[Sugarpink]

In case you´re interested: Here are the key figures for my improvised 1000-Karma System:

• Metatypes: Elf 15, Orc/Dwarf 20, Troll 25. Humans are free, Attributes start at 1 (Seems a bit cheap at first glance, but the raised max. Attributes aren´t as valuable in Karmagen. At least, it´s surely balanced better than priorites  )
• Magic/Resonance: Aspected Mage 15, Adept 20, Technomancer 25, Mage/MysAd 30. Magic/Resonance Attribute starts at 1. Spells/Complex Forms are bought seperately. To learn a spell, you also have to buy the Formular.
• Attributes: You may put a maximum of 500 Karma into your Attributes. To that limit, you add: 30 for Elves, 40 for Orcs/Dwarves, 50 for Trolls, 50 if your Character has Magic or Resonance Attribute.
• Qualities: Max. 50 in Positive Qualities (not counting Magic/Resonance), max. 30 gained from Negative Qualities
• Skills: Bought from Zero, Max Skill rank at chargen is 6 (7 with the Talent), max. 2 Skills maxed out.
• Knowledge/Language Skills: Minimum of Logik*Intuition Karma in Knowledge/Language Skills, 1 Native Language for free.
• Contacts:  Minimum of Charisma*Charisma Karma in Contacts.
• Ressources: 2000 Nuyen per 1 Karma, max. 250 Karma (or 500.000 Nuyen) PLUS max. 50.000 Nuyen in Debt (GM approval needed), Augmentations are applied after Attribute/Skill Adjustments (no weird Burnout stuff!)
• Leftovers: You may safe up to [highest Lifestyle cost] from your Ressources as your starting money, as well as up to 10 unspend Karma.

Edit: I´d 1000 Karma gives you a Character in the same ballpark of the Priority System, but with a bigger tax on min-maxing on one hand and with fewer traps (like Attribute E... jeez, I just remembered how bad it really is this time...  ) on the other. To adjust this to "Street Level", I´d suggest to just lower the total Karma amount to 800, the max. Karma in Attributes to 400 and the max. Karma in Ressources to 100, and also lower the max. values for Attributes, Skills and Availability by 1-2 ranks.

Thanks, that looks a lot better than the priority system!
We stumbled upon one problem. It still feels like you have to max out the money.
Money still scales linearly and feels "cheaper" than what you get for a run: the rewards for a run were more like 500 nuyen to 1 Karma.
This leads to people "hoarding" cyberware during character creation because they're afraid they won't be able to afford an upgrade later.
How did your group deal with that?

At least according to the Run Reward section in the 6E Core Rulebook run rewards should be more 1,000 Nuyen = 1 Karma (they also suggest a multiple of 5 Karma and 5,000 Nuyen per session for moderate progression).

[Finstersang]

In case you´re interested: Here are the key figures for my improvised 1000-Karma System:

• Metatypes: Elf 15, Orc/Dwarf 20, Troll 25. Humans are free, Attributes start at 1 (Seems a bit cheap at first glance, but the raised max. Attributes aren´t as valuable in Karmagen. At least, it´s surely balanced better than priorites  )
• Magic/Resonance: Aspected Mage 15, Adept 20, Technomancer 25, Mage/MysAd 30. Magic/Resonance Attribute starts at 1. Spells/Complex Forms are bought seperately. To learn a spell, you also have to buy the Formular.
• Attributes: You may put a maximum of 500 Karma into your Attributes. To that limit, you add: 30 for Elves, 40 for Orcs/Dwarves, 50 for Trolls, 50 if your Character has Magic or Resonance Attribute.
• Qualities: Max. 50 in Positive Qualities (not counting Magic/Resonance), max. 30 gained from Negative Qualities
• Skills: Bought from Zero, Max Skill rank at chargen is 6 (7 with the Talent), max. 2 Skills maxed out.
• Knowledge/Language Skills: Minimum of Logik*Intuition Karma in Knowledge/Language Skills, 1 Native Language for free.
• Contacts:  Minimum of Charisma*Charisma Karma in Contacts.
• Ressources: 2000 Nuyen per 1 Karma, max. 250 Karma (or 500.000 Nuyen) PLUS max. 50.000 Nuyen in Debt (GM approval needed), Augmentations are applied after Attribute/Skill Adjustments (no weird Burnout stuff!)
• Leftovers: You may safe up to [highest Lifestyle cost] from your Ressources as your starting money, as well as up to 10 unspend Karma.

Edit: I´d 1000 Karma gives you a Character in the same ballpark of the Priority System, but with a bigger tax on min-maxing on one hand and with fewer traps (like Attribute E... jeez, I just remembered how bad it really is this time...  ) on the other. To adjust this to "Street Level", I´d suggest to just lower the total Karma amount to 800, the max. Karma in Attributes to 400 and the max. Karma in Ressources to 100, and also lower the max. values for Attributes, Skills and Availability by 1-2 ranks.

Thanks, that looks a lot better than the priority system!
We stumbled upon one problem. It still feels like you have to max out the money.
Money still scales linearly and feels "cheaper" than what you get for a run: the rewards for a run were more like 500 nuyen to 1 Karma.
This leads to people "hoarding" cyberware during character creation because they're afraid they won't be able to afford an upgrade later.
How did your group deal with that?

