Aero, that really constitutes a gigantic straw-man. It's not what anyone here is advocating; if anything, it is a caricature of the way it should, rightly and properly, be balanced.

Given your scenario? As a GM, I'd count up the net BP cost of gear and nuyen expended, and apply that towards the removed negative flaw. Then, I'd look at what Karma awards I would have otherwise given the player, and apply THAT.

If there was any balance left against the character, then and only then would I either ask them to pay more Karma, go into debt for some Karma, or we could talk through a mutually-agreeable replacement negative quality. Or some combination of them all.

For example, if they would have earned 4 karma, and blew ~$25K worth of stuff, eliminating a 13-point enemy? They'd be 6 BP / 12 Karma "short". So one option might be to "owe" 2 karma, and pick up a replacement 5-point negative quality.

...

Any negative quality that is too easily fixed / cured / solved, is not AND NEVER WAS worth much (if any) BP during CharGen.

Or I might allow the player to burn a point of edge to essentially negate me using hand of god on their enemy. Because I totally would use hand of god on their enemy otherwise.

Burnt point of edge will make up for karma cost of quality.

Law of shadowrun is that you should never get more out of something than you put in. There should be some loss. Especially when it comes to negative qualities.

I have said all along that it should not be easily fixed and that is up to the GM. Taking your Reduced Sense example, there is the perfect solution on the same page in RC - namely, require delta grade implants: 10 times the cost and you still have to find the parts and the clinic which is no mean feat.

Thing is, at chargen you have to pay for everything in BP/karma, but that is just chargen and it is expected that you can will gain things by actions in game without being mystically tied to the abstract currency. A PC walks into a bar, buys a few drinks and goes home. Does the GM give him half a dozen 6/6 contacts without question? No, of course not. Does he charge him an adventure's worth of karma to pay for the few contacts he could reasonably gain? Also absurd. How about money? "The Johnson paid out 5k a piece, right? That's two karma less for everyone who took it then." Bound spirits? As if magicians could afford another karma sink. You put in the work to make contacts, bind spirits and make money and you get them.

On reflection I think buying off qualities without any roleplaying is reasonable where roleplaying would not make sense. Buying off Gremlins for instant. What I can't get behind is charging karma for results that the PC has earned.

That said, there is of course the issue of general advancement (attributes, skills and what have you) which is equally a means of buying bonuses or paying as well as earning so I can't claim to have a perfect answer. It is for this reason that I intend to develop an in-tandem system for advancement without karma so that characters can spend a couple of months at the shooting range without learning nothing.

Would you really count up everything they put in? I'm starting to think there are GMs out there who would be best off forgetting about putting together any kind of adventure and instead just hand out 10 karma to each player at the start of each session and then watch them just move the numbers around their sheets.

You can't mean that, surely? Whatever you do you should be worse off for having tried?
What about taking what you have in character and situation and aiming to use your wits and resources to achieve a better character and/or situation? Isn't that ultimately.the goal?

You misunderstand what I mean. I'm talking from a dystopian point of view. Yes, you achieve to become better, but you always lose something in return. If you want to become stronger, you can spend a bunch of karma or you can get muscle augments. They're cheaper but you've the extra (metaphysical) price in essence. You can become quit powerful as an awakened character, but your going to have to spend a lot of karma to do so.

And thats what it comes down to really, what is karma? karma's a bitch. If you can't pay it down, the world works against you and your enemy survives (hand of god) or is supplanted. Or you kill them and in doing so, your enemy has info on you somewhere in the matrix set to be released on his death. Now your Wanted (10 BP) or have Records on File (10 BP)...

Personally, I do a mixture of both.
If one of my players wants to buy off a quality, I put in the work to think about how to do it.

Example 1: One character has a child. He has lived in a boarding school for most of his life and doesn't really know his mother. She's also an alcoholic. Then she decides to clean up her act and gets her son to come home to her. Her 10 points alcoholic quality morphed to a 10 point dependent quality.

