Edge, Karma Pool and Group Karma, A theroretical and (maybe) completely house rule thread Options

[Screaming Eagle]

Good day y'all.

On another thread someone asked the differences between Karma (pool) and Edge and this got me thinking.

In an old long-ish running SR 2 to 3 ed game I was playing in the team opted into the Group Karma Pool rules. Now I'm not saying a translation of these rules is nessasary but I find myself curious if anyone has done a "full team port from 3rd to 4th" and had to deal with this issue.

For all I know this Group Karma was some house rule of my old GM cause I can find no referance to it anyplace. (I'm not looking all that hard and lack his crushingly sized library of source books for first though third ed.)

I ask because I wondering if there is any new version of this option - I have no pressing need of it as I have a few "floater" players in the group so the team is unlikely to be interested in the option.

And if there is no newer version has anyone cooked up a house rule to replace it they have play tested?

[Inncubi]

IIRC Team karma was a Shadowrun 2 mechanic. In was there essentially to support team work, it worked just like Karma pool, except it helped all the teammates. The team members contributed their Karma pool points to it, after they accumulated some -so after you had 10 points of good karma your personal karma pool would rise by 1, and then you could "export/donate" one of those Karma pool points to the team-. There was also a mechanic about leaving teammates. If you abandon the group you can't tap into the Team Karma pool, but also it'd be divided by two when one of your teammates decided to go Ronin. As absurd as it sounds (punishing the characters severly) it enhanced the idea of once in you'll never et out, and forced loyalties to a group. Pretty much like the Mafia thing; angry characters might hunt down the bastard that betrayed them, left them out to dry and cut their team karma by half, after much effort in building it.

Its a good mechanic, however with the current edge rules its implementation isn't so straightforward. You could, if you want, have the team have a communal edge attribute (i.e Team Edge) that starts at 0 and they can buy points for it using Karma. It could make the game into an Edge fest, where high edge characters with high team edge spend it like water and have exploding dice every so often.

On the other hand its a mechanic that enhances team work and fortifies the party's relationship.

[Chibu]

I personally didn't like Team Karma. Don't get me wrong, it was really good, but that was the problem. Even as a player, I thought it was overpowered. It made it so anyone who needed to could succeed at anything. Even with only 4-5 players each contributing 2-3 karma, it got out of hand pretty quickly. When you only had 3 to work with, you had to think whether or not you were going to need it later, if it was worth the risk. But when you have 15? We're even trying to find a house rule to limit the NORMAL karma pool because after a few runs it gets silly, let alone after a year. One of my characters used his karma pool for stupid things like dancing checks (in a club, with no particular need other than looking silly for it to go well). He had 10. So, even if it came down to the wire later on, he'd still be able to re-roll plenty of times.

Everyone in SR4 already has Edge as an attribute... for some reason... Inncubi's post about a group attribute seems to be about the best way to do it. Either that, or as in previous editions, make the characters donate their own points. being an attribute however, it would have to still cost the same to raise as if you had not donated, otherwise characters could easily drop to 1, buy to 2, drop to 1... etc.

[Screaming Eagle]

I similarly saw the power of the rule: by the end of 2 years of play my Dwarf had 10 karma pool, the group pool was somewhere around 8. I shudder to think what kind of pools the 2 humans were pitching.
The balance was the GM made us NEED it. The Runs we as a high grade team were hired for were F-ing insane. On one memoerable occasion we were all out of karma after and extended trek though the hostile wilderness, break and enter an ultra secrue facility and extended escape firefight involving choppers, rigger and free spirits...