[ShadowSeeker]

Does a difference in karma between characters unbalance the game?  if yes how do you determine how much is acceptable?  I know it applies differently between character types with some being more karma dependent.  Also, as a GM do you impose any limits between how much the top and bottom characters?

I would also ask the same question but in regards to Nuyen?

[jamesfirecat]

Does a difference in karma between characters unbalance the game?  if yes how do you determine how much is acceptable?  I know it applies differently between character types with some being more karma dependent.  Also, as a GM do you impose any limits between how much the top and bottom characters?

I would also ask the same question but in regards to Nuyen?

It can or it can't as a general rule look less at karma and more at dice pools for what a character is good at.  Someone could want to be a generalist adept hacker and have spentn 150 karma and a lot of new yen but not be noticeably better than a recently created street samuria when it comes to fighting.


If there is a gap of more than five dice between what character A roles for his best skill and what character B roles for it the two characters should probably not run together unless character A's best skill is a skill that is really hard to buff.

[ZeConster]

My brother errs on the side of caution and gives everyone the same amount of Karma, regardless of individual player performance. When my character brought in her cop contact as extra runner on a rescue-someone's-kidnapped-daughter run, even agreeing to cover part of his share if we didn't manage to recover the ransom money (the client didn't have enough spare money for a full extra runner), the cop ended up being crucial in keeping the funds from disappearing, resulting in a nice bonus for the team: when I pointed out how fortuitous my decision had been for the team, we all got +1 Karma.
Anyway, hypothetically speaking, 15-ish karma can be a pretty big difference for magic users and technomancers, since it covers the cost of a single initiation/submersion, but other than that, it takes a lot of karma to get more than one extra die compared to someone else, especially if you only look at the top skills. So as long as someone doesn't consistently get 2+ Karma more (or less) than the others, I don't think it'll really be unbalancing.