His original character did those with spells... He wanted a change... Seemed to work well for him...

Fair. It works, but it's expensive.

No Argument there.

It's not merely having 3 Magic, it's also having 3 Magic after spending 6 Magic worth of BP on it, plus the cost of the Stirrup. *shrug* Not my idea of a good time, nor of a 'fun' flexible, capable character.

I would hazard a guess that you have never played such a character. So, How would you know?
Besides, it was not a Stirrup; Just a Wired 2 and Reaction Enhancers 2.

Except a Stirrup is what we're talking about!

If you're positing that I have to experience things before I'm allowed to have opinions or ideas about them, then there's no point in talking.

I wasn't so concerned with the Adept option, frankly, what I guess I'm wondering is could I build an effective TM who rigs himself? If I could, what roles would he be capable in, out of the gate? My goals for this character would be to be a competent hacker, gun-bunny/street sam, and maybe a face if I can fit it in there - if it helps to know.

Gun Bunny and Techno-Hacker and Face and Rigger?
You're trying to hyperspecialize into Jack of All Trades, and the rules specifically forbid that.

Also, there's no way in hell you're going to be able to rig your body and use it as a drone more effectively than doing it the Natural Way. Assuming your GM lets you do it at all.

I think i could build this, if i was shooting for 10-12 dice in the primary areas.

Probably minus the techno aspect.

Well, I wouldn't say specializing in everything - my GM usually limits us to native dice pools of 12-14, at least initially, so that means we can sorta do that. I'm just wondering if it's feasible though. But what could be done well with this concept, assuming it works (which I am)?

You know me better than that. My point was that having an opinion is fine and dandy, but you have no real basis to compare against if you have not played a character of the type discussed. Try it sometime, you might be surprised. I know that I was...

No worries, though, Yerameyahu...

No, they just make it difficult.







-k
may play a Gunbunny/Hacker/Face/Rigger for Missions. Maybe.

How would you do that, if you were also going to rig yourself (if such were made possible by the GM)?

No, without the (mythical) self-rigging.

Well, depending on how you look at it, technically the character in question that everyone "sees" is rigged.

But no, the character in question cannot have any cyber, so she can't rig herself. Rigging an anthroform drone on the other hand is entirely possible. She just plays it off as her "real" body while she hides. When the movie "Surrogates" came out, I laughed out loud.

Start with a Mystic Adept. You'll be at least half Adept, so your spellcasting and conjuring will be okay but not spectacular. Adept powers can boost skills, especially social skills, into the stratosphere. Pro Tip: Gunnery isn't a Combat Skill, so Improved Ability (Gunnery) is cheap. From the Mage side comes the ability to put things into wonderful Spell Foci.

As a Rigger, you can use the cheese of not having to have any other attack skill except Gunnery. Also note that since most of your activities will be run through drones, your meat body attributes mostly don't matter. So that means more BP to put into other things such as Hacking or Vehicles and such.

There's also a number of skill boosting equipment options out there, especially for Matrix stuff.

The particular build I am running has Social skills in the 16-24 dice pool, Matrix skills in the 14-18 range, Gunnery in the 18-20 range, and Rigging pools in the 14-18 range. Plus Spellcasting and Conjuring in the 8-12 range and getting better due to Initiation. I did "waste" some BP on roleplaying stuff, though, so if I pushed it I could probably squeeze more dice in.

Throw in an Edge pool of 6 and well...

If I WAS going to rig myself, well, it'd actually probably worsen the build as less Essence means less Magic, and my build is heavily Magic dependent. Which reminds me, next Initiation I need to take Cleansing, Background Count hurts.

Plus taking double damage every time I got hit does not appeal to me.




-k

You're still much too proud of all that cheese.

I am proud, because all the cheese is both RAW and RAI. I don't particularly get impressed by builds that violate RAI to do what they do.

The only rules-grey area is the rigger cocoon I mentioned before, and that has no impact on the dice pools as mentioned even if it was disallowed.



I will note that the build is expensive as hell, nuyen-wise, so I had to spend a ton of the BP on cash.



-k

There's no such thing as RAI cheese; that's just broken writers. But I was just teasing. All rigging is super-powerful, regardless of what else the character can do.

I'd do it with a cyborg. Self rigging at its finest.
Charisma 6, influence at 4, empathy ware 6 running on some high rating sensors. That covers basic facing. Gun-bunnying is easy with Gunnery. Hacking is cheap. Totally doable.

I could probably do it with a technomancer using charisma synergy and a point of ware. Once you're a hacker, it doesn't take a lot to be a good rigger too. And hey, elves get both agility and charisma.

I'm not sure gunnery not being a combat skill, for purposes of Improved ability "RAI"

Sounds like you should give Eclipse Phase a whirl.
What exactly is the perceived problem with Analyse Device? Here I showed you would need to cast Analyse Device at Force 9 in order to get a +1 net bonus using a smartlinked gun (or in this case cyberware). I still don't see what's overpowered about that when you can just take a drug that'll give you +1 for far cheaper.

I would classify a smartgun as electronics (OR 4) rather than a full-on computer, but that's a matter of interpretation.

I guess I think it's just cheesy to rely on spells that increase your understand of a device to not so much replace your skill, but even double it. I mean, if you had a skill of 7 in pistols, what is Analyze Device going to tell you about a gun that you don't already know?

Also, what is knowing how a gun works going to matter if you don't have hand coordination or any sense of aiming?

It just feels like they haphazardly slapped a game effect on the spell that goes way beyond what it should.

I guess. In the days of Tron, a machine that could render 3D gradiented surfaces in real-time was a CRAY engineer's wet dream, and now kids leave their DSes behind on the bus. Apparently my Texas Instruments calculator has more grunt than the bleeding edge "computer" that ran the first Mars rover. So one (technological) generation's computer becomes the next's generation's basic component. I certainly wouldn't call the valve computers (think Fallout or Twelve Monkeys) mere "electronics (OR 4)" even though they had less computational power than a tamagotchi. As soon as it does calculations (such as ballistic parabola extrapolation from a moving point of origin) using electronics / fibre-optics, I classify it as a computer (so the Antikythera Mechanism would not be OR 6). As you say, it's a matter of interpretation, but that's my rationale.

The skill 7 and specialisation tell you all about that category of weapon. The Analyse Device tell you all about that specific object. Any dust in its rifling or wear on its hammer or smudge on its smartgun lens that might add a slight effect to the range-finding value presented, etc.

But yes, knowing all about a gun shouldn't be very useful if you're largely incapable of firing it in the first place (Quadriplegic or Blind, for example).

Well, they deliberately moved it from being a combat skill in earlier editions to being a vehicle skill.

The real only reason to move it out of the 'combat skills group' into the 'vehicle skills group' is so that either a) it does NOT share in any Combat Skill modifiers, or b) so that it DOES share in any Vehicle Skill modifiers.

So I don't have a problem believing this was intended.





-k

Well, according to my copy of SR4A, gunnery uses ranged combat rules, (P171, the one with the fugly faced chick with a hot bod on the back of a bike(in case you have a problem seeing the page number ), so those arent quite believable reasons, to me.

Maybe they just felt it was more appropriate, since most of the time it's only used for vehicle-mounted weapons? I'm not sure there was really any great plan behind it.

Whatever it's used for, it's clearly combat.