Example 2: Another character is addicted to amphetamines. Her boyfriend has threatened to leave her / kick her out if he finds her passed out on a slight OD one more time. She invests the karma to buy it off, representing hard work and cold turkey (I really have no idea if this is possible, medically, but it sounded plausible enough).

I won't let either one of those characters off the hook without some serious roleplaying.

Myself, I've lost and gained new connections, by roleplaying mostly. No karma or money invested, usually, but connections come with their own odds and ends, as everyone knows (DUDE! I need a place to crash tonight, 'salright if I come over, isn't it?)
I've also made and lost an enemy, purely by roleplaying and a hard run, where I had to burn edge at the end.

It all depends on how much effort a player puts into his project of losing a negative quality.

However, if it's a quality that comes with the creation of the character, I'll think twice about how to get rid of it. In most cases I eyeball it and say 'a bit of karma here' (maybe even double the BP cost, as the rulebook demands it) and 'a lot of roleplay there'.

Some qualities, I'll flat out refuse to let the player buy off.

Yeah the one guy I play with forces us to pay 1 karma per point rating of a contact. Which I feel is a bit wrong... but that's the way he runs things.

I'm more in line with bannock... contacts come and go... you off one enemy. Fine you've bought yourself some time... another one will creep up or it'll be replaced with another quality until you pay it off.


The only bit I disagree with is Paxes treasure expended tally. Sorry but cold hard cash is a bit too easy to come by in game and 2500/karma is way too cheap to buy things off in most cases. I don't know if he uses the karma/$$$ exchange rules or not, so it may or may not make sense.

Far better way to handle this is individual and group karma/$$$ award. Each player is assured of some of each, and can't simply run straight karma or $$$... but they're free to divvy up the second part as they see fit. Some will want the karma others the $$$ and they both end up happy or working out a deal.

adding my own 2 cents into this, I notice an extreme number of karma-intensive builds, such as awakened or resonant characters, taking the In-Debt negative quality, and paying it off as their first order of business. No karma is required to do so, they simply have to pay the debt, the %50 add on, and the 10% monthly fee. This is not "easy" per say, but it requires no karma. I've thought this was a bit of a break, myself.

That one is fun. Family enforcers breaking into your flat while you're out of town, smashing things to bits, because 'You skipped town on me, hombre. Don't do it again.' ... Broken thumbs and stuff, and if you fight back, there'll be an 'invitation' to the capo or whatever to tell you, that you're liable for the damage caused. I do not make this easy on players, even if it isn't in Karma costs.

yeah, in my game if you buy off the nuyen cost of debt without buying off the karma cost, it gets replaced with something else.

This, I don't do. The quality states quite clearly that it's bought off if you pay one and a half time the amount you're in debt for. But during that time, the people you're in debt with have you by the short and curlies
No one's saying that there won't be any complications though.

yeah, at this point you are literally making the characters pay more for their negative quality than if they picked another. Only people needing the money beyond starting available (and only up to 30k more) would ever consider it. Me, I think 30k should be worth maybe 10-15 BP, not 30

No the quality does not say it's bought off Bannockburn. Never not once in the entire entry. It only says you owe at least this much every month. Just because you think you owe $0 this month doesn't mean the quality is gone.

While you might no longer owe the lender anything, they're still out there, and they still have all your information. If they were able to collect on your badass self or make your life utterly miserable they're still out there and still might try. Who knows they might try and leverage a little protection payout now and then when the character is flush after a hot run especially when they're trying to keep their head low (or sell out to the guys looking). If word on the street is that you just scored a major payday and are laying low... you can bet they're going to approach you for their cut to not let the authorities (or worse) know where to look.


I'm not a big fan of outright replacing the quality with other negative ones though. While it doesn't strike me as right to replace 30BP worth of in-debt after paying with 3 different records on file with 3 different megas for example.



BTW: this is specifically written under enemies... as covered by the quality...
"Enemies are the antithesis of typical contacts. However, they use a similar set of game mechanics. Generally, an enemy should be a 400 BP character approved by the gamemaster. Enemies will use the Hand of God (p. 277, SR4) to reappear even when they should, by all rights, be dead."

