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> Energy Drain should be replaced by Essence Drain, Metagame ressource-stealing is dumb...
Particle_Beam
post Oct 28 2007, 10:51 PM
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One point that somehow irks me is that somehow, there are some critters like Shadow Spirits who somehow can steal Karma. But frankly, how do you explain that ingame? Stealing Karma in SR is like stealing levels in D&D. It's absolutely metagame, and only meant to punish players, but not characters.
Also, how does one Shadow Spirit determine if his target got any Karma at all?
And furthermore, we all know that Energy Drain causes other problems, in regard to Blood Spirits, who would in less than a day become almighty Blood-Galactus, because of how the rules work and what Energy Drain does...

Now, if Energy Drain gets replaced with Essence Drain, perhaps this might work better. You could say that Shadow Spirits would turn drained Essence into their own Karma, and the rules of Essence Drain already has the limitations about not being able to get more Essence than your natural Essence rating.

Somehow, Energy Drain simply is either absolutely rubbish, or too powerful.

What are your ideas, where do you agree, what do you think should be improved and so on?
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hyzmarca
post Oct 28 2007, 11:07 PM
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QUOTE (Particle_Beam)
One point that somehow irks me is that somehow, there are some critters like Shadow Spirits who somehow can steal Karma. But frankly, how do you explain that ingame? Stealing Karma in SR is like stealing levels in D&D. It's absolutely metagame, and only meant to punish players, but not characters.
Also, how does one Shadow Spirit determine if his target got any Karma at all?
And furthermore, we all know that Energy Drain causes other problems, in regard to Blood Spirits, who would in less than a day become almighty Blood-Galactus, because of how the rules work and what Energy Drain does...

Now, if Energy Drain gets replaced with Essence Drain, perhaps this might work better. You could say that Shadow Spirits would turn drained Essence into their own Karma, and the rules of Essence Drain already has the limitations about not being able to get more Essence than your natural Essence rating.

Somehow, Energy Drain simply is either absolutely rubbish, or too powerful.

What are your ideas, where do you agree, what do you think should be improved and so on?

Karma is a very real commodity. It can be bought, sold, traded, stolen, or used to build things. Given the Free Spirit power called Wealth, it is the only raw commodity that has any value to spirits.
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Particle_Beam
post Oct 28 2007, 11:13 PM
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Explain to me how it is real, and how a spirit knows that the other person has avaiable Karma at all? It's a meta-game ressource, like XP in D&D, nothing more...
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hyzmarca
post Oct 28 2007, 11:41 PM
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QUOTE (Particle_Beam)
Explain to me how it is real, and how a spirit knows that the other person has avaiable Karma at all? It's a meta-game ressource, like XP in D&D, nothing more...

Karma is the fundamental building block of SR metaphysics. Without it, persistent magical constructs cannot exist. It can be bought, sold, or traded. It can be given freely or it can by taken by force. It can be fashioned into any number of magical constructs or used to improve one's own form.

It is as real as a gold coin and more real than a nuyen.

Unfortunatly, there is no way for a spirit to know is a person has karma without attempting a karma drain or a transfer ritual.
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FrankTrollman
post Oct 28 2007, 11:43 PM
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I don't agree with all of your arguments, but your main point stands. Yes, Energy Drain should just go away and be replaced with Essence Drain. Energy Drain is broken in like a million ways and Essence Drain is not.

-Frank
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Glyph
post Oct 28 2007, 11:43 PM
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It should be a purely metagame concept, but unfortunately Hyzmarca is correct. Karma in the game is also one of the forms of life energy desired by spirits. I would still rather lose Karma than lose Essense, though. A few points of Karma can be replaced, but a few points of Essense, and you might as well roll up a new character.
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Particle_Beam
post Oct 28 2007, 11:55 PM
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QUOTE (hyzmarca)
Karma is the fundamental building block of SR metaphysics. Without it, persistent magical constructs cannot exist. It can be bought, sold, or traded. It can be given freely or it can by taken by force. It can be fashioned into any number of magical constructs or used to improve one's own form.

It is as real as a gold coin and more real than a nuyen.

Unfortunatly, there is no way for a spirit to know is a person has karma without attempting a karma drain or a transfer ritual.

Which is another problem with Karma in specific. How do you really explain it, and how do you see it? Essence can be measured. Karma, on the other hand, is purely meta-game.

