Let me just start with this: a lot of this character will be filled out (such as unregistered programs, and a fake SIN) after chargen. I couldn't possibly get it all in at chargen, and I don't want to buy anything that I would have to buy at a higher rating later.
Also, I was reluctant to post this because people are going to give advice, and I'm going to end up taking it if it's good, which will make me feel like I was asking for advice.

Without further ado, I introduce John Smith; a caucasian male between 20 and 30 years of age.
BOD 1
AGI 1
REA 1
STR 1
CHA 2
INT 5
LOG 5
WIL 5
EDG 7

Qualities:
Chatty (10BP after errata)
Analytical Mind (5BP)
Erased 24hrs (10BP)
More than Metahuman (5BP)

Negative Qualities:
Allergy common mild Pollen (-10BP)
Prejudiced specific biased Emerged (-5BP)
Prejudiced specific outspoken Awakened (-10BP)
Scorched (-10BP)

Skills:
4 Cracking
4 Electronics
1 Con (+2 Fast Talk)
4 Disguise
1 First Aid
6 Gunnery (+2 Ballistic)
4 Medicine
3 Negotiation

Cyberware:
Simsense Booster (second hand)
Encephalon 2 (second hand)

Bioware/Geneware:
Symbiotes (rating 2, second hand)
Enhanced Protein PuSHeD

Lifestyle:
High (one of my drones, which people should believe to be a cyborg)
Middle (me)

Gear:
Singualrity Battle Buddy Basic (will upgrade as soon as I get the chance, but for now my programs will run at R5)
Nanopaste Disguise (Large)
4 Laes cigarettes
Latex face mask

R Program
6 Analyze
6 Armor
6 Attack
6 Biofeedback Filter
6 Blackout
6 Browse
6 Command
6 Corrupt
3 Data Bomb
3 Decrypt
3 Defuse
6 Disarm
3 ECCM
6 Edit
6 Encrypt
6 Exploit
6 Firewall
3 Medic
6 Nuke
6 Purge
6 Reality Filter
6 Scan
3 Sniffer
6 Spoof
6 Stealth
6 System
3 Track

Vehicle:
Rover 2068
+Ram Plate

Drones:
Bust-A-Move
Evo Orderly
Ford LEBD-1
+Armor, Normal, R9
Steel Lynx
+inherent weapon turret
++Ares Desert Strike
+++High Power Chambering
+++Smartgun System, External
+++Improved Range Finder
+50 High-Power Rounds
+Armor, Normal, R12
+Improved Sensor Array
+Modular Electronics
+Vehicle sensor array
++Ultrawideband Radar R4
++Cyberware Scanner R6
++Laser Microphone R6
++Radio Signal Scanner R6
++Olfactory Sensor R6
++Radar R6


Finally, drones wishlist:
Renraku Stormcloud (SR4 350); Modified GMC Chariot (AR 119); Ferret RPD-1X (AR 118); Knight Errant P4 (AR 119)

That about covers it.

Whenever a character sheet is going 1,1,1,1,9,9,9,9 or like that, a fairy dies.

I myself as a gm would smack you up the head with your sheet for that. I normaly just ask the player: How did he survive to this age. What did he do? I mean, REALLY. Never moved his body, played with some kids, never fought off any diseases, moves less than 5 minutes a day (gets up, gets into the drone... closes the cocoon and that's that?)?

Edge 7?....... REALLY? And with the skills. No infiltration, no athletics (of course not, ok), nothing but maximized Gunnery (where did he learn that at global high value without being TRAINED as a back-up fighter and standard military skillsets?).

The whole concept doesn't feel right. (It feels like blatant one-trick pony min-maxing with no rhyme or reason). I wouldn't let this into my game, sorry.

With those stats, you might as well just make an AI.

Definitely min-maxing. My only reason? Stay under the radar and kill anything dubbed "special".

I considered it. I didn't give it too much thought though. I think I was more worried about the binary nature of an AI's existence. It's either going to live forever, or someone will find its home node and destroy it while it defrags.

Also with those stats, Id probably say Parapalegic would be the best neg quality for you. It's the best explanation of what you have.

I want to avoid being noticed. Parapalegic could hurt my chances.

Also, what's wrong with EDGE 7? The other possible reason I can think of for the higher cap is to allow you to softmax at a normal char's hardmax.

All your physical stats at 1 should be very noticeable anyways. You are about as healthy as someone completely bedridden.

Sorry, Longbowrocks, but I have to agree with Summerstorm here...

I have a nice hefty book for the smacking, as well...

You didn't create a character here, dude.

You created a collection of stats.




