[Xenon]

with a flat point cost for skills and attributes from priority during chargen but a progressive karma cost for skills and attributes from left over karma and post chargen karma you almost always end up in a situation where you use the attribute and skill points for specialization. You get a few metatype maximum or near metatype maximum attributes and a few at or near metatype minimum. You get a small sample of skills and you push them up very high during chargen.


with a flat point cost for skills and attributes from priority during chargen AND a flat karma cost for skills and attributes from left over karma and post chargen karma you no longer "gain" as much to min/max your points from the priority table. Since it cost the "same" after chargen there is no longer such a huge reason to get a few metatype maximum or near metatype maximum attributes or a small sample of skills and push them very high.


So flat cost reduce desire to min/max with priority table points during chargen
- which might be a good thing

But it also reduce the desire to branch out with left over or post chargen Karma
- which might be a bad thing


(but it might also be considered a good thing that each player in the group have distinctive roles that they are very very good at. SR5 is, after all, trying to put a lot of emphasis on distinct roles and prevent hybrid builds. A flat cost on attributes and skills would possible enhance that further)

[KagedShadow]

I helped our final player gen up his toon yesterday (street sam) and he didnt even use his starting karma for any attributes or skills - spent it all on contacts and qualities - then again, this is a guy who we had to re-spec his character mid campaign once as the character he was roleplaying wasn't anything like how his sheet looked 

One other aspect which we found flat costs help with (in nWoD) is allowing players to re-spec mid campaign / bring in new toons. Using BP for char gen, then escalating xp in play, meant character brought in late could more easily min/max using the extra xp they have to fill in more holes which they leave from CC. I also let my players re-spec if they find they don't like how their toon is playing - a lot easier with flat costs that escalating we've found.

I'm still lost on the actual costs for flat karma, as karma rewards in general in SR are different from how we normally handle things. Again using nWoD, I normally give out 1xp per session, with some bonus xp once the story in complete - whereas for SR missions, we get the cash and karma at the end of a mission - for Chasin the Wind, in our first 4 hours, we only finished the Midway Airport scene so far - so it might take several sessions to get through - only 6 karma for that doesnt go a long way for several weeks worth of play....

[Top Dog]

And when those specialities hit the stratosphere, which they will and quickly, we get to see what a really breaky character can do.  Fortunately, limits and hard caps on skill and attributes will put a dent in that.  Still, how many best-in-the-world Shadowrunners should be in one team?  That and edge will let them blow their limits.

Or for the same price your Sammy can finally buy enough etiquette to not make an assistant of himself in front of Mr.Johnson.  Yeah, I'm seeing a problem with this.

Limits are based on stats, which are also relatively cheap to level. But yes, you'll hit hard caps eventually. So you switch over to your second specialty, and max out that. If your campaign lasts a long time, you might get one after that, but probably not. So yes, you probably won't get uberspecialists in one skill, but you'd get characters which put their points - all their points - in a relatively narrow set of skills.

And yes, your street sammy without etiquette is problematic. But people do that now, with scaling costs. It's usually not that big problem, since that's what the face is there for, but it might come up at times. It'd still be problematic with the 4 dice he gets from Etiquette 1, but - thanks to the nonscaling system - now most street sams will look at the cost and decide going from "Terrible" to "Bad" for a skill they're unlikely to use isn't worth it. Some people will still take it, of course, if only for roleplaying purposes (sitting out on meeting is boring after all), but it makes it a suboptimal choice.


Which, incidentally, brings me to my second point. This system might work. It needs some balancing pointswise, but as KagedShadow and Xenon point out, it has some benefits. It's not without it's own problems, though, and won't fit any group. If your players just build the character that suits them, it's a simpeler and quicker system which is still more or less balanced. It won't work well with more min/max-inclined players, and for truely long games it'd probably end up being unbalanced regardless. But in the right games, sure.

