[X] My Assistant

[Cain]

I prefer using the graduated karma pool rules, myself. You earn the first 10 karma pool normally, but then the cost rises by 10; humans now need to earn 20 karma for their next pool dice, and metahumans move to 30. Once they've accumulated ten more, the cost rises yet again, and so on.

This doesn't break a game in the slightest, nor does it penalize the more powerful players (who have already spent their tons of karma, and are therefore much tougher); but it does make it easier to integrate new characters as time progresses.

[Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_*]

That's insane.

I blame the GM. If they can't offer a good challenge to a PC with a massive KP, then they aren't doing their job. Personally, I've seen Wireknight's PC in action and the GM sure as hell didn't make it easy. I've seen people burn copious amounts of KP (expending it for re-rolls or burning it forever) because they had to, and to start instituting rather ludsicrous rules just to keep a player in check is weak.

[Edward]

The issue with character turnover is an annoying point.

Wen a new character joins a game he should be given something to bring him at least nearly up to the power level of the group. This is for balance and realism.

Think about it. If I was prime runner of 100+ good karma 8-10 in my primary skills (10-12 for specialisations) 3-6 initiations if magical with many spells, mostly bata wear and cultured bio if augmented with a good stockpile of equipment not available to starting characters would I really want to run with a patsy just starting to make a name for himself.

Prime runners are supposed to get the best paying jobs (and they pay well because thy are harder) if the teem brings in a new runner then there ether going to have to cover the newbie’s hoop (better of going it alone much of the time) or take runs below there station thus not making the money they think they deserve and having to run more often than they want to (I see the prime runners running less often for more money and living higher lifestyles).

We have always used KP refresh at end of run even as starting characters. When we got to 3-4 KP I was still hording it like a miser miss a critical shot rerole once. Still missed leave it to the others on the teem. I saved it to save my hoop wen the other option was out of action. Most of the time this meant I still had it at the end of the run.

Edward

[toturi]

I disagree with Edward. There can be plausible reasons for bringing in a relatively newer runner (remember, right out of chargen, the PC is assumed to be experienced).

Your mage got wasted and you need one in a hurry. You go for the best money can buy in a hurry. The established ones might have their own groups or want a bigger slice of the pie than what you would like. Decker PCs are also easily integrated into most games.

[DarkShade]

odd.. my own view would be if your pcs have too much karma pool it is because the runs they are going in are not hard enough...I dont suppose you are actually giving any threat level karma if they arent even using up most rerolls..
if you are complaining that there is no challenge then for sure they arent hard enough.
you dont need to set them against a team of a feathered serpent , two great dragons and a battleship in order to get them to burn this.. just take a good hard look at the items in shadowrun, especially weapons, take a look at your npcs´ and see what are they shooting with.. play around with bullet types, check normal paracritters with melee <2 or 3 barghest can really ruin your day if they get into melee>, check tactics, I assume they are going against red samurai and other elite teams, those use tactics, have access to heavy weapons,with proper recoil soaks not stock weapons.., good ammo, use grenades <if you are near a wall a grenade will eat up karma any day of the week, mages when the team is on the defense will also make them reroll like there is no tomorrow, then anything rigger controlled.. etc etc.. sometimes you can have players that are better than the gm at tactics.. learn from them :)

dont give them a super encounter that makes them burn all their karma <unless you want that type of "epic" run>, just increase the diff until you see they are actually NEEDING all those rerolls and burning some now and then.. then you will have hit the sweet spot.

DS

[Edward]

There are reasons to bring less experienced members in a teem but usually to do a job. You might hire a Decker to do overwatch for you when going against a facility with inferior matrix security (compared to its physical security witch will challenge the 200 karma combat specs) but if you bring in a starting combat Decker he will be a liability in his combat roll. And if you bring in a starting character overwatch decker he will be useless on the next run against a facility with good matrix security.

If you bring in a new mage to replace your old he will have great difficulty with the spirits and initiated sec mages you would expect to find accompanying security that will threaten your 200karma front liners

And it is highly unlikely that your new ringer will have the coms tech to interface with your military grade battle tac system.

