I've never used any of the BP/Karma gen systems in SR3 and never played 4. I like priority gen. My reason is simple. With a priority gen (or some of the non-karma/xp systems) you get a very clear idea of where the Starting strengths and weaknesses are intended to be and where you go from there. Which means whenever an XP gen system is introduced that system is often designed to allow for the same variance of the TOP end of each points category otherwise the beginning character feels underwhelming compared to the core standard, of course this also means to avoid that you end up with a more "abusable" system.

Either way if your game desires (and I would hope most do) characters who's stats fit concept it's upto the GM and the Players to generate characters in this way. If you don't find min maxing into specialist fields is an issue then that's fine too. No system, save adding artificial caps, will prevent min maxing if that's the argument.

Yes, the points given for karmagen in 4th was more than what you got point for point in the build point system. However, that does not mean that karmagen is more abusable it just means that the designers did not balance both systems to correctly each other, if balancing them to each other is even possible. I think the 4th Ed karmagen was about 100 karma to high.

Just having the disconnect between your point allotment when creating a character to how much that character is "worth" in the after creation karma costs shows a clear difference in how much swing you can have in those two costs. Sometimes that difference can be over 100 (virtual) karma. That difference is what drives people to select getting a stat/skill of 6 on one thing instead of getting a stat/skill of 3 in something else just because to buy that 6 later is vastly more than to buy that 3. That disconnect is where the abuse is.

When the creation costs and the advancement costs are the same that level of disconnect goes away. It does not stop someone from getting that stat/skill of 6 but it does not penalize getting the stat/skill of 3 either. Therefore, the "suboptimal" builds are due to player choice or character concept not from the loss of virtual karma from choosing a stat/skill 3 instead of 6.

I assure you you get the same picture with a karma/BP system - if you can distribute 10 attribute points or 20, if you have 0 magic - or magic 5 - or 10 skill points to distribute .. or 40.

SYL

Karmagen is not build points...
They are two different concepts. Build points do not equal karma in 4th. Not even close...

Buld points is closer to the "Sum to 10" build system in 3rd Ed.

That may be but thats not the point: you still get a very clear picture of your strength, limitations and possibilities with either BP or Karma.

SYL

The difference is priority has clear cut offs. BP and karmagen tend to blend things a bit more so there are less obvious steps between attributes and skills or whatever. Though it is possible to build even larger contrasts, its just not as common I think.

It was hard to build minmaxed monsters using karmagen in SR4 because attributes and skills at high level took up so much of your resources that you would just plain run out. You can search this board and find the BP monsters who abused Troll attributes, bonded foci and selected augmentations that no karmagen character could touch since BP worked on a linear scale.

Indeed Mikado, it makes a difference. But that's kind of the point. Being good at something is instantly accessible with a BP/Priority system, where as the cost is steeper with an XP system. But if the DP system is balanced against any core system, then costing more is just numbers on paper, if it's not balanced then XP gen characters are going to be weaker out the box.

Ultimately Priority gives you some very definite numbers for each part of your character. BP gives you flexible numbers for parts of your character and Karma/XP gives you a directly related flexible set of numbers. If they're all balanced against one another then you'll see mostly similar characters, if they're not then you'll see a trend depending on system. Again, non prevent any element of min maxing. It the more flexible the system the easier it is to min max. The only way to prevent that is you add more caps (which just means a lower min max). It was a common thing on the WoD chats that you could have a max combined combat skills of 5 or 7, only Two Attributes of 4 etc. which meant the combat characters filled those points immediately and the Stats went into what you wanted to be good at. While it evened a playing field for PVP it otherwise very little difference to the storyline play.

My experience is, the fiddlier a system is, the more prone to abuse it becomes. SR4.5 BP had 400 moving parts to abuse, which made it easily breakable. Karmagen has 800 points to mess with, making it even fiddlier.

Really, to quote Montgomery Scott, "The more complicated the plumbin', the easier it is to stop up the drain." I've discovered to simpler, easier systems are less prone to breakage.


YMMV, but my experience is that the more points you give, the more min/maxers try to squeeze the life out of them.

My experience is that it's easier to shore up your dump stats under karmagen. It doesn't prevent min/maxing, it just shifts the burden around a bit.

People, you have to define how exactly you're using the term min/max. The first approach is literally setting stats at a minimum you can get away with to maximize other stats, while the second is to minimize your weaknesses, while maximizing your advantages. These are two different, but related concepts in the linear/exponential model, but once you jump into a karma character creation system, the two theories get divorced from each other because maximizing your stats is, in itself, a weakness under karma creation.