Translation... yes you may have thought you offed the enemy... but no he magically survived your ill-designed plot to eliminate him. Simply killing the enemy does not buy off the quality. Even the RAW makes this clear.

not under my time value of BP/nuyen analysis

I chose to interpret
as such, Falconer. But as I said: No guarantee that there won't be complications

"Your enemy's children, the oldest barely twelve, stare at you in horror as you're covered in their only adult family's blood. They had witnessed everything, your verbal and physical fight where you had both laid down why only one person would walk away from this final battle. The twelve year old's lips shudder in terror, pain, and fury as he runs across the hall to grab a mace that is decorating the extensive building that is their home, and he runs at you with the anger that can only come of having seen his parent die... What, do, you, do?"

I like Falconer's take on In Debt. You're right; didn't think of blackmail or later contacts afterward by said loan-shark. Cool

... yes, that suggestion pretty much makes my point: it shouldn't be so easy to compensate for negative qualities.


... I am not even going to grace this hateful nonsense with a rebuttal.

I'm honestly just shocked anyone would argue against buying off flaws, *especially* In Debt. I've never heard of anyone not recognizing it as preposterously broken under the 'just repay the money' resolution: 30 free BP for the privilege of *taking* extra chargen cash, to trivially repay later? Even without the money, this would be beyond a bargain. Even if you had to repay X nuyen in exchange for just BP, it would be fantastically good, head and shoulders beyond any other NQ. That leaves two options: fundamentally change it (perhaps making it a 0 BP 'flaw', or a cheap-ish Positive Quality), or use the existing buyoff rules that are sitting right there for this exact purpose.

Worst case, like Aerospider's extreme Enemy example, the GM is setting aside 'bonus' karma for all that good roleplaying and planning, for the purpose of buying off that flaw for him.

Enemy's children? What children? They have no idea that their parents were killed by the PC. They were told that their parents were killed in an avalanche during a ski trip. There were no witnesses.

Or you could just allow repaying the money resolution.

And I do not recognise it as preposterously broken under the repayment solution, in fact, I would encourage it as the most efficient method. The drawback to this solution is that the Negative Quality is technically still on the character's sheet, except that the amount owed is 0.

Except that's in no way a drawback, unless you *invent* some random and totally extra penalties for it. The rules list no such penalties. And yes, it's 'efficient'; that's *why* it's brokenly good.

It's not like I've never heard this before, it just doesn't make any sense. It is possible to—again—totally invent more drawbacks, and it's even possible to make them sort of make sense, but I don't see how sticking the player with new penalties is any better than sticking the player with a RAW karma cost, the listed method for removing *any* flaw. (I thought you adored RAW?)

We've certainly discussed In Debt in the past, and it's pretty messed up from any perspective: +30 BP is gigantic, the loaned nuyen is a significant chargen boost (especially compared to things like Born Rich), and there's almost no fair and sensical way to handle the repayment. That's what I find it such a weird example for this point of 'just pay via roleplaying'.

Doesn't the RAW of that quality also include a repayment method?

Well, the RAW makes it quite clear that Negative Qualities must be bought off with Karma. Having In-Debt, with a Balance of 0 is not bought off for Karma Purposes. As such, you still owe your shadow creditors favors.

That's one of the options under the 'invent new drawbacks' method, but my point is that's not part of the RAW. If forcing the player to buy it off with karma is objectionable, surely new penalties out of nowhere is at least equally bad?

So, instead you have to house rule these extra penalties in *before* play starts, meaning you're fixing the broken In Debt.

Yes, toturi, exactly as you say: "the RAW of that quality also includes a repayment method". It's additional, and doesn't remove the general one. Even if it did, as I said, the result would be stupendously imbalanced. Obviously so, because basically everyone notices this on their own. Things so obviously broken, no matter how RAW, are not okay; it's lucky for us that this isn't RAW, then.

Does the quality actually say that you owe your creditors more than just nuyen?

RAW makes it clear that Negative Qualities are bought off with karma. But that does not mean that those Negative Qualities cannot be made inconsequential or minimised by other means.

