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Falconer
Glyph:
You missed two MAJOR items here.

All attributes including specials are subject to the 375 karma cap for the human who not only has LESS karma to spend. Meaning that for an awakened char you only have 37.5 karma average per stat. 41.7 average for a mundane.

Also gets hit with the double whammy of the ork is allowed to spend 40karma more on attributes giving him a 415 karma attribute cap. So the ork is allowed to spend on average 41.5 karma awakened and 46.1 mundane per attribute.


So no this is not balanced in any way shape or form... it is in fact grossly mismanaged. No character should get over 10% more karma than another just because they picked a race which is for almost all purposes mechanically superior in game. You're stating that the ork comes out with what for many group is many MONTHS worth of in-game karma just for being an ork... and that this is not a problem. That is not a small karma disparity.

I stand by my original position... karmagen as both published and retconned is a travesty which does nothing except tell people they're getting a better deal by playing humans while laughing all the way to the bank by dissing them with a huge mechanical drawback. Everything in karmagen was done very well except the most important part... handling metatypes!


If they would have applied race as an attribute modifier AFTER attributes (BTW; this is EXACTLY how the game handles NPC stats... it says to just drop the racial template on top of the NPC to alter the attributes up and down)... it would have been a different story... then an average ork or troll or dwarf or elf would pay just as much for attributes as an average human. With a reasonable oppurtunity cost tacked on for the racial package deal... which might save them some karma... but would produce NONE of the other distortions present in the system. People who played to type would get a slight bargain (a strong tough troll)... people who played against type would pay a little extra but no so much as to be punishing (a super smart troll since he'd have to buy up then see them brought down a little by the template... though those types are also likely to invest in geneware and the like to raise those penalties to max(augmented max) anyhow.

Instead they warped the system into giving benefits just for the ones who did want to play to type... but not realizing how utterly broken those were for people who were not going to play to type.

No player should be docked months or even a years worth karma just because they choose to be human. (and yes humans get more skills.. only because the game forces them to spend that extra karma on skills. Attributes utterly dominate the game... so more skills means jack when the other guy has more to spend on attributes to make up the difference).
Jaid
but then, there's also the other extreme. for example, technomancers... where you basically want to spend as little on attributes (other than resonance, and in karmagen not even that so much) as you can possibly get away with. mostly because all the other stuff that you basically *need* to be effective as a technomancer is so expensive... then again, it's not too far off that for a decker either, given you don't use attributes for the matrix at all (in fact, even less than technomancers, though deckers are also much more likely to have a secondary specialty in the meat world).

additionally, at least when it comes to strength... if it's important, it's probably less expensive to just augment it rather than actually buying it higher, at least for the attributes that most metatypes get. want a 3 strength? well, that's not terribly expensive to upgrade, and if you're not maxing out those attributes (at which point orks are spending tons of karma again), you'll never notice the difference between augmented 3 and natural 3. granted, the body is nice (and not so easy to augment)... but then, so is edge.
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