Which just blows my mind, since all of those are about player cleverness in character creation and roleplaying - they are ways to reward the players for being cool, IMO.

That's the thing. Karma isn't a player-only award. It's a character award that can come from player control. There's even a few awards that are specifically aimed at the player rather than the character (like Humor), but in the end it's still a character award as the character is the one who benefits from it.

But like all the things mentioned throughout the thread, karma wards obviously occur on a semi-regular basis for everyone in the game. If not, no one would ever be able to advance at anything since, for some strange reason, karma is the only way you can do that.

Just look at those titles again. Guts, Smarts, Motivation, and Right Place/Right Time. Those are all perfectly valid and believable reasons for why a character would gain the experience (in Shadowrun's form of karma) to improve themselves in some fashion. There's no reason it should be limited to players only; that's metagaming. And while, in practice, karma *is* a metagaming tool, they've woven it too much into the game for it to *only* be a metagaming tool.

Why? He's roleplaying, too. He just plays everyone else rather than one specific character.

He could. He'd spent it all on his NPCs.

Why? It's his job to give out the awards. And while, technically, he's not directly awarding himself, that doesn't mean the vast majority of metahumanity in his potential control should be stagnant creations. It's a breathing, living world even if he's not detailing every single one of those lives... but they're all still earning karma every time they do something get into a fight, stand up to someone, take the initaitive to do something important, or are just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.

Why not? I hate to make the comparison, but that has been pretty much a staple in RPGs since the original D&D box set was released. NPCs gain experience at either half the rate of PCs, or at the GM's discretion.

As to Karma and IEs ... it isn't necessarily the awarding of Karma now, but the fact that they could have earned it in the past. And relatively easy too.

The original argument was that IEs would not be able to get to such high levels.

The response was that IEs could earn Karma, even during the downtime, and that while they might have quite a few frivilous skills, and they may have wasted Karma here and there on other things (including possibly HoG), they would still have earned more than enough Karma (or however else you want to justify their skill improvement), to be quite highly skilled at certain things, usually including Magic.

From there the debate spread to earning specific Karma, and whether NPCs are eligible of receiving Karma, and a few other directions. The core argument is as stated above however, at least IIRC.

Perfectly reasonable point of view.
If you live for thousands of years, you'll have plenty of time to do all the things the IEs allegedly have.

I just wish there was at least one IE waster - you know a relatively normal person, as opposed to an insanely motivated over-achiever, who spent a couple of thousand years thinking..."Yeah, I could kick his wimpy mortal ass, if I really wanted to...", but never actually got around to doing all of those cool 7331 things.

Someone who spent eternity having a life, rather than preparing for the next round of power-hungry politicking.

With that, I shall bow out of the discussion, as I depart for holidays in Rome, as decreed by She Who Must Be Obeyed (Props to whoever gets that reference!).

Well, not all IEs are as focused as, say Harley or Aina. Some would be slacker on the magical and/or physical in exchange for more learned pastimes (not that Harley would be slack there either ). As for just 'having a life', there would have been plenty of that type of thing too. If not, eternity would be intolerable. This falls under the 'various frivolous skills' category.

Then you have the new crop of IEs, like Frosty and that now-dead-guy-whose-name-I-can-never-remember from Tir Tairngire [edit: Glasgian Oakforest], and even Lady Brane Deigh, who haven't yet had the time to be all-powerful.

Have a good trip.

Damn you and your logic!

I just have a problem with the linear progression of the IE's. If you live 30,000 years, you get better every year. This doesn't gel totally with me, its one of those things that makes perfect sense in terms of the game but I think it wouldn't work out like that in real life.

I mean, clearly, I'm not trying to say I'd know what a guy would look like after 30,000 years of life, I'm just saying what I would imagine would be significantly different from the IE's as presented. I'm more interested in coming up with alternative takes on the idea of immortality rather than to debate the specific merits of IE's. They don't have a place in my game, but thats not to imply there is anything wrong with games that do use them.

