SR3 (or 2 or 1 even)

Question 1 - Anyone ever make the Karma Pool a Attribute + Attribute / number thing? Right now I have Charisma + Reaction + Willpower / 3 but willpower is in too many pools IMHO (though Intelligence is to), Id love to use Charisma + Strength / 2 (see Question 2) but that makes no logical sense to me that Strength has anything to do with luck...

Question 2 - What are some reasons to have a high strength outside of melee, recoil, and how much you can carry?

Question 1:
No, does not work.

Question 2:
Athletics maybe.

Also how far you can throw stuff and shoot arrows.

Well neither does having a karma pool of 12+ when you can just keep rerolling your failures all day

A SR3 Character STARTS with 1 Karma Pool.
A HUMAN character WITHOUT unlucky/bad karma flaw gets 1 karma pool point for every 10 good karma.
So 12+ Karma is 120 Karma accumulated.
At 3-5 Karma per game, this comes out to 20-30 games.
And at that point it is deserved.

Metahumans and Humans with bad karma/unlucky flaw get one such point for every 20 good karma.
Meaning they need to have been played 60 games to accumulate that and never ever need HOG or burn karma.

And may the great old ones have mercy on your soul if you happen to be playing a metahuman with that flaw.
One point every 40 karma.

These are characters we have been playing for years... (I joined in 95, and while not the newest player, im not the oldest character at the table either) We are finally sitting down and hashing out what to do with the guy who has a karma pool over 50 when we realized everyone is ridiculous. Even with karma burned the low guy has double digits. We used to play weekely I left in 03. Now thanks to VT we are getting the gang back together. Some of the guys I played with never stopped playing though they moved to monthly rather than weekly a few years ago. We were just thinking what kind of solutions could their be to this, One is obviously we all divide our karma pools by 10 and start again ish.

Quick answer: Reboot. Retire the old characters, for the time being, start a new campaign. Fresh air almost invariably helps.

Longer and more involved: Take the old characters, cut them down to the meat. Cap skills at 8 or 10, relegate karma pool to attribute status (much like Edge in SR4/5) and get rid of cumulative costs for re-rolls. One re-roll per roll only, or add the full attribute. It won't work as well as Edge does, because of variable target numbers, but it will massively increase lethality and grit.
Start at 1 for metahumans, 2 for humans, let them buy it up with karma.

Making karma pool a derived pool leads to madness. There are so many pools already to keep track of.

Or just cap Karma pool.

That's one of the things I considered when I still played long-term campaigns in older editions, actually.
I discarded the idea, because it gives you another karma sink if you treat it like an attribute, making choices matter more. In the final version it was also capped at 6, or 9 when exceeding the racially modified limit (with adjusted corresponding karma costs).

If you're starting fresh, use staggered karma pool. Humans get karma pool at 1:10 until they get 5, then it goes up to 1:20 to 10, then 1:30 till 15, and so on. Metahumans go at the same rate.

It slows down karma pool inflation tremendously, but doesn't punish metahumans too badly.

Question: isn't karma like experience? It seems the OP is speaking about edge, but nobody has corrected it, which would be VERY unusual fior this group. Please school me.

Karma Pool was what Edge is now, only for earlier editions.
Once upon a time, every tenth (or twentieth, or fourtieth) point of Karma you earned went into the Karma Pool instead. It worked a bit like Edge, only with more re-rolls possible, with cumulative costs.

For example: You want one re-roll, it costs you one point of Karma Pool, you want a second one, now it costs two, etc.

This in turn lead to a LOT of re-rolls possible for characters with high overall Karma levels, which could get very silly.

I see. Thank you for educating me. I would never use such a ludicrous system, though a cap on the total available pool would certainly curtail the kids of abuses obviously available in that system. I definitely like how edge works much better.

Aside from that it does not . .
Karma was earned at least, by experienced characters.
Edge is bought luck and cen be pretty broken as the Mr.Lucky build can attest to.

If you can start with 8 Edge as a human, that's equivalent to a human in SR3 with close to 90 good karma under his belt.
Which comes out at around 10 games more or less. Which many characters simply did not manage to do, if they even got played that often/long.

The difference being a hard cap, no matter how much karma you earned. I know some people playing characters in the thousands of accumulated points, for whatever reason. It's just mathematics at this point, which just makes for a whole lot of rolls, instead of challenges.

There are good arguments for both ways to do it, and I wouldn't call either ludicrous, but I definitely prefer Edge as a mechanic, although Karma Pool with a few tweaks (such as only allowing a single re-roll per test) becomes very workable as well.

The biggest problem is that you can front-load Edge, whereas Karma Pool can only be earned over time. There's also more ways to control Karma Pool, and since you have more time to figure things out, it's easier to find a system that works for your table.

The biggest BReak is that under SR3, Hand of God took ALL your pool away . . and under SR4 it only takes one point of edge away which you can rebuy later on . .

In both cases don't the rules state that you can only ever use the HoG once per character?

Not to my knowledge. Might be wrong though.

SR4 doesn't have any such restriction. It's a quick fix, though, if one doesn't like the concept.

Not in SR4/4.5. You can use it as much as you have Edge. Which means every single human being on the planet can withstand two direct hits from a THOR shot in that system.

Which is why the Thor DoubleTap never made it into called shots.