No, to properly maximize your advantages in karma creation, you get as many different modifiers that apply as possible because it's cheaper to buy more, different individual things at a lower overall level than investing in one thing at a higher level. Human Cyber-Mystic Adepts become Karma creation's Melee Trolls because they have so many different ways to spend that karma at a low exponential level. Further, to minimize weaknesses specifically goes against having any sort of dump stat and since eliminating dumpstats is cheap, it's very easy to minimize weaknesses. You put a little karma into attributes, skills, adept power points, spells to boost the rolls, cyber to augment them, and the proper gear to give an additional boost, and suddenly you're probably as effective as the specialist in his field who paid through the nose to "max" his attribute and skills, while having the versatility to dominate in every other area that the specialist "minimized" in.

Just because karma creation combats a specific type of optimization in the linear/exponential model, does not translate into the fact that karma creation cannot be "minmax"ed.

I never played 4e, so I can't speak to the karma /bp generation system in it. I played 1e through 3e alot, and once it came out, we used Becks Karma Gen system. I always liked the creator's comments on it:


Why create BeCKS at all when the existing
Shadowrun sourcebooks already provide two viable
methods for character creation?
I created BeCKS to remove the discrepancy between
how characters develop during character creation and how
they develop in game play. The existing character creation
methods for Shadowrun both encourage a min/max-ing
attitude. For example, let’s say you’re using priorities to
build a troll strongman. He currently has a Charisma of 1
and a Strength of 9, and you have one attribute point left
to spend. Where should you spend that point? The “good
roleplayer” would say to put it in whichever would best
suit the character, but the smart money says to put it into
strength. After all, the extra point of Charisma may be
more in-character, but you can always buy up that extra
point with 4 Karma after one or two sessions of game
play. Raising the Strength score to 10 after initial creation
would cost 20 Karma. The primary rule of BeCKS is that
all elements of a character should cost the same amount
whether purchased before or after starting play.
A pleasant side effect of this, I’ve found, is that starting
characters tend to be more well-rounded, with more midrange
skills and fewer high-level skills. As was pointed
out to me, when you can buy two skills at 4 for slightly
less than one skill at 6, which option do you think will be
most useful to your character? This means the sixes are
reserved for the most vital skills of each character, and
everything else tends to be more diversified. This works
ideally for the sort of campaigns I like to run. I understand
that other people like to see specialist characters who have
a narrower focus but are better at what they do. That’s fine.
That’s why BeCKS is simply one option among many.


BeCKS is extremely complicated. Shouldn’t
character creation be more about the character and less
about fiddling with numbers?
By its nature, BeCKS is complicated—as complicated
as character advancement in Shadowrun with the added
hardship of having to allocate so much Karma at one time.
And as I’ve said before, it’s not for everybody, but for me
personally, it allows me to focus more on creating exactly
the character I want without worrying about if I’m getting
the most bang for my karmic buck. The example I used
in the first BeCKS article is still my favorite: Jack Bull, the
ork decker, is almost done with his character— he just has
two skill points left to allocate. He realizes that his history
mentions his time as a chauffeur, and he thinks that he
should really spend those points to take Car 2. But on the
other hand, if he instead raises Assault Rifle from 4 to 6,
he’ll be that much more effective in combat, and he can
always buy the car skill later for just 4 Karma, when the
gun skill would have cost 16 Karma at least. By staying
true to his character concept and taking the vehicle skill,
he essentially shorts himself out of a 12-Karma advantage.
Why should he be punished for staying in character?
Of course, I personally prefer freeform character
creation with no artificial constraints, but that sort of
thing doesn’t work so well in Shadowrun where there is
more emphasis on and need for fairness and game balance.
In that vein, BeCKS is as fair and balanced as character
creation gets."

At the end of the day, use whatever method you like - you can min-max with either - and if the GM has players who min-max, then he just needs to either accept that they do so, or talk to them and say, "Don't make your character so overpowered, here, let's talk about how we can keep your concept, but make it friendlier for the game I'm going to run."

Conversation between GM and player stops min-maxing, character generation systems do not.

This, a thousand times, this.

Karmagen makes it easier to min (dump stats are easier to raise to a functional level), and harder, but not impossible, to max (by having exponential, rather than flat, costs for skills and Attributes). But while having your primary Attribute(s) and skills soft-maxed may be more expensive, you still have enough points to do it.

Using spells, adept powers and augmentations is a no brainer when it comes to optimization, whether playing a specialist or a generalist. They not only have flat costs, but are comparatively cheap - by design (this is a game with strong transhumanist themes, after all).

