Anyone know if it's canon or not? If so, can you tell me where to find it?

Aye Bad Karma is a character flaw which can be found in the Shadowrun Companion. Oddly enough, in the flaws section.

TBO

Bad Karma has sometimes been called the Power Gamer's Flaw; Cursed Karma is a bit better in terms of effect.

bad karma is for stupid powergamers. karma pool is what seperates the men from the dead men; trading half of it off for 5 measly creation points is nowhere near being worth the cost.

Truthfully, I never use my karma pool that much.

-Siege

Powergamers take the Bad Karma flaw (and Cursed Karma) so that less Good Karma is taken into the Easy-to-Burn Karma Pool. Unfortunately, Cursed Karma tends to come back to bite said gamers in the ass.

Personally I find that I only use Karma Pool as an emergency backup plan. Usually one or two re-rolls during a game is more than enough. If I require more than that then I seriously f**ked up somewhere along the way and no amount of Karma Pool is going go save me.

Besides, depending on the character's background or history the idea of bad karma isn't entirely unreasonable.

I tend to agree that Cursed Karma can be a bit more dangerous but for some character's it just makes sense. You can't tell me that you've never met a person who alternatively has either stunningly good luck or stunningly bad luck with little middle ground. One day they'll be on top of the world and the next they'll be the doormat for the planet.

Saying that one or both flaws are for powergamers exclusively is a rather ignorant thing to say. While it's true that many players with see either flaw as a quick way to grab character points there are easily an equal number who took one or the other because it made sense given the character concept or background. But regardless I'm sure we'll have time to discuss this once you step down from your high horse and feel like dealing with us mere mortals again.

TBO

My PCs have done well without using Karma Pool, since they usually make sure their PCs are well-built and well-min-maxed.

The problem with Karma Pool is that it refreshes at GM's discretion. There is no fixed Canon refresh rate and I am very harsh with Karma refresh. I've even ran one campaign with no refreshes before. Having Bad Karma in my games is good, since low refresh punishes people who rely on Karma or in a RP sense "luck" or "experience" rather than skill and tactics.

I like bad Karma. In games I run, I never allow my PCs to ever have more than 5 Karma pool. Period. This makes sure the players think things through more, and do more planning, instead of looking at buttloads of Karma Pool and thinking they can do anything with enough re-rolls.

In my games players dont accumulate that much karma pool because sooner or later theyre burning it to survive. My players have never even seriously considered Bad Karma or Cursed Karma because it will sooner or later undoubtedly mean their demise. They use their karma pool often, and to save their bacon. SRing is a very dangerous occupation and their use of Karma Pool reflects this.

In fact, if my players heard someone say they rarely used carma pool they would tell you you're playing in a game very, very different from theirs. They usually roll their eyes at a statement like that, but hey... every GM runs differently.

But bad karma is such a juicy flaw.

It's 2 points of body and one of skill.
Thats a lot of karma pool rerolls you never have to make.

I assume that all you people who are talking about what an awful Flaw Bad Karma is never play metahumans?

Metahumans can have bad karma too, y'know.

Yup! sure can.

For humans, i don't see Bad Karma as being all that bad. They're at the same KP rate as metahumans then, and get 5 build points to show for it. For a metahuman, it's absolutely awful.

There's a version SOMEWHERE that punishes characters for doing stuff like shooting people in the back and not helping others if there's a single possibility that they could. Where can I find that?

I do not give out much karma, so players in my group learn to treasure their karma and would rather not have their karma pool suck up the karma they need to initiate/increase stat/etc. In fact, my metahuman Awakened PCs all have Bad Karma. It is a requirement. It could well mean one more run at a lower Magic point and no metamagic technique.

i think things through and use karma pool. i tend to have seriously bad luck, though; a typical stealth roll for me--13 dice--will come up all 5's or lower half the time. it's an incredibly rare run where my character doesn't go home with an S wound or worse.

not that i'm complaining, though. i've never gone above S+3 *knock on wood*.

well, bad/negative karma as direct recompense for evil actions doesn't.

Shooting someone in the back isn't evil. The US let its military Sniper program languish a few decades ago in part due to ideas like these. It just doesn't meet Western Civilization's idea of fairness, and in court it may indicate that the shooter wasn't in immediate danger from the dead guy. Hollywood also never has us see the hero shoot someone in the back, same as a dog never dies in a movie, unless it is a hero in the film and it died saving someone. Only the bad guy ever shoots at a dog in the movies.

And there are several threads about karma versus experience versus good and evil concepts.

I subscribe to the "it's all experience, baby" school of thought.

-Siege

But how much Karma do you really need? 2? 3? 10? What is the chances of you doing that 12+ ones again?

Bah I guess I'm just one of the few remaining members of the "Suck it up and pray you survive" school of gaming. The fact that Shadowrun has rerolls at all makes it a very forgiving game system IMO.

TBO

It has rerolls, but not many of them.

~J

I'm supprised that nobody brought up the Bad Karma from SR1, it's kinda like Dark SIde Points in the old Star Wars game. You got it for things like killing babies, or helpless people. It was the way that SR1 tried to enforce the bloodless run. A GM could use your bad karma against youin many ways. If anyone still has a SR1 they might be able to post the rules.

