So, going through SR4A, and came across the Karma table. I was wondering...does anyone actually USE this table? To me, unless you plan on having your campaign last a really long time, its Karma rewards are just too low. For some char types (Sams) its not too bad, because you're more about gear than skills...but for say, adepts, TM's, and Mages, it would take forever to advance. So my question to the GM's out there, is, what's your standard Karma rewards, and for what? For what pace of game do you play?

Didn't the increase the karma awards in SR4A?

*goes to check*

Seems like an easy 5-6 karma per run. I can see the problem if a run is taking multiple game sessions to complete, but if 1 game session = 1 run, what's the problem?

The New 4A Table (average 7-10 Karma per Run) is even better than the old SR4 Table (5-6 Karma per Run)

with a better Dance
Medicineman

Hadn't seen the new table in SR4A, was going off of what our GM had said. I agree with the table in this instance, that per RUN, that's a good setup for rewards. Especially if its 1 session per run....with multiple session runs being rewarded more.

I guess this was intended to balance out the increased cost of increasing attributes.

So do people find that its enough for a decently paced game then?

It depends what feel you want, how quickly you want to advance, how many party members are awakened, and how long the campaign is. Shorter campaigns should have higher rewards so the characters gain a sense of advancement, while longer campaigns can do a little bit lower so the GM can keep a leash on character development. Awakened characters use more karma than nuyen, so if you have a lot of awakened characters consider higher karma runs than higher nuyen runs, and visa versa for teams with little to no magic.

But in any case, I find that with my group at least, an average of 8 karma per run works pretty well. I'll drop it down to 7 if they didn't complete their objectives well, and I'll raise it to 9 or 10 if the run was particularly hard. I'll also add 3-4 points for each additional pay session the run lasts even if the run is easy because even if a session doesn't matter to the characters, they matter to the players. Then again, I prefer fairly quick advancement, it's my experience that most characters don't get too powerful to manage until after several hundred karma.

What he said.

Everyone in my party is either Awakened (2 Adepts and a Mage) or a TM.

Then yes, you'll want it to go faster.... those higher levels of Magic and Resonance get expensive fast.

I suggest that if you are increasing karma, you should up the nuyen per run as well. Or gear dependent characters will be out of luck (and even fall more quickly behind).

If his group is 2 adepts, a mage, and a TM, they're not exactly gear dependent. Not unless the adepts are gunslingers or tech head adepts or something.

"Enough" Karma? Yeah pretty much. My Group doesn't play that often and up till now i gave them just little downtime (They still don't really know what to do with it, it's all: Workworkwork with them) So ingame only two and a half months has passed and the magician is working on her second initiation. (I wouldn't let her initiate two times without some preparation time)

But a busy character in SR4 which takes (and survives) demanding missions all the time earns so much Karma it is insane. They get more per month than a normal person in maybe five years. The only thing that slows them down IS the high cost of super-high attributes. (The prospect of saving up so long while you can just get initiation for like NOTHING makes it a bit better *g*)

But i forsee that my magician will have a crapload of metamagics and bound focii soon. Ah well, at least i can slow her down with focus-addiction then.

The Table Awards in SR4A have worked out well for our table...

On Short runs (1-2 Sessions) this amount is just right... we have a lot of these interspersed short runs through out the campaign... mostly personal goals or things that are designed to help out our contacts, filling in favors, and what not...

Standard Runs take from 2-4 Sessions, Dependant upon Objective, and we get 2-3 per session, with Run Completion netting us more...

Interspersed throughout the campaign, we also have the Major Campaign Advancement Runs, these tend to take more than 10+ Sessions... on these, we gain 2-3 points per session on the Main Concern (in addition to any for completing a Short Run) and then a completion Karma Award that is towards the upper end of the Chart once the Major Campaign Advancement Run has completed. We have been pursuing a Major Plot Development for well over a 15 Months now (we game every Friday), in between Standard Business Runs and Short Personal Runs, when we can fit it in.

Characters have a good spread of Karma between them...

