Machine and Man in Cyberpunk

[sabs]

The Vehicle Rigger needs to be a non-protected role.
Basically, the Vehicle rigger needs to haveenough points to be the vehicle rigger, AND something else, while at the same time not turning ever hacker into a vehicle rigger.

If you're michael knight.. you're also a drone rigger? there's basically 100% coverage on that.

[Stahlseele]

yes and no . .
you have one vehicle that can operate independently, but it still has all the other limitations of a normal vehicle . . namely, big and unwieldy, very conspicious in most cases and either horribly over powered due to vehicular armor or a guaranteed TPK because vehicular armor means the big guns have to come out on the other side . .

[Ancient History]

At the low-end, a rigger is the pilot/getaway driver. Their special skill is the ability to drive, and especially to have the reflexes and knowledge of vehicles to out-drive the other guys. Unless you're Jason Statham or Wash, this is about the end of their special role in the mission: they sit in the car and wait for the chase scene, where they shine, and then they go back to various comic relief and minor support roles.

In a cyberpunk 'verse, this also means that a rigger can pilot robots wirelessly and with their brain. How this is different from hacking depends on your brand of phlebotonium, and in SR the efforts to distinguish a role for riggers led to the idea of "security riggers" that can interact with buildings or environments the same way, usually at a more visceral level than hackers - though again, this is a bit wonky.

At the other end of the scale, you have rigger-heroes piloting mechas, because they're the ones with the holes drilled in their heads so they can plug into them.

While Shadowrun might could still use a driver-specialist character, I wouldn't consider it a major character type. It should be folded into hacking.

[Stahlseele]

Vehicle Rigging is something cool though, and we want our cool in our games right?
Jesse Mach isn't quite as bad as Michael Knight, because his vehicle of choice can go to more places than the others, but it's still not very usefull to drive it through a building for example.

[Red_Rob]

Riggers seem like they have enough going on to make them compelling characters. First they have the drone thing - and piloting little flying gun platforms or remote controlled cars full of explosives is a pretty cool schtick by itself. Then they have the getaway driver thing - every good heist should end with a chase scene, so that makes them someone you want to bring along right there. When you add in that they are also the Mechanic and Electronics guy (to soup up and repair their vehicles and drones) they look to have a solid skillset that brings enough to the table to me.

[JesterZero]

OK, let's step away from the encryption/decryption nonsense for a bit . .
How do we get the Vehicle Rigger to be more usefull/integrated?
The Drone Rigger is easy, but if you want to play Michael Knight or Jesse Mach, you are boned something fierce . .

To a certain extent, that's just the Shadowrun version of the mount conundrum from D&D ("What do you mean my horse/dragon/whatever can't fit into the underground tunnels with me?"). As long as Shadowruns are primarily taking place in highrise office buildings, gutted tenement buildings, and converted sewers, your sports car and/or speedboat probably can't come too.

That being said, there are a few things that would make it better:

• Have runs that emphasize the need for vehicles for infiltration/exfiltration.
• Have vehicle rules that actually work.
• Have chase rules that actually work.

Do all that...and riggers will still emphasize drones over vehicles. But at least the vehicle rigger would take a big step towards being a viable secondary role for either the drone rigger or the hacker.

[Username17]

I like the idea of one-time use super hacking programs tailored to a specific system. That seems very true to the fiction; writing, stealing or being given a back door exploit program to an otherwise impenetrable target by a Mr. Johnson is like the starting point to half a dozen Cyberpunk stories.

The key would be making it so you didn't just knock up a specialised program every time, or else it would become mundane. I guess you'd just have to make it costly in either time or money (by spending one you save the other) so that it only became worth it for the big runs.

I agree. I would think the basic way to do that would be to require someone with inside information on the system in question to make a specialized breaker program. So you don't make a specialized program for every mission because you (or your Johnson) don't have a contact on the inside for every mission. And then when you do get such a break, it's rare and special.

How do we get the Vehicle Rigger to be more usefull/integrated?
The Drone Rigger is easy, but if you want to play Michael Knight or Jesse Mach, you are boned something fierce .

There's always a canal. More seriously, while a getaway driver is an important part of a heist, they are incredibly damn boring to play in a game. I mean, for fuck's sake, their actual job is to wait in the car until the mission is over and then drive away.

Now, there are things you could do about that. With a more rigorous escape minigame and a more abstracted mission minigame, the getaway driver could be a more major character - or even a dominant character if the action zoomed in primarily on escaping and left the initial smash-and-grabs to a couple of quick die rolls. That kind of addressing of the issue is probably bad however, since conceptually the driver still is acting while the other characters are passive and vice versa.

