Ok RC has.



Which means if you take 30BP of In Debt, you owe 45,000 to whomever with a 10% interest accruing on balance.
Generally when you want to get rid of a negative quality, you pay it off with karma, but if you manage to make say about 50,000 nuyen in your first month, conceivably, you could pay off your principal + first month's interest.

Would you still have to pay off the BP in karma?

I would require karma pay off, yeah. Until then, the person is still known as someone who was in deep with the Mob or the Yaks or whatever and that may make them unlikely to loan him money, do favors, etc.

This is Shadowrun though. You might not be allowed to pay it all off at once. They might want to squeeze you, and the interest is not 10%. It's not a bank and your not getting off that easy. Generally that kind of interest is 100-200% back by the first month... at least. Lending to the mob is not a bank and a Shadowrun bank is probably owned by the mob. I have had cards that had an interest of 30% and that is what an actual official bank was trying to rape me with for the interest.

I would say you pay it off with karma.

Yah... I should have posted this in the missions forum...

How that impacts in a home game is different from a missions one... If I pay the loan shark back and give him 10% interest for the current month... he get's 49,500 for the 30,000 he loaned me... he's making good money period.

I'd also like to point out that he's got almost 50,000 he can now loan out to somebody else and get about 82,000 back from the next month if its paid off...

That's a 40% margin on the first loan and the second.


Also note that the other things your talking about aren't quantified in the rules.. there isn't a street cred impact for going in debt... the only negative connotation is if you don't pay the interest payment each month.



Even a loan shark expects you to pay something on the principal... it's the nature of a loan, even to the mob, you eventually pay it off or die... for the mob it's more profitable if you pay it off (unless they get the drop on you and your body is intact for sale as spare parts).

When the runner shows up with the full payoff in the first month, "Oh sorry, I sold your paper to corp X who would like you to pay it off in kind rather then cash."

Probably some of the newer negative qualities in RC should have the noteriety attached.

Ok... but that's like saying that "you took Astral Beacon as a negative quality... and to me that means you get gremlins as well".

RC/RAW says you have to make payments of at least your interest every month or they come looking for you...it also states that the interest is compounded if you don't make your interest payment, which implies you should be able to pay your principal down.

If you paid off your 30,000 loan with what amounts to 65% interest in the first month, other than GM fiat and trying to be hard ass on your player who already just spent his first 50,000 to pay this debt off... Why would you do that?

That's probably a valid point... perhaps an RC erratta that gives you a point of Notoriety for every 5 bp of indebtedness?

One possibility is to treat it as a Nuyen for Karma to buy off the negative quality.

Loan sharks generally have very little return that is why it's not just 10% for the first month and 10% every other month. Generally it is 50-100% per month at least. Loan sharks don't expect you to pay them back, which is why bounty hunters have jobs, and why loan sharks "go to plan" is to break your legs instead of a stern lecture.

Ever seen the movie Goodfellas? The minute you take a loan out or get protection they own you. They own you and they know you are a runner. You will pay it off with karma, because it doesn't matter how much money you have you still owe them.... big time.

The reason why it's a foolish quality is because it puts a money cap on the game. 5k for 5 bp means that they have assigned a value to what they expect you to make in a run. It's dumb, because it all goes back to the car stealing quota. The beginning of the game everyone would have this flaw and then go and steal about 10-15 low end cars in a month and everyone will be paid off. Generally the exchange rate is 1 bp for 5k so why is it 5k for 5 bp? It's a foolish flaw that says "This is the way the game is supposed to be played. This is how much you are supposed to make per run." That is why most people will just out and out ban this flaw.

Also it will turn your game into dead mans boots. That runner will strip everything they possibly can to pay off that debt as quickly as possible.

Also again you are actually given money as part of the flaw and BP. It is basically the best flaw in the game bar none.

i think if you've got good players who arent going to just loot everything it would be ok to use say it fits in the consept coupled with an addection...
a gambler who needed some fast cash from whoever crunch wize there are 2 neg aspects and all kinds of story potential the mob going after you the casino you screwed over spend abounch of points on skills or stats, low edge(your not lucky you just NEED to gamble, the rush thrills you) secound hand or low grade cyber to get him the edge extra reaction math coprosseser for counting cards magnetic hand for rulett (if its a steel bal andnot some non ferrous materil)

any way there one idea it would be good for really if they play it up and pay it off with a few good runs i wouldn't charge karma then maybe later to get rid of the bad rep.... but if they bought it and with a money run and pay it off just becouse then i would charge karma

This flaw is very clearly worded, and if you pay off the money and interest, the flaw should be gone.

