Why cyberware should cost Karma rather than cash (SR4)

[Catharz]

One of the classic problems of RPG balance is making money fair. If a character can buy power, anybody who does buy power to the exclusion of all else will be way off the spectrum compared to 'normal' characters. And at this point, money is everything in terms of power.

If I'm playing a pseudo-cyberpunk RPG, I don't want money to be everything. It doesn't matter that you can carefully balance the amount of money PCs get. I want to make 6 million euros, or newyen, or whatever on a lucky run, and spend half of it on a better looking pair of cybereyes. And not because the eyes cost half the essence and give me SONAR. I want to buy a 3 million pair of cybereyes because they look cooler. Morphing fractals or fully functioning teeth are way cooler than red LEDs. Then I'll gamble the other 3 million in VR poker.

'But,' somebody might say, 'we don't want this to devolve into some sort of fantasy RPG with elves and dragons and magic swords. This is cyberpunk. You really can buy power, because that's realistic.'
That's true, but remember that we have no rubric for how difficult this is to learn how to use. I would guess that after a nice session of brain implant surgery, you need to spend a significant amount of time just practicing, rewiring your brain to get the damn' thing to work. And that's karma right there, baby.

The other issue is that i'd like to see high-tech at a reasonable price without making every PC filthy rich. Nice cyberware isn't usually something you just walk into the store and buy. If you aren't filthy rich, it's because your fixer knows a doc who just picked up a bleeding edge synthetic heart which he needs to move fast. Or it's because the corp that just hired you is filthy rich, and wants to implant a rebreather, nictitating membranes, and a hidden laser welder because it will increase your success probability by 15.337% for their mission.
When you complete the mission, you'll still be poor because there was a currency crash (yes, that was your unknowing fault). But you'll have practically priceless cyberware. Priceless in that you could never afford it, and that you can't sell it for anything.

So the idea is to cut out the process of converting BP to N¥ in character creation, and to instead have cyberware on about the same level as Adept Powers, witch the difference that, because you've already had the expensive part (e.g. surgery), you can swap faceplates like a nokia phone.

Wow, that was long and rambly. Any opinions?

[shau]

One of the problems that my Shadowrun group has run into is the problem of how much money we should make. On one hand, shadowrunning is extremely dangerous and should pay much more than low risk crimes; stealing cars for example. On the other hand, many of the game's players (must notably myself the rigger) turn money directly into power.

What emerged is what we call the "hookers and blow" ratio. The idea is that we get payed huge amounts of money, but we are forced to spend most of it on stupid entertainment stuff, like hookers and blow.

So in our game you would totally be able to spend all sorts of cash pimping your eyes, and not have to worry about being left behind by the guy who uses his money for ultrasonic vision or an army of combat drones.

[Catharz]

That's great if it works for the group, but I hate the idea of forcing players to spend money on anything.

In effect it sounds like you've agreed to significantly increase lifestyle costs, but at the same time can now spend a good portion of that on something more specific that "lifestyle." That would be a much less invasive fix than messing around with Karma & cyberware. Assuming you phrase it the right way ('I'm using more realistic [bigger] lifestyle costs, but you can actually spend it on cool stuff'), it won't trigger that loss aversion/railroading reflex a strongly.

I still think that cyberware should (in some future edition, or at least in my house rules) be paid for in karma, to balance it with magic, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't use your idea too.

[Lago_AM3P]

I already brought it up in the Shadowrun for newbies thread that has questions that demand answers, but it seems relevant here, too.

The amount of karma you get on a mission is almost completely uncoupled from the difficulty. Yes, you get a measly 1 karma bonus if the adventure was especially challenging, but you get more for actually completing it. Most of your bonuses come from roleplaying a hero with personal goals and motivations.

Unfortunately, the flavor text of the game suggests that Shadowrunning is a low-paying job. Like, a high-difficulty run should pay 4000 nuyen per person before deductions (page 14).

