, for just such a drone wrangling mystic adept. If people are interested in seeing it, and how it works, I suppose I can dig it up.

Thanks for that idea, by the way. It's awesome.

Take a look at my signature and look at the Mercenary Rigger, that's essentially the role you seem to want to fill. You can either take the sheet and modify it as desired, or just use it for ideas.

Oh wow. Someone knows it already. That actually kind of makes my day. <3.

The great thing about that build is that while he can't use all of his tricks at once, he has ridiculous tactical flexibility in deciding how he wants to apply them to any situation, from sustaining a bunch of buffs without penalty to using a drone as a pointman and holding a free action to Jump In and go on full defense if things get hairy.

Human

Body 3
Agility 4
Reaction 4
Strength 2
Charisma 1
Intuition 5
Logic 5
Willpower 5

Allergy, Common/Mild
SINner, Criminal
Incompetent
Hung Out to Dry [COM]

Cracking 4
Electronics 3
Firearms 4
Mechanic 2
Dodge 4
Gunnery 4
Pilot Aircraft 2
Perception 4
Demolitions 4
Pilot Ground Craft 3
Stealth 2

Contacts
Connection 3 Loyalty 4
Connection 4 Loyalty 3
Connection 2 Loyalty 5


Gear
Colt America L36 Smartgun External System, Gyro Stabilization. 1000 rounds.
Ares Desert Strike- Smartgun system external, Gas vent 3 system, Tripod, 1000 rounds
HK MP-5 TX- External Smartgun system Gyro stabilizer, 1000 rounds

Attention Coprocessor Rating 3
Datajack
PuSHeD

Shop (Explosives)
Shop (Weapon)
Goggles
+ Smartlink
+ Vision Enhancement II

GMC Hermes Van 1
MCT Fly-Spy 5


Comlink Fairlight Caliban
Response 6 Signal 5
OS Novatech Navi
Upgraded to
System 6
Firewall 6
Analyze 5
Browse 5
Command 5
Edit 5
Encrypt 5
Scan 5
Armor 5
Attack 5
Biofeedback Filter 4
Decrypt 2
Exploit 5
Sniffer 2
Spoof 5
Stealth 2
Track 2


I've taken some of the advice I saw here and also brushed up on the rules a bit more. I may decide to take a more restrained role on the team rather than running with them for the first run or so and see how things go. So far I modified some of my attributes dropping Strength and Charisma as secondary traits I don't really need. I picked up some gear that looks handy.

I had a few questions about my Commlink. I can load all those programs onto it that I bought correct and just not have them running? I'm wondering if I can pick and choose which are currently on to not destroy it's response rating. Also is that kind of commlink way too much to invest in? I was also thinking of getting the middle class lifestyle, but instead try to swing my GM into letting me have a rundown apartment complex in a bad neighborhood. One that is warehouse style with cavernous rooms. Possibly old office blocks now abandoned and see if I can get my shop and a garage in there. Do you folks think that would be alright for a middle lifestyle or worth more?


I'm still unsure about my weapon selection of guns, but I figure with a Sniper rifle even from the back of my van I can still be a relevant threat depending on the environment and with an SMG I could at least lay down some cover fire. I was also wondering about what kind of drone would be best for combat. So far I have 5 fly spy drones that I'm not sure I'll upgrade cause I don't yet know the rules for that. I'm thinking of expanding the list with a few combat drones, but am unsure what to pick.

Would any of the matrix based group contacts be worth while for a rigger/hacker like the op describes?

..for aerial combat drones: MCT-Nissan Roto-drone (medium-size)..
Colt L36 w/ gyro stabilisation???