Exactly. Now, granted that 4.5 karmagen favored certain builds over others-- mages and adepts, for the most part-- but both systems could be easily abused. The biggest problem was that both only really focused on limiting attributes and skills, when those often end up being only a minor part of the overall dice pool. For example, the pornomancer has skill 7; but since he's slinging up to 52 dice, that's really not a significant component anymore.

I experimented with BeCKS a bit, back in the day. Even using McMackie's, I found it to be really complicated to work with, and the benefits just didn't seem worthwhile. I still could make broken characters, it was just that you had to be more clever about it. I generally don't mind more complex character generation, provided I'm getting something more out of it, like exact customization and better balance. I never found that to be true with BeCKS.

I did more experimentation with 3e's point buy. I found it much easier to min/max than the standard Priority system. When combined with the added complexity, I decided that it wasn't for me. It was too easy to break, and even though it was only a little more complex, I wasn't getting any benefit out of it.


Very much so. Clearly communicating the game expectations will make life easier for both GM and players.

Yes, but when I can get a generalist who is in the same ballpark as the specialist in the specialist's own field of expertise, but at the same time is also quite adept at the specialist's weaknesses due to exploiting those cheap, flat costs, I seriously question the reasoning that Karma gen is intrinsically better than a linear system because of the rational that karma gen stops minmaxing. Because Karma gen doesn't stop minmaxing, it just changes how the minmaxing is accomplished.

I've been thinking... my experience is in fact the opposite. The more points I hand out, the less concerned my players get with optimizing every point. Further, when I throw out point limitations altogether, and ask "what kind of character do you want to play?" and arbitrarily assign extra karma or build points to specifically meet the requirements of that character, they're much happier overall.

We have a saying: "This is where character creation ends, and point whoring begins!" Because often a player will have an idea of who the character is, and then they'll start assigning character creation resources to accomplish this vision... only to run up against some sort of limitation, which is ostensibly placed for "balance" reasons but then forces the player to start optimizing character creation to fulfill their vision of their character. Instead, as a GM I try to remove those limitations, and balance post hoc. This has tended to end up with happier players overall who don't have to fight a system to play the character they want to play, and I don't have as much to worry about players having differing levels of systems mastery, which in turn produces differing levels of character power level even though they had the same resources to begin with.

Of course, my group is formed out of long time friends who talk to each other, and no one's attempting to get everything they can, just because they can. I have played with those types of players... and the only resolution to that type of conflict is to talk, compromise, or if irreconcilable, agree to still be friends, but not to game together.

To your first point: It's been my experience that the more variables I hand out, the more people try to maximize them. 800 variables is a lot to maximize. Also, it's not just points, it's resources. For example, a supers character in GURPS might be built on 400 points. But since those points are worth more, they're less likely to maximize them. 800 karma is a lot, but individually they don't mean as much, so I tend to see more players trying to break it.

But to your second point? Absolutely. I find that players are much more willing to accept limitations when I help their characters be awesome in many ways. As long as they feel like they're playing the character they want, they tend to not care about things like point levels and build efficiency.

My initial response was the same as tjn's. That is I usually do not min-max as hard when given more resources. But I would say all it takes is for me to feel that one guy is min-maxing harder than me and the character optimisation gets on.

I have a different experience with limitations. The more awesome my character, the less limits I want placed on him. I keep thinking of ways to improve my character, how I can make him better, as close to perfection as I can visualise him, the more concerned I am about points and efficiency.

My GM has been complaining about overspecializing in our group, which seems to attract an inordinate number of melee specialists with minimal to no ranged combat ability or outside combat utility. I can't blame him. I blame the other game, which many players are migrating from.

You know what moving parts are?
This makes no sense at all!

And why would a system which employs the same rules for character creation as it does for character development be more complicated?
Sorry, if I sound a little angry about that, thats because you hear that kind of argumentation everywhere and it is just so wrong.
You can't talk about complexity and then not look at the whole system. Sure, if I break some thing up in 1000 parts, every part is less complex than the system itself, but to compare one system to another I have to compare all the parts, not just some. It is like arguing a book gets thinner, if add an additional chapter as the first chapter and make it really short, because now the first chapter of the book is really short.
Second of all the complexity argument is not entirly valid. Everything needs some level of complexity to function. You can't just delete halve the stuff for example of an autopilot and it works better, thats a silly idea. (But in this sense still promoted by a lot of people in many occasions, as it seems...)

Actually there are two things which are proven to make systems more stable/predictible/easier to control and oversee: Hard Limits and deminishing returns(dampening).

I'm not intending to sound aggressive, so if I come across that way, I apologize.

