[X] My Assistant

[tyweise]

[the_dunner]

[Cain]

There's also the matter of money and gear and contacts. I saved up more than enough for an attention coprocessor, which does make a huge difference. While I can't see any fair way of distributing these, except for a karma buy-in, they can make a bigger difference in character power levels than karma alone. Combine the two, and you've suddenly got a huge gap.

[Alphastream]

I've generally found few people that just want to DM in a living campaign. A home campaign is different, of course, because the GM is creating the world. You can't really share that. In a living campaign, the GMs are only aware of the plot for that particular mod. They may know a few things more than the average player, but there is no reason why they should know too much (the mod where it matters is where you explain it to the GM, not the preceding one).

For a living campaign, and here I have played Living Greyhawk and Spycraft mostly, I find that very few GMs want to just judge. They want to play a bit as well.

If you are low on GMs, then this is a big problem. You are trying to talk people into either:
- Come in brand new to the campaign and start judging, or
- Switch from being a player to being a judge.

The first will bring inexperienced judges. The second will generally bring in cautious people who want to try it out and see how it goes. This is where rewards really pay off. When they know their PC isn't taking a hit, sure, they'll eat a mod. And eating mods is generally what happens in the 90% of the US that doesn't have some super-dedicated person that knows everyone and attends all the cons.

Maybe the real question out there is whether people would judge more if they had rewards. If they would, then you have to balance the desire for having 'pure' judges that are dedicated because they want to judge, and bringing more judges into the system.

I am not sure that the quality of judging has anything to do with whether you like to play. In my Spycraft and LG experience, there is no link. There are great GMs that only judge and great GMs that have 18 characters.

Teos

[warrior_allanon]

suggestion, and since we used this one I can tell you it works so long as none of the GMs flake on you, is that each GM run a different set of runners, this not only lets your players experiment but it keeps the karma equal all across. Now granted each player will have a number of characters to keep track of equal to the number of GMs but thats not difficult so long as they keep them filed in the same place, (IE their book)

[the_dunner]

[Alphastream]

I added a poll just for fun. I'll be quiet on the topic now, just learning the ropes and seeing what's what.

Teos

[tyweise]

@the_dunner

That's an interesting (and wholly foreign to me) perspective on the Missions campaign. Like Alphastream, I come from a Living style campaign background, so I suppose I have "that kind" of mentality about public/organized campaigns. I gather from your latest post that SR Missions runs a bit differently. With a strong continuity (which I like) I completely understand not wanting to GM a later mission before playing a previous one. My main concern would be playing a Mission and then GMing that same mission for others; something that I feel would help the campaign grow.

From my perspective, discouraging players from GMing and GMs from playing severely limits the growth of Missions in popularity. It would seem (from what I've read in this thread) the ideal model is to run Missions like a home game campaign, with one GM and the same set of players throughout. But that to me runs counter to the whole point of a public/shared campaign, where players from different areas get together and conventions and participate in a common game world.

Also, if not playing half of the 25 Missions in this campaign means you're only out about 30 karma, then you're getting an average of 2-3 karma per mission? That seems like a quite slow rate of advancement; if I were to miss out playing half the missions, then with my ~30 karma, I could just barely up my Firearms skill group to 5, and up Perception to 2 by campaign's end. Slow advancement is fine, by itself, but it may also serve to discourage players from GMing missions (and spreading the campaign) without playing them first, if they like the idea of seeing their character improve throughout a campaign.

Reading people here posting about 250+ karma characters is mind-boggling to me; unless the rollover karma from the previous Missions campaign accounts for a huge chunk of that.

[DireRadiant]

[the_dunner]

[tyweise]

[the_dunner]