those of you who read the topic "Gaming Dilemma" May know that I'm planning on running a game or so after the current GM finishes his game. What I've decided to do with these games is to showcase the more obscure parts of the shadowrun world so that people know what their options character-wise really are. The games are probably going to be using pre-gen characters and are hopefully going to cover Rigging, Decking, and Magic in as much detail as possible.

The first of these games I'm planning on running will be a rigger game for 3-4 players. Right now I have 3 ideas for characters, but I'm not sure exactly how to split the duties for this group (the primary function of which will probably be assault).


My 3 ideas for specialised characters so-far are:

1. Electronic Warfare Specialist
   Pilots a custom Large Anthroform drone (like the ones discussed in the Possible Power Armor thread), tricked-out wilth all of the accessories a master of sabotage and electronic tomfoolery needs.
2. Transport & Heavy Supprt Specialist
   Gets the team in using a range of craft. Has other craft sitting miles away to provide heavy mortar cover & similar.
3. Combat Drone Specialist
   Possibly the most vague of the categories, this guy packs the punch to get the job done. Be it some steel-lynxes backed-up with a coupple of Ares Guardians or an army of skimmers with assault-rifles

If a 4th player does turn-up, a second drone specialist would probably be an idea, specialising them further into air and ground drones, perhaps?

The idea I have for the game is as follows:
There is some item in a well-guarded paramilitary base that they need to get. Thebase is on the coast at the top of some cliffs. For plot purposes, I'm going to make this item magical somehow (possibly a focus or similar) so that the next 1-off can run-on from this. The base is probably fairly well laid-out, with a radar tower, comm tower, barracks, main buildings, vehicle and drone hangers, patrols, ETC.

The electronic warfare guy gets in close (on foot or by the sea via an Ampbibious Operations Package) and scans the local airwaves for drone networks and finds two. One is a small, unencrypted, network comprising of a few small maintenance robots. The other is larger (with stronger transmitters) and encrypted as-if-to-say "No, you can't just turn all of our combat drones against us!". The base is also protected with a number of heavy turret emplacements, there are also probably helicopters in the hangars decked-out for combat.

Assuming electronic warfare guy gets in and manages to remove mid-long range communications ability by destroying the comm tower (fighter jets, T-birds, and attack helicopters from the nearby airbase would be bad for party health), the rest of the party can move in piloted by vehicle&support guy (hopefully, piloting a T-bird if one can be made that's affordable. You'll see why later).

Combat ensues, and airborne/groundborne troops will probably be on high alert once they realise comms are out or someone tries to highjack a drone network. With a combination of mortar-strikes to take-out heavy targets, drones with light to heavy arms fire, a few aircraft-mounted missiles, and a huge special effects budget the group should be able to take-out the defenses and break-open the front of the main compount (which is pretty-much a bunker so it shoudln't be destroyed even by prolonged heavy mortar fire). The drone rigger's troops go in and the Electronic Warfare guy meets-up with the rest of the party again. Queue drones tearing through guards who don't have any AV ammo and a general sound of retreat.

The guards retreat downwards through some heavy doors and there is a loud, low, grinding and shaking sound. What is actually happening at this point is that the front of the cliff-face is opening up and the artifact is being loaded onto a T-bird. The rest of the group hear about this from some patrolling mini-blimp. Once the doors are open, out shoots a heavily armoured (but not too well armed) T-bird. This is where we get a chase scene. If the electronics warfare guy goes down too, there's a fast speedboad he can hack into and hopefully pilot after them as the party T-Bird (the only other craft fast enough to follow it) gives chase. The craft is probably heading to rondevous with a carrier and trying to get out of jammer range so it can send a distress signal. Queue the party taking down the enemy T-bird by ramming it (no heavy weapons on the party T-bird either) into the ocean. They hope they can get the artifact back later using the amphibious anthroform.

So... Any ideas/suggestions?

Looks like my idea was similar to what you're doing. That'll be tough to balance, but rewarding if you pull it off.

How is the EW guy going to take down the comm tower?

~J

He' has a good jammer and a rating 10 power amplifier in one of his arms. Otherwise a shot with his mecha-scale silenced sniper rifle (read silenced assault canon packing AV bullets) should be able to take-out the satellite dish or its power source. He could also sneak-in and lay explosives (but that's a risky plan).

I suppose he could try and wrest control of the maintenance drone network and have one of them pull the plug. This has the disadvantage that it takes a few turns to wrest control of the network, which leaves a large oppertunity for the allarm to be sounded.

Anybody got any other ideas as to how to take-down a satellite uplink or long-distance radio link? (not decided which it is yet)

I'm also open to character designs for the others on the team (I have much of the electronic warfare guy down, but I'm still open to suggestions) and vehicle designs.

Just in-case anybody wants to take a stab at them:
I think support guy should have:
1 Command T-Bird, nothing larger than a coupple of ARs in weaponry
1-2 well-armored craft with drone racks (maybe one chopper and one van?)
1 Support platform (Heavy mortar with seeker rounds)
Enough money left from 1M to buy some starting cyber and ammo.

Drone Guys:
I'll probably make two of them. They don't need anything to transport their drones in, but they do want full battletac FDDM and IVIS capability. Maybe one (or both?) of them should have tac comps?

