Yes and yes. I've been handing out BPs instead of Karma since the game came out, and it has been working fine. As you've noticed, the Karma and Build Points are not "fair" when used together, so it is best to play with BPs as story awards or with character generation based on starting Karma.

I find that BPs as story awards is easier, because the math is simpler. Although Serbitar has a functional version of the game going the other way.

For discussion of this very point, try this old chestnut:

Or This Thread.

Or Serbitar's Houserules.

It works either way, but as printed, with BPs and Karma, the game becomes amazingly unfair in a short period of time.

-Frank

Definitionally no. If it's linear, it doesn't have increasing costs and if it it has increasing costs it isn't linear.

What you could do is have a system where things are linear within a range and each range is more expensive than the one before it. For example, skills could cost 2 BP per point for ratings 1-3, 4 BPs per point for ratings 4-6, and 6 (or even BP for ratings 7-9. That would seem to cover the three things you want out of life:

1. Easily calculatable costs.
   
2. Commutative advancement, taking A then B is the same cost as tking B then A.
   
3. Relatively slower growth for more advanced characters.

If you had other design goals, I'm sure that the math could be moved around a bit to take that into account.

That actually is a pretty big incentive. But any system where starting character points are spent at the same rate as points later in life is going to solve what appears to be your number one problem - that starting with a 6 and a 4 is better than starting with two fives once you have some games under your belt. Whether those points are spent in a linear, exponential, or geometric fashion is immaterial to game balance, it comes down to preference.

And as soon as it comes to that, I can't actually give you definitive answers. What I can say is that both the Serbitar Chargen and the Frank Advancement system solve that problem, and they can't be used together, and some people prefer one and some people prefer the other.

Hopefully something very similar to both of those sets of house rules will appear in the SR4 Player's Guide as game options. It's entirely possible that could occur, and that would be good for the game.

-Frank

That would automatically be the case if you used Karma in character generation.

Since I like the increasing cost, because it makes higher ratings a little more rare, as they should be, I used that approach back then.

As it seems, Serbitar has a functional version for SR4, so no need to reinvent the wheel.

Bye
Thanee

Gah! I suppose sounding more like an ass than usual will teach me to post past my bed-time - I believe what I meant is: Has a character creation method been created that allows for higher skill levels to become increasingly more expensive, without having to do quite the overhaul that Serbitar has done - Attribute raises costing in the hundreds of karma, for instance.

Afterall, I like the notion of rewarding players 3-4 karma after a run as opposed to plotting out a bellcurve, and determining that the run garnished a return of 24.2 - Not that I don't appreciate the intricacies of Serbitar's system. Just that I may have to extensively explain the character generation system I adopt to players who are familiar with SR4 canon.

I'm not entirely sure how the word 'linear' snuck in there. But I am certain that tackling the issue tomorrow morning, after recharging a bit, might do be wonders.

I'll be back.

I like the notion of rewarding players 3-6 points per completed run, with a 1-2 point award just for being there are out bi-weekly sessions...but, if you look at it from a large picture, taking current karma costs into affect (and that is just raising skills and attributes), it would take a helluva long time to get up to a prime runner. And even at 250+ karma, you are not talking about "superheroes" either...

I suppose it all depends on how often your group plays and how long you would expect to play the same character, but I think you need to plot that out first, then see what the average karma per session or adventure should be.

At four hours a session, usually completing a run 75% per session and playing weekly... 6 karma per run (on average) means that you have gained 78 karma in a year (or 52 sessions or 208 hours of game play). That just doesn't seem like a lot of karma to build your character up in a year's time...

Oh? I havn't really looked at Serbitar's system in detail, but that sounds like it's much more complex than it needs to be... at least to do what you are looking for, apparantly Serbitar is looking for some additional things in there.

As I said, it's incredibly simple. Just use the costs to increase skills, attributes, and so on with Karma from the book, and you are almost set.

Bye
Thanee

Note, that in my system, racial bonuses are not taken into account when raising attibutes. So the highest ammount you will ever have to pay (if you have an exceptional attribute) is raising an attribute from 6 to 7 which is 35 karma (which SHOULD be a considerable step).

My system is using the standard SR4 karma rewards, which are about 2-4 karma per 5 hour evening.

I did a lot of math and simulations and everything works out as expected. Of course, attributes will not change as much as in RAW but, that whas the goal (and starting characters are a little better than RAW ones to compensate).

I would suggest to try and build some characters with the excel sheet and see whether if fits your needs.