Side note, the flaw specifies interest of 10% compounded monthly, which works out to an effective APR of 214% (quite a bit higher than even an annual credit card rate of 30%)

The flaw text clearly state a leg breaker won't be sent if the money is paid.

sr4 p. 265
"If the gamemaster feels that a character has made the
necessary changes to shrug off a negative quality, he can allow
that character to pay twice the quality's BP cost to remove it."

is also clearly worded.

Thus we have the OP question.

In my opinion, if the GM has some sense that the nuyen will be so free flowing that the debt could be easily repaid, then perhaps the Negative quality should not have been permitted to begin with and the player informed that the opportunity to gain nuyen and upgrades/gear would be soon available in game.

I don't think, my opinion, that there's any real problem with getting rid of the negative quality by allowing the simple payment of the debt off. At least not for that player. The thing to think about though is what happens when other players start thinking about spending karma rewards to buy off their own characters negative qualities. You'll have established that some in character thing can get you around the karma costs that normally are used. I think that Negative Qualities are a valuable component of a PC, that Negative Qualities are a good thing for a PC to have for roleplaying purposes. I love seeing PC with negative qualities, it gives me something fun to work with. SO I would prefer an approach that continued having the negative quality, either extending the term through circumstances, changing the terms, converting the negative quality to some other negative quality, or karma debt, or establish the nuyen to karma for all the players in the game.

That's why I asked yes...

At the same time I also realized I should have posted this as a missions question because we're trying to stay legit within missions so my players can play their missions characters at conventions.

Since the wording of the flaw makes it so that it looks like you can get rid of it by paying it off in cash... even if I were doing a home game, I'd find it hard to not just let the player off. Though it seems that it should carry a notoriety hit with it. Having a -6 dice pool to negotiations tests might slow down the negotiated pay.

I ask because the group I'm with are very good. In the third mission they managed to hack the rigged chopper and land it. They did this with a longshot test that wound up hitting the pilot with Stick-N-shock. The pilot failed to dodge the shot in her seat and while the actual stun damage wasn't enough to incap her, the carry over effects of electricity damage was enough to incap her for a number of rounds. By then, they had landed the chopper and disposed of the pilot. an almost 500,000 chopper sold at about 25% of its street value and divided between 7 players is about 17,000 nuyen... that plus the mission payouts for the first three missions just about puts all the players in our group at the point where they can pay off the debt in their character's first month of running. With the next mission in line for them, and the trucks, etc that they can sell off... they'll easily be able to do it.

I was hoping I had just missed reading some additional penalty that you get from in debt that would make you pay it off with karma... but there isn't one per RAW... which is how con compatible missions are supposed to be run near as I can tell.

And no, generally they don't loot every little thing and strip the boots off of corpses... I've been a bit forceful in having them not do that kind of thing. But a half million nuyen chopper and some looting when it can be done and done without having to worry about law enforcement heading after them right then... well that's very probable.

I've always taken the rules for buying off a flaw with karma to represent the time investment in getting rid of the flaw without having to play through all the details.

In the case of debt, I would assume that buying it off with karma would represent favors done in lieu of cash that settled the debt.

I also would not allow the flaw in a game where it would be easy to pay-off in only a month or two.

It would be unfair to require full cash payment and karma—without warning the player during character creation—since this flaw in particular clearly describes how to pay it off with just cash.

Once you pay of In Debt with Nuyen, you still have the Negative Quality - it simply provides no effect, & thus is as good as gone.

A couple of comments.
Most loan sharking is done for pure profit. They DON'T want to own you in general, they want you to borrow 50k today and pay them 60k in two weeks. This is how they stay solvent. If they didn't get paid back, they would run out of money, and go away. They don't loan money out to guys who can't pay it back, because they're in it for profit.