That said, Karmagen is basically a "quadratic system". It's always going to be more complex than a linear one. Now, as you pointed out, complexity is not necessarily a bad thing. It does bring up the question of gain, though: If I accept the cost of added complexity, what do I get for that added price? Since my experience is that you don't get any real increase in game balance, I don't think the cost is worth it. Basically, I don't feel like I'm getting anything for the added complexity.

What's more, my experience is that simpler, easier systems are more resistant to breakage. For example, in SR3, the Priority tables were pretty resistant to breakage. Not impossible, not by a long shot, but it did deliver consistent results. SR3's BP system, on the other hand, was more complicated and coincidentally, much easier to break. Granted, this is just my experience, I realize that this may be a YMMV thing. But, my experience is backed up by over thirty years of role playing, including playing Shadowrun from the time it came out. Time and time again, I've discovered that not only are simpler systems easier to work with, they provide more balanced results.

Do you find handing out karma during play to be just another variable for your players to screw you with? It seems like you're against this because your players have abused it in the past, probably by allowing Initiation during chargen with karma. Get rid of that and you'll see a bunch of characters with 3s and 4s in their attributes and skills in the 1-4 range, which makes for generalists but can't even begin to touch the hyper-specialized all-maxed BP builds because of the differences in point costs.

Actually, I'm against it because I ran some tests with karmagen. I handed it to a couple of munchkins and asked them to see what they could do. Not only did they break the system, they broke it harder than what I normally saw under BP. Initiation was one abuse, but it certainly wasn't the only one. When combined with the added complexity, I rapidly decided that it wasn't for my games.

I will hit this one...

Why do you assume that Mass Initiations are allowed in Karma Gen? That notion would not even get off the ground at our table.

Apologies - You are right on that. However, I do tend to equate Min-Max with extreme Mohawks. Most of my most broken characters (and yes, I do make them from time to time, mostly to work out a Character Concept Itch) tend to have some pretty extreme mohawks, especially in Shadowrun)... Probably a failing on my part.

Your point is taken.

Agreed... More than anything else, the group must be on the same page.

So no actual PLAY testing, though. This was all decided upon through a simple "Can you break it" test?
There is a difference between the theory-crafting and actual play time. You can Break any system, but what you use to break a system is generally not what you actually play in the system, in my experience anyways.

I agree, Intiations allowed at chargen is a GM decision and you certainly have the power to disallow that. I've never seen anyone let that happen aside from Prime Runner games.

Hey, I haven't read the whole thread, but just in case you're interested in a detailed analysis, I believe the tables in this thread can be useful:

Karma Costs of Priorities

In particular, what I called the differences table gives you directly a karma-wise "bang for the buck" for the various priorities.

Situation: Game started with a ton of new players, so GM said that they should all play street sammies to keep things simple. As a result the runs were heavily combat oriented. Replacement characters are now even more heavily minmaxed for combat, which means that all further runs need to be combat oriented, which means more characters built for combat, which means more combat runs... yeah, it's a vicious cycle. We've managed to break it a little bit, but our GM believes in roleplaying all social interaction which means that our newly minted face feels his heavy investment in skills and attributes is wasted as he's only gotten to roll them once or twice.

Your GM is stupid.

I know it sounds harsh, but roleplaying the social interaction (which is certainly nice) while ignoring the rollplaying (rolling the dices) and bringing both the words of the player and the skill of the character together is one of the biggest error a GM can do.

Remember: you are playing a character ingame, and what the character can do and cannot do is not defined by the golden tongue of the *player* but by the abilities of the character. I am certainly not James Bond IRL - but my character is. Why? Because my character has the skills for it (and I as a player can imagine all the cool stunts neccessry to breath life into the character). If your sam can roleplay the social situation while ignoring the social skills, simply let your face roleplay the battles (while simply ignoring the combat rules and combat skills).

The "perfect" solution of course would be, that a social interaction is both played out by the player and rolled with the skills/attributes and that the GM intepretes both and describes the situation according to both things (player action and dice action)

SYL

The problem has been brought up and we're working on a solution.
Of course, for some unknowable reason many of the combat characters minmax for really odd things. Like the throwing adept who minmaxed for high dicepools but only has 4 strength, giving him lousy range and low damage compared to even a holdout pistol... then made that his one and only combat skill. Some of the stuff people have come up with is just dumb.

Oh well, the new plan to enforce diversity is to stop catering for special snowflakes. A few engagements at medium range for assault rifles will make the cc monsters realize that they need to be able to do something beyond arms reach, that sort of thing.