And yay, at least one person who agrees with me about doing away with Energy Drain. :)
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DTFarstar
post Oct 29 2007, 12:18 AM
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I wouldn't mind losing Energy Drain, or at least giving it a serious overhaul, but not for the same reasons you espouse. I have no problem with Karma being an immeasurable quantity that is still a commodity. I actually kind of like the fact that free spirits are static beings and they need to siphon off a little bit of metahuman creativity to grow themselves in any way. It takes them down a peg and makes it make a little more sense as to why they don't just kill all of us. I mean, let's face it humanity as a whole is an annoying little universal dung pile that most everything else wishes would vanish. If we weren't useful in some way, I'm sure they would do it.
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Wounded Ronin
post Oct 29 2007, 12:26 AM
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Particle Beam, I don't know how sr4 works, but in SR3 a character could choose to give a specific amount of karma to a spirit. It was not metagame. It existed and could be given away in discrete amounts as part of a conscious in-character decision.
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kzt
post Oct 29 2007, 12:50 AM
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If it's not a metagame concept, how do you measure it in character? What's it measured in? What does raw karma look like?
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Particle_Beam
post Oct 29 2007, 01:30 AM
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I would consider it to be totally abstract, like hitpoints in D&D. Karma is probably like a wild mixture of good favour by the gods, experience, memory, time and effort, faith, money substitue and so on.
When used for spending it on raising skills and attributes, Karma would represent your time and your will that you are putting into learning or enhancing your body.
If you're creating a magical do-hickey, it might be some kind of magical juice that you're putting into, although it also might be just putting time and effort into the thing and taking good care of it.
When you get specific positive qualities (or to be more precise, you as the player decide that your character is getting the positive quality, with the approval of the GM of course), like for example Wll to Live, Spirit Affinity, Photographic Memory, and other rather hard-to-clue-down things, it's simply a trait that came up that was somehow always there, but never played a role in the life of the player character before. Of course, once again, you could argue that you could learn such things, given enough time and with dedication.
It does get problematic if we're talking about the creation of an Ally Spirit. Of course, it might be some part of your inner self, your conscience, your memory, your devotion to some higher power...

So, in the end, Karma would be time and dedication for your character. But you as the player, you somehow can get it for pure metagame reasons, like making the plot go on and/or making everybody having a good time and a good laugh at the table, or even something totally absurd like "good roleplaying"... So, totally meta-game, and totally abstract.

Which brings to the problem of how a spirit is going to determine that your character has non-spent Karma, and how it can steal it from you, with the power of Energy Drain, which should be replaced anyway with Essence Drain for other benefits (just simply so that the almighty Blood-Galactus can not come into fruitition would be a good idea). Also, it might streamline the rules, actually, if there's only one kind of terrible life-leaching power that everybody's afraid of.
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Jaid
post Oct 29 2007, 01:35 AM
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QUOTE (kzt)
If it's not a metagame concept, how do you measure it in character? What's it measured in? What does raw karma look like?

it need not be visible, or even detectable using current technologies.

atoms and molecules existed long before we had instruments capable of proving their existence. the fact that they couldn't weigh an atom 5,000 years ago doesn't mean it didn't have weight, nor that it was unweighable.
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kzt
post Oct 29 2007, 01:46 AM
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QUOTE (Jaid)
atoms and molecules existed long before we had instruments capable of proving their existence. the fact that they couldn't weigh an atom 5,000 years ago doesn't mean it didn't have weight, nor that it was unweighable.

Would you consider it logical for a game set in ancient Greece or Rome to require characters to intelligently discuss the specific heat, neutron cross section and molecular weight of objects?
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Wounded Ronin
post Oct 29 2007, 01:49 AM
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Characters in medieval morality plays or operas didn't need to know the atomic weight of their soul to sell it to a demon. Likewise a character may not be able to describe karma very well but he can feel (or consent to) having a portion of it being ripped away from him.
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Big D
post Oct 29 2007, 02:08 AM
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Yes, but they operated under the assumption that they had one (1) soul to sell.

With karma... it's a lot harder. And yeah, it's basically XP.

The problem is, SR has made a habit of bringing XP from a metagame concept into an IC phenomenon. My understanding is that karma has been referenced directly in a number of novels, and that some of them have featured things such as purchasing favors from free spirits with karma. Thus, it's not something that you can just wish away.

And yes, it is broken. Give me a mage with a level of initiation and a few years to work with, and I'll have him stronger than Harlequin, with a small army of Allies by his side. All it takes is a quest to gain a F1 succubus and a good negotiation (or repeated bindings) roll.

If everybody earns XP, and you can buy, sell, and steal it, there will always be a way to "cheat" your way through the game. And you don't even have to permanently hurt anybody.

Essence Drain--which can't be used to permanently increase your powers, much less create Allies--is another matter. Plus, it's much harder to do without seriously hurting or killing people, which attracts attention. On a metagame note, it also tends to make players a little more squeamish about using, despite the fact that they kill innocents on most runs anyways.
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Orient
post Oct 29 2007, 03:16 AM
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It doesn't really bother me...