What they did in Goodfellas was a scam from the start. They send their own guys in to be a pain in the ass. The owner of the resturaunt, bar, whatever, goes to the boss and asks for help. He says, "take me on as a partner and no one will bother you." Then, everything is free for the entire crew. Run the place into the ground for a few months, then burn the place down, and get paid again, based on the origonal value.

Game wise, 5 points of karma for 5k is crap. That's why it doesn't work.
If it was 50k per 5 points it would make sense. Now, you can get another 200k for 20 points. The 20 points of karma would be the game mechanic to pay for the offline stuff a PC did to pay back the nuyen.

It seems RC has more than one such negative quality that can be just bought off with some coin.
Evil twin - Sure, you look like someone famous but what prevents you for taking a small surgery?
What about Day Job? I quit! Worked there with a fake SIN so yea, you have to burn that SIN but so what.

Getting rid of negative qualities requires karma, so in my books, those cost karma, too. But, as mentioned before, the ratio between karma and coin just doesn't add up this particular quality. The whole quality is more win-win anyway. I can well understand it being there but it would require some extra (house)ruling to make it more of a real negative quality. Perhaps increasing the money gained by it and increasing the payback amount would make it more to think about. 10k, 20% monthly, 200% payback for 5bp. So for full, you get 70k coin but paying 14k a month would be a big deal. As is, the max payment of 3,5k is more of a joke. Drop lifestyle by one or more notch and you are covered in most cases.

The yaks are actually like a bank, apparently. No interest, and fees for everyhthing, but hey. It's safer than most grey/black market banks.

In other words, the character needs to pay off the nuyen amount of the loan, and then the karma to get rid of the negative quality. If he doesn't have enough karma available, the GM takes it from his karma payouts until enough karma has been paid.

The wording only says the leg breaker is not sent if the interest is paid.

There is nothing in the negative quality that says the negative quality is bought off by simply paying nuyen.

The text on improving characters with karma explains exactly how to buy off negative qualities.

Buying off the Negative Quality requires
- GM approval
- Significant IC actions (Paying off the debt)
- Karma = 2 * BP

The average group of PCs are far more dangerous than your average restaurant owner. People who tried clever tricks on the PCs I've known tended to have bad outcomes.

I think DireRadiant finally nailed everything. If a player wanted to pay off the debt without having enough karma to buy off the quality, I'd contrive a reason why the creditor doesn't want to be paid off. He'll take your money, sure, but he's in a position where he can just rip you off, because you agreed to pay back X% every month for the next Y months, and he's got more leg breakers at his disposal than you have legs. After all, if you make minimum payments for the next few years, he makes a boatload more money than if you pay back the principal plus some chump change tomorrow.

I take it, Bearclaw, that you've never done any lone sharking. Or if you did that you weren't very good at it.

Lenders play the long game, because that's where the money is, same as casinos, card counters, investors, and ect. They make their money from playing the long game. But, unlike casinos, it is possible for their clients to force them to play the short game, and they lose money on the short game, due to simple business overhead (which is why people in the lending business refer to those who pay everything off immediately as "deadbeats"). For this reason, they have to use certain tactics to persuade the borrower to play long.

Banks use the long-term payment plan racket, lending very large sums of money with very long repayment periods and relatively low minimum payments. Credit Card companies prefer a combination of constant revolving debt and minimum payments. The returns on these strategies are low, but they add up to be considerable.

Loan sharks deal with smaller numbers and fewer clients, so they need a different strategy with higher return. Their solution, one that it fairly ideal for them, is to couple high interest rates and minimum payments equal to the interest rate with social engineering people into getting a loan so large that they can only make the minimum payments, but not so large that they'll default.
Modern loan sharks charge around 35% interest monthly, it isn't compounded because that's the minimum payment, so your principal never increases and thus your minimum payments never increase, unless you get another loan. But as long as you keep making the minimum your debt never goes down. After three months, everything they get from you is pure profit (minus overhead). At this point, they have very little to gain from total repayment of the loan and a very lucrative revenue stream to lose. As long as you keep making the minimum payments and nothing more, they keep collecting money from you.