That's complete and utter ass, by the way. At this rate of cash influx with an average karma award per adventure of 4.5 (page 263) by the time the Street Samurai can afford some Wired Reflexes 2 and a rating 3 synthacardium as friggin' basic cyberware, a magician with magic 5 can initiate and raise their magic stat twice, in addition to whatever magic doodads he or she wants. This is of course assuming that the Street Samurai had no other expenses whatsoever, including buying a bus ticket or having a home.

So what gives, gentle reader? I'm with Catharz here--why shouldn't you be able to buy cyberware with karma? Cyberware already has a hard limit, why screw mundanes even more?

[Username17]

Different character types advance more or less with different kinds of inputs: money and power are differently useful to magicians, cyborgs, and hackers. That's actually a good thing in the right hands.

The Game Master can basically hand out as much karma or :nuyen: as they want. Just like in D&D except that it actually works.

See, in D&D a Fighter needs crap tonnes of equipment. By throwing in more gold pieces you make the Fighter more meaningful, and by withholding the gold pieces you rape them in the ass. But that doesn't give you any more control. Basically you can make the Fighter suck if you want, but throwing more gold at the problem gives the wizard more magic items as well.

In Shadowrun, throwing more yens at the problem does increase the relative effectiveness of samurai and riggers at the expense of magicians. Throwing more karma at the problem does increase the relative effectiveness of Mages and Adepts instead.

Putting everyone n the same advancement schedule is bad. It would be like D&D. Some character types, some players would be more effective than others, and the Game Master would have no stealthy way to slide some chump charity to the guys pulling up the rear.

-Username17

[Lago_AM3P]

In Shadowrun, throwing more yens at the problem does increase the relative effectiveness of samurai and riggers at the expense of magicians. Throwing more karma at the problem does increase the relative effectiveness of Mages and Adepts instead.

Except that magicians and adepts can burn the candle from both ends, too, with foci and all that other crap, While this stuff is expensive, it isn't NECESSARY for them to function. So you end up with street Samurai/riggers not getting nearly as much benefit from 100 karma and 200,000 nuyen as mages and adepts.

There's a certain amount of arbitrariness that goes with any advancement schedule, but the thing is that it has to be equal. People only put up with fighters getting exclusive artifact weapons in D&D because A) they sorely need artifact weapons and B) a lot of people can't even use them. And there's still a certain amount of jealousy associated with it.

Even so, I don't think this makes up for the fact that the game setting and rules implies a minimum and maximum rewards a character should be getting. While nuyen is a more flexible reward than karma, the game also seriously implies that you have to sweat your balls off to earn that much. I mean, you own post awhile back where the players are raking in 6 figures entails an extreme amount of difficulty and risk. Mages and adepts, by contrast, advance much safer ahd arguably better by taking on gangers and nobodies. There's less incentive for them to take on challenging runs to advance at a reasonable pace. Mundanes HAVE to do crap like that if they bullshit like deltaware.

[Username17]

Except that magicians and adepts can burn the candle from both ends, too, with foci and all that other crap, While this stuff is expensive, it isn't NECESSARY for them to function.

And the Riggers can burn from both ends because they can purchase skills and attributes with their Karma while they are throwing money on the altar of faster cars and bigger robots. Everyone gets something from money and something from Karma, just some people get more from one or the other.

So you end up with street Samurai/riggers not getting nearly as much benefit from 100 karma and 200,000 nuyen as mages and adepts.

If you're having that experience - and believe me not everyone is - then what you should do is hand out more money and less karma. Look who is on top at a million yen and fifty karma. Or maybe work up to that with a less hardcore slope.

The point here is that different play styles are flat out going to reward some kinds of equipment, abilities, powers, or whatever. Some playstyles and campaigns are going to punish them. In a "hack the planet" campaign taking place primarily in matrix nodes, even Real Ultimate Power on a mage is a tertiary concern. In a campaign where people dimension hop constantly while fighting with and for insect spirits a character without astral perception is just this side of useless no matter what they do. And so on and so forth even with less extreme examples.

And that's what you're looking at when you're designing an advancement system.

There's a certain amount of arbitrariness that goes with any advancement schedule, but the thing is that it has to be equal.

Hells no. The abilities and equipment aren't equal one game to the next, so an advancement schedule can't be either.

