I like long campaigns. My players like long campaigns. In our current campaign, we're between 200-300 total karma earned so far. Things are really getting going, now.
But even for metahumans, 200 karma earned is a karma pool of 10. It's getting ridiculous. I feel like they have too much.
So should I set a limit? I've tried that before. I've set a limit of 5 + 1/100 total karma earned. And then another limit for how much the team can have in it's pool. But then what to do when they earn more past that limit? It seems too harsh to just have them earn one point of good karma instead. They're hardly comparable. I've let them, if their pool was full, trade in that point they would've earned for pool for 3 points of good karma. That seems to make them pretty happy. They seem to feel that a point of kp is worth about 3gk.
What does everyone else do? Do you let the human run around with a karma pool of 30?

Well, I like short campaings, so I've never been up there in the 30 karma pool range. But, even when my players start going into like 5 karma pool or whatever, they ALWAYS end up having to burn some to buy successes. So my advice to you is to put them in tough challenges where they'll have to do that. Or burn karma to lower TN, things like that. There's also nothing like Hand of God to say "you have too much Karma, boy"

There is Hand of God, true. But buying successes is the only use of KP that permanently burns it, yes? All the other uses are just a temporary burn, I believe. Personally, I think there need to be some more uses of KP that burn it permanently.

I've been in three long-running Shadowrun campaigns where characters have reached the 300 earned Karma level. In all cases, we virtually retired the characters because it became more fun to run new characters. I think part of the problem was the large Karma pool, and the other part is that Shadowrun is supposed to risk your character, and we didn't want to risk them anymore.

Right now we only use the retired team as part of overriding plot hooks. For example, who uncovered that the election of 2056 was rigged, thus forcing there to be an election campaign in 2057? (Super Tuesday, page 8, 3rd paragraph.)

I've seen Team Karma pool build to 30 or so, and then get dropped to 7 by having two characters leave. (There were threats of murder after that.) A guideline I once read suggested that personal Karma Pool "too big" could be "solved" by more-experienced characters contributing to the Team Pool, which keeps the less-experienced characters alive. I've NEVER seen that done.

Lowering a near impossible Target number also permanently burns off karma pool. Another way to do it might be to use some unique free spirits who don't want good karma, they want Karma Pool in exchange for services. other methods could be to inflict temporary Bad karma on anyone with 20 Karma pool or more. As soon as they drop below 20 you are fine again.

One last thing is offer a special ability my GM called Luck bonus. By trading in 4 Karma Pool you could get a permanent +1die to any particular type of test. this die is a bonus die that is rolled whenever that test is made. A second die in the same type of test can be purchased for 8 karma Pool and a third for 12 karma Pool. Initiative should never be improved this way

Example: QuickDraw has 30 Karma Pool, since he spends a lot of time shooting people before they can shoot him he decides to buy 2 dice in Pistols Test and 1 Die in Submachine Gun test costing him 16 Karma Pool. Then he buys a die for spell resistance because he is a samurai and tired of falling victim to the Cat Shaman's Control Emotions spells that cost him another 4 Karma Pool. Leaving him 10 Karma pool. Now sure he gets a huge edge with pistols, submachineguns, and spell resistance, but his overall luck is not 1/3 of what it use to be too.

Other test require you to burn karma, like lowering TNs like lorthazar (and me as well) pointed out. Check the BBB.

I like long campaigns too. Whenever my players have hit the point when they can basically reroll any roll to ensure all successes, then I introduce a limit. I don't change how they earn it, but limit them to using a maximum of 10 per session. They can have plenty in the bank, but they have a daily limit, basically.

I also like the Luck Bonus idea, Lorthazar.

I have a very strict method of awarding karma, so long campaigns do not necessarily net a lot of karma. 100 good karma is tough to acquire in my games and karma pool accumulates very slowly.

I do not like limiting the amount of karma pool a PC has access to, sometimes PCs need a lot of karma pool in a hurry.

