Aero, that really constitutes a gigantic straw-man. It's not what anyone here is advocating; if anything, it is a caricature of the way it should, rightly and properly, be balanced.

Given your scenario? As a GM, I'd count up the net BP cost of gear and nuyen expended, and apply that towards the removed negative flaw. Then, I'd look at what Karma awards I would have otherwise given the player, and apply THAT.

If there was any balance left against the character, then and only then would I either ask them to pay more Karma, go into debt for some Karma, or we could talk through a mutually-agreeable replacement negative quality. Or some combination of them all.

For example, if they would have earned 4 karma, and blew ~$25K worth of stuff, eliminating a 13-point enemy? They'd be 6 BP / 12 Karma "short". So one option might be to "owe" 2 karma, and pick up a replacement 5-point negative quality.

...

Any negative quality that is too easily fixed / cured / solved, is not AND NEVER WAS worth much (if any) BP during CharGen.

Or I might allow the player to burn a point of edge to essentially negate me using hand of god on their enemy. Because I totally would use hand of god on their enemy otherwise.

Burnt point of edge will make up for karma cost of quality.

Law of shadowrun is that you should never get more out of something than you put in. There should be some loss. Especially when it comes to negative qualities.

I have said all along that it should not be easily fixed and that is up to the GM. Taking your Reduced Sense example, there is the perfect solution on the same page in RC - namely, require delta grade implants: 10 times the cost and you still have to find the parts and the clinic which is no mean feat.

Thing is, at chargen you have to pay for everything in BP/karma, but that is just chargen and it is expected that you can will gain things by actions in game without being mystically tied to the abstract currency. A PC walks into a bar, buys a few drinks and goes home. Does the GM give him half a dozen 6/6 contacts without question? No, of course not. Does he charge him an adventure's worth of karma to pay for the few contacts he could reasonably gain? Also absurd. How about money? "The Johnson paid out 5k a piece, right? That's two karma less for everyone who took it then." Bound spirits? As if magicians could afford another karma sink. You put in the work to make contacts, bind spirits and make money and you get them.

On reflection I think buying off qualities without any roleplaying is reasonable where roleplaying would not make sense. Buying off Gremlins for instant. What I can't get behind is charging karma for results that the PC has earned.

That said, there is of course the issue of general advancement (attributes, skills and what have you) which is equally a means of buying bonuses or paying as well as earning so I can't claim to have a perfect answer. It is for this reason that I intend to develop an in-tandem system for advancement without karma so that characters can spend a couple of months at the shooting range without learning nothing.

Would you really count up everything they put in? I'm starting to think there are GMs out there who would be best off forgetting about putting together any kind of adventure and instead just hand out 10 karma to each player at the start of each session and then watch them just move the numbers around their sheets.

You can't mean that, surely? Whatever you do you should be worse off for having tried?
What about taking what you have in character and situation and aiming to use your wits and resources to achieve a better character and/or situation? Isn't that ultimately.the goal?

You misunderstand what I mean. I'm talking from a dystopian point of view. Yes, you achieve to become better, but you always lose something in return. If you want to become stronger, you can spend a bunch of karma or you can get muscle augments. They're cheaper but you've the extra (metaphysical) price in essence. You can become quit powerful as an awakened character, but your going to have to spend a lot of karma to do so.

And thats what it comes down to really, what is karma? karma's a bitch. If you can't pay it down, the world works against you and your enemy survives (hand of god) or is supplanted. Or you kill them and in doing so, your enemy has info on you somewhere in the matrix set to be released on his death. Now your Wanted (10 BP) or have Records on File (10 BP)...

Personally, I do a mixture of both.
If one of my players wants to buy off a quality, I put in the work to think about how to do it.

Example 1: One character has a child. He has lived in a boarding school for most of his life and doesn't really know his mother. She's also an alcoholic. Then she decides to clean up her act and gets her son to come home to her. Her 10 points alcoholic quality morphed to a 10 point dependent quality.