… It kinda means exactly that. Especially when you got up to 30BP for it. Even if common sense, fair play, and GM intelligence didn't tell you this, the rules mention it in several places. If you get clever with a flaw, the flaw gets clever with you.

How so does it "kinda" mean exactly that?


Except that you are not getting clever with the flaw per se. You are doing exactly as the flaw tells you: you owe money, you repaid that money. There is nothing clever about it, except for the fact that it is indeed smarter to pay off as much of the sum owed as quickly as possible.

Because of common sense, fair play, and GM intelligence, and the rules mentioning it in several places:
• "Gamemasters should not allow non-hackers to apply Codeblock towards hacking actions that they are never likely to take."
• "Gamemasters are free to reject any choices that would prove irrelevant or exploitative in actual play (ie. such as Incompetent: Pilot Aerospace in a campaign where characters are street-level gangers)."
• "The BP bonus of this quality is reduced by 5 BP if the character enjoys a Full Immersion Lifestyle (p. 38, Unwired)"
• "However, should the target of the Vendetta be killed or neutralized somehow, someone will take up the vendetta in his place (unless the quality is bought off )."

It is clear that, as you say, "Negative Qualities cannot be made inconsequential or minimised by other means." There is ample evidence of a general principle that NQs should be rejected or offer reduced BP if their penalties are made inconsequential or minimized by other means.

Yes, by paying it off fast you avoid the interest penalty (a very fair trade). But you still got a bunch of free BP, and you still got the opportunity benefit of chargen cash. Fair is fair. Again, the imbalance is obvious (not just to me, but to everyone). If there's no other penalty, there should be no BP bonus (just for example; there are various ways to fix In Debt). If you use this option, it should probably still count as part of your total NQ use… or everyone would just take the cash.

No, it is not. Negative Qualities can be made inconsequential or minimised while still being relevant or non-exploitative in actual play.

Your PC has an Allergy, your character gets someone to cast Alleviate Allergy. The Negative Quality has been made inconsequential or minimised, but it is still relevant and non-exploitative.

For In Debt, the penalty is that you owe money and need to pay it off. How you do so and when you do so is entirely up to the player. Once that sum is paid off, the sum owed is 0. The quality is still technically there. If RAW has other mechanics that rely on the character having In Debt, then the character suffers those consequences.

So your argument is that free BP and chargen cash is 'relevant' (whatever that means) and non-exploitative?

Maintaining Alleviate Allergy is a nontrivial, ongoing use of resources. That is a (perhaps barely, heh) acceptable tactic. That's very different from In Debt (which is often more bonus BP than Allergy, as well).

To me, In Debt is not free BP and/or chargen cash. Thus it is relevant and non-exploitative.

That's just nonsense, then. Those are what it literally is; they're what it does and why it exists.

How is it nonsense? Do you NOT need to repay the money?

It's nonsense to say that In Debt is not free BP and chargen cash. That's exactly what it does and why it exists.

For the privilege of going beyond the 50BP cash cap, Born Rich charges you 10 BP (and then you still pay for the cash; 30k¥ = 6 more BP). Total *cost* 16 BP.

In Debt *gives* you 30BP for taking 30k¥ (beyond that cap), and you have to pay back 45 later. Total cost for 30k at chargen: -30BP (only -15BP if we count the eventual payback as 'chargen cash'). Maybe if you let the compound interest run up a lot, this would start to change a little: to reach parity with Born Rich, you'd have to accrue a total debt of over 150k¥ (something like 12 years of nonpayment? I guess you'd get your legs broken by then!). So the 50% penalty is still a bargain, and the 10% interest is negligible even for the maximum debt amount.

That's a difference of over 30BP in favor of In Debt, plus the significant opportunity cost of not using any of your limited PQ BP slots. Heck, In Debt effectively pays for Born Rich + 30k¥ more, if you took both.

One thing I wanted to say on the OP regarding the Analytical mind quality.

This quality is ridiculously useful once you start to think about it.
I have to get my team from point A to point B without alerting security. That's a puzzle to be solved.
I have to figure out where my target went with the info at my disposal. Evidence analysis.
I have to hack this system code and determine a valid password or find the flaw in the code. Pattern recognition.
I need to figure out who has the paydata we need. Clue hunting.
Plus the bonus to all Data Search and Software tests.