EDIT:

Some people has suggested that after a certain point the karma pool does not accumulate as quickly. I have a slightly different system, after a certain point, the runs that you do, do not give you as much karma as before. If it is the first time you are breaking into the Sepherim HQ, you get full karma. IF you are doing it for the Nth time, you do not get as much karma.

I've come across this, since the team average Karma for my group is above 250. I've had to get creative, but I think I've managed to 'patch' the problem at least.

Firstly, I modified the Karma pool rules slightly. If you're using Karma Pool for re-rolling failures on a test which will result in harm to someone or something, one point is always burnt. So it someone were to shoot a sec guard but didn't generate sucesses, then it'd cost them 1. For the second re-rolling of failures on that test would cost them 2 but burn 1. The third costs 3, one of which is burnt and so on.

Also, I've said that when your Karma pool gets to 12 it takes double the good karma to go up. The Cat Shaman in my party now has 12, so it'll take 40 before she gets another karma pool point (she took bad karma at char gen).

So far this seems to work reasonably well.

Another possibility is declaring that a character cannot spend more than x karma pool on a given run for non-burning uses. That encourages Hooper-Nelsoning or buying successes.

Though it does remove those dramatic moments when the PCs try to hit a TN of 30 on four dice.

~J

Are you sure? I thought it was exponential (1-2-4-8-16-etc.).

~J

It is as wireknight says.

Oops, I made that mistake too. Either way, 1 Kp is always burnt in my campaign for damage dealing tests.

i kind of liked the optional rules in the SRComp where you could convert Karma Pool dice into specialized pools to reflect the the increased skill level with particular skills. For instance, you could create a Pistols pool and permanently move dice from your Karma Pool to a Pistols Pool. It couldn't be higher than the skill, IIRC. This allowed you to use your Combat Pool more for dodging and damage resistance. You could also create special Pools for groups of skills, such as a Social Pool to use with all Social skills, etc...In any case, total Pool dice remained capped at the skill level, as normal...

I know another GM that used this method also, and forced his players to cap at 10 Karma Pool - as they earned a new Karma Pool die, they had to assign it somewhere else into one of the other pools.

I'm really not a fan of tweaking the rules to penalize players who have been savvy/lucky enough to keep their characters alive through 100+ good karma of intense play. Just bear in mind that as PCs advance, the difficulty of their work should increase. As the challenge level increases (prime threats go from gangers, to rentacops, to real cops, to well-trained/high karma sec forces, to evil black ops guys) the need for karma increases. If you still have 200+ karma characters running around the Barrens fragging go-gangers for a living, they're going to have attracted a lot of attention, meaning their illustrious careers should be ending soon anyhow. Just keep the game challenging and you'll find PCs who really need that 10-15 karma pool.

Another tactic is to limit the rate of karma pool refresh. Maybe tougher campaigns take longer, meaning one might have to use the same karma pool dice over several gaming sessions. Afterall, the "you wake up in Amazonia wearing your skivvies and holding only a bic lighter" adventure could take a while to complete.

I was in a campaign once where a character had 99 Karma pool (second ed). He had 400 good karma and up, but beyond a hundred or so he just contributed it all to team karma. The guy was pretty ridiculous and the game fell apart.

So, it all depends on what you're doing. If you have to, start snipering people off. That'll get 'em to buy successes if anything does. Or crash their suborbital: that'll get 'em to use hand of god rule, all right.

We houserule it that no character can have more than 5 Karma Pool, ever.

If they burn one, they can then accumulate another Karma Pool point to bring it back up to 5.

This makes players think more because they can only reroll any test once, so they tend to avoid doing stupid things that will get them killed or injured, and makes things a little riskier as they have less Karma pool to use than someone with 10 or 15 karma.

Plus, by this point, most of our PCs prefer to have that extra karma point to spend on skills, attributes, magic etc, than another Karma Pool.

Cray, perhaps you should try raising the difficulty of the runs that the runners are being hired for. i mean, in D&D, you don't throw goblins at 10th-level characters. in SR, you don't throw rating 4 maglocks at 10kp characters.