Kaged, on missions - they're supposed to take about a night, and the karma cost is balanced for that (so about 6 per session, sometimes more). At the start, missions might take longer. Once you get used to the system, the time it'll use will probably go down (especially combat, usually). That does depend on your players, though; some players will go into a lot more detail and that takes more time. So if your players tend to do that and it keeps taking multiple sessions per missions, I'd think about upping the reward (say 4 karma per session minimum, with nuyen equivalently increased). You might as well still give it at the end of the mission though - spending it requires downtime anyway.

[Zar]

You are missing Metatype in your write up.

[JimmyCrisis]

Or for the same price your Sammy can finally buy enough etiquette to not make an assistant of himself in front of Mr.Johnson.  Yeah, I'm seeing a problem with this.

Autocorrect is killing me.

So flat cost reduce desire to min/max with priority table points during chargen
- which might be a good thing

But it also reduce the desire to branch out with left over or post chargen Karma
- which might be a bad thing


(but it might also be considered a good thing that each player in the group have distinctive roles that they are very very good at. SR5 is, after all, trying to put a lot of emphasis on distinct roles and prevent hybrid builds. A flat cost on attributes and skills would possible enhance that further)

Pretty much nailed it.

Flat Karma costs rub me raw for two reasons. 

1)  it punishes the 'jack-of-all-trades' character.  A RAW jack-of-all-trades can afford to buy plenty of skills - or skill groups - at rating 4 and still be competitive in one or two areas.  In my experience, this is your Face, your Engineer or your Intrusion Specialist.  In a flat karma game, this character will be able to buy, say, four new skills at rating four, and your street samurai will have spent their karma getting their ranged and melee skills up to 12 each, as well as pumping their perception to 10 (assuming the sammy starts with ranged, melee and perception at 6).  This leaves your 'jack-of-all-trades' in the dust.

2) it diminishes the incentive to round out your character development.  Let's say my character Sammy needs to learn how to swim.  In order to develop an appreciable swim skill for the one or two missions that happen anywhere around water, I need to forgo capping one of my primary skills.  This is a practical example, but there are plenty of areas that a character may want to 'shore up' or develop off-tangent to their normal skills for utility or roleplay reasons.

On the one hand, it does a good job of removing the efficiency incentive to min/max at char gen.  This really appeals to me - I'd like to see more balanced characters without glaring flaws straight out the gate. 

Sadly, it replaces that with a mechanical incentive to min/max at char gen anyway - it's still a race to skill caps.

The intuitive way to remove both of those incentives is to use a 'karma only' character generation - which is mathematically unwieldy.  I already see problems with it.  Man, you think the devs had a hard time balancing all this stuff?

[Xenon]

The solution if you dont want min maxing is actually to implement a progressive cost for attribute and skill points (instead of the flat cost we have today), in addition to the progressive karma cost we have today. But that would make the math a bit more complicated during chargen and you would also need to add metatype attribute bonus points (racial min values above 1) to after you spend the progressive priority attribute points.

this would promote a lot of well rounded jack of all trades characters that doesnt really max out anything (but i am not convinced that would be a good idea).

[Mithlas]

The solution if you dont want min maxing is actually to implement a progressive cost for attribute and skill points (instead of the flat cost we have today), in addition to the progressive karma cost we have today. But that would make the math a bit more complicated during chargen and you would also need to add metatype attribute bonus points (racial min values above 1) to after you spend the progressive priority attribute points.

In other words...KarmaGen? I personally prefer KarmaGen not so much because it "stops min-maxing" (the people who will min-max are there anyway) or because it encourages more rounded characters, but because it uses the same rules for character advancing as character creation. There's less of an impression of "I have to do this at character creation" when you can do the exact same thing with the exact same rules after character creation.

Except for Mystic Adepts, but they're kinda screwed until somebody at Catalyst realizes that they need an option for gaining PP and there was nothing wrong with how 4th edition handled it with "I choose to allocate this new magic point to my adept powers". That made things work by the same rules in chargen and after, which I always think is a good thing. Simple, straightforward, and consistent.

[Xenon]

In other words...KarmaGen?

No.
Not that drastic.

(with a huge risk of misunderstanding what you mean with the word "KarmaGen")
KarmaGen would be remove the entire A, B, C, D, E priority system and replace it with a point buy system.
But a point buy system let you build C, C, C, C, C characters (which let you take on multiple roles with ease).
This is anything will promote min/maxing and deep behind the scenes knowledge of the rules... Expert rules(!)

No, I am talking about keeping the priority system
...but attributes and skills cost more "points" the closer you get to metatype maximum.

[KagedShadow]

Again using my groups nWoD experiences - we used a 'karmagen' system for 5 years for our weekly campaigns, and yes, it removed the difference between CC and gameplay levelling - which is great - having 2 different mechanics of improving characters is really unwieldy, especially for long running campaigns. When the GMC for nWoD came out, we switched to the flat costs - my current mage game is going great (originally 7 mages, so the specialisation of the 10 types of magic really helped) - we have some fantastic characters - and my wife especially when she GMs likes throwing curve ball plots where characters are forced to use their weaker aspects (no magic for a 4 week plot kinda hurt) - I have a forces/mind hacker techno mage that practices parkour with very heavy cyberpunk/shadowrun symbology 

I am surprised by how many posts on these boards are about maxing a single dice pool for a character - our new street sam has a 18dice pool sword attack (and charisma 2 with uncouth)- but thats not gonna help him one bit if he cant get to the target - surppressive first seemed really effective in our first combat? So having a super ability really doesnt make a character - SR is not DnD, is not one combat encounter after the next surely, so only being good in combat isnt going to work - and there are so many ways to attack a character, its almost impossible to cover all your bases - matrix defences, physical defences, atral, mind etc etc, easy to hit show off how super pumping one 'stat' doesnt make you a god...or maybe it is and I just havent seen it yet?

As to mission's - from the first session, our group where asking a lot more questions, wanting to scout out the location and generally do more leg work - alot of which wasnt covered much in the mission write up - and also because I was trying to add a little more context to things to help explain Chicago, CZ, the bugs etc. Working out rewards/karma was the hardest part I found when I ran a brief campaign in 4A. Combat actually went very smoothly and fairly quick 

[Michael Chandra]

Except for Mystic Adepts, but they're kinda screwed until somebody at Catalyst realizes that they need an option for gaining PP and there was nothing wrong with how 4th edition handled it with "I choose to allocate this new magic point to my adept powers". That made things work by the same rules in chargen and after, which I always think is a good thing. Simple, straightforward, and consistent.

Except that in SR4, Mystic Adepts were not an option because you'd be C- in both, rather than A- in one and B+ in another. They sucked big time.

[ZeConster]

Except for Mystic Adepts, but they're kinda screwed until somebody at Catalyst realizes that they need an option for gaining PP and there was nothing wrong with how 4th edition handled it with "I choose to allocate this new magic point to my adept powers". That made things work by the same rules in chargen and after, which I always think is a good thing. Simple, straightforward, and consistent.

Pretty sure Mystic Adepts are stronger in 5th than in 4th.

[Mithlas]

Xenon: I don't see how a point-buy system would encourage min-maxing. I'm pretty sure that all possible systems are susceptible to that. To be honest, the only part of the priority system that I like is that you have a reason (besides iffy social racism) to play human. Maybe if the point-build grants humans a point or two for any special category (as they basically have in priority) then this would carry over to point-buy. KarmaGen, however, sounds exactly like what you were talking about with increasing costs as you increased in attributes and skills.

I was referring to the fact that they don't have special rules allowing them to only buy power points in character creation - most of my post was about a unity and continuity of rules - one set to make and to improve. I'm not actually sure whether they're better or not because I'd need to take a look at a few side-by-side comparisons (though yes I would agree right it's easier to make a lousy MA in 4 than a good MA, though I don't see this as being different in SR5 yet).

[Xenon]

point buy dont force you to be bad at one or two areas (and almost waste points on another) like the priority table does. Much easier to get the exact right attributes to reach important limits if you know the rules very well.

personally i like the priority table with its flat cost combined with progressive karma cost.



Let your MA buy PP up to their starting magic rating for 5 karma per PP even at post chargen.