If you stop making the minimum payments, they won't break your legs, of course. That's just a stupid mythological stereotype perpetrated by Hollywood. There is no profit in leg-breaking. They'll repo your car. Most have a contract with a used car dealer or automobile salvage company, they pick it up and it goes right out. They probably get a few hundred bucks for it a grand or two if it is very good. Ostensibly, they do this to recover as much of the principal as possible. In reality, it's for the threat. They don't want anyone's POS car, but losing your wheels can be far worse than a couple of broken legs. And it's legal.


So yeah, they do want to own you, in the sense that they want you to pay and pay and pay, forever.


And no, I wouldn't have legbreakers go after the dude who tries to pay off the debt. I would, however, have a pornomancer give him a very good offer on a slightly larger loan, one big enough for him to buy that doo-dad he's been wanting for a while. Said doo-dad will, of course, serve as collateral for this new larger loan and will be repoed if the interest goes unpaid.

If the doo-dad is Big Bertha, a heavily customized full-auto assault cannon with underbarrel laser chainsaw, that'll just be heartwrenching for the PC who has to give it up. If it's Synaptic Accelerator 3, the repo guy will just wrench that out and not bother to touch the heart.

Mafia goes in for the pain, destruction of property, or "favors."

Loan sharks go in for the bounty hunters, or repossessing items. <- more legal then the first

I really wanted to say what you said hyzmarca, but part of me felt like there was no point.

It is all about keeping you in their system and having them milk it for all it's worth. You are professionals, you can get the money back quickly if you cared to. You can stat out a character who could basically be ex-special ops and plus I think it is better to play off the flaw in other interesting ways. The mafia boss does not care about the chump change he lent you, and trust me it is chump change. He knows how good you are and you are going to do him some favors. It adds to the story aspect of the game.

Just having a debt that you can just *poof* get rid of does not make the game interesting, and makes this particular quality just a BP and nuyen sink since you can do so much more with 30 bp and extra 30 k instead of you know... taking the cursed quality, or allergies, or all the other tons of negative qualities (and you will have to take 2-5 of them to equal just this one) to even get close to equaling this negative quality, and then somehow slap on 30k.

The reason why this is not a good quality is because it is specific. It almost tells you how you are supposed to pay your runners and what type of game you are supposed to make SR seem like. To me it feels like you are supposed to be rolling gangers if you want to prolong this negative quality. I mean hell most negative qualities runners don't pay off with karma. So if you can pay it off with you should be able to pay off every other negative quality with either karma or

One of the main people who use loan sharks are crooks who need front money for a job. For example, you need to break into a safe and need a burning bar/thermic lance for your safe guy. So unless you want to go break into airgas and steal a bunch of oxygen tanks first (etc) you need someone to come up with the couple of thousand bucks you need for the gear, gear that can't be easily traced back to you if you leave it on the scene.

People like this find it really hard to get a bank loan. So they go talk to their friendly neighborhood loan shark. 20-40% for a week to a month is just fine. They'll be back in another month or two when they have spent all their money and need to go do another job.

I don't know how you guys know so much about loan sharks, and I'm not sure I want to know.

But I do know a bit about payday lenders, who simply trash your bank account and credit rating if you don't pay up. In Washington state, I believe the legal APR for a payday loan amounts to over 300%, assuming you carry the debt over from paycheck to paycheck. Their main targets are ordinary people who get into a cash crunch, who then are more-or-less forced to carry the debt indefinitely.

There is nothing in the In Debt flaw that indicates you don't have to spend Karma to buy it off. There are lots of other flaws that could easily be corrected by minor cosmetic surgery (or quitting your Day Job, or kicking out your Dependent, etc.). But in addition to whatever in-game thing you do to get rid of a flaw, you also have to pay the Karma, or have it deducted, in order to get rid of the flaw.

Now, In Debt may not be that bad of a flaw, but it's still sacrificing Karma and a big chunk of your first few paydays, to get a bit of extra cash at character generation. And it's not without risk, as your character might be doing some low-paying jobs, barely making the interest payments, while waiting for the better jobs. But you still have to pay Karma as well as paying off the actual debt. ALL of the negative qualities work that way. You can't get rid of your Enemy simply by shooting him - if you don't buy off the flaw, he'll have a brother or someone else who becomes your new Enemy.

