Reading the BBB I come to the conclusion that you must spend karma to improve skills (which sucks if you're a mage..)
however the errata states

Does this mean that you are capable of learning skills without spending karma? or that you just have to spend time and effort on it to (as if not risking your neck was enough)

No, that's what you do in order to spend the karma to improve the skill (the test listed). Most GMs ignore that particular requirement.

So, there is currently no way of improving skills without Karma?

That's what Karma is for... you could always buy skillwires if you wanted.

sucks to be mage

Mages have always been karma black holes.
That's the price to pay for being able to play with the laws of physics and reality...

You can beg your GM (bribes also work). Otherwise you are stuck with never ever having karma (EVER!)

Course, you should be rolling in dough. If your hobby is binding spirits, though, you will forever be broke and exhausted. Welcome to the world of magic!

Hey, deltaware cyberware isn't cheap either!

Besides, what would all the non-Awakened spend their karma on, if they could get their skills for free?

As the team spellslinger, I must concur that it sucks to never have karma to spend on raising my skills.

However, I take sweet solace in knowing I can turn the obnoxious Sammies gray matter into guacamole or if the case warrants, Ignite that 100 rd belt of APDS he so proudly wears around his neck.

Life is full of pluses and minuses. Knowing your own and using both to their fullest potential is a secret of the successful shadowrunner.

Sincerly,
C. "Wormwood" DeGaulle
Street mage and shadowrunner,Retired

You do your Avatar credit Vegetaman


Attributes

I have an idea: RNA therapy! I read it in a scifi book once. To be honest, I don't know how RNA would give you knowledge, and it's centuries beyond Shadowrun's tech level.

But maybe you could make some brain fixing nanites that teach you skills for free? Not that I think it's a great idea, but if you really wanted to...

The other sucky thing is the Karma Cap.

But, Magic and Technomancers are major karma Sinks. Mundanes have the "advantage" of being able to diversify alot more easily, while a mage or technomance is going to be putting all their Karma into stuff directly relating to magic or technomancery. Personally, I wish there was a way to reduce the Karma Cost of learning things..

Honestly I do not see a problem. I guess it depends on how much your campaign will escalate though.

I figure that if you need to improve a skill you bite the bullet and improve the skill. So, that means you do not initiate and do not get that sweet metamagic for a while. So what? The street sam has the same problem if he tries to improve the agility or body.

I see the issue of mages getting too power hungry. They want to constantly improve their spell slinging ability at the cost of everything else. In my experience, most mages are good enough (at the worst) to deal with most things the runner team needs to do. I would much rather spend the karma to learn NEW spells (read: become useful in other areas) or improve my skills; or spirits forbid, learn a new skill.

Yes a street sam can get skillwires to do that easily, but he cannot make peoples heads explode just by looking at them (not to mention the host of other things a mage can do.)

I guess my point is that I see mages trying to be too much bookworm and not enough shadowrunner. If the lack of skills really hurts you, lose a point of magic, (I am sure you have improved it 2 or 3 times by this point when you start to worry about lack of other skills,) and get some skillswires.

My 2

I totally agree with lunchbox. With most magicians its initiation after initiation. I've always preferred, and lamented the lack of, mages with a high level of spell versatility, rather than brute force and huge drain-soaking willpower. Frag Albino Dwarves.

I like the idea of power hungry mages, because I feel that's what every mage in Shadowrun's world should be like. They are superior, they have the power and they need more...

This gives mages the dark (or at least gray) side that's often missing in magic. Most of the time magic is shown as a light of hope, sure there are magical threats, but these are non-human evil things, as if humans couldn't be evil on their own.
Same with character advancements: street samurai sell their humanity to buy their implants and end up as cold inhuman killing machines, while adepts are wise and pure warriors...

But with power hungry mages, magic becomes something as rotten as everything else. Streetsams sell their humanity, mages and adepts sell their souls and nobody is pure... at least nobody who's still alive.

I separate out Karma and Skill.

If they use the skill, they start to acquire skill points.

However, understand that the SR rules are empirical in nature and are meant as a control on player silliness (that eternal "you're interfering with my fantasy" problem). In my games, it's more of a roleplaying thing. The "skill points" are fuzzy; when the character is ready for the skill increase, then it just occurs. I do keep a tally of successful and unsuccessful uses...both count toward learning. Sometimes, it's very clear the character is ready and it just happens. Sometimes, the character will have to spend money on training, use the skill a whole bunch of times (and fail most of them) before it goes up...it all depends upon context within the story, player goals, and drama and "dwama."

I treat karma as special. It feeds magic and special stuff. It's tied to party success, roleplaying, and exceptional individual accomplishment within the story context. Screw up as a bunch of lone wolves and the PC's will be shopping for karma vitamins at the local Stuffer Shack.