I spent some time today hammering out something that might work for my own gaming needs, did a little character progression plotting, ran into some problems, corrected them, so on, and so forth -- After a good portion of the day, I came back to review your system, Serbitar, and I found to my delight that there were some serious similiar aims and numbers popping up. Given that I believe you've looked into the matter much more heavily than I, I shaved and padded a bit to give this system a better fit with yours.

So, as it stands, I -really- appreciate all of the work you put together with your system. And you too, Frank - You've got some good stuff floating around in there. I ended up going w/ a progessively more expensive raise system, just because the game environment won't give me quite the degree of policing that I'd have at a standard tabletop game. Letting the diminishing returns police skill/attribute raises will be easier than me explaining to players why they can't just raise their Automatics skill to 20, and blow everything else off.

So. I really appreciate the work you guys put in - It helped me blend the parts I liked out of your approaches, and mesh it together here. If anyone would like to pick apart this system and show me if there are any glaring oversights, I'd really appreciate it.

Feel free to completely wreak havoc, if necessary. And constructive feedback is always welcome. Thanks!


-----------------------



Chargen Rules - Characters are based on 500 NBP (New Build Points), and may spend up to 250 NBPs on attributes, and may divide the remaining NBPs between special attributes, skills, resources, contacts, lifestyle, Qualities, and may also purchase a metahuman race. A character can start with a maximum of =Y=252,000 worth of resources.Character's are limited to 3 of each negative and qualities. Once game play begins, awarded karma may purchase character improvements at a 1:1 karma/NBP ratio.

Special Attribute Edge: Edge is accumulated at a rate coinciding with a Character's total received Karma. The first point is received at 20 karma, the second at 50 karma, the third at 90 karma, and so on:

Character's start with a number of knowledge skills equal to the sum of their Logic + Intuition, multiplied by 10.

Edge Pool
1 - 20
2 - 50
3 - 90
4 - 140
5 - 200
6 - 270
7 - 350
8 - 440
9 - 540

No changes have been made to a bonus provided by racial choice, excepting that Human's may start with 4 positive qualities.

Skill groups have been removed. All skills are raised individually instead. Optionally, GM's who enforce training rolls may allow players to expend one lump sum of karma equal to the sum of raising all skills inside a Skill Group by one, allowing a player to make one training roll for the entire lot, using his highest applicable dicepool.

--->Exceptional Attribute - 10 NBP - Each time an attribute is bought at a rating of 6, or higher, it must be accompanied by an Exceptional Attribute Quality. This quality may be purchased multiple times, and each time it is purchased, it allows an attribute to be raised to a higher level than previously allowed, through an expenditure of karma, normal. It must be purchased seperately for each attribute, and each instance must either apply to allowing a new attribute to be increased to 6, or apply to raising the cap on one of the character's pre-existing Exceptional Attributes. This quality is not exempt from the total number of qualities available during character generation.

---->Apptitude - 5 NBP - Each time a skill, active or knowledge, is bought at a rating of 6, or higher, it must be accompanied by an Apptitude Quality. This quality may be purchased multiple times, and each time it is purchased, it allows a skill to be raised to a higher level than previously allowed, through an expenditure of karma, as normal. It must be purchased seperately for each skill, and each instance must either apply to allowing a new skill to be increased to 6, or apply to raising the cap on one of the character's pre-existing Apptitude skills. This quality is not exempt from the total number of qualities available during character generation.

Left column is cost to raise incrementially, while the right column is the cumulative cost. To better round out character's, and facilitate metahuman's, attributes begin at rating 2. Lowering an attribute to 1 earns a character +10 NBPs which may be applied to other attributes, exceeding the 250NBP cap.

:::Attributes:::
1:+10 CC:+10
2:- CC:0
3:15 CC:15
4:20 CC:35
5:25 CC:60
6:30 CC:90
7:35 CC:135
8:40 CC:175
9:45 CC:220

:Active Skills:
1:2 CC:2
2:4 CC:6
3:6 CC:12
4:8 CC:20
5:10 CC:30
6:12 CC:42
7:14 CC:56
8:16 CC:72
9:18 CC:90

:Knowledge:
1:1 CC:1
2:2 CC:3
3:3 CC:6
4:4 CC:10
5:5 CC:15
6:6 CC:21
7:7 CC:28
8:8 CC:36
9:9 CC:45

:::Magic/Resonance::::
1:- CC:-
2:6 CC:6
3:9 CC:15
4:12 CC:27
5:15 CC:42
6:18 CC:60
7:21 CC:81
8:24 CC:105
9:27 CC:132

::OTHER::
-Resources: 4K per 1 NBP
-Lifestyle: Unchanged/3 Months must be bought during character generation.
-Contacts: Rating x Loyalty
-Active Spec: 6 NBP
-Knowledge Spec: 3 NBP
-Spells: 4BP

::Race Cost Table::
Ork: 30
Dwarf: 30
Elf: 45
Troll: 45

Skill/Attribute Caps have been removed, and instead policed by diminishing karmic returns.

