Shadowrun 5E Character Optimisation

[Silent Wayfarer]

In SR5E, if I want to hekatonkhire my way to victory, should I make a conjurigger or just stick to mundane rigging with a big stack of cash?

For Instance:

Resources A
Skills B
Attribute C
Race (Human) D
Magic E

for a mundane guy

Resources A
Skills B
Magic C
Race (Human) D
Attributes E

For magicrigger

[pragma]

In SR5E, if I want to hekatonkhire my way to victory, should I make a conjurigger or just stick to mundane rigging with a big stack of cash?

Mundane with a big pile of cash is definitely the more straightforward build. The priority you wrote is the same priority I had in mind when I was putting up the last post. You can also build it as a dwarf/ork for stereotypical flavor, but losing out on 5 edge is a tough pill to swallow.

You're going to be pretty attribute starved with the magicrigger as outlined: you'd like to max the usual rigging spread (Intuition, Reaction) but also add charisma (bound spirit cap) and willpower (drain resistance) into the mix. Naturally, you'd pick a charisma tradition to minimize your attribute dependency. If you're going mystic adept you'll be somewhat karma starved at the end of chargen too: you need to split it between mystic adept power points and attribute increases.

I've kicked the priorities around and I find myself begging for point buy. If you had skills, attributes, and resource all at C then you could pull it off just fine. As it stands though, I have trouble putting together a magicrigger that I'd like to play. I'd recommend just building a normal mage/mystic adept and then buying as many drones as you can during game since small amounts of cash seem to flow more freely than the karma you'd need to salvage the attribute spread. You can prefetch the rigger aspect of the character by investing your now copious attributes and skills in rigging related stuff that comes online after a few runs. The piece of the build you'll probably never get to replace is the control rig, but if you're OK commanding drones w/ the control device action rather than jumping in. You can still have an army of gun drones backed up by primal forces of nature that way.

[Silent Wayfarer]

Cashwise the big sinks are the VCR, the RCC, the drones, and their weapons. Someone mentioned that a good combo was the Nissan Rotodrone with an Ares Alpha, and the Nissan can mount two of them if need be. Total cost for a rotodrone + one Ares Alpha is about 7.65k each, and the RCC and VCR cost about 100k each.

One good thing is that even the basic VCR counts as R3 Wired Reflexes, since you're going into hotsim VR, so you can skimp on that most expensive of bodyware, and it can go even higher if there's a simsense booster for a total of 5d6 Init dice. However, VCRs actually make all your vehicles faster (+rating to Speed and Accel), so you probably want to max it out when you can.

Hmm. If I'm not wrong, by Frank Trollman's description of his magicrigger, he had the drones for "normal" fighting while the pokemans spirit was used as an astral scout and to Great Form materialize and ruin the shit of anything his drones couldn't take care of, and also as an emergency summon in case he was cut off from his drones...

[Stahlseele]

otherwise:
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=40801
dumpshock has a rigger optimization threat for SR5.

[Silent Wayfarer]

Very nice. Thanks, SS.

[Silent Wayfarer]

All right, so here's a WIP 5e rigger.

Chiyo "Centimanus" Mihama

Resources A
Skills B
Attributes C
Race D
Magic E

AGI 1/6
BOD 1/6
REA 5(8)/6
STR 1/6
CHA 2/6
INT 6/6
LOG 5(7)/6
WIL 3/6
INI 11(14)/12(18)
EDG 5/7
ESS 6

Initiative: 1d6+14
Matrix AR Initiative: 1d6+14
Matrix Cold Sim Initiative: 3d6+14
Matrix Hot Sim Initiative: 4d6+14

Mental Limit: 7
Physical Limit: 4
Social Limit: 3

Physical Boxes: 9
Stun Boxes: 10

Skills
Engineering Skill Group 5
- Aeronautics Mechanic 5
- Automotive Mechanic 5
- Industrial Mechanic 5
- Nautical Mechanic 5

Gunnery 6 (Ballistic +2)

Pilot (Aircraft) 6
Pilot (Ground Craft) 6

Perception 6 (Eyesight +2)

Armorer 6

Artisan 1
Demolition 1
First Aid 1
Forgery 1

Knowledge Skills
?
Contacts
??

Positive Qualities
Gearhead (11)
Juryrigger (10)

Negative Qualities
Distinctive Style (5)
Incompetent: Close Combat (5)
Severe Addiction: Building Things (20)
National SIN (5)

Augments
Used R3 Control Rig (3.75E, 156k)
Used R3 Reaction Enhancers (0.9E, 39k)
R2 Cerebral Booster (0.4E, 63k)

Gear
Meta Link (100)
Hot-Sim module (350)

Vulcan Liegelord RCC (66k)
- Device Rating 5
- Data Processing 5
- Firewall 6

Northrop Nightwing (20k)

MCT-Nissan Roto-Drone (5k)
- Standard Weapon Mount (2.5k)
- AK-98 (1250)
- Regular Ammo x250 (500)
- Frag Grenades x3 (300)

How can it be improved, besides not playing SR5?

