I'm hoping someone could direct me to a source, or give me an example of some good home-brewed rules on the following:

The SR rules give decent coverage on Karma gain for adventures or runs, but how much karma would you say a person doing a normal job per month gain? If I'm not mistaken, since Karma is really the only way you can improve skills, and only a small population are actual runners, everyone else must gain karma to improve their abilities somehow.

How much variance might you expect based on professions? Cops and bodyguards gain more karma per month just doing their job than the average wageslave. What about the street mage that owns and runs that magic shop on the corner? etc etc

Siege (IIRC) likes to quote something that says you can only gain karma through Shadowrunning. Not sure where it is, though.

~J

I give normal people a karma point every day they come home from work, and an extra one if they have a tough commute. That way when my players want to pick on defenseless civilians they can have superhuman combat abilities

Unfortunately regular people spend almost all thier karma on stuff like:

Knowlege skill: Americas next top model.

No, that's paid for on credit somehow, like everything else. They lose the skills, and gain them at the same rate. THey've got some dark pact on karma exchange. think about it - you ask them who was America's next Top Model five years ago - betcha they won't know.

EDIT - no, thinking about that, it just means that the skill only covers America's NEXT top model. Of course they don't remember anything about the previous one! They haven't made a pact, they're just vacuous rules lawyers!

Heh. Its sad. Because its true

This page has some rules for learning without karma, as well (if you scroll down about mid-way) to earning karma without shadowrunning.

Think of the absolute combat beast Bill Gates would become if he could buy karma points for $5000 apiece.

He'd just pump Negotiations and 0wnz0r everyone else.

~J

considering Karma represents both your useful experiences as well as, to a certain degree, the memories that make you a unique and unusual person, I say you stop gaining karma as soon as you become a 9-5 employee, as can be seen by the poor wage slaves who watch as their soul is sucked dry by the corporation.

Honestly, I'd say it would depend on two factors; how challenging the job is and how the person responds to that job. An accountant will have poor karma gain because he rarely tests any skills beyond adding numbers. A researcher will have a significantly more karma (and a significantly wider range of skills) because he's always expanding his knowledge and dealing with the challenge of learning. Managers who've earned their way to the top through merit will have more karma than their underlings and children will likely have a higher karma gain than the average adult (they need it, its expensive to boost those attributes!)

Nezumi, good point.

I think that karma represents, for most uses (ie, rerolls and other luck related things aside ) the effort that a character puts in to learning something. The more karma you earn, the more work you've done. Challenging things reward you with more karma. You then "spend" that karma to learn a skill -- signifyin NOT that you suddenly get discretely better at {shooting/jumping/intimidating}, but rather that you have been working on it, and that now you are allowed to reap those benefits in-game.

Like the page that Backgammon linked, I think it's reasonable that average joes would be able to gain karma/ learn skills related to things they DO. If they put effort in to learning a martial art, or regularly go to the gun range, then sure -- I'd expect them to get better. Admittedly, it doesn't follow the way the BBB says that player characters gain skills/attributes, but I think it still makes sense. Similarly, I think that it would be reasonable for a GM to reward a person with skill in something if they practice at it, work at it, etc.

For example, character X hijacks a tank and drives it off into the jungle, delivering it to some local rebels he's helping. His GM might reward him directly and say "You now have Tank Driving 1", or conversely, he might award him a little extra karma, but give the stipulation that it cannot be used to raise anything BUT that skill.

Yeah, I know, kindof radical, when you apply it to other skills, or skills the character already has. But, imaine this -- your semi-munchy Gunbunny decides to help with negotiations. You know that they are saving every bit of karma to upgrade that SMGs skill to 7, but you'd rather see them get more balanced - so you can award them this extra karma, with the stipulation that they spend it on negotiations.

Hmm... that smacks of railroading when I think of it that way. Maybe it's not so good after all, lol. I think the core idea is sound, but that restraint would have to be used when applying it.

Thats just a completely different game mechanic.

Shadowrun is a development point system. You earn development points by playing the game, and you spend them to improve your charachter.

Another system is a level system, where you earn levels and levels improve your charachter.

Another is a use improvement system. One could make it so that each statistic that you use has a chance of going up with each use, that so many uses raises a statistic automatically, that each statistic you used significantly has a chance of going up at the end of the adventure. Pretty rare in paper rpg's (maybe the original call of cthulu worked this way?). A few MUD's and other computer games use these systems.

Yet another is a time based system where your skills would go up over time. Perhaps all uniformly, perhaps you would get to allocate them.

One more is a training system. Training costs and times would be the limit on improvement. Quite a few systems have optional rules to add training costs and times to thier other systems, but one could also make cost and time the only limit.

The use improvement system and the training cost/time ones are by far the most realistic, but they are also the hardest to balance and require the most bookkeeping or gm handwaving. To be very realistic you would also want a non-use skill loss mechanic.

Anyway, Voran, why could you possibly care about the charachter improvement rates of regular people NPCs?

General wage-slave improvement rate I wasn't really concerned with, but Karma/Skill improvement rates for people like bodyguards, cops, the mage owner of that magic shop up the road, etc, were more the ones I was interested in.

He would've Faded by now.

Or become something like the Borg Queen.

Or 7-of-9!

Aren't there rules somewhere for Study Karma?

Or perhaps that was a house rules I once played under.

If I recall it was something like a maximum of 4 karma per month (but that assumes that you study a minimum of 8 hours every single day for that month, lower levels of deducation earn less study karma).

We don't give any player characters Karma for going to a job for a year. Shesh, what kind of game is this? And yes, NPCs are whatever the GM decides they are, and improve in any way the GM says they improve (perhaps they step over to Amber for a while, after all, it's his game).

I once designed a roleplaying game called "Credit Cards and Malls". The player characters could increase their shopping skills and the credit limit on their cards (and get new card offers in the mail) if they went shopping. No one raised their skill or limits working a day job in that game either. It wasn't that kind of game.