I've read about people doing this in a couple of threads, but I want to get a general consensus. Do GM's offer karma for nuyen? Is it broken? What is the exchange rate people have found works the best?

Cash for Karma I think was mentioned in previous editions (Or perhaps was just a house rule on the SR MUX I used to roll on... ). I was never a fan of the rule personally, and if I were to implement such a rule it would be a case by case exchange rate, depending how much cash was flying around in the game at the time.

I'm not such a fan because it is kind of unfair to certain builds (Street Sammies and your average Adept), and eventually you are going to have a magician want to sit in his magician house and crank out focuses, or a decker to go on long boring paydata hunts all to sell and for karma points.

One related house rule I have stumbled over though was a Karma system that awarded Karma to characters for earning certain figures. Encouraged a realistic greed amongst the players.
I think it was something like 1 Karma every 20,000 earned, again older edition, and you would be running into the same problems.
Perhaps a poll would be helpful in soliciting wider response.

Edit: Your mom ate my punctuation.

I find that Karma for nuyen can be applicable if you follow two basic concepts:

1) Anyone can do it as long as it fits their character. A holy man could tithe a certain amount to the church to recieve his hevean clout. An evil man could fund a local terroist squad to bring about change in his favor. A scientistic man could donate to a ongoing project to witness it's final outcome. No one said karma is just good, or just bad; but a balance of both. An amount of monitary resources to a group or cause to illict a physical result of held belief could be seen as giving cash for nuyen.

2) The amount of Karma is rote and insignificant. The religous view is always: not how much you give but how much you got to start with. Thousands of people give to the Red Cross and disease cures daily, making the over-all effect a spread out success. In a game with an inhierant time schedule (i.e. rolls for recovery, rolls for fencing, rolls for availability all work off time intervals), I would say that a devout giver should recieve no more than 1 karma a week for his weekly tithe and ritual. As a house rule the Game master could change that, make it larger or smaller, tie in contacts like a local priest or scientist on a project, and "Run" ideas could come fromthese sources like defending a soup kitchen from a group of gangers.

Everyday people advance in skill and power, so everyday day people have to have a source of karma to do so. Albeit, thier rewards may not be as high as a Shadowrunner; then again, a Mr. Johnson, on top of his corporate carrer, gives to charity, sponsors scholarships, goes to church and tithes, spends quality time with his family, and hires shadowrunners for missions of mercy. I would bet that guy earns tons of Karma.

As a gamemaster, Karma is the amount of effect a person has in the world, good or bad. Any resource has the potential for earning it.

My group only gets to play around 8hours out of every two weeks and the game that shall not be named has cut into that time lately as well. In this situation and only because of this situation I'm considering instituting a 1/5 ratio.

1 Karma= 5,000
5000 = 1 Karma

Similar situation with the "other game" actually awarding lvl's in place of experience. For games that are short on time I've come to feel its only way you'll get to see any real advancement in a single off mission/campaign.

Seen lots of other methods/numbers on boards here and bottom line, like anything else in P&P games is really up to the GM. What works for you.

This is how I'm going to handle the Karma for Cash and so on.

As long as there is a half assed story reason behind it, anything can go in the home game. And even that is moot.

Give me a good story and I'll let it fly unless it is something insane like an ascetic mage donating all his profit all the time and living a street lifestyle and using his ton of extra karma to far outstrip the party in power.

Chris

The rusty metal stairs reverberate with your every footstep as the ephemeral woman leads you down into the dank basement that houses the Seattle Exchange. Down and down you go, deeper than you believed possible. As you descend, you begin to hear voices. Faint at first, they soon rise to a cacophony and keep rising. By the time you reach the floor you can hear nothing but a single deafening roar forged from the voices of hundreds of traders each trying to yell louder than the others. And then it stops.

The woman tilts her head and smiles. Her lithe, dexterous, beautiful fingers scribe words in the air in ASL with all of the elegance of a swan swimming on a lake. "I'm sorry", her fingers flash, "I know that the noise can be jarring to people who don't have the ability to tune it out. This sphere of silence exists to make our clients more comfortable. Would you mind if I touched your thoughts? It will make this transaction much easier."

