Too much karma pool, Is this possible? Options

[Moon-Hawk]

I like long campaigns. My players like long campaigns. In our current campaign, we're between 200-300 total karma earned so far. Things are really getting going, now.
But even for metahumans, 200 karma earned is a karma pool of 10. It's getting ridiculous. I feel like they have too much.
So should I set a limit? I've tried that before. I've set a limit of 5 + 1/100 total karma earned. And then another limit for how much the team can have in it's pool. But then what to do when they earn more past that limit? It seems too harsh to just have them earn one point of good karma instead. They're hardly comparable. I've let them, if their pool was full, trade in that point they would've earned for pool for 3 points of good karma. That seems to make them pretty happy. They seem to feel that a point of kp is worth about 3gk.
What does everyone else do? Do you let the human run around with a karma pool of 30?

[Backgammon]

Well, I like short campaings, so I've never been up there in the 30 karma pool range. But, even when my players start going into like 5 karma pool or whatever, they ALWAYS end up having to burn some to buy successes. So my advice to you is to put them in tough challenges where they'll have to do that. Or burn karma to lower TN, things like that. There's also nothing like Hand of God to say "you have too much Karma, boy"

[Moon-Hawk]

There is Hand of God, true. But buying successes is the only use of KP that permanently burns it, yes? All the other uses are just a temporary burn, I believe. Personally, I think there need to be some more uses of KP that burn it permanently.

[RedmondLarry]

I've been in three long-running Shadowrun campaigns where characters have reached the 300 earned Karma level. In all cases, we virtually retired the characters because it became more fun to run new characters. I think part of the problem was the large Karma pool, and the other part is that Shadowrun is supposed to risk your character, and we didn't want to risk them anymore.

Right now we only use the retired team as part of overriding plot hooks. For example, who uncovered that the election of 2056 was rigged, thus forcing there to be an election campaign in 2057? (Super Tuesday, page 8, 3rd paragraph.)

I've seen Team Karma pool build to 30 or so, and then get dropped to 7 by having two characters leave. (There were threats of murder after that.) A guideline I once read suggested that personal Karma Pool "too big" could be "solved" by more-experienced characters contributing to the Team Pool, which keeps the less-experienced characters alive. I've NEVER seen that done.

[lorthazar]

Lowering a near impossible Target number also permanently burns off karma pool. Another way to do it might be to use some unique free spirits who don't want good karma, they want Karma Pool in exchange for services. other methods could be to inflict temporary Bad karma on anyone with 20 Karma pool or more. As soon as they drop below 20 you are fine again.

One last thing is offer a special ability my GM called Luck bonus. By trading in 4 Karma Pool you could get a permanent +1die to any particular type of test. this die is a bonus die that is rolled whenever that test is made. A second die in the same type of test can be purchased for 8 karma Pool and a third for 12 karma Pool. Initiative should never be improved this way

Example: QuickDraw has 30 Karma Pool, since he spends a lot of time shooting people before they can shoot him he decides to buy 2 dice in Pistols Test and 1 Die in Submachine Gun test costing him 16 Karma Pool. Then he buys a die for spell resistance because he is a samurai and tired of falling victim to the Cat Shaman's Control Emotions spells that cost him another 4 Karma Pool. Leaving him 10 Karma pool. Now sure he gets a huge edge with pistols, submachineguns, and spell resistance, but his overall luck is not 1/3 of what it use to be too.

[Backgammon]

Other test require you to burn karma, like lowering TNs like lorthazar (and me as well) pointed out. Check the BBB.

[Ezra]

I like long campaigns too. Whenever my players have hit the point when they can basically reroll any roll to ensure all successes, then I introduce a limit. I don't change how they earn it, but limit them to using a maximum of 10 per session. They can have plenty in the bank, but they have a daily limit, basically.

I also like the Luck Bonus idea, Lorthazar. :)

[toturi]

I have a very strict method of awarding karma, so long campaigns do not necessarily net a lot of karma. 100 good karma is tough to acquire in my games and karma pool accumulates very slowly.

I do not like limiting the amount of karma pool a PC has access to, sometimes PCs need a lot of karma pool in a hurry.

EDIT:

Some people has suggested that after a certain point the karma pool does not accumulate as quickly. I have a slightly different system, after a certain point, the runs that you do, do not give you as much karma as before. If it is the first time you are breaking into the Sepherim HQ, you get full karma. IF you are doing it for the Nth time, you do not get as much karma.

[Canid13]

I've come across this, since the team average Karma for my group is above 250. I've had to get creative, but I think I've managed to 'patch' the problem at least.