Short of deliberately weakening the resistance in the new character’s field of “expertise” (which would work for one or two runs but wouldn’t make sense for long) and heaven forbid the player wants to bring in a new character that overlaps some skills with an existing character. He just will not stand a chance, and if the existing characters have a moderate number of arias of proficiency it could get very difficult to find an aria in witch a starting new character could show proficiency beside 200 karma characters.

As to experienced characters having groups already shadow runner teems are quite transitory. This is partly shown by the fact that as you pointed out “ht out of chargen, the PC is assumed to be experienced” (so why was my most professional teem mate last run a 16 year old brat?)

I’m not saying you should let new characters come in as powerful as the old. There should be some reward for keeping your character alive all that time. But giving a new player 75% of the average teem member’s karma and 75% of the average teem member’s accumulated wealth (not including expended wealth) will allow them to have a character that is useful to the teem as more than a 1 trick pony.

Edward

[Krieger]

[Blaze]

How long (in game sessions) have these uber-characters been going? I can't speak for other GMs, but I give my players a maximum of 5 Good Karma per session (normally 12-14 hours). They're up to around 70-80 GK over their lifetimes, and they have a KP of about 5 each. This is mainly due to the fact that about once every other session they'll be put into a situation where permanently burning a Karma Point is a near-necessity.
If you're frightened of your players getting an easy ride due to their Karma, I'd suggest either reducing the amount of Karma they gain (and applying the graduated karma rules) and/or putting them up against opponents with equivalent abilities and karma pool. An Equal or Superior opponent should be just that, and even the grunts should have some KP to use. You'd be surprised how much it terrifies players when their opponents start using Karma too, and it certainly gets them burning through theirs.

-JH.

[DarkShade]

I go with the guideline of 3-5 karma per run <each run taking between 2 and 5 sessions..>, 10% of which gets deducted and thrown in the reroll pool.
worked well for our las GM so I adopted the guideline.. keeps skill progression semi realistic.. not sure what everyone else does..
moneywise things are more compex because if I use a published adventure and the players know it they will play `hunt the mage` as they always seem to have hyperexpensive foci :)

DS

[Kremlin KOA]

uh Edward I can say three good reasons

1: the Brat (read Otaku) was the only PC whose background included shadow experience. After all the other two PCs (not counting the Sammy that later joined later) were an ex race driver and a mouse shaman doing effectively their first runs)

2: The race driver was still in race driver frame of mind and the mouse shaman was seriously deluded ("I'm not a shadowrunner I just do favors for people and get paid for it." :eek: )

3: the mouse shaman was played by M1 and the rigger was played by M2, (neither of which read these boards btw so will give a short descrip, and will try to be nice.)

M2: whiner who is a bit of a spotlight hog and seriously praise hungry

M1: well let's just say that M1, if you greate character creation concept guidelines she will create the opposite.
e.g. No orks = M1 makes ork shaman.
No leadership feat (D20) = M1 creates character with leadership as class ability, tries to claim since it isn't a feat per se it should be allowed.
No evil (once again D20 example) = M1 creates LN char that turns LE in session 6
Professional shadowrunners = "I'm not a shadowrunner."
these are just the ones that spring off the top of my head.

[Stumps]

If it really got that bad and it was too late to reverse things...
I would tell the players that I'm taking their KP and giving them all "XXX" amount of CharGen points and to go make a Second backhistory to explain their life over the next 5 to 10 years. I would work with them on it, personally keeping informed about what they want their character to do over that period of time.
I would then decide how much of the KP to give back to the group after they reformed and send them out on missions about 3 to 4 times as hard as they were on.

[Johnson]

Well I have a good way of getting by this whole thing. My first group of runners which are still running ti this day 6 years down the line mass between 60 nad 100 karma a year 30 Sessions so yea they get between 2 and 5 karma a session.
so yes I have a 420 Karma human with 40 KP.

