[X] My Assistant

[Kagetenshi]

Total thread necromancy, but I know you're still around and this is an important topic that I just dropped on the floor:

A- If the PC runs a good plan, and no roll derails, it works, even if I could have added some cinematic action. I understand the value of both approaches. But I've picked up the first.

Exemple: PC has to steal in Sylvan's corp the hand written original book from Ehran.

They came up with a good plan. They asked me who did clean up the building. I thought it was a rather small compagny so they payed a compagny for the clean up. So the player decided to take their places, intercepted them and faked tkeir access card. I don't remember how, but they fooled sylvan's security (either they fake-mailed them to inform them form the change of employee, or they used a mask spell to take their appearence). Nonetheless, they did all well and I didn't do any deus-ex-machina in order to add a little action. It just succeeded.

It isn't so much a matter of adding difficulties if things are going too well, it's about how complex the run is from the beginning. That said, published modules do suffer from a relative lack of scaling—the Sylvan run just isn't that complex as written, so if you want to play them as written I could see that being another case where high KP could legitimately be unbalancing. On the other hand, the same could be said about high attribute or skill levels from high earned karma.

By overpowered, I mean this:

If, in average, saving karma for crucial rolls implies saving something like 5-6 karma, that's 10 more (15 karma seems ok for a semi-experienced character) for fights.

The thing is, the amount of KP saved for crucial rolls is a lever that the GM can push on—by increasing the number of expected crucial rolls, or even the amount of uncertainty as to the number of expected crucial rolls, you increase the amount of KP that a group is likely to save. Granted, though, this is sensitive to your players' risk aversion and tendency to plan carefully (as noted above).

That said:

Then about risk management, take in account the fact that I'm usually able to improvise a way for the PC to recoverfrom a failed test/plan if they planed well (see Mercurial's exemple).

I don't want it at high level to be Ocean's Eleven.

Mercurial's exemple was derailing and heading to a failure. Hence each moment went electric. AND they did it nonetheless in the end.


Now reroll anything to a success because you have 40 Karma pool....Any half decent plan can work...

My solution does involve adding moving parts to the run, which could be at least partly what you mean by being Ocean's Eleven. On the flip side, though, how do you address the attributes, skills, spells, and foci that 390 karma buys? Because of the way difficulty scales with TN, it seems like you need to add moving parts anyway on account of not being able to just crank single-test difficulty.

Other thing that scares me. How do you feel if hand of god make you lose 40 karma pool?

This, however, is an issue. As I've said above, I find the issue with KP to be not so much absolute size but differences in relative size—and burning KP causes just that, nothing more spectacularly than HoG. I don't really have a solution to that.

~J

[sk8bcn]

I really need to reraed the full thread (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[sk8bcn]

It made me think:

buying a dice is usually weaker than re-rolling failure.

Add to that that additionnal dices are bought at *2 Karma points. Suppressing the multiplier would make the option more attractive but does someone have an counter argument?

[Kagetenshi]

It made me think:

buying a dice is usually weaker than re-rolling failure.

Add to that that additionnal dices are bought at *2 Karma points. Suppressing the multiplier would make the option more attractive but does someone have an counter argument?

My initial reaction is to concur. It lets you hit thresholds you couldn't otherwise, and there might be some edge case hiding somewhere where that's important, but spending KP is a pretty high price to pay.

~J

[child of insanit...]

I've doubled the cost after 8 karma pool and it seems to be working fine. But I also 'give' them it for free when they're supposed to get it. Instead of earning 10 karma, 9 going to good and 1 to pool, I just say every 10 karma your pool goes up by 1. The humans use their karma more often, and burn it when they need to, while the meta's use it less often and have yet to burn any of it. the team is all at <100 karma atm as well.

[Lindt]

A) Kage, stop being a necromancer. No one likes Necromancers.

b) The small group I have been running on and off for... 12 years? Something like that... has 1 human, an orc, and a dwarf. IIRC, the orc has the largest amount of good karma at 160 something, a karma pool of 9. The human has a pool of 14. All that has changed from a GM stand point is that I can fuck with them more, and not have to worry as much about accidentally PTking them.
It encourages them to take an extra risk once in a while, but at this point they are half way to being Prime runners, and should have the ability to take a risk and come out on top without me fudging dice for them.

[Cain]

Okay, I ran a game for about four years with the same characters. By the end of it, I recall that they were all somewhere around 150-200 karma. So, it was a high-powered game.

Fortunately, I had set a staggered-rate gain for karma pool. I can't recall the exact break points, but it did go up at regular intervals. Because of that, karma pools were manageable. They still were fairly large, but since the challenge level was also up there, it wasn't unbalancing. I also refreshed every session/story break; basically, any significant downtime would refresh karma pool.

What I'm getting at is, there's plenty of reports here (including mine) that say staggered-rate karma pools (aka diminishing returns) works wonderfully. As long as the challenge level increases to match karma pool and other improvements, it's not unbalancing or overpowered.

[Kagetenshi]

To some extent that's no longer the question. I mean, I do think it gets tricky to handle high skills/attributes with low karma pools, but since the game works at low/moderate KP levels it will presumably broadly work at those levels even if they take longer to reach. My argument is that staggering is unnecessary—there's already diminishing returns at the point of use, and the returns that don't diminish (freedom of use, total number of uses on tests with reasonable chance of success) enable and are largely counteracted by more complicated runs.

Though I must admit that if I ignore whether or not KP causes problems and just look at how quickly it accumulates relative to the karma cost of high skills or attributes, it is a bit odd. I think it's important to gain KP quickly at the beginning, and the most reasonable apparent fix would be to have a two-tiered formula (rather than a steadily-increasing one)—but this ignores the IMO crucial issue of whether this "fix" does anything useful, not to mention whether it does anything harmful.

(For that matter, the "oddness" is relying on some very dangerous intuition. Most average-strength people would probably have an easier time gaining strength than learning how to use throwing weapons. For that matter, it's also probably a lot easier to learn how to use clubs acceptably than it is to learn Heavy Weapons (never mind that Heavy Weapons includes the disparate categories of machine guns and assault cannons), and both strike me as easier to learn (at least for someone with no preexisting combat skills) than Underwater Combat.)

But yeah. I think we've established that diminishing returns provides acceptable results—the question now is if they provide benefit over canon accumulation (modulo issues about KP disparities).

Edit: one thing that comes to mind—if you really don't want to make your runs elaborate enough that players are managing and conserving their Karma Pool, one solution might be to change the refresh mechanics—players only have access to some portion of their Karma Pool at a time, and there are "sub-refresh" events that might restore some spent karma, but also allow players to replenish their accessible KP from their reserve. Not terribly thought-through, just an idea that popped into my head.

~J

[Cain]

I don't know about that. My experience is, three rerolls on one task is pretty powerful. But even then, it's more that at that point, they could make six different rerolls instead, which is potentially even more powerful. Since karma pools are a measure of experience, player characters will not only have more rerolls, they'll have more dice to reroll, making it a really potent combination.

Larger dice pools aren't a problem by themselves, but it does mean players are less likely to fail. But when combined with a lot of karma pool, they're even less likely to fail, which makes challenging them even harder. Since I don't like escalating things, I personally find it preferable to prevent the problem from cropping up in the first place.