From Darwin's Five Stages of Life to every major religion, Death is the 800-pound gorilla of the human psyche. Its there, its unavoidable. It is arguably the most human thing you will ever do (along with being born and having sex). Except for the realtively small percentage of people currently alive, every single human being who ever existed in the history of the world has died.

To my mind, removing this key component would alter every single thing about a person, rather than just make him "better". That isn't to say there wouldn't benefits to living 30,000 years, I'm just saying I don't think the downsides have been sufficiently explored for my tastes.

And even if they were, I still don't like the linear progression, because don't think its borne out by real world comparisions. Experience (in life) seems to be more cyclical, with people getting better at some things and worse at others, as well as bound by inherent limitations. They also waste their potential. While you can tie this to the finite nature of our existence, it is a fundamentally human and to change it changes what it means to be human.

But thats just my opinion, I could be wrong.

The big problem is that Shadowrun doesn't have rules for skill atrophy. A friend of mine once recommended including skills in the SOTA rules, and I thought that was (at the very least) a good place to start if I were to develop rules for that sort of thing.

Death is still there, though. Even if it isn't going to be anywhere near as soon, it is just as inevitable.

~J

I can't remember either, though you're right, I am pretty sure I got it from an SR book. If I had to bet, I'd say NAGRL, but thats a blind guess.

Edited for this, which I forgot:
Demosthenes: I was going to say Rumpole of the Bailey, and then you went ahead and put it in the spoiler tag. I always liked Leo McKern, even though I've only seen him in like three things. (The other two being Ladyhawke and The Prisoner, and the second and next to last Number Two. "Who is Number One?" "That would be telling.")

Ye gods. I suppose it depends on what degree of realism you want to include.

-Siege

Has anyone stopped to think that maybe creatures that live for millennia have a different 'world view' than creatures that live for 100 years at most.

Obviously, the IE's and GD's of the world live by a little different set of rules than most of (meta)humanity. Maybe creatures who nature has decided get to live for 20000 years don't accumulate karma at the same rate, or even for the same tasks as a short-lived metahuman.

4th World, 5th World, 6th World whatever. In all of these, Mother Nature rules by the law of equilibrium.

You learn something new everyday.

Unless you're an IE or GD.

Then you walk around in a coma for thousands of years. Oblivious to all around you.

When I woke up this morning, still half asleep and wondering in Paris Hilton was really trying to kill me, I thought about IE's. Don't judge, people.

I guess the first thing that popped in my head is, wouldn't you eventually get bored? After 50 or 60 Initiate Grades, wouldn't the challenge have diminished a little? (Some say yes, some say no, for the sake of argument I will continue as though the answer to both of these questions was a resounding "Yes" in Sperenthiel or Klingon.)

And then I thought about the D&D/Tolkien convention of IE's that after a few thousand years either get on a boat for distant lands or flutter up to different planes of existence. Since a lot of SR is putting the modern spin on this mythology, I thought of two possibiities that these "metaphors" for immortality might come from.

"Drifting Away, 1"
Thousands of years are a hell of a thing to go through. Elves who live through them tend to become blase. Short-lived humans come and go from their lives, leaving no footprints. Researchers call this the "Groundhog Day Effect", where the elves simple lose interest in the day-to-day world. A condition marked by brief periods of mania intersperse long periods of quasi-catatonia, these individuals cease to be able to communicate with "lesser" minds in any way.

"Drifting Away, 2"
Thousands of years are a hell of a thing to go through. Elves who live through them cease to be challenged by this world (where the more things change...), and will seek out other planes of existence that they can continue to explore without the stagantion of this place. These IE's will eventually use an Astral Gateway (from a spirit with the power, or any other imaginable source), to "move on". Once gone, they rarely return in any sort of recognizable form.

Anyway, thats two alternate takes I came up with in five minutes after a bizarre dream in which Pais Hilton was chasing me with a chainsaw, so I think there is probably still undiscovered country here. Both of these ideas are incomplete, but I post them in hopes of sparking more discussion on alternates takes on IE's, rather than suggesting these things are usable.

