Teh goal is to make the edition internally consistant with itself first, rather than be backwards-compliant. Where possible we do both, but where it can't be done, this generation wins over a previous one. Once a proper cost is found here, it doesn't really matter what the cost used to be.
That said, I know it can be jarring, and I know that some much lower costs were floated for some things, including cyber.
But we'll take a small break on that one to shift to talking about Trolls, since it's related.
Trolls are a pain in the butt.
Balancing most races isn't *that* hard (There're a few oddities, like racism vs Orcs, that are alwys sticking points, but that's relatively minor) ... but Trolls have such HUGE stat adjustmenst that they deform everything that they come into contact with. As many of you noticed, there's a problem with Trolls getting a high strength ... namely, after you start play, the Karma cost for boosting your Strength is enooooormous, same with Body. Trying to set up some kind of system where you'd remove the boosts of your attribute, then figure the cost, then re-increase it, was a bit of a headache... I mean, it's easy to see it, but hard to put that together and it's odd as a mechanic.
With a Troll, you have a further bit of attribute fun in that, for a while there, they didn't just get bonuses, but they had some penalties as well. If your Logic is lowered by 1, to a minimum of 1, then you have an odd cost situation based on what your attribute WAS, with a 1 Logic being a bit of a 'freebie' while a higher Logic stat is penalized.
There's also a related issue in that, for quite a while, the reason people took Trolls was to take them at the bare min on Body and Strength, then boost the other attributes (especially menatl) to make a Mage who could suck up a bullet. As it was cheaper to do this than to directly buy a Body and Strength a point lower than what you got from being a Teensy Troll, it became a default way of doing things.
So, from teh design side, you have to make a few calls.
First, do you want to change Troll modifiers. If those modifiers are what's deforming the system, then they could be gotten rid of ... but, if you make them smaller, it clashes with tradition hard and, when possible, we like to retain things. Furthermore, if you lowered the Troll's bonuses, they'd be pretty hard to make distinctive from an Ork, so, we'll punt on that for now.
The next one is to determine when racial modifiers are put in place... before buying an attribute or after? At one point in time, it was before, on the grounds that you'd choose your race before picking attributes, so you'd have a 'floor' in place from which to buy things. As you can imagine, this quickly erased the ability to make a Troll that was big and strong. The Tiny Trolls still existed and were still a marvelous investment, but, that ties into the next issue:
What style of play do you want to encourage.
The archetype of a Troll is big, strong, and kind of dumb. If you want to encourage that, then you need them to get bonuses to Strength and penalities to Logic. If you want to encourage playing against type, then you give the modifiers BEFORE buying attributes, which saves the character a bajillion points for going Tiny but penalizes big and strong.
There are several approaches that you can take here. For instance, what happens if you give Trolls an ability that says all increaes in Strength or Body are at half cost? Or, failing that, some kind of bulk discount? What if you 'frontload' the cost of being a Troll and make the racial modifiers kick in *after* you buy attributes, to keep them competiive?
You also have to decide if Troll is, in and of itself, an archetype. Back in the day, since it was Priority A, being a Troll defined your character. Did you want to retain that, or do you want to make Troll not much different than being a redhead, from teh CAS, or left handed?
There are other issues of course... should there be a mechanic in place for racism against Trolls, or should it be a role-playing element at tables? If the latter, can you factor it into the cost of being a Troll? If you do, and that effect isn't used, is it bad that they get a 'freebie'? If you don't factor it in, but some tables really lay in to that aspect, is it fair? How do you want to approach Trolls being half again human size in terms of buying things? Shoudl all gear cost more? Just food? Should there be some kind of 'Big guy in a tiny car' penalty? Just how technical do you want to get?
Trying to shoehorn a Troll into Karmagen is very, very difficult, and trying to figure out how much they should cost is just one part of it.
While I can, and will, go into a few mechanical examples and show how some of this COULD be done, I want to open the floor up to y'all for a day or two first to see how you'd handle it. Do you nerf the Troll's bonuses? Do you do race mod before or after picking your attributes? How much should being a Troll cost? Should there be a reward for playing to type? Should there be a reward for playing *against* type? Should there be a penalty in place for either form? Just how many Trolls do you want to see at an average table? Should Trolls just be removed as a PC race and moved back to the 'expanded' book (Run Faster was the eventual name) and possibly replaced by something else?
This was one of the more frustrating things that we had to deal with, believe it or not. They just don't fit well into the character design matrix and deform it by their very presence. But, by golly, we wanted them to be reflected.
