Looking through my notes of last weeks game in preparation for this weeks I've noticed something.

I award Karma for the usual stuff (role playing, good ideas etc) but also there's the Lucky Git award (last week award to the player who left his unlocked Porche outside a bar in Redmond overnight - and no one stole it ) and the That Would Look So Cool In A Movie award which is self-explanatory.

So any others out there award Karma for less than sane things?

Completely OOC things. I give karma when someone pays for my meal, has their wife bake cookies for everyone, makes me a milkshake, or smokes me up.

S'good to be the king

we keep a quote book. Anyone who paralyses us with laughter with a good quote gets a karma point. A GM who comes out with something that does the same goes in the back of the quote book and gets a 'Gm Point' which they can use anytime for something (like, say 'uh, you know I said the pay for this job was going to be x% of the price of the unit you stole? well, I hadn't really researched it and its actually worth 10 times the amount i thought it was. Anyone mind if I modify the percentage?' (that's an example drawn from someone else on this board who I can't remember, from another thread in the autumn).

This is very similar to the humour award in the book, but this is specifically for good quotes instead of humerous actions.

Recent good ones include

(GM) 'Its a mass of teeth and claws travelling at 42 meters a combat turn. That's about 50 kph.'
(player): 'i'm gonna take a free action, and use it to say "F**K ME!!!"'

And

'This grenade that's about to go off... Would it do less damage if I sandwiched it between two passengers?' (he got a Karma Point for that, and if he'd actually DONE it when I told him the answer was yes, he'd have gotten another for actual comedy actions).

And my personal favorite:

'What's that lassie? Timmy's fallen down the mine and now he's a giant insect?'

But yhis isn't a quotes thread, so I'll leave it there. Suffice to say this does mean that we give out probably higher individual karma awards than we should, but people make an effort to be creatively funny (double entendres don't count) which generally keeps everyone relaxed and enjoying themselves. Except me. I only have two Gm points but the players between them have more than 30 extra karma points, counting the number of quotes in the book, over an 10 month period since we started.

My first GM would award Karma if you could make him literally roll on the floor laughing. I was the first and only person to get that particular award though twice in a single gaming session. This was way back in the days of First Edition, I had created a rigger, who was a borderline sociopath. Sociopathy was my interpretation of Essence loss, as you became more and more detached from the world around you. He had less than a .1 Essence, so he was basically a loon. During our first run, the infamous and personal fav, Food Fight!. My characters only friend, a poor soul with even less Essence, had been threatened by one of the gangers, who told him to put his hands up (the sam in question had a cyber arm with a shotgun installed). He of course complied and then made a grab for the gangers face, winning unarmed melee he lifted the now terrified ganger off the ground and fired his shotgun, sticky ganger mess ensues.
I look to the GM and ask what aisle that happened on, 14 was the response and in a passable intercom voice said "Clean up on aisle 14, cleanup on aisle fourteen."
5 minutes later the GM has the gangers roll for surprise.

Second was later in the run, after snagging an e-paper comic book from the shack and bringing it with me on the run, I sat down and began reading it. The troll in the party, whom up until this point I had completely ignored, started trying to read it over my shoulder. I asked him if he could read, he said no and asked me to read it to him. I began translating it into Japanese. The player of said troll says to me, "But, my troll can't speak Japanese." to which I reply, "So?"

Yeah, in our group players get awarded extra karma for good all those things that the book mentions, and of course sometimes even for OOC stuff.

Missing Blood spoilers ahead!!!

I keep meaning to write up and post my dictionary for roleplaying at some point. Two entries that I routinely quote are:

Food: item used by players to bribe their GM out of experience (or karma in this case)

Experience: item used by GM to bride their players into providing them with food.

to my knowledge, nearly every gaming group I've eveer been in has had some form of this going on in it (personally, I like being on the GM side of things myself).

It's not shadowrun, but in the D&D game I run I give 1xp per sweet (skittles etc), 2xp for something slightly more substantial (a bit of chocolate bar), 4 xp for a cookie or similar, 10-15 xp for a drink, 20-50xp for "food" (fried potato products to pizza slices) and 1-5 bonus xp if I like it alot.

The intention was that if players were really so desperate that they were willing to spend money to go up levelsthen they could. I have also had fountains that gave xp in-game, at one xp per drink, characters felt bloated and sloshy after a few (5+) drinks though and started getting penalties. One of them even threw his XP back up.

In the games I play, PCs get karma for doing things that are interesting or realistic as well as well thought out or funny. Having water fights after some astral reconnasaince or playing with orc children at a revival meeting tend to result in extra karma--simply because it's something my character would actually do. . . .

Hey, when did you go to this revival meeting and why wasn't I invited?

