For magicians, the rules are simple: Magic reaches 0 and they burn out, forever losing their ability to manipulate magic. So far, so good.
It would be natural to assume that Resonance works the same way, however I haven't found a ruling on what happens when Resonance actually reaches 0. It limits the attributes of your living persona, great. It gets lowered through essence loss, great. However, I have yet to find a ruling as to what happens when Resonance reaches zero, beyond its effect on the living persona.

Someone please guide me to the page that has the info I seek. Thanks a ton in advance.

Persona attributes of 0 (living or otherwise) wouldn't allow you to function in the matrix, would they?

Probably not, although I am not aware of specific rules that would forbid it. My main question is not so much about how well a zero Resonance Technomancer can function, though, but whether the rules allow a technomancer to Submerge from Resonance 0 and improve its rating once It already hit zero in the past.

Extreme case excemple:

Player "Bob" takes the Technomancer quality (meager 5 BP) at character creation and continues to create his essence 1.5 Combat Monster. He decides to dump his attribute BPs into relevant Combat stats, instead of Resonance and leaves it at the starting 1.
Now he adds his 4.5 Essence worth of augmentations and reduces his Resonance to 0 (or technically to -4, since the resonance entry mentions that it gets substracted but not that it stops at 0).
Now Bob goes on a few runs with his character. His already impressive augmentations serve him well, but with his low essence Bob feels that real improvements for his character are only left in the Matrix realm. He decides to submerge with his earned Karma and starts buying up his Resonance rating to a positive level, gaining access to a working Living node again as well as his technomancer abilities.

Now my question is: is that possible? I know it's not possible for magic. I know it should not be possible for technomancy, either, for the very same reasons. But I cannot, for the life of me, find a ruling that actualy forbids it.

Max Submergence Rank = Resonance.

Nice, do you have a page reference for me?

EDIT: mn, found it: p.243 SR4A

Now the only question that remains is: what happens to a Rating 0 Living persona. It surely won't do much in terms of surfing the matrix, as a signla range of 0 is rather limiting in that endeavour, but what happens if you add a dtajack? Can you now have hacking safe data storage (except against resonance entities)?

Living Persona ratings are the same as a comlink. System 0 cannot run any programs. Firewall 0 can't stop the common cold from getting past. Response 0 is nonresponsive. Signal 0 can barely reach past the TM's own skin.

And a resonance of 0 is the same as a magic of 0. Technomatic burnout. No, this is not explicitly stated in any rulebook, but be real folks. With a resonance of 0, a TM cannot have any complex forms, even threaded ones (max rating is based on resonance, threaded max is resonance x2). Their maximum submersion grade becomes 0, and like an otaku undergoing fading, any submersions they had from before go away.

Look, I know 'common sense isn't' and all that. But when you're looking at a situation where A equals B in all measurable ways and there is a state where B becomes useless, then A will become useless in the same state.

This is an artifact of the old rule that Max Magic = Essence (rounded down to the nearest whole number) + Initiation.

RAW has any reduction hit both Current & Max Rating values at the same time.

For my campaign I run it like so (with this house rule)...

Any Essence reductions hit your Max Magic / Resonance. They don't hit your current Magic / Resonance unless your maximum is lower than your current rating.

That makes a lot of sense to me. When everybody started with 6 magic / "reonance", loosing 1 for 1 made sense. But it doesn;t make a lot of sense for folks who only ever had a very little magic (rating 1) to loose it just for getting a tiny bit of cyber.
On the other hand, that lets cybered mages of cheap at character creation. Currently mages effectively have to pay BPs for ever E worth of augmentations they want. It might be worth requiring some sort of Positive quality ("Auric Augmentation Adjustment") for mages (and TMs) who start the game with / purchase implants that don;t actually reduce their magic (resonance) rating.

This is something I raised a while ago and I don't remember getting a very conclusive answer. In my home game the samurai's firewall (unbeknownst to him) is being shredded by a virus and is about to hit 0. Does that mean that hacking attempts automatically succeed, or do security and admin modifiers (+3/+6) bring the threshold back up into the positive again?

@darth: Have you tried running that rule with people who "dip" into magic through the Astral Perception, Latent Awakening quality or a single point of Magic? Seems like it could be VERY powerful. 5 points cyber/bio, Power Focus 4, Magic 1. You'll start out fairly weak compared to a full mage but you'll likely be better than a Magic 6 Phys Mage.

I ran into a new problem with this:

Take a technomancer with resonance 3. Now that Technomancer Installs 3 Essence points worth of cyberware, dropping HJis Resonance to 0 and His Essence and max Resonance to 3.
What prevents the player from simply raising his Resonance back to 1? Does he regain access to his Technomancer Abilities? Can he submerge now?
And what if he installed 4 points worth of augmentations (effectively reducing his Resonance to -1)? If he now wants to buy a point of Resonance, does he go from -1 to 0 first? How much does he pay for that? Does he start at Resonance 0, regardless? Can you even purchase attribute improvements below 0?

The RAI seems clear: he burns out. But I cannot find anything in the RAW to support that. Someone please point me in the right direction.

If the augmentation example happens at CharGen, you can buy the 4th point of Resonance and start the game with a Resonance of 1 (max 3).

Post character creation, if you burn out, there is no way to restore the talent listed in the rules to my knowledge.

I would have to say that it would be a +3/+6 depending on the account they are trying to hit.

So your example would be a Hacking + Exploit (0, Complex Action) for a user account, (3,Complex Action) for a security account, and (6, Complex Action) for an admin account.

Raises an interesting point for TMs... is it better to burn out or fade away?

Do you have a page reference for the Burnout, though? I can't find one for the life of me. I am fairly confident that the burnout best represents the RAI, but I cannot find anything in the actual RAW to back it up.

If that's what you think then run with it, your game after all. Not every little thing that happens in Shadowrun has to be dictated as RAW.

It still doesn't answer my question, though and I am curious by nature. Also, I don't like to introduce house rules, where RAW already cover things.

I know of a few cases that cause a Resonance score to hit 0 and it is explicitly stated that the Technomancer looses all of their abilities. Problem is, one is by being infected with any HMHVV virus or becoming a Cyberzombie (both of which grant you a Magic score, which is explicitly incompatible with a Resonance score).

Beyond that, IIRC and as best as I can find there is no RAW printing or errata that says a Technomancer with a Resonance of zero is no longer a Technomancer.

I know it says under possession rules that when a technomancer is possessed he loses access to his Resonance attribute and thus access to his technomancer abilities, but I don't know what happens when a Resonce score is reduced to 0 through essence loss or what have you...

Decided to start reading the section on Technocritters in Running Wild to familiarize myself with them, and came across this little piece of info (and immediately thought of this thread):

RAI, I'd wager that it's supposed to be the same for metahuman Technomancers as well. Closest thing to RAW I've seen thus far.