JH's aversion to errata is nothing new, so nobody should be surprised to hear he doesn't like that attribute costs in karmagen were changed from Attribute*3 to Attribute*5. But instead of simply ignoring that change as in previous cases, we're in for an ingenious little gem:

http://forums.wolflair.com/showpost.php?p=...amp;postcount=1

Yup, Jason brings out the calculator with the expressed aim of getting back to the glorious days when mixing karmagen and BP-gen characters at one table was a sure recipe for disaster. Thanks a lot!

This is just ridiculous.

To be fair, the karma gen system is kind of ridiculous as a whole. Not adding in metatype costs when it's in the book about special racial types, no more free knowledge skill points, physical/mental attributes and special attributes from the same pool.

The errata version is "metatype/race karma cost = BP cost"

But don't worry, the 250 extra karma are probably enough to offset that cost, too...

I have to disagree, this is STUPIDLY ridiculous

From what I can follow of his "reasoning", because attributes will cost more, you should start with more Karma (and can spend 62.5% on attributes). This about right? I'm not really sure, because even after reading that several times, I'm still not quite sure what he's really saying...

...which, if that's the right interpretation of what he's saying, goes against the stated intent of BP cost for attributes in the first place: make it easier to raise skills, harder to raise attributes, as a way to diversify characters.

To which I further state, bwuh?

It seems as though he's trying to undo any mechanical impact of the cost increase, which is fine if the only problem being fixed by th errata is that 3 does not look like 5.

Except even then there is collateral damage because he assumes all characters spend the maximum allowance on attributes. Suppose I only spend 240 under the x3 rule, leaving 510 for everything else. Under the x5 rule the same attribute ratings would cost me 400 karma. With the proposed overall increase I now have 600 karma to spend on everything else, none of which has risen in cost at all. For an all 3s human character the increase in karma for non-attribute spending goes up from 630 to 800 and 170 can buy a lot of skill points.

In short, by trying to maintain the cost of attributes relative to the overall spending power he's made everything else cheaper, thus undermining his own motivation.

It's 215 karma for an all 3s human (you forgot Edge). So that leave 785 karma, assuming 100 spent on resources, leaving 685 karma for skills, contacts, and qualities. It's 22+2 karma for a single rating 4 skill with specialization which means you can raise 31 skills to rating 4 with specialization....

Now if THAT ain't diverse i don't know what is . .

Well, there's 56 skills....

I also didn't consider going with Skill Groups to 3 then a single rank and specialization....

Using groups....
Combat: 226 Karma
Physical: 310 Karma
Social: 133 Karma
Technical: 424 Karma
Vehicle: 144 Karma
Total: 1237 Karma

Well, there really are more than 56 Skills. Have a Cyber Logician with just over 300 Karma and exactly 82 Skills. With a list of more skills to buy. *Shrug*

I intentionally ignored Magic and Resonance (because we were talking a straight 3s human without those attributes) as well as ignored the Exotic Weapon/Vehicle skills which are about as open ended as you can get....

With these being the case on top of the increase to the cost of attributes, the increase in the amount of points available needed desperately to be done. For one, Awakened--especially human Awakened--were completely screwed unless they wanted to "dump stat" at least two stats and completely ignored knowledges since there would be no feasible way to really afford any and be decent at what they should be good at.

Gotcha...
Of Course, the character I was talking about is neither a Magician nor Technomancer, and only has a few vehicle skills, and no exotic weapon skills, so...

What are you including that I didn't? Knowledge and Language skills?

Nice try JH

Yes... I always include Knowledge Skills and Language Skills. Though I guess that at many tables, these have absolutely no playability, so I understand if others don't really give them any attention.

Also... Artisan SKills are Broken into seperate Skills at our table. Not that I have more than 1 of them, though.

Whuh? That's a heck of an assumption to make. I'd tried several times to make a decent character with the 750, and not a single one could come out anywhere near good functionality under the x5 attribute costs in comparison to a 400 BP. After I heard about the increase to 1000, I went in and tried again with that number. The character was functional but not overly good. Basically in order to make something grotesquely overpowered with the 1000 karma, you have to be intentionally breaking the system in an attempt to "prove" something--though it would serve nothing but "prove" that some outliers can exist.