Payday loan and title pawn companies are the loan sharks of the day. They pretty much drove the mafia out of the business with the ubiquitous advertisements and lack of leg-breaking. Or, more realistically, the organized criminals who were doing leg-break loans back in the day wised up and went legit by starting the whole concept.



The vast majority are really just dudes who couldn't afford a Wii on their minimum wage jobs but really wanted to get one for their kids.

I know this isn't RAW, but I've not had players want to take this flaw because they know that realistically a syndicate isn't as cuty and dry with money as, "oh you paid it back we'll be done now". They'd consider the giving of the loan even if it's paid off as a favor, one that ought be paid back. I agree that getting a bonus for a negative quality particularly one that can go as high as 30 BP is a bit counter-intuitive but it is a neat character idea to have your runner starte off indebted to a shadow element of one stripe or another. I like the flavor of the quality so I make sure to but the spurs in to make the players aware of the real world consequence via flavor.

Another idea is the karma represents blackmail material if you pay it off without the money, but gain some notoriety. And an irritated loanshark.

So the player chooses to not pay it off with karma.

He now owes 10% compounding interest on a 0 nuyen balance... ergo 0 nuyen.

There's no other penalty other than to pay off the in debt balance. No notoriety hit, no street cred hit, nothing.
Why would he want to do more than pay his balance down to zero. And the negative quality tells him how to do it.
He has to pay at least the interest rate or they come looking. It's treated like a loan, so paying the principal is also possible.

The max amount of in debt loans you can have is so paltry for the amount of bps you get from it, everybody would pay it off. If it was 10K per bp... sure you'd get a ton of money... but your interest payments would be through the roof instead of basically one run a month.

There are three conditions to getting rid of a Negative Quality.
GM Approval, which you are apparently giving.
IC Actions, Paying off the debt
Karma, which you are deliberately waiving.

You can either figure out a way to make the negative Quality meaningful despite the PC being able to payoff the principal, or you can choose to figure out a fair way for all the players to simply get rid of what would normally cost 60 karma to get rid of. That challenge I leave to you.

There have been many suggestions on how to continue the Negative Quality effectively, if you don't want to do that, that's fine.

But as a player in the game who didn't get the 60 karma freebie I would certainly raise some questions when it came time for my own character advancement.

In Debt, along with several others in Runners Companion, should not even be a quality. My suggestion - allow players to take it as normal, up to 50,000 Nuyen, but without any Build Point reward. It is not a quality, & does not cost Karma to pay off - only money.

And as for how the quality is written, you do not need to buy it off with Karma. As I and others have said, you keep the quality, but do not have any negative once the debt is payed.

To be fair, the potential havoc insued if there isn't enough money awarded to the player to pay off the debt should be enough to warrant a Karma penalty. I know that I didn't start handing out large Nuyen payouts till after a few months OOC and almost six months in character. If the debt quality had been had it would have come up given the amount of time between runs and it would have come up. I didn't do this on purpose it just worked better for my purposes and plot pacing, so a karma reward for the interest on the loan or the legbreakers sent to exact some money ought to have been accounted for in Karma. I see the issue if it's paid off quickly or without a couple of months interest.

This I agree with, if your handing out nuyen without wanting to deal with BP and karma buyoff, just do this.



This I disagree with. While you can certainly make that choice in how you work it, the description does not make it so.

The argument about the flaw is that you get 30 bp and 30k. You have to pay 45k + 10% per month. So that is 4.5k a month you would need to pay off at least and then eventually get rid of the 45k. The thing is this flaw basically comes out and says "this is how you are supposed to play your game." It means that runners are more apt to steal everything if your Johnson is only going to pay the party 2k-5k per runner each and if you only have a single job per month. To have the character slowly pay off a 30bp flaw... aka it would normally take 60 karma. That is a lot. I mean it is a hell of a lot. To have a flaw like this basically comes out and says "have your runners play a street level game where you get paid nothing."

Its annoying because if you approve this trait it will turn into dead mans boots unless the GM basically goes out of their way to discourage this kind of theft. It might also piss off your players if you just go out of your way to punish them to keep their flaw. It turns your game into a street game, and basically makes runners go and steal cars for about two to three months to pay off all of their debts before actually getting into the story setting. I should also add there are teams of people who do this in real life (stealing cars on a daily basis) and they are not 400 bp characters. They are also not magical at all. They might all be highly specialized, but a few stated out specialized gangers could be able to do it and make more money then those shadowrunners who are getting shot at, kidnapping, doing highly questionable assignments, or shooting others for money.

