What's it worth to ya?, Anyone have good Shadowrun payout guidlines? Options

[Blade]

Fluff-wise, this depends a lot on the premise of your campaign.
Payouts will be largely different if runners are supposed to be high-profile mercenaries who could get a high paying steady job in a corp or a criminal syndicate if they wanted or if they're supposed to be desperate punks who've got the choice between a miserable life as slaves to some criminal syndicate or taking on shadowruns.

Crunch-wise, payouts will have an impact on the character improvement. Pay them too little but give karma generously, and Awakened will improve much faster than gear-oriented characters. And even if you pay them generously, if one player likes to spend most of it in booze, babes and blackjack while another player spends it only to get new ware/drones/hacking stuff, they'll improve at very different rates.

That's why I'm in favor of having character improvement be unrelated to the actual payouts. (For example you can set a karma/nuyen exchange rate, and have only the nuyens bought with karma be usable to buy improvements.) This way, you can have any kind of payout without throwing balance/character improvement out of the window

[Neraph]

Pay them too little but give karma generously, and Awakened will improve much faster than gear-oriented characters.

I didn't know you were a comedian.

[KnightAries]

I didn't know you were a comedian.

Yea, there's always one in the group somewhere. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[Blade]

@Neraph: I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

[Neraph]

Some extra karma here or there by no means allows awakened to advance faster. Holy crap, the sheer karma-drain that it is to simply think about advancing as a mage is daunting.

13 karma for Initiate Grade 1.
16 for Grade 2

If you want to increase your Magic then it's 35 karma or more.

5 karma per spell.

New Rating x 4 for every single skill you want to raise, which are all the mundane ones that everyone else needs, plus five (eight if you do spirits).

If anything, granting more karma than nuyen helps mages stay competitive with mundanes. And even then, all that extra karma that the mundanes are getting that they don't have to spend on Magic-related things is going directly to making them more impressive in their own fields.

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

3 karma per spell.

5 Karma per Spell Neraph... It is only 3 Karma in Character Generation.

[Neraph]

I was close. Like I said, I've been out of the loop for three years. I'll fix it.