Karma Levels, Your character has how much karma?!? Options

[Dr Komuso]

My group and I have been playing the same campaign for a little under 10 years. We began the game with maybe 7 characters between four people, only two of whom are still alive (One died recently). Some others joined up after the initial 7, and I'd guess that 3 of those are still kicking. So, the original 2 are both over the 1000 earned karma mark, as was the decker-rigger-mechanic who died. The second stringers are each at around the 600+ mark. In the course of the campaign we've played around 60 characters between five people, and so karma pools and earned karma are generally just aaaaall over the map.

It's an interesting way to play, honestly. Our high-powered characters wield influence on par with some of the big boys of the SR universe, while the lower "ranked" characters answer to them. It allows myself and the other GM to create intricate and detailed plots which incorporate published material, add more, and allows it to all be viewed from both the "decision maker" level and the "street op" level.

Good stuff. :spin:

[mfb]

yeah. one thing i like about shadowrun is that, unless you're specialized to hell and back, you can run a 200-karma char with a 0-karma char, and it'll work. for instance, my adept is pretty badass, but there's been several times that he wouldn't have survived without the help of the 10-20 karma chars he was with for that run.

[Mr. Man]

Current Character
Incept: October 2002
System: Priority
Starting Karma: 0
Total Karma: 198
Unspent Karma: 171
Hours Played: ~188

Previous Character
Incept: December 2001
Retirement: October 2002
System: Priority
Starting Karma: 0
Total Karma: 300
Unspent Karma: 132
Hours Played: ~156

Hope this helps...

[mfb]

...you've got 171 and 132 unspent karma? what, are you waiting for the after-christmas sale?

[Mr. Man]

[Digital Heroin]

You do realize that the very acts you describe, planning and executing runs, creates a realistic place to spend karma... skill builds best through use, neh?

[Mr. Man]

[Hero]

I have been playing my character that goes by the street name "Hero" from 1999 to 2001 where he was finally retired as a NPC. I remember that before he was retired he had accumulated around 450 karma, was a 8th level initiate in his magical order. He had his most important skill ratings in the 8 to 10 level, as far as I could tell he was probably the most powerful mage in are game world. He now a some what of a power player in the corporate arena through his cover of Ido, the CEO and "Founder" of Agendum Weapons Technologies.

[Dim Sum]

I've GMed waaaay more than I've played SR. I played Johnny Demonic for about 4-5 years almost daily for an average of about 4 hours per session. He has 182 good karma in total but, as someone else also mentioned earlier, he doesn't feel like a 182-karma character. He's only got one skill at 10, a whole bunch of 7's and 8's, and is very fluent in some 6-7 languages. I kinda distributed my karma over a lot of skills, I guess.

The other character I played with any kind of regularity is a PC I played on and off for about 2 years and he's only got 23 karma.

[Wireknight]

My character's working handle has changed through the years, but I started him quite awhile ago, during that era of late middleschool and high school when there wasn't much to do besides gaming or outdoors activities, which, with a sack full of dice and a couple clipboards, papers, and pens, could just as easily turn to gaming when it got boring.

We averaged about one session a day, three on weekends(and much drinking of the gallon jugs of tea we'd make), for a few years. Two characters went the distance, with others dying or retiring over the course of the rather epic ongoing campaign(we basically did it in four-month sub-campaigns, with survivors of the sub-campaign migrating to the new one, with occasional rare "episodes" where a new character would join up into the mix for a session or two, while the pre-existing character was captured or just absent.

Both surviving characters, a human mercenary-turned-syndicate boss(cyberware/bioware) and an elf infiltration specialist-turned-archmage/ninja(magician adept), had far beyond the upper limits suggested in that poll(or at least pretty damned far into the last categorization). I took over the mercenary/syndicate boss, a friend's character, and brought him over to Shadowland as a behind-the-scenes NPC. My character, the elf magician adept, is still running until he obtains his goal of 500,000,000 :nuyen: in various accounts.