Does any of your Group(s) read DumpShock FuelDrop? If not recommend some of it HEAVILY.

I try. Got one of the new players somewhat interested, it's Deadbolt/Hollywood's player. He's a really great guy, in spite of liking *shudders* 4th edition of the other game. He's really getting into the Roleplaying side and isn't afraid to ask for advice and ideas for both mechanics and fluff concepts while maintaining his focus on what he wants the character to actually be.

For instance with Hollywood he started with the idea of an off-brand James Bond and at this point is working with a former door-to-door salesman who pretends to be an off-brand James Bond. He switches accents on a whim and changes his IC backstory every time he's asked, all of which add to the charm of the character. His only real weakness is he's limited to pistols and unarmed for combat, which fits very well with his role as a face since both of those are highly concealable but mean if the fight is taking place at long range he's in trouble.

Other players are a little more sporadic. They'll read an article if I link it to them but otherwise don't really look into it.

I don't need to let a pornomancer ruin my games to know its unbalanced. A quick survey of dice pools tells me all I need to know.

But no, it wasn't just one test. Character creation times were one of my biggest complaints in SR4.5. Karmagen promised even longer spent in chargen, with fiddlier mechanics, and more difficult to audit. In exchange, it promised me a small decrease in broken characters... which didn't prove to be the case. It's not worth the price, in my opinion.

This is one of my greatest gripes. I agree wholeheartedly.

My take on it is, if you're going to ignore the stat I've invested in, then I get to ignore the stat that the other guy invested in. If you're going to ignore Charisma of a character for purposes of being good (or, esp., being bad) at speeches, then I get to ignore their Str for the purposes of attack rolls, damage, and feats of strength. It's mostly just to point out the inherent flaw of it. As a GM, I don't always make people roll social checks. I give bonuses based on keywords or presentation (screw you, player, for mentioning "birthday" that one time, it was gonna get tense...) and I'm willing to forgo dice rolls in some situations. For a face, I'll allow more social situations to pass without a roll, but for somebody who's not optimized, I hope your wrist isn't cramping on you.

Edit:spelling

Allowing initiation in karmagen is an optional rule, and one that it specifically calls upon GMs to be cautious in using. The only area where karmagen is broken is when you use the original version (free metatype) in conjunction with playing a free spirit or an AI. Even the errata version doesn't fix this, because they made the racial cost too big of a component in balancing them - the creator of karmagen admitted that karmagen doesn't work for those two options.

But speaking not as a munchkin out to break-test karmagen, but as someone who likes optimized characters, I would say that karmagen characters don't have to have a bunch of middling scores all around. Even the most stringent version of karmagen, 750 karma with the eratta, usually works out to more than 400 build points.

Karmagen was never claimed as a system to curb min-maxing, merely as a system to make character creation more similar to how character advancement works.



On the social skills issue, an approach I would recommend if you don't like breaking up the roleplaying with a bunch of dice rolls (and really, dice rolls should only be made for quantifiable things like fitting in at a ganger house party, negotiating payment with the Johnson, making a loudmouth drunk back down, etc.), then I would say let them roleplay however they want, but keep their stats in mind when you have NPCs react to them.

For the face, have women cross the street to hit on him, have the bouncer just wave him though the door, and so forth. For the characters who have dumpstatted their Charisma and social skills, make them have to work for the things the face gets with a smile and a wink. I have used him as an example before, but think of Aahz from Myth Adventures. He is someone with a cunning mind and a take-charge personality, but is lacking when it comes to Charisma and some social skills. So people tend to be skeptical, prone to distrust him. They are unnerved when he is not trying to intimidate him. If they have a chance to dick him around and get away with it, they do it in a heartbeat. That is not to say he can't get things done, social-wise, but it costs him time, effort, bribes, and serious negotiations. That is how it should be for low-Charisma, low-social skills PCs. Let them play how they want, but make them work for it when they try schmoozing and fast-talking. That way, the face won't feel as much that he wasted his skills.

Well, it is more stable and therefor more balanced. Sorry, but the BP System is broken beyond repair. The Karmasystem only suffered from issues the BP System introduced. So the Karmasystem had to deal with ductape fixes needed for the BP System. (And there are a lot of those in the game)
The fact alone, that you had two different versions for essence and magic to interact was silly. You have one and you stick by it, period.
The next point is, that complexity for the player (on the paper) does not matter balance wise that much. What matters if the complexity for the developper. And from this point of view non-linear costs are actually reducing complexity, because negative feedback automatically creates a stabil system. And stable systems are much easier to handle than instable once. (Take cars as an easy example, if you do not change anything, your acceleration does not increase, it acutally will decreases. If you would build it otherwise (constant acceleration), while beeing much "simpler" on paper (out of the persective of the driver not the engineer!), you would have accidents all over the place.)