Probably a better solution is to get the drivers out of the cars to do action hero stuff during those portions of the adventure when the characters are not in cars. From Bandit Bean (Riding Bean) to Frank Martin (The Transporter). Hell, they are on their sixth fucking Fast and Furious movie, so I think that there's legs for that kind of character. It's a bit unrealistic, but if the rigger can remotely start the car and drive it from "not the driver seat", having them run around punching guards and grabbing sacks of loot instead of sitting in the driver seat waiting for the rest of the team to get back to the car makes at least a little more sense.

-Username17

[CatharzGodfoot]

How damaging is it to have a 'guy who hides out in a cleverly disguised van and controls remote drones and runs comms for everyone else'? I seem to remember people throwing their arms up and yelling 'Oh Pee!', but it seems like a legit role to me for the guy that keeps the getaway car running.

[Lokathor]

It's a bit unrealistic, but if the rigger can remotely start the car and drive it from "not the driver seat", having them run around punching guards and grabbing sacks of loot instead of sitting in the driver seat waiting for the rest of the team to get back to the car makes at least a little more sense.

James Bond does this in Tomorrow Never Dies.

For better or for worse.

[Username17]

How damaging is it to have a 'guy who hides out in a cleverly disguised van and controls remote drones and runs comms for everyone else'? I seem to remember people throwing their arms up and yelling 'Oh Pee!', but it seems like a legit role to me for the guy that keeps the getaway car running.

The specific reasons that the van guy is overpowered in Shadowrun are extremely specific to the way 3rd and 4th edition rules happened to work. Mr. Van and Bots could put up the same dicepools with the same weapons with the same reaction times with better recoil compensation and more resilience for less money, essence, and skill points. And he could do it in three places at once just to drive the point home.

But that's extremely contingent on the rules being written the way they were. There's no reason that the Rigger's reaction enhancement should necessarily cost half as much as the Street Samurai's reaction enhancement, but in SR3 it totally did. There's no reason that the Rigger should get access to all weapons with a single skill while the Street Samurai had to buy them category by category off a list of five - but in SR4 it totally worked like that. It would be just as easy to flip that around - forcing the Rigger to buy all the implants and skills at normal cost and then coughing up for an additional implant or skill to be allowed to use his abilities remotely.

More generally, characters who sit in vans and launch attack drones tend to be characters who are "heavily focused" in the Champions sense - they experience very little personal risk as long as they are flying robots around unless and until something breaks their actual Van in which case the entire character has to be retired. That is a problem that I'm not sure there's an easy solution to. Characters who have spent a lot of "character points" on owning expensive toys are an exploit waiting to happen - the character dies or retires and the team gets a lot of character points worth of expensive toys, or the character's toys are broken or taken away and the character is better off committing sudoku so that the player can make a new character. But that's not just Cyberpunk, that's every game where you are allowed to spend starting character points on owning physical stuff, from Scion to GURPS to RIFTS.

I really don't think that "gear head" is an archetype that has any problems conceptually being a useful character during legwork phases. They transport characters, they build stuff, they break stuff, they rig things to explode, they do physical recon, and so on. It's not a problem. And however big a portion of the adventure is taken up by escaping is added to how useful the driver is to the mission itself. But during the mission itself they pretty much have to either stay in the car and contribute by remote control or get out of the car and contribute physically until everyone jumps back in the car. Either or both of those models could be made balanced. But you're still stuck with a character concept who is heavily invested in external gear, which is separately problematic.

-Username17

[Red_Rob]

Why not have the character invest in skill points, which allow him to create / operate the gear, rather than the gear itself? Similar to a Champions "Control Pool", the character has "Drones 6" or whatever, and that allows him to have a certain number or rating of drones "active" at a time. The drones could be relatively inexpensive, with the expectation that they get busted up pretty often, however the drones without a competent operator are pretty worthless. The important part is the rigger, not the toys.

If the rigger's incidental skills were useful in a direct way during a run - electronics and mechanical skills being useful to bypass door controls, for example, the rigger should be incentivised to come along for the ride. Or the drone control signal could be easily jammed or disrupted over long distances, forcing the rigger to stay close to his drones or risk them being useless.

But that's not just Cyberpunk, that's every game where you are allowed to spend starting character points on owning physical stuff, from Scion to GURPS to RIFTS
....
But you're still stuck with a character concept who is heavily invested in external gear, which is separately problematic.