Let me give my point one last time just in case someone missed it. What I don't like about this trait is it is a win win trait, and they basically said how a GM should play their game by assigning an actual set amount. It didn't scale it, it didn't give you options, and it clearly spelled out the entire flaw to a tea. It just gave you a silver platter flaw where you as a GM must recognize this is the power scale your game should be at. Where the hell is the play testing?

Remember, the original path of this was to be compatible with SRM.. I was hoping I had missed something... at least a street cred or notoriety hit that would encourage them to pay off the karmic debt as well as the cash one.

In a pure home game... it would be different. In there I could explain to those who took it that it would have XYZ homerule running against it... but since I need to stay within the rules of SRMissions... I guess they pay it off in cash... and keep a 30bp flaw that doesn't have any impact.

The intro mod for Missions Denver pays enough to make the monthly payment of interest and keep a roof over your head.

How exactly does the In debt, somehow force the gm to make the campaing a street game.It's just some extra money for chargen, money that the character has to pay back with interest none the less.

The issue I have is that the description does not state that there are any other consequences. Your view (that there should be other consequences if the debt is paid off, but not the karma, is quite reasonable. It goes a long way to balancing the quality. But it is not what the book says. The book does not say anything about any other consequence other than what happens if the interest isn't paid. Folks have written interesting description of what various "lenders" might want. Many quite defensible

But, if you as a GM intend to apply that penalty, it would seem appropriate to warn your players ahead of time. You are doing something beyond what the book says. And the OP was asking about the Missions context. As I understand it, in Missions GMs can't just make up drawbacks to hit the players with.

Yours,
Joel

There is one other aspect that bothers me a little about the assumption of how the "lenders" will act. While it is relatively common in fiction, I just have trouble with the mental image of the mob (or corp, or ...) threatening someone in order to get their help, when they don't have some other hold. "Help us or we will break your legs, and tell your boss you sold company secrets" when they have evidence of said selling, makes sense. But we are talking about shadowrunners here. There is no boss to tell. Even if you put word on the street that the runners borrowed from the mob, most folks would go "so what." Even corp tie-ins wouldn't matter much, since many runners have corp in their backgrounds.

I do understand it when the group feels that you owe them something extra. But in this context their is no implication that an honor debt is owed. Just nuyen. I just can not see the mob (or any other group) going to much trouble to get an extra handle on everyone who pays off their debts. If they did, loan sharking would be a much too expensive proposition.

To some degree this may be a matter of "but the story is better if they behave that way." It just bothers my sense of consistency.

Joel

Another comparison to think about is what the affects of other 20 BP Negative Qualities are. If you choose a 30 BP Negative Quality, don't be surprised if it affects you as much as some other 20 BP Negative qualities. IF you want Consistency.

If your Johnson pays you 15k per runner and you do one run per month. Lets say you loot some nice stuff as well and say maybe each runner gets an extra 2k per run. You will have a 30 bp flaw paid off in three runs. Three god damn runs.

Thats bullshit so if you want to character to keep a 30 bp flaw, which is generally supposed to be debilitating you have to pay your team almost nothing 2.5-4k with 2-4k in loot drops per runner. Looking at the only BBB 30 bp flaw is burnout. You lose 1 essence right off the bat and if you don't spend karma to kick the habit the GM can knock off a point of essence as he sees fit until you just die. That is the only 30 bp flaw in the BBB. Sensitive system is only 15 bps and it hurts as well. Bad luck 20, severe allergy 20, low pain tolerance 10. Anyway you spin it you get some really bad flaws that you need to pay off with karma and not money. You also don't get money for those flaws for creating your character.