-k

Who is surprised? My favorite is Gunnery 6 (Ballistic).

Just make everything 2-3 instead. It's not like you need those stats.

All RP issues aside, you will need that 7 edge becuase you will be burning it left and right to keep the character alive. There will be times when you have to get out of the van, its inevitable. There will be a hacking job where the paydata is in cold storage, and you have go there in the meat to get it. There will be that run that takes place in the orc underground, and you can't get the vehicle down there. There will be the meet and greet with the client and there will be an ambush. A cubscout with a monkey wrench can make you his bitch in a street fight. You just built a nice NPC, the physically crippled spider who sits in his room and runs the base secuirty, but this guy is so limited I don't see you surviving the shadows.

Bingo.


My party is never going to see me. If somebody finds out who I am, I don't want to play this character nearly as much, because there will then be some conceivable way for mages to get a picture of me, which they can turn into a link for rituals. If anyone encounters me on the street by chance, I don't know what I would do since I don't want to cause a commotion. I might fast talk my way out of trouble, or I if I didn't care anymore I might just use my clockwork drones and walk by the crispy villain.

And you're the face...

And you're prejudiced against Emerged and Awakened, so I"m betting there's a couple people on the team you wouldn't mind seeing dead.

Honestly, I don't see how people play characters like these at the table with everyone else. They seem to exist separately from the team. I don't see how they're supposed to work with the team. The more people are separate from everyone else, the more often random boredom and distractions enter the game as people art looking for something to do while the GM is focused on a single individual.

Now we're getting somewhere.

I took chatty. I'll talk through my drones with a voice modulator, but I wouldn't show my face. That would be bad.

I'll try not to kill my teammates. Most of my passion will be directed towards a random mage I work on killing between missions. I'll try to keep that to an abstract single roll after every session, so I don't take up everyone else's time (i.e. data search for info on my target, or single contact about him letting me remodel his house).

Ugh, I know what you mean. My bow troll had days where he didn't do anything, so I ended up wistlessly watching my team to face work and hacking. Hopefully I'll do better now that I can participate in combat, social, and technical skills.

As for the cold storage, there's got to be a number on that signal reduction, and I eventually pan to have my mutual signal range at about 1/2 the globe when absolutely necessary. I'd probably just proxy through the underground wired network, or have repeater drones though.

Kind of hard to have 1/2 Global Mutual Signal Range when said Cold Storgage Facilty has no signal that penetrates outside of the walls, and no Wired access outside of the facility at all.

This is more min-maxed than I was expecting. The fun part is the orderly's crotch based off switch. One swift kick to the balls and down he goes. Plus, people are going to love getting you across borders.

I think I'm missing something here. A key part of your plan is to pretend to be a cyborg, throwing any would-be pursuers off your trail. Let me list a few problems with that.

#1. Not one of the drones you have is even vaguely humanoid. This might work with your SR buddies but...
#2 You've rented a high class apartment/house for the "fake you". At this point, pretending to be an escaped cyborg in the body of, say, a drone tank will raise eyebrows amongst your neighbors.
#3 High and Medium lifestyles require SINs
#4 Neither your nor your "drone" you have either a real or fake sin. In fact, you have no ID, fake or real, of any kind.

Also, at some point your GM is going to have corps/cops/mafia run a trace on you, or TI, or something and you have no defenses on your drones or home node to prevent serious hacking. This will end poorly and your GM will laugh at you.

Yeah Ggodo, Just disallow the character and have him move on...

That many drones and no Control Rig?

Also, what happens of the group takes a job that needs to hack something offline, like a nexi stored inside a faraday cage. What will your "I have the ring of invisibility! You Can't See Me!" hacker plan on doing then?

He will Faint from Stage Fright?

but thats the problem. there will be times that the group is doing something where you *can't* just phone it in via the net. It will come up. Corps aren't dumb. If you had something really really valuable on a computer, with the state of hackers being what is it, would you put in on your LAN or would you put it in a system with no access to the outside world? Are you just going to sit there and eat cheetos during those game sessions or are you going to insist that your GM write every single story in a way that accomidates your character never having to go hands on? Neither seems like a reasonable solution, so the character probably is not a reasonable choice.

@Summerstorm

Oh, thats easy. One severe illness and strait there you go.
(Oh, and you do not need lasting effects. Coma + severe fiver and there you go. Starving in about 2 weeks from 100 to 60 kg is not a bid deal that way.)

I'd buy the physical stats if the character had the paraplegic (or better yet quadriplegic) flaw. For someone who's not supposed to be completely crippled I'd expect a minimum of 2 in their physical stats.