The problem is exacerbated in Cyberpunk due to the fetishizing of gear in such settings, though. Near future games are about the crazy tech and how getting the latest gear gives you an edge to a degree that Superheroes or 1920's games really aren't. If you allow players to choose to spend chargen resources on gear you always run the risk of having the problems you listed. The straightforward approach would be to standardise gear at chargen - you get a set amount and can't take more.

Honestly, the amount of starting gear most Shadowrunners have seems kind of out-of-genre anyway. The most sensible choice a starting shadowrunner could take would be to sell all their shit and retire to Honolulu.

[Nath]

As a gamemaster, I somehow translate a character's social skills and contacts as the amount and quality of gear he can acquire in a given timeframe. Instead of spending points on money, and money on a sniper rifle or a helicopter, you would directly spend points on having a gunrunner contact, and find the money somewhere.

If starting gear was strictly restricted to "internal gear", it would probably help starting balance a lot to do calculation accordingly to the actual increase/decrease of attribute and skills it provides, instead of wondering how much it should cost in a given currency based on technology level and supply versus demand.

[Username17]

If characters had skills and abilities that allowed them to be a badass with materials on hand, rather than had the "ability" to start with high tech military gear, that would go a long way, yeah. A game where characters were expected to run through equipment on a mission by mission basis would suffer a lot less from all the ailments of large starting equipment (that we've just gone over in detail).

There's a fair amount of source material for it, with movies in theaters right now including Iron Man 3 (where Tony Stark assaults a compound armed with weapons he made from crap he bought in a hardware store) to Fast and Furious 6 (where the heroes do most of their shenanigans with stolen cars). It would probably be an overall improvement if a "gun character" was such because they were able to get and make guns, rather than that they were slightly better at pulling a trigger and happened to own some military hardware.

The vehicle character could be the same. A character who specialized in stealing, anonymizing, and ditching cars would make a lot more sense as a member of a group of criminal lancers than would a character who happened to own a tricked out and unique combat ready humvee.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

I really like that idea. It seems like it would do a lot to make the characters feel more like shady criminals and less like special ops.

[Stahlseele]

Yeah, that is a good idea O.o

[Red_Rob]

It would probably be an overall improvement if a "gun character" was such because they were able to get and make guns, rather than that they were slightly better at pulling a trigger and happened to own some military hardware.

Disposable equipment being the norm seems like it would work. I can't name any of the weapons the characters used in the Matrix, and that film was entirely about shooting people in the face while assaulting defended installations. The fact they throw guns away rather than bother to reload them in that film shows how important an individual weapon is in the scheme of things. Guns, drones, and vehicles could all be given standard stats for their type without affecting the core experience of the game I think, and it would encourage things such as ditching your gear after every mission to avoid leaving a trail, which is thematic.

[kzt]

There is zero support for your worldview. Computer ntworks existed when DES was still a military secret, and they continued to exist (and to use DES) after DES was publicly broken. You cannot simply claim that encryption is unbreakable in a particular story because it does not get broken in a particular story.

DES was NEVER a military secret. It was adopted in 1977 to secure sensitive but unclassified data. Computer networks in 1977 have absolutely no resemblance to modern networks. In 1977 the largest "computer network" in the world was the test conduced between three universities over dial-up modems and involved a trivial number of computers. IP wasn't fully standardized until 1982. This is an era where most core network protocols were designed with absolutely no security of any any kind, and those that had some pretense of security (like FTP) had "security" that is a joke. There was no encryption used in any part of original IP.

DES was never officially used by the military for anything. It was not considered secure enough for the NSA to approve it for use. For example, when banks and the federal reserve were using 56 bit DES to secure huge financial transactions in the 80s and early 90s DoD was using the 128 bit (and damn heavy) KY-57 to secure battalion-level tactical voice backpack radios. It was keyed using, I kid you not, paper tapes. Oh, and the KY-57 and DES were developed and approved at about the same time.

[Vebyast]

It also feels a lot like the classic summoner/necromancer/artificer characters from DND, where the character's role is "provides useful doohickies" and its abilities are directed toward ensuring that the doohickies (summons, skeletons, gadgets) are always available and useful. The drone guy is the closest to this (doohickies = drones, availability = rebuild them from salvage, usefulness = do nifty things with drones), but you could make a shooty character on the same framework (doohickies = guns, availability = can get good guns, usefulness = can shoot good guns). They're on the same "power schedule", if that's the right word, as summoner and necromancer builds.

