[I_AM_ZHOUL!!!]

Which is my point, as compared to the 'victory conditions' that are part of wargaming.

1. 1st & 2nd edition D&D
2. Rifts
3. 2nd edition Shadowrun
4. Battletech
5. 3rd edition Magic: The Gathering

Those are the games I grew up playing as the mainstays. The only wargaming was Battletech and that wasn't ever RPG though some scenarios can take a very long time (like fighting 2 full RCTs against each other.) But it could just be a result of my observed stereotypes... which I formed at 14 as a sophomore in HS. There was one guy who always trumped "Story over Stats"... I thought it was weird when he built a High Strength Wizard in a Planewalker campaign & knew it was stupid when he made a SDC character in a MDC Rifts campaign (anyone who ever played Rifts will understand just how useless that character truly was.) So maybe there is something to the viewpoint you have but I have met plenty of other people who hold it since and all it looks like is crappy character design that's been artificially gimped to hold some kind of Morally Superior attitude  (another universal trait with these guys) that makes them Role Players & better than Roll Players. So if you are the Exception that Proves the Rule about people who have this viewpoint... Congrats!!!! But artificially gimp in your players instead of giving them more difficult adversaries as been a sign of not very good GMing to me for close to 2 decades now. There are people who like it, they are the minority out of all the people I've met in this hobby.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

... if you break up your sentences and paragraphs, and use punctuation a bit more, you'd be a bit more coherent; I can't entirely tell what you're saying here.  You do seem to have the attitude that building an efficient character takes priority over story, and that people who build organically, or who feel that building to concept ('story over stats'), are somehow contemptable in feeling that creating issues for their characters makes for a better story.

Here's my issue: there's a limit.  In Shadowrun especially, but in other games as well, there's a conceptual limit to the 'more difficult adversary'.  After your team has taken out MET2K singlehandedly and slain Lofwyr and his five Great Dragon buddies, what can possibly be a 'more difficult adversary'?  After you've slain Zeus and taken over the pantheon, what's a more difficult adversary?  The problem - okay, MY problem - with 'always a more difficult adversary' is that at some point - often sooner rather than later - it violates the realism/causality of the game world.  One man stands against - casually slays!! - an entire horde, or the army of the evil overlord, which has consequences.  Even throwing thirty security guards at a team as though they were popcorn has to make the GM start to wonder what happens to the security officer who does this, or whether or not the corporation is simply going to spend a bit more 'making an example' out of the PC via a silenced high-caliber sniper shot.

Having your players - and being willing to play - with what you're calling 'artificial gimping' allows for the existence and continued game-play of a character who's earned over 4000 karma and who's got every item they'll ever need, and is worth a couple billion nuyen - because they 'artificially gimp' themselves, whether that's 'needing' to leave all their gear behind and going into a place where the best weapons they can by are crappy AK-97s and meat cleavers, or slipping into a high-tech facility by way of an upper-crust party, to which they cannot take their rocket launchers and super-sayyan katanas and such.  Difficulty comes in doing the tough job without your best toys - or minimal toys (or any toys at all), not in having 'more difficult adversaries' - which, after a while, become 'artificially' inflated, things that just don't make sense in light of the game world.

I'm not - never have - said that bringing out the big guns and going to town on major 'more difficult' adversaries isn't fun - but it isn't the only way to have fun, and IMO it sure as hell isn't the most challenging way to have fun.  I guess that makes me not the exception, in your book, but I think that also gets me to be more creative, able to do more with less.  YMMV.

[I_AM_ZHOUL!!!]

Oh...... okay. I get it now, your players are no longer playing PCs!!!! Which brings up a question just out of curiosity... why are your players playing characters that are no longer PCs??? We've all been there, that beautiful bittersweet moment where you release your PC to become a God or some other functionally similar NPC that has transcended the bounds of the game and becomes part of the ongoing framework of the Campaign World!!! Then you get the joy of making a new character that is fresh & different, one who is back operating within the Rule Set. New class, new race, a whole new Story to tell.

