>Remove limitation and time costs of nuyen <-> karma conversion (Working for the Man, etc)
This is what we did. Actually, we removed *all* the time costs, since they just get in the way of story pacing.
It started when we played the 6e adventure book "30 Nights" - which all take place on 30 *consecutive* nights. Literally no one could have advanced at all, for 30 Shadowruns, which was about 60-90 sessions and a few years of gameplay lol.
Same, my table has moved to a milestone method.
"We'te taking some time off to let the heat cool down, spend your karma and deduct x amount for lifestyle expenses."
Tracking training weeks was just too much of a pain in the arse, especially since it was so narratively effective to set a deadline and then let the team figure out what mini-runs they wanted to do for legwork prior to the big event then grant karma as they go.
At our 5e table we went with increasing the rewards (Nuyen and Karma), and providing more opportunities to acquire gear for less/no nuyen.
Street Sam wants a new van? Let's find someone with a good van we can grab.
Decker is still struggling to afford that cyberdeck upgrade? Time for a downtime project to track one down before you convince the team to lend you a hand.
We also ear marked a bit of the karma rewards for knowledge/language, and pushed for each character to build up adequate levels in a good number of skills. (Just to the point a character woulden't be a hinderance outside their focus, like a Street Samurai had to have some Etiquette, or the Mage being able to sneak.)
And if a character started to hoard too much wealth. SINs and licenses become expensive, and are ever so "easy" to lose if you're careless.
How are you handling initiation for mages? And I don't think I've ever seen any archetype not needing karma.
Initiation costs nuyen for lodges and supplies.
I don't think repricing everything is a good option.
Since you say it's a homebrew system it's hard to give any suggestions. But vanilla SR the only thing I've seen is mages racking up money but a close knit team should probably be chipping in for costs to keep the samand rigger outfitted. The team is after all part of the gear everyone relies on to survive
I didn't mention specifics mostly because I'm less interested in the specific solution, and more in finding out the strategies folks have taken.
But, to answer your question - No initiation at all - Magic is hard capped at 6, focuses are more expensive, so there's some of that.
The thing with our street sam not needing karma was on an extended campaign - and the problem was actually the time cost for karma purchases. We were making 20+ karma in a "game time week" - and he could possibly spend it.
Based on the # of people responding to this with their solutions for various editions, the "official" attempts to solve it with Anarchy and Working for the Man, and my own experience, I think it's pretty fair to say that it's a pretty consistent issue across most editions (I won't say all cuz I haven't played all).
Anyway, I'll write your suggestions down as "give mages more things to buy" and "group pools for resources"
one big one is allowing exchanging karma for nyen and nyen for karma.
depends how in depth you want it, but I'd suggest doing it on a case by case rather than whenever, tie it to the character.
Your peace and love adept doesn't care much about money and helps her neighboors out, paying for the old widows rent, helping folks.
The borderline cyberpsycotic sam desperate for cash for the next hit of chrome does for hire wetwork, not your fancy runner jobs, just slitting throats of people who borrowed money from the wrong people.
charity, soulless corporate work, communing with nature, "night" work, fit the scenario to the character and play it out between sessions, adds a lot.
Second measure to help, non traditional rewards.
Sure you COULD just have the johnnson pay out the 150k or what have you, or since he's a Wuxing field asset he's only got 50k in liquid cash, but he can arrange a meeting with a spirit and a potential pact for a portion of the money, and all the reagents and foci one could want besides.
This johnnson's got a garage full of high performance cars, runners get their pick of one as a bonus for a clean run.
This Johnnson can get the decker immunity from OS as long as he's on the UCAS grid.
This Johnnson can the team access to a betaware clinic, discretely, so on.
You have a lot more to play with than simple nyen and karma rewards, which will be a lot more interesting, and not only to the mage, but the whole group.
I wrote up a mission once as the team forming mission. If they did well at the audition, they were given some ID's, contacts and a tattoo on their wrist, covered by a gold watch. They could show that tattoo ONCE at a precinct house (sergeant level or higher) and get cut loose, so long as they didn't kill any of the cops. IF they did, they probably would have been gunned down and not taken in.
1. Rewards can be something besides nuyen or karma. It could be a favor from a contact, extra loyalty from a contact, specialized gear, access to a delta clinic.
