My derailment in the "beginning shadowruner needs advice" thread got me thinking about the advancement of cash heavy classes and what you can do to balance them with Karma hogs.


Now IME one point of Karma is worth about 15 to 20,000 nuyen to a Street Sam, a Rigger, even some Hackers. Now lets imagine a group of 'typical' players. say there are 5 members, they average 5 karma per run. They also divide any cash rewards (Johnson payouts ect.) equally. Now, say to keep this group 'balanced' and his Sam players happy the GM starts handing out more and more nuyen for each run. Eventually the Sam gets his fancy ware, and the rigger gets is dream car but by then the physad has initiated to level 2 or 3 and the mage powerful enough that he is beginning to make them redundant in a lot of situations. They're also easily affording the payments on a hi rise condo in Bellveu while the cash hogs are living in a warehouse.

To equal this out I came up with a crazy idea. ShadowCash.

ShadowCash fills a metagame roll sort of like Karma. No person in game ever hands you over a point of karma, and likewise no one ever hands you over a stack of ShadowCash. ShadowCash is awarded at the end of each adventure, or whenever you award Karma. ShadowCash is worth the same amount and Nuyen but it works very differently. First of all, Shadowcash cannot be used for anything but very large purchases. Stuff like expensive ware, armour plated vehicles, even big guns, whatever the GM doesn't want freely available on the street. To spend ShadowCash a player only needs to state that he is doing so, and what he wants to buy. The GM then introduces it into the campaign as soon as he feels is reasonable. How exactly the introduction goes is up to the GM. Maybe the Rigger has an opportunity to steal and convert an armoured security truck, or the Sam finds a cybertorso in the Ares facility they are raiding, or the Mage finds a useful foci or summoning materials on the body of a sec mage. They may still need to spend a small amount of actual nueyn on them before they can use them, the Sam might need to pay a streetdoc to install the war and the rigger might have to pay a hacker to wipe the van from the records, and a few other modifications. These costs should be kept as low as possible however. If the GM wants to charge a lot for the service then he might want to lower the ShadowCash cost of the item by the same amount. Anything awarded with ShadowCash is considered the sole property of the character who spent the money. It is not the 'groups' van it is the riggers van and he can do with it as he pleases. ShadowCash cannot be transferred between characters. There is no group ownership of a Thunderbird just because the mage heavy group has a million nuyen sitting in their ShadowCash deposit boxes.

Day to day living costs, bribes, requests for help and everything worth less than at least a few thousand nuyen are still drawn from the players real nuyen just like normal. This means that the GM can award a great deal more ShadowCash than regular cash if he wants to keep the game "street".

Calculating ShadowCash.

The first step of calculating how much ShadowCash to award is to determine how much cash you feel a point of Karma is 'worth'. I've just been using my numbers (20,000:1) in this thread because they're what I feel the balance point is between a the ultimate karma hog (the mage) and the ultimate cash hog (the sam). This theory is untested though so use it at your own risk. If you want to try this set the number where you feel comfortable 1000:1, 5000:1, 100,000:1 whatever floats your boat. Think of how much cash you're usually happy with doling out and go from there.

The second step is to decide how much Nuyen you want to actually give your players. You figure you want them having a tough time making ends meet, constantly hunting for next months rent, but still becoming more and more skilled as they advance. With this in mind you decide you want to give them a 'piddly' 500-1000 nuyen for every run with 3 or 4 runs per month. Assuming he set the nuyen-karma ratio at 20,000:1 this means that he needs to give the runners each 19,500 ShadowNuyen for every point of Karma they earn. This means that the Street Sam will be able to 'afford' a 300,000 nuyen set of Beta Wired Reflexes III (my example in the other thread) after 15 points of Karma. In other words, about the same time a Mage is likely to be initiating. Given the split between ShadowCash and real cash the likely amount of Karma necessary will be 16-18 but still, it helps level the playing field. Just like how a mage needs to spend some of his Karma doing stuff like improving skills a Sam will need to spend a portion of his resources keeping up his lifestyle and other needs.