Thought you knew. Simple to remedy--she'll probably joke about it at some point, you express interest, and voila! Revival meeting for all! Bring out the troll thrash praise band!

Hehe, just got an image of the curch from Blues Brothers, with everyone dressed the same, but all the parishoners are orks and the preacher is a troll sent from on high.

And when a troll preacher asks if you've seen the light, you say YES!

And you make damn sure you put some nuyen in that collection plate!

[randomandstupidasusual]

AMEN, BROTHA!! AMEN!! PEACE AND----*gets mouth ducttaped shut before he can make a further moron of himself*

[/randomandstupidasusual]

We also use cash for karma - but they have to describe an appropriate way of making it. we do it on a % basis (10% character funds per karma point, max 50% spend at once) which makes it both very expensive and more difficult to justify at higher levels.

Similar to what maergrethe said, it also has to be appropriate for your character. For mages for example, they might declare they are living a magical lifestyle, and spending money on purification rituals and magically harmonious decor for their home, that kind of thing. A more altruisitic character might donate money to the local hospital or go track down a bunch of medical supplies (the act of which might even generate its own karma if its particularly involved, as would the mage tracking down what they needed). If the character is an evil-type, it must still be appropriate so might be sponsoring a particularly brutal combat pit fighter, bribing officials to make the character's life easier (without providing specific benefits like permits) or paying a gang to go rough up a tenement building just for fun.

It provides interesting downtime activities and sometimes promotes spontaneous runs if what they wanted to throw their money at doesn't prove as easy as first thought - I beleive in making people work for their karma, even if they're going to lose money as well. Nothing worth karma should be easy. The players do respond well to this and means that often they do my job for me, and all I have to do is provide information and NPC interaction instead of coming up with things to keep them interested. Mind you, I don't mind them occasionally saying, 'look, I want to anonymously donate 30% of my earnings to that shamanic healer group that patched us up last month, even though they said they didn't want anything' and just wiring the cred through and giving them the karma, but generally, they have to be more creative than that.

(incidentally we also allow karma for cash which can be done by pure gambling if need be, but its at 1 karma point is worth 5% of earnings instead. I dunno, it just seemed right. People rarely use it. Money can be accumulated by simple datasteals if need be, and might earn you karma in the process, so why bother?).

We also award certain listed things like 'right skill right time' (especially if its a very obscure skill) or 'excellent roleplaying' on the spot in addition to any they might get for their overall performance.

The only other thing we do in awarding karma that is a bit unusual is if a player leaps to the right conclusion in something particular complex with a minimum of information. Eg. if they have only a few peices of the puzzle in a conspiracy against them, but make the right connections and figure out what is really going on (a guess is not good enough, the 'why' those pieces lead to that conclusion has to be there), then they will get a karma point, on the spot. This has a side effect of confirming the player is correct when they shouldn't know for certain, and indeed sometimes I therefore don't give it on the spot if there are other players vocalising equally plausible (but incorrect) theories. But most times I give them a karma point and chalk it up to the character (rather than the player) has made the connections and is so convincing in his arguments that the others realise he's right, or intuition - it IS the 6th world after all. Just because you aren't awakened doesn't mean your totem isn't watching out for you.... On occasions where I do keep it secret the character gets it added to their main award later with the explanation.

i got the "Crazy Guy Attacking The Bigass Elemental" award, once. looking back, i'm not sure it was worth the ass-whuppin' my character received...

yeah, but this was specific. anybody can get a random Crazy Fuck award.

Well if the preacher was a Troll you might get that response. But being that he is a human mage its even more certain that people put money in the collection plate.

Since we have a lot of talented people in our group (artists & writers), I give out 1/2 the total personal karma award (rounded up) for anyone who draws a picture of an event that happened in the game or for anyone who chronicles the adventure in short story form. Since a regular run can be anywhere from 8-10 karma, this reward bumps up the average to 12-15.

I suppose it might be unfair for those who have no talent, but then again, I don't want untalented people in my gaming group. j/k

I posted my modified experience award system a long time ago... It is very similar to the standard system, but I also implement a "Player's Choice" award. At the end of a run I let the players vote on who played their character the best over the course of the adventure. I won't go into all of the math, but basically if one player gets the majority of the tables votes he or she would get 2 points of Karma and the person or persons in the cas of a tie with the next largest number of votes gets 1 point. A tie for first place gets each player 1 point with no second place points given out. If you play in a game with higher karma awards you could always bump those point totals up a bit.

I also use "cash for karma". My take on it is that you have to be spending the karma on something that someone is teaching you, and you have to pay the extra cash to the instructor. In essence you are purchasing the instructors karma. You can never purchase more karma than 25% of whatever it is you are learning (or more than the instructor is willing to provide).

...

Okay, suddenly I'm seeing the validity in that rectal shotgun cyberware they were talking about in the other thread.