karma management Options

[fatal2ty]

ok, I've been reading, and re-reading the karma rules and it seems to me that it can be kinda limiting for groups that don't play that often. Charactor progression seems to be much slower than AD&D and the such.

for example, if I ran my players through "On the Run", and at the end of the adventure I distrubuted an average of 6 Karma to each player, that leaves some upgrades or skills completely unattainable, and forces them to choose between a lot of things they could do. I don't have the PCG in front of me so I can't quote specifics, but it seems to me that giving more Karma than the rules say would allow for more enjoyable skillset advancement.

I guess my question then would be, how do the GMs on here handle Karma, do you give more or less that the PCG says, or do you leave it up to other factors.

[Simon May]

Personally, I hand out Karma as I see fit. Screw the rules. If someone comes up with a brilliant idea or wows me, I may give him a few points of extra karma. At the same time, everyone gets a little karma if they show up and play.

Of course, we run a weekly game. If it were monthly or less frequent, I'd probably hand out more karma simply to cover the downtime between missions. During the points where the PCs aren't playing, their characters are still out there studying, improving, and doing minor jobs.

[Jaid]

D&D advancement is ludicrously fast anyways. why would you feel the need to duplicate that?

[fatal2ty]

[NightRain]

I only play once every month or two with my group, so we give out karma not liberally, but I if undecided, I err on the side of giving the karma rather than not, because otherwise, in /real time/ the character is not developing, even if they are developing fast in /game time/.

I tend to err towards the higher end of the typical amounts listed in SR4, but still in the same ball park

[It trolls!]

I prefer giving players a little too much karma to risking to starve them karma-wise. It's not fun at all when karma is so sparse that you need a year of weekly gaming for your mage to be able to initiate.

[FriendoftheDork]

Fatal, you might want to give out karma after each session, not every adventure. I'd still advice not to allow them to spend it until the adventure is over, or a suitable downtime breaks out.

As for my group, we've been playing several sessions and they've earned themselves almost 70 karma, mostly because of a few really high paying ones. In fact, I may have given too much and now I'm holding back again.

However, if you're players are used to the advancement in D&D (which is often speeded up more than intended), remind them that a 400BP character is already something of a high-level character compared to the game world. Advancent is everything in D&D, but is hardly not necessary in Shadowrun as the starting runners are supposed to be competent enough to do most runs.

That said, the group should not expect to be increase their primary skill after a single run, although they could get enough to buy a new skill or start saving for a stat.

[eidolon]

[deek]

I run a high karma game. We play every other week, and regardless of the adventure, I give each player 10 karma as a base, just for being there. Then I add anywhere from 1-8 (normal karma rewards as written in adventures or BBB) depending on the session.

That is a lot of karma, but everyone is able to advance their characters in what "feels" like a good flow. No one has had a problem with it, and the group is certainly not god-like...

[Eryk the Red]

They key is: 1) Suit your karma awards to the goal of the campaign. If you want the group to be the bad-ass, elite-of-the-elite type, your karma awards should run high. Gritty, realistic games should keep the karma awards small. (Though I do not recommend the awards as written unless you always finish a run in one session. Award the players for every session. It's more fair and better for morale.)

2) Suit your game-world to the karma awards. My campaign has been pretty high-karma (though I have gradually scaled it back, since the mage's fourth initiation is imminent and power-levels started escalating faster than intended). So I always assumed that the character's high karma and high stats didn't make them top of the heap. It's been this easy for them to get this far, so that means there are likely others like them. There are runners who are much more badass than them, as well as weaker ones. The cops can still be very dangerous. My game is fairly high-power, so the world around them is fairly high-power (though not excessively so).

It's not easy to find the right levels (like I said, I had to change my ways, because I didn't like the direction it was going). But it's okay to experiment. If things seem to advance too slowly, toss the players some bonus karma and see if it helps. If it seems to work, stick with that level of karma. That's the best advice I can give.

[Blade]

Just be careful to balance karma and nuyen so that awakened characters don't get too far ahead or behind augmented or heavy equipped characters0