I've been involved in a couple of runs with a few friends and always found the Karma point distribution too low at the end of the run. A four hour session with at least an hour of combat mixed in should warrant more than one Karma point right? Now, I'm good friends with the GM and i don't plan to argue my point with him as it is his game and we all tend to play by the GM's rules. I just wanted to know how other groups budget their Karma points, how they distribute them and how many.

Thanks for any input.

For Us... FOr a Run, It may take multiple sessions to complete the run... at the end of each individual session, we generally receive 1-3 points (Survival, Roleplaying, Possibly another if we did real good)... at the end of the actual RUN... we get totalled Karma for the run itself, averaging aqbout 7-9 if we did really well... so a good run that takes 3 sessions could conceivably net us from 10 to 15 total points of Karma over the course of those 3 sessions... it is generally the lower end, but sometimes we do get lucky...

Keep the Faith

I'm in Tymeaus game. Some weeks we only get 1 point. Other weeks when a run is completes we may get as much as 10 points. We have been playing for over a year, almost 2 in fact, and my character is almost to 200 Karma.

Thanks to both of you. I guess now that its explained a little further it makes sense. That seems like the logical way my GM is probably running things and we've only had a couple of sessions so maybe more Karma points are coming in the near future.

We have a house rule that you might like.

The GM awards Karma at the end of the session as appropriate - You got the Briefcase, you didn't die, etc. Then he opens the floor for nominations - anything that the players think was particularly awesome and reward-worthy is brought up. The GM considers whether it was really worth an extra point, and awards where appropriate. The key to it is that nominations for another player are weighted more heavily then nominations for yourself.

This has turned the after-game session in our group into a gleeful recap of everybody's greatest hits, and gets players to point out where their teammates really carried the day. It's great for morale and camaraderie, and it makes the GM feel better about awarding those points.


...to answer your actual question, we earn about as much as Tymeaus' group...although since the onus is on the players to find excuses for bonus Karma, there aren't too many complaints.

I recently ran Extraction Reaction (created by someone else on these boards, you can look it up) and gave 7 Karma to the team for successful completion of the run, which took 3 sessions (two of planning).

JaronK

We don't use karma. Advancement is done by group consensus.

I try to go by the 4A Rules so I'm a little Generous. 6-9 Karma per Session(1 Session is 7-9 Hours of Play).Right Now one of my Groups is in a very High End Adventure (discovering a Caer and a "Big League Horror",Lofwyre will appear...) I guess It'll be about 6 to 8 Sessions and Ill guess they'll earn > 50 Karma.They finished the easy Parts (3 Sessions) and have 15-20 allready

with a High End Dance
Medicineman

I try to make the adventure long/challenging enough to award 5 / game session (usually 8 hours with a lot of time built in for eating and BS'ing).

Then we also have the players vote on that game's MVP for +1 Karma (1 person, no ties) and players may then lobby, in front of everyone, for 1 Karma due to a superior idea, role playing, etc. (because sometimes I forget things that happened a few hours ago.)

Finally, I try to keep the players involved with the game's web page... so if they update the adventure log, npc information, etc. They can each earn 1 Karma between games.

That puts a max possible at about 8.. but realistically 6 is the average per player per game (every other week)

*edit* - S4A (though it was only 1-2 less on average under S4

4th ed - Non-A
1-2 points per sessions more or less regardless - one for arriving and a second for... something, seriously how bad are the players that they don't do at least one of the other awards? If we just role play I tend to run the awards from 1 (was present) to 4 (role played well, made the game break either for a "wow, that was awesome" or laughter/fun and one more for advancing personal plots.

Runs tend to award another 1-3 for how kick ass they did with one or 2 "bonus" points kicking around for "doing the right thing" and the like.

Minimum/max 2-9 - for the record 9 would require a kick ass roleplaying and long session or someone intergrating advancement of their personal stories duriong a mission (its been rare but has happened).