This means that as the campaign advances and the nuyen awards increase, the ShadowCash rewards will decrease. Every time you award Karma look at how much nuyen you've handed out since the last time Karma was awarded and subtract that number from the amount of ShadowCash you award at the same time. Say the team finishes a run that nets them each 5 Karma and 20,000 nuyen, then you give each player 80,000 in Shadow Cash.

If you feel like getting particularly creative you could even make players go on special side quests for particularly expensive items similar to how a mage often needs to go on a side quest to initiate. It could be a run on an MCT shipment that apparently has a particularly hot piece of ware that the Sam wants or whatever. If it would be disruptive to the game though just have it fall into their lap over the course of a run.

Advantages:

This lets you control the atmosphere of the game. You can keep it as dark and gritty and hand to mouth as you want, or make the runners crazy jet setting special operatives for hire, or anything in between and still be confidant that the characters power level will be relatively equal.

It encourages (or at least doesn't discourage) the runners from taking on 'pro-bono' work for each other, contacts, friends, and hooks in their backstory since as long as they earn karma they are still getting some sort of cash reward.


Possible Weaknesses:

It is a relatively useless beanie to karma heavy classes like Mages and Physads. Sure they'll get a few things out of it like more powerful Foci but eventually that'll max out for them and this would most certainly earlier than would normally be the case.

Some classes that rely on a more even spread of Karma and Nuyen like Riggers or Deckers might begin to advance even faster though double dipping.

It also requires a gentleman's agreement between the GM and players that various 'get rich quick' schemes (like carjacking americars) simply won't work. The players might try as hard as they can to find that 'big payday' but it just won't ever pan out. This might actually make a good overall plot. A scheming batch of runners, always on the lookout for a big score but something always gets in their way. The GM might also want to introduce a huge payday to the runners at one point. That might be amusing too, especially if the campaign has been going on for a while. Instead of the Beverly Hillbillies you could have the Bellveu Barrens Rats. The key is though that the group will be able to make these jumps at about the same time.

Anyhow... I spent far longer writing that up than I'd originally intended. If you've stuck with me this long I'd love to hear your thoughts.

What about massive rebates on certain types of gear, granted by appropiate contacts? What you are really playing on is the price of implants/matrix/vehicular gear.

That might be an excellent way to explain the spending of ShadowCash. The real purpose of it though is to gives GM's and players a nice yardstick to measure what kind of gear Sams should be getting vs. straight forward GM fiat which can be tough to implement consistently.

This is an interesting idea. I've implemented it before in the form of favors. You do a pro bono job for this guy and he'll set you up with favors in the future. So right now the crew (6 PCs) are doing a job for about $35k because the Johnson is their fixer, who is giving them a huge discount on gear purchases.

Your method makes that more flexible. They could do a job for the old lady down the street and it transfers to buying stuff from their fixer. That may be good, since it allows for more more available plot hooks, it also makes things sort of awkward since it doesn't make so much logical sense as to why the old lady down the street is helping you buy a panther assault cannon. At minimum, I'd change the name to 'favors' or somesuch, to represent that you're swapping a favor with the old lady for a favor with your fixer. The amount of favors a character can give is based on that contact's Connection level, so the old lady is a bit more limited than the fixer.

Well, first of all if you want to up the cash in a game this is actually a clever enough idea.

If you wanted to do this an idea to add could be a karma to shadowcash conversion, but I'd shy away from that because skill expansion is a good thing in game.

A couple things. First of all if I recall correction in 4th free spirits still are on the prowl for other peoples karma (which in the Earthdawn sense is sort of "real" as opposed to just a game mechanic). They will pay cash for that if need be. So cash for karma is already RAW.



Second I disagree with your cash/karma ratio. At least the high end. As I recall you got it by comparing the most efficiant gain for karma cost thing there is (initiating the first time) with a very innefficient cash equivalent (the horribly expensive beta wired III). And saying they should be about equivalent.

Anyway the point is that it isn't a fundamental cash/karma imbalance, it's that SR loves mages. We already knew that.

However other people are spending 25 karma to get a 1 point increase in some active skill group.

Even consider the adept. If they want to go from a softmax to increased reflaxes 3 they'll need to initiate and raise their magic attribute 5 times. That's 212 karma. A sammy type could get a synaptic booster III for 240,000. And with the more generus bio/cyber mixing rules it shouldn't be that hard to fit in.

