Is there some explanation (in-game or not) for the use of the term "Karma" for the game´s experience pionts ? What the devs had in mind when they came up with it?

In the older versions, there was more uses for Karma than just EXP. Edge took over some of those roles in 4th Ed.

And, also, they didn't want to be AD&D.

I don't think I've ever seen anything that explicitly states why Bob Charrette, Paul Hume, Tom Dowd, Jordan Weisman, L. Ross Babcock III, Sam Lewis and Dave Wylie did this in 1st edition SR. ( I have my copy open in front of me!) But yeah basically they didn't want to XP points, and I believe-and this is just a SWAG (Systematic Wild Ass Guess) on my part but Karma can cut both ways, and represents sort of the flow of luck in a similar fashion to the way Magic is believed to operate in Shadowrun. And since it's a little more versatile than just determining what "Level" you are, I think it works.

Actually a lot of initiate powers still use Karma

Anything to be different... such as the use of the feminine pronoun throughout all the books instead of the standard male pronoun. So PC of them...

Strictly speaking though, Karma is somewhat fitting. To be true to the concept of the word, however, characters would earn good Karma and bad Karma and it would work similar to Edge (though knowing when to apply the bad Karma would be tricky) but then character advancement would have to be handled another way

And to be fair Karma still can do more than just "Level Up."



You kind of make this seem real cynical. I guess I never really noticed this, and now that you point it out I guess it doesn't bother me.

A little bit I guess and if it was a common practice or switched back and forth I probably wouldn't notice - but flipping the common pronoun in a whole series of books when doing so has really nothing to do with the actual subject matter in the book strikes me as PC grandstanding. Honestly, even then I really don't care that much, it just made for some disjointed reading at first as I unconsciously tried to figure out if the writer literally meant a specific female, just female characters, or if they were implying most runners were female.

If they were really in a twist about using "he" they could always have gone with "they" instead...

No. They is plural, he and she are singular.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

"They" is the third person plural form. (You cannot say "They is" for example) English doesn't have a third person neutral which can be applied to people. ("It" only applies to non-living objects like corpses.) "He" was the gender neutral standard for many years, but there was a growing movement to emasculate the language and apply the feminine as the standard.

Linguists argue about this type of thing regularly. Some languages have a gender neutral form, but it generally applies to a more global concept, such as the role of "one" in the following statement: one's relationship to society is determined through one's actions and appearance.

There's a disclaimer in some gaming books where "he" will refer to the GM and "she" will refer to players, unless specific names are used to denote gender. I don't believe Shadowrun included one, but it was discussed behind the scenes a bit.

Back to the OP: Prior to 4th Edition, Karma awards were added to the characters Good Karma, as a reflection of total amount earned. Every 10th or 20th point was transferred instead to the Karma Pool, which functioned like Edge. You could earn karma for shooting people in the face, but special bonuses could be earned for doing good things. Beyond the "Exp," my supposition is that they wanted to remind you that even though many runners do "bad things" they can actually be "good people" if they want to. Maintaining their humanity and goodness against the overwhelming swell of megacorps is part of the cyberpunk genre.

A long-contested position. As the wiki entry phrases it after several classical usages: However, in some of these sentences, there is a component of pluralness in the meaning of "they".

They, for common usage, implies pluralness.

I'll add that at the time I heard one particular group complaining of the feminine generic. They were, bluntly, misogynists. As a rule they were the type that though not only that women didn't play these sorts of games but shouldn't play these sorts of games, and any nod otherwise was "offensively PC". It has left me, I admit, with a biased perception of those who complain about how PC various word choices might be.

Singular they is, and has been for centuries, totally acceptable. You use plural conjugations with it, but this fact doesn't alter the use. You use the same conjugations for 'you' (singular or plural).

It is no better to use 'she' than 'he', so if 'he' is a problem, 'she' is a problem.