What that flaw hands you is an extra starting 36 BP for your character (30 bp for the flaw and every 5k = 1 bp so since you get 30k thats 6 extra bp) with having to pay off a 45k loan + 10% of the loan per month. It's not that the quality isn't written, it's that it is written and spelled out badly, and makes a large assumption on how a GMs game is supposed to be. It is so clearly worded that there is really nothing a GM can do without making a houserule or just denying it from the table all together. There are all types of ways that you can bring this flaw to heal, but the fact that you have to is annoying. If you play by RAW this is one of the best flaws ever for starting out a character with. The 30 bp flaw in the BBB is debilitating so the assumption is made that the 30 bp flaw of owing people money must also be debilitating. Someone had to have written that rule thinking it was really really harsh on the players. SR4 seems to also be made by the basis of "the coolness factor." If it's cool throw it in. Yet it seems like people don't step back and really consider with all the other RAW that it might end up creating exploitable power loopholes.

Why do you have to "keep" the flaw? Like others have said, it's just a way to get some extra cash at char-gen, at the expense of needing to pay back more, and with a bit of uncertainty factor (even a high-rolling runner isn't guaranteed high-paying work).

As for the "Well, then he has a 30-point flaw that doesn't do anything" argument, again, it's like someone killing their enemy or quitting their day job. Either their attempt to get rid of the flaw doesn't take (a new enemy shows up, or the guy you paid your debt off to disappears, and his bosses still show your debt on their books), or you deduct the Karma until it is paid off. If you just give the player karma normally, and hope he'll decide to pay off a flaw that doesn't have any actual negative consequences any more, then I'm not surprised if it doesn't quite work.

The version in the book does definately imply you can just hand over the cash and walk away. But really, stressing about the relative worth of negative qualities will just make you go insane.

These are all worth the same amount of BP to a cyber samurai:

Astral Hazing

In Debt 10k

Moderate Allergy: Gold

Mild Allergy: Sunlight

Do you seriously think that they even have close to the same impact on the character?

Then consider that for a low essence cyber sammie.. he could have paid like 25 point positive quality and got arcane arrestor.

Woohoo!

I can answer this issue in 30 words or less:

RAW: Yes you must pay karma + cash to remove the Negative Quality.
RAI: Subject to DM fiat. No reason it can't be paid off without the karma.

Kthxbai. </end thread here>

- J.

Correct. However, please point to where it says you must remove the Negative Quality after you pay off the debt. In every other Quality that you can buy (Nuyen) off, it specifies that if you do so, you must pay the Karma to remove the quality. In Debt does not. If you pay off the debt, you have no more negative effects from the quality, & are not required to remove it with Karma.

The rules say that you need to pay Karma to buy off a negative quality, and the In Debt quality doesn't say anything to contradict that. Keep in mind that for other negative qualities, you need to pay medical or other expenses in addition to the Karma cost, so saying that you only need to pay off the money to get rid of it doesn't fly. And it's not like the player has a choice - the GM can withhold some, or all, Karma awarded until the flaw is paid off. Again, it's like day job. Nothing says you can't just quit your day job, but you still have to actually buy off the flaw with Karma. In Debt is hardly the only flaw that can be gotten rid of in a straightforward way. A GM who can not enforce this would be better off simply not allowing the quality at all.

There are other flaws you can effectively reduce to zero impact, under some circumstances, without removing them. Allergies to sunlight come to mind for a character that either has the right spells, or just does not leave the house during the day.

On a tangent, we require all characters to be indebted to the mafia in our current campaign, though since we do not use chargen rules, nor actual money, it gives no advantage.

to slove this I will leave my self with a 10Â¥ debt 1Â¥ a month still a negative

There is a bit of a problem with more than just In Dept:

If a runner becomes famous in the game (by rescuing the major's daughter or something else), would you charge karma from the char to buy the Fame Quality?
If a runner "earns" an Enemy by some ingame actions, he gets karma according to the value of the Enemy?
If you can get a contact, who is a great martial arts teacher. Have you to pay for the Sensei Quality?

In some cases: there is just no sense in buying of qualities with karma.

Such things (like Sensei, Restricted Gear, Fame) are options that you have something special at the beginning, if you earn something like that ingame, you don't have zu pay (as you don't pay for connections). Also some negative Qualities can be acquired during game without getting more BP/Karma out of it. Therefore you must be able to get them off without cost.

If a character ingame gets to the mob and demands a loan of 30000Y, will he get 60 karma. If you say no, than a character should be able so pay his dept, so that the negative quality went off, without karma payment.

cya
Tycho