EDIT: Correct Knowledge Skill cost corrected - Ratings 7,8, and 9 were 1 NBP too cheap.

You must be kidding there.

Bye
Thanee

All attributes begin at 2. If one is lowered to 1, +10NBP for attributes is generated. If it later is bought back up, that 10NBP must be payed off, which brings it back to 2. Racial modifiers are added after attribute generation. Attribute Raises are at base attribute, ignoring Racial/Magic/Bioware/Cyberware bonus.

The only unfortunately part of this is that it means that Trolls must automatically buy Charisma up to -at least- 3, spending 15NBP of their NBP Attribute Total. I toyed about deducting a portion of that straight from their racial modifier cost.

Meanwhile, elves have no negative attributes, and are, unfortunately, prime for mix/maxing. So they maintain the same XP cost as Trolls.

Am I overlooking anything?

Would you care to constructively demonstrate why they should be cheaper?

Why would they have to do that? Trolls don't have a Charisma penalty, they have a reduced Charisma maximum.

-Frank

I'm more speaking of Troll and Elf on one level... Troll is already too cheap with the original 40 BP and this seems to be less than that.

Bye
Thanee

This is not a bad thing.

THIS is the bad thing. Ive never liked this and think it is a big mistake. Trolls should be less intelligent/have lower charisma on average and not only have a lowered max.

Right.

So - How's the modifications to your system look like it'll play out, Serbitar? Playable? Any serious problems? Anything I'm overlooking?

If Trolls have a lower maximum, they do have a lower average. The Average is the combined values of all Trolls divided bythe number of Trolls. If you replace the Trolls that would have 5s and 6s in an attribute with numbers betwen 1 and 4, the average is lower.

The minimum is 1 regardless, so the reductions in attributes below 1 that then have to be bought up to 1 are just an accounting gimick. That doesn't actually mean anything.

And that's why I've never been with you on the whole Karma for Chargen thing. I acknowledge that it works, but the kinds of contortions you are putting yourself through are to my mind unacceptable. Having characters start with negative attributes that they mandatorily purchase up to positive values is something that 4th edition did away with and that was good.

No it isn't. Trolls get a lot of bonus attributes, but those bonus attributes are Strength andd Body. And those attributes suck ass. Sorry folks, the real weapons in Shadowrun are guns (agility), spells (magic), and computer detonated explosives (Logic). Swords and axes kind of blow evenn if you are crazy strong.

Body and Strength are both weak sister attributes and they probably should have been combined into one. The Troll's extra reach almost makes up for his reduced Agility maximum, and his Dermal Armor in no way makes up for his increased size and noticeability. This is a game about getting away with crime, being a human or an ork is awesome, being a dwarf or troll is pretty dangrous.

Trolls are weak at 40 BP. They get a lot of attribue points, but it isn't like they are getting real attributes like Agility or Charisma.

-Frank

OK, let me correct: I want the average troll to be more stupid than the average human.
According to the BP system of RAW, both, the average human, and the average Troll pay 30 BP for an intelligence or charisma of 3, and are thus equally intelligent/charsimatic.

I do not want that (not at all), by design desicion and my system nicely corrects this.

@Steak: Still checking

No. The Human pays 20 BP for an Intuition or Charisma of 3. The Troll pays 40 BP for being a Troll and another 20 BP for a Charisma of 3. Since the "bystander" in Shadowrun only seems to have about 120 BP to throw around for stats, that 40 BP is going to hit the bystander Troll somewhere important. Maybe he can make it up by dumping a bunch of mental stats. Maybe by throwing skills overboard.

The pint is, points all come out of the same pool. If you have less points and your maximums are lower, your average is less. By a pretty immediately obviously large amount actually.

-Frank

Then why mess with the system at all? The BP system isn't there to make 'average' people, it's there to make PC's and notable NPC's which by definition are supposed to be a cut above.

The BP system doesn't need to work to make the clerk at the local stuffer shack, unless he also runs around at night beating up muggers with a bat on his chest.

That was the very same with BeCKS.

Yep. That's why I don't feel entirely comfortable with charging so much for Trolls.

That is the point. The 40 BP payed for being a troll have nothing to do with charisma or intelligence. They can be taken from anything. These 40 BP only mean, that the Troll is somewhere worse than the human. But I explicitly want trolls to be dumber and less charismatic than humans, thats why I am directly reducing these stats.

