At the moment I am just getting characters together for my new Shadowrun campaign that will be starting soon. One of my players is making a technomancer, but it is her first time playing a character who does anything to do with the Matrix, so I have been helping her out along the way. After a bit of advice and explanation she went off to put together a rough sheet, and came back having made a lot of the expected pitfalls and mistakes that I was anticipating. However, she picked two qualities that I had simply never considered before for a technomancer: Home Ground (her electonics shop) and Codeslinger(Registering Sprites).

So, the character is intended to use her Sprite minions for a lot of her hacking. Of course, having only a single unregistered one is not terribly useful, and Registering takes time. But, in "downtime" portions of the game, this character is now getting +4 to all her registering attempts while at her home due to Home Ground and Codeslinger, and +2 to create the Sprite in the first place. Of course, this doesn't help with the drain much but it is much more likely for Home Ground to have a meaningful contribution to the game with it being centered on an area where she uses her non-combat skills, as opposed to a Sprawl Ganger taking his home neighbourhood (since the neighbourhood is rarely going to be the target area of a run).

There is of course the downside of the characters workplace/home being relatively easy to destroy (thus losing the quality), but has anyone else ever come across characters making use of Home Ground this way?

I can see it being very useful for runners who use the Mechanics skill group a lot or modify a lot of their own gear, as +2 to all your active skill tests is quite a lot. Logic monkey's can really benefit this way, as a lot of their "big" skills are often used outside of runs and are not required to be "on site" (Medicine post-run, Mechanics pre/post-run, Hardware/Software modifications) and skills like Forgery would benefit immensely from this bonus.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Home Ground requires the location to be an accessed network on the Matrix to benefit from the +2 coding bonus. However, that's an easy enough fix.

And honestly, you aren't the only one to miss this application of Home Ground. I think I just came up with a few character ideas from this!

-K.

I've considered taking Home Ground for a Metasapient AI, focussed on his Home Node ...

Your player would do well to buy a Nexus, and have THAT be their Home Ground. The EVO Mobile Hub is reasonably affordable .... and mobile.

Does the fixed location requirement not apply to Matrix home grounds? I mean, I guess it's a fixed location in the Matrix, but still...

EDIT: Thought about it some more, and I guess since you could potentially access the nexus from anywhere it makes the fixed location thing a moot point. :/

Crappy computer made a double post, sorry!

My understanding of the Matrix Home Ground was that if your selected area was a Matrix Nexus or Datahaven, then you got the +2 bonus for all actions while you were "in" that node, but you could do so from any physical location. So get the bonus when data-searching in your Home Ground of ChatR-Us whether you be in Seattle or Arabia, or even the middle of the Sahara (assuming you can get signal of course).

Having thought about it a bit more for a physical location, I would give the bonus for all AR tests but not VR. And since registering sprites requires VR you wouldn't get the bonus. Of course, if your physical home ground has a wired-only network that needs a trode net to access and lacks external connections, would it count for the Matrix tests as a bonus? Sprites could be compiled, moved onto a commlink and then set loose upon the world if so.

And furthering on this...Home Ground plus an Aspected Domain makes for some scary-ass Ritual Spellcasting

That makes sense. I think I just over-analyzed it as I tend to do and became a bit confused.

As for your example of a wired only network, I personally would say that you couldn't compile sprites unless accessing the wireless Matrix. It seems to me that sprites are made up/compiled from the erroneous bits and bytes of the Matrix, which I would imagine a wired only network would have little of. But that's just me.

-K.

There is no difference in the matrix between a Wired Connection and a Wireless one. It is ALL the Matrix.

In a similar vein, using the lifestyle rules from Runner's Companion, a home with Feng Shui can help one's hacking ability by a fair amount. Also resonance wells for registering sprites and the like, but the exact bonus from that is unspecified.

The location IS fixed ... in the sense that it is a specific, particular Node.

...

As a GM, I would let a player take a sufficiently-large mobile space as a Home Ground. A cargo container ship, for example.

Eh. Feng Shui shouldn't help hacking, per se. Writing yoru own code with Software, maybe.

The RAW may say it does, just ... it offends my sensibilities, is all.

I've had magic users take home ground. Helps with summoning, enchanting, and some Spells you are planning to sustain. (SR3, but think it ports to SR4.)

To me, that's like calling a LAN not connected to any other systems the Internet. It's a network, yes, but it's not the 'Internet.'

-K.

No, it doesn't anymore; Feng Shui is pretty specifically tied to Technical skills now.

If you're responding to tisoz, he specified Home Ground.

Well since the fluff says that there are still some backbones that are wired, like across the Atlantic Ocean, it'd be more like calling a LAN connected to the Internet the Internet. As long as the wired network was connected to the Matrix that is.

Welcome to 2070. If you are in a Node, it does not matter how you got there.

one would assume the Resonance Well Bonus is the same as the magical equivalent. +2

Thats the "In tune" Lifestyle Quality.

Pretty sure Kishe MEANT to say "I personally would say that you couldn't compile sprites unless accessing the wireless Matrix."

Except that in Shadowrun, accessing a node is considered being in the Matrix, unless you are not.

Yeah, thanks KarmaInferno. What I believe the OP was saying (correct me if I'm wrong), is a node NOT connected to the Matrix - that is, a node that you must be jacked in physically to access (for a non-technomancer), and has no wireless capabilities to access the wider Matrix. A closed network, if you will.

In my opinion, on such a network you wouldn't be able to compile sprites since they are made up of "the fabric of the Matrix" (SR20A, pg. 240).

Essentially, what I think the OP is trying to do, by making the Home Ground a physical location with a closed network, is to gain both the physical location and Matrix location benefits. When I look at Home Ground, however, RAI (to me) is that you choose one or the other, not both

But this is all just my 2 cents, and he or she can do whatever he or she wants.

-K.

Honestly Im not going to use the "closed network" thing to allow my player access to her Home Ground bonus, it was just musing on possibilities. Especially since there is nothing to stop such a closed network being hooked up with a satellite uplink or similar and suddenly becoming accessible world-wide

Except now it isn't a closed network...