-The Eggman

I just skimmed my SR1 book and didn't see anything about bad karma -- I've played SR on and off since SR1 and I don't remember anything about bad karma.

Are you thinking of a different game?

-Siege

Remember that Karma Pool doesn't let you reroll failures if your first roll was all ones. At best you can use a Karma Pool to change the result from a disastrous failure to a simple failure. SR3 p. 246 "Avoiding an OOPS"

Sounds like that Bad Karma rule is a house rule to encourage "nice" characters.

A GM has no need of any explicit karma source to make the opposition scale up.

What are the bad karma rules from SR1? Can someone post them here?

I'm going to have to stop by the local game shop and see if they have an SR1, but IIRC there is a Bad Karma box on the character sheet.

-The Eggman

I've got no problem with atrocities as long as it's in character. if the guy with the pacifist flaw suddenly peeks at a baby's brain through the soft spot, that's when karma penalties come in. if the combat monster, blood thirsty, vindictive knife fighter spares the guy who punched him in the face just for looking at him funny, then there's penalties. but hell, if same combat monster stabs a cabbie in the back of the head for mocking the monster's mother then kudos, he gets the karma for in-character playing, but now he has to deal with the in-game consequences.

Simonw2000, I don't think there is such a rule, and I'm not sure there ever was. If your players are being particularly nasty, rather than looking for some rule, why not try to find another way to deal with it. (slightly off topic posting coming up)

Eg. If they're being particularly nasty with any form of magic, they can attract things man should not wot of, so to speak. Have a shufty at Dragons of the Sixth World and look up (sorry if this is a spoiler for anyone, but I won't mention any specifics) the wraith thing for an example of something unique and unpleasant. Get Threats 1 and look up Tutor. MITS: Free Shadow Spirits, dodgy initiate groups, toxics, etc etc. Also from Threats 1 - Winternight. That's pretty perfect. Winternight will send them on nastier and nastier runs, and they'll make enemies of those opposed to their new patrons very quickly.

If they're just shooting guards in the back because they are good enough to sneak up behind them, then fine. But remember, a shadowrun team which breaks in and does the job without killing anyone will get a lot less heat than a team which goes in guns blazing. The second team is going to have the friends and relatives of the victims screaming for vengeance, especially in the case of a megacorp where they probably all live and work within the same corp. The Corps ego gets badly bruised if they don't grab some perps. If you sneaked (snuck?) in and out without a sound, theycould decide to find you and hire you next time they need a good team! A few instances of this type of outcome and they'll get the message.

If they're murdering babies, then it time to start thinking if you're playing an 'evil' campaign, in which case you stop rewarding them for good things and let the chips fall where they may. Eventually, the biggest man hunt you've ever seen, aided by people from the shadow community who hate kid-murderers as much as any one else will come stomping all over the PCs and it'll be time to roll up new characters. Maybe you don't go for the 'evil' campaign (I wouldn't), cos its too cheesy. Fine. But word WILL get round about these psychos and eventually someone will decide they're a danger to those around them (vis a vis, other shadowfolk who don't like the heat the characters attract, and the rep they bring with them) and put them down. The cops are still the cops, the feds are still run by the government, corp security are multinational, and the shadowcommunity is an information network (albeit disorganised) capable of very quick response.

Never mind organised crime syndicates. Who's to say the characters last victim wasn't some oyabun's nephew, and he takes affront. The more Yak soldiers coming for revenge the characters geek, the more ticked off that oyabun's gonna get, till the players have a mitsuhama Unit 13 assault squad knocking on the front door with a HVAR and half a dozen Hachimans.

Don't sweat it, you don't need a rule for this, you just need to give them some rope. They won't notice the noose till too late, if you do it right.

As for karma awards, well, simply make extra karma points available on the total of the run and award it to the players who did the least killing or whatever. If that keeps happening I reckon they'll cotton on pretty fast.

Alternatively, you could just try talking to them. Say that you don't particularly like the way the campaign is going, or you don't think they're taking it seriously enough or whatever and remind them that its supposed to be fun for everyone, including the GM.

hth. I've read it through and it sounds a trifle condescending. It isn't meant to, but I really haven't the energy to retype it all. Apologies if I inadvertently cause any offence.

no, it can only be used in that instance to turn a botch into a simple failure.

Karma pool can be spent for a reroll only as long as one sucess was scored

That's untrue. Only buying successes requires an initial success. Rerolls do not, hence their value.

~J

i hate the way karma pool works on open tests--you pay kp costs per die you want to reroll. skills that require open tests (stealth, mainly) are hard enough to succeed at as-is; who's idea was it to penalize them even further, with those incredibly expensive reroll costs?

Too true. Thats why i house rule that if ya gonna reroll on a open test you reroll ALL the dice even that 8 you rolled......

same here.

Actually I virtually eliminated all open tests. Open tests are about the dumbest thing to come along in 3rd edition by a big fat huge longshot in my opinion.