Our group has generally been retiring characters around the 100 Karma mark, sometimes a little higher. I was just wondering what everyone else does. Also, do you include "cash for Karma" in your retirement count?

I generally retire character once they get to the point that anything they go up against is lethal if they arse up.

We never use cash for karma...never. Usually players in my group will retire when they have attained some sort of goal, including purchasing a lifestyle for life in most cases. Accumulated enough cash/equipment to start a business, finally settled an old score, and settled down with a nice girly are also reasons why.
Our group never retires based on how much karma they've accumulated.

The lowest karma a player in my group has retired at is about 50 or so, but usually it is around 200-300 good karma. The two longest lasting characters lasted 388 good karma before retirement and 1,200 some-odd good karma before retirement.

Hear that Cray, My name sake has a Karma Pool of 18, Dispite being Meta Human and having bad karma

Retirement comes as a bullet to the brainpan.

Seriously, we've never retired characters. I just sort of end campaigns and leave the possibility of the characters being used later open.

I've never retired a character from any campaign, for any game, nor been involved in one as a player or GM, that had character's retired.

Maybe the games we play in my area are more lethal then everywhere else.

never had a runner retire, but some have changed professions. such as a consultant on movies, or security consultants etc. usually because they get caught and its a better alternative.

That's another big retirement reason.

It just gets too hot when they do go on runs, and it just isn't worth the risk of being caught anymore due to other things going on in the runner's life. One of our PC's retired immediately after his (the Character's) daughter was born. Got a job managing a Nacho Mama (through a contact) and started studying engineering at community college...we laughed at him for days.

It became difficult to challenge our characters above 300 earned Karma, so we started playing new characters. The new ones that have played consistently are at about 120-160 earned Karma, but many of us have tried a half-dozen character ideas for a few runs each. My latest is the 'legal magician' with no spell or focus above rating 2.

At the rate we are advancing the timeline, one of our characters will be released from Jail in another year of play.

i plan on retiring my favorite character at around 500-800 karma. haven't really put much thought into it. retiring at 100 karma seems... disappointing, to me. that's like two or three major skill upgrades, a few grades of initiation, a couple stat increases... i dunno, 100 karma is about when i really think a character starts hitting their full growth.

I think our primary reason for retiring at or around 100 (I know a couple of our groups' earlier characters got up to around 200) is, as some people have mentioned, after so long it just gets hard to challenge the team. Granted, this usually won't happen until you surpass the 300 mark, but... I don't know what it is. Most of what I find enjoyable about the game is the building up of a character. The pattern we seemed to have fallen into is that we get the characters up to a stylish and notable level (say 100-150 karma) and then they basically turn into permanent NPC's that are brought back in later campaigns for cameos or a helping hand.

It should also be said that of late the magic level of our groups has dropped drastically. Where we used to have about 2 mages and an adept or 2 per run, we now are lucky to see one of either, though adepts are more common. This could point to another reason we cut off at 100 karma. Who knows, maybe we're just wierd.

My personal highest was my namesake, who turned out to be a sniper with 80-some karma. In retrospect, he never really was all that interesting, he just had the custom-made rifle with a nice stack of both APDS and AV rounds. I redesigned him, of sorts, and thought out the character more, but have yet to play the spurned sniper, calle "Flea".

Oh, and thanks for the input. Since this is the only group I've ever played with long enough for this to come up, it's nice to hear what other people do.

Edited for spelling/grammar at least once.

i dunno. i've seen a GM challenge a character possessed of a total earned karma in the thousands. i'll agree that the game moves on a different scale, when you get past around 200-300 karma, but i've never had a problem challenging such characters myself.

I guess it all depends on who's GMing for you.

And just out of curiosity, what sorts of things would you come up with to challenge said high-karma characters?

The Arcology. Stealing nuclear submarines. Space. Girlfriends.

Watching a high-powered character balance a shadowrunner lifestyle and a girlfriend is one of the greatests joys of GM-dom

the high-thousands character doesn't come out all that often; this was a bit of a special occasion. i wouldn't one to be the one running a regular campaign with him in it. that said, the character faced a number of situations in which his abilities were stretched: at one point, he found himself tracking his quarry through a field of Awakened prosectutor vines--big clumps of 3-4 meter vines which could animate and make whip attacks. the plants had a reach of 1 to 3, had something like 5 to 7 attack dice, and never attacked in groups of less than 4 (imagine being attacked by every blade of grass in your front yard). at another point, the character and several others under his protection were attacked by two Hinds loaded with several pods of missiles each, with several initiate mages onboard and several great form air spirits running interference for them. like i said, though, that was a special occasion; that character is more of a plot device, usually, than an active participant in any runs.

at less unbelievably high levels, say 200-300, i usually throw things like insect spirit-invested paracritters, compounds whose defenses are actually designed with the intention of keeping intruders out, Ghost-level opponents, maybe even a dragon now and again.