[Stahlseele]

You either Improve or get rid of the Demolition Skill or you are not getting within 1 mile of anything i want to see intact . . .
Seriously, Demolitions 1 is just asking for it to blow up in your face. quite literally in this case . .

[Silent Wayfarer]

Doesn't Log 7 help as well? Although I could always replace armorer 6 with Demo 6. I wanted Armorer to build my own guns, but that doesn't seem too useful since it relies heavily on Mother May I from the GM.

[Username17]

8 dice of demolitions and an Edge of 5 should be plenty to do anything you want to do.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

Does SR5 character advancement still feature triangular costs? Because if so you may want to combine those 1s into a single skill and then scoop up the others on the cheap with karma and default in the meantime. I'd recommend First Aid as a skill to plow the other 1s into--if it works the way it did in SR4 you can only apply First Aid to a given set of wounds once, so oftentimes you want to be REALLY good at it or step out of the way. Getting it up to a double digit base pool is good enough that just applying your skills at the earliest convenience would almost always be a defensible play.

The big exception to the above rule of thumb is if you're playing short campaigns or are talking about super good skills that cannot be defaulted at all. For example, the SR4 Hardware skill could not be defaulted and covered so many things that I would understand if you said you didn't want to live without it for even a single session.

[Aryxbez]

I'd recommend First Aid as a skill to plow the other 1s into--if it works the way it did in SR4

As I recall it's still a single daily use, but the kit by itself can be used to produce a DP of 12. So if your Firstaid isn't better than that, better off just dropping it on a downed patient, and let it do its thing. First Aid & Magic relationship also have this complex bit where want you to track what order you healed yourself in, I think including right down to the number of boxes? I believe if you magic first, you're screwed for using First Aid, or vice versa (not sure it's 5th exclusive, but definitely rather dumb).

[Username17]

In SR5, First Aid is extremely teamworkable. Everyone should have a single point of First Aid, regardless of Logic score, because every hit they get raises the limit on the main medicine man.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

right, i forgot that only having 1 in any skill ain't as bad as it used to be anymore . .

[Silent Wayfarer]

Is there a way for me to emulate Briareos from Appleseed and control entire carrier battle groups at once? The rigger I'm making has an aspiration to do just that.

Also, is the threat hackers pose to a rigger vastly overstated, unless the GM just fiats their viability to make them more threatening?

[Stahlseele]

A Rigger can control dozends of vehicles if both he and the vehicles are specced for it.
And no, technically Riggers are the only really viable target for deckers, because they need to be online to do their stuff

[JesterZero]

Being online still doesn't make deckers much of a threat. Sure, you need a wireless connection to send commands to your murderbots, but a decker is only going to mess with one at a time, and you can selectively reboot drones on an individual basis, which is basically the rigger telling the decker "do not pass Go; do not collect $200."

In a straight up fight, the decker does damage to a fraction of your action economy, and you do damage to the decker. The more drones you're running, the smaller that fraction becomes. From what I recall, Drop Out doesn't even require you to have Matrix skills, it's just something you can arbitrarily do in most cases.

Feel free to fact check that, because SR5 is far from my favorite edition, but that's the gist of it.

[Stahlseele]

As a smart decker, why go for the drones if you can go for the riggers inside bits?
Take over his VCR, disable the DNI input and now you control his gaggle.
I am not aware of there being anything that speaks against this working.

[Silent Wayfarer]

Well, if you were smart you would not play a decker.

More importantly, wouldn't a decker who got close enough to try and hack a rigger (who operates behind 7 proxies anyway) be a sitting duck for drones with grenade launchers?

[pragma]

Hey SS, I don't think targeting the control rig as a device would work. It doesn't have to specifically wirelessly enabled since it doesn't have a wireless bonus. I also don't think you could target a riggers RCC as a device since it becomes a persona while the rigger is using it to connect to the matrix.

When is a device not a device? When it's a persona! ... When a person uses a device to connect to the matrix, the device's icon is subsumed by the persona's icon, so it's basically gone from the matrix until the persona jacks out.

It's possible to get marks on a persona, but that doesn't seem to let you do much. The actions that seem to achieve the catastrophic network shutdown you're describing are Jump Into Rigged Device, Format Device and Reboot Device. All of those actions specify in their description that they target the _device_ that is marked, so they probably won't work on a persona. The Spoof Command action will allow you to give one drone at a time a bad command if you have a mark on the rigger's persona which may be a distraction for the rigger, but I don't think that acquiring marks on the rigger's RCC is a path to achieving the kind of network disabling hacks you're looking for.