The things that have Energy Drain are fundamentally different from the things with Essence Drain; the former include Blood Spirits and various incarnations of the Enemy, right? Given what's been written about them, the in-game concept of Energy Drain doesn't seem out of place.

Regarding game balance, I've never really had to deal with Bloodzilla in any game I've played, and I think I might have missed most of the related discussions here on the forums. It does seem like Energy Drain would be a really, really horrible thing to allow players access to. It doesn't seem like it'd be bad to allow a competent GM to have access to. Note that I said "competent GM." In the hands of an incompetent GM, there are so many things that can drive (and do*) drive games to complete idiocy that singling out Energy Drain seems kinda trivial. That is, being a competent GM means keeping a pretty constant eye on balance - not just in rules calls, but in how often those rules even come up. In my opinion, a GM who abuses Bloodzilla-type stuff is about on par with a GM who rules that nuclear weapons are available at the local Weapons World outlet. Hmn. I dunno - have these things shown up in your games and screwed things up..?



*Ugh. I'm going back over the list of "less than pleasing" gamers I've met. How about, "my favorite character was a fox shapeshifter who had a cybernetic 'human suit' that he used to deal with people day-to-day, so people would think he was human. That's how he was able to keep his job as one of the heads of a cutting-edge electronics/cybernetics corp." Yeah. Whatever floats your boat, Sparky.
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Big D
post Oct 29 2007, 05:07 AM
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This isn't just a matter of Bloodzilla, it's also a matter of mages being able to steal massive amounts of karma from other people very quickly and easily, as well as folks with lots of money being able to flat out buy karma...
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kzt
post Oct 29 2007, 05:15 AM
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Yeah, you'd think that with the hordes of desperate sinless people that they would be much more open to selling karma than a kidney.

And hey, with the mind manipulation spells, whose to say you have to pay up?
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hyzmarca
post Oct 29 2007, 05:41 AM
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Just binding a Force 1 Succubus doesn't actually work because there is no tradition that has natural access to the Succubus metaplane. In order to get a Succubus's spirit formula you'd first have to find a Succubus. If this Succubus is of Force 1, then you're set. This is highly unlikely given how powerful they can become. If not, then you'd have to either risk bind it or, if it has Astral Gateway, somehow convince it to send you to its home so that you can quest for another Succubus's formula.

Insect Shamans questing for the Formulas for Force 1 Mantid Mothers pose more problems.
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NightmareX
post Oct 29 2007, 06:57 AM
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Then of course one runs into the problem of how precisely the succubus is supposed to transfer karma TO the wannabe super mage. Don't seem to be a mechanic for that that I'm aware of.....
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Fortune
post Oct 29 2007, 08:15 AM
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QUOTE (NightmareX)
Then of course one runs into the problem of how precisely the succubus is supposed to transfer karma TO the wannabe super mage.

Um ... sex?!? :D
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FrankTrollman
post Oct 29 2007, 08:16 AM
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QUOTE (NightmareX)
Then of course one runs into the problem of how precisely the succubus is supposed to transfer karma TO the wannabe super mage. Don't seem to be a mechanic for that that I'm aware of.....

The plan as I understand it is to hope that it is capable of making a Power Pact, grab the Energy Drain, and turn into a Super Saijin. Or something. Like Pun Pun it's an infinite loop which requires the intervention of an NPC who may not even exist.

-Frank
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JBlades
post Oct 29 2007, 08:28 AM
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QUOTE (kzt @ Oct 28 2007, 05:50 PM)
If it's not a metagame concept, how do you measure it in character?  What's it measured in? What does raw karma look like?

Well, it may not be a perfect correspondence, but I'd measure it in life experience and memory. If you accept that, it can be measured in time increments, and raw karma looks like wisdom/experience/knowledge/spiritual enlightenment in the eyes and minds of those who have it.

Energy drain could result in amnesia/memory loss of given periods of time or of particularly emotional moments in the person's life that define them as an individual. The succubus giving karma could be a transfer of a series of emotional highs which lead to a realization on the part of the receiver, lord knows I've had a few of those moments during sex, and "Oh God!" is certainly a spiritual cry of enlightenment... :rotfl:

EDIT: To be metaphysically technical, I'm talking about events of personal gnosis.
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Riley37
post Oct 29 2007, 08:54 AM
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If there are mages who would benefit from a third party giving karma to a spirit, then at least some of them would pay nuyen, no?
So what is the going rate in nuyen for a point of karma?

We know that a BP equals 5,000 nuyen, but the BP-to-karma ratio can vary.
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Blade
post Oct 29 2007, 08:57 AM
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There's a big problem with your succubus theories: we still don't have rules for dikote in SR4.
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