Just curious how this sounds: For the SR game I'm planning to run soon, I thought I'd try a novel little death mechanic. Whenever a PC dies, their karma is split up evenly amongst the other players and GMs (there will be two of us), who decide how much to give back. 'Odd' points go to the GMs.

For the 'leftover' karma points, I'm not sure. The easiest thing is to just get rid of 'em. But on the other hand, it might be interesting if they went into a group fund, or maybe could be used to buy a sort of team Karma Pool dice pool of some kind.

It depends on the people you play with of course, but suddenly I have this vision of my own group going: "So let me get this straight... We are AWARDED for making sure our teammates die? "

Why wait for them to die? It'd be oh so easy to 'nudge' them along a bit ...

And I can definitely see that happening with the group I run with.

Unless this is a clever ruse ot make the players do the job of killing stupid PCs for you, I think a far safer way of recycling karma would be something along the lines of allowing peoples new characters a starting karma equal to the karma of the group member who has the least - 10 or so. So there'll still be a penalty for death, but you won't get one hugely powerful player that skillfully managed to off all his teammates.

Well, since even the player who died would have access to the group pool when they are brought back... and of course, that's a secondary idea, the main one is allowing the group to decide how much he or she gets back.

I'd tend away from this. Seems like too little logic and too much potential for abuse.

~J

Vet characters: there can be only one.

It might be an interesting hook if you're looking for team infighting and promoting that level of cutthroat behaviour. I think it'd be fun for a session or three, anyway, though the idea that starting characters come in at a slightly lower karma total than the rest of the team seems more likely to work over time.

Your call, really, just make sure that your players are mature enough to handle this new mechanic, all right? People can get really pissy when their friends keep trying to kill off their timeloved characters.

Enh... Half the fun is arriving quick enough to make it look like you really tried helping your runner buddies, slow enough that they die anyway, but not so slow you can't complete the run and poket their shares as well

This sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. But if that is what you are going for, fine. I have heard of Game Assasins for hire. Are you sure the player who brought this up isn't planning on icing your campaign by being a munchkin PKer?

It is possible that this rule won't start a bunch of infighting. It wouldn't with my group.

I still wouldn't use it though, as players should be rewarded for getting the job done right, not getting themselves killed. Even if it doesn't start infighting, it might make players play a little more fast and loose because death isn't such a bad thing anymore.

Sounds like the sort of thng to turn a shadowrun game into Paranoia.

ALL HAIL FRIEND COMPUTER!

And what's wrong with that Lantzer? Do you doubt the omniprescense of the computer?

Unless you a) want infighting or b) know and trust the group to play fairly, that particular mechanic is a bad idea as others have said.

Here are some of my ideas.

1)All or part of the dead PC's karma goes into the group pool. The pool is acessable to everyone so long as they remain loyal to the group. Any act of backstabbery will disolve the pool. To prevent the karma pool from getting too high you could rule that karma from dead players never refreshes.

2) The player's new character keeps 10-60% (roll 1d6) of the old character's due to some metaphysical soul sharing or whatnot. The rest goes to the bad guys (or vanishes into the ether, if you're not that evil).

Well, the point is that any particular player keeping his or her karma requires staying on the good side of all the other players and the GMs. A player that pisses everyone off will fall behind the curve. Likewise, players will have an incentive to take care when negotiating with the others, since a partial or null bid now will probably result in the same when it's their turn to be at the mercy of the pack.

The idea of a group karma pool would go in hand with the group voting to allow a player access or not. Simple majority rules, ties (not quite sure how many players will be in the game just yet) mean "No." Any use of the karma pool would be a 'burn' use, although I might allow the group as a whole to buy contacts/rep/'lucky breaks' (Oh, well, there's normally six guards on duty, but two called out sick and no one's sure where Fred is...) with it.

The idea of novice runners joining up with a well-established team seems pretty iffy to me. I would expect a known team to only recruit those that can keep up- experienced runners, well-trained greenhorns, naturally gifted and the like; that's why I would support new characters retaining a part of the old total karma.

It's not the application so much as the threat. Players (of both genders, oddly enough; I would have expected this from males more than females) in my experience tend to get most 'prickly' towards each other when their characters are in danger. This would give them a good incentive towards remaining civil. Conversely, very few groups I've played with really seem to get mad if a player is playing a selfish or malevolent character intelligently... it's only the infamous screaming gimmies (anyone ever had a player over 20 on their team they could have sworn was under 12?) that piss 'em off. And rightly so.

And finally... in my experience, pretty much any decision involving karma could be described as 'passive-aggressive metagaming.'

One of the groups i'm playing with currently have the following two house rules for karma:

1) Any player whose character dies gets to make a new one like usual, and gets enough free karma to bring him up to five karma points behind the groups lowest karma-owner. So there's a loss of karma involved, but not so much they aren't on par with everyone else.

2) Everyone sacrifices 1 point from their karma pool, to go towards the group pool. This group karma refreshes at the same rate as normal karma pools, and all group members (including NPCs) can withdraw karma from it pending a majority vote. (Everyone who's contributed get one vote).


Seems to work. While having a karma recycling system is not bad in itself, a player death should nearly always be because the group screwed up and not warrant a reward to the other players.