I got to thinking with the hardships in making a hacker style TM at creation, how hard would it be to make one that was a rigger style individual instead?

Some basic computer/cracking skills still.. but more focused on drones and vehicles (which means less need for most complex forms; just scan, stealth, eccm, encrypt, and of course command being really needed as a rigger)

I can see the drone rigger type or even the smuggler

I've messed with it a couple times but I've never found a build i'm particularly happy with. The biggest problem is to be a really good rigger you need a control rig, it's not an absolute must have but it is a considerable benefit, that and being a TM eats points, points that a rigger would likely want to put into skills and resources. On the upside machine sprites are an amazing tool in a technomancers arsenal that just can't be duplicated elsewhere, autosofts on demand, the diagnostic power, what's not to like? On the other hand compiling and registering them is going to eat more build points.

Also what harships in making a hacker TM? They only do one thing, but they do that one thing pretty amazing.

"I wish many guns. Floating around me. Controlled by murder thoughts."

That's how Technomancer Riggers are.

Dronomancers tend to be a common focus for Technomancers, so it's definitely doable.

The hardship is in making one that isn't the type that has to stay home on a run, most are focused so hard they can't do anything else.

Or compared to a hacker at creation with similar skills is weak since the BP costs eat up in complex forms, tasking group, resonance.. vs a hacker that can start with a psudo-god commlink and most of the ware to be a god with higher skill ranks

They are nigh unto gods.

I don't know. I generally take my extremely focused TM on a run. He's usually the guy carrying all the gear that other people forgot. Like the Flashbangs, or the medkit. Which reminds me. Buy a few points in First Aid (1-2, whatever). Use your Machine Sprite to run Diagnostics on the medkit... Suddenly you're even more useful on a run.

I have that image.
Wait a second.
Edit:
ah, here we go:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2607/404011...eb11043e1_o.jpg

I'm thinking of writing a Heavy Metal song named "Guns Controlled By Murder Thoughts"...

Not Heavy Metal.
But Hard Rock.

DEATH METAL! *Punch to the face*

Sorry, couldn't help but do the Metapocalypse reference.

Building any kind of technomancer for the first time is a leap of faith. And building a dronomancer is just as difficult as a hack technomancer. Just now you get to have the fun of decking out your drones!

Mordivan your assumptions are not correct. A starting technomancer can eat alive a starting Hacker and it's a gap that only widens.

Take a look at the archetypes, a starting TM is below skilled compared to a Hacker. They burn through karma to get to the hacker's skill level and for complex forms long after the hacker reaches max skills and buys a maxed commlink in the matrix.

and the hacker has better real world skills and attributes to boot (meaning a TM in the flesh is just meat vs useful early on)

TMs are build-your-own. Optimal builds vary greatly between the BP and karma system, but starting TMs can surpass all starting hackers in matrix abilities if they want in either system.

I wouldn't go that far. A starting otaku can match or even occasionally exceed a focused starting decker in one area, but can't cover all matrix abilities equally. For example, by abusing Threading, you can have an otaku with a huge Stealth rating, exceeding even the stealthiest decker. But he pays for that by not being able to do much of anything else.

What about this outline?

200 BP: Ork, body 5 agility 2 reaction 2 strength 3 Charisma 4 Intuition 5 Logic 3 Willpower 3 Edge 1 Resonance 5

20 BP: TM, Paragon, Analytical Mind, Perceptive 2, More than Metahuman, SINner, Media Junkie I

150 BP Electronics 4, Cracking 1, Compiling (Machine sprites +2) 2, Registering (Machine sprites +2) 3, Perception 4, Pilot Aircraft 5, Dodge (Ranged+2) 5, Gunnery (Balistics+2) 3, Etiquette 1

30 BP CF: Stealth 5, Analyse 5, Command 5, Exploit 5, Spoof 5, Edit 5

Looks Good... What about it?

And for the record... TM's can be exceptionally cool, and even very powerrful at character creation... but a Hacker is generally better all around for the first 100 Karma or so... once that has been reached, the TM takes off and never looks back...

It was my suggestion for a rigger-style TM outline. Gear and Contacts would be missing, paid for either by negative qualities or taking away something else.

Oh, Right... got it...

If you use 20 dice pool cap then they both have their limits. And How they get there is really just two different paths. Technomancers get there by karma and hackers get there via nuyen+a little karma

Let's use a common matrix action, Hack on the Fly....