Well retirement is a good thing. I tell my players they can play thier characters as long as they want till they get tired of them.

The current campaign I am running. I have between 4 and 7 players per run.
Stumpie 271 Karma Dwarf Gunslinger
Terl 247 Karma Orc Merc
Shaava 262 Karma Tiger FullMage Shapeshifter
Hawk 196 Karma Elf Sniper
These are my regulars. They still have a hard time by weefle runners. I have kept money as a restriction in the campaign as then they go over board with Cyber and Bioware(the best). Kick a## guns and the like.

Dragon Fly 62 Karma Elf Street Shaman Rat
Boris 168 Karma Troll Full Mage.
Barak 96 Karma Orc Armed Comabt Specilist.

Not So regulars. There have been no retirements as Yet.

Hawk has already used a Hand of God to survive a fall froma 36 Story building.

I have Elf Weapons specialist who is in the 2632 Karma. with 5 Mill cash.
I retired him as a Weapons dealer and specilist.

He is now availible as a contact in all of my campaigns.
The worst is when you have your greatest characters over 250 Karma killed be cause the GM want to make it challenging.
This is how I do it.
Police and Military. I use the security rating for zones to limit there armour use and weapons selections.
Road Blocks and the like random vehicle searches. No matter how much good Karma and Karma pools you have it is still a challenge.

my character--200ish karma shooter/sneaker/puncher adept--was a part of that fight. i have to rate it as the second-best fight i've ever been in, in an RPG, even with that 1,000+ karma working with us.

woo, gives me a rush just thinking about it.

I'm SO seeing MG cut scenes with snake in dodging incoming....

[EDIT]What was the first?

it happened during Brainscan. our group, dressed for a meet (light weapons, street clothes) goes to an Overwatch hideout, which was at an automated Choco-Tart factory. during the meet, a group of Blues and their pet Medusa attacked. it should be noted that the guy who was GM'ing this is the same guy who runs that 1,000+ karma character i mentioned earlier--he likes him some badass characters, and he redesigned the Blues to fit his personal vision of how badass they should be--they were, in other words, utter death machines. the end result was some of the best posting i've seen. i ended up saving the logs, if anyone feels like reading them. my character is Italy. most it should be pretty self-explanatory.

choco factory, page 1
choco factory, page 2
choco factory, aftermath

You, sir, are Da Man.

OTOH, Connor's pretty badass, too. I only wish he slapped Dodger's tongue out of his mouth before heading off into the sunset.


Brownies....

heh.

I retired a character after I realised runners shouldn’t take enchanting. At initiate grade 4 or 5 with enchanting 4-5 I decided to make myself a big power focus but first I needed some oricalcum. I purchased unprocessed gold and all the other radicals made the radical gold rolled the tests for the oricalcum and had 35+ units. I used most of it on my focus and went on a couple more runes and did it again. This time I got over 70 units. I retired from running and spend 2 months of the year making oricalcum.

I don’t know if I should have been able to do that (gm told me what to roll. I didn’t quite understand the rules for making oricalcum)

If you don’t use cash for karma what do magical spend there cash on. I played a phisad for some time (after aforementioned character) and never came up with anything to spend money on other than training and initiation components (as a description of cash for karma) he upgraded his weapon focus once and had no implants. His expenses where minimal.

Why would you have a tem of runners that are so different in power level that you cant challenge one without killing the rest? When you have a character die or a new player enter the game with 200 karma characters you throw him a bone. Let him build sum to 11 or sum to 12. or just give him 150 karma to spend to bring him up to the level of the party.

If you are elite you want to do elite jobs for elite pay and you cant do this unless you are working with other elite runners.

This is a problem my character has in one game where he is quite professional and is running with a couple of complete Muppets.

Edward

It would take a loooong time to make 35 units of oricalum, as when making it you don't multiply the successes by the units to determine the final amount.

If your character can spare a year doing nothing but watching his furnaces, then he probably doesn't need to be running anyways.

er, cray, that's only a problem if you're mixing 200-300 karma characters with new ones. read your bible, son--you don't just go around putting old wine in new skins.

i see threats like the ones i mentioned as being wholly realistic, in SR's world. they're put into the books because they do exist; why not use them?

I think his GM forgot or didn't know that you can only have one circulation going at a time. That is, he didn't know you can only use one unit of each radical when making orichalcum.

My current GM made us retire our characters because he felt we were "pretty far advanced" despite the fact that we had obtained a total of about 30 karma (though our karma was variable, that was the highest), and had done somewhere between 5 and 7 shadowruns. I was upset cause I had long term goals in mind with that character but there's nothing I can point to in SR where it says "a mid level character would have a karma total of around 100" or whatever. So I tried to make a character without very lofty/long term goals for the next time, we'll see how it works out...

-Joe

ouch, geez. i sometimes hand out 30 karma just to round a character out.