Example 2: Another character is addicted to amphetamines. Her boyfriend has threatened to leave her / kick her out if he finds her passed out on a slight OD one more time. She invests the karma to buy it off, representing hard work and cold turkey (I really have no idea if this is possible, medically, but it sounded plausible enough).

I won't let either one of those characters off the hook without some serious roleplaying.

Myself, I've lost and gained new connections, by roleplaying mostly. No karma or money invested, usually, but connections come with their own odds and ends, as everyone knows (DUDE! I need a place to crash tonight, 'salright if I come over, isn't it?)
I've also made and lost an enemy, purely by roleplaying and a hard run, where I had to burn edge at the end.

It all depends on how much effort a player puts into his project of losing a negative quality.

However, if it's a quality that comes with the creation of the character, I'll think twice about how to get rid of it. In most cases I eyeball it and say 'a bit of karma here' (maybe even double the BP cost, as the rulebook demands it) and 'a lot of roleplay there'.

Some qualities, I'll flat out refuse to let the player buy off.

Yeah the one guy I play with forces us to pay 1 karma per point rating of a contact. Which I feel is a bit wrong... but that's the way he runs things.

I'm more in line with bannock... contacts come and go... you off one enemy. Fine you've bought yourself some time... another one will creep up or it'll be replaced with another quality until you pay it off.


The only bit I disagree with is Paxes treasure expended tally. Sorry but cold hard cash is a bit too easy to come by in game and 2500/karma is way too cheap to buy things off in most cases. I don't know if he uses the karma/$$$ exchange rules or not, so it may or may not make sense.

Far better way to handle this is individual and group karma/$$$ award. Each player is assured of some of each, and can't simply run straight karma or $$$... but they're free to divvy up the second part as they see fit. Some will want the karma others the $$$ and they both end up happy or working out a deal.

adding my own 2 cents into this, I notice an extreme number of karma-intensive builds, such as awakened or resonant characters, taking the In-Debt negative quality, and paying it off as their first order of business. No karma is required to do so, they simply have to pay the debt, the %50 add on, and the 10% monthly fee. This is not "easy" per say, but it requires no karma. I've thought this was a bit of a break, myself.

That one is fun. Family enforcers breaking into your flat while you're out of town, smashing things to bits, because 'You skipped town on me, hombre. Don't do it again.' ... Broken thumbs and stuff, and if you fight back, there'll be an 'invitation' to the capo or whatever to tell you, that you're liable for the damage caused. I do not make this easy on players, even if it isn't in Karma costs.

yeah, in my game if you buy off the nuyen cost of debt without buying off the karma cost, it gets replaced with something else.

This, I don't do. The quality states quite clearly that it's bought off if you pay one and a half time the amount you're in debt for. But during that time, the people you're in debt with have you by the short and curlies (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)
No one's saying that there won't be any complications though.

yeah, at this point you are literally making the characters pay more for their negative quality than if they picked another. Only people needing the money beyond starting available (and only up to 30k more) would ever consider it. Me, I think 30k should be worth maybe 10-15 BP, not 30

No the quality does not say it's bought off Bannockburn. Never not once in the entire entry. It only says you owe at least this much every month. Just because you think you owe $0 this month doesn't mean the quality is gone.

While you might no longer owe the lender anything, they're still out there, and they still have all your information. If they were able to collect on your badass self or make your life utterly miserable they're still out there and still might try. Who knows they might try and leverage a little protection payout now and then when the character is flush after a hot run especially when they're trying to keep their head low (or sell out to the guys looking). If word on the street is that you just scored a major payday and are laying low... you can bet they're going to approach you for their cut to not let the authorities (or worse) know where to look.


I'm not a big fan of outright replacing the quality with other negative ones though. While it doesn't strike me as right to replace 30BP worth of in-debt after paying with 3 different records on file with 3 different megas for example.



BTW: this is specifically written under enemies... as covered by the quality...
"Enemies are the antithesis of typical contacts. However, they use a similar set of game mechanics. Generally, an enemy should be a 400 BP character approved by the gamemaster. Enemies will use the Hand of God (p. 277, SR4) to reappear even when they should, by all rights, be dead."