Pretty much every aspect of legwork and tactical/strategic planning of a run, except logistics (and depending on the amount of red tape you need to bypass, this could be a fun puzzle too).

In short, you have vastly underestimated its usage.

Yeah, it seems like the GM would have to be very careful about those definitions, Jhaiisiin. As you show, things like 'puzzles' and 'pattern recognition' cover essentially every possible mental action in the universe.

Why do you feel the quality is not free BP and chargen cash Toturi?

Explain it a bit better... as far as I'm concerned if all I ever had to do was pay off the cash in game quick and live on bread and water for a few months... it's BP rediculously well spent. The negative quality is at that point pretty badly undercosted.

Look at the other 30point negative qualities in the game. None of them are anywhere near as trivial as 'in debt'.

My own feeling is the vast majority of runner's companion is one of the worst products that was ever put out for SR4. It's where they put all the other questionable ideas and concepts and just tossed them in a big book of optional rules.

Not that the book doesn't have it's gems... some of them like night vision and eagle eye I kinda like there's some nice ones for making unaugmented mundanes, though they're costly compared to just buying cyber as it should be.


As I see it... for in-debt to have meaning you have to have got the money from someone who can actually enforce repayment like a large organized crime group or say a magical group with ritual samples on file and the like. And if they'll profiteer off the loan in the first place... they're just as likely to profiteer on any info they can get or sell on you later.

Even if you pay it off slowly, you're coming out way ahead. There are plenty of ways to tweak In Debt into something that makes sense, probably used in some combination. TJ mentioned the 'you owe favors' method already. You could also make the player pay for the cash with separate BP (as with Born Rich). You can make the debt something more recurrent, like you *can't* get your balance to 0 until you buy it off with Karma… instead, there's a new service fee each month regardless. You can make the BP bonus (much) less. And so on. It's a neat idea, it's just very badly executed.

I didn't mean to drag this off the already off-topic discussion of the 100% RAW 'NQs can only be removed with Karma' that Aerospider was addressing, but In Debt is just the very worst possible example.

Your analysis simply proves that it is better to get In Debt than to be Born Rich. It does not mean that the BP or cash that you get from In Debt are "free".

*Vastly* better, which is the critical point. Don't quibble, though. You know perfectly well what I mean: In Debt is a huge bonus for a tiny drawback (under your assumptions). Read it as 'effectively free' or 'nearly free' or 'might as well be free', if you like. If you view the 50% repayment as a fair trade, then the BP bonus is just gravy: 'free'. To say it's not is to say that repaying the extra 15k¥ is the same as 150k¥ worth of chargen BP.

I'm not even sure 45k¥ + 60 Karma is a fair cost… but it probably is. I'd still prefer a flat-out 'fixed' version, though, because 60 Karma is pretty onerous on an advancing character. Everyone would be happier, except the munchkin.

I do not deny that. It may well be 'effectively free' or 'nearly free' or 'might as well be free', but it is NOT absolutely, totally, without a shadow of doubt "free".

(AFB at the moment, can I trouble you for a quote of the In Debt rules?)

I accept your tiny correction on my colloquial terms. You are right, I didn't mean literally no cost. Let's go with 'effectively free'. Effectively free things are not good.


I've always kind of wondered at this last bit. *If* you can't find a whole 4500¥ in a month (or 4950, or 5445), they *may* send someone looking for you… and do something. That's just not very much money, even though the GM could in theory do mean things for failure. I think people spend that much in ammo.

Absolute worst case, you could fence your starting gear! If you bought negotiable goods (sort of halfway RAW), that's (-1BP per 5k) to buy them, and (+5BP per 5k) for the debt. If you only have 'fenceable' gear, that's 30%: (-3.3 BP per 5k) bought, (+5BP per 5k) debt. You're still making an instant BP profit of up to like 10 BP (24 BP if you buy credsticks)? My math might be off a little, but you're still winning right out the door.