Firstly, I modified the Karma pool rules slightly. If you're using Karma Pool for re-rolling failures on a test which will result in harm to someone or something, one point is always burnt. So it someone were to shoot a sec guard but didn't generate sucesses, then it'd cost them 1. For the second re-rolling of failures on that test would cost them 2 but burn 1. The third costs 3, one of which is burnt and so on.

Also, I've said that when your Karma pool gets to 12 it takes double the good karma to go up. The Cat Shaman in my party now has 12, so it'll take 40 before she gets another karma pool point (she took bad karma at char gen).

So far this seems to work reasonably well.

[Kagetenshi]

Another possibility is declaring that a character cannot spend more than x karma pool on a given run for non-burning uses. That encourages Hooper-Nelsoning or buying successes.

Though it does remove those dramatic moments when the PCs try to hit a TN of 30 on four dice.

~J

[Wireknight]

[Kagetenshi]

Are you sure? I thought it was exponential (1-2-4-8-16-etc.).

~J

[Moon-Hawk]

It is as wireknight says.

[Canid13]

Oops, I made that mistake too. Either way, 1 Kp is always burnt in my campaign for damage dealing tests.

[bitrunner]

i kind of liked the optional rules in the SRComp where you could convert Karma Pool dice into specialized pools to reflect the the increased skill level with particular skills. For instance, you could create a Pistols pool and permanently move dice from your Karma Pool to a Pistols Pool. It couldn't be higher than the skill, IIRC. This allowed you to use your Combat Pool more for dodging and damage resistance. You could also create special Pools for groups of skills, such as a Social Pool to use with all Social skills, etc...In any case, total Pool dice remained capped at the skill level, as normal...

I know another GM that used this method also, and forced his players to cap at 10 Karma Pool - as they earned a new Karma Pool die, they had to assign it somewhere else into one of the other pools.

[RangerJoe]

I'm really not a fan of tweaking the rules to penalize players who have been savvy/lucky enough to keep their characters alive through 100+ good karma of intense play. Just bear in mind that as PCs advance, the difficulty of their work should increase. As the challenge level increases (prime threats go from gangers, to rentacops, to real cops, to well-trained/high karma sec forces, to evil black ops guys) the need for karma increases. If you still have 200+ karma characters running around the Barrens fragging go-gangers for a living, they're going to have attracted a lot of attention, meaning their illustrious careers should be ending soon anyhow. Just keep the game challenging and you'll find PCs who really need that 10-15 karma pool.

Another tactic is to limit the rate of karma pool refresh. Maybe tougher campaigns take longer, meaning one might have to use the same karma pool dice over several gaming sessions. Afterall, the "you wake up in Amazonia wearing your skivvies and holding only a bic lighter" adventure could take a while to complete.

[Cray74]

[Clyde]

I was in a campaign once where a character had 99 Karma pool (second ed). He had 400 good karma and up, but beyond a hundred or so he just contributed it all to team karma. The guy was pretty ridiculous and the game fell apart.

So, it all depends on what you're doing. If you have to, start snipering people off. That'll get 'em to buy successes if anything does. Or crash their suborbital: that'll get 'em to use hand of god rule, all right.

[ShadowGhost]

We houserule it that no character can have more than 5 Karma Pool, ever.

If they burn one, they can then accumulate another Karma Pool point to bring it back up to 5.

This makes players think more because they can only reroll any test once, so they tend to avoid doing stupid things that will get them killed or injured, and makes things a little riskier as they have less Karma pool to use than someone with 10 or 15 karma.

Plus, by this point, most of our PCs prefer to have that extra karma point to spend on skills, attributes, magic etc, than another Karma Pool.

[mfb]

Cray, perhaps you should try raising the difficulty of the runs that the runners are being hired for. i mean, in D&D, you don't throw goblins at 10th-level characters. in SR, you don't throw rating 4 maglocks at 10kp characters.

[GoldenAri]

[ES_Riddle]

We recently went from Karma Pool being a 24-hour refresh time to having it only refresh at the end of the run. It upped the difficulty greatly and meant that there were fewer trivial re-rolls, which is fine for the double digit karma bearers.

[Brazila]

This is why our group has KP refresh at the end of the run, not every 24 hours.

[Rev]

You could say that karma pool beyond the first few are usable only for burning.

You could also allow them to buy something with karma pool on occasion. Perhaps edges, or wierd magical boons of some sort.

[Wounded Ronin]

The one thing that destroys shadowrun campaigns is ridiculous amounts of karma pool.