The easiest way to LOSE karma is to start babbling about SR stats when it's NOT clear you're in character. I really, truly, hate this sort of conversation (don't even get me started on on Vampire players who do this). Go play Warhammer if you want to talk about stats.

Since Karma is "supernatural" it's very easy for the GM to manipulate...carrot or stick...it's up to the players.

Most of this comes down to training your players. When you get to the point where you don't even assign XP anymore, then you're golden. If they're constantly asking, then there are some attitude adjustments that need to be made.

I've used a House Rule for this since back in SR2. Our awakened characters can gain a certain amount of karma from kills they make using magic. (Varies. .15 karma per essence must make an opposed Will test as the moment of death). Which shows how "dark" the mage is. I record this karma separately as a good indicator of how "evil" they are. This is an automatic test and requires no real "activation" or forethought.

I do use a variation of the rule on p.264. The characters can disregard the rule and spend the karma flat out. Or they can be taught/instructed. In that case the amount of karma can be reduced by as much as half. -1 Karma per success from their instructors roll to teach them. They also have to make the roll described on p.264.

I have yet to apply this to my SR4 game, but I think I will.

My sam can. SG Link in eye + Armtech MGL 12 = Exploding heads.

I understand what youa re saying. Being Karmic black holes is part of being a mage. In SR4 it is more so for everyone with the skill/att caps and huge expense of raising skill groups and attributes. My sam doesn't have buckets of karma just lying around, there is allways a new skill he needs to get or improve. Mages it is just less so, you start wth almost all the skills you need, now you just need to improve them. Sam's start with maybe a quarter of the skills they need, and those skills are woefully low.

Imo just get some lvl 5 skillwires. costs you 1 magic and you will never have to worry about non magical skills anymore and their cheap enough to even get at delta grade so plenty of room for other nice thingies like a pain editor.
Or just don't put every point of karma you get into initiation + magic.

As a house rule I like to hand out knowledge skill points as rewards. I tend to give equal karma awards to all my players at the end of a run, but if one player does something amazing I give knowledge skills in keeping with whatever they did. So a brilliant plan might net them points in a tactical or security procedure skill, or an amazing RPing encounter might give some sort of cultural/societal knowledge skill.
A single point in a knowledge skill can be worth a handful of karma, so it's a really nice award, yet it's virtually impossible to unbalance your game this way, even if one player earns several while another rarely does. Knowledge skill are supposed to flesh out a character, and this sort of ensures that the sheet stays consistent with a characters behavior/history without asking them to take precious karma away from their important not-dying skills.

Of course I realize this is vaguely off-topic, since you no doubt just wanted active skills.

I guess another aspect of it depends on how often you do a run. Our group pulls a run once a week game time usually. Average award for that week is 3-5 karma.

That means 12-20 karma a month. That may be high, who knows. How often do you all run?

How fast do you really need to improve your magic? I mean the initial magic you set for your mage represents YEARS of development. Yes in our games you can blow all your karma and raise your magic rating every 2 months. Looking at that from a real world perspective is incredibly fast development. Hell, at that point every corp sec mage you run across should have a magic of 10 or so.

Obviously that does not happen because people do more than just read about magic.

I think people should stop and think about how fast the characters can develop and really think about what all they want to do with their characters. No metamagic this month timmy, you need to raise the pistol skill from 2-3.

I a group I once played in, you got a little point every time you used a skill. IOf you were to improve the skill, those points would rank as additional successes on the learning test (meaning you get around the test if you increase a skill you have used). In SR4, those dots could easily be additional hits on the extended test, and, as in SR3, reflect experience gained by practice. This made learning times much more usable and nicely refleced that it's harder and requires more conscious effort to increase skill in areas not of your personal expertise than what you do anyway.

That's assuming the security mages feel the need to Initiate as soon as possible. Also, Shadowrunners need to improve to survive, but what motivates Corp Sec? Sure, some may initiate a few times, learn some metamagic, but I get the feeling they will never be as motivated as shadowrunners.

Some have proposed that you would find a great deal of super mojo from the academic/scholarly crowd, but even then, they lack the battle experience necessary to really compete with runners.

as moon-hawk does, I also hand out some freebie karma points to spend on knowledge skills this reflecting character development.

I certainly couldn't ask the people who were struggling to spend every little point of karma to round-up some well developed characters with some skills they had to leave over at chargen to also spend some Karma to level up their knowledge. I think I am a GM with a heart.

Cheers!

Max

Right, and they spend much more time coming up with customized metamagics that do useless stuff like swap around their spirit/spell category mappings, or let them analyze their own spellcasting more easily, or let them be a part of a cyberzombie-creation team or something.

This is the Cyberpunk 2020 way. It seems to work well. I just prefer to make it more fuzzy and rely upon roleplaying using the "points" as an indicator for an increment.