Shadowrun Riggers Cant Repair Drones?

How much stuff are you trying to have your character do, with the drones, compared to the other characters? For me, if one character has fifteen drones all doing things every round, and I have a character with an assault rifle and some cyberware... I'm probably done, regardless of how reasonable it is that drones are better at everything that other characters can do, except magic.

And it is reasonable that programming drones to do stuff is more efficient than having people with guns do the same stuff. It's kind of how having a decker programming at the speed of thought should get a hundred actions for every action somebody walking around gets. It's still horribly boring for the person waiting around for half an hour between actions.

Compared to the other characters? My drones are generally fire support for them. The two street samurai take the lead on attacking things and choosing how we do so. My drones are tasked with backing them up. I have one drone I fly to cover whatever area those two can't cover. The mages cover the aetherial stuff, of course, and usually perform the other tasks we can't do -- healing, targeting people we can't get to easily (or might accidentally hit non-targets on the way), and so on. Our Decker is doing decker stuff, including hacking enemy cyberware during fights.

I'm not trying to be a one-man army, I'm really not. I'm sensitive to making sure everyone else is having a good time. But I'm trying to find the balance where my character is not completely nerfed while everyone else is doing fine. Also, I have fifteen drones, yes, but I've only got seven that will be in a fight (at maximum), and so far haven't used more than five. My drones kill more targets than the others do, because I can go full-auto more easily (thanks to recoil rules) or because they do the initial damage and the drones mop up. But I make sure to talk to the players about what they want me to tell the drones to do. The questions that have come up was about the complexity of those orders. (The most complex of which was a drone switching targets to a bigger threat in the middle of a fight when the bad guy stopped using his standard little gun and pulled out an MMG.)

For all the blather about "retro aesthetics", this is the correct answer.

These autopilot rules are, frankly, really clear: The drone is capable of independent actions and can engage in combat. If the GM feels you're giving the pilot program a command that's too complicated or if the situation is too complex, then he can call for a Device Rating x 2 test (as described on pg. 269).

Finally, as GoldenH notes, the rules for rigger command consoles (RCCs) on pg. 267 specify that they can be used to issue group commands by giving "a command to one, all, or some of your slaved drones with the same Simple Action". This is a little bit vague because the word "command" is not treated as a term of art in 5th Edition: In 4E it was used exclusively to describe issuing commands to an autopilot, but in 5E it's used interchangeably to describe remote control, rigger control, and for issuing commands to an autopilot. Theoretically, therefore, you could liberally interpret that rule to mean that an RCC would allow you to simultaneously exert rigger control on multiple drones.

It's far more likely, however, that the intention is for this simultaneous issuing of group commands to apply only to autopiloted drones. Ignoring the legacy from previous editions, the give-away is the phrase "the same Simple Action". Rigger and remote control both require non-Simple actions; it's only issuing commands to an autopiloted drone that requires a Simple action.

But I digress: The point here is that there's no interpretation of the rules which doesn't allow an RCC to simultaneously issue group commands to multiple drones and then allow those drones to carry out those orders without further oversight from the rigger. The OP's interpretation of how this should be working is 100% correct. The GM is apparently assuming that every movement of the drone (a) requires a new Simple action and (b) that action has to be issued to each drone independently. Neither is true by the RAW.

With that being said, the GM does have the option of calling for those Device Rating x 2 tests if the drone finds itself in a situation too complicated for its piloting software. If this is stuff like "patrol the perimeter and ping me if you spot a warm body" or "everybody attack the tank" I don't think any roll would be called for. Sending your drones into a complicated combat situation and asking them to figure out friend-or-foe without prearranged friend-or-foe signals being broadcast, OTOH, would probably prompt me to call for the check to see if a friendly gets targeted by mistake.

Thanks. I've read these rules but apparently I didn't retain much of it. My GM may be happy with the DR x 2 tests, because that's kind of all he was interested in last time we talked: a chance that the drone won't be able to work its way through a decision tree. I'll run it past him to see what he thinks.

The GM doesn't think every drone action should be one of my Simple Actions to command. Another player asked if that's how it's supposed to work--and I want to emphasize, he wasn't angry about what I had been doing. He was curious how the rules were supposed to work, because he, like me, wondered how far that could go. We all realize that a Rigger at character creation could field an army. The only reason I didn't buy 15 combat drones instead of splitting it 7 spies, 7 combats, and my primary vehicle (which I consider a supplementary drone since it is armored and armed to the teeth, even though I haven't used it in combat yet) was because I was afraid of what it would do to the game. The GM isn't sure how it's supposed to work, since he's new to this version of the game and he's still trying to figure out the magic and Matrix rules, and hasn't read through the rigger stuff as closely as he wants to. That's what led to my question.

