When a rigger jumps in a vehicle, the rules state that his icon merges with that of the rigged device. Does that mean that any decker who spots the drone's icon can directly attack the rigger, with a Biofeedback or Blackout program?


If my suspicions are correct, their software could directly mess with my rigger's brains instead of just his hardware. That's a bit too harsh to my taste...

Yeah, they either need a combat decker to cover them or to always run in hidden mode and lose some dice. Or both.

Yeah, a decker can wreck you, although you should have reasonably okay defenses given a highish Willpower and a decent RCC.

I've thought about houseruling the ability to auto-trace the physical location of any icon that is within the 100 meter auto-detection range (or which has been successfuly detected in hidden mode using matrix perception) OR making Trace Icon not require MARKs but just make it an opposed test.

I'm agreeing with the others.... but I'd like to point out that the text you quoted was stating that a hacker can mess with your rigging gear, but you can mess with his physical body, in return. It's hard to finish messing with a rigger when he's parked a van on your head, or just shot you with a vehicular weapon.

A good decker should be able to brick the vehicle in one or two Data Spikes, unless the rigger is wired directly to said vehicle and said vehicle has all wireless functionality otherwise disabled.

If the rigger is jumped in through an RCC or Commlink, I think the decker has to brick the RCC or Commlink first (p. 266). Once the rigger's persona was focefully de-matrixed, the decker would have a shot at bricking the vehicle or drone.

and i think his point is that with the right programs, the decker can fry your brains just fine, so it's not even remotely a situation where he can only harm your hardware while you can put a bullet in his head.

Fortunately, I forgot this rule:



With solid Willpower and Firewall ratings and by going on full matrix defense, the decker will probably brick his own deck just by attacking you.

Firewall, Intuition, & Willpower. Data Spikes are resisted with Firewall & Intuition. Willpower is added in the case of Full Matrix Defense. Pretty effective, considering it's almost an ersatz attack. Note that it only helps against [Attack] actions like Brute Force and Data Spike (The description gets a little loose later into the paragraph describing it, but the first sentence is explicit).

Aha, so no now my unstoppable elven technomancer assassin became the unkillable dwarf technomancer judo master. Exceptional attribute willpower, Force 8 quickened Increase Willpower, full matrix defense gets you 24 dice plus Intuition to defend and bounce back attacks. Muahaha!

Ha! That would be pretty funny. Flavor them as a Neo-Luddite who uses evil technology (a cyberdeck) and who's only goal in life is to usher hackers to their doom by causing them to brick themselves (toss on Biofeedback and you're damaging their brains since Biofeedback applies to failed [Attack] actions too).

Indeed, too bad Biofeedback program can't be loaded on RCC's...

One of the freelancers mentioned that the list wasn't all-inclusive. It only listed the programs deemed "handy" for riggers. Most of the programs not included only do something if you have an Attack or Sleaze attribute, so they're pretty much useless on an RCC. Hopefully an official FAQ entry will be included on it. I'm honestly not sure why Configurator wouldn't be considered handy, for instance.

As long as Configure can be used to swap Noise Reduction & Autosoft sharing as opposed to Matrix Attributes (which you can't do with RCCs), yeah, I agree, it would come in pretty handy. The program swapping, if it can do Autosoft swapping, could be great.