[Basic] Disadvantage of the Week: Quadriplegic

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Plane

If you have regular access to that shell then wouldn't you need to buy it as an Ally/Minion?

Not necessarily. In the above example, the character didn't even have possession. They just used gear and ubiquitous high-end Virtual and Augmented Reality to pilot vehicles obtained via cash, theft, or requisition. And it wasn't the same robot every single time. Any character could have done the remote piloting, but the one that chose to do so was a brain-in-a-jar.

You can have any amount of HP at any size though, so being a 10 HP brain in a vent is better than being a 1 HP brain in a vent :)

But the brain wasn't hanging out in the air vent. The brain and character were at an unspecified and remote location, and there was little way for the bad guys OR the other players to find out where that location was. At least from the time-scale of combat. For most practical purposes, the character was the multiple very disposable cleaning robot they had hacked into. Other than the fact that if the "brave" bot was wrecked it was a trivial loss.

Most brain-in-a-jar characters are like that. They have ways to be effective without using their bodies, and often in a rather physical manner. And Most of the time it doesn't matter if they're entombed in a life support shrine or if they're a chubby basement-dweller.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Most brain-in-a-jar characters are like that. They have ways to be effective without using their bodies, and often in a rather physical manner. And Most of the time it doesn't matter if they're entombed in a life support shrine or if they're a chubby basement-dweller.

Yeah, this very much comes down the premise of the game and the GM-Player compact.

In ericthered's game where I played a quad in a full VR immersion medipod. the premise was drone-rigging was simple, ubiquitous, and generally reliable. That I'd have access to either specific drones supplied for missions (it was a Cyberpunk style game) or access to 'generic' shells through some 'not-particularly-difficult' hacking/renting/purchasing actions. That the character wasn't the combat monster (or the hacking monster, or the anything 'monster') probably played well into the compact, but "I'm not going to have to do anything in meatspace without using a drone, and in exchange we won't bother with messy Disad/Ad builds" was explicite.