Furthermore I want the game mechanics to reflect the distribution I want to end up with. By subtracting/adding the race mods from the inital "human" average distribution, I get exactly what I want. Especially, I can say what the distribution for a metareace is, whithout doing BP math (as BPs do not really exist in the real world and actually it is a very bad idea to base any world models on BP or Karma, maybe except in the case where you are comparing attribute costs with attribute costs or skill costs with skill costs).

Bsides, with my 5xAttribute Karma, Trolls would not be payable if I did not add the modifers after creation. With a normalKarma system, a Troll has to pay more than a human to get his "average" strength. Something I also do not like. All in all, trolls in my system are cheaper than in a Karma system with modifiers before creation.

I do not want to defend my system, I just want to say that it is doing exactly what I want. I put quite some time into it, and if you do not like it, more power to you, but you should know that I am aware of most of the stuff going on there, and chances are good that I put a certain mechanic there because it produces exactly the results I want it to prodouce.

@ Rotbart: So what?

This sentence no verb.

If you are reducing their stats below one, and then forcing them to buy it back up to 1, you aren't reducing their stats. You're just charging them more points. The points to raise the attribute "back up to one" comes out of the general pool. All you're really doing is making the cost of being a Troll deceptive. The "true cost" includes purchasing the attributes hat you are dropping, while the "apparent cost" is just the price tag you put on the Troll itself.

The Troll is still going to have a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 4. All Player Character Trolls will fall somewhere in that range, and NPCs will have whatever stats you say that they have.

You haven't made any real changes. You've just put some of the costs of column A into column B so that they are harder to find.

-Frank

Sorry about that. The sentence "This sentence no verb." actually has no verb. It's technically not a valid English sentence and doesn't literally mean anything. The implication is that it contains the word "has" and thus is a statement about its own lack of a verb (which would make the statement true so long as it continued to not be a valid statement).

It's a classic English phrase meaning that something is missing from a logical argument causing it to be meaningless. The fact that the statement is true only so long as it isn't a fully formed statement is a reference to the failure of the statement that it is used in reference to to convey its intended intent or properly persuade its audience.

Roughly translated it means "Ich glaube, der nicht zutreffend ist." and is predicated on the required phrase structure of well-formed English sentences. I apologize for using a statement that barroque on a multi-lingual forum, that sort of thing just comes out from time to time.

---

Anyway, I believe that the point still stands. Player Characters aren't avrage. Average people have stats in the 2-3 range and are not bought with points anyhow. Telling your players that they must purchase a stat in the 3-6 range and then reducing their stats by two is more complicated, and not otherwise different, than simply giving them less points and asking themm to buy a stat in the 1-4 range.

-Frank

Not at all.

Because Attribute/Skill caps have been removed, Metahumans no longer have caps on attributes that would ordinarily be capped for them. Instead, they pay more to raise some, and pay less to raise others.

For instance. An Ork pays the same karma cost to raise body from 5-->6, as a human pays to raise from 2-->3. Likewise, an Ork pays the same to raise charisma from 2-->3 as a human pays to raise from 3-->4.

But since the amount of points you have to spend is at any point fixed, this actually shoehorms a Metahuman much more than the normal rules could hope to. An Elf isn't going to be "about 1 die better" at shooting, he's going to be evolutionarily ahead of anyone else. He's paying less to improve himself in Agility than other people, his relative advantage as a shooter increases over time.

And since you're charging people just to get starting values, you have increased the costs of being a non-elf metahuman. That you have also committed such characters to pay more on top of that if they want to be any good at all at a task that is uncharacteristic of their metatype means that you are kicking them twice.

A Troll Street Sam, for instance, is paying th Troll costs, and he's paying extra to raise his Agility, and he's being forced to buy the standard Agility for more points. These sorts of systems really punish characters who play against type.

And that's boring.

-Frank

Hmm... back then, I identified this as a general problem.

If you apply modifiers after attribute increases, the value of the modifier increases with every increase of the attribute, which leads to minmaxing. Something you want to counteract with the new system in the first place. It's a different incentive than the linear vs non-linear costs, but it's nonetheless a strong incentive as well. It's not as bad as in previous editions, where it only applied during character generation, and afterwards the costs to increase the modified attribute suddenly skyrocketed, but it's still there.

That's why I had decided to apply racial modifiers first, just like SR4 does it now as well, give them a head start with the bonuses (or boni for the latin-speakers) and simply cap the maximum with the penalties.

All in all, at least I think so, an orc and a human with equal attributes should cost roughly the same.

Bye
Thanee