Which would leave you with 40BP less. (Thats 10% if your total BP)
You can either cut down on attributes or you can cut down on skills and resources.
Both is possible.

That is why I like Karmagen. Four attributes from one to two just costs 40 Karma, which is about 5% of your total Karma.
But increasing four attributes from 4 to 5 costs 100 Karma which is 13% of your total Karma.
(You might want to cut Karma to 650 and hand out free Knoledge skills like in BP)

Wow Longbow just Wow!
It is as it was said by everyone. You will not like the results that occur when you do hit Wi Fi inhibitors and it is everywhere just like Wards are for the Awakened. Plus Border Crossing is gonna be a bitch. Where did you plan on hiding? You cannot even drive any of your drones. You do not have the Pilot skills. You are kinda stuck in Default mode which is your Reaction to even Rig your drones you are hiding in. Forget doing any type of running or evasion. One firefight and your drone go BOOM!

Completely off topic, but "Hacker Rigger Face" sounds like a very uneducated Troll's best insult for anybody who can use a computer...

As far as the character goes... I like the idea of the "behind the scenes" type hacker, but they almost never seem feasible in the long run. Had a guy like that in the last game I played. GM had him out of his van by the third session, and though he weaseled his way back in, he ended up running 3/4 of the two year campaign half a world away from his beloved ride. Weird thing was, he was a dwarf and took 5 body at Chargen, tied for second highest in the group with my Russian Ork Sniper/CQC Expert behind the Troll Tank/Anal Violation Enthusiast. Even had decent strength and took up a few weapon skills later, wound up making a decent battle Rigger, relying on his drones to provide cover for the group as we moved about.

So I guess my advice is to go for it with all your heart, but be prepared for the inevitable change of status quo that will put you into an "in-the-flesh" run.

Son, I am disappoint.

Also, your lifestyle logic is flawed. Cyborgs are about as commonly known of in 2072 society as the Immortal Elves; that is to say, they are not commonly known about AT ALL. If you want people to believe that your drone is a cyborg, then you'd better be prepared for the corporate extraction team that comes smashing down your door within a day or two.


Has this reminded anyone else of pattyhulez, if only briefly and slightly? Or am I just going crazy?

Maybe someone else said this somewhere else in the thread, but i wanted to put it down just for the record.

If you consider this guy a rigger/drone character you have built the worst one in the history of the game.

YOU HAVE NO PILOTING SKILLS. You also have a reaction of 1, meaning on the piloting skills that you can default on you default to zero, count them, zero dice. You might get something to follow grid guide, but you basically have no chance whatsoever to do anything with a vehicle that actually requires a roll. You can't pilot flying drones at all becuase you can't default on that skill. And even if you could, you would default at zero dice again.

That gunnery skill you put 6 levels plus a specialization, it links to your agility, which is a whopping 1. You may have incredible gunnery training, but your native skill at aiming is so damn bad that you come out about where a mid range gunner would. Certainly not 'runner good, not anywhere near elite.

This guy is a decent hacker and a cripple and a nut, thats about it. Its going to be hard for him to get steady work with a team because the only thing he can really do is hack, and he cant do that in the flesh when needed. The guy would make a great spider as long as someone else was running the drones, but thats honestly about it.

Presumably, his plan is to use Remote Control (Command) rigging. Which trades DP for having to use Complex Actions, but you can certainly shoot well enough. And you might as well use FA then. He does still need Pilot Ground (Specialized to Remote Control, natch).

I am still getting some of the more advanced/optional rules down for 4th ed. Do you mean that instead of going VR and piloting he is just going to subscribe the drones to his comlink and give them commands, and let their piloting programs fly/drive them? Makes sense, but what makes him any better at being a rigger then than anyone else on the street? Other than the gunnery skill? And considering he plans to do all of this from his secret base far from the action, isn't he buggered if they hit some decent electronic warfare or they get in a building that has wireless signal blocked to the outside world?

Neither Hacking nor Rigging use the character's Attributes at all except for Initiative rolls.

Hacking uses Skill + Program.

AR Remote Control rigging mode uses Skill + Command (or Skill + Sensor Rating).

VR Jumped In rigging mode uses Skill + Response (or Skill + Sensor Rating).




-k

Another glaring omission - a face with no Etiquette skill (and a Charisma of 2 to boot) is not a face. Assuming he doesn't piss off the Johnson to the point of retracting the job offer and deleting the whole team from his virtual roladex, the first guy with whom he makes enquiries might sooner kill him than give him directions.

One of my players has gone for a similar concept - he's an AI living in the hub node of an old people's home and at any given time is pretending to be one of the residents by means of having them doped up and sat in his transys steed. The concept is ludicrous and flawed and I allowed it for humour and curiosity more than anything else, but it's still a damn sight better and more playable. Above all it's interesting, which this guy really isn't.