We recently went from Karma Pool being a 24-hour refresh time to having it only refresh at the end of the run. It upped the difficulty greatly and meant that there were fewer trivial re-rolls, which is fine for the double digit karma bearers.

This is why our group has KP refresh at the end of the run, not every 24 hours.

You could say that karma pool beyond the first few are usable only for burning.

You could also allow them to buy something with karma pool on occasion. Perhaps edges, or wierd magical boons of some sort.

The one thing that destroys shadowrun campaigns is ridiculous amounts of karma pool.

I prefer using the graduated karma pool rules, myself. You earn the first 10 karma pool normally, but then the cost rises by 10; humans now need to earn 20 karma for their next pool dice, and metahumans move to 30. Once they've accumulated ten more, the cost rises yet again, and so on.

This doesn't break a game in the slightest, nor does it penalize the more powerful players (who have already spent their tons of karma, and are therefore much tougher); but it does make it easier to integrate new characters as time progresses.

That's insane.

I blame the GM. If they can't offer a good challenge to a PC with a massive KP, then they aren't doing their job. Personally, I've seen Wireknight's PC in action and the GM sure as hell didn't make it easy. I've seen people burn copious amounts of KP (expending it for re-rolls or burning it forever) because they had to, and to start instituting rather ludsicrous rules just to keep a player in check is weak.

The issue with character turnover is an annoying point.

Wen a new character joins a game he should be given something to bring him at least nearly up to the power level of the group. This is for balance and realism.

Think about it. If I was prime runner of 100+ good karma 8-10 in my primary skills (10-12 for specialisations) 3-6 initiations if magical with many spells, mostly bata wear and cultured bio if augmented with a good stockpile of equipment not available to starting characters would I really want to run with a patsy just starting to make a name for himself.

Prime runners are supposed to get the best paying jobs (and they pay well because thy are harder) if the teem brings in a new runner then there ether going to have to cover the newbie’s hoop (better of going it alone much of the time) or take runs below there station thus not making the money they think they deserve and having to run more often than they want to (I see the prime runners running less often for more money and living higher lifestyles).

We have always used KP refresh at end of run even as starting characters. When we got to 3-4 KP I was still hording it like a miser miss a critical shot rerole once. Still missed leave it to the others on the teem. I saved it to save my hoop wen the other option was out of action. Most of the time this meant I still had it at the end of the run.

Edward

I disagree with Edward. There can be plausible reasons for bringing in a relatively newer runner (remember, right out of chargen, the PC is assumed to be experienced).

Your mage got wasted and you need one in a hurry. You go for the best money can buy in a hurry. The established ones might have their own groups or want a bigger slice of the pie than what you would like. Decker PCs are also easily integrated into most games.

odd.. my own view would be if your pcs have too much karma pool it is because the runs they are going in are not hard enough...I dont suppose you are actually giving any threat level karma if they arent even using up most rerolls..
if you are complaining that there is no challenge then for sure they arent hard enough.
you dont need to set them against a team of a feathered serpent , two great dragons and a battleship in order to get them to burn this.. just take a good hard look at the items in shadowrun, especially weapons, take a look at your npcs´ and see what are they shooting with.. play around with bullet types, check normal paracritters with melee <2 or 3 barghest can really ruin your day if they get into melee>, check tactics, I assume they are going against red samurai and other elite teams, those use tactics, have access to heavy weapons,with proper recoil soaks not stock weapons.., good ammo, use grenades <if you are near a wall a grenade will eat up karma any day of the week, mages when the team is on the defense will also make them reroll like there is no tomorrow, then anything rigger controlled.. etc etc.. sometimes you can have players that are better than the gm at tactics.. learn from them

dont give them a super encounter that makes them burn all their karma <unless you want that type of "epic" run>, just increase the diff until you see they are actually NEEDING all those rerolls and burning some now and then.. then you will have hit the sweet spot.

