Spun off from the Edge thread

Our group has advanced to a point of playing where we don't care for Karma anymore and just go with whatever suits us and what is okay for the GM. We don't even keep track of money anymore. That's not to say that our character don't. They're still a bunch of money-hungry terrorists for hire.

IC, no one would know or care. It's not like people can see some little xp bar over their head, glowing and shifting after every fight or something. In real life, I know I certainly can't always tell the instant I type a little faster or shoot a little better. Sure, I can compare my wpm (or a target) from today to one I typed (or shot) ten years ago -- but I couldn't tell you exactly what I did to earn those experience points, exactly when I spent them, etc, etc. With the exception of a few milestone achievements (like Initiating) I imagine most Shadowrun characters are, in-game, much the same.

Shadowrunners are in it for the money, for the most part. That's why you negotiate with a Johnson for more nuyen, not more karma. I've never seen a group of shadowy characters stand around a back room in a nightclub, send forward the pretty boy to talk to the guy in a suit, and insist on doing a job only if security at the target facility is doubled the day of their operation (so they can pressure their GM for extra karma at the end of the job). Just like real-life criminals, when you get right down to it they're in it for the cash.

And, with some groups, "just for the money" would remain a viable method of character advancement. In fact, it's even suggested in one of the old supplements as a way to play an "amoral" game. No karma (since they're doing bad things, and karma represents more than experience points) rewards, but allowing cash-for-karma and letting the players be as brutal and merciless and mercenary as they want to be (which is all based on the assumption average Shadowrun characters aren't, which makes me giggle).

Would advancement slow down? Sure. Would players lose interest? OOC, some would, sure. But IC? In-game? It's not like anyone would know.

I play in a game where our GM did away with character creation rules. You just verbally ran down your story with him and we adjusted character stats as we went. My character ended up quite close to 400BP, someone else is more like 300BP and I'm sure some of the others are over.

To illustrate how it worked one of the players wanted to make a character who was incredibly good at playing pool. He ended up with a cyber arm, gyro mounts, internal air tank (so he can hold his breath taking the shot) along with a bunch of other stuff. He ended up getting ""recruited" into the military and trained as a sniper. Similar application of gear to playing pool.

It made interesting characters. We don't make much money as we spend all our time on the run from all the enemies we seem to make without noticing. Karma comes but is slow, maybe 2-4 per session.

-Strobe

The problem with a no-karma game is mages and otaku. They're more-or-less dependant on karma to grow and expand as characters. They *can* tell when they learn a new spell/complex form, when they go up a grade of initiation/submersion, etc, etc.

While I can picture a sam who never cares about increasing his skills, I can't picture a mage who never wants to learn a new spell.

Why not? If he thinks that he might know enough spells for now and cares more about money for lifestyle and a girlfriend, there is nothing wrong with magicians who don't use all their time to learn new spells.

That's easy, your mage could know every spell he already wants to know. Would the fact that you already know all the spells you want to know make you un-interested in playing the character?

This may be due to the fact that our group is new to SR as a whole but we typically view money/karma as just "reloading" in between adventures.

The story is the reward if it's done in an entertaining and fresh fashion. It's novel to us still that we can do all sorts of creative things (and have actual gameplay mechanics for it) instead of just making it up.

Don't get me wrong though, me likey the nuyen!

You can also simply make a voyage to the metaplanes, which is even more transcendental and furthering than learning any spell or initiating every time could ever be, or get to know other traditions better and share their view to better understand magic, without the need to have to turn this 'experience' in a new initiation grade or the next superspell that targets enemies and heals your allies on the same time (of course, that's not possible under the rules, but for whatever goal a mage might set, it's in an abstract manner quite viable, the same as searching means to teleport or to manipulate space and time). Sometimes, the magical experience simply is enough.

Besides, we are talking about shadowrunner mages, the type of people who aren't normally grounded into their tradition anyway, and many see in their gift a means to gain money the fast way, or physical power, or a new opportunity to see their abilities unfold in a society that challenges the best and gives out a great reward.