Advice? Start again. Forget munckinnery, ask your GM what stats and gear your concept needs at a bare minimum and then keep tweaking your concept until said GM can, with a straight face, say your character will still be appreciated by his team mates after the first attempt at a run.

I'll point out that no one in our group wants to play a hacker, face, or rigger. If I didn't do this, we would have 3 street sammies, two of them elven snipers, and the other a bear shaman spec'd for healing, but primarily trying to maul everything including my SUV.

I'm getting very conflicting info. Everyone wants me to increase my low stats. Ok, high pools go down to 10 or 8. Everyone wants me to get more equipment to take care of alternate situations. Ok, I no longer have all those hacker programs, or I need to get rid of some drones.

I already gave up on recon drones. I'm waiting till I get some money in the campaign to get those.
I already gave up on fake SIN. I'm waiting till I get some money in the campaign to get that.
I already gave up on useable nonregistered programs. I'm waiting till I get some money in the campaign to get those.
I already gave up on all but the absolutely essential skills for face. I'm waiting till I get some karma in the campaign to get those.
I already gave up on combat drones for various situations. I'm waiting till I get some money in the campaign to get those.
I already gave up on jumping in. I'm waiting till I get some body so I don't screw up for that, and I'm waiting till I get some karma in the campaign to get that.
I already gave up on Agents. They'll screw up tests I could otherwise pass and lead right back to me, and I'm waiting till I get some money in the campaign to get those.
I already gave up on fully modding all my vehicles and drones. I'm waiting till I get some money in the campaign to get those.
I already gave up on empathy software. I'm waiting till I get some money in the campaign to get that.
I already gave up on any personal armor or weapons. I'm waiting till I get some money in the campaign to get those, and even then I probably won't get any since anonymity is my only functional armor.
I already gave up on physical stats. I'm waiting till I get some karma in the campaign to get those.
I already gave up on some of the skills I need to keep my drones in shape. I'm waiting till I get some karma in the campaign to get those.
I already gave up on a commlink that can run my programs. I'm waiting till I get some money in the campaign to get that.

I'll fill this list out more if I think of more, but I finally have a chance to work on my character a bit. I feel like I dumped way too much money into my Lyger Zero Panzer's sensors, so off to fix that!

Proxy through a drone at the edge of the cage. I already take most of my matrix actions through a proxy, and use hot sim to counter the -1 penalty. That's another I forgot to get in my last minute rush to finish my character. A sim rig.

#1. Doesn't matter. Any drone can be adapted. The important part is the feeling that shows you aren't a robot. Also, fluidity of motion. You need to show you're used to the body.
#2. I wasn't aware the Evo was a tank.
Anyway, yeah. Half way through the session today I did two things:
A. I realized that the whole "nobody in my party knows about me" isn't going to work. I need to relay my actions truthfully to the GM, and the guys at the table will probably have a difficult time roleplaying the "I believe this guy is a cyborg" act, once they figure it out.
B. I realized I was getting a bit too overzealous with the cyborg idea, since that does precisely the opposite of what I'm attempting, by drawing way too much attention.
#3. Taking care of that. I'll make the availability test next session. I hadn't really used lifestyles before, as I was pretty happy with street, and though VendingWear was a nifty idea that deserved to be advertised.
#4. That's number 3.

As for the trace, what do I not have to prevent hacking? Proxying is +4 threshold to trace me. I have a firewall running at rating 5. I have stealth, spoof, decrypt, exploit, etc. Did my original post not go through, or is there some hidden fifth element?

Better than the whopping 2(or 1) and no skill my teammates have.

Ah, caps lock. I see you have mastered the art of starting flame wars on 4chan. Have you read any of the rules for riggers? Please do so and get back to me on that. Page 247 of the core book would do you some good. You may notice my Ford is completely unequipped. This is because I plan to use it later, once I actually gain the resources to support all these rolls. Thank you for your patience.

Actually, I wasn't aware you even could use agility on matrix actions. Okay, I'll stop teasing. Just read that page I sent you.

Actually, the hacking is kind of bad at this point. I'm leery of using any of my programs until I can get a warez contact for some unregistered ones.

One last thing. Not sure if this matters or not, but this is:

• My first hacker.
• My first rigger.
• My first face.

The bear has 7 CHA. He just breaks walls instead of talking.

Ah. Forgot drain stats.