He's still fun to play, and the fact that he's got no cyberware means that he pairs well with riggers and deckers of any karma level. Likewise, his preference for stealth and infiltration over frontal assaults means that even though he can probably outclass most of the front-line combatant characters he encounters, it's rare that he assumes that role and thus outshines them.

It's all a matter of how you play a high-karma character. I'm sure I could easily have him levitate around in an invulnerable physical barrier effect, firing blasts of energy from his eyes and destroying all opposition. However, his mindset is too human to really consider things that are obviously inhuman, like the aforementioned. He still carries personal weapons, for instance, even though his distance strike does damage comparable to a shotgun and with pistol-like ranges.

A character's power, and his full potential, are two different things. I've never really had to push that character to his full potential, save for a couple of the big sub-campaign finales, since about his second year of play. All he does, in-game, is complete missions satisfactorily and methodically, usually with fairly little effort. He keeps a low profile, alters his appearance frequently, and changes handles when one starts to garner too much of a reputation. He isn't the greatest(hacker/swordsman/magician) in the world. He's the badass that no one's ever heard of.

[edit]
Oh, and some actual statistics... his given name, that he rarely uses aside from with the few people who he knows regardless of what identity he's assumed at the moment, is Zack.

Zack's got quite a few skills in the 9-10 range, knows nine languages fluently, has advanced background and theory skills in areas of magic, security, and psychology. He's got the educational equivalent of degrees and certificates in thaumatury, psychology, and parapsychology, as well as musical skills and the all-important wide range of generically applicable skills, for his role as a social chameleon.

His highest specialization is Athletics(Gymnastics) at 12/16, followed by Edged Weapons(Swords) at 8/12. His highest base active skill is Stealth at 14, followed up with either Conjuring or Kung Fu at 13. He's got Magical Background of 10, Disguise(which is now Active) at 9, Security Procedures at 8, and a wide variety of social skills and knowledge skills in areas like Literature, Piano, Guitar, Dance, and Conspiracy Theories.

His adept powers tend towards speed, senses, and mysticism, including improved reflexes, delay damage, distance strike, nerve strike, shattering blow, killing hands, magical power, empathic sense, magic sense, and astral perception. He's also got a few unique powers, and an unmentionably long list of boosted/added senses.
[/edit]

[Kurukami]

In the campaigns I've been in to date -- most of which are from the same GM -- it's startup characters plus 100 Karma. The difficulty arises in that most of the more experienced players/characters have been in the campaign for nigh on five or six years, and have something like 500-700+ Karma squirrelled away.

And, naturally, they don't want to retire their powergaming little pets. So virtually any newcomer who doesn't go ultra-cyber and heavy combat is completely outclassed and far slower, ensuring little effect in any combat. That's just one of the reasons I'm contemplating leaving that campaign...

[mfb]

i won't ask about the potential of non-combat characters--it sounds like there isn't any room.

my most powerful character, currently, is a 250-karma (241 spent) grade 8 physad with one bought power point. all his powers are geasa'd to using only pre-industrialized implements, which gives him a hell of a boost--it's munchkin as hell, i know, but i tend to think of him more as an NPC; he's wholly owned by the guys who trained and employ him.

my most powerful character ever was my first one. though i tried very hard to stick to the rules, i misread the rules for alphaware; i mistook "20% less than base essence cost" for "20% of base essence cost". luckily, i deleted him before anyone noticed the fact that he had wired-3 and a VCR-3.

[Reaver]

[Drain Brain]

I'd like to point out that although I voted option One, it's because I always GM, not because I'm a "maker-not-player" or something. I'm playing on here, PBP, and that character has no karma yet

[Rev]

I think the most I ever got up to was around 80. That was the only character I ever used in more than a half dozen sessions.

There is also the thing that many people build and play several charachters simultaneously even in one campaign, while others build one charachter and use it in multiple campaigns (and often across significant rewrites) and or for many years. This is most true of pickup games like many over the internet.

[Talia Invierno]

Kurukami - I've been in a similar situation, always when joining existing campaigns with established tones and power levels. I've since learned that there are several ways of merging new players with powerful established ones, but all the players have to be willing, and in any case the established general tone is going to remain.