Hacker
Hacking: 7 (With aptitude)
Exploit Spec: 2
Exploit Program: 6
Codeslinger: 2
Optimized Commlink: 1
And an Agent to help with the Teamwork test: 2
Total: 20 (Yes you can get higher, but if you use cap.. you're done.)

Technomancer
Hacking: 7 (With aptitude)
Exploit Spec: 2
Exploit Complex Form: 5 (Because face it... a 6 resonance at start is stupid expensive)
Thread your Exploit: 5 (If you do well)
Registered Sprite to lend a rating, or codeslinger: 1
Total: 20 (You get plenty higher here as well.. but theres your limit.)

All in all the two are similar in a multitude of ways and although they go about things a little differently, they accomplish the same things relatively easily. Your hacker is going to leaving you scraping the barrel for nuyen and resources, especially if you use degradation rules. And a technomancer will eat up all of your karma as fast as a Lone Star squad in a doughnut shop.

Actually, the hacker gear's basically cheap. Everyone should hack.

All depends on your power level of your game really. If you play a high scale game where you're making 10k a run, sure. But if you're playing a syndicate/street level game and want matrix overwatch. That 2-3k job isn't going to cover lifestyle, agents, hackers to help upkeep degradation, and new toys. So a technomancer sounds pretty nice. And hell if you play Missions, have fun with your 2k jobs if you don't fence your enemy's gear.

Yuck. I wouldn't take a 2k run.

Welcome to Shadowrun Missions. From the Denver ones I've read through they pay out squat. Though I haven't looked through The Rotten Apple's yet. Hopefully NYC pays better than Denver

RYU: What about jamming? Should your rigger TM take ECCM instead of, say, Edit?

Well, I wouldn't play premades with strangers anyway, so there you go.

Fair enough. Haha. And Yerameyahu, are we going back and forth on multiple forums?

A Hacker has about 12-14k of software to rebuy every month.
On top of that, he's got about 4.5 million nuyen worth of cyber he /really/ wants.

And if you're playing for keeps. You want a Nexus or two, and 10-20 agents doing various things.

Lies, it's nowhere near 12k per month, and nobody needs 4.5 million of cyber.

Looks good. Another potent 5 point buy is a Resonance Bond for a force one free sprite(which you have as a contact, because it wants your registered sprites).

The Echo Bond trades one of your Echoes, CFs or Widgets for a sprite's power. Even at force 1, there are plenty of good sprite powers that don't reference a sprite rating, and unlike the spirit equivalent, it doesn't go away after 24 hours.

Sure, its possible you may get a bit of karmic debt as the sprite gains powers (because the resonance bond is sprite's edge x5bp), but on the plus side, you're going to gain access to new stuff to leech.

Like Stability. Never glitch again. Or any of the drones you're subscribed to. Proficiency(from a tutor sprite) lets you give limited skills to anyone willing to listen to you guide them through stuff.

Additionally, don't neglect the TM's ability to thread Command up to 10 or 12. Then add gunnery, and the ballistic specialization, and the hotsim bonus, and their machine sprite's Diagnostic's ability.
Also, machine sprites come with resonance autosofts, which aren't limited to rating 4 (because they use the sprites rating as their rating).
TM's are able to throw out some big dice pools. Yeah, they make some scary riggers.

I dunno... if I want to make my all delta grade bio/cyber man of many faces who can lift cars and shoot a dime of a stick from two miles away and leap a building and spit chemicals and shoot lasers from his eyes and be able to have every skill in the game on a whim and hag tusks and fangs and 4 initiative passes and be a one man walking cyber/bio army with 0.1 essence. Then! I could spend that much nuyen on cyber.

Right. But not for a hacker.

Well... he could hack too. Skillwires are fun like that. Or maybe we'll make him a hacker, and he'll just be able to do everything else via cyber and bio.

Heh, okay. If sabs was referring to a one man army who happened to be a hacker, then yes.

Alright. Just had to make sure my over-the-top, ridiculous point was clear. Ahaha!
As for actual hacker 'ware I can think of off of the top of my head. Simsense Booster, Implanted Commlink(I guess), Control Rig, Cerebral Booster (In case you ever actually decide to use your logic. ), And wired relfexes/synaptic booster (In case you need to go in the meat and do some AR hacking while moving).