There is a difference between "guy with middling skills who does the talking, because no one else could be bothered", and a face. So really, he's a hacker/rigger. Actually, he's a hacker with some drones. Honestly, while the low stats don't bug me as much as they do the others, they are still a glaring weakness (bunker riggers/stay-at-home hackers only work up to a point). I would recommend dropping Edge to shore up your physical Attributes a bit - Edge is nice, but you want to cover the essentials first, then raise it.

I personally loathe it, but I am still surprised that, for a techie plugged into the party spokesman role, you didn't get empathy software for him.

Dang, you've got a point on the facery, but I'll be amending that soon.
I've thought about the edge so many times, but I just can't do it. That last point is going to cost me 35 karma in game, whereas I can raise BOD, AGI, and REA to 2 for 30 karma in game, and STR effectively to 8 for 3500 nuYen if I absolutely have to.
The physical stats thing seems like a lesson I'm going to have to learn the hard way. I just hope the time doesn't come for a while, because even after chargen, I wasn't done with chargen.

Couldn't afford it. You seem to have noticed that social took a "backseat". YEEEEAAAAAHHH
But seriously, I don't negotiate or con left and right, so I generally just boost it with edge.

Just for the record, a score of 1 in an attribute doesn't mean a character is crippled in that area. It just means they're rather badly underdeveloped in it. Hell, if we were to pretend that SR's attribute system worked in real life, I'd probably have a strength and body of 1 myself, due to a chronic disease that's left me with sapped-out muscles and an out-of-shape cardiovascular system. I can still walk around for a bit on errands, or carry a couple of bags of groceries for a bit, but I'm not going to be running very far or lifting much more without becoming quickly exhausted. I'm not crippled in those areas, but I *am* really quite bad at them, even compared to the average person's more frequent scores of 2 or so (3 is "average", but more accurately "high average", 2 is more the "average average").

Now, mind you, I would have an agility and reflex of 2 or 3 (though they used to be higher), so I'm not all 1s. Someone with all 1s would be...in a pretty bad place to even try and get around on an average day. They'd be a mess. But they could still huff and puff and occasionally trip their way down a hallway on a run, even if they'd be in serious trouble if they were in the thick of things when the shit hit the fan. But they WOULD be able to walk down a hallway without dying (I mean, assuming it isn't trapped...) and take a seat to hack a non-wi-fi server. They're just going to be really reliant on their more able-bodied teammates to keep them from dying when the aforemention fan-shitting happens.

(Not defending lbr in this thread, or giving characters 1s in scores to save points in general, just saying...1 doesn't mean "crippled". It just means "really bad performance in this attribute". Same goes for mental scores, too. An intelligence of 1 doesn't mean one is retarded, it just means one has the problem-solving and memory of a sieve. A charisma of 1 doesn't mean the character has to offend everyone they ever meet the moment they open their mouth, it just means they're really unlikely to ever IMPRESS anyone when they open their mouth. And, of course, less dice means more chance for glitches, which covers the "low attribute should have extra penalties" aspect. They do. They're called glitches when the character is FORCED to try their hand at something they're bad at.)

And yet, you have a character that cannot truly fulfill the roles of Hacker, Rigger OR Face. Really, Longbowrocks, you should ignore the compulsion to Munchkin the character, and actually come up with something else that would work as a viable character. I am not the only one who thinks that the character you proposed is an epic fail for those niches you want to work in.

Which is why it does not work very well. It is hard to combine archtypes into an effective whole, especially if you have never created/played the ones you are trying to combine. Hacker/Rigger is rather easy to accomplish, as they use many of the same skills and stats. Throwing Face into the Mix makes it a little harder (No Cross skills/Attributes), but can be done. Just not usually as your first attempt at it. And as a note... Combining them into a single whole will usually result in a character that is not as good as a Dedicated version of what you are combining.

However, Good Luck on the attempt.

@longbowrocks
Talk to your group and use karmagen.
I too have a problem with putting attributes beyond 1 in BP sometimes. Because I want the extra BP from INT and LOGIC for hobbys and a bunch of contacts and every skill my character has picked up in his backstory.

But do yourself a favor: All physical attributes to one is just bad. (Body 3 is going to help you a lot, because it ups your dices for resistance from 3 to 9, which is very nice)

(But yes, the character will probably not have any problem to survive, since you have enough edge to throw around.)

(As a matter of fact going with an technomancer would have been a viable choice. For you get your explaination for the bad physical attributes for free)

Not really, no.
Why is a Technomancer inherently poor in his Physicals?

@Tymeaus Jalynsfein#
Beeing locked up in the matrix while your body is dependend on artificial nutrition can do that to you. (Actually will do that to you)

(If you need to do it through the blood stream because the digestive organs started failing, it gets even worse)