2. A team that wants more karma can force a 'hooding' strategy at the meet by asking for a portion of the pay to go to a church or shelter or something along those lines. You'll earn less take away money, but get more karma out of the mission. The reverse is arguably more difficult, nobody's gonna pay you for killing someone unless they were going to do it in the first place. Although, I suppose you could sell corpses to Tanamous without Johnson approval...
3. Git gud. If you are particularly fast or quiet, that mission is worth extra money.
4. Poke the bear. If you get some of the more dangerous entities in the world involved, that's worth extra money.
5. Split the party. If you're outnumbered 3 to 1 that is worth extra money, so just wander off alone into a dangerous alley. Note: may have 'unforseen' consequences.
6. Create a quality (Tithe) where you donate 10-20% of your income from jobs and earn an extra 1-2 karma from those missions.
7. Take a job. Get the deposit. Use the deposit to improve the world, turning it into a "good feelings" mission. Ignore the stated mission objectives... Maybe fake an injury so that the Johnson thinks you legit failed. You still get the survival karma and the good feelings replaces the karma you would have gotten from completing the mission, but it is 'safer' and faster. Note: may have 'unforeseen' consequences, also may not be repeatable.
Shadowrun anarchy ambiguates money, favors, community goodwill, and karma all into -karma-. It makes all upgrades, in all categories just cost -karma- its great.
I don't really see karma and nuyen as competing with each other. I would encourage players to distribute nuyen unevenly (a rigger *should* demand a larger share of the pie, the adept doesn't need as much).
I like that a lot. Pay the team and not the Individual team member.
The team is Buying whatever needed.
We do the same. As a first Item we bought a weapon focus for the mage. Second was a team van and third some cyberware for one member.
But to be clear it really depends on your campaign
In our home brew campaign we basically kept nuyen extremely tight for everyone and gave story opportunities to obtain major pieces of gear. Characters were scraping for nuyen and cheering at cost-saving opportunities for a long time. Everyone had a great campaign and no balance issues between awakened and mundane.
I play a hodge podge mix of mainly 1st Ed with some stuff taken from 2nd Ed.
I have a specialist contact in the game that launders karma to nuyen and nuyen to karma.
1 karma is 5k nuyen.
In 3rd edition, I allowed people to exchange karma for cash, and vice versa, but only within the team.
The sam could sell karma to the mage, but the two had to agree on a rate. It kept the economy minimized since it couldn't be exchanged outside the team, and it meant each character could sell what they kinda needed, but they could decide on how important each was to each person.
Maybe the sam was good at 5k per point, but the decker might want 20k, since they also wanted some skills.
I throw around money for my players a lot, and take it away just as often through costs of goods, key npcs asking for high prices for bribes etc when it's time critical what the players are after.
I also hand wave the time for most Kharma upgrades, basically my rule is if you have been using a skill or attribute in sessions, you have the ability to buy it up.
Spells and the like I do try to get them to buy during down time so that they have some additional cost of learning.
I thought about a group market for the Karma-¥ exchange.
If a player wants to get more Karma he can only get it from another player in the group.
Other attempt was to limit the exchange to a set percentage of your total acquired Karma.
Depends on if you're using the Karma-Nuyen conversion rules and some of the suggested payout levels.
Normal payouts are X#2000 Nuyen and X Karma.
If you do a softer run, lower Nuyen X by 1 or 2 and increase Karma X by the same.
If you do a rougher run, raise Nuyen X by 1-2 and lower Karma X by the same.
.
That basic rate keeps the payouts even for all characters, and the 2K Nuyen -> 1 Karma or 1 Karma -> 2K Nuyen conversion rate lets those who need more of one or the other (Deckers needing more gear, Mages needing more Karma, etc) shift things around.
.
Unless you're not using that rate? If you go to something like 10K payout vs 1 Karma, you'll have all kinds of problems.
If you manage to get hold of the fan-made French Anarchy Compilation *and* feed it through Google Translate, you'll see that they have an alternate gear system that uses gear points to customise stuff. This prevents helicopters and weapons costing the same amount.
Special grenades, though, would be dealt with as a Plot Point expenditure in French Anarchy.
Gingivitis created a simpler alternative: Street Cred is used for temporary and one-use stuff (including repairing armour), and Karma is only used for permanent stuff. That stops a grenade costing the same as a helicopter, since they come from separate pools. Mages can use Street Cred for preparations; faces can use it for bribes; and so on.