While I do not believe it balanced, I hardly believe it is free. And while karma-whore characters have more money to put towards this, the 10% per month, which is 4500 at the highest level, is no joke to come up with. All it takes is GMs being RAW level or less with payment. Then the PC's HAVE to do something desperate/stupid to get anywhere. My technomancer with this hacked and sold a commercial helicopter. And every game session, the GM is making rolls to see how far ahead of the law I stay.

Fencing gear rules start at 30% and go DOWN from there. It would require a pornmancer or face just to get that, depending on hardware. Since GM is final arbiter on price as well, I must disagree with this being viable.

I do not see that as the absolute worst case. IIRC, that is one of the more optimal cases; the worst case is to be forced to pay it back when you cannot pay off the interest on your normal income.

To my view, taking your numbers, it is 10/30 free, about 33% free.

UP: 30BP + 30/5 BP
DOWN: 45/5 BP
Result: 30+6-9=27

27/30=0.9 90% free

To me either result is a far cry from 'effectively free' or 'nearly free' or 'might as well be free'.

Just do the smart thing and ask yourself: Is In Debt "cool" in any way? Basically everyone agrees it's not, it's just a cheesy way to get money easily. So just don't allow it (that's what I'm doing as well).

Concerning the discussion about contacts: That's exactly why i use the houserule that gives players free point for contacts based on Charisma. No one likes to spend Karma / BP for something at Chargen that is free later in the game, right?

Yerameyahu, I'd like to address your outrage
First off, I don't handle everything RAW (which I paraphrased, I think). I repeatedly stated that most of this is resolved through roleplaying, and the problems get worse the higher a negative quality is. Meaning, a 5k in Debt quality will lead to less ... unfortunate incidents than a 30k quality. Furthermore, I think that the severity of this quality is dictated by the amount of cash flowing into the characters at a table. Were I to GM a 400BP campaign, a 30k debt would be _very_ detrimental. I usually play at the 500BP level, and even there it wouldn't necessarily be easy to remove it. I was never under the impression that it might be too easy to come up with the interest at the rates I pay my player's characters.

Second, I'm partly with Aerospider here. It is not fun if you invest time, money, maybe even burned edge points (= Karma to buy it back, btw) into an incredibly hard run to confront your Nemesis on his skullshaped island fortress only to be told "But his son hates you now." At the very least, I'll reduce the ratings of an enemy after such effort and I'll think hard if the character can remove the quality.
It's true, I eyeball the cost, but that doesn't mean I let the players off the hook easily. I like qualities, they flesh out a character. But if a player isn't happy anymore with a quality and wants to remove it, we'll talk about it. It's a dialogue after all, and my job as GM is to give the players a story that they (and I) like.

Thirdly, if I can afflict characters with a quality, then I can also remove it from them. Such is the power (and responsibility) of a GM. I don't need a rulebook to tell me so, and while I usually hold to the letter of the rules, I am also flexible enough to recognize where RAW would impede the playstyle of my group.

This is, of course, highly subjective. What works for me may be poison to others, and the other way around.
On the other hand, my players usually do not cheese out their characters and their qualities are not bought for efficiency but for detailing the character. E.g., I haven't seen a mage with focused concentration for a long time at my table
If they do (mostly unintentionally), we talk about it, and I've _never_ had a situation in 14 years that I GM, that didn't get resolved through talking.

'Worst case' for balance and justice, toturi; possibly 'best case' for the munchkin.

I wouldn't call it 'outrage'. I said I was shocked that anyone would call it 'fair', hehe.
RAW is what we're talking about, though.
I think I demonstrated that it *is* a joke, unless you're in some kind of artificially low-money campaign.
But this is exactly what the rules say, and just like Aerospider, you're giving a pretty misleading case. 'Oh, but the player/character already worked *so* hard, they even burned Edge!'. If they did all that, they definitely earned some karma to buy it off with. While they were doing all this, what was the rest of the team up to? Were they dragged along to help this guy remove his chargen flaws?
Yes, and the rules for gaining a PQ in play or losing a NQ are 'pay 2xBP in Karma'. If you give them a NQ, maybe they deserve a karma refund or trade, then.
I am glad to hear you are so lucky. But that kind of means your experience isn't relevant: you're talking about a situation with house rules and model players, while I'm specifically talking about RAW and abuse potential.