DS

There are reasons to bring less experienced members in a teem but usually to do a job. You might hire a Decker to do overwatch for you when going against a facility with inferior matrix security (compared to its physical security witch will challenge the 200 karma combat specs) but if you bring in a starting combat Decker he will be a liability in his combat roll. And if you bring in a starting character overwatch decker he will be useless on the next run against a facility with good matrix security.

If you bring in a new mage to replace your old he will have great difficulty with the spirits and initiated sec mages you would expect to find accompanying security that will threaten your 200karma front liners

And it is highly unlikely that your new ringer will have the coms tech to interface with your military grade battle tac system.

Short of deliberately weakening the resistance in the new character’s field of “expertise” (which would work for one or two runs but wouldn’t make sense for long) and heaven forbid the player wants to bring in a new character that overlaps some skills with an existing character. He just will not stand a chance, and if the existing characters have a moderate number of arias of proficiency it could get very difficult to find an aria in witch a starting new character could show proficiency beside 200 karma characters.

As to experienced characters having groups already shadow runner teems are quite transitory. This is partly shown by the fact that as you pointed out “ht out of chargen, the PC is assumed to be experienced” (so why was my most professional teem mate last run a 16 year old brat?)

I’m not saying you should let new characters come in as powerful as the old. There should be some reward for keeping your character alive all that time. But giving a new player 75% of the average teem member’s karma and 75% of the average teem member’s accumulated wealth (not including expended wealth) will allow them to have a character that is useful to the teem as more than a 1 trick pony.

Edward

How long (in game sessions) have these uber-characters been going? I can't speak for other GMs, but I give my players a maximum of 5 Good Karma per session (normally 12-14 hours). They're up to around 70-80 GK over their lifetimes, and they have a KP of about 5 each. This is mainly due to the fact that about once every other session they'll be put into a situation where permanently burning a Karma Point is a near-necessity.
If you're frightened of your players getting an easy ride due to their Karma, I'd suggest either reducing the amount of Karma they gain (and applying the graduated karma rules) and/or putting them up against opponents with equivalent abilities and karma pool. An Equal or Superior opponent should be just that, and even the grunts should have some KP to use. You'd be surprised how much it terrifies players when their opponents start using Karma too, and it certainly gets them burning through theirs.

-JH.

I go with the guideline of 3-5 karma per run <each run taking between 2 and 5 sessions..>, 10% of which gets deducted and thrown in the reroll pool.
worked well for our las GM so I adopted the guideline.. keeps skill progression semi realistic.. not sure what everyone else does..
moneywise things are more compex because if I use a published adventure and the players know it they will play `hunt the mage` as they always seem to have hyperexpensive foci

DS

uh Edward I can say three good reasons

1: the Brat (read Otaku) was the only PC whose background included shadow experience. After all the other two PCs (not counting the Sammy that later joined later) were an ex race driver and a mouse shaman doing effectively their first runs)

2: The race driver was still in race driver frame of mind and the mouse shaman was seriously deluded ("I'm not a shadowrunner I just do favors for people and get paid for it." )

3: the mouse shaman was played by M1 and the rigger was played by M2, (neither of which read these boards btw so will give a short descrip, and will try to be nice.)

M2: whiner who is a bit of a spotlight hog and seriously praise hungry

M1: well let's just say that M1, if you greate character creation concept guidelines she will create the opposite.
e.g. No orks = M1 makes ork shaman.
No leadership feat (D20) = M1 creates character with leadership as class ability, tries to claim since it isn't a feat per se it should be allowed.
No evil (once again D20 example) = M1 creates LN char that turns LE in session 6
Professional shadowrunners = "I'm not a shadowrunner."
these are just the ones that spring off the top of my head.

If it really got that bad and it was too late to reverse things...
I would tell the players that I'm taking their KP and giving them all "XXX" amount of CharGen points and to go make a Second backhistory to explain their life over the next 5 to 10 years. I would work with them on it, personally keeping informed about what they want their character to do over that period of time.
I would then decide how much of the KP to give back to the group after they reformed and send them out on missions about 3 to 4 times as hard as they were on.