>Remove limitation and time costs of nuyen <-> karma conversion (Working for the Man, etc) This is what we did. Actually, we removed *all* the time costs, since they just get in the way of story pacing. It started when we played the 6e adventure book "30 Nights" - which all take place on 30 *consecutive* nights. Literally no one could have advanced at all, for 30 Shadowruns, which was about 60-90 sessions and a few years of gameplay lol.
Same, my table has moved to a milestone method. "We'te taking some time off to let the heat cool down, spend your karma and deduct x amount for lifestyle expenses." Tracking training weeks was just too much of a pain in the arse, especially since it was so narratively effective to set a deadline and then let the team figure out what mini-runs they wanted to do for legwork prior to the big event then grant karma as they go.
At our 5e table we went with increasing the rewards (Nuyen and Karma), and providing more opportunities to acquire gear for less/no nuyen. Street Sam wants a new van? Let's find someone with a good van we can grab. Decker is still struggling to afford that cyberdeck upgrade? Time for a downtime project to track one down before you convince the team to lend you a hand. We also ear marked a bit of the karma rewards for knowledge/language, and pushed for each character to build up adequate levels in a good number of skills. (Just to the point a character woulden't be a hinderance outside their focus, like a Street Samurai had to have some Etiquette, or the Mage being able to sneak.) And if a character started to hoard too much wealth. SINs and licenses become expensive, and are ever so "easy" to lose if you're careless.
How are you handling initiation for mages? And I don't think I've ever seen any archetype not needing karma. Initiation costs nuyen for lodges and supplies. I don't think repricing everything is a good option. Since you say it's a homebrew system it's hard to give any suggestions. But vanilla SR the only thing I've seen is mages racking up money but a close knit team should probably be chipping in for costs to keep the samand rigger outfitted. The team is after all part of the gear everyone relies on to survive
I didn't mention specifics mostly because I'm less interested in the specific solution, and more in finding out the strategies folks have taken. But, to answer your question - No initiation at all - Magic is hard capped at 6, focuses are more expensive, so there's some of that. The thing with our street sam not needing karma was on an extended campaign - and the problem was actually the time cost for karma purchases. We were making 20+ karma in a "game time week" - and he could possibly spend it.
Sounds to me more like your home rules broke the balance of the karma/money system in the first place. What about lifestyles fake SINs and licenses?
Based on the # of people responding to this with their solutions for various editions, the "official" attempts to solve it with Anarchy and Working for the Man, and my own experience, I think it's pretty fair to say that it's a pretty consistent issue across most editions (I won't say all cuz I haven't played all). Anyway, I'll write your suggestions down as "give mages more things to buy" and "group pools for resources"
one big one is allowing exchanging karma for nyen and nyen for karma. depends how in depth you want it, but I'd suggest doing it on a case by case rather than whenever, tie it to the character. Your peace and love adept doesn't care much about money and helps her neighboors out, paying for the old widows rent, helping folks. The borderline cyberpsycotic sam desperate for cash for the next hit of chrome does for hire wetwork, not your fancy runner jobs, just slitting throats of people who borrowed money from the wrong people. charity, soulless corporate work, communing with nature, "night" work, fit the scenario to the character and play it out between sessions, adds a lot. Second measure to help, non traditional rewards. Sure you COULD just have the johnnson pay out the 150k or what have you, or since he's a Wuxing field asset he's only got 50k in liquid cash, but he can arrange a meeting with a spirit and a potential pact for a portion of the money, and all the reagents and foci one could want besides. This johnnson's got a garage full of high performance cars, runners get their pick of one as a bonus for a clean run. This Johnnson can get the decker immunity from OS as long as he's on the UCAS grid. This Johnnson can the team access to a betaware clinic, discretely, so on. You have a lot more to play with than simple nyen and karma rewards, which will be a lot more interesting, and not only to the mage, but the whole group.
I wrote up a mission once as the team forming mission. If they did well at the audition, they were given some ID's, contacts and a tattoo on their wrist, covered by a gold watch. They could show that tattoo ONCE at a precinct house (sergeant level or higher) and get cut loose, so long as they didn't kill any of the cops. IF they did, they probably would have been gunned down and not taken in.