Well, actually, there are, thanks to astral rifts, IF you're not initiated. You might also befriend another mage who has some spooky contacts, like a Free Greater Guidance Spirit, who would help you if you'd do some kind of special work for him (read: Shadowrun), like retrieve the guy who made a life-pact with him (of course, the spirit is not going to tell them that this guy's bonded with him), or other works.

Notice that I do not say that there isn't (or shouldn't be) any character progressions. Simply that you as player don't need to keep track of karma and money for yourself as motivation. You can easily abstract these two values, and focus on other things than waiting for the karma and money number finally exceeding a certain point so that your character's attributes increases by one or put up some cybergear into him.

My character is an initiate with at least a dozen spells and a quite powerful force 6 ally spirit, I as a player just don't need karma and money (by which I mean ingame money, not realworld-money, I of course love realworld-money ) to have continual fun with my character. I just tell my GM that I think now might be okay for him to become initiated, we play a scenario where everybody's involved, and by the end, he simply is initiated, and then, we play several months without any stat changes, having wacky adventures and cinematic actions.

I wouldn't really see a problem with a no-karma game, but agree with what people are saying about it potentially gimping mage-types. Some people may have all the skills they need, or think they have all the skills they need, but in a no-karma campaign you either rue-out advancement or run it fast and loose. Ruling it out means you get the 'old dog can't learn new tricks' syndrome, and for some odd reason your characters can't learn anything even if they have good IC reasons to do so (what about the character who decides they need better melee defence and so take martial arts classes?).

I have no real problem with fast and loose, but what about when one character gets things faster and looser than another? Why is that innately better than just handing-out karma where the game determines the going rates?

My first reaction to this thread was - take away my karma awards and you won't see me for dust.

But then I realized that I only am able to play-by-post now (in other words, I have been playing like a dog for over a year and my grand karma total spread over half a dozen characters for that entire time is 19), so essentially I am playing in a karma-free world. Nature of the PbP beast, I guess.

Nonetheless, me, nuyen is nice but I am still plugging away in hopes of karma awards. I have definite visions for my characters, and those visions can rarely be achieved at chargen - indeed, I usually START with character history and then work up the stats, and I have yet to have half the points I need just to justify the sort of knowledge and skills my characters would have picked up just living their lives up to game start.

I love role-playing, and more karma means more abilities means more latitude with what my character can do, which enhances the role-playing, adding cool and interesting actions to mere words on a page.

Just me briefly chiming in...

One of the main pillars of support to RPGs is progressing and improving your character, directly. I think it would be a rather lame any other way. Think about it in terms of real life. Wouldn't it be the most egregious thing to stay stagnant. To never increase above an intuition 2 or Logic 3. To always be average and mediocre in that area. Or maybe, in terms closer to Shadowrun, just to always be above-average and never achieve excellence. I just don't like it. I think Cain hits the nail right on the head with mages and technomancers.

1) It really has varied depending on the characters being played. For many of them, it was the standard "path to success and retirement" type outlook. For others, means to some particular end. I have yet to see a character in my games that was unmotivated by money, but a lot of the time it's an indirect motivation.

On the player side, nearly all of the people I have played with viewed money as one of the inherent reward systems in the SR game. However, I have had players that were not upset when in-game circumstances meant that they didn't get paid, didn't get paid much, didn't make them rich, etc. So while they are motivated by the system's monetary reward structure, it wasn't the sole reason they played by any means.

2) Well, let's discount part of the question for a moment (whatever their primary motivation) and assume that the two motivations are the reward of Karma and Money. I have had players that would probably still play for only the monetary reward and for only the karmic reward. It really just depends on the player I think. Put back in "primary motivation" for the moment, and assume that you have players that are into the story of their character and the story going on around them, and I'd say that in my experience, most of the players I have had would still play. I have definitely had some thought for whom the only motivation is perceived character improvement by monetary and statistical measure, who would probably not get much enjoyment out of a game that lacked either.