In Mission: Impossible, they took along the guys who had the specific skill set they needed in each episode. But in Shadowrun you take the same team every time. If you play a lot of missions that team members don't have the skills for - you need to throw down some new toys for them or they'll feel useless and disenfranchised.

So no, an "equal" advancement scheme isn't possible or even desirable. The resolution on the money/karma dichotomy isn't great, and it's hard or impossible to take karma back (while comparativel simple to retroactively remove the nuyen), but it's better than nothing. It works better than the XP and the GP - and it seems "realistic" enough that it isn't insulting.

-Username17

[Lago_AM3P]

So no, an "equal" advancement scheme isn't possible or even desirable. The resolution on the money/karma dichotomy isn't great, and it's hard or impossible to take karma back (while comparativel simple to retroactively remove the nuyen), but it's better than nothing. It works better than the XP and the GP - and it seems "realistic" enough that it isn't insulting.

So why have two separate systems of accounting at all? Why can't they adjust the cost of cyberware and/or initiation and have both systems work off the same currency? I don't mind the idea of mages having to spend nuyen to advance their magic or street samurai having to spend karma to advance their cyber. I also don't mind the idea of the two forms of currencies compensating both character sets equally (though it's damn hard to, see below) but I don't believe that it does do that.

Because my biggest problem with the system isn't that the GM can't equally compensate mundanes and awakeneds, it's that the difficulty of timely advancement for mundanes and awakeneds is different. By making both sets of characters benefit equally from the same currency that will solve my complaints. I mean, I don't particularly care if people experience advancement proportional to the challenge or completely uncoupled from the challenge but I don't think it's fair to have some people advance on one scheme and have the others advance on the other one.

[RandomCasualty]

1167764192[/unixtime]] I mean, you own post awhile back where the players are raking in 6 figures entails an extreme amount of difficulty and risk. Mages and adepts, by contrast, advance much safer ahd arguably better by taking on gangers and nobodies. There's less incentive for them to take on challenging runs to advance at a reasonable pace.

Well, this is an RPG, so that sort of stuff doesn't even factor in when you start playing. In general, you do the run that the GM prepared for you anyway, and he's going to control the difficulty in such a way that it's challenging for your character.

I don't see any way to power level your character in any pencil and paper RPG. This isn't Diablo, and if you end up trying to walk back and forth through the slums fighting street punks, the group ends up getting bored and telling you to do something else more profitable. Unless you've got a whole group of people wanting no challenge, then the GM probably quits or includes a lot of random extras in every quest to change things up.

So yeah, deliberately taking easy runs is a concern if you're talking about a computer game, but in a pencil and paper RPG, it isn't so much. Most players don't want to waste their time running around doing stupid stuff like it was a MMORPG, not when they can be gaining karma doing something fun.

[Username17]

So why have two separate systems of accounting at all? Why can't they adjust the cost of cyberware and/or initiation and have both systems work off the same currency?

Because that's obviously unfair. If the DM says "Your character is really awesome, so I'm going to start charging you more XP to go up a level" - that's really aggravating. But if the Game Master simply hands out rewards that happen to be more useful to one character than another it isn't as much.

Yes, you'd get a similar - probably better effect by simply handing out a single total of "awesome points" and then charging characters an arbitrary number of awesome points to get each new awesome thing they wanted, but that's not really playable. People want to look these things up in a book. People want to pretend that the GM isn't just fucking with them.

-Username17

[Catharz]

That's a very good point, Frank. Giving the DM a tool to surreptitiously balance magic vs. mundane is certainly not a bad thing.

Which forces me to admit that one of the resons for wanting to see a karma/BP cost on cyberware is to break the Essence cap. I don't like that you can't give a character a full set of standard cyberlimbs, cyberbody, cyberskull, cyberears, and cybereyes without killing him. You can just barely do it with alphaware, but at this point your character just sucks. You've spent almost all of your money to get all your physical attributes at three.

And, dammit, I want to play the Lonestar Roborentacop!

Another alternative to make that work is to dispense with Essense as an ability entirely, and instead have it subtract from Magic & Resonance, and from healing as %, and add to repair as a %. Which opens up a number of options, none of which seem hugely overpowered.