Really? Wow. Mine blew the 400 BP Hacker right out of the water... He was simply awesome. NOTE: We do use a few Optional Rules though, to make Logic more important. Kind of one sided (what Hacker isn't) though. I like my characters to be more well rounded, I guess, which the 750 Karma Gen makes possible.

Every character I made with 750 Karma Gen (with the Errata) turned out better than they did in 400 BP Gen. However, My character design philosophy is likely different than yours is...

Example. My Unaugmented Mercenary at 750 Karma has right at 50 Skills... Give me an extra 250 Points to play with and he would be completly hell on wheels (and probably not unaugmented any more either). Of course, Most skills are from 1-2, with a few focused 3's and 4's. Nothing Higher.

"Well rounded" is one thing, but to be "well rounded" you need to be really good at some things and decent in several others. Most things at 1 or 2 is being able to half-arse a lot, but likely not succeed with much of it. Thus "well rounded" would be most at 3's and 4's with a couple 5's.

It depends on the character. High attributes/high skills favor the 400 BP System (static costs, regardless of attribute 1 or 6), low attributes, low skills favor the Karma systems (skill 2 = 8 Karma, skill 6 = 44) Karma).

Personally I would prefer the Karma system with 1000 points (according to SR4A rules). What I simply *hate* is the complete messed up mixture of 400 BP, 750x3 and 750x5 system with long delayed errata and massive balance issues in either way.

SYL

Well rounded is 8-10 Dice in most of your skills. With about 12 in your good ones. That is my design philosophy.
The Merc has 30+ Skills in the 8-10 range, with some in the 12 Range and the rest in the 5-8 range. THAT is well rounded. And this for a completely Unaugmented character. Not bad, if I say so myself.

Like I said, We likely have very different design philosophies.

Chill man, I'm only joking...although, I begin to think you doth protest too much

Also, wow! 1000 karma...and you only got a "functional but not overly good" character ?!? I think your calcs might be wrong somewhere, because that's just crazy talk...

Indeed... 1000 Karma is a HELL of a lot of points.

And why do you think attribute costs went from x3 to x5? Hint, it's not because karmagen and BPs were perfectly balanced and somebody wanted to make karmagen inferior...

My 800 karma recon sniper is a helluva lot better than my 400BP recon sniper.

I have nowhere else to go besides assuming that you are either lying because you are mad that the overpowered nature of Attribute * 3 got nerfed or you have a genuine psychological impairment that does not allow you to experience the world like the rest of us.

I guess I just don't see the atrocity here.

Since JH has no way of preventing anyone from playing shadowrun any different then they do now, the only thing that's really changing here is the validity of a few pointless internet debates.

...

oh. nevermind. carry on.

I also agree that the 750 point with x5 makes decent characters, and 1k makes *very* good characters. The guy saying he can't make a good character in either is either trying to make hyper-specialist awakened characters or somesuch, which is not the focus of that system.

Honestly? Even 750 Karma blows most - perhaps all - 400BP characters out of the water.

I took several characters I've built on 400BP, in Hero Lab, and changed them over to KarmaGen. Each and every one was spent out completely on BP.

A Mystic Adept go-ganger dwarf? Wound up costing 627 Karma.

A Nartaki samurai? 597 Karma.

A Pixie Mystic Adept? 649 Karma.

An Elf Face? 555 Karma.

Noticing a trend, yet? Not a single one of those characters had less than 100 Karma left to spend, yet, every one was spent to the wire under BP gen. Even though, under KarmaGen, they had to PAY for their Knowledge and Language skills, yet they were generally FREE under BP Gen.

...

The only conclusion I can draw is, that you have a very skewed view of "good functionality".

Making a personal attack because I disagree with you? Real friendly there...

He doesn't think you disagree at all. It's not possible to disagree about this fact. He thinks you're lying or crazy.

It's possible he builds characters 'sub-optimally', or in some other manner that the hive-mind would disapprove of. Neither constitutes grounds for violating the forum rules on personal attacks.

Count the things that have a BP:karma ratio above 1:2.5. Consider that you need that as an average. A natural 1->5 attribute increase is 40 BP or 70 karma. 9 of those for a mundane human are 620 karma / would be 350 BP. 100 karma on resources bring the char to 400 BP / 280 karma left. Get your un-free 30 knowledge skill ranks for around 80 karma, and you have 200 for the general skillset left - should end up higher than 500 BP. While trying to be ineffective.