Ha. So basically: depends on the player. How's that for earth shattering?

For me, I have to say that the money and karma are pretty well equally important. That's not to say that I expect boatloads of both. I love a "scrape to pay the bills" game as much as I do a "I just bought my third Westwind Turbo" game. Actually, on Karma, less is more for me. I don't like getting so much K that my character sprints up the ladder and doesn't have to try anymore after four runs, but prefer the fun of "finally getting that skill up to 8" or something. "Other" primary motivations are my bread and butter though. I try to have some story based or character driven reason for continuing to play a character, and have retired a character mid-game and made a new one because the former's story was finished for the time being.

I'm just going to cross-reference eidolon's thread, in part for the opening post (as well as for the in-thread post -- which was copied here while I wrote this ), because it's a different take than this one and gave perhaps different context. Is that context relevant? I really don't know -- but it would have been interesting to find out.

(Tsk, tsk. That'll teach you not to be awake during Hong Kong hours, eidolon.)

Here, IC and OOC motivations are definitely becoming blurred -- the latter mostly glossed over -- and the question of what money actually means to the character has been lost entirely. Eidelon -- edit your opening post to ask only that second question, and you'll have a completely unique thread.

For now, what I'm gathering from the answers is that whether character advancement is seen as important depends on two factors:

Players playing min-maxed specialists seem to place little or no focus on advancement relative to generalists.

Players playing mundane characters see far less relevance in karma than those playing Awakened or technomancer types. A specific point brought up here was the perception that continual learning lay at the core of Awakened or technomancer types -- only.

the idea of not advancing your character is just... weird, to me. i've played min-maxed specialists, i've played generalists, i've played mundane and Awakened, and i fight for every scrap of karma pretty much equally on all of them. i can only think of one character i've tried extra-hard to get karma for, and that's because i designed her with a specific vision in mind (both IC and OOC). i like seeing my characters advance and improve, develop and change. i get a big kick out of surviving a situation that i know would have killed my char earlier in their career. advancement isn't the only reason i play, not by a long shot--but it's one of the big ones.

I have mixed feelings about advancement. As a player, I love it. I crave it. I am a karma/experience whore. Leveling up makes my tumors wiggle in the cancer game.
And that is exactly why, as a GM, I don't like it. The best RPing I have ever seen has been in situations where there is no advancement, or where advancement is so rare no one thinks about it anymore. (ex: one-shots, characters who know they're going to die, mid-high level AD&D2, etc) When there's no XP on the line or no level-up looming on the horizon, then people stop trying to get it and just concentrate on playing the game.

Maybe advancement is not so important. There are a lot of PbP games where people beg to have their characters accepted for play that offer no reward other than completing the mission.

Maybe advancement is important, because the newness of getting accepted to the game rubs off pretty quick and a lot of those games fold.

i don't think i'd still be playing PbP if it were all one-off games where i have to roll up a new char every time. i've been playing the same char on shadowland for seven years, all the way from his first run to his semi-retirement. i've started several other characters i plan on playing for at least that long. i'll do one-off games, sure, and have a lot of fun with them, but playing those exclusively? it's like trying to live on tic-tacs.

Money:

Money is the reward for and the point of a less than legal life. Money is used to buy pleasure, to ease the passage of life and to accquire things that are wanted. Money is not the whole goal, but it is the path to the goal. Money for my players and their characters is how they obtain things that are meaningful to their characters, to themselves that will improve the game. My players portray selfish criminals who do illegal things to get rich - and enjoy all the associated benefits.

Would my players play if I stopped handing out karma?