I do think the Karma idea is still worth considering. It lets you be very flexible with what kind of $$ and non-cash prizes you hand out while still knowing approximately what a player can do. Without flat out saying, 'Sorry, everyone is out of synthacardium."
But it probably isn't worth doing that without totally revamping the system. Which I'm tinkering with, but I don't seriously think the changes will ever be used.

So, what I'm looking at now, for my upcoming 'unmask the Brotherhood' campaign:

• 
  
• Increase pay.
  
• Increase lifestyle costs, but give players freedom in spending it.
  
• Use Essence lost as a stat rather than Essence, and leave it uncapped.
  

Simple, uninvasive. Good for a newbie GM who can't leave the rules untouched.

[RandomCasualty]

1167776731[/unixtime]]
Use Essence lost as a stat rather than Essence, and leave it uncapped.

I always wondered why they didn't do that for SR4. It would seem so much simpler. Where you could just subtract your essence loss from your magic and other attributes or add it to the threshold for things they want to make harder for cybered characters.

About the only problem I imagine you'd run into is for critters with the essence drain ability, though I've always considered that a poorly designed ability anyway. It should be drain (unaugmented) body or drain willpower. The idea of permanently draining essence is probably a bad mechanic anyway.

Increase lifestyle costs, but give players freedom in spending it.

Why would you want to do that? If anything I thought the lifestyle costs were super high in SR4 as it is. Most things got a price cut from SR3, except for lifestyles, which are still super expensive. Wired reflexes 3 used to be around 500k if I remember right, and it got cut to 100k. However luxury lifestyle was 100,000 and remained at 100,000.

To me, it seems that lifestyles are way too expensive. Anyone who puts any money in there is losing a huge percentage of their cash.

[Lago_AM3P]

To me, it seems that lifestyles are way too expensive. Anyone who puts any money in there is losing a huge percentage of their cash.

Fuck yeah, man. I mean, I think lifestyles should just be an automatic reflection of how much swag you currently own. Like if you own enough of your own vehicles, you automatically get a townhouse with a garage to park that stuff. If your street samurai is wired up to the max with deltaware, he can automatically elect to have his own mansion with servants. Or he can be living in a rat-infested basement adding saltwater to his tofu. Both are equally badass.

[Catharz]

1167781480[/unixtime]]

Increase lifestyle costs, but give players freedom in spending it.

Why would you want to do that? If anything I thought the lifestyle costs were super high in SR4 as it is. Most things got a price cut from SR3, except for lifestyles, which are still super expensive. Wired reflexes 3 used to be around 500k if I remember right, and it got cut to 100k. However luxury lifestyle was 100,000 and remained at 100,000.

To me, it seems that lifestyles are way too expensive. Anyone who puts any money in there is losing a huge percentage of their cash.

I also said I'd increase total cash flow. The idea is to decouple style (which comes from money) from pure power (which comes from karma), which was one of the original points of making cyberware karma-based.

[Edit]As for the lack of change in lifestyle costs when max starting cash went from 1 million to 250k, I think that's because whoever designed the chargen thought that shadowrunners should be poor. Which only makes sense if you have a very limited view of 'starting shadowrunner,' but there you have it. [/Edit]

So, in a reverse of what Lago says, if you have a garage you have a nice car to put in it, and if you have a big closet you get the clothes. And the overall cost of lifestyle goes down, because you don't have to pay for the flying limo with autopilot if you're already living the life of luxury.
Of course, you can always fly that limo to a highway overpass and squat.
In effect, having a lifestyle becomes more like having a 'theme,' and money you invest in it has to be spent on that theme.

Buy yes, it's the same problem as in D&D. If you can spend money on a castle or on a sword, you always get the sword.


Maybe I should dump lifestyles entirely and have it work similarly a contact. This could almost split money into two pools.


-

On an unrelated note, did anyone else notice that the middle-class lifestyle is a ripoff compared to both low and high? It's more of the 'fuck the middle class' mentality which has players punished for starting with ability scores and skills of three, and for that matter a reasonable spread of middle-quality gear.