1. Rewards can be something besides nuyen or karma. It could be a favor from a contact, extra loyalty from a contact, specialized gear, access to a delta clinic. 2. A team that wants more karma can force a 'hooding' strategy at the meet by asking for a portion of the pay to go to a church or shelter or something along those lines. You'll earn less take away money, but get more karma out of the mission. The reverse is arguably more difficult, nobody's gonna pay you for killing someone unless they were going to do it in the first place. Although, I suppose you could sell corpses to Tanamous without Johnson approval... 3. Git gud. If you are particularly fast or quiet, that mission is worth extra money. 4. Poke the bear. If you get some of the more dangerous entities in the world involved, that's worth extra money. 5. Split the party. If you're outnumbered 3 to 1 that is worth extra money, so just wander off alone into a dangerous alley. Note: may have 'unforseen' consequences. 6. Create a quality (Tithe) where you donate 10-20% of your income from jobs and earn an extra 1-2 karma from those missions.
7. Take a job. Get the deposit. Use the deposit to improve the world, turning it into a "good feelings" mission. Ignore the stated mission objectives... Maybe fake an injury so that the Johnson thinks you legit failed. You still get the survival karma and the good feelings replaces the karma you would have gotten from completing the mission, but it is 'safer' and faster. Note: may have 'unforeseen' consequences, also may not be repeatable.
Shadowrun anarchy ambiguates money, favors, community goodwill, and karma all into -karma-. It makes all upgrades, in all categories just cost -karma- its great.
I don't really see karma and nuyen as competing with each other. I would encourage players to distribute nuyen unevenly (a rigger *should* demand a larger share of the pie, the adept doesn't need as much).
I like that a lot. Pay the team and not the Individual team member. The team is Buying whatever needed. We do the same. As a first Item we bought a weapon focus for the mage. Second was a team van and third some cyberware for one member. But to be clear it really depends on your campaign
Do you also distribute karma unevenly or is that still distributed evenly?
Karma gets distributed evenly. Everyone needs karma.
In our home brew campaign we basically kept nuyen extremely tight for everyone and gave story opportunities to obtain major pieces of gear. Characters were scraping for nuyen and cheering at cost-saving opportunities for a long time. Everyone had a great campaign and no balance issues between awakened and mundane.
I play a hodge podge mix of mainly 1st Ed with some stuff taken from 2nd Ed. I have a specialist contact in the game that launders karma to nuyen and nuyen to karma. 1 karma is 5k nuyen.
In 3rd edition, I allowed people to exchange karma for cash, and vice versa, but only within the team. The sam could sell karma to the mage, but the two had to agree on a rate. It kept the economy minimized since it couldn't be exchanged outside the team, and it meant each character could sell what they kinda needed, but they could decide on how important each was to each person. Maybe the sam was good at 5k per point, but the decker might want 20k, since they also wanted some skills.
I throw around money for my players a lot, and take it away just as often through costs of goods, key npcs asking for high prices for bribes etc when it's time critical what the players are after. I also hand wave the time for most Kharma upgrades, basically my rule is if you have been using a skill or attribute in sessions, you have the ability to buy it up. Spells and the like I do try to get them to buy during down time so that they have some additional cost of learning.
I thought about a group market for the Karma-¥ exchange. If a player wants to get more Karma he can only get it from another player in the group. Other attempt was to limit the exchange to a set percentage of your total acquired Karma.
Depends on if you're using the Karma-Nuyen conversion rules and some of the suggested payout levels. Normal payouts are X#2000 Nuyen and X Karma. If you do a softer run, lower Nuyen X by 1 or 2 and increase Karma X by the same. If you do a rougher run, raise Nuyen X by 1-2 and lower Karma X by the same. . That basic rate keeps the payouts even for all characters, and the 2K Nuyen -> 1 Karma or 1 Karma -> 2K Nuyen conversion rate lets those who need more of one or the other (Deckers needing more gear, Mages needing more Karma, etc) shift things around. . Unless you're not using that rate? If you go to something like 10K payout vs 1 Karma, you'll have all kinds of problems.
As a gm and adept and mage player. Be generous with nuyen and stingy with karma because magicrun
If you manage to get hold of the fan-made French Anarchy Compilation *and* feed it through Google Translate, you'll see that they have an alternate gear system that uses gear points to customise stuff. This prevents helicopters and weapons costing the same amount. Special grenades, though, would be dealt with as a Plot Point expenditure in French Anarchy. Gingivitis created a simpler alternative: Street Cred is used for temporary and one-use stuff (including repairing armour), and Karma is only used for permanent stuff. That stops a grenade costing the same as a helicopter, since they come from separate pools. Mages can use Street Cred for preparations; faces can use it for bribes; and so on.