Hey guys,

So I am making a new 5th ed. rigger and I'm having a little rules trouble.
Basically, I want my drones to be as secure as possible and I want to be able to hijack and sell other people's vehicles.

What skills/gear do I need and should I invest in hacking/Cracking group or is that just for deckers/techs?

Thanks!

Hacking, Electronic Warfare, and Cybercombat are pretty well useless unless you have a cyberdeck (Electronic Warfare has one solid rigger function to jump into a hostile device, but requires marks to use, and you can't really get marks without a cyberdeck).

Computer's only really useful for matrix searches and matrix perception, which may be worth it. Software's mostly useless unless you really want to be able to disarm a data bomb on a file you probably have no way to get access to anyway.

So basically, without a cyberdeck, don't bother with hacking. That said, a cheap cyberdeck would put those all back on the table. You'd want to be best at acquiring marks (either Hacking or Cybercombat) and also Electronic Warfare (for using Jump into Rigged Device).

I haven't mathed it out yet, so I don't know how viable it is, but I've thought a Technomancer would make the best use of a rigger jacker concept. Since TMs are a living deck, you get all the hacking toys, you'll have wait a bit to get your first submersion before you can jump in to drones, and you'll need to buy an RCC and invest some attributes in to your meat stats to make your DP while jumped in worth it. And over all, this sounds really expensive...but I think it might be viable.

I can't jack somebody's drone without a deck though, right?
That's not just an Electronic Warfare test right?

The problem is that Jump into Rigged Device (the opposed-test Matrix action you use to jump into someone else's drone), while being a Data Processing action, requires 3 marks to use. Now without being exceptionally clever, there's no real way to get those 3 marks without an Attack or Sleaze attribute, which means you need a cyberdeck.

On the plus side, you can get the deck for a 50,000 investment and most vehicles have a Pilot (e.g., Device Rating) of 1 to 3, meaning they only get maybe 6 dice to resist when on autopilot or otherwise unattended.

This means that a dice pool of 9 with an Sleaze of 3 is generally sufficient to start acquiring the marks you need (though Sleaze 4 would be safer) against most targets.

So I recommend this for the rigger/jacker:

Decent Logic (4-5) maybe with a Cerebral Booster, Hacking 4-5, Electronic Warfare 4-5

Microdeck Summit (Attack 1, Sleaze 3, Data Processing 3, Firewall 4) running Virtual Machine (Exploit, Toolbox) -- this would give you an effective Sleaze of 5 for Hack on the Fly, and Data Processing 4 (for the Jump into Rigged Device action).