I am curious if anyone else is playing without karma or nuyen in their game.

In our campaign, we don't use karma. Characters are created "good to stay", and advancement is not by karma but by DM decision/permission. If the samurai gets a new cybernetic implant, then the mage might get a new spell or initiation grade. Effectively, we have frozen skills long before we switched to SR4 (a month ago), and we used a fixed "reroll pool", roughly like the SR4 edge rules, in SR3 as well.

Nuyen, well, we don't use them in game, not as numbers. Payment is "low, decent, generous", and players are poor, well-off, and so on. Gear is either easily gotten without a fuss or payment, or requires some run or other RPed adventure (Player says what he/she wants, GM approves and makes a run/adventure out of it). So, a gunbunny wanting an assault cannon would lead to a trip to africa, and some adventuring there, a mage wanting a new spell might lead to some tangling with a mage circle, or some archeological digging, a villa on the beach would have some dark secrets, and would be financed by some mob contact, with the "you do this run, and we handle the next mortgage payment" following, and so on.

It works well for us (easy to balance characters, more control over how, what and when something enters the campaign, less trouble over payments for runs, which was a huge issue for me, and the ability to rn year-long campaigns without having uber characters) but I wonder if anyone else does run campaigns like that.

Not that it isn't possible for people to want detail in some areas of the game but not others, but I at least appreciate Shadowrun for having avoided such extensive abstractions.

Of course, I can't say I've houseruled the Lifestyle rules into separate rent, trips to the grocery, utilities, etc.

~J

I've thought about it with Shadowrun but haven't actually tried it, but the idea seems to work in World of Darkness, more or less.

*Edit*

Just to clarify I was talking only about abstracting resources, not Karma.

A friend of mine home brewed a variation of D20 that removed class and xp.

Instead of using levels every skill and stat trains individually but w/out the spending of xp. Instead everytime we use the skill in an active encounter the skill moves "x" amount closer to the next level. If we choose to spend out time training (i.e. practicing w/ a sword instead of getting into a for real sword fight) the skill will move closer to an increase but not as quickly as if we had been in an actual encounter.

I considered adopting a method similar to this for SR but decided against it because of the stat/skill maximums.

To be honest w/ you as much as I am a fan of WoD games I've never been a huge fan of the resources ratings that those games use. I prefer having characters who deal in cold hard cash. It makes it more fun for me. The spending of wealth in game (on more than just new guns/items) is a lot of fun. I enjoy watching my characters "hard earned" money slip away as he blows it on ammo, joygirls, booze, and novacoke (or whatever).

In my previously mentioned friend's game he actually went so far as to get a ton of fake coins and gems to represent our characters wealth and we all have coin purses full of loot to spend. We all have a lot of fun w/ it.