[Sabato Kuroi]

@Herr Brackhaus

The first line of my post was referring to  Mirikon's comment about me being crazy or having never played with a competent GM



Anyway even if a fight is in an  enclosed environment the greater mobility of drones can tip the balance

[JackVII]

The house rule I've contemplated but not employed was to make Drone Condition Monitor = BOD x 3 (Anything with BOD 0 is destroyed on any hit, even a glancing one). I feel it makes a lot of security/combat drones a lot more survivable. It makes the Steel Lynx pretty scary but, while merely Restricted, I've always seen the Steel Lynx as being something that shouldn't be brought out for a regular run, similar to a Wasp.

[Kincaid]

The house rule I've contemplated but not employed was to make Drone Condition Monitor = BOD x 3 (Anything with BOD 0 is destroyed on any hit, even a glancing one). I feel it makes a lot of security/combat drones a lot more survivable. It makes the Steel Lynx pretty scary but, while merely Restricted, I've always seen the Steel Lynx as being something that shouldn't be brought out for a regular run, similar to a Wasp.

Be prepared for a lot of janitorial drones

[Mirikon]

You shouldn't be able to take them down with a pistol.  Plus they are way too expensive to repair to be viable to be a PC drone rigger.

Is 100 nuyen/box on a roto-drone that prohibitive?

Except you missed the part where if the drone's condition track is filled, it turns to junk. And a Body 4 drone has 10 boxes. And the rotodrone has, what, 6 dice to evade? Any halfway decent shooter (9 dice - 3 AGI, 3(+2) Pistols (Semi-automatics), 1 Smartlink) is going to average at least one net hit each time he pulls the trigger. That means you're resisting at least 9P with 7 dice (-1 AP), assuming they use normal ammo. That's an average of about 7 damage each shot. Firing in SA means that 5000 nuyen drone (plus the cost of weapons and any other mods) is junk within the first pass.

[Kincaid]

I'm certainly not saying drones shouldn't/couldn't be more durable--riggers need their fun too.  It's just a matter of how it's done.  The cost to Speed suggested earlier is a good one (everything has its price, as they say).  I don't want drones to replace sams in 5e in the same way commlinks with nice programs replaced hackers in 4e--a piece of gear should never trump a character.  A drone shouldn't break when you breath on it, but given how short most SR combats are, finding that sweet spot is hard.

In the meantime, use those range tables and visibility modifiers to your advantage!

[Mirikon]

If your GM let you get away with having a commlink with nice programs, and no skills to back it up, then I got a few choice words about your GM that would get me banned. Any of the important matrix actions required Skill + Program, so you had to have the skills to back up the programs if you were going up against anyone above the matrix equivalent of gangers. For simple things, however, it allowed non-hackers to not be utterly boned if the hacker caught a sudden case of lead poisoning.

This is one of the issues I have with 5th edition as a whole. 5th STRONGLY encourages 'single class' characters, while in 4th you could 'multi-class', and cover two roles if need be. Sure, your Shaman might not be able to work on the same level as your party's Face, but there was redundancy built in to your party if, as I said, someone caught a bad case of dead, or you needed to do things in two parts of the sprawl at once. When you make it so some things can ONLY be done by one character type, then you make it so that if that character is out of action for any reason, your whole team is fragged. Hell, in 5th, a rigger that notices he's being hacked only has two options, go turtle and hope he can hold out until someone geeks the hacker, or reboot, and lose control of his drones. In 4th, it was at least possible for a rigger to fight back in the matrix, and a hacker could rig a drone if he needed to, but the return to RCCs and decks means that redundancy is dead.

And for those of you that wonder why I like the idea of redundancy, remember that there's a reason IRL that most manned space missions have at least 2-3 of anything mission critical on board.

[ScytheKnight]

I just wouldn't mind the rolls for drones being clarified... All the mechanics I can find are for when the Rigger is piloting them... but most rolls aren't covered for when the autopilot is in control.

[Hibiki54]

Drones are glass cannons. Simple as that. With the current rules, they are a huge money sink dependent on the types of weapons you outfit them with and how you implement them in game.

A typical Drone Rigger with a couple Roto-Drones with AK-97s, a couple Dobermans with FN HVARs and a Steel Lynx with M202 running out of a GMC Bulldog is your baseline Rigger. This is someone who has drones for situations and would benefit greatly from having options to make his drones more durable.

Swarm Riggers running mass Roto-Drone swarms armed with Ares Alphas are the ones who don't need more durable drones. I recently played a couple SRMs with a Swarm Rigger and he was taking out mooks left and right running 12+ drones doing full-auto or mass HE grenades.

[Mirikon]

Hibiki, swarm riggers can be nasty, but that is a situation that is best handled by the GM having a conversation with the player, and working out an agreement on limits. With the explicit understanding that going too far will result in same (or nastier) tricks being used against the party, and the rest of the group will all be told that it is the problem player's fault.

[Sabato Kuroi]

Unless you're heading to  a warzone anything more than 2-3 combat drones (which probably lack sneaking autosofts) is like begging to get caught.

[Vibral]

Unless you're heading to  a warzone anything more than 2-3 combat drones (which probably lack sneaking autosofts) is like begging to get caught.

THIS. So much this. Using a literal FLEET of drones is going to draw a LOT of attention and the very wrong kind. I think this seems to be an understated fact and not used at a lot of tables (including the one I play/part time GM at) There are Drones everywhere in the slightly nice to super nice parts of town. Illegal activity or strange behavior is going to get noticed. So while this cheese is totally legal and effective it has it's own self policing measures.

[Mirikon]

Indeed. And, again, let the rest of the group know that it is all that player's fault. Take a tip from boot camp. Don't punish the individual, punish the squad. Most of the time that'll get the individual to shape up, and prevent future problems.

[SichoPhiend]

Except you missed the part where if the drone's condition track is filled, it turns to junk. And a Body 4 drone has 10 boxes.

Actually, to further emphasize your point about the fragility of drones, as per P.199 of the main book, drones have a physical condition monitor of 6 + (BOD/2), so said rotodrone only has 8 boxes.

[halflingmage]

I don't mind drones being fragile, I mind them be so expensive to fix/replace.  Keeping them fragile keeps the player characters front and center, with the drones as support and recon.  But if you do start to loose drones, it can be hard for a rigger to cover the costs and still be making a profit.  The rigger is probably paying higher lifestyle costs as it is for a place to keep and work on his fleet, Having to replace drones regularly puts a financial strain on the rigger that other characters just don't have to put up with.

[Mirikon]

I think the price of drones is about right, but they need to be more durable. If a rigger's drones are able to replace the characters in all things, then I'm pretty sure there's a failing in the group, and it isn't with the rigger. Drones are great for recon, and in 4th were effective in combat, but they never replaced the need for the street sammy or the rest to keep doing what they were doing. The only time in play I saw a set of drones replace the need for most of the players in combat, we were setting up an ambush on some military vehicles. My Reaper drone drops bombs, taking out the trail vehicle and cutting off the road ahead, and the sniper PC goes to work. By the time the rest of the group gets into action, the combat was mostly over.

There are some key balancing points about drones people seem to forget. While drones may be everywhere, COMBAT drones bearing machine guns DEFINITELY still grab as much attention as a troll carrying the gun. That attention gets cops called. There's a reason the rigger doesn't roll down the street convoy style with his fleet of drones around the van. Likewise, one of the key weaknesses in the 'drone swarm' horror stories some people bandy about is that each drone is a point of weakness to the entire network. So if hackers find a drone's icon, and hack in, not only can they control the drone, but they can track back through the connection to the rigger and not only locate the rigger but take control of the whole swarm, turning it against the party. If there is more than one hacker, the situation gets worse.