Bottom line: *without* totally additional house rules for In Debt ('favors', vague threats of 'very detrimental', 'service charges', etc.) and especially without the totally RAW Karma cost, the power-focused player will take In Debt all day long, and twice if possible. It is vastly better than everything else in the game, particularly its Positive Quality counterpart, and has a negligible, temporary downside.

But I appreciate you bringing thing back to the 'roleplay effects' issue. It's not an argument for me to mention that repay-with-karma is RAW, because we're specifically asking if it *should* be (for all NQs, not the terrible-broken-example In Debt). As a couple of us noted earlier, the RAW actually says 'it's both'. It specifically says the GM should require the PC to earn the right to buy off NQs, through the kind of RP effort you described. So it is in no way the 'boring numbers game' strawman Aerospider talked about. The real issue is, 'RP+payment' or 'RP, no payment'. It seems pretty clear to me that there should be fairness and balance in the rewards the GM hands out, right? That's why there are guidelines for the amount of Karma (and why we get so many threads here asking 'how much nuyen should I give out?'). But surely the good GM believes this? Surely the good GM *does* reduce the cash payout if the PCs get a bunch of free expensive gear (literally, in lieu of some of their payment); why wouldn't this be the same for Karma rewards? If you roleplay hard, you get more rewards. You don't necessarily get more rewards… PLUS another massive reward of NQ-removal, or free PQs (again, the rules 'suggest' 2xBP for those, too). That's certainly not fair to the player who didn't load up their character with NQs, gain all that power, and then drag the team around fixing his special problems with 'good roleplaying'.

A munchkin would not need a "best case". The best and only case for balance and justice is the RAW.

Sorry if I over-exaggerated with 'outrage'
Those are all valid points you make. I only disagree with "RAW is what we're talking about"
I stated that this is how _I_ handle things. Just to give an example. I do not GM official missions campaigns, so I am not bound to RAW in my house campaign

The thing is, all the good points you make (and I would definitely enforce them, were I to run official missions) do not invalidate what happens at my table (or my IRC channel mostly).
To answer some of your questions:
I generally lowball money, yes. I do not think it's artificial, though, just a point where my players and I are comfortable with. A rule of thumb is that I look at the Karma I intend to give at the end of the run and then multiply that by 2500 to get a reward sum. It works pretty well. Some adventures are lower (we do a lot of 'hooding' runs), some are higher, but in average it rounds out.

My point in the burning edge thing (or burning money, which can be made equivalent by my usual calculation) was: How much is the quality worth? How much karma does it cost to raise the edge again? How much ressources did the player lose by getting rid of his enemy? If all that evens out to about the Karma cost of buying off the flaw, I don't give them anymore grief. They might meet said son later, though
And yes, they DO earn Karma for this, and I do calculate that in. It's a bit of a numbers game that happens behind the scenes, if you will. Usually, the group will help said player, and they will earn Karma as well. It's a relationship after all, and they'll get the character's help in return some day.
To put this in relation: I already stated that I tend to look twice at chargen flaws, and I am kind of a hypocrite in the way that I do tend to make it harder on players to get rid of those.


Why would I give them a refund if they earned a flaw through a severe wound, e.g.? Sorry, no. But they may work, put in time and effort (equals Karma and money, in most cases), and maybe lose it again.


I do not think it makes my experience irrelevant. We agree on the RAW point, after all. I just say, there are different ways to resolve a conflict with a cheesing player. It is not Player vs GM, it's Player WITH Players WITH GM. In my opinion, you cannot reduce an argument about roleplaying relevant flaws to just rules. There has to be a metagaming component involved.

My last resort as a GM is, after all, to just say "No, I don't like this character, and you won't play it at my table". It has happened, people probably have thought me a dick for it, but it only ever happened on conventions. And, even there, I only had one incident, where said player didn't want to use another character and looked for another game. So yeah. Experience tells me, I might do something right