What you are describing I've never even heard about let alone seen with my own eyes. Well I take that back... there is one example. My friends dad when I was a kid, had this 20 year old character from before it was AD&D. Him and his friends would play a game night with their old characters who had ascended to God's 15 years before for old times sake. It was part of an old guys staying banded with friends that had moved away ritual cause 2 of them would travel back to our town every year for that Saturday night game. Is that what you're doing??? Or are these players showing up every week to be functional Gods in your campaign??? I have so many questions... like I said this is a unique thing you are describing to me. Are there other people who do this and I've just never met them in 20 years of doing this hobby??? It's not even just this game but across the whole host of people I've met while playing RPG, Cards, & Tabletop. We usually do at least 2 if not all 3, but no one has ever described this to me. Why do they want to continue to do it? Don't they want to play new characters? Don't they want to be part of a new story? How many editions has this transcended or are you still using the same ruleset? See what I mean.... so many questions!!! The poorly built "Story over Stats" characters that you might be the exception from pales in comparison to this mystery. Where is the fun of playing as a functional god every week knowing that the only reason it is even mildly challenging is by accepting this artificial limits? This pretense to mortality is such a fascinating concept... I can't wait to hear your response. Thank you for showing me this unique concept that you play under though I am baffled as to why. Hopefully your answer will make it make sense.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

I've found it difficult to answer this levelly, because your post is (to me) so clearly offensive, but I'll try.

Why do you think someone with 4000 karma is no longer a PC, is a functional god, whatever?  Considering that the potential difference between one character with that and a GM's NPC is ... what?  Nothing.  Because this is Shadowrun, and because anything that can be acquired/learned/used by one character can be acquired/learned/used by another.  13 Agility?  Sure, that's just a standard elf (or Gnome, Hanuman, Menehune, Dryad, Wakyambi, Xapiri Thepe, Oni, or Falconine, Lupine, Pantherine, or Tigrine Shapeshifter, or Nosferatu, Harvester, or Banshee) with both Exceptional Attribute and Metagenetic Improvement in Agility (or Nocturna or Pixie without one of those two) who's had the attribute maxed out, plus maximum enhancement.  Have a 13 skill?  Hey, PCs aren't the only ones who get good, and as the man says, "There's always someone better than you."  Or at least as good.

It is difficult for me to imagine being ABLE to bring all your gear on every run, whether you're at 4/40/400/4000 karma or not, whether you've earned 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,000, or more nuyen.  If a character's story is not done - and until they're dead, they are always potentially unfinished - then why could you NOT return to the character and play them some more?  Certainly new characters are played, whether that's because a prior one has died, you join a new group, or you just get curious about a different ability or play-style or whatever.  And of course, here's the amusing thin - I am wondering, why do you restrict your real self artificially from developing a character's complete potential?  Do people just stop when they hit a certain level, or do they keep trying?  "Oh, I made manager, I'm done."  Some, sure, but let's face it, in a non-level-based RPG you develop side skills, you get into other things which is where your XP/karma goes, you spend it to learn something you desperately need at the moment (like that language at a 1).

Likewise, what you are calling 'artificial limits' are imposed by your subscription to the universe of the game in which you're playing.  If there are (as has sometimes been conceptualized) 300 street samurai / physical adepts / muscle in Seattle's 3 million, and this represents a good ratio worldwide, then what comes of the journey of the samurai who wishes to be among the top ten of those 700,000 non-aligned individual-mercenaries-for-hire when one shrugs and says after a hundred or a few hundred karma, "okay, that's enough, we're too powerful"?  Until you have your weapon skills and gymnastics all maxed out, and you've encountered and fought individual conflicts by the score, and you and your GM have played your storyline through peculiarities and injuries and all sorts of things ... where's the story?