Nope, almost normal. He specifically said he'd *tried* to make them powerful. They're judging him on his own terms, nothing at all to do with 'disapproval'. It's always fun to see you talking about rules and conduct, though.

I'm pretty sure that his overall idea is that you are bad at optimizing.





-k

Comparing BP and Karmagen is relatively meaningless though, since they were designed to favour different build styles.

Bottom line, if you increase the cost of x it does not make sense to increase the resources to spend on x.
Especially not if done proportionately.

For those interest in some maths, I found the best way to compare BP and karma is simply to convert cost into a fraction of the starting amount. That is, 1 BP is 0.25% of 400 BP, 1 karma is 0.13% of 750 karma (rounded).
Of course, if doesn't take into account the BP-gen limits on attributes spending, skills levels, and spells and complex forms numbers.

Qualities, Resources and Contacts = 0.25% BP or 0.27% karma.

Active Skill
- rating 1 = 1% BP or 0.53% karma
- rating 2 = 2% BP or 1.07% karma
- rating 3 = 3% BP or 1.87% karma
- rating 4 = 4% BP or 2.93% karma
- rating 5 = 5% BP or 4.27% karma
- rating 6 = 6% BP or 5.87% karma
- rating 7 = 12% BP or 13.07% karma (Aptitude cost factored in)
- Specialization = 0.5% BP or 0.27% karma
Multiply by 2.5 to get Skill groups costs.
Didn't bother doing the math for knowledge skills, free points based on Intuition and Logic makes it way too complicated. BP gets an extra between 3% and 19.5% that way.

Metatype
- Dwarf = 6.25% BP or 3.33% karma
- Elf = 7.5% BP or 4% karma
- Ork = 5% BP or 2.67% karma
- Troll = 10% BP or 5.33 karma

Attribute, +0 modifier
- rating 1 = 0%
- rating 2 = 2.5% BP or 1.33% karma
- rating 3 = 5% BP or 3.33% karma
- rating 4 = 7.5% PB or 6% karma
- rating 5 = 10% BP or 9.33% karma
- rating 6 = 16.25% BP or 13.33% karma
- rating 7 = 23.75% BP or 23.33% karma (Exceptional Attribute cost factored in)

Attribute, +1 modifier
- rating 2 = 0%
- rating 3 = 2.5% BP or 2% karma
- rating 4 = 5% BP or 4.67% karma
- rating 5 = 7.5% PB or 8% karma
- rating 6 = 10% BP or 12% karma
- rating 7 = 16.25% BP or 16.67% karma
- rating 8 = 23.75% BP or 27.33% karma (Exceptional Attribute)

Attribute, +2 modifier
- rating 3 = 0%
- rating 4 = 2.5% BP or 2.67% karma
- rating 5 = 5% BP or 6% karma
- rating 6 = 7.5% PB or 10% karma
- rating 7 = 10% BP or 14.67% karma
- rating 8 = 16.25% BP or 20.00% karma
- rating 9 = 23.75% BP or 31.33% karma (Exceptional Attribute)

Attribute, +3 modifier
- rating 4 = 0%
- rating 5 = 2.5% BP or 3.33% karma
- rating 6 = 5% BP or 7.33% karma
- rating 7 = 7.5% PB or 12% karma
- rating 8 = 10% BP or 17.33% karma
- rating 9 = 16.25% BP or 23.33% karma
- rating 10 = 23.75% BP or 35.33% karma (Exceptional Attribute)

Attribute, +4 modifier
- rating 5 = 0%
- rating 6 = 2.5% BP or 4% karma
- rating 7 = 5% BP or 8.67% karma
- rating 8 = 7.5% PB or 14% karma
- rating 9 = 10% BP or 20% karma
- rating 10 = 16.25% BP or 26.67% karma
- rating 11 = 23.75% BP or 39.33% karma (Exceptional Attribute)

Spells = 0.75% BP or 0.67% karma

Complex Forms
- rating 1 = 0.25% BP or 0.27% karma
- rating 2 = 0.5% BP or 0.53% karma
- rating 3 = 0.75% BP or 0.93% karma
- rating 4 = 1% BP or 1.47% karma
- rating 5 = 1.25% BP or 2.13% karma
- rating 6 = 1.5% BP or 2.93% karma

So, basically, Karma-gen is cheaper on metatype, active skills, attributes in the 1-6 range and spells. BP is cheaper on everything else.

