In my current campaign, new characters come into play with a portion of the total Karma and nuyen earned by the rest of the party. Soon, they'll start with enough karma that a character can walk into their first game session already initiated. And I began to wonder, would it be so wrong if you could initiate with BPs?

Would an "Initiate" Quality be kosher in your Seattle? I'm figuring it would probably have to be 20 BP in order to approximate the Karma cost of Initiating and take care of the increased Magic Attribute that starting characters could buy, but is that too much? Too little? Pointless because a Magician couldn't buy any other Positive Qualities?

My tought is it cost 2 Karma to remove 1 BP or add 1 BP of Qualities. So getting initiation should be ruled that way also. But you should only allow characters to take that if they enter a groups from the start.

I don't see a need for it. If your players already get bonus Karma at start (to catch up with the rest of the team), just let them use that karma to initiate, if they want to.
I am not entirely certain what you hope to gain from the introduction of a BP cost for initiation.

Depends on what you want. A 400BP team with 300 karma can still run with a guy who is just 400 BP, but there nothing wrong with having a guy start with the extra boost though so there isnt as much catch up

Most mages I toss at players are corp sec and at least a 1st or 2nd grade initiate. Very rarely do they run into someone with talent who isn't interested in advancing that talent and in those cases there is some personal reason or circumstance. I assume anyone with talent wants to advance that talent at some point. All players are also encouraged to look into initiation ASAP, normally by pointing them to the page with Masking on it.

Allowing players to start out initiated isn't that big of a change. They still need to purchase up a higher magic stat and that can get insanely expensive. I'm also cool with starting out with ally spirits. Basically anything a player could do during game should be ok at start, as long as it fits in the rules on availability. I even give players a One Year rule, where they are assumed to have one years worth of time dedicated to personally crafted items, software or enchantment they can start with.

All this goes ditto on submersion as well.

This is not a good ruling, as it makes characters who rely on "free" equipment, such as software, significantly more effective than others.

To contradict the aparent reasoning behind this ruling, I must point out that, according to the book, the Nuyen for purchasing equipment during character generation is not a representation of how much money the character has or what they have bought, but rather a representation of the total value of equipment they possess, regardless of how that equipment was obtained.

Thus, any character capable of doing so can have 100% self-coded software - they still purchase it as normal during generation. The same applies for spell formulae, weapon modifications, blueprints, etc.




On to the original subject, there is very little reason to not allow Initiation at character generation (only two I can think of off hand are Street / Ganger level game [which should then use ~300BP], or a Missions / RAW-Only game).

Initiation at character generation should cost 10 BP per Initiate Grade, and 5 BP to join a Magical Group if desired. The maximum Initiate Grade acquired at generation I will leave to you, but I would suggest 2 for a standard 400 BP game.

I remember when bioware wasn't available to starting characters.

Yeah, but that is SO 2050's...

Keep the Faith

Yeah, and limiting initiation to karma is so 2070's. Now who wants to be ahead of the curve?

No Argument, We can now purchase Bioware at chargen and Initiation after... as we are IN the 2070's, this seems like it is the way it should be...

Keep the Faith

I was thinking in general. My current game is RAW so we can rotate GMs, so this Quality would be a no-go anyway.