Five Karma sounds about right for 25000 untaxed extra income

Sounds reasonable to me.

@gilga, @Beta other opinions?

I am all for giving some love to mundane players, and while magic talent constantly develops with little karmic intervals (e.g., new initiation, a new spell, raise magic --- all within the reach of a chapter). Getting like 10k nuyen before expenses leaves economic progress for the runners that need gear almost impossible.

E.g., I do not see a better deck for AM in the foreseeable future. Out of debt perhaps, and then I want a small flying drone. So given the nature of the game, I'd get the equipment the way I want it in the beginning and trust the game to finance an occasional drone but not whole new equipment.

I'd maybe add some time to make that transfer, just to make the process not quite so smooth. Three days per karma transferred or something (so that if you are saving up hard for gear and want to move 5 karma over, it also takes about half the typical time between episodes (15 days)). Given the high amounts of karma we generate, otherwise it might seem just a bit too automatic? Maybe I'm just being needlessly difficult? I guess my gut feeling was that there should be some cost to doing the conversion, and time is the only other currency that I can think of.

I'm not sure I'd go to that level of detail.

Time granularity is going to be tricky is the play-by-post environment where we're always going to be earning more karma than we could spend within the RAW timelines.

I'm generally comfortable with how we've been doing things. By the book, initiations could take many months. I think our approach - where an initiation lasts roughly a chapter - works well.

I have some loose rules around only advancing an attribute by one point during a chapter, or skills by 1 point if they are rating 4+. (Rating 1-3 skills can be advanced quickly since their interval is measured in days, not weeks.)

There's the additional complication where you never really know how long it will be (IC-wise) before the events of the next chapter. Let's not get into situations where Player X can't convert all their karma and spend all their nuyen because the next GM didn't advance time as much as was expected.

Yeah, as long as you describe the transfer fittingly, I don't think we have to worry too much about meta rules.

I always assume that training for a skill or attribute began long before the karma was available.

By the ways, what house rules we use for quickening? (if at all)?

None, afaik. Though with the prevalence of mana barriers and spirits we are facing, going around with a bunch of permanent spells isn't a good idea anyway. So you'd likely shut those down yourself when you don't need them anymore.

@Tecumesh By the way the post about Trouble is hilarious. My intention however was for Trouble to Manifest as in let Mato know he is there). Though as AM tries to give Trouble his autonomy I don't mind the cat spirit materializing and making a fuss;)

Oh, you did say manifest, not materialize. My mistake!

There are no consequences for the scene. Trouble could manifest (or materialize) again once the Doc leaves.

As for Quickening, I've taken it before and thought it was fun. It's usually best handled through OOC conversations. Our situation is a bit different in the sense that karma is so plentiful that the prospect of losing 1 or 2 points isn't as concerning as it might be in a more typical game.

As a GM, I'm not afraid of playing up the IC consequences, like shining like a beacon on the astral. We do encounter a lot of background counts and magical protections in our journeys too. But if others don't want to police it then we can figure out some guidelines for it.

One rule I have seen used is that the karma cost is equal to the Force of the spell. So a Force 6 spell would require 6 karma. Obviously there are ways to game that with reagents for spells that need net hits instead of Force, but those are the spells that get popped by background counts very easily.

Another rule I've seen is one quickened spell per level of initiation. So it's still potent but takes longer to come online.

As GM I have no problems with Quickening. Though wards become a massive pain. Slipping trough is an option, but takes a lot of time.
Not to mention driving in a car and hitting a mana barrier without being able to stop...

The logical consequences of quickening are sufficiently challenginG, IMO, that I don't have a problem with it per se.

In my home game, however, I have both a lot of wards and watchers, and a house rule that an edge point can't be recovered until whatever you used it on is done and gone. Reduces using edge to bind spirits or or quicken super charged spells, as well as having more consequences to edging in long duration extended contests (I do those as a background sometimes to represent difficult research or crafting). Basically I always felt that a daily resource shouldn't be used as a free way to power up longer term activities.

I'm not saying that we should adopt that rule, just putting some context around my 'haven't had trouble with it' feeling.

Oh, that's clever. I have not heard that one before but I like it.

Another rule I've used is that you must buy hits on Quickening rolls. That means no rerolls (or Edge) to maximize hits.

The edge rule is good, but the buying hits actually favors planned power ups instead of spur of the moment quickening to spells, you just need to survive for one scene.