Can't really think of anything else... and none of the is by any means necessary.

The full list for a hacker for a super hacker/rigger combo is pretty much:
To start: Simsense booster, control rig, simrig w/hotsim(tacnet channels, good for making an implant cluster). Commlink with simsense accelerator mod, and a response enhancer plugged into it.
For Log-Linked skills: Neocortical nanites, PuSHeD, Encephalon
Boosting perception checks and miscellaneous dice pools: Reception enhancer, Synch, and cybereyes for the Smartlink(to use with your drones)
Using response 6 chips on all cyberware, running it as a cluster, with system/firewall 6, and each piece of the cluster Optimized(the hardware mod) for something.
Then you throw that into a Lifestyle with Fung Shui, Privacy Screen(matrix), and Free Access.

and that's pretty much the best you can get with money.

That's dumb. Just use trodes, no need for cybereyes or simrig. Trodes for everything! Besides, simrig can easily be external, just like trodes. If your TacNet thinks that emotional data is somehow relevant, and you decide not to simply velcro a couple sensors to your chest.

Clustering peripheral nodes should disable their actual function, because you're wholly re-tasking them; probably like wiping something and installing Linux (bleh). You'd never want to cluster random bits of cyberware. Silly RAW that doesn't answer these kind of questions.

Thematically you are absolutely right, my rigger should have ECCM. On a shortlist of CFs, the ability to tamper with files is more important. As a pure rigger I would forego Cracking, Exploit and Spoof, but only if there is another matrix char on the team.

Please tell me where you get those numbers from...
They are ALL out of whack with 4th Edition...

The simrig doesn't just deal with emotional data - its 3 other free tracks. For a clusterer, its a bargian buy because its a rating X device(dependent on grade), which also has a sim module(a rating 3 device, but it has to follow ware grades too), so its actually two devices for clustering at the same rating, instead of 1 - and its the same price as an implanted hotsim module.

I don't know what you're smoking with your line about clustering peripheral nodes disabling their function. Distributed networking has been in use for a long time. Your desktop computer is a prime example. What you're basically saying is(in the fictional world of shadowrun logic), that if you plug a graphics card(a peripheral node designed/optimized for graphics processing) into a computer, it should stop working when it starts talking to the rest of the computer. Ditto Sound card, NIC, or even physics processing units. And that's dumb.

i believe the line of thinking is, if your graphics card's processor is busy running OTHER code, then it cannot also do graphics at the same time. which, to me, makes perfect sense. clustering is not like borrowing unused clock cycles to search for aliens, it's like finding anything with a CPU and running linux on it. and i don't think any of your examples are especially good ones, since they are all subcomponents of a computer, and not independent devices in and of themselves. what you're saying is that, in the fictional world of shadowrun logic, that you should be able to use your commlink's R6 signal as another R6 system. and that's dumb.

No, i'm saying you ought to be able to use your commlink, your sim module, and your datajack as the subcomponents of a larger system. To refine your example, in SR-logic:

borrowing unused clcok cycles to seach for aliens is running a SETI program.
making anything with a processor run Linux is, uh, exactly that. Custom OS program: Redcap 'Nix.
Clustering, as written, is -exactly- like building a computer out of a bunch of random parts. The clustering rules let your put anything with a device rating together into a single whole. It is not necessarily a better whole, because clustering has some Weakest Link wording(low ratings in some areas bring down the entire cluster's performance in some areas.) Basically, you're not using the R6 signal as another R6 system, you're using the Response chip attached to the Signal6 to enhance another Device. the main rulebook even specifically points out Peripheral nodes as being used for this purpose specifically:

4a 221: One advanced device available to programmers and hackers is the clustering of multiple peripheral devices together to create a distributed computer(rules for such advanced applications such as clusters can be found in Unwired).

Clustering your Cyberware is, well, just an easy way to get a decent cluster to hack from. Beta-Jacks are really cheap for device rating 5, and cluster nicely with your implanted r5 commlink.

My point is that when you assemble something out of parts, those parts are *used*. No free lunch. The RAW in no way contradicts this.

Neither does it make sense for a subcomponent like a sim module to count as a separate device, even if you ruled that clustering (which takes a transformative setup test) didn't disable previous functions.