Your response if terse and to the point. Her amazing fingers reach out towards your face first one and then two and then three cradling your temple. And very suddenly her voice reverberates in your head "Intimate, isn't it?" A part of you, a very large part of you, wonders what other miracles she could work with those fingers, what other places could she touch you. But you know what she is, you know why she makes you think that way, and how, and that alone prevents you from acting on the intense desire to melt into her arms and beg her to love you. You force thoughts of business to the fore of your mind and experience the peculiar sensation of those thoughts entering the mystical link that she created between you both. "Of course", is her simple reply.

The floor of The Exchange resembles the floor of the old NYSE, before the quake of '05 - or it would if the old NYSE was populated by vagrants, criminals, and all sorts of other creatures which have no business in the well-lit places that give false comfort to fools. Among the unwashed mob are occasionally sprinkled young entrepreneurs, middle class familymen at wit's end, overworked wagemages, and even a Mr. Johnson or two looking to hone their negotiation skills.

Many trade the traditional way, using slips of paper to represent their commodity. This is necessary for dealing with those traders who have neither eyes not the ability to use electronic aids, who cover a significant portion of the floor. Many more trade electronically. The radio signals bouncing around the cavernous underground chamber dwarf the voices in their volume. The countless waves of binary numbers flying back and forth are enough to drive a technomancer insane, or at least make one ill. The spaces around the trading floor are rented by professional brokerage houses, providing both rest for their traders and a central place to coordinate their trades as clients place orders from all over the world and a place to tend to their injured. Most of the traders on the floor work for one brokerage firm or another. Some are shadowy branches of the big firms. Others purely deal in these particular sorts of commodities.

You aren't here to trade. You've already done that from the convenience of your own home. You're here to settle up. Stocks are easy to trade. It can all be done electronically. The commodity you bought, however, is much more personal in nature and must be exchanged face-to-face, figuratively speaking. The buyer is the only one that actually has to do any facing.

The seller is sitting on a leather lounge in this very well furnished brokerage office of sorts, waiting for you. He is a handsome young man, nude except for some worn out old shoes several sizes too small for him so that his toes stick out their split fronts. In the magically enforced silence, you couldn't exchange pleasantries even if you wanted to.

Your broker kisses you without warning, her tongue slipping into your mouth and twirling around you're in a way that you never thought possible. When she pulls away you feel it - the power - the hunger. You feel like you could eat the whole world, and that gnawing hunger in the pit of your stomach so desperately wants to. You can barely resist the urge to throw your broker down to the ground, to ravish her, to force her to feel passion and the it until she is dead and dry. And she knows this, of course she does. She is not an amateur; she is a professional and this is a duty she has performed many times now. Her eyes lock onto yours and the playful beauty they once possessed is replaced by a boundless sternness. You don't need to here her thought through the link to know that she wants you to remain clam, that is is commanding you to remain calm. The thought of being commanded by her sends an odd and unexpected chill of pleasure down your spine.

She mounts the buyer and kisses him, even more deeply than she kissed you. He opens her top and fondles her as they grind together. Silent moans escape their lips and you can feel their passion as if it were a tangible thing. Or, rather you can feel his passion - she is cold and calculating, with an edge of whimsy, like a cat toying with the dinner mouse.

"Drink", she says in your mind. And you do. His many lusts are like fine wines and are fully intend so slowly savor each and every one of them. Yet you can't help but gore yourself all at once. Time slows and then ceases to exist altogether as the world fades away, first the trading floor, then the broker, and then even your seller, until there is nothing left but you and the delicious emotions which you devourer with your eyes as if they were hungry mouths.

"STOP!", the harsh command fills your head and you obey without thinking - not that you would think of ignoring it; the very idea of disobeying her is, at the moment, sacrilege to the vast majority of your being and your rational mind is buried beneath an inebriation that no human concoction could match. "If you take more than you paid for, you'll have to give it back, and that wouldn't be a pleasant experience at all".

The power vanishes; you can no longer feel the emotions around you and you no longer hunger for them. But you still can't think straight. Your kind, beautiful, predatory broker guides you to sit beside the unconscious naked man and tells you to rest for a moment until your head clears.



- And that, chummer, is how buying Karma works in SR4. At least, that's how it should work.

Thanks for the replies. My group meets once a week, but we have a definite time line by which the campaign will be done (when school is over), so it'd be nice to have a good amount of advancement done in that time. This exchange being broken isn't much of an issue as those who'd seek to abuse it won't be coming up with good fluff to support their karma gain.