Well I have a good way of getting by this whole thing. My first group of runners which are still running ti this day 6 years down the line mass between 60 nad 100 karma a year 30 Sessions so yea they get between 2 and 5 karma a session.
so yes I have a 420 Karma human with 40 KP.

He could as said burn Karma at a rate of knots.

I generate all my NPC as Characters and allocate them a % of Karma of the Team. So they get to use KP as well. They also have the right to live. So just for a person to negotiate against a Fixer can be a KP intensive affair.

With this you can use your KP as follows.

Motor mouth (PC) has a KP of 40
Jimmy(NPC) has a KP of 30.

Motor mouth has an effective KP of 10 against . This is a one on one.

Combat would be a GM's night mare. But it can be solved.
PC Team has total KP 169
NPC Team has KP 124
NPC team get 45 KP divided evenly between them allocating KP to those who need it like Team KP.

Try it it will limit the endless use of KP.
You could just assign a KP to a Joe soap. The higher KP is like a high Rep, you start dealing with high Rep personal.

I tend to agree. In the games I've run, I usually encourage the players to retire around 100 karma. I'll do this by having a corp, the govt, or some other group with deep pockets offer the player an incentive to "settle down" (having a Street Sam offered all the latest cyber and a sweet paycheck to bodyguard a corp exec that's not nearly as important as he likes to think he is, for example).

If you like long campaigns you can have the characters work from a character pool. You can also be more stingy with the karma, offer a cash for karma deal. I don't know what kind of game your running, either, but you may want to consider that IMO when a runner gets around 300 karma, he's pretty far removed from the gutter- keep the opposition on par (or higher) than the player characters. If the opposition stays the same then it'll get boring for the PCs as well.

Hope this helps.

I, for one, advocate letting players have high karma pools. Sure, it gets ridiculous with a street sam, but look at deckers. My game's 2nd edition, and trying to build a deck by the rules in the original virtual realities, some of the target numbers at the higher ends of the scale break the TN 12, possible with 2 dice barrier with no sweat, with a base time measured in YEARS. If the decker wants to put a rating 3 response on his MPCP 12 deck, that'll be a TN of 17 with a base time of 540 days. If you want to actually use such a thing before your group retires, you're going to need to take major time lapses (which my group hates) or cut that base time down with a LOT of successes. And just burning isn't always an answer there, because my example ignores how many karma you would need to use just to get to the point of having an MPCP of 12, with other goodies on the deck to match, let alone surviving long enough to have the skills to try something like this. If a character burns all his karma getting MPCP up to 8, he'll die before getting to try for 9.

My answer would be to encourage the group members that don't need karma for other things (the street sam) to do seemingly foolish things that require him to use (not burn) karma at nearly every turn. If you design the run right, this can turn out to be cool (our street sam does stuff like diving out windows into traffic to avoid getting shot all the time, you just have to imagine him being a badass about it), and for the characters that DO need karma for other stuff, just point them to the relevant passages of Virtual Realities that talk about how frowned upon deckers that actually buy their decks are. Anyone that's not a tool will definitely want to make their deck from scratch, with all the TNs of 17 and base times of 540 days that that entails.

When I'm playing I like magicians. Because of this, I don't think I've ever really broken a GM's plans with excess karma pool.

"I'll use karma to reroll, but just once."
"Why just one?"
"I'm saving the rest for the inevitable Magic Loss check."

As a GM, I really don't worry about it all that much. Both because I tend to do story-heavy games instead of mechanics-heavy, and no matter how big the PCs get, I can always throw something worse. The PCs aren't the only characters in the setting that have been saving up a boatload of karma for a rainy day.

Heh, I can see it now, with the super karmaed up PC.....

"Well, Mr. GM, my character now has so much karma that all tasks are trivial."

"So, Mr. Player, are you going to retire your character?"

"No, Mr. GM....I'm going to walk naked through Seattle, and take on Lone Star...using only unarmed combat."

.....hours later.....

"That's the 3000th Lone Star officer you beat into submission! Can we stop now?"

"No, I still have karma."