I've never seen anyone do a spur-of-the-moment quickening. Is that basically just spending karma to avoid a sustaining penalty for a bit?

Exactly. I have - most often for transformations on opponents (turning enemies to stone).

I understand the min/max aspect of quickening every buff spell all the time to create some uber soldier/mercenary but my character is not much of a mercenary and would prefer not to be in the front line anyhow. For the utility spells, she has all the sustaining necessary for us since Trouble can sustain spells for her ( a bound spirit service), so hacking while augmented is solved for example, and negotiating while increased charisma is done with focused concentration. Even so, I try to let her do things also while not augmented (and sometimes regret it) but I assume she does not want to feel incompetent without a blessing from her totem.

The usages I had in mind we're trying to get some use out of my ritual magic (6 points skill but hardly ever used). I am thinking about why I don't use rituals and the reason seems to be that they take up too much time so it is a pain to invest in rituals where a need a arises and we need to wait hours to just cast some awesome detection spell (that may not solve the issue). I was thinking that by quickening said spells, (perhaps on Trouble) we can have access to ritual magic without actually doing ritual magic on the spot.

Has anyone else managed to get some utility out of ritual magic? (I was thinking mainly remote sensing) I have 6 points in this skill that I never seem to use, but I'd imagine it fits to the way I picture AM.


Another thing I wanted to try is to create a magic deck (or RCC if tamarind is open to magic) using the analyze device spell. The object resistance would be evil, so I thought of using these special (and expensive) reagents to lower it -- and then as it becomes an expensive spell to quicken it so that we do not need to go through all that again when we hack/drone control.


One last thing I was thinking about is a few augmentations for our car/headquarters and perhaps drones. E.g., a quickened reinforce spell on one of the cars or on a drone can eventually save our day.

A house rule I've used in the past is that anyone with Ritual Spellcasting automatically knows all of the rituals on p. 297-8. That saves some of the investment so that you don't have to spend the karma learning each ritual. I often let spellcasters of other traditions participate without the -2 penalty as well.

I don't think I've tweaked the time requirements of rituals. I personally haven't had a problem with those.

Y'all are being much more creative with quickening than I ever was. I had a vampire PC who quickened Alleviate Allergy (Sunlight) to make life easier. She also quickened Detect Enemies (Extended), which I love doing as a PC but makes me roll my eyes when I'm the GM.

I've never quickened Petrify but that's devious. I hadn't even thought about reinforcing a vehicle or animating a statue. I always thought that's what a homunculus is for.

There has been little use of rituals in any game I've been in. A couple of times with detection spells, but more often I've used them as plot elements. The existing rituals just seldom seem to do what shadowrunners need done, given that it ties you down for hours in a lodge, so that even if you create an opening with a ritual, those involved in the ritual usually can't take advantage of the situation.

(Honorable exception to Watcher spirits).

I am fumbling towards a meta-planar trip in one home game to a meta-plane where rituals are the primary form of magic, hoping to see some creative use of them. But I haven't quite figured out the plot to make the timelines favour rituals as a likely approach to the situation. I'm hoping for enough growth in integrating rituals into our thinking that maybe they'll show up in regular play after at some point. But like, maybe I can report back in a year on how that goes?

I'd be fully on board to grant the basic rituals as part of the ritual skill.

To be honest, we had a few good options to use them, but usually just relied on footwork and matrix skills instead.

Rituals get really potent once you have the Greater Ritual initiation, but I think that would be overkill. A few more watchers wouldn't hurt to have around, especially with our rather precarious security situation. Likewise a homunculus might deter low level rabbel.

Alarm and Charged Ward would be an excellent addition.

Bobby will at one time learn the attune animal ritual, though we haven't come across any animals since our first hellhound with Bobby around.


All in all, I don't think we have to house rule Quickening unless it turns out to be a problem. This isn't a pink mohawk, nor a mirror shades run. Our characters are part of a community, so unlike a lot of shadowrunners we are confronted with the social consequences of our actions a lot more.

I think that watchers are short-lived so they would not be very useful for security.
"A watcher lasts for a number of hours equal to its Force times the
net hits on the sealing test. A watcher’s skills are equal to
half the Force of the ritual (rounded up)."

So for security, we'll need a new watcher every day which I don't mind the cost but it would get tedious to roll so many dice. What do you think?

Yeah, all in all, the Homunculus is the better guardian, as it lasts days rather than hours and can also look into the astral. Also the cost for reagents would get pretty high, pretty quickly.