I've been told I run advancement a little bit "fast". Something in the order of 20% faster then suggested.

I've always been stingy with Karma. But I'm looking to change that. I'd like to set up so that after each session every PC can advance at least one skill or ability after each session. In previous years money has always been easy to get, but karma was in short supply. I'm going to try and scale back the cash, and scale up the Karma.

I don't award Karma on a "per session" basis, but based on the Objectives for the Run and for how difficult that objective was to complete.

My players go really slowly, and our sessions are limited to 3 hour chunks. Thus, they go for quite a few sessions before getting Karma awards. For a typical Run which had between 2-4 objectives, it usually comes out to around 6-8 Karma a piece after bonuses and roleplaying are taken into account.

Just be careful with that rebalancing so that awakened characters don't pull too far ahead too fast on the mundane (and cyber) characters... who can depend heavily on cash for major upgrades (beta/deltaware, new toys, etc.)

Unlike most other games, combat, or the lack thereof, should not factor into the karma award. Receiving one karma point for a session, however, is very low. I can only assume that the mission was not completed during the session, but even at that, each player should walk away with at least 2 points, one for survival and one for roleplaying/pushing the plot/humor/right skill at the right time/buying the GM pizza... whatever stands out for each player. I have only awarded a single point of personal karma in two instances, the first time was when one of my players slept through almost the entire session, and the other time was when a player refused to have his character do anything other than sit at the safe house during a mission (this despite the fact that I basically told him point blank that his character should join the others because nothing was going to happen where he was).

Now, if you have actually completed a mission (or even if you failed, but wrapped it up), you should be getting quite a bit more. Each player should receive team karma awards after a mission is wrapped up, and this is on top of any personal karma awarded for that session. I typically give 1-4 points for threat level, and one point for each objective accomplished. Maybe your GM is confused over the team karma award, and is adding all the karma up and dividing it between the players in the group? It should not be divided, each player should receive the full amount of karma.

Hey everyone, thanks again for the insight, my GM's pretty in tune with the rules and i have no reason to seriously doubt him. Sometimes i just feel we aren't getting enough. We are about ten-minutes-into-the-next-session away from completing the current run we are on so I'll see what happens then. Maybe its only been one point per session because he's saving a good karmic bonus for the end of the run. I was just curious as to how other groups did things, and i am really happy to recieve a veariety of insightful thoughts on the subject.

It's a concern, believe me.

I award karma based on the length of the run usually; sometimes the length of the game session comes into play.

A standard run for the group is: The Meet, the Footwork, the Execution, the Wrap-up. This usually gets the PCs 4 karma.
If I throw some hooks or plot twist in there then I tend to add more karma, roughly equaling +1 per twist.

For example, the run is an extraction. On the way to the exchange site the heli goes down landing the group into a ghoul infested body shop. They are then stuck hoofing it through the Redmond with a critically sick Extraction subject in tow. The game also took a long time. I think I gave 7 karma. Would have went up another if I added the doublecross at the end; I was just too tired and wrapped the session instead.

Pish-posh. Foci are a huge money sink and a huge advantage for mages. While not deltaware bio implants expensive, few things are.

SR4A RAW is about 6-12 Karma for an Adventure/Run with 7-8 being Average
(and I consider it Unfair to use 4A Rules if you don't get 4A Karma )

he who Dances with Karma
Medicineman

Hmmm... Could someone please give me a couple examples of why more karma is required for SR4A? I haven't compared the two versions in detail. The only difference I have noted up till now is that some adept powers were cheaper in SR4A (if I am not mistaken), which would suggest giving less karma rather than more. But I assume a lot of other stuff has changed too...

to raise an Attribute costs now "new Attribute x5" instead of the old "new attr. x3"

with a new Dance
Medicineman

Ok, thanks. I read a bit more about SR4A vs SR4 in another thread and now feel a bit more up to speed on the issue. I love the game. The fluff is delicious. But I wish the rules were better than they now are. I don't know if the 4th edition was rushed out the door or what, but... Oh! Well... No use in bitching and whining.

