Comparing different systems is silly. You have to look at each system individually and see what kind of characters they create amongst themselves. If they are consistently of a similar power level and create the types of characters you and your friends prefer (ie, characters with a wide array of low-level skills vs. a handful of specialized skills and nothing else), the system works fine.

Neither BP nor Karmagen will create characters of a consistent power level. That is one of the pitfalls of an open build system vs. character classes and levels. You have an incredible degree of freedom, but characters built with the same number of points can vary wildly in effectiveness, breadth of abilities, and degree of experience. You can make a novice street punk or a seasoned pro with the same amount of points.

Personally, I think a lot of people are blaming character generation systems for their own choices in character creation. BP and Karmagen don't really "force" people to min-max, or to get a wider spread of skills. I have min-maxed in Karmagen, and made well-rounded characters in BP.

The only real limits of character creation systems are the hard limits - how much you can spend on something, how prohibitively expensive certain options are, and how many overall points you get. Karmagen is more limiting in the first two areas. The cap of half your allotment applies not to the base Attributes, as in BP, but to the special Attributes, as well. The exponential increase to Attribute costs makes improving metatypes cost-prohibitive after a certain point. Despite being more limited (and less scalable), Karmagen is more lavish in the third area, giving you more overall points for most builds.

Note that I am talking about the revised (German errata) version, where you pay the racial cost for metatypes and buy Attributes at SR4A costs. In the original version, the limitations were overwhelmed by the sheer amount of points that you got. You didn't have to make tough choices any more - you could max out your main areas of skill and get a wide spread of secondary abilities. My personal experience with it was curious - despite it being a system that could be horrendously abused, I was less motivated to do so, and more encouraged to explore quirky concepts that would not have been practical in BP. I think it goes back to something Cain once said - when you give players more points, they are less likely to min-max. Still, the original Karmagen was a very brute force approach to that problem. Cthulhudreams is correct about characters winding up as the equivalent of 600+ BP characters.

Priority, I think Dr. Funkenstein already nailed the flaws on. I like the general idea of it - I loved it in SR3 - but the execution of it was too clunky in SR4. It fails in its primary goal of being something to help out newer players who are overwhelmed by BP and need something more structured.

It's not really that. A big problem with the Build Point System is not so much the system but the game as a whole. There's simply too many "must have" skills in the game, yet they give you so few points with which to purchase them. Nearly every runner should be competent in Infiltration, Perception, Etiquette, Dodge, Athletics, and at least one Combat Skill regardless of their chosen specialty. Getting them up to an average of only 2-3 each, and that's a good 50-60 Build Points right there. Contacts are also important, moreso for some concepts than others, and they cost an arm and a leg, too. Just getting two with only Connection 2 and Loyalty 2 costs you another 8 Build Points. Without even touching your concept's requirements, you've already blown through 15-20% of your points. The Karma System, on the other hand, lets you do that for only a handful of points, thus allowing you the freedom you need to build your character properly. Which is particularly challenging (in the BP system) for more complex concepts, which I personally tend to be prone to create.

I really wish a more White Wolf-style Priority System were viable for Shadowrun. I'd be all over that in a heartbeat. Damn you magic system. <shakes his fist angrily in the air>

The good thing about the karma system is that it doesn't "punish" you for taking skills at mid level ratings, which allows you to make chatacters with believeable backgrounds (no more troll ganger with 6 Unarmed and 1s in everything else).

So how the heck does build points "punish" you for taking mid-range skills? Skills are a flat cost, so a skill of 4 costs the same as four skills of 1. In Karmagen, the former is more expensive than the latter. As others have said, the only way Karmagen encourages diversity is by giving you more overall points.

This puzzles me. If in karmagen, a skill at 4 is more expensive than 4 skills at 1, then wouldn't itself encourage diversity? And that Karmagen encourages in-depth learning by giving you more overall points?

When designing KarmaGen (yes, yes another lecture from Uncle Ancient) one issue under consideration was attributes vs. skills. Given the nature of the SR4 system, it is almost always better to have higher attributes than it is to have higher skills. The prohibitive cost of raising attributes after character creation meant that most characters pent the maximum (200 BP) on raising attributes, and by comparison many character builds spent less than 100 BP on skills - with a substantial chunk of that going toward maxing one skill or skill group, or soft-maxing two. Given how skill-intensive the SR system was, it was determined that players should be encouraged to buy more low- and mid-range skills to broaden out their character. KarmaGen basically does that by keeping most of the BP-gen hard spending limits (max attribute rating, max you can spend on attributes, max skill rating, max cash, etc.) and using the different price structure of Karma advancement - skills and attributes are cheaper at lower levels and more expensive at higher levels. Basically, you have more points to spend and less to spend it on, so most characters will have to put a greater percentage of their points into skills, and with the hard skill limits those will almost always be low and mid-range rating skills.

You just said it yourself. In the BP system, whether you spend 1 or 6 points in a skill, each of those points costs exactly the same. In the Karma System, lower level (rating 2-3) skills cost significantly less than higher level skills, thus encouraging you to have a wide array of mid-range skills for nearly the same price of one or two high level skills. If you try to duplicate that in the BP system, you quickly run out of points. As, you know, demonstrated in my previous post.

It's less a "punishment" by BP and more an "encouragement" by Karma.

