In game rewards and motivations Options

[Solomon Greene]

Money:

Money is the reward for and the point of a less than legal life. Money is used to buy pleasure, to ease the passage of life and to accquire things that are wanted. Money is not the whole goal, but it is the path to the goal. Money for my players and their characters is how they obtain things that are meaningful to their characters, to themselves that will improve the game. My players portray selfish criminals who do illegal things to get rich - and enjoy all the associated benefits.

Would my players play if I stopped handing out karma?

Without a doubt, absolutely. I play a very story-driven, PC-centric game. PC's are "cool", they come out of the gate cool and stylish. Their abilities are tied to narrative and story-centric themes, not to karma boosted abilities. We've been sitting around many times, telling stories about what happened in game and karma points have never popped up in any light. I've never heard "Man, two more points and I'll get my pistols to six" or "All I need is ten more and I can initiate again, then I'll be really bad ass". What I do hear is "Do you remember when we had to deal with that whore and the btls on the metro autobus?" or ".. and this this freak summons a spirit of Man right in the middle of the cathedral!". It seems my players really aren't that concerned with advancement as much as they are with the story - as long that keeps going, I don't really think they'd care.

[Critias]

...I can't help but want to repeat myself. A "no karma" game is listed right there in the SR3 Companion as a viable model for a long-term campaign. Instead of doling out a mixture of money (the IC motivator) and karma (the primary OOC motivator), you go heavier on the nuyen and allow cash-for-karma.

It's not that unreasonable, really.

[tisoz]

[Critias]

No, it means using the rules as written they're getting no karma, only money (just like the what-if that started this conversation). My point is that there are ways to handle just exactly that sort of game, and that if they saw fit to waste printing space on them (SURGE catgirls notwithstanding as an example of how picky the editors might not be) someone with some experience in the game thought that such a campaign was, if not totally awesome, at least still a feasible gaming experience.

[James McMurray]

Is the variant "no karma" or "no karma except that which you buy via cash-for-karma"? From the standpoint of character advancement there's a huge difference between those two statements.

[Cain]

"no karma except that which you buy via cash-for-karma"

Which, of course, is a different animal than what we're talking about. We're discussing a no-advancement game, not strictly a no-karma game.

[James McMurray]

Yeah, there's a huge difference between the scenario in the OP and the suggested variant.

[Particle_Beam]

Well, we're talking about a no karma-improvement game, which in the end does encompass both things, either a no-advancement game, or a no-karma game either.

[James McMurray]

I would only play in a no karma improvement game if it was a one shot, and hence the loss didn't matter, or if there was another way to improve one's skills beyond buying better skillwires. I like characters to be able to start off lacking many of the skills needed to thrive in the shadows but still improve themselves and become prime runners.

[Glyph]

The game depends on the interaction between a player's desires for his character and the rules which are used to resolve the character's actions. To me, the stats and the personality of a character are intertwined.

I would hate to play a stagnant character. I think I would rather start out with a brutally effective sammie with a bad BTL addiction, and watch his abilities decline, than play a character whose abilities never changed.

[Ddays]

I like playing mages who slowly advance in magical power, who focus more on gaining more knowledge than material wealth, so a low karma game would suck for me.

[Gothic Rose]

A Non-Advancing game would be terrible, in my opinion. There's only so much that you can do with moniez, and while they're nice, it doesn't have the same feeling that Karma does.

Also, for many players, the feeling of advancement, watching your character grow both in the statistical sense and the personality/rp sense is a very rewarding aspect of gaming, and this would take half of that away.

[tisoz]

If folks do not like the no advancement game, why do we get so many GMs on here talking about their sub-standard starting BP, low karma award games? Are their players masochists who then revel in hoarding stingy karma awards until they have accumulated enough to spend on anything?

[FrankTrollman]

Different story telling traditions require different methodologies. The Epic has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The hero (or heroes) starts off one way (often unimpressively) and through the story achieves maximum potential and ultimately triumphs at the end. The Serial, however, is fundamentally different. It may or may not have a beginning, but in any case is specifically open ended. One adventure starts at pretty much the same point as another - characters aren't expected to change much between stories.

Many legends partake of both extremes. For example, the Pendragon begins his life as a poor and unimpressive youngling and he has his early adventures where he picks up the swod that makes him rightwise king of England and has sex with his aunt. And he wins the hand of Gwen, picks up a retinue of grade A badasses and ultimately slays Mordred in a final confrontation. That's pretty much straight epic material right there, and is actually available in literal epic format from actual bards. But there are also an inumerable number of Arthur legends and songs which fit somewhere in the middle and have no real effect on the overall story arc. These are the middle age's version of afternoon cartoons, and they don't really go anywhere. The characters are usually coming into the song already in their iconic gear and they fight some monster or accomplish some task and end the story while still being essentially in iconic form.