That said, doing cybercombat to the persona to knock the rigger off the matrix is a totally rules legal strategy that should disable all of his drones (though not give you control over them). Unfortunately, I don't think it's a particularly effective strategy: it's trivially easy for a rigger to be throwing 15-16 dice on full matrix defense (INT 6, Transys Avalon FW6, Will 4). The rigger can probably buy himself 3-4 rounds (or more) of uptime between reboots with full matrix defense. I rarely see fights last more than 3-4 rounds.

(This analysis assumes that the GM has nixed hackastack shenanigans, if those are in play the rigger is pretty legitimately untouchable.)

So my interpretation says that a smartly played rigger sees a hacker as little more than a drag on his action economy. That said, a good guy hacker scrubbing marks and providing defense will help a rigger spend his actions on driving and shooting rather than full matrix defense.

[Silent Wayfarer]

I decided to invest in an Ares Roadmaster (BOD 18 ARM 18) and according to the vehicle soak rules, if attacks don't deal more than my ARM in base damage, it does no damage to me, amirite?

So this would pretty much make me immune to most small arms (assault rifles do 10-11P with -2 AP, while sniper rifles do 11-14P with -3 to -5 AP), which seems to be working as intended. However, this seems to suffer from the SR4 Hardened Armor problem where being shot by something which even manages to damage your vehicle results in horrific damage; for instance, if someone tagged the Roadmaster with a Ranger Arms SM-5 (14P, AP -5), I would be soaking 14P with 31 dice, which averages to about 4 boxes of damage (out of 21). Which means someone with a sniper rifle could blow up an armored car in less than half a dozen glancing hits. lolwut.

And apparently the chunky salsa rules mean that grenades are vicious as fuck since the explosions bounce off the floor and further increase the initial boom.

On the topic of drones, they have BOD+ARM scores of like, 6? So this means even holdout pistols can easily one- or two-shot them? I mean, this is why I'm shooting from near-max range with silenced assault rifles or grenades, but it's really depressing to know that drones are essentially made of tissue paper. Good thing they have a base 4d6+6 initiative to shoot first. Also, since attack tests vs unaware targets are unopposed, even the tiny pools of 6 dice or so won't be a huge problem, IIRC.

[Username17]

The Matrix rules are catastrophically bad in 5th edition, but one of the few things there actually is, is a quite detailed account of how a Rigger can spend one action every two or three rounds or so to force a Decker to start over from scratch by rebooting one of his drones. The Rigger doesn't even have to roll dice, he just does it. It's fucking terrible is what it is.

-Username17

[pragma]

Agreed, I was reminded just how headache inducing the rules are while digging for specifics on this.

Unfortunately, the example directly contradicts everything I read in the rules: it discusses targeting the RCC with both cybercombat and marks. I think rules text trumps example text, but I'd just prefer that there weren't glaring contributions in a piece of text so bloated that you can lose stuff.

That said, in the example the hacker is trying to accrue matrix damage on the drone, so it is possible to have the drone land and fix itself as a simple action. Had the hacker been trying to accrue matrix damage on the RCC/persona (depending on what rules you interpret) then the rigger would only be able to shed matrix damage by rebooting the RCC/persona. That would result in all of the drones being uncommanded for a turn, though I think the practical effects of an uncommanded drone are that it does whatever it was last told to do. So that technique wouldn't even get one drone to stop shooting you.

[Username17]

I decided to invest in an Ares Roadmaster (BOD 18 ARM 18) and according to the vehicle soak rules, if attacks don't deal more than my ARM in base damage, it does no damage to me, amirite?

Nope. Rules for hardened armor for vehicles don't exist in SR5. Hardened armor is a critter power exclusive. That's probably just an oversight, but it's SR5 so who can tell? APCs are rather easy to blow up with small arms.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

Well, it may be in there by omission, since vehicles don't have a Stun track to apply the damage to.

[Silent Wayfarer]

I decided to invest in an Ares Roadmaster (BOD 18 ARM 18) and according to the vehicle soak rules, if attacks don't deal more than my ARM in base damage, it does no damage to me, amirite?

Nope. Rules for hardened armor for vehicles don't exist in SR5. Hardened armor is a critter power exclusive. That's probably just an oversight, but it's SR5 so who can tell? APCs are rather easy to blow up with small arms.

-Username17

I was getting that from page 199:

As most vehicles are a bit less squishy than metahumans, they have a Condition Monitor equal to 12 plus half their Body (rounded up), they ignore Stun damage (though electricity-based attacks are considered Physical Damage to vehicles), and any attack where the modified DV does not exceed the Armor of the vehicle does nothing.

Which is still weaker than the Hardened Armor creature power because that critter power also counts half the Hardened Armor as autohits on the test.

But really why I'm asking is because I want a thing to transport everyone quickly and efficiently and it makes me sad if we all explode and die because some fuckface shoots us with a pistol five times. I took the Ares Roadmaster because I thought the armor and body meant something but now I'm thinking I should take the GMC Bulldog instead because same number of seats, same handling/speed/accel, lower armor and comparable survivability, but costs about 30% less.