I would like to explore Nanotechnology a bit and was thinking of the following basis for a potentially very fun, but maybe weak character. The worst thing about this quality is its enormous cost. I can't even take Analytical Mind and Paragon anymore. Probably one can convince a GM to drop the cost to 20BP or so.

Given:
Technomancer
Wild Card Nano Prototype
0.75 points of essence lost due to Nanohive
Engineering (Nanorobotics) 6 (+2) knowledge

Reprogramming can be done in a few hours with an optimized build.

What to do with this set?
What tricks can you come up with?
What house ruling would be necessary to make it really worthwhile?



on a side note: Can you harvest nanites via taking a blood sample or another sort of extraction method and then let the colony in your body be reestablished to full rating by you Hive?

Nothing worth a damn
Crying while eating chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream with your bare hands and wishing you didn't have Wild Card Nanites instead of nice things.
Making Wild Card Nanites not super terrible. Or make it cost like 5 points.

You can make it slightly less sad by getting a cyberlimb and putting the hive in the cyberlimb. If I were forced to try to make this character as not bad as possible, it would be a Logic stream technomancer, and fill up the entire point of essence with a partial cyberarm, PuSHeD, and Cerebral Boosters.

I'd have expected more creativity from you, Umaro

Nanite-manufacturing Shop, at the usual toolkit prices.

Idea's come up before in our group. One of the best suggestions was that the nanite-making device resembles a coffeemaker, and you don't want to glitch getting your caffeine in the morning.

I recall a bit of text in the nanohive that says they can only replenish a nanosystem to it's original rating, not improve it, despite that it's building more.


If you're reprogramming nannies ANYWAY, you should be able to split your wildcard nanohive into 3 rating 1 systems, then manufacture them up to rating 3.
There is no process for this, but using the aforementioned nanoshop you should have the tools you need. An external nanohive(that is, one not installed, so it doesn't suffer from body degredation) hack to fill itself up to max capacity should do the trick.

A wildcard system is pretty worthless by itself, but when you have 6(or more) wildcard rating 3 systems with sprite/diagnostics/probability distribution support, it quickly becomes really amazing.

Could you expound upon that?

what, specifically, is giving you trouble?

Edit: basically Wildcard Nanites are pretty terrible and overpriced on their own. All it does is give you a single rating 3 nanosystem which can function as anything.
To make it good and worth using, you use nanofabbers, nanofaxes, nanohives - anything which makes nanites - to make it into more than one nanosystem.

well, unless they changed the rules on me when i wasn't looking, you'll get much much much better mileage out of hard nantidotes. nice and cheap, can be reprogrammed, and if you get the highest rating version, you can lose up to 6 points of rating due to unsuitability and *still* have a system as good as wild card.

more specifically:

Augmentation, p 107, "Reprogramming Hard Nanites".

"Reprogamming allows a speci c “breed” or system to perform
as if it were another system at a diminished rating.  e decrease
in rating may vary from –2 to –4 depending on the gamemaster’s
perception of similarity between system functions."

universal nantidotes come in hard or soft versions (obviously you want to buy the hard version) up to rating 9, and cost 2,500 per rating. thus, at a cost of 17,500 nuyen, or slightly less than 4 BP, you can get wild card at rating 5 (better than 5 for some applications).

although, to be fair, it is possible that wild card nanites are faster to reprogram than usual. that isn't really clear, tbh.

Wildcard nanites DO "circumvent the normal limits on reprogramming hard nanites".
That includes the time limit. It's why they are so good. You have a rating 3 anything system on-demand.

I was sure, that was written somewhere, but I can't find it.

Its in the description of the quality itself.

Its also worth mentioning that wildcard systems can mimic other types of internal nanoware, like nanoinfectors. I think cutters and shrikes are also on the table.

It would be worth the points if they could perform as Dynamic Handprints, Retinal Adjusters and Voice Mimic.

uh. I just caught something. The text says "(circumventing the normal limitations on reprogramming hard nanites)". One would assume, that the usual -2 to -4 malus is meant by this. But isn't the time spent (24, 1 hour) to reprogram a limitation as well? So, I say, reprogramming Wild Card Nanites doesn't take an extended test, but is instantaneous (or maybe a complex action). It also says "reprogrammed with great ease", which I see as not needing a doctoral degree in engineering.

Looking at the text:

"that can be reprogrammed to perform as any internal nanoware systems also at Rating 3 (circumventing the normal limitations on reprogramming hard nanites)."

It looks like it's circumventing the limitation on what Rating the nanites are after reprogramming and that's it. They're always Rating 3, no matter how dissimilar the old and new systems are.

well, that's just one interpretation. The brackets are behind the rating text. But they are also behind the whole sentence. While yours might be more obvious and more realistic, I'm trying to find a interpretation, that makes this quality actually useful.

I agree, it's just my interpretation. Sorry, I wasn't clear that you were looking for different interpretations to make it useful, my mistake.

What's with the Engineering (Nanorobotics) KS roll in the reprogramming nanites section? I find that weird. The book also mentions Engineering (Nanotech) in another section, and I would think those are the same thing.

For the reprogramming, it seems to make more sense to use the Cybertechnology (Nanoware) skill, or even Software or something. It's not as though the Cybertechnology skill gets used for much anyway, might as well throw it a bone...

ok. Assuming reprogramming takes 1 minute, because that's about the time blood cells need to circulate the body. So it's also the time a nanite needs to get back to its hive for reprogramming. The plan can be loaded into your nanohive with a complex action given that you have it ready, i.e. stolen, bought, programmed, etc.

Could it help if he got a separate commlink for programming the Nanites?

A Response 5 Commlink will drop it's rating by 1 for every Response 5 amount of programs running.

It can run 9 rating 4 agents at Response 4

Agent Loadout:
Programming Suite 4 - Ergonomic 4

The Ergonomic Option is...iffy since the description says that:



So which is it? Both? Or One?

If it is the Processor Limit then it is 5. If it is the Agent Payload then it is limited to the payload that in turn is limited by the current response of the commlink.

Since agent rating is limited by the commlink itself it would be lower and lower per agent anyway.

But it should give a good Dicepool with Teamwork tests that can work 24/7 with only reprogramming nanites.

That's how I read it too.

For 30BP you can reprogram them into a rating 3 but never higher than that. A good programmer reprogramming regular hard nanites that have rating 6 could become a rating 4.

It makes them at least playable.

If only they could also act as soft nanites, it would at least be useful.

eh, it really isn't remotely that clear what they mean by it. as the many posts above this one demonstrate.

additionally, if it does circumvent the time limit, it never really specifies by how much; is it a free action? complex? the same test with an interval of 1 minute or 1 CT instead of 1 hour?

or is it just a system that comes pre-loaded with the programming for each type? because that's probably just as useless; if that's all it is, then you should be able to pre-write a program for any nanite swarm and upload it with the same kind of action...