I was just wondering. I know that, in the previous season, there were rewards to players with 150 / 250 karma characters for creating new, lower-karma characters for the tables, and the enticement of prime missions for those retired characters.

With the new edition, I'm just wondering what will become of all that. Will prime missions continue to be written for SR4? Will there be benefits to new characters made for SR5? Etc.

I know you guys have a lot on your plate at the moment, so I don't necessarily expect the quickest answer. Just thought I'd throw it out there and check back in a bit.

--
gargaM0NK

p.s. Thanks for all of the crazy man-hours going into cons and the release roll-out. I'm really looking forward to this year.

When we were originally going to do the Prime Mission system when Season 4 launched, we were planning to set a semi-low karma threshold and were effectively "forcing" some players to give up their characters for main Missions play. The Benefits concept was there to try and make up for that a little bit. Unfortunately, due to a rather high number of unforeseen issues, we never quite got Prime Missions off the ground. And when we realized Season 5 and SR5 was on the way, we tabled it.

Now with SR5 here, we're having everyone start off "fresh". Partly because this provides a nice, even playing field for everyone to learn the new system and ease into the new campaign, and partly because a lot of characters simply cannot be recreated yet due to the expansion books needed not being out. As such, we're also not offering up "bennies" for players this time around. Again, level, even playing field.

We will be rolling out the first Prime Mission soon, I hope. It's pretty much written, just needs to be finalized and get art done. We hope to release 4 of these per year, and these will be SR5. The Season 5 FAQ will have rules for rebuilding your SR4 characters under the new system in what we hope will be an easy and fair manner (aka, build a new starting character from the ground up using standard chargen. Then you get X Nuyen per previous adventure run plus the total of all the karma you've earned to spend on advancing your character to rebuild him as close to your old character as you can). And since there's no transferring into Season 5, any character can be redone as a Prime character, regardless of Karma amount (though Primes generally assume at least 100-150 karma, but that really shouldn't be a huge stumbling block).

I expect a lot of players will wait a little while to rebuild their Prime Missions until a few of the splat books are out though, since as I said, many concepts simply can't be done yet.

Bull

That's... very reasonable.

On the one hand, the little (okay, big dominating show-boat of a) voice in my head that likes to munch hoped for benefits for new characters... but everything you said makes sense.

I'm happy to hear that prime missions are still in store - I thought that was a really cool idea.

Thanks.
--gargaM0NK

Oddly, my Legendary character can mostly be rebuilt with the core book. Old Man Jones is largely a hermetic mage with some cyber. And that reminds me, I need to do his writeup.

My rigger, sadly, will likely be retired once I've played her in the last couple of SR4 Missions. The changes to Rigging pretty much make her impossible to recreate in SR5.



-k