Without a doubt, absolutely. I play a very story-driven, PC-centric game. PC's are "cool", they come out of the gate cool and stylish. Their abilities are tied to narrative and story-centric themes, not to karma boosted abilities. We've been sitting around many times, telling stories about what happened in game and karma points have never popped up in any light. I've never heard "Man, two more points and I'll get my pistols to six" or "All I need is ten more and I can initiate again, then I'll be really bad ass". What I do hear is "Do you remember when we had to deal with that whore and the btls on the metro autobus?" or ".. and this this freak summons a spirit of Man right in the middle of the cathedral!". It seems my players really aren't that concerned with advancement as much as they are with the story - as long that keeps going, I don't really think they'd care.

...I can't help but want to repeat myself. A "no karma" game is listed right there in the SR3 Companion as a viable model for a long-term campaign. Instead of doling out a mixture of money (the IC motivator) and karma (the primary OOC motivator), you go heavier on the nuyen and allow cash-for-karma.

It's not that unreasonable, really.

No, it means using the rules as written they're getting no karma, only money (just like the what-if that started this conversation). My point is that there are ways to handle just exactly that sort of game, and that if they saw fit to waste printing space on them (SURGE catgirls notwithstanding as an example of how picky the editors might not be) someone with some experience in the game thought that such a campaign was, if not totally awesome, at least still a feasible gaming experience.

Is the variant "no karma" or "no karma except that which you buy via cash-for-karma"? From the standpoint of character advancement there's a huge difference between those two statements.

"no karma except that which you buy via cash-for-karma"

Which, of course, is a different animal than what we're talking about. We're discussing a no-advancement game, not strictly a no-karma game.

Yeah, there's a huge difference between the scenario in the OP and the suggested variant.

Well, we're talking about a no karma-improvement game, which in the end does encompass both things, either a no-advancement game, or a no-karma game either.

I would only play in a no karma improvement game if it was a one shot, and hence the loss didn't matter, or if there was another way to improve one's skills beyond buying better skillwires. I like characters to be able to start off lacking many of the skills needed to thrive in the shadows but still improve themselves and become prime runners.

The game depends on the interaction between a player's desires for his character and the rules which are used to resolve the character's actions. To me, the stats and the personality of a character are intertwined.

I would hate to play a stagnant character. I think I would rather start out with a brutally effective sammie with a bad BTL addiction, and watch his abilities decline, than play a character whose abilities never changed.

I like playing mages who slowly advance in magical power, who focus more on gaining more knowledge than material wealth, so a low karma game would suck for me.

A Non-Advancing game would be terrible, in my opinion. There's only so much that you can do with moniez, and while they're nice, it doesn't have the same feeling that Karma does.

Also, for many players, the feeling of advancement, watching your character grow both in the statistical sense and the personality/rp sense is a very rewarding aspect of gaming, and this would take half of that away.

If folks do not like the no advancement game, why do we get so many GMs on here talking about their sub-standard starting BP, low karma award games? Are their players masochists who then revel in hoarding stingy karma awards until they have accumulated enough to spend on anything?

Different story telling traditions require different methodologies. The Epic has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The hero (or heroes) starts off one way (often unimpressively) and through the story achieves maximum potential and ultimately triumphs at the end. The Serial, however, is fundamentally different. It may or may not have a beginning, but in any case is specifically open ended. One adventure starts at pretty much the same point as another - characters aren't expected to change much between stories.

Many legends partake of both extremes. For example, the Pendragon begins his life as a poor and unimpressive youngling and he has his early adventures where he picks up the swod that makes him rightwise king of England and has sex with his aunt. And he wins the hand of Gwen, picks up a retinue of grade A badasses and ultimately slays Mordred in a final confrontation. That's pretty much straight epic material right there, and is actually available in literal epic format from actual bards. But there are also an inumerable number of Arthur legends and songs which fit somewhere in the middle and have no real effect on the overall story arc. These are the middle age's version of afternoon cartoons, and they don't really go anywhere. The characters are usually coming into the song already in their iconic gear and they fight some monster or accomplish some task and end the story while still being essentially in iconic form.

And many legends do it just one way or the other.