Beyond that Deckers aren't saving up for excalibers anymore. 8,000 and they've got their response 6. Drones are also cheap for riggers. Big ticket vehicles should probably be group purchases.

Personally I don't think the missions do a bad job of giving cash.

Nezumi: my only concern with that is that it might become a bit too complex to easily keep track of. The old lady isn't 'giving' the players their ShadowCash anymore than she is 'giving' them karma for helping her out. It's more abstract that that. ShadowCash is more representative of a sort of 'luck' than it is anything that directly relates to the game itself just like how karma is an abstract representation of 'experience'.

For example: The street sam might just happen to be in the right place at the right time and find his new toy as part of a run. Sometimes he might hear from his fixer that there is a firesale on a piece of gear he wants because someone hijacked a large shipment. Sometimes he might get a tipoff as to where he can find it, or any one of a million other ways that gear might trickle down to the street. ShadowCash can cover all those explanations depending on what suits the campaign at a particular moment. The runners themselves have no IC knowledge of what this ShadowCash stuff is any more than they know what Karma is or how many HitPoints they have in a D&D game. It's not awarded to the character, it's awarded to the player and takes on a more metagame role.

Sunnyside: Keep in mind this is an early draft. Even my 20,000:1 ratio is just based on my gut feeling about Sams and how much cash they need to keep up with other team members. The ratio can easally be lowered, in fact if I were to experiment with it I would likely start with 10,000:1 or even 5000:1 until I saw how it affected the groups advancement...

I like the idea, but I like it more if you wouldn't tell the players you are doing this. After you have banked enough shadow cash you give it to them as a reward during a run. There happens to be a run on a cyberware clinic and boom the samie gets his nice piece of gear w/o having to pay through the nose. You set up a wish list for characters, and give them their happy go lucky stuff while at the same time you can thread it into the story.

That's what I was going to say--it's a sweet concept, but works better (IMO) as a ruler for the GM. I'd say if there's an imbalance between the characters--and it isn't the player's fault--that it should be the GM's job anyway to introduce "random cool stuff finds" like this to balance things. That way you get the effect without breaking the illusion too much with metagamey-ness.

As for making sure the players get something they like rather than an expensive trophy they aren't interested in, just encourage them to talk about their gear aspirations in-character.

Rigger: "Man, you know what's really cool? That new armored van ares came out with. I'd love to get my hands on one of those babies..."

GM, a few sessions later: "You run into the parking garage, corpsec hot on your heels. Looking around, you notice one of those cool armored vans parked by the exit, and some dumb fragger left the keys in the ignition..."

Except that karma isn't just a metagame consept, it's an real an definable thing.

WOAHHHH!!! Thata's some killer Deepweed! Don't troll that joint, chummer!

Are you describing the Hindu/Buddhist concept of Karma or Shadowrun's use of it? The religious use of the word isn't relevant and in terms of Shadowrun I'm not sure how a character would be able to define in character how much Karma they have any more than they could define how many boxes they have in their physical damage track. That places it (with the exception of free spirit karma/cash exchanges) firmly in the realm of a metagame concept.

In other words it's perfectly reasonable for a character to go to his fixer and say "Hey, I'd like a GMC bulldog. I have 35,000 nuyen sitting in an offshore account that I could use."

It is conceptually impossible for a character to go to his fixer and say "Hey, I'd like you to put me in touch with a martial arts expert. I have twenty points of Karma burning a hole in my pocket and I'd like to improve my unarmed combat skill from five to six."

It'd be like going to your community collage and saying "Hey. I'd like to take an art class. My work as an accountant has earned me six karma so I'd like to use it to open up a new skill."

Mages use karma for so many thinks, that they must be able to tell how much karma they have.

And street samurai use agility for many things... does it follow that if you walk up to a street sam and ask him how agile he is he'd say. "Oh. Well I just recently installed some muscle toner so my agility is 8 now." Chances are he'd say. "Well I can shoot a quarter out of the air at 20 feet so I'd say I'm pretty damn agile."