Which is fine. So write in the plural:

"The rigger tends to work with multiple drones by the seat of her pants: jumping into one here, sending groups there, managing a fluid situation with disperse assets. To do this effectively, she needs to be able to communicate with her drones."

becomes

"Riggers tend to work with multiple drones by the seat of their pants: jumping into one here, sending groups there, managing a fluid situation with disperse assets. To do this effectively, they need to be able to communicate with their drones."


And I'm not one of those - I wish more females played. (and no, not because I'm lonely or even single ). I'm a huge believer in women's rights - I just find something like solely using the feminine pronoun to be a childish "thumb my nose at the giant misogynistic conspiracy" kind of move. Is the common use of the male pronoun in non-gender specific text a legacy of 10,000 years of largely patriarchal cultures? Sure - as a male I apologize on behalf of our gender for the entire history of our species. If the SR books are the battle ground they wanted to chose to strike a blow at modern literature, however, the correct move would have been to swap back and forth or write in the plural. Discarding the masculine all together (with the exception of some of the examples) is, at best, sinking down to the the misogynists level.

If it sounds like I was accusing you of being 'one of those' I apologize. I'm merely noting during the late 80's the constant frothing on the issue from certain individuals was such that the phrasing is indelibly tied to them in my mind.

and Yerameyahu, not "totally" acceptable. Used as an alternative for the generic, yes. But it is much more frequently used for the generic plural.

Interesting angle. Didnt think about it before.

Essence measures the humanity you manage to retain despite a increasingly techological world, while (good) Karma measures the moral/goodness you manage to mantain against a increasingly imoral/callous/egoistic society.

Cool.

And, even today, there's a segment of the male population in the US (and the majority of the male population of the rest of the world) that see women as chattel or worse...
That we have been able to survive as a species boggles the mind.... though this is totally derailing the thread

At least English doesn't give items a sex. French threw me completely. Why is a Tree male while a Table female? Did the carpenter do a SRS on the tree when he built the table?

Yeah, the whole measure of "What makes a Human-human?" and all that which is one of the main cornerstones of good Cyberpunk. Good catch!

You're asking why the sky is blue, to me

Greek/Latin language all have item-gender and no neutral pronouns and surprinsingly, 90%+ of genders are the same between spanish/italian and french. I don't know for romanian and greek.

Latin roots I guess.

When I was young I didn't understand why english speakers kept putting Le/La in front of every french words they tell (even the ones that take a L', like Amour for exemple, come one that grammar rule is dumb !). It's like saying "the" in front of each word you use, that's kind of stupid. I guessed now it's how french is teached

My apologizes to have a such complicated language to learn. At least it's not german !

Who says I learned it? Only reason I didn't fail French in High School was because you actively had to work at failing French to do it.

I'd have loved to have taken Latin as my second language course, but they stopped teaching it the year I arrived in High School.

I, for one, do not apologize for the fact that I have a penis as my father before me and his father before, etc, etc, etc...
That being said, women are the best and the worst invention ever right after the wheel.




In portuguese (also a latin language), both of those are feminine nouns.



As I'm learning french right now to request an immigrant visa for Canada I find amusing that english native speakers have some difficult learning french considering that more than half of english words were stolen, er, borrowed from french words. Seriously, anytime I learn a new french word that is not similar to a portuguese word, I think if there is something similar in english, if there is, there's a 99% chance of both words sharing the same meaning.

Now, back to the topic at hand. Yes, karma in older editions had a lot of uses besides representing your experience, and you always gained extra karma everytime you did something "for the children".

Gave a good reason for "Hooding" Shaodwruns, actually. I might give a Karma bonus for doing things like that if I ever run a campaign again, actually.

Honestly, a lot of systems use different names for "Experience" when they're not using a class-based system. Deadlands, for example, had "Bounty" (Because of it's Western feel, even after the Supernatural Atomic Bombs went off), which was measured in poker chips.

I have a strong preference to Classless systems as it lets me grow my character in any direction I want, even from the start. I hated Star Wars D20 in all it's flavors due to the fact that I wasn't a "Back Of Beyond Tramp Freighter Captain" like in D6, instead I was a "Level 7 Scoundrel, Level 2 Flying Ace, Level 1 Gunslinger" or some such thing.