Translation... yes you may have thought you offed the enemy... but no he magically survived your ill-designed plot to eliminate him. Simply killing the enemy does not buy off the quality. Even the RAW makes this clear.

not under my time value of BP/nuyen analysis

I chose to interpret
as such, Falconer. But as I said: No guarantee that there won't be complications (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

"Your enemy's children, the oldest barely twelve, stare at you in horror as you're covered in their only adult family's blood. They had witnessed everything, your verbal and physical fight where you had both laid down why only one person would walk away from this final battle. The twelve year old's lips shudder in terror, pain, and fury as he runs across the hall to grab a mace that is decorating the extensive building that is their home, and he runs at you with the anger that can only come of having seen his parent die... What, do, you, do?"

I like Falconer's take on In Debt. You're right; didn't think of blackmail or later contacts afterward by said loan-shark. Cool

... yes, that suggestion pretty much makes my point: it shouldn't be so easy to compensate for negative qualities.


... I am not even going to grace this hateful nonsense with a rebuttal. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/mad.gif)

I'm honestly just shocked anyone would argue against buying off flaws, *especially* In Debt. I've never heard of anyone not recognizing it as preposterously broken under the 'just repay the money' resolution: 30 free BP for the privilege of *taking* extra chargen cash, to trivially repay later? Even without the money, this would be beyond a bargain. Even if you had to repay X nuyen in exchange for just BP, it would be fantastically good, head and shoulders beyond any other NQ. That leaves two options: fundamentally change it (perhaps making it a 0 BP 'flaw', or a cheap-ish Positive Quality), or use the existing buyoff rules that are sitting right there for this exact purpose.

Worst case, like Aerospider's extreme Enemy example, the GM is setting aside 'bonus' karma for all that good roleplaying and planning, for the purpose of buying off that flaw for him.

Enemy's children? What children? They have no idea that their parents were killed by the PC. They were told that their parents were killed in an avalanche during a ski trip. There were no witnesses.

Or you could just allow repaying the money resolution.

And I do not recognise it as preposterously broken under the repayment solution, in fact, I would encourage it as the most efficient method. The drawback to this solution is that the Negative Quality is technically still on the character's sheet, except that the amount owed is 0.

Except that's in no way a drawback, unless you *invent* some random and totally extra penalties for it. The rules list no such penalties. And yes, it's 'efficient'; that's *why* it's brokenly good.

It's not like I've never heard this before, it just doesn't make any sense. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) It is possible to—again—totally invent more drawbacks, and it's even possible to make them sort of make sense, but I don't see how sticking the player with new penalties is any better than sticking the player with a RAW karma cost, the listed method for removing *any* flaw. (I thought you adored RAW?)

We've certainly discussed In Debt in the past, and it's pretty messed up from any perspective: +30 BP is gigantic, the loaned nuyen is a significant chargen boost (especially compared to things like Born Rich), and there's almost no fair and sensical way to handle the repayment. That's what I find it such a weird example for this point of 'just pay via roleplaying'.

Doesn't the RAW of that quality also include a repayment method?

Well, the RAW makes it quite clear that Negative Qualities must be bought off with Karma. Having In-Debt, with a Balance of 0 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) is not bought off for Karma Purposes. As such, you still owe your shadow creditors favors.

That's one of the options under the 'invent new drawbacks' method, but my point is that's not part of the RAW. If forcing the player to buy it off with karma is objectionable, surely new penalties out of nowhere is at least equally bad?

So, instead you have to house rule these extra penalties in *before* play starts, meaning you're fixing the broken In Debt. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Yes, toturi, exactly as you say: "the RAW of that quality also includes a repayment method". It's additional, and doesn't remove the general one. Even if it did, as I said, the result would be stupendously imbalanced. Obviously so, because basically everyone notices this on their own. Things so obviously broken, no matter how RAW, are not okay; it's lucky for us that this isn't RAW, then.