I hand out a ton of karma to my players, but balance it by limiting the amount of time they have to train, but even with that, they all advance pretty quickly. But realize, quick advancement is a point here and there, so it is more noticeable when they get low karma.

Anyways, each session I hand out a minimum of 8 karma, then give bonus points for roleplaying, survival, great ideas or just generally how much fun and action was had. So, that ends up being between 9 and 14 karma per session. We meet every other Monday for about 5 hours, so while the PCs advance insanely fast in game time (campaign has been going on for about 4 months in the game), in real time, we've been playing over a year, so the 150ish karma everyone has feels right.

I give out Karma at the end of the run, not every gaming session. Some runs have lasted over three sessions. If a run takes one session the karma is about 6-8, two sesssion 10 to 12, and 3-(Have had only a couple of those)-15 for one and 20 for the other.

If that is justification to increase karma rewards, then there's no point to change the cost.

All you're doing is negating a change that is pretty obvious to be intended towards slowing character growth.

From my understanding the increased Karma and increased cost of raising stats is more to promote overall growth instead of just "stat growth"

Under SR4 it was commonplace for stats to be the only things raised over the course of several adventures... by raising that cost and increasing karma it makes it easier to raise skills, add spells & foci, etc. Options other than just stats become more desireable.

Actually the change included the increase in suggested Karma. Looking at the math it overall speeds growth but slows stat advancement relative to skill advancement. Whether this actually results in slower stat advancement has been debated at lenght.

It does however make you MORE retarted for not sinking max to near max points into stats at character generation.

In 4th A looking at it I'd be awarding 4-15 Karma per session with tha average closer to 7-12. Yikes. Skill central and heavens save us from the initiates.

Exactly, it slows growth. By increasing Karma rewards, it won't hold the same effect as the penalty for going attributes over skills is lessened to the point that it's still better to go with attributes over skills. Under the old system you would need to just commonly use 2 skills in order to justify raising an attribute over the skill. Now you just need to have 3 skills linked to that attribute that you use in order for raising attribute to be more cost effective.

The point is that by increasing the karma rewards AND increasing costs to raise attributes you essentially cancel each other out. You're talking about a karma increase from 4-5 to 7-8 on average, which is about a 60% increase in earned Karma rate. With a 66% increase in the cost of raising attributes you effectively cancel those out. The key is that this change -only- fosters balanced growth IF the attribute in question only has 1 or 2 skills linked to it for the character in question (body and willpower will be set aside since they have obvious functions outside of skills). 1 skill is obviously better to raise via skill rather than attribute, but at 2 skills linked to it, it's dubious as to whether the attribute or individual skills are better. Direct cost wise, yes two skills is cheaper, but if down the line you pick up a third linked skill then the attribute may not be such a bad choice. The point is that it's not difficult for a player to utilize 3 skills that share the same attribute, at which point you haven't solved the problem of distribution between skills and stats.

Which is the same cost/benefit analysis that can be done for skill groups (since attributes and skill groups now cost the same to raise). And some skill groups cover sets of skills that don't all share the same linked attribute, so depending on your needs, one or the other might be better.

The problem with skill groups is that some are 3 skills and some are 4. Regardless of 3 or 4 skills, you need to actually use 3 of the groups skills to make it more worthwhile than grabbing the 2 individual skills you would use and ignoring the 3rd. However between skill groups an attributes, you need to once again have 3 skills linked to the attribute in question to make the attribute viable. SR4A costs actually make it cleaner to make a comparison between skill groups and attributes since they progress at the same rate.

when I was playing 3rd back in 1998-2005 time period I tended to award around 3-5 per session, which worked out to about 1 per hour +/- a bit.