Side Note: Are there any mundane IE's? All the one's I know are the ubercasters, but I don't know them all. If magic doesn't function in a downcycle, it doesn't seem like a mundie IE would be all that disadvantaged to living through them (in fact, it seems like he'd be much better off as he didn't waste any of his points on skills that would have been useless for the past few thousand years. Looking at it that way, you'd think there would be a majority of mundane IE's).

That very thing may have happened to scores of IEs, but surely not every single one. Since there are only a very few listed in canon, it's quite possible that the ones that got bored are just not portrayed.

Magic does function during a Downcycle. It is just extremely difficult to manipulate the mana. What takes a moment in 2060 might have taken days of ritual in 1860.

Any thought/flames regarding what I said at bottom of page 7???

None whatsoever, because this thread is only two pages long

~J, continuing to campaign for recognition that not everyone uses the same posts/page setting.

Edit: giving myself the lie, I ask: law of equilibrium?

Arg! Good point. I thought maybe my post got lost on the "last page", turns out it was just meaningless =)

Thanks for the heads up!

edit : Look at the world, everything lives in a balance. For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. Osmosis. One of the driving forces of nature is balance.

"Immortal elves go all night long and then some, breeder."

"Too bad they can't get their powerbolts to fire, daisy-eater."

But if you look at most other planets, you have no balance. Life as we know it requires a balance, yes, and everything that exists on this planet is in balance, but that balance is delicate, not enforced by any law or tendency.

That being said, I don't see its applicability to the IEs except insofar as they have not unbalanced the world and rendered it incapable of supporting their life.

If I'm going to use something in a game, it has to make sense. Sometimes we call that realism, but its stretching the term. I guess in this context, "realism" to me means I have to believe that it could be real; that it is a possibility. Insect Spirits, for instance, are fantastic creations, but I can accept that if the spirits of insects were real, how they are represented in SR would be how they would act.

My problem with IE's, GD's, and at various points, the aliens in science ficiton movies, is that they are "too human". IE's in particular are presented like demigods who have taken way too many courses at the Learning Annex.

So my interest in this topic begins and ends with coming up with an alternative way to handle IE's thats more in tune with my outlook and play style. I don't want to argue the specific merits of IE's because we'd just be arguing opinion. If you like the way IE's are handled in SR, I don't think that there's anything wrong with that. Our games might be a little different, but thats not to imply I think one is better or worse.

Or, if nothing else, maybe we can come up with bumper stickers for IE's. Such as:
Immortal Elves do it for eons

But if you look at other planets, they ARE balanced. They just have a different ecosystem than our planet. There is more to balance than life, but weather patterns, core temperatures, etc...

The balance on this planet is delicate true, but when that balance is broken, it sets into motion things which after they have run their course eventually re-create the balance.

I don't think Immortal Elves and Great Dragons are as powerful as most everybody seems to think on this board. I think that in terms of 'influence' they have immense power, but I don't buy that they are unstoppable uber creatures with no reason to fear mortal man whatsoever.

It may not make sense to you, but to an IE or a Dragon guiding the course of human events towards or away from something, it may make perfect sense.

A code is just so much gibberish unless you have the key.

-Siege

I use them. They are no different as far as game tools go than the Japanese Emporer or Damian Knight or Loftwyr, or any other high-powered-and-tough-to-effect-safely NPC.

On the subject of IE's and GD's steering history.

Firstly, you have to consider: not so much can they, but do they want to? And do they feel they should?

I've actually considered immortals carefully for my own writing (if my first book gets published and I get to write a sequel, the immortals of the world will be a major plot thread). And the thing I decided that the immortals want most of all is the world to still be there tomorrow.

This to me argues against constant meddling, and for occasional meddling in specific areas. Think about nuclear weapons. We've had them for sixty years now, and despite some close calls we've not pushed the button yet. From a SR fiction point of view, maybe the Immortals have been steering key people away from the use of WMD's. On a lower key note, I would expect many Immortals to be active participants in ecological movements. It's to their benefit to keep the world ticking over properly.