That was actually not in the 1st edition rules, IIRC it was not introduced until SR4.

PC, was a Player Character back in 1989.

It was the 80s, dude.

Karma makes more sense for this system than "experience" as you spend it.

In D&D, your power is dependent on how much experience you *have*. You don't spend it, so a long term adventurer has "lots of experience".

In shadowrun, your power is dependent on how much karma you have *spent*. If they called it experience instead of karma, yu would find that a long term shadowrunner has very little "experience" as he keeps spending it on improving abilities.

Philosophically, Karma makes more sense to describe something that you earn and spend.

It's prevalent through the 3d edition. Not constant by the way - I've found masculine and feminine used - but there are plenty of feminine pronouns used for generics.

Can't speak for any before that as I don't have copies to check.

It started around the time SoNA was released, IIRC.

It was not the case in earlier editions. You had to keep track of both your unspent karma to buy stuff and your total karma for the karma dice.

And I don't see how spending karma to learn makes any more sense. If anything, it should be the opposite: shooting people in the face for money burns karma and reaching a better understanding of the universe gives karma.

I really like the fact that they used Karma instead of XP. One of the things I love about Shadowrun is the sheer amount of customization you can do with your character. Karma is an excellent vehicle for that customization. Instead of going up a "level" you improve your skills with karma, which to me seems a lot more fun and less tedious than searching for that perfect feat or power like in D&D when you level up. I think they did a really good job choosing this kind of skill improvement system. I would say that they did it just to be different, but I also think they added some ingenious aspects as well in terms of the effect on the overall character improvement system.

I like to think the basic team learned a lot from writing Aftermath.

Of all the D20 iterations, Star Wars SAGA was by far my favorite. Yes, it is a class-based system, but the feats list and talents list gave you enough customization that the name of the classes could be completely ignored when creating any concept.

Coz 80s.

French, italian, spanish and portuguese are all offshoots from latin - no wonder the genders are the same. English was also heavily influenced by french for two reasons : the french-speaking norman lords. The influence is obivious in the pork/pig, mutton/sheep case, beef/ox : the meat is named in french (by the lord who eats it) and the animal in germanic or celtic by the peasant. While in french both the meat and the animal use the same word. Second reason is that for quite a long time french was the language of culture and diplomacy in europe.

Though as far as similar wordings go, the french and and english similitude can also come from a germanic or celtic root that was retained in both french and english.

I've read somewhere ancient franch defined as 'soldier's latin spoken with a thick gaul accent'. Which is probably close to truth.

I think Karma tied in with something that was emphasized a lot in earlier days: that many runners dislike the corporations, and consider themselves rebels, even though they also work for the corporations.

That many runners considered themselves good people in a shitty world, forced to take jobs from corporations due to circumstances. But that because most of their work was against other corporations, that mitigated their guilt somewhat; at least *an* evil corporation is being hurt.

I agree. It's a cultural aspect of 80s cyberpunk. That's why your sourcebook needs native american hipsters.

Fixed it for you! Yes that is how foreign languages in the 80's and 90's was taught.


PS: I took german in the late 80's when in High school.

Actually not necessarily. The concept of Karma does not always have "good" and "bad" associated with it, that's something that was mainly added by western culture. The Buddha described "karma" as more like a residue of existence that builds up in a consciousness, (or something like that, it's been a long time since I studied Buddhism at all) not necessarily evil, but something that must be worked through/let go of before the person can enter Nirvana. Hinduism, which is the origin of the word, may have a more good/evil association I'm not sure.

Anyways, if you think of it like that, Karma being simply the energy that a person acquires on the path through life, then it's a pretty good fit for the measure of a person's growth.

While we (the western cultures) might say good karma and bad karma, everything that you do is karma. And the whole point is to balance your karma until your good deeds are balanced with your evil deeds, then you become enlightened, or something like that.

Damn... I have to be more evil then.

Well, I'm off to go kick kittens.

That is not really EVIL per se... just a good common practice for those who are allergic...

There were other games that used 'karma' as opposed to other methods of tracking character development as well.