Departing from RAW, my group finds it crazy to blindly use device ratings to hand out free response chips. The sample peripheral nodes list implies that this really isn't the way it should work. That is, random cyberware doesn't have 4s and 5s in everything for no reason. This doesn't matter to much, though, because it already doesn't make sense for cyberware to be clustered 'for free' in the first place.

One problem, a TV remote control is a rating 4 device... but it's eprom based

It can't be programmed or made to do anything but what it was made to do.

A cyberarm isn't a reprogrammable computer, it's a dedicated system with specific functionality. It can have the bios updated for that functionality, nothing more.

I'm fine with all peripheral nodes in the future being reprogrammable via clustering. It just shouldn't be *on top* of their existing functionality, and their stats should be reasonable, instead of the clumsy and often overpowered Device Rating ones.

However, neither does it say it stops filling its old function - its merely networked with other devices, sharing resources at a deep level. Clustering does not magically remove the rules text associated with the subcomponents. If you cluster a datajack, it does not stop being a datajack. It still has DNI, and may still run knowsofts and linguasofts. If you indulge in some commlink modding before clustering, Clustering doesn't remove the capabilities of the mods you applied either. Nowhere in the clustering rules does it say its a transformative process that magically deletes capabilities from the stuff you use to make the cluster. In fact, the RAW goes the other way - All accounts from each node are valid in the cluster node, which means the node keeps settings from before the cluster. Additionally, its a computer+logic 2 Test(and use skill is a complex action), which means you can set up a cluster very very quicky.

Its less 'oh god melt it all together delete everything start anew, my sim module no longer counts as a sim module, blah bla blah' and more hyper-fast cloud computing. What? You can cluster wi-fi devices just fine. (in the real world, this would be a pain in the ass, and involve a lot of rebooting and port forwarding) Making an effective setup with it just takes a bit of forethought and planning.

On the sim module bit - i think you're misreading one of my comments. Simmodules -are- seperate devices. You pay for them seperately from a commlink. In the fluff and backstory, they often come with your commlink(but this opens up a can of worms, in which a hacker may have a commlink with a sim module included, and thus avoid paying essence for a Sim unit). Distinctly seperate, a simrig is a piece of cyberware that also incorporates a sim module - because its description says it does.

ya know, i think we should chalk this one up to "grey area," as some of us are assuming things that are never referenced in the rules, specifically firmware vs. software that is device specific and represents too much minutiae to represent in the rules.

e.g. my datajack IS a NODE; it presumably has system, response, firewall, and signal ratings, just like any other device. when used as a datajack, there's SOMETHING in it that interprets its input in order to make it BE a datajack - one would assume that this is firmware, because there is no program listed specifically that runs on a datajack in order to let that datajack handle data. however, you could just as easily see it as a "computer in the form of a datajack" that runs a software program that handles exactly that same thing.

if we go with the firmware idea, then presumably making it do ANYTHING ELSE (which it would, presumably, be doing in cluster mode) would seem to necessitate that it's no longer doing its datajack thing.

if we go the software route, then your new clustered system still has to run that unspoken but presumably rated datajack program, which would count against the new cluster-node's program limit and all that other stuff. one would presume that your datajack would not "be a datajack" as well when it's part of a cluster than it does on its own, and that your cluster's computing power would suffer if one of its component devices were busy doing what it's normal job.

at least, from my perspective, this seems to be one of the potential pitfalls we're running into in discussing it. if anybody has any other ways on how to approach it, toss them out there!

*trying to promote collaboration instead of divisiveness*

Udoshi: No, I'm not saying RAW says clustering does that. I'm saying it doesn't say either way, and mine's better. It makes perfect sense for a clustered peripheral device *not* to act exactly as before, plus better. You *can* cluster devices just fine in 2010; it either partially or wholly removes their original functions.

Sim modules don't make much sense as independent devices. I understand that you can buy the module separately, but it only functions as a simrig or commlink add-on. Not that it matters much to this discussion, because the problem is *all* devices.

The New York runs seem to pay out anywhere from 4-8K per runner depending on table rating. With the occasional 12K or so if you score a big item to fence. Also, once you start getting associations with the various factions in NY, you start getting some really nice and often expensive gear.

And... there was that one mission that failed to specify a cap on how high a negotiate roll could push the payout... we had a social skill monkey at the table... Bull was not pleased.





-karma