A group of the Immortals of my fictional world all meet every year under truce to negotiate how to address current issues. This includes characters who, under normal conditions, would cheerfully render each other down for dogmeat. Because they work on the principle of enlightened self-interest; it does nobody good for (to give an example) The Evil Corporation to kick off a nuclear war, since the bloke in charge knows he will have to live through hundreds of years of the aftereffects even if he survives the initial attack (things to make your brain go twang - the Terminus Corporation performs illegal experiments on unwilling subjects, engages in surgical assassination, bribery, corruption, general evil - and has the cleanest pollution record of any company in the world, donates money to ecological causes, and campaigns against nuclear weapons).

On the other hand, in areas that do not directly affect the continued survival of the planet and therefore the continued survival of the Immortals themselves, they probably don't much give a tinker's damn. This could lead to some interesting oversights; imagine an IE who had the chance to stop Hitler, didn't because he didn't see a threat to himself and therefore didn't care, then lost whole slews of friends and family (of the period) in the "racial cleansing". Could make for an interesting background to a series of odd runs dealing with charismatic politicians...

Or European theater of WW2 was actually won with IE help, since all those Nazi Concentration Camps were seriously screwing with the manasphere. Or it was not actually Schindler that smuggled the Jews out but one of his close friends who was actually an IE.

You know? There is all those lovely Highlander scenarios to choose from, just pick one. American Civil War - maybe one of the Founding Fathers was an IE in disguise. Or WW1 - the mastermind actually responsible for the assasination of the Austrian Archduke was an IE. Or the reason for all those Pharoah myths were because of IE interference... maybe the Pyramids were built with IE help.

I don't have a problem with that.

My problem with it is only that, we tend to look back and see history as this logical chain of events that an IE could affect, but at the time those events were just the usual, chaotic mish-mash of day-to-day life. I think that its a common trap in doing alternate histories, to see what has happened as a series of foregone conclusions.

Not to mention, the IE's are a very small number of people with very limited magical ability during a downcycle. Five guys who can cast Powerbolt every five days aren't going to turn the tide of the European Theatre, so whatever they did do should be fairly limited, even if it does ultimately have far reaching effects. In the case of the Holocaust, perhaps IE found out about it then spent the rest of the war getting the information to, among others, the United States and the Vatican, who then decided either it was too unbelievable or they didn't have a dog in the fight.

To me, in WW2 (though this could be a blueprint for anything they do in the downcycle), the IE's would have probably been responsible for the Nazi's research into the occult, with an equal number of IE's working against them. Occult research really didn't influence the tide of the war, but the IE's knew that having a world power with deep-seated magical traditions would be either a very good or very bad thing depending on which side you were on, and the Awakening was right around the corner (what's 50 years to an IE).

My last point is this, about revisionist history. I am wary of playing fast and loose with history because for all the chronological retelling nonsensical chaos that it is, it was still real people getting killed that provides us the bulk of it. If I can avoid peeing on the sacrifices people have made, I try to.

I personally would prefer to believe that an Immortal Elf was following around a young Austrian in Linz and Vienna, watching his actions and feeding his growing paranoia that his failures were due, not to himself, but to a vast Semetic conspiracy.

Or, more accurately, I see no real reason why Hitler would be objectionable to most Immortal Elves. Harlequin, perhaps; perhaps also some of the more Horror-fearing or soft-hearted, but unless they were already in positions of power the destabilization of Europe would have aided them in reaching them, should it be desired.

~J

It really depends on what level of influence and manipulation you want to talk about.

A manabolt every five days, probably not.

A "Control Thoughts" to tell Adolf to attack Russia...

And while the notion of using IEs to justify X, Y and Z may be bad storytelling, if you're willing to suspend logical disbelief and accept that humanity's history has been so skewed because of Immortals influencing for and against each other as well as for particular causes, it can make for an interesting source book or two.

Conversely, without the hypothetical influence of external forces, human history would be a lot more coherent and orderly in one direction or another.

-Siege