[kzt]

It really doesn't matter whether we get the "offensive" and "defensive" grenades backwards or not, so appeasing the realism demands on that issue hurts nothing.

It hardly seems overly demanding to expect that some guy being paid to write rules and another guy being paid to edit those rules understands what a dictionary is and knows how to look at up what the word "velocity" means and what it doesn't.

[Sigil]

If you wanted your characters to feel more like special Ops instead of shady criminals, you could go with some sort of wealth system instead of discrete money. Your rigger would simply primarily invest his Revenue Points into Drones and Computers, while your street samurai would have most of his invested into Cyberware and Combat Gear. Between missions you could allow the characters to decide what that expenditure actually represents for that time frame, and could even have them incur minor penalties or bonuses for destroyed equipment during the prior mission.

Implemented poorly, though, such a system has its own problems (see D20 Modern).

[Whipstitch]

How damaging is it to have a 'guy who hides out in a cleverly disguised van and controls remote drones and runs comms for everyone else'? I seem to remember people throwing their arms up and yelling 'Oh Pee!', but it seems like a legit role to me for the guy that keeps the getaway car running.

It's legit thematically, but yeah, in practice, Van Guy is the worst. First off, he is the team's true heavy artillery and will basically put anyone who doesn't realize that Street Samurai are actually the team generalists out of a job. But most damningly, when I think of shit that doesn't really work in SR4, the three things that come to mind are high end damage scaling, the matrix and the chase/ramming/crashing rules--AKA, everything Van Guy touches. Games seriously become worse just because he exists since now you've got a character who signed on to do stuff that is better left to MTP'd hireling. In most groups, I'd also note that Van Guy is pretty much guaranteed to succeed, forever. That's because the alternative is to try killing his ass like anyone else, except he's in the team van, so that typically requires hardware dick-waving contests or hackers and fiery crashes, which is highly likely to result in tpks and butthurt. So I get why people want them in the game, but as a GM I'd really rather have players take the bus.

[kzt]

I said a while back that encryption in a set of rules on computer hacking is like tires in a set of rules on car chases. It's assumed that you have both tires and encryption and they both just work, because rules about encryption are going to be about as exciting as rules about tires.

But just like tires are the reason why you can't drive up the side of a 57 story building in you super car, encryption also limits what you can do with computers. "It just works that way", you don't have to write a fucking dissertation on the coefficient of friction of the various tire compounds and how this relates to adhesion on glass, or the effects of rain or smog on glass and how it modifies vertical acceleration.

Going on about how "my cool plots" rely on encryption not working is like wanting rules that allow people to drive up the side of buildings "because I have all these cool plots that need that." Fuck no. If you want a vehicle that drives up to the 83rd story penthouse your plot needs a helicopter, not a car with "really fancy tires".

[Desdan_Mervolam]

I like how everyone's talking about "Riggers, Y/N", except for KZT who is still talking about encryption. No one's talking back about it, he's just talking to the wall.

[kzt]

Vehicle riggers are kind of boring, for all the reasons already stated.

Drone riggers can range from superstars or nearly worthless. Which they are depend on how the drone rules support them, and how other rules like encryption, signal penetration into buildings, jamming and RDF work.

How powerful do you want them to be? How easy do you want them to be located and blocked? How capable do you want their drones to be without a human running them? Do you want the stupid SR "lets duel about who runs this drone" crap or not?

[Stahlseele]

@KZT
Gecko Tape Modification for Vehicles with Tires/Tracks is actually a Thing that exists in Shadowrun . . so, if the rules are as bad as i think they are, then yes, you can actually drive up walls with these tires . .
Well, if you can convince your GM that your vehicles Tires/tracks can actually touch the wall to latch on to it.
Because that means your vehicle needs to actually only start with the chassis and casing behind where the wheels start.
Kinda like the Hummer H1 here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXvxIy4YupI
And then you have the same problem on the rear.
Tracked Vehicles and Bikes are actually not as problematic, but then again, once you are up there, you face a whole world of different problems too . .
But yes, the Van-Guy problem is basically that either he kills anything below another Van-Guy in terms of Armor/Weaponry or anything that can kill Van-Guy will make mince-meat out of the Not-Van-Guy characters . .
And if you do go that route, at least 50% of the Van-Guy character is blown to bits, probably more because the rest of the Character is usually in there, else it would not be the Van-Guy . .