What I like about Shadowrun is the same thing I enjoyed about 1e Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying - given the most simple of circumstances, a first-day security guard (city guard in WFRP) can flat-out kill even your most advanced character.  Is it likely?  Hell, it's not likely for starting characters to be so slain, but no matter the amount of armor, or skill, or anything, a nervous guy with a shotgun can still Ruin Your Day.  Why?  Because what you continue to call 'artificial limitations' are what so many of the rest of us call 'the enforcement of reality'.

I think I would understand you better if I could understand what your 'character path' usually winds up being, start to finish, and what sort of social contract exists between you and your GM in regards to the world within which you play your characters.  You start out with what, a low-end shotgun or pistol, an armored jacket, and a motorcycle, and you build yourself up until with every mission you're carrying an elite assault rifle firing high-velocity APDS/AV rounds, an under-barrel grenade launcher (with a wide variety of munitions), wearing heavy military-grade armor with all the fixin's, carrying ATGMs and C12 with a remote Thor Shot on standby ... and then what, you stop playing that character, because there are no more challenging opponents?  Do you always go into every mission brining the heaviest weapons, armor, and gear that you have?

Serious question, this: what kind of game are you playing??

[I_AM_ZHOUL!!!]

Ahhhhhh..... see you back pedaled far from your original point. Which was breaking & taking Players Karma invested items away from them as being perfectly legitimate things to do as a mere matter of course. Now it's just that "you don't take all your gear with you." Two substantially different points... and I totally agree with the 2nd one. Just like you back pedaled from the "once players have slain Lowfyr & his 5 great dragon buddies what else are you supposed to do" point that you were using to try to use as a justification. You start new characters if you have slain Lowfyr!!!!! You have become a Functional God and outside the ruleset... achieving Apotheosis means YOU WON!!! So now that you are done with Hyperbole & I'm done with Mocking Credulity... maybe we can get back to the thread.

The only rules that cover Disenchanting a Focus are the ones where it takes Hours per Force. Just like they removed the rules that let you immediately spend a point of Karma to break the Bond from previous editions. So turning a Focus off is the only Combat/Quick option available.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Here's the thing - or rather, two things: first, while I may have used some hyperbole, it's because I don't understand your games, which lack of understanding I have attempted to correct by asking you a question.  The second is that I haven't backpedaled one inch; in Shadowrun, as in every single other game out there, destroying gear (karma-invested or not) is a tool for the GM, and a consequence for players.  You're the one who called these perfectly legitimate tools 'artificial', and got into how I and GMs like me, who can run the same group of characters week after week for six years, are somehow bad GMs for doing this, and/or for setting up situations in which you simply can't bull through it with whatever Big Gun your character happens to be equipped with.  You don't like this.  There are also games in which the scenario requires you to go in with less, or nothing, and you have to deal with that.  You don't like this either.

I have played - without hyperbole - the same character for a decade or more, and not just one of them.  None of my characters, in any game system, have achieved a godhood apotheosis, despite becoming powerful - and despite permanently losing gear they've made themselves, with time, money, and karma/experience.  You seem to think that these events makes for a bad GM; I would have to guess that you have had nothing but bad GMs, if the only way they can challenge you is by giving you something bigger and badder and tougher and more cowbell, and with never taking you from the top of the mountain back down to the bottom, penniless in the street without a gizmo / magic item to your name, with even your reputation ruined.  I've had that happen more than once with some characters in Shadowrun, because no matter how powerful you get, you can never be everywhere, able to do everything, all of the time - and there's still 'office politics' to worry about.

But you've still dodged my question, Zhoul.  Will you answer it?  Is this the sort of game you've played - where you collect stuff, gain karma, and after a while you simply have to stop playing that character because there's nowhere left to go?  At what point do you find you have to give up the character because 'they're unplayable'?  I've described, repeatedly now, the sorts of games in which I play, and the kinds of scenarios I throw at my players (and which my players, when they're GMs, throw at me); I don't see any sort of description from you except that I and my players are bad GMs AND bad players for being able to play a character for years upon years.

[FastJack]

Okay, it think this thread is done. Everyone to their respective corners unless we want warnings to go out.