Same issue with the increasing costs. If you go linear, the system is easier as long as you planned 100% in advanc, but this already adds a lot of actual complexity to the task! And it what we have seen on the boards all the time. How do I get the best bang for the buck in BP, Priority.... If you invested your first 10 Points in the wrong skill, you pritty much fucked up your character (accident with the car as comparism), in the non linear system you are maybe 1 or two 2 Points behind after the fact. So the one system is forgiving, while the other is not. The major example here would have been a meta race, not pushing their increased attributes. For humans it went as far as the build of MR. Lucky. Which simply abused the fact that you could get almost quadratic boni (stroner and use it more often) for linear costs!
Increasing costs cut back drastically on the difficulty to design a game and make balancing much easier, because such a system automatically addresses for differances in playstyle in different groups, by reducing the negative effects an inexperienced player would suffer. (Or to be more precice by reducing the amount of boni you get from gaming the system)

You mean smaller systems, thats because those systems mostly work with hard limits or rather limited options. So they are easy to overview. Thats not a way to design a bigger system, like Shadowrun.
And further you confuse "can be done faster" with "is less complex". That does not need to be this way. It is often the other way around. A free system always takes much longer to use than a class system where you have packages like race, background, class, diety and so on, and then just add up. This system is fast, and would generally work, but you would have a very limited range of character options. Now if you increase the selection, the class system gets far more complex than the free system, but would still be faster. But a player who has put efford in looking up the bonuses of each package will have a serios advantage. Systems get broken mostly by unforseen synergies (I take a dwarf, with a backround barbarien and as class witch).

There are two ways to adress this issue. The one way is to eliminate those, by reducing the possible choices (either by directly outlawing it or by making anything of the road hellish expensive, DA2 took this way as far as I know).
The other way (which I prefere) is the positive approach to strengthen realistic synergies or even enforce them. So it should be easier for a guy who is good at running to increase swimming and other "fitness"-stuff. Even if, for example running, is much better than the other, because in synergies with some form of attack and some spell, with adding increased costs for higher values it would still be unable to break the system, because the system is "stabil". To summarize it: If a system is stable and uses one set of rules, it is easy to balance, because you do not need to try to regulate everything seperatly.

Fair Enough. In my experience, most people theorycraft far differently than they actually play. Ask me to break a system and I will give you a broken character, and looking at it will tell you that "yep, it is broken." And you don't even have to go so far as the 52 Dice Pornomancer for that (the 30 Dice Pornomancer demonstrates the same issue). Ask me to produce a character for a game, on the other hand, and the character will look very different than the theorycraft, even if they are the same concept.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending BP. BP was indeed beyond broken. However, I didn't like karmagen either, and I dispute that it was more stable. My experiments with it showed me that it broke just the same. I didn't think the added complexity gave me anything back.

Not true. SR3's priority system had tons of options, but never felt limited or constraining. White Wolf's oWoD system likewise gave you plenty of options with few hard limits. In both cases, the games are "bigger" yet served perfectly well by a simpler and easier character generation system. Also, "free" systems aren't necessarily slower than class-based ones. For example, creating a character in 3.5 takes forever, especially if you're starting past first level. Savage Worlds characters can be done in minutes, and adding experience is simple.

Really? My experience is the opposite here as well. Race, Stats, Feats, Skills, Equipment, Done. Literally less than 20 minutes. Yes, if you are creating a character at 12th Level it may take an additional 20 minutes, but I never saw a 3.5 Character take all that long to create. Especially if you use the programs that were simply a matter of point, click, print. Admittedly, if I was using a Custom Word Doc (my characters tend to flow to many multiple sheets, with some custom background information, etc.) it might take a few minutes longer (my typing speed is atrocious), but not much.

The longest process for me, in most games, is the conceptual stage (whether it be DnD, Fate, Hero System, Shadowrun, or whatever), which occurs long before I ever even crack a book. But once character creation starts, it is in and out. So I have to ask. Do you find that most of your time is wasted due to trying to decide what you want? Are you conceptualizing at the same time that you are building? Or do you not truly limit yourself until you start the chargen building (do you gather all your books and peruse until you find a concept you want to play, and then start building from that point)? Or are you building, scrapping, and rebuilding to gain the best choices as things change?

Could be that I am just a bit weird, too. I would be the first to admit that one.

It's not just you.

Game Design has a particular oddity. The more options you give, the less character diversity you tend to have.