He could as said burn Karma at a rate of knots.

I generate all my NPC as Characters and allocate them a % of Karma of the Team. So they get to use KP as well. They also have the right to live. So just for a person to negotiate against a Fixer can be a KP intensive affair.

With this you can use your KP as follows.

Motor mouth (PC) has a KP of 40
Jimmy(NPC) has a KP of 30.

Motor mouth has an effective KP of 10 against . This is a one on one.

Combat would be a GM's night mare. But it can be solved.
PC Team has total KP 169
NPC Team has KP 124
NPC team get 45 KP divided evenly between them allocating KP to those who need it like Team KP.

Try it it will limit the endless use of KP.
You could just assign a KP to a Joe soap. The higher KP is like a high Rep, you start dealing with high Rep personal.

[Wireknight]

[Vagabond]

I tend to agree. In the games I've run, I usually encourage the players to retire around 100 karma. I'll do this by having a corp, the govt, or some other group with deep pockets offer the player an incentive to "settle down" (having a Street Sam offered all the latest cyber and a sweet paycheck to bodyguard a corp exec that's not nearly as important as he likes to think he is, for example).

If you like long campaigns you can have the characters work from a character pool. You can also be more stingy with the karma, offer a cash for karma deal. I don't know what kind of game your running, either, but you may want to consider that IMO when a runner gets around 300 karma, he's pretty far removed from the gutter- keep the opposition on par (or higher) than the player characters. If the opposition stays the same then it'll get boring for the PCs as well.

Hope this helps.

[Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_*]

[CircuitBoyBlue]

I, for one, advocate letting players have high karma pools. Sure, it gets ridiculous with a street sam, but look at deckers. My game's 2nd edition, and trying to build a deck by the rules in the original virtual realities, some of the target numbers at the higher ends of the scale break the TN 12, possible with 2 dice barrier with no sweat, with a base time measured in YEARS. If the decker wants to put a rating 3 response on his MPCP 12 deck, that'll be a TN of 17 with a base time of 540 days. If you want to actually use such a thing before your group retires, you're going to need to take major time lapses (which my group hates) or cut that base time down with a LOT of successes. And just burning isn't always an answer there, because my example ignores how many karma you would need to use just to get to the point of having an MPCP of 12, with other goodies on the deck to match, let alone surviving long enough to have the skills to try something like this. If a character burns all his karma getting MPCP up to 8, he'll die before getting to try for 9.

My answer would be to encourage the group members that don't need karma for other things (the street sam) to do seemingly foolish things that require him to use (not burn) karma at nearly every turn. If you design the run right, this can turn out to be cool (our street sam does stuff like diving out windows into traffic to avoid getting shot all the time, you just have to imagine him being a badass about it), and for the characters that DO need karma for other stuff, just point them to the relevant passages of Virtual Realities that talk about how frowned upon deckers that actually buy their decks are. Anyone that's not a tool will definitely want to make their deck from scratch, with all the TNs of 17 and base times of 540 days that that entails.

[Crimson Jack]

[tisoz]

[Conskill]

When I'm playing I like magicians. Because of this, I don't think I've ever really broken a GM's plans with excess karma pool.

"I'll use karma to reroll, but just once."
"Why just one?"
"I'm saving the rest for the inevitable Magic Loss check."

As a GM, I really don't worry about it all that much. Both because I tend to do story-heavy games instead of mechanics-heavy, and no matter how big the PCs get, I can always throw something worse. The PCs aren't the only characters in the setting that have been saving up a boatload of karma for a rainy day.

[Wounded Ronin]

Heh, I can see it now, with the super karmaed up PC.....

"Well, Mr. GM, my character now has so much karma that all tasks are trivial."

"So, Mr. Player, are you going to retire your character?"

"No, Mr. GM....I'm going to walk naked through Seattle, and take on Lone Star...using only unarmed combat."

.....hours later.....

"That's the 3000th Lone Star officer you beat into submission! Can we stop now?"

"No, I still have karma."