Karma in Forum Games - Help!, How much to award? Options

[adamu]

Karma in forum games - specifically on the Welcome to the Shadows board.

I have been dabbling in GMing there. It is fairly fun, and adopting to the different medium has been an interesting challenge.

But I have yet to come up with a good system for Karma awards.

I mean, the BBB/tabletop way, no one will ever get any karma. The idea of awarding karma at the completion of a run assumes that
(A) the campaign is built around conventional "runs", which most of mine has not been until recently.
(B) the "runs" are completed in any sort of reasonable RL time frame. Near as I can tell, even a very small run with a short, simple objective and a limited number of players can take a month or more to get through on these boards. A more involved "full" run with several players - well, never seen one completed, although I have heard that in a few legendary cases it happens.

So basically, no one would ever get "paid" and you will have faithful players posting day after day but achieving no game-terms character progression - one of the key pleasures of the game. Is that pleasure to be surrendered just because one is playing by post?

Watching other games, I have seen weekly awards based on post frequency.

I have seen awards given to people for GMing (don't know how that one works, but I like the sound of it!)

I have seen awards at the completion of "chapters" of runs.

I have seen awards at arbitrary intervals (when the GM got around to it) based on BBB individual award standards.

And I have seen games where there were never any awards even after goals were reached/small runs completed.

Over the past ten months, I have experimented with combinations of most of these methods, but have yet to find anything satisfying. Either I feel that hard work and great play are going unrewarded, or that I am being way too generous a GM. Never was a problem in my zillion years of tabletop GMing, but this forum thing has me stumped.

Would appreciate any comments.