Marvel Super Heroes, for example (the FASERIP one). And indeed in that game, you got Karma for being good, and lost it for being bad. You couldn't lose what you had spent, but you could go negative, which prevented you from improving your stats until you did more 'good'. This affected teams as well, as they shared certain amounts of karma.

It didn't work all that great, for example, the Punisher NEVER would have improved anything, Wolverine regularly would have pissed off the X-Men by losing team karma points, but it was an interesting alternative to straight experience points.

And I am allergic to them...

Damn, now I need a new evil thing to do...

There's always Puppies...

I like puppies...

"Karma" also hints that maybe some jobs that pay less (because the downtrodden masses are poor) may have bigger non-monetary rewards. A few extra points of Karma on a hooding run instead of a juicy nuyen payout can be nice too.

Yeah. It all depends on the game you're playing. I've traditionally been really stingy with karma, and liberal with cash. I can take your fancy grade A bang bang. I can trash your cyber gizmo's and run up in you any time I need or want to as the GM. But Karma...That stuff is a game changer.

So I am actually changing the way I do things. In my current campaign I'll be real liberal with Karma...well as liberal as I can get. And I'm going to cash starve them. Sort of a GM social experiment. I'm also going to pay much closer attention to street cred, street rep and continue how I deal with their contacts. (I have a great system in place for this.)

Yeah, so do I. Just throwing out suggestions...
How about Marmots?

I've wanted to run a more "swashbuckler" style campaign, with an easy-come-easy-go attitude towards equipment. It'd be easier to get replacements and get new stuff, but it also frequently gets confiscated/lost/broken.

I'm not sure how well it'd work though, equipment/implants are such a huge part of stats that it's not very interchangeable. Maybe it'd work better in a game system where skills were more clearly dominant over equipment, where equipment quality and ratings aren't such a big deal.

I remember how in 3rd ed if you gave karma for everything they said you should at the back of the sourcebook, the karma awards became huge.

I think 'karma' and how it was awarded was a gentleway back in the late 90's to get the players to be 'good.' Since there were no alignments so to get the job done you might actually be better to be ruthless- on D&D terms Evil, the karma awards tried to gently press you to be moral.

So you shot bad people in the face for money to make the world a better place.

Other posters already nailed the primary reason. The original designers were basically making D&D set in a cyberpunk setting, but wanted to distance themselves from those mechanics as much as they could while also trying to interject as much flavor into the game mechanics as possible. Using "Karma" in place of "Experience" was an easy way of doing both of those things, and changing it so that experience points were a currency instead of just a measuring stick was an evolution of that. You can see that philosophy in lots of other areas, such as magic swords (adding their enchantment bonus to your rolls) becoming weapon foci (which add their 'Force' to your rolls).

And that's really all there is to it. There have been attempts, both officially and unofficially, to define it better and even to incorporate the good/bad ideology with it, but most of the time they just end up even more convoluted and awkward.

One idea I had some time ago, which I borrowed from another game system (Feng Shui I think? I don't know, it's been a long time) was separating the two concepts a bit. Your "Karma" would be the grand total you earned and used to advance your character, but each point you gained would be split between Good and Bad Karma when the GM rewarded them. Then, as a replacement for Edge (which I absolutely loathe), you'd be able to take a risk and use your Karma Dice to influence your rolls. You'd roll a black d6 (bad) and a white d6 (good), and depending on which one of your Karma subtotals was higher, you'd subtract one from the other, with the result being either a dice pool modifier or hit modifier depending on which worked out better after playtesting it enough. Hmm, on reflection that doesn't sound quite right, but I can't find my notebook to save my life. Bah. I'm pretty sure additional dice were used somehow, but I'm drawing a blank right now.

Anyway, I've wandered off what I was saying as usual. In the end, it's just a character advancement currency with a fancy name, with a few legacy uses beyond that such as feeding free spirits and the like. Unless you really want to get down to it and readjust the way everything works, it's best to just accept it for what it is and not put too much stock on the word "Karma." It could have just as easily been "Insight" or "Epiphany."