There is wild diversity at first as players try things out, but as system mastery increases the tendency is for a handful of optimized builds to prevail over anything else. If you want diversity to continue, you have to build in tricks to force players to make choices, whether that be drawbacks to the best options or restricting choices up front.



-k

Hmmmm... Never noticed that...
Will have to keep an eye out to see if we trend that way or not. I have always considered my builds to be more interesting as System Mastery Increases (and increased options exist), as I am more willing to experiment.

That's a problem with the options we have in the book. You want to be a cyber sammy? There are only so many useful augments you can get/afford at character gen, so a lot of characters end up looking the same. The same goes for Adepts, where there are clear winners and losers in powers; magicians where certain spells are no-brainers and a lot of the others are of very minimal use; and so on.

Once the rest of the crunch books are out I expect there will be a lot more diversity but it's just not the case yet. There's nothing wrong with picking optimal character choices just like there's nothing wrong with picking "flavor"choices.

A key point to this that I have noticed is the use of Fluff to balance Crunch. All the time, we hear about how Orcs and Trolls are discriminated against, but how is that reflected in the game? They both have a lower cap to Charisma, but is that really as far as it goes? Does that really reflect societies views on them or just their own inherent limitations? Elves, on the other hand, are supposedly discriminated against, yet have MORE Charisma. In exchange for something not mechanically represented, these metatypes receive other enhanced attributes. Most GM's I've played with are happy to ignore fluff that might complicate things or be tedious, but keep all of the crunch that it balances for.

It's why I favor systems where crunch balances crunch, and fluff balances fluff. "Oh, we're not playing in that world," is an easy way to accidentally overpower one character choice over another. Yeah, the Troll and Ork are big and beefy, and can take lots of punishment... that's why the club has a strict No Greenskin policy and a virtual swat team on standby to keep any "greenskins" out. It's why the Troll and Orc are able to move more boxes, but still can't find legitimate work in the Harbor district. It's why that Orc middle-manager will never rise to VP status without some blackmail and shady dealings against his own corp. And it's why the checkpoint will pull the Metavarient's SINs on a "random stop" more often than they will the human's. But I don't see a rule for that, do you?

So what exactly is broken in the Karma system?


1.) oWod was much worse than Shadowrun, in any aspect considering balance (and it has kind of a class system with the clans...).
2.) Creating past the first level is not Character creation. And what you say is only true if you increase the options beyond the core book. I have already addressed that. (That was my main issue with class systems. More flexibility means a lot more complexity. It is still fast, if you choose fast, though)

My point is, that everything broken in shadowrun can be traced back to getting better than linear or linear returns. And if you take a look a principle of cybernetics/system theorie, well that result
can be expected.

Example:
Buying up Magic and spending it on ware (repeat loop).
You spend 10 Karma for one point of essence. Thats linear and clearly broken.

Getting your attributes up at the beginning in BP (espacially with metas).
Again clearly broken in its effect, only saved by the fact, that there is a hard limit! (Yeah, the point of hard limits)
But guess what would happen if you would allow initiations for 10 BP...

Spirits: You need less than double the dice to get a spirit double the force reliably. And a spirit twice the force is about 3 to 4 times more helpfull. In addition you can only control one "unbound" spirit. Which makes high force spirits again much more valuable. I guess nobody argues that this is broken.

And new the powerpoints, you can buy for some karma. Again, you pay a linear price for a linear advancement (or a bit more than linear in some cases), and again it is broken.

Sure you can fix all of this by making it so expensive, that you may not use any of it. But this would only be another case of " hidden hard limits".
(That was also the kind of "fix" they used in BP for Spirits...)

Without going into build wars, let's just say that I didn't see a decrease in broken characters under karmagen, and in fact I found a few new broken builds were now viable. Mostly Awakened builds, but I recall one or two mundanes.

1) Not really, at least not when you consider only the base book. Splats did start a lot of power creep. However, the oWoD system worked for many different games, not just Vampire; and in each of those, there was a "clanless" option.
2) I haven't played in many 3.5 games that started at 1st level. And even then, character creation is still time consuming. See my response to TJ, below.

But to continue the comparison: Savage Worlds is a big game. It allows for a very wide array of character concepts, far more than D&D does. As part of that, Savage Worlds is a universal system, like GURPS: it addresses just about every genre possible, not just the traditional D&D fantasy heartbreaker. So, it has to offer a really wide range of options, to cover every possibility. Despite this, it's faster and easier to build a character than 3.5 ever dreamt of being. What's more, there are no "player traps"; every choice is a good one, instead of having to weigh optimal choices versus crippling ones.