This would seem to be heavily dependent on the type of drone. In today's world, bomb squad drones generally have manipulators but flying Predator drones don't.

Looking at the core rulebook drones, it's pretty easy to see that stuff like the micro- and minidrones wouldn't have manipulators. OTOH, something like the Azetchnology Crawler (designed to navigate urban environments) would almost certainly have manipulators (in order to open doors if nothing else). On the gripping hand, it appears that most combat-oriented drones don't have grabbers, instead preferring hard weapon mounts.

Yeah, my argument was my ground drones should have a manipulator with an effective Strength and/or Agility of 1, not that the flying ones should. Although there are flying drones that can pick up and move things around and even assemble structures.

Although I don't see why weapon mounts and manipulators have to be exclusive. They aren't in the real world. It's one of those things where the advanced tech is more limited than real tech.

Unfortunately I feel like you're not playing in the genre conventions then. I would just ask you to leave the game if you want to insist on playing a tech-heavy character using tech that there isn't rules for and isn't in theme with the game. It's the same reason I don't let deckers just copy the entire database and search through all the data, disconnected from the matrix, from the safety of their remote bunker. Or let mages nuke/mind control people from across the country via sympathetic magic, Mage: the awakening style. It defeats the thematics of the game, and the limitations are very important for investigative style drama.

No. I'm sorry, but "genre conventions" is a very small fig leaf for covering the sins of rules. Especially when the game spends so much time on so many other rules to cover all kinds of situations. This isn't about genre (which is science fiction, a genre I know something about professionally, academically, and as a fan), this is about there being vagueness and poorly written rules. How is it not in genre to, in a game where there's a class all about using drones, to have drones that can function at least as well as real world drones? How is it not in genre to insist on being consistent with basic tech levels when the character is focused on advanced tech? Also, if you don't let deckers copy databases, then you've unnecessarily ruined the decker class. They're not as good as real hackers, and therefore are more useless than a street samurai with a flash drive who can break into a facility, plug it in, and type in two commands to grab the database. And mages explicitly, in the rules, can't do what you're talking about, although they are better snipers than any given tech person because they can hit anything within line-of-sight. The rules imply that includes anything you can see through old-style binoculars or scopes, although my GM has ruled that digital feeds don't count.

And when has Shadowrun ever been "investigative-style drama?" In what iteration of the game was that true? I know I only played two (now three) versions of that game, but every game I've seen or heard about was gritty science-fiction with a fantasy element gonzo cyberpunk action-adventure. Ultraviolence was always a hallmark of the game, and that's why thematically most of the gear you can implant makes you better at killing stuff. In fact, one of the jokes I've heard through the years is that in Shadowrun, "investigation" means "keeping someone alive long enough to ask questions."

I mean, I can see that we wouldn't have a good time playing in one another's games, and that's fine. I bet you have a great time playing in your style, and so far (despite the rules issues) I'm having fun in mine. But I can promise you that the game I am playing in is a lot closer to my interpretation than it is to yours.

You should be more specific about what you're telling your drones to do, then. From what I read, the answer I gave resolves the questions in your post, and allows you to do everything you described in at max, one action per round. You should also be able to issue standing orders like "guard this door an shoot anyone not on the whitelist" before combat. But giving it robocop-like directives and releasing it on the street, outside your rigger control, is right out. You'll end up with the ED-209 killing you more likely than not

I can't really say more, because I don't know what you're trying to do, but setting up elaborate contingencies ahead of time can kill the game for GMs. It's one of the classic GM/Player arguments, as lampooned in the classic Dead Ale Wives sketch. Shadowrun does a great thing in keeping players responsible for declaring the actions of their drones and keeping those directions simple enough that the GM can actually remember them in combat.

Well, the GM doesn't want to remember the commands. He wants me to remember them, and he wants to be able to judge on the fly whether they're reasonable. The discussion is about what "reasonable" should be for the tech level and the rules. I think ninthworld9 helped me out a lot there.

Now I just need to figure out where to go to find rules for modifying stuff. Does Rigger 3 not have that kind of stuff in it?