An idea I've done with my campaign may work for you. Using similar principles of a tithe in church. 10% of the current nuyen a character has will grant the character 1 karma. This will keep the characters from buying more then 10 karma at any one time. Even then, I will limit when the characters are able to spend their money in this way. For example, they will not be able to purchase during a run, or in unfamiliar territory.

It is presumed that characters wishing to purchase karma, are doing that by giving their hard earned cash to a charity, cause, or benefit that only the character is familiar with. As such, there will be times when, if enough money is spent, certian eyebrows will raise. Money, especially lots of money can attract notice. Also, this kind of spending will almost always leave a data trail. Most good shadowrunners will be able to prevent the worst from happening, but they can slip up -- watch for it, shadowrunners can become lax in their downtime.

You could make spending money for karma a run into itself. The only issue to my logic (though limited it may be) is the reverse of the rule: nuyen for karma. Any game mechanic I use for he character to gain money for spent remaining karma has simply slipped my mind. It will very likely include their total karma gained, street cred or something like that.

Before anyone responds, understand that I've been playing this game since the first printing, and it has always been a wild ride! This will be the first time I've used that mechanic, as I've seen the original game mechanic badly abused. Also, I may not allow people to get money for karma, as the necessity will not likely apply. Street Sammi's looking for that new peice of delta gear may just have to run for it. Mages, Adepts and (imo) especially Mystic Adepts advance far slower than the average mundane. Technomancers are hosed even more, given their complex forms is not initially treated the same as spells when they advance or buy new ones with karma. This could be unbalancing (I know), given that the rule can be abused. However, as a GM, I will limit or stop the ability to spend to keep my game balanced. There are only 2 players in my game that take advantage of this. I take advantage of their money issues.

Lemme know what ya think!

What about cash Or karma? If the rigger hacks a drone or the sam nicks a new gun, that can be a significant improvement for the character. If the mage and the technomancer steal a duffel bag full of gold, they might not have a lot they can do with it. Maybe it would help balance advancement rates if gear-dependent characters had to choose OOC whether to get their IC rewards in usable goods or karma.
For example, the characters manage to steal a semi full of cyberware. After the run, everyone gets 10 karma. The shaman is looking to learn some new spells and takes the full 10 points. The sam, meanwhile, already has his gun arm unscrewed and is upgrading himself out of the loot. He decides to take a reduced karma reward to able to keep the equipment. Everyone is, at the end, more effective to a similar degree.
They can take the rest of the loot and liquidate it for lifestyle expenses, block parties, charitable donations, bribes, or other expenses that don't improve the mechanical viability of the characters.

Free spirits.



A free spirit with either the wealth power or has a steady revenue stream from whatever source would no doubt be willing to literally purchase said karma from a player.

what i currently do is only allow the magically active and technomancer exchange money for karma at a rate of 5000 per karma point, and even then it can only be spent on bonding foci, learning new spells, and complex forms, not perfect but seems to work, i experiment with going the other way, but i ended up with quite a few maxxed out street sams it was way too easy to come with a couple hundred thousand nuyen after a few runs

Hehe, yeah, that could work. But definitely not all the time. Free Spirits with a lot of karma can be all kinds of bad in this game.

Why do you think I'm using Sleazy?

My approach to Money for Karma is actually 50,000 Nuyen to buy 1 Karma, to a maximum of 1/2 the Karma the Character has actually earned.

Reasons:

In previous editions of Shadowrun, you could use 1 unit of Orichalcum to get a -1 Karma reduction to the cost of a first bonding of a Focus if used during the enchanting process. Orichalcum currently costs 50,000 Nuyen per unit. This sounds like a auspicious number to start from.

Look as how much money it would cost a character to be able to raise his Agility by +1 compared to the cost of buying bioware to increase Agility by the same +1. Considering that the Karma method costs no Essence, I like to compare it to Beta and Delta grade bioware to judge the value of the Karma gained.

I plan on doing 25,000 Nuyen for each Karma spent, but none of my players has ever asked how much money they could get for spending Karma.

Only two of my players has bought much Karma with this method so far. the Magician that wanted a better power focus than he currently had the Karma for, and the Adept that wanted to Initiate for more powers due to his refusal to ever get any Cyberware or Bioware.

My players are also at the 200ish Karma Range currently.


- Umbra