Likewise if you went to a mage and asked how he knew when he was ready to initiate he wouldn't say "Well after that run on the ares facility I got those three Karma that let me initiate." He'd say something like "After the run on the ares facility I felt comfortable enough with my power that I was ready to explore it deeper."

I think it's more that people in SR don't know what karma is, or how to detect/define it. Sort of like manna prior to the awakening. Spirits know what it is, so clearly it's something that exists in-game--it's just not well understood by the metahuman scientific/magical community. It's like essence or the idea of a soul. We may not understand what it is, but clearly there's something there, because certain situations can deplete it.

To Mäx: Personally, I have never been too happy with the double role of Karma as experience and its other uses. I always feel sorry for the Talismongers. That aside, I think it is quite common for GMs to allow minus Karma for binding, if it fits the plot line. So, the way I see it, they do not know how much they have, but feel when they give from themselves (lose Karma) or feel too drained to invest any more of it (when the Karma does not suffice for binding and the GM does not allow minus Karma).

I think ShadowCash is a brilliant idea as a helper for GMs to stay ahead of who deserves how much in a game that doesn't hand out too much karma.

As for the ratio:
The IP 4 is the maxxed out speed and it should be expensive. PhysAds have it around 100 Karma (if aiming for it). Technically it costs them 79 Karma (For Magic 7 and 8 plus Initiation) Sams should have it a little later, after all, the bio version usually frees up Essence and is about as expensive (240k) and thus gives them versatility instead of making all further choices even more expensive. So, I would say 120 Karma. Which brings us to a 1:2000 ratio. At 1:3,000 they get it at 80 Karma. At 1:2,500 they get is at 96 Karma. But don't leave out of sight that the Sam will improve through Karma while the PhysAd is stuck with luxury life style. However, if you allow karma-for-cash the 1:3,000 hits it quite precisely. On the other hand, Attribute boosts for the Sam are much cheaper than for the PhysAd, so you might want to err on the expensive side.

Mages can have the IP 4 from much earlier by the Improved Reflexes / Sustained focus combo, they just have to buy and bind the Force 4 focus. But mages are imbalanced anyway, so I just leave them out of the comparison. In my opinion, Improved reflexes should require 2 hits per level of Reflexes, so IP 3 comes with 4 hits and IP 4 with 6 hits. That way they don't outperform everyone from the beginning. The cost of a sustained IP 4 I. reflexes is then 60k for the Focus and 12 Karma for binding and a nice dice pool to make the 6 hits. Still less than half of what the others are have to pay

Can you clarify your math a touch? Improved Reflexes Rating 3 (for IP 4) costs 5 magic points. Characters can start with it.

Plus if you want to buy up your IPs it is probably cheaper karma wise to install bioware and take the hit to your magic then invest in magic 5 over the long run.... I mean it just doesn't make sense to throw 79 to 100 karma at the situation.

If you are going to use shadowcash to handle all major purchases, why aren't you dropping the tedious accounting invoving the fact that you had to spend 50Y to bribe the bouncer? SR already takes a major step in this direction with the idea of the lifestyle. You don't have to keep track of exactly how much you pay for groceries, or in rent, or whatever; you just have stuff based on how much you are paying out in lifestyle costs.

But what makes it different from regular nuyen then? The idea is that you hand out enough normal nuyen to keep the game at whatever level of atmosphere suits you best, and then hand out Shadowcash to compensate. If you completely replaced nuyen with ShadowCash then you're back at square one having just changed the name. Another way to look at it is this.

Imagine the players have a shadowy benefactor of some sort. They could actually be members of a special forces team or shadow organization if you want it to be obvious. ShadowCash in that instance might represent how much money the organization is willing to invest in the PC's. It's a sort of 'reputation meter' in that case.

A more abstract variety is required the further down on the foodchain the runners move. If they're gangers, then their 'shadow benefactor' is just plain luck, being in the right place at the right time for awesome ware to simply fall into their laps.

In both of those cases the players will likely receive enough money to maintain a particular lifestyle. The gangers might be squatting in a warehouse, the special forces soldiers being kept in comfortable barracks with all the facilities they could need. At the end of the day though, both will have access to similar gear.

Except the little old lady isn't getting you gear. She is the grandmother of some mob guy who has a contact in <insert company> who owes the mob guy a favor.