Thanks

TBH, that hasn´t been that much of an issue so far. The main reason is that my current players aren´t the biggest powergamers anyways and liked to keep things reasonable, especially, when there was no reasonable explanation on why the character is running around with a small fortune in Augmentations. So, that´s probably one way to tackle it: Demand an RP explanation for the expensive stuff before greenlighting the character. It´s not like that you suddenly win a 250.000 Nuyen Reflex booster at a Spinrad lottery and then decide to live your live as a Street samurai*. That RP explanation may then entail further constraints and problems: "Ok, so you are an escaped clone of a secret Aztech supersoldier programm? Wouldn´t that mean that you are hunted by them?".

Apart from that, I only nerfed the adjustments for used Augmentations a bit (80% of the base costs for 120% Essence cost or a little glitch or flaw).

But the best way to tackle that problem is what you indicated: Screw the suggestions for Karma and Nuyen rewards! Seriously, I don´t know why they stick with this super-slow character progression over all the editions. And that´s both a Karma and a Nuyen problem. If your raise the rewards for the actual run, add some juicy bonus loot or allow and reward creative side businnesess, players aren´t so afraid to waste their supposed "last chance" to cyber up.

*Ok now that I think about, that DOES sound like an interesting background story 

[Sugarpink]

But the best way to tackle that problem is what you indicated: Screw the suggestions for Karma and Nuyen rewards! Seriously, I don´t know why they stick with this super-slow character progression over all the editions. And that´s both a Karma and a Nuyen problem. If your raise the rewards for the actual run, add some juicy bonus loot or allow and reward creative side businnesess, players aren´t so afraid to waste their supposed "last chance" to cyber up.

I personally think the 6E approach in the Core book is pretty good. They say that 5 Karma / 5,000 Nuyen is the baseline. They don't say with how much you multiply it. Want faster progression? Just multiply with 5 and dish out 25/25,000 per session. Or even more. The sky is the limit (unless you got a space ship, in which case, just keep going).

However, this does not address rewards specified in officially published scenarios. Since I never play official modules (seriously, in 15 years of D&D, Shadowrun and Warhammer not even once did I use an official module as-written), I would not know how screwed up those are in 6E. I think 30 Nights are the only set of missions currently published... or do we have a new season of SR Mission already as well?

Edit: Typo

[Michael Chandra]

In SR5, I think SRM rewards were quite similar to the main reward guidelines. In SR6, exactly what rewards the SRMs will give is still under debate. I should point out that in SRM-2081, you basically will have 1 run per 2 weeks in-universe.

[Xenon]

At least according to the Run Reward section in the 6E Core Rulebook run rewards should be more 1,000 Nuyen = 1 Karma (they also suggest a multiple of 5 Karma and 5,000 Nuyen per session for moderate progression).

During chargen (p. 66 Customization Karma) the ratio seem to be 2,000 Nuyen = 1 Customization Karma.

[markelphoenix]

Hi,

we played the "30 nights" campaign and abandoned it, because it felt frustrating having just too powerful characters. Everything melted in combats. We didn't even get damaged on the first five nights. Our team consisted of a very strong close combat character, another firearms specialized  character and a decent hacker.
The problem seemed that any character was really capable of at least 2-3 skills and at least medicore to good in the rest of it (because high attributes resolve in high skill values).

We decided to restart and try the "street runner" level to have more of the feeling we wished - doing low jobs for low money and have the feeling of experiencing a character developement.

Now, these are my concerns:

• The CRB deals in two sentences with creating street runners. Don't know if this is really a problem, but availability of biotech, weapons, etc. isn't taken into account by these rules.
• Huge "firepower" in fights seems still a problem, if a character specializes on that. (E .g. the first character has a attack pool of 16 and defense pool of 12 using AGI 7 and Reflex Booster + 3.)
• It seems like min-maxing profits even more from this system.
• I am not sure, but could it be that one dimensional characters and casters profit from these rules while riggers and deckers have barely enough money to get their equipment? The latter seems to be intended while the former would be bad.

Don't get me wrong, the bulletpoints above are supposed to be "concerns" - not saying these are true.

1.) What's your opinion about that? Have you tried/experienced the street runner option?
2.) Would you recommend creating street runners and lower the difficulty of foes? Or would you create standard characters and higher the difficulty?

Thanks in advance!

Try to think in lore. After a few runs, if there were any witnesses to how hot these runners are, they would potentially be escalated on a corps/nation/gang/dragons threat matrix. This would add an element of 'properly cover your tracks', 'limit witnesses', and even potentially spin off runs of, 'erase our data trail as best as possible or implicate another runner team to take heat off'.

Provide enough hints that this is happening (that a witness noticed them, corp security recorded them, your Decker came across someone selling a recording of your team fraggin' a fully geared special forces team to an underground entertainment site, etc.) Make their bad ass-ness something to account for. Do they play it professional and keep the noise down or do they make a lot of noise and leave a lot of evidence?

They can be bad ass mojo flingers, gun slingers, and Whiz-Kids with a deck, but get too noticed without the right protections...well, that ends bad sooner or later....

Hell, even make it more interesting, they lob a grenade into a train car where security is chasing them? Congratulations, one of the civilians killed was a local rock celebrity in the fashion of Mecurial...she happened to have a few shadowrunner fans...did I mention she also side lined as a Fixer for the local 'Runner community? Of course, if you pull something like that, there has to be opportunity to notice them (i.e. if they pass through car, anyone that had even a remotely related knowledge skill should ping off her. May even be an opportunity to check players knowledge skills and work it into the scenario. Maybe instead of a local rock star, if your play has a skill around modern firearms/modifications, it'd be a gunsmith known for keeping runners gear customized,

Be like water. Think of the setting. The dice are only one part of the whole.