Cool, thanks Nath! That's pretty useful

The more they change karmagen, diverse it gets.

Well, that's the kind of no-brainer argument that could be applied to anything. Book is full of empty pages? Oh well, just play the game as you like it...

How is ignoring the comments of one man akin to purchasing a defective sourcebook? How much did you pay to read JH's comment?

basically this: (warning sarcasm)

OH NO MY BEAUTIFUL BABY ITS MINE NOW MY PRECIOUS IT WORKS ACCORDING TO MY WHIMS, LETS INVALIDATE ALL THE THINGS THE GUYS WHO USED TO WORK ON IT CUZ THEY LEFT ON A SOUR NOTE AND NOW ITS MIIIIINNEEEEEEE (/sarcasm)

while all the customers are thinking 'goddamn just fix your broken shit already' while catalyst is going 'only the internet minority caries about that, so we're not gonna do it and focus on things our customers actually want'.



On a more serious note, I wanted to respond to this.

I did a comparison of a similiar nature earlier, and basically my conclusion on Rx3 karmagen vs bpgen was:
Attributes and skills and specializations are half off, races is free, there's no hardcap tax, and you have twice as many points to play with for fine control. (Oh and i guess you have to spend maybe 30-50 points on knowledges, if you want to)

You build a 400bp character that benefits from those discounts and affordable levels of cheap stuff, and I guarantee you will see characters more comparable to those produced by karmagen.

All I can say is that on what is essentially a 900 point karmagen mundane, I have a pistols and dodge DP 20+, as well as several other combat skills 11-16 range, 14-19 infiltration, climb, gymnastics, and at least 11 dice on a bunch of technical skills. with 1000 Karma he would blow my original 400BP version of the character out of the water, because the 900 pt version already kicks his ass.

I find it impossible to build with BP so to each their own.

Just imagine what your skills would look like if it was 900 karma with a 100 karma limit on resources rather than 200.

I just want to say that I agree with this.

I have characters that are built better with BP than with karma at the 3*attribute costs. So at 5*attribute costs, they would come out even further ahead. There are characters that are better with BP than with karma, and vice versa.

I normally would agree that it's better to just ignore any person's comments, but in this case, JH is THE voice of the direction that SR will take in the future, so if anyone's opinion should be listened to and evaluated, unfortunately it's his. I think.


I don't think the general discussion was about whether BP or karmagen was better, but more about whether 750 karma could build a "decent" character (even with the 5*att change), and whether 1000 karma would produce a "functional but not overly good" character.

What does this mean, exactly? It sounded like you were saying Karmagen had these various discounts, then suddenly you switched to BP.

toturi, what proportion of characters ('in general'), and what kind, are significantly better with BP? I feel like I've seen examples before, but it's been too long. I had thought the answers were 'very few' and 'hyper-minmaxed'.

The "better under BP" things tend to be trolls or bear shapeshifters with high Body and Strength, nosferatu who buy a lot of knowledgs skills, and high Edge, high Magic human builds, which don't really work in karmagen since special Attributes also count towards the 375 point cap.

Karmagen usually works out better, though. I know that I am an optimizer, and my optimized builds come out a bit better in karmagen, yes, even with the eratta, paying for metatype and x5 for Attributes, and purchasing knowledge skills. More generalist builds tend to work out to be way more than 400 BP.

Yeah. Aftr all the debates here? I've decided that when I use KarmaGen as a GM, I'm going to do it this way:

• you get 750 Karma
• you pay 2xBP cost for your metatype
• You buy your attributes up from 1 to max (where max is 6, minus any negatives from metatype)
• You can spend up to 1/3 (250) of your karma on attributes
• Edge and Magic are not part of that limit!
• You then add in any positive adjustments from metatype to your attributes
• You get free ranks of Knowledge/Language skills (same number as under BPgen)
• Gear costs 1 karma per 2,500 ... max of 200 karma
• all else is per standard Karmagen.

Of course, that's just the first draft version. It needs tweaking/polishing. But at first glance, I think it's superior to the RAW version.