I have the exact same problem. For example, one of my character concepts was a former wage mage corp brat who had all sorts of advantages growing up. He went to one of the finest magic programs available with a cushy scholarship and received a genuinely top-notch and well-rounded magical education as opposed to being your stereotypical "What the hell are Rituals good for anyway?" combat mage. I wasn't shooting for having a 4 with every Magical skill and he had no high powered foci, but even standard BP makes it tough sledding to create even a modestly talented general practitioner who can also survive a run. Enchanting and Arcana may fit the character concept like a glove but at the end of the day they won't stop a ganger from ruining your weekend with a brick and a length of pipe. It's why I often struggle a bit when it comes to making low point characters that aren't simply a collection of "essential" skills and a dump stat. I dislike building PCs that are genuinely vulnerable on multiple fronts.

Yeah, but he was talking about Build Points discouraging mid-range skills, which is why I pointed out that in Karmagen, the four skills at 1 are cheaper than one skill at 4. If anything, Karmagen is the one that, if you min-maxed, would lead to skills of 6 or 1 - the skill of 6 that you need for your specialty, and the cheap skills for everything else.

Except neither system is really that dire. I have no problems making a well-rounded character with Build Points, and I have no problems making characters with higher-rating skills in Karmagen.

That hasn't been my experience. I struggle a great deal with the BP system with most of my concepts.

That's one of the problems with comparing the two systems. Different people have different character concepts that they favor, and some might be favored more by one system than by another. For me, Karmagen usually nets me a bit more, but certain concepts are not doable in Karmagen - an awakened version of Mr. Lucky isn't going to come in under that 375 point limit. And I haven't really tested it, but some of my ghoul builds probably wouldn't translate over to Karmagen that well, either.

I've actually pulled off an Awakened character with an Edge of 8 using Karmagen.

To add a bit of fuel to the fire, it's not BP or Karmagen that encourages maxing out skills. It's the system itself that rewards huge dice pools with huge successes.

Defibrillators aren't used for resuscitation, they're used to stop fibrillation. If you're asystolic, you're pretty well fragged, chest compressions/cardiac massage and adrenaline are the answer in that case. And the success rate for those is pretty unspectacular.

Was that with the revised rules (unofficial except in the German version) of paying racial cost (irrelevant since Mr. Lucky is human) and paying the SR4A rates for Attributes? It is the latter that makes an awakened Mr. Lucky so difficult to pull off. An Edge of 8 costs 165 Karma, and Magic of 5 costs 70 Karma; this only leaves 140 Karma to spend on 8 Attributes.

Most characters that I make with Build Points have some Karma left over if I convert them to Karmagen, but this character (a Lucky social adept) wound up at 450 Karma cost for Attributes and Special Attributes, way over the 375 point limit. And I had only spent 160 Build Points on core Attributes. The irony is that the total Karma for the character would only be 603 (including paying for the knowledge skills that were free in BP). If the cap was only on Attributes, not Attributes and special Attributes, he would have been fine, and actually had points to spare.

And I agree, the system rewards hyper-specialization and makes Attributes more important than skills. Karmagen doesn't really affect the former - it still pays to have that skill of 6; you merely have more points left over to buy other skills. And since the limit to what you can spend on Attributes is harsher (extending to special Attributes), you have more points left for skills whether you like it or not.

I'm not sure of the precise details, but the point is that anyone can use an AED. You apply pads and wait for the machine to tell you if you should push a button. With 2070 medicine, an AED would be part of a rating 6 medkit; so someone with 12 dice should be able to easily help someone in cardiac arrest. According to that guy's house rule, you couldn't do it, even with that huge dice pool.


I used straight karmagen; the German errata hadn't come out then. The 4.5 rules made such a change in character advancement, we decided that conversion wasn't worth the effort.

That limitation should only apply to Physical and Mental Attributes, just like it does in the BP system (SR4A, p. 82). Unless, of course, you want to do a blind reading of the Karma Gen rules instead of applying the same restriction to both the BP and Karma system. If you instead ignore the Physical/Mental clause for the BP system, that means you only have 75 Build Points to apply to your other eight attributes (which is an average of less than 2 in all of them) in the BP system. That's quite a bit more limiting than 140 Karma (an average of over 3).

And if you're not going to apply the same sensibility to both systems, there's really no point going on. The paragraph in the Runner's Companion looks very hastily written, and if you're going to hold that against it for the sake of argument, well... <shrugs> Additionally, if the logic of choice only applies to one system and not the other, what's the point of the other restriction? Why should Special Attributes be exempt in one but not the other? The cost of those Special Attributes are their own penalty, limiting what you can do with the rest of your points. It's not there to try and cripple your base attributes.

I agree with that, and I originally thought the rules were hastily written, too. But when I asked Ancient History about it, he confirmed that it was intended that way, rather than an oversight.

Yes, I remember that was the answer in one of the Q&A threads too.

I'm sorry, but I don't speak German (and I'm illiterate in German as well), so...

As far as i heard those errata were made by CGL but not yet published.
Pegasus (german Publisher) decided, they did not want to publish RC after SR4A without those errata. It would be silly to first have SR4A saying Attributes are x5 and then publish RC with x3


So those errata are the official ruling made by CGL.
But i am not sure whether they will ever publish them, considering the actual situation

That would have depended on what they wished to achieve. If they wished to put emphasis on attributes at chargen, then making RC with x3 makes sense, since you will end up with a situation where attributes are cheaper at chargen situation.

And what happens when you de-fibrillate someone with a giant static shock? Their heart stops beating and then the biological mechanisms that keep the heart pumping get restarted.

You're right that sometimes it doesn't work, but anyone can use and AED to equal effectiveness. Its when it doesn't work and you have to use chest compressions that the "higher skilled" individual will succeed.