I'm not including programs in build time, because it's not fair. I'm not discussing D&D 4e, because I've never made a character without the builder, for example. That said, "stats" is not that simple. Assuming point buy, it can take 10-20 minutes alone to assign stats (less if you roll, but then you add +10 minutes as the player whines about the attributes not being good enough. ) Once you're done with that, you then need to calculate all the derived stats: your saves, HP, spell bonuses, skill bonuses, etc. Finally, feats are a serious challenge in their own right. Owing to the way 3.5 is designed, choosing the wrong feat can cripple your character for good. I found it took me 20 minutes or so to pour over the books well enough to come to an informed decision.

Also, since we're discussing D&D, you forgot the biggest obstacle of them all: magic items. This is especially a problem if you're creating a character past first level, but I have seen games where people started with a small magical item. Now, I don't recall exact numbers, but I seem to recall that there are dozens upon dozens of books carrying magic items for 3.5, none of which are collated anywhere. (4e has a lot of items too, but there's the Compendium to make up for that.) Even if you just restrict yourself to a few books, decision paralysis can easily set in. Trying to balance out the utility vs cost vs flavor of the magic items you get is very challenging, and can easily take hours as the player pours over book after book, trying to find the perfect choice.


It depends on the system. I go in with a framework, but I'll adjust and adapt as I learn the system. For example, if I discover that my concept isn't workable in the game I'm going to be playing, I'll back up and restart. I do scrap and rebuild based on the best choices for the character, but that doesn't always mean min/maxing.

I do admit that the first thing I do when i get any system is try to break it. I do set out to see what are the most broken character builds I can create. Once I'm done with that, I generally put them away, and then focus on playing the game. This step is because I'm used to games requiring a high degree of system mastery (like SR4,5 and 5) , and I want to make sure there aren't any player traps. Once I've broken a game a few times, I feel comfortable with it, and then I can settle down and enjoy the game.


I dispute that. For example, a big broken part of 4.5 karmagen was allowing Awakened characters to initiate. That wasn't on a linear scale, but it still broke the game. Buying up attributes is another one: it's cheaper and easier to buy augmentations than it is to raise them with either BP or karma, so scaling costs won't help.

More important is this: even if there is a benefit to going karmagen, I don't feel it's big enough to be worth adopting. Karmagen requires more math, and is slower than BP, which were my biggest problems with the BP system. I haven't seen anything suggesting that the gains of going karmagen outweigh the costs.

Again, initiation at character generation was up to GM discretion so you did not have to allow it in your game. That seems to be your big argument. Duh, if you have 750 karma to spend it's a no-brainer to initiate 5-6 times at least.

Not sure what you mean by "buying up attributes" since in BP it is quite literally easier to buy your attributes to max/softmax than karma where costs increase exponentially. Maybe you didn't use the eratta that made Attributes cost [new level x 5] instead of x3?

You may think karmagen is slower, I think the exact opposite. The numbers are extremely easy since, once again, they are the same thing used for in-game advancement. You quite literally add numbers off of a table in the book. Hard to mess up there if you have a calculator and remedial math skills.

BP is a wholly different system with equally fiddly parts but it is entirely divorced from the logic of the karma system.

I'm fairly sure that given even a modicum of effort ANY character generation system can be 'broken' by some definition. Priority, BP, Karma, Character Points, Class and Level... even random rolls (Some supers games, FATAL, ect) end up with some characters massively more powerful than others, the difference being that rather than the system being gamed by the player it's the system itself which is inherently creating different and unbalanced power levels. I'm fairly certain that the 'cure' is to have a well-rounded campaign that encourages people to spread their skills around a bit rather than dump everything not directly related to combat.

On a side note, I find that in almost every system I've ever encountered the most time consuming part is buying mundane gear. After all the flashy stuff is done you still need to sort out rope, tag erasers, bug scanners ect. and since the list tends to change between character roles and concepts that's usually where I spend most time.

Fait enough, Programs do simplify it a lot. And I NEVER discuss DnD 4E. It is not an RPG, as far as I am concerned. Nor one that I cared to invest in.
But 10-20 Minutes to assign 6 stats? Really? You and I are truly different when it comes to building a character, then.
I disagree that Choosing the "Wrong" feat will cripple a character. And there are rules to allow one to re-aspect feats if one so chooses to do so after discovering that you don't like it.



Magic Compendium... there have been iterations of it ever since AD&D came out. There is a very beautiful one for 3.5.
Decision Paralysis is a Player issue not a game issue. Choice is Good.


But I do see where you are coming from now. Thanks for taking the time.