Optional Rules for Companion

[The Undying]

when you take the standard rule, each character can do his karma ritual as often as he wants and whenever he wants

I am fairly certain karma ritual is still once per day RAW.

Yep, near the bottom of page 83 in the Player's Guide, "Your player may perform his Karma Ritual once per day." It also takes a half hour and must be certain conditions (a scout can't - or SHOULDN'T - allow himself to be made lost in the middle of a dungeon where more enemies might be roaming.

[etherial]

when you take the standard rule, each character can do his karma ritual as often as he wants and whenever he wants

I am fairly certain karma ritual is still once per day RAW.

Yep, near the bottom of page 83 in the Player's Guide, "Your player