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Question about Karma Build System in SR4A

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Glyph

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« Reply #30 on: <05-14-11/1827:14> »
I haven't really had that experience.  I fiddle around with character creations a lot, and most of my optimized ones come out worth more than 400 BP.  And that includes paying for the knowledge skills that I would normally get for free under BP.  Generally, a min-maxed karmagen character will work out to be the equivalent of 450 BP, give or take, while a non min-maxed karmagen character will work out to be quite a bit higher than that.

Karmagen doesn't so much punish min-maxing, as reward generalization (because low skills and Attributes cost a lot less).  Well, kind of rewards it.  Dice pools are still one of the main gauges of character effectiveness, so characters that are spread out a lot are still disadvantaged, even if their character can have a lot more of these low-rated skills than they would in BP.

Triggvi

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« Reply #31 on: <05-14-11/2054:55> »
Having some low level skills help round out the character. Bp characters have very few skills often have major holes in them.
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Glyph

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« Reply #32 on: <05-14-11/2155:56> »
I'm not saying low level skills aren't good.  I take skills for my specialty higher, but still pick up some other skills to round out the character.  Lopsided BP characters happen when players concentrate on being the best at a narrow role, at the expense of being pretty weak and useless outside of that one area.  Karmagen discourages hyper-specialization with a bit of a carrot and stick approach (exponential cost increases for higher stats, but more overall points to play with).  But BP does similar things (higher cost to hard-max a skill, limits on points that can be spent on Attributes or how many high-rated skills you can have), with mixed effectiveness.