And if you want to participate in cooperative storytelling games,t here's no pressing reason why you should start characters below the power level you imagine them and gradually work up. You could just as well start the characters in iconic shape and have their adventures take place at the point where you want them to be and just not advance them. That's entirely reasonable.

-Frank

if storytelling is the big, main goal. it's a good goal, i'm not saying otherwise, but it's not the main goal, for me--it's one of two main goals. the other is to enjoy the game itself, the marshaling and clever use of my character's resources to overcome challenges, and then grow afterwards.

In this case, this would simply be called serial epic, wouldn't it?

Hmm, it's interesting that so many people tie character development directly to the character's ability to shoot people in the face. I mean, if you character starts out being able to face-shoot someone at 50m at night and then his skills improve to the ability to do this at 100m, at night, during a hurricane he's obviously a well developed character isn't he?

----

Would you be interested in playing a game sold as the following:
You control billions of Y, hordes of minions, have whatever skills and powers you want and your objective is to (select one of the following or make up your own):

Restore the Republic of Ireland after kicking out those pesky elves
Seize back control of humanity's destiny from the dragons
Or some other suitably world shaking and epic motivation

Nuyen rewards are irrelevant (except in the 'you gain a controlling interest in Ares Macrotech' kind of way) and anything less than that you can buy. Want 5.999 essence worth of delta grade cyber goodies? go right ahead.
And even if you gained 300 karma over the course of the campaign, it would still be insufficient to increase your core skills, you are just that badass.

So the game is about what you are willing to do to accomplish your goals, not how mch better you can get at shooting people in the face.

----

I suspect that skill and gear advancement is so important in SR for the following reasons:

The stuff written on the character sheet is a way of gaining narrative control over the game. In SR, the characters tend not to be able to change the world, and the focus on the game is not on their relationships with each other or the NPCs, so the abilities of the characters are the only 'control' the players have over the game, especially because the GM is normally adversarial in SR games.

Yes, but I think Bob's saying that there are more ways to advance than simply by getting better at things and erasing some numbers on a character sheet to put new numbers there.

Not in some things. You cannot get better at talking to people in generic social situations without crossing out Etiquette 1 and replacing it with Etiquette 2. You can't learn entirely new schools of knowledge (as opposed to tidbits here and there) without gaining ranks in the knowledge skill. You can't learn a new spell without some sort of advancement rules. etc.

I understand what you're saying, but I still think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. No, you can't necessarily get better at things except by...uhh...getting better at things. But that's the character sheet advancing, not just the character.

Characters and personalities and outlooks can still grow and change without a single number being shifted. Was Han Solo, on-screen, an appreciably bigger badass at the end of RotJ than he was when we first met him at the Mos Eisley cantina, as a for instance? Did the Lethal Weapon series end with Martin Riggs a better shot or combatant than the series began? Did Wolverine think up exciting new ways to cut-a-bitch between X-Men and X3?

No...but all three of them were different people at the end of their respective movie runs, all the same. The characters in those films interacted with one another differently, shifted roles within the group without any obvious shifts in power level.

It all comes down to the sort of game you want to play, as to what you call "character development." Speaking from my own Shadowrun experiences, I'd say my street sam developed more as a character when he learned his background and real name and then got his daughter back than, say, when he got his Ingram Supermach specialization up to a 9 from an 8.

There are things a GM and play can do to develop a character that have nothing to do with dice and karma. Were I in the right sort of game with a GM and other players I trusted, sure. I'd play in a campaign where I didn't earn karma.

Of course characters can grow as people. I'm sory if I imnplied I didn't think that was possible. What I do think, however, is that there's more to advancement in a game than personality.

The two are far from mutually exclusive, so it's not like you actually have to choose "the sort of game you want to play." You can play both at the same time.

I do not believe anybody ever suggested that you couldn't play both at the same time. However, you can play without any game statistic shifts for a long time, or in some cases even never.

On the other hand, playing without any changes to personality would be more boring than the other thing.