TacComp really shines when used with SUT, and as such the backup guy is probably a better choice there.

~J

Hmm. I contemplated that, but I suspect he'd be getting really streched by that point. A tac-comp is 400k, that's 40% of his resources even before he buys his T-Bird. I suppose I could say that the drone riggers would need to contribute towards their ride in and out...

Silenced PAC? Cool, does the tall, short, fat, thin guy carry spare mags in her back pack.

Given that, IIRC, the cheapest T-bird is 2.2 million nuyen, I don't think he'll have to worry about paying for one.

~J

Does the silencer on the assault canon disturb you more or less than the 10-foot tall, heavily armored, robot wielding it? What about the dwarf inside the thing driving it?

Keep in mind that by "silenced" he means "not quite so loud".

~J

Well... I suppose it's possible to make one usiong the design rules but I just did the math and the cheapest one (basic, no mods) is still around 1.2M.

What other cool craft could he have as a command craft? I'm thinking that a tilt-wing might do the job.

Why the bloody mech? Give a city master, it holds more stuff!

be that as it may, its still not as cool as a mech

It's also not as maneuverable, or stealthy. A Large anthroform drone can climb the cliff face (using cyber climbing claws) after coming ashore, what vans could do that? The Anthroform can fire a range of weapons, and even pick-up weapons from fallen enemies. It can perform virtually any task, and go virtually anywhere that a troll could.

Besides, if you can get a silencer for the 14D Barett 121 then why not one for sniper rifle that does 18D? The simple fact that I'm taking the stats from an assault cannon dosen't mean that it's exactly the same weapon. For a start, I envisage the barrel being longer on this model.

Remember the Dikoted Claymore on the drone can really do a good melee number, twinked out martial arts adept or not!

Gundam! Gundam! Gundam!

Ya think that thing was designed by a man? That takes phallic to a whole new level!

I was planning on going for Dikoted Spurs using the rules from the main rulebook where you do 1.5 times the character's strenth. If I went with 12 strength (fairly easy to get to) then that'd be 19S before staging. A dikoted katana or no-dachi would be cool too as then he'd get +2 reach, but I think any melee attacks aside from basic punches would require weapons skills.

So far his skill set is:
Electronics (Electronic Warfare) 5(7)
Mechanical Arm Operations (His Anthrosuit) 5(7)
Walkers (His Anthrosuit) 5(7)
Gunnery 6
Athletics 4
Stealth 6
So assuming I go Skills B (these characters are made using the priorities system) I can still tack-on some combat skill at 6. Suggestions?

Anyhow... As GM I get the final say on how large a silencer would have to be for a weapon larger than the Barett. The weapon will have a caliber slightly greater than the Barett's .5 BMG round and the gun will be about 8 feet long. The silencer takes the last foot or so of that, and will be about 2 inches across. Does that seem a fair silencer size?

@Young Freud. Wow. Even if the gun was silenced, you'd think someone would have heard the bullets impacting with the vault wall...

LOL. I know how they can chase down the escaping craft and get the artifact without needing an LAV ramming contest... Their main vehicle is a tilt-wing (or cargo helicopter) with a winch and the vehicle they're trying to catch is a heavily souped-up sports-cruiser. I suspect they'll be drawing straws to see who actually attempts the suicide mission of securing the hook to the other craft, both vehicles are probably travelling at speeds of around 200mph, but it'll make a fun scene to end the 1-off on.

So this is what the future of Battlebots looks like.... wow.

That and a VCR 3 pretty much kills any chance for more cyberware.

But with a VCR-3, there ain't much more you need.

~J

Very few of them (probably none of them) were going to have a VCR3.

If I was seriously going to consider giving the stealthy electronics warfare guy a citymaster, there are a number of things that you'd also have to persuade me of:
Could it be as stealthy? RAM can only take you so far. You'd need to build a custom EFC one. The base signature may only varies by 1, but the smaller anthroform can hide behind smaller obstacles keeping enemy TNs high. (Not to mention passive perception test TNs and manual gunnery TNs)
Could it be as mobile? Again, not much can be done to a stock citymaster to take it close. Going custom, the base off-road maneuverability of 12 for the van tells me this is not the case and, AFAIK, it can't be reduced below 2, ever. (compared to the -2 all-round handling rating possible for the anthrosuit)
Is it worth the cost? I'd need to go custom to get remotely close abilities to the custom anthroform, but the medium transport has a markup multiplier of 1 rather than the anthroform's 0.4.

Having a van may be nice, in-fact if he was a solo op he'd probably have a basic one of his own for transport and repair, but it's just not an appropriate transport MO for the stealthy EW rigger.

Stock Citymaster: Hand. 4 on-road.

Drive-by-wire 3: Hand. 1.

Vehicle Empathy (optional): Hand. 0.

Not that this might not be an unsuitable run for one, but you can get their Handling pretty darn low.

~J

Yes, but that's on-road handling. My grounds for assuming that off-road handling is important is the fact that nothing on a road is really stealthy. It'll probably be open terrain with nowhere to hide plus more heavily watched than off-road terrain.

Admittantly that's an assumption, but for any non-urban job it's very possibly the case.