The mob guy loves his grandmother and he finds out that the runners helped out his favorite grandmother on something big and didn't screw her over. Being a grateful grandson, he delivers the Panther cannon to the runner via a "dropped off the back of the truck" shipment. The cannon comes with a note: "What goes around, comes around. Thanks for helping granny. Call me @ ###-###-#### for more jobs."

This method can give plot hooks out the yin-yang.

I think it would be better if the little old lady is actually a triad crime boss. Thankful for helping her out with her little situations she will drop you a bone now and then when their gang gets a particularly good score.

Maybe you could have even stoped her from getting shot during a combat scene where she was actually in her home turf, and didn't have her body guards with her during the time of the shooting or maybe they were not packing firearms at the time (what if she didn't actually get shot at but just saw you tearing up the opposition.) This got you set up with the first gig that she hired you to do.

Anyways I think there is some point at which karma has some sort of form to it. It might for the most part be intangible, but when you can't bind a focus and suddenly you can, or use it to help with summoning or binding spirits how the heck do you suddenly know it's time? When you use karma on a skill or stat it does take actual in game time to learn it, but mages can go 'poof' and use it to the fullest extent. Something tells me now that magic is around that karma is tangible, but probably not easily definable.

On the Karma as a real thing arguments. For me that comes out of Earthdawn for one and also out of the adventure Halequins Back where at one point you can actually hold your Karma in your hand as poker chips and pass them back and forth if you like. This ties in with dragons being able to mess with Edge/Karma in SR.

Think of it like strength. John Q Public doesn't know how strong he is. But somebody who is really into weightlifting probably knows quantitatively exactly how strong they are as they know how much weight they can lift in a wide range of excercises/machines.

Similarly some things like cyberware essence loss are probably quantized. Not neccessarily how we do it. They might have a scale from 100 to 0. However some things, like how Karma is gained, and how much is needed to raise agility, are totally unknown except to maybe a couple dozen people.

Back on subject I do like the idea of a behind-the-screen ledger of cash/karma to see if something fishy is coming up. That could either be through the GM giving too many lean or fat runs or because they players are horrible roleplayers but always keep their eye on the cash or vice versa.

Though bear in mind that whatever you think an appropriate ratio is it shouldn't be constant. SR is structured that you don't get more and more karma as your missions get harder, while your cash flow does go up.

Part of the problem when runners do not have enough money sometimes it just turns into "SR deadmans boots." Not generally the best thing in a game. The best amount of real cash and shadowcash ratio is probably best described as "the players are not well off on money, but they are not stripping everything off of every single person they kill or maim.

If shadowcash is going to be used to by anything important, with regular nuyen only being kept around to buy happy meals, plunk into the pay toilet, and so on, then why keep track of regular nuyen at all? Unless it's a plot point that the characters don't have enough pay-toilet money, they always have enough pay toilet money. This way they don't have to keep track of whether they have 37.5 or 375 in pay-toilet money.

I think he was talking about shadow cash to buy high end items. Not happy meals. It allows for the GM to pay the player 2-5k in a run, but at the same time doesn't screw over the cyber sammie, rigger, or hacker in the team. You can still use that small amount of made to buy ammo, grenades, weapons, sins, or other small end purchases (like food, bus, pay toilets,) but in the end if it's high karma low money w/o any type of big reward for just the cyber/bio monkeys, hackers, or riggers, then everyone in the group should play a mage, adept, or mystic adept.

On a side note our games just scale up the difficulty for the team and generally each run nets each player anywhere from 20-50k per team member. Some of that needs to be fenced off though, so it does require some moving and shaking to get that much.

The problem is where do you draw the line when using shadowcash.

0-15,000 = regular for purchases
and 15,001+ = shadowcash?

MasterofM pretty much nailed it. Shadowcash is used for individual expensive goods.

Want Elastic Joints? Use your ShadowCash.

Need a new SIN? Use your real cash.

Want an uparmoured bulldog? Use ShadowCash.

Need to bribe the dock manager to turn a blind eye when your shipment comes in? Use real cash.

Ect. Ect...

Masterofm also has a good point in that it is a challange to figure out where to draw the line. It'll take playtesting to figure out what makes sense...