I was building my first missions character for Origins this year. He's an Ork tactical soldier/hacker. And I was just wondering if people having tacnets is common at all, because you need at least three people for it to be useful. Is it seen enough to be worth picking up?

Depends on the group, really. I haven't seen it pop up too often though. It's fairly pricey, and if you're jumping in and out of random groups, it's unreliable.

Doesn't stop you from taking it though

Bull

You need 3-5 participants but those participants can be crappy minidrones.
I'd set their signal to 1-2 though and keep them in visual range to mitigate them getting nabbed by someone.

My team uses a tacnet but we play as a group so YMMV.

In my experience if you give strangers a Tacsoft some will use it and some wont but make sure they have enough channels. If they dont you'll need alower rating tacsoft so carry one of each.

Lastly, since it is neither common use or hacking a cracked tacsoft degrades by 1 pt every 60 days and it only takes a week or less to patch it. That means after 7 missions you'll need to patch one tacsoft.

One thing to remember is per unwired only one person needs to have the tacnet as long as the others are willing to slave to his comlink (not too bad an idea for a hacker anyway,as long as you trust the hacker to a certain extent). The Omaha contingent makes fairly good use of them to the point of people starting to construct characters that can satisfy 4-6 sensor channels.

Hand out commlink/tacnet nodes to party members.

You can use them as friend-or-foe transponders too. Or at least tell your party member that's what they are.

Be sure to include the exploding security system that can be remotely triggered. But remember not to tell the party members about that bit. If you don't end up needing it, they didn't need to know about it, and if you DO end up needing it, they will find out soon enough.



-karma

Man, who builds a character without 4-6 sensors? :/

Yes, if you're a professional Runner, you should plan on either bring a TacNet, or providing enough sensor channels to join one. If you're careful, the cost can be fairly low, especially if you run things like atmospheric sensors or Geiger counters. I'd recommend spending starting build on attributes, etc, but by the second or third mission, you should have the cash and should plan on being ready to join or run a TacNet.

Quince keeps burner commlink specifically for TacNet participation, and runs additional superfluous sensors, to guard against channels dropping. Getting forced to drop out of the TacNet does no one any good.

This is entirely my editorial bit but I always take issue with folks wanting to throw stuff like geiger counters or emotoys on as tacnet sensors (I have seen someone try and make this argument in person, shot em down). But I agree for most people getting a rating two tacnet level sensor suite is not hard at all. Many people however do not plan their runners around tacnets as while they are relatively easy to gather in game they are a bit out of a starting characters reach meaning that you have to rely on one other runners provide your tacnet hook up. If you are not willing to slave your characters comlink to another that means you have to have enough copies of the tacnet program for every member to run and ensure they have a comlink capable of running it AND having the subscriptions capable of talking to all other members of the tacnet.

So yes when done properly tacnets are non trivial affairs.

On the plus side anyone cybered should have quite a few channels right out of the box that they can supply.

GM fiat is another reason, I suppose, to run more channels then a TacNet requires...

Well, obviously only *relevant* sensors count for the TacNet. That's what GMs are for.

But it's still cake to have at *least* 4 channels, if not 6. 8 is a little stretch, but not too much.

That word, it does not mean what you think it means, but I'll leave it alone.