The Technomancer has 200 Karma
The Hacker has 266 Karma
The Triad Liason has 300 Karma
The Triad Lieutenant has 200 Karma
The Street Samurai has about 160 Karma (Joined the Game Late)
and The Magician has 250 Karma

As you can see, the Triad Liason has the most, as he has been the only character that has had an uninterrupted Shadow Existence... Our Previous Mage Died... the Hacker spent some time in Prison before he was able to extricate himself from the clutches of Mitsuhama, and the Street Sam's Player had to bow out of the game when he moved... leaving us with a search for a new Street Samurai... which we eventually found.

Advacement has been steady and we have had no real issues... the longest played characters (The Hacker and the Liason)have been in this campaign for the last 30 Months or so...

Hope that this helps...

Keep the Faith

30 months of every Friday......wow. In your case, I can understand...you don't want them to advance too quickly. For an every Friday game, that sounds about right.

Frankly, I for one think that being able to improve their characters' abilities is quite rewarding for players, so I am quite generous when giving away Karma.
A classic example of a system done right is Dark Heresy - each session a player gets some 100 to 200 exp, and can acquire a skill or an ability or that.
I try to act along the same guidelines, giving some 2 to 5 Karma per session, based on achievements and each character's participation. Same goes for money - going to session after session for a month or two with the same stats and skills and equipment is extremely boring, after all.

I think a good way of handling this is to have nuyen and Karma be exchangeable, justify it as the group getting paid and then donating money to some character driven purpose, such as a charity or family or a religion. Depending on your group this exchange rate might be different but I'd think the base 1 karma for 2500 nuyen would probably work out in general. Then you can decide how much karma you want to give players per session and they can decide how much of that they want to be nuyen and how much they want to be karma. This way, the players get to decide how they advance and there's less danger of one type of character outclassing the others.

I think it depends entirely on the game you play in and how often your group changes out characters.

Yeah, It hasn't been too bad... and we are able to advance characters fairly quickly in comparison to the game world... of course, this may not synch up with other tables, but it works for us...

Hell, I have 37 Active Skills and 24 Knowledge SKills... with a laundry list of other skills I am in need of...Let alone any gear that might come along...

We don't do too bad...

Keep the Faith

It must be a nightmare if someone wants to change characters. Do you use the Karma Build rules and let them build a character that is average for your game?

Not too bad actually...

We use normal BP for builds on replacement characters... tehn the GM provides around 100 XP to flesh out the character, so a replacement character will start in the neighborhood of 100 Karma... then they discuss things like contacts and equipment obtained after character Generation... we have had 4 replacement Characters (The Mage, The Technomancer The Street Sam and the Triad Lieutenant)... So, though they are not on par with the regular characters that started, they are not newbs right off of the streets either...

I imagine that once we all crest the 300 Karma mark, and if we then need a new character to join us, the Karma awarded may be bumped to 150 points or thereabouts...

Seems to work out pretty well...

Keep the Faith

But wouldn't a 100-something Karma gap kinda imbalance the team, making some characters necessarily dominating the game?
Everything we play, a character dies, a new one is rolled with roughly the same power level as the rest of the team, minus maybe some slight penalty that's offset by the fact that the player now knows what's his character is likely to be up to.

That depends, really. I joined a group playing a 400 BP troll phys-ad and kept up just fine with the 150-200 karma street sam who even after buying off notoriety several times still had a public awareness of like 3 or 4, and in fact I was better in a few areas to him (especially taking and dealing damage in close combat). So could a 100 karma gap imbalance the game? Maybe. But maybe not. Depends on the players and characters and how well the players know how to play their characters. A TM can dominate in meat space if they want to, despite what everyone says.

It's rather easy to build a character with a whole brick of dice in his primary skill set to start with, so being able to competently fill your role on the team shouldn't be that big of an issue unless your chargen fu is weak. Awakened types can be a bit problematic since initiation can open doors that a fresh character simply cannot under standard rules, but that's about the biggest problem. After all, the higher the rating, the more expensive it is to improve; mundanes in particular have a tendency to branch out and become more well-rounded characters as opposed to attaining ridiculous overall dice pools that require a complete retooling of opposition forces. A post-karma Samurai can certainly be a better shot than his 400 bp counterpart, but that's a far cry from saying that a 15 dice in automatics chargen samurai can't hit the broad side of a barn.

Of course, when asking about balancing issues, I'm not taking characters who spend karma to redeem their own failures into account. (He could have bought Erased and have some plastic surgery and that'd still cost him less, btw).

Hm, and how would a TM do that? Massive rigging?