And many legends do it just one way or the other.

And if you want to participate in cooperative storytelling games,t here's no pressing reason why you should start characters below the power level you imagine them and gradually work up. You could just as well start the characters in iconic shape and have their adventures take place at the point where you want them to be and just not advance them. That's entirely reasonable.

-Frank

[mfb]

if storytelling is the big, main goal. it's a good goal, i'm not saying otherwise, but it's not the main goal, for me--it's one of two main goals. the other is to enjoy the game itself, the marshaling and clever use of my character's resources to overcome challenges, and then grow afterwards.

[Talia Invierno]

[Particle_Beam]

In this case, this would simply be called serial epic, wouldn't it? :)

[Crusher Bob]

Hmm, it's interesting that so many people tie character development directly to the character's ability to shoot people in the face. I mean, if you character starts out being able to face-shoot someone at 50m at night and then his skills improve to the ability to do this at 100m, at night, during a hurricane he's obviously a well developed character isn't he?

----

Would you be interested in playing a game sold as the following:
You control billions of Y, hordes of minions, have whatever skills and powers you want and your objective is to (select one of the following or make up your own):

Restore the Republic of Ireland after kicking out those pesky elves
Seize back control of humanity's destiny from the dragons
Or some other suitably world shaking and epic motivation

Nuyen rewards are irrelevant (except in the 'you gain a controlling interest in Ares Macrotech' kind of way) and anything less than that you can buy. Want 5.999 essence worth of delta grade cyber goodies? go right ahead.
And even if you gained 300 karma over the course of the campaign, it would still be insufficient to increase your core skills, you are just that badass.

So the game is about what you are willing to do to accomplish your goals, not how mch better you can get at shooting people in the face.

----

I suspect that skill and gear advancement is so important in SR for the following reasons:

The stuff written on the character sheet is a way of gaining narrative control over the game. In SR, the characters tend not to be able to change the world, and the focus on the game is not on their relationships with each other or the NPCs, so the abilities of the characters are the only 'control' the players have over the game, especially because the GM is normally adversarial in SR games.

[eidolon]

[James McMurray]

[Critias]

Yes, but I think Bob's saying that there are more ways to advance than simply by getting better at things and erasing some numbers on a character sheet to put new numbers there.

[James McMurray]

Not in some things. You cannot get better at talking to people in generic social situations without crossing out Etiquette 1 and replacing it with Etiquette 2. You can't learn entirely new schools of knowledge (as opposed to tidbits here and there) without gaining ranks in the knowledge skill. You can't learn a new spell without some sort of advancement rules. etc.

[Critias]

I understand what you're saying, but I still think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. No, you can't necessarily get better at things except by...uhh...getting better at things. But that's the character sheet advancing, not just the character.

Characters and personalities and outlooks can still grow and change without a single number being shifted. Was Han Solo, on-screen, an appreciably bigger badass at the end of RotJ than he was when we first met him at the Mos Eisley cantina, as a for instance? Did the Lethal Weapon series end with Martin Riggs a better shot or combatant than the series began? Did Wolverine think up exciting new ways to cut-a-bitch between X-Men and X3?

No...but all three of them were different people at the end of their respective movie runs, all the same. The characters in those films interacted with one another differently, shifted roles within the group without any obvious shifts in power level.

It all comes down to the sort of game you want to play, as to what you call "character development." Speaking from my own Shadowrun experiences, I'd say my street sam developed more as a character when he learned his background and real name and then got his daughter back than, say, when he got his Ingram Supermach specialization up to a 9 from an 8.

There are things a GM and play can do to develop a character that have nothing to do with dice and karma. Were I in the right sort of game with a GM and other players I trusted, sure. I'd play in a campaign where I didn't earn karma.

[James McMurray]

Of course characters can grow as people. I'm sory if I imnplied I didn't think that was possible. What I do think, however, is that there's more to advancement in a game than personality.

The two are far from mutually exclusive, so it's not like you actually have to choose "the sort of game you want to play." You can play both at the same time.

[Particle_Beam]

I do not believe anybody ever suggested that you couldn't play both at the same time. However, you can play without any game statistic shifts for a long time, or in some cases even never.

On the other hand, playing without any changes to personality would be more boring than the other thing.