In 4th it's kept up with that, more or less, although we now only award points at the end of runs and not in-between. I tend to give points for a mix of in-character and out-of-character reasons, although general categories are:

successful objective; unexpected plan; humor; good roleplay; survival; 'threat' of run (usually measured by how much damage I inflicted as adversary, not damage that is self-inflicted..); memorable moments; altruism.

as I said before I think a good benchmark is about 1 point of karma per hour played, although I don't generally actually *reward* it that way. (e.g. in my campaigns a character with 100 karma has survived about 100 hours of game, somewhere between 20-25 sessions.) works out to about 180-220 karma a year for us.

incidentally, lethality is pretty high in our games and characters over 50 karma are quite rare.

under the SR4A rules with increased costs for certain things, I think a benchmark of 4-7 karma per 4 hour session may be more realistic and I've found myself moving slowly in that direction.

I'm happy to see this post has generated a number of helpful and informative replies. thanks again for contributing, when i start GMing sometime in the future I'll probably come back to this and draw from the resources you've given me to develop an unique karma award system.

Thanks again everyone and if you have any more thoughts please provide them.

I've been hearing our Party's Mage talking at length about all the tricky stuff he wants to use to upgrade his character - Long-term bindings, Attuning Foci, and at least three other upgrades I can't recall off the top of my head - and they all cost him Karma. The real painful part of that is that he built his character using a risky build that counted on him earning karma fast to shore up skills and stats. Conversely, my Rigger is already more then competent in his core abilities, and is spending his first 30 karma to buy off a negative quality for RP reasons. Some characters just need Karma worse then others.

Except for one thing... it does not actually work out that way...
If you are raising a skill to a higher rating and you are raising your stat to that same rating, then yes, it is relative to each other and makes little to no difference at the increased costs... However, if I am raising a Skill from 2 to 3 and the relavent attribute is a 5, then I can raise 5 such skills to the single stat point... so it no longer has the correlation to your comparison... If my stat is at capacity, then it is no longer feasible to raise the stat, and skills linked to said attribute become cheaper compared to Karma awards in SR4A (you get more Karma, so skills increase faster, which I think was the reaoning behind the increase)... so you really have a hard time comparing, as every character will be different in the skill/attribute combinations that matter to the character...

Of Course, Your mileage may vary...

Keep the Faith

Which would exist regardless of attribute cost being x3 or x5. While it is easiest to make comparison based on equal attributes and skills, it's not impossible to compare a number of variable skills

NewAttribute * 5 <= TotalNewSkillLevel * 2
NewAttribute * 3 <= TotalNewSkillLevel * 2
We'll use Longarms 4-5, Infiltration 2-3, Palming 1-2 = TotalNewSkillLevel of 10

Under the New System
NewAttribute * 5 <= 10 * 2
NewAttribute * 5 <= 20
NewAttribute <= 4

Under the Old System
NewAttribute * 3 <= 10 * 2
NewAttribute * 3 <= 20
NewAttribute <= 6.667

If either of those equations are true, then raising the attribute is more cost effective. My point is that by increasing both Karma and attribute costs by about 60-66% you don't make attributes any less appealing. It will still take the same amount of time to increase attributes. Perhaps that's the goal, making skill increases more common, but I do believe this is only going to generate an impact on players that spend Karma as fast as they earn it, not players that save up lots of Karma before spending it. The increased karma rewards seem extraneous and unnecessary unless the success cap based on skill is enforced, but it is still just an optional rule. However I personally don't like it since Street Cred is derived from Karma and Public Awareness is derived partially from Street Cred. And Public Awareness can be a problem, a problem which I have heard some people suggest you commit notorious acts just to burn off Street Cred.

There's a lot of cascading down the line from increasing Karma rewards, especially when increasing the rewards was unnecessary to improve the appeal of increasing skills over attributes.

Of course, I tend to subscribe to the school of thought of making small changes rather than big ones.

Thanks for the breakdown... and I do tend to agree somewhat... But it is my firm belief that they did indeed intend to make skill increases more common, while making attribute increases more expensive...

Keep the Faith