Re: [SR] Karma costs for raising skills

[Ubiquitous]

gu...@xs4all.nl wrote:

>In my campaign, which uses essentially a mixture of SRII and SR3 rules plus a
>lot of house rules, something recently came up about raising skills using
>karma. The thing is that concentrations and specializations (or, in SR3, just
>specializations) very much work against you if you have them. Somehow, this
>never came up over 30 years of playing this game, but now it bugs me and I’m
>looking for a reasonable solution that sticks close to the original rules :)
>
>The BTB rule is that raising the general skill doesn’t raise
>concentrations/specializations along with it — so if you have, say, Athletics
>(Climbing) at 3 (5), then you need to spend 4 × 2 = 8 good karma to raise
>that to 4 (5).
>
>However, if you start out with _just_ Athletics 3, and then take a Climbing
>at 4 and raise it to 5, followed by raising the skill to Athletics (Climbing)
>4 (5) as above, you will actually spend (4 + 5) × 1.5 + 4 × 2 = 21 karma
>(since fractions are rounded down).
>
>All fine and dandy. BUT: if you start with Athletics 3, then you could have
>the _whole_ skill at 5 for just 18 karma, saving you three points _and_ being
>better allround than if you buy Climbing separately first.
>
>That is to say, concentrations and/or specializations (depending on your
>edition of choice) seem to be a reasonably good choice when making a
>character, to get more effective at the things you can do out of the starting
>blocks. However, they're a very poor choice for a character spending good
>karma, because if you later increase the general skill, you’ve wasted
>everything you spent to get the concentration/specialization to the rating
>that the general skill is now.
>
>We thought we had a fix: if you have a concentration in a skill, spending the
>karma for raising the general skill will also raise concentrations etc., but
>also allow the choice of raising only the general skill by spending (new
>rating × .5) karma — that is, the difference between raising the general
>skill and raising a concentration. That _looks_ like it’s a good solution,
>until you run some numbers:
>
>* 3 (5) to 4 (6) is 4 × 2 = 8 karma
>* 3 (5) to 4 (5) is 4 × .5 = 2 karma
>* 3 (5) to 3 (6) is 6 × 1.5 = 9 karma
>
>IMHO, the problem there is the difference between the first and the last: by
>increasing the skill as a whole, you gain _more_ yet spend a point less
>karma. This gets a lot worse with higher relative ratings:
>
>* 3 (10) to 3 (11) is 10 × 1.5 = 15 karma
>* 3 (10) to 4 (11) is 4 × 2 = 8 karma …
>
>That doesn’t work, if you ask me. This way, it’s pretty much always cheaper
>to raise both at once than to raise just the specialization, and the greater
>the difference in ratings, the worse this gets.
>
>And all of this mess gets even worse if you have more than one concentration
>or specialization …
>
>
>I can’t think of a good way to fix any of this, other than to ignore it by
>sticking to the original rules. If so, my conclusion is that it’s always
>better after character creation to not bother with concentrations or
>specializations at all, but save your karma for a bit longer so you can raise
>the general skill instead.
>
>Thoughts and ideas would be very welcome :)

I always thought it wasn't worth starting with a concentration or
specialization at chargen, but my players who were super min-maxers would
make starting chars with Firearms(Pistol: Sliver pistol) 8 and it annoyed
the hell out me.

--
Let's go Brandon!