This grew out of a separate thread, but I thought it would be interesting to discuss what's worked for people who play TMs. I mentioned in the other thread that the guy playing a TM at my table is remarkably useful and people asked for some examples. Busy day at work, so I'll probably add to this slowly over time.
This is slightly off topic, so if people want to move TM coolness to another thread, we can do that too.
A few basic principles. Obviously, a great deal of this is my opinion and not empirical.
1. The technomancer at our table is a summoner. To use a MMO analogy, deckers are blasters and technomancers are (or at least, can be) summoners. They're different roles in the raid.
2. The most powerful skill in the game is Binding. The second most powerful skill in the game is Registering.
3. As you'll note with any discussion about street sams, the number of initiative passes you get/control is a critical factor in determining how effective your character is. A good sam will probably get 3 IPs reliably. A good technomancer can pretty easily get 8.
4. A sam has more flexibility with what he does with his IPs than a sprite (even if all he does is six-round bursts), so it's not entirely apples to apples, but if a player goes into a situation with a playbook (in my case, a literal playbook of things jotted down on notecards), he can exert a great degree of battlefield control.
5. If you want someone to break into a host and fetch a file, then at the lower end of the karma curve, a decker is probably going to be better, barring some sort of wild specialization. Direct connection is at least one Submersion away and a host's Firewall can be a serious impediment. Until the technomancer gets Skinlink, host access-related challenges are probably best solved through social engineering. Given how so many shadowruns are set up with the expectation that "the Matrix guy" will solve all your host problems, I can understand the frustration a player feels when his technomancer's ears begin to bleed and everyone else at the table is giving him the "You had one job!" stinkeye.
Everyone at the table needs to stop asking the technomancer to play to his weaknesses and start asking him to play to his strengths.
Shadowrun is a team game. Creatively problem solve getting into a host for 2-3 sessions and your technomancer will have Skinlink. Suppression is also truly awesome in a host. Delaying IC by 2 Combat Turns gives you 5-6 IPs to get things done.
6. We can return to hosts in a bit, but let's focus on battlefield control. As many people have noted, playing a decker in the middle of a firefight is a little frustrating. You have to spend a Complex Action to get marks or resort to Data Spiking guns; the sam can just kill the guy with a six-round burst with a Simple Action, making the decker feel remarkably inefficient. Fork is awesome and helps a little in this scenario, but it's still a game of catch up.
7. The weakness of the decker in a firefight is poor action economy. Technomancers don't have this problem. Let's say you use one machine sprite as a buffer for the sam's gun (not too exciting, but he'll appreciate it), another as a roving destroyer of enemy guns/cybereyes/wired reflex + reaction enhancer systems, and your other sprite simply Data Spikes things. Note we've just replaced the decker's Data Spike spam with 1/3 of your army and you haven't actually done anything yourself yet. (Note for your playbook: specify different classes of targets for your sprite's Data Spikes and the other sprite's Gremlins--you don't want them to target the same thing).
8. So what do you get to do during all this? Since the sprites are handling general mayhem, you could spend a few IPs to generate marks and swing the environment if that's an option--closing doors, taking control of communications, those sorts of things. When I play mages, I'm a big fan of illusion and manipulation spells, so I'm also a big fan of Resonance Veil. No OS, no marks required. Don't believe what you're seeing? Roll your extremely excellent Computer skill, Mr. Sec Guard. Did every guard's biomonitor flatline? Is my gun about to cook off ammo? Where exactly is my smartgun telling me to point my gun? And so on. If I can spend my action to do something that makes a guard not shoot my teammate, that's a win. A less interesting, but fairly efficient, choice is to follow up your sprite's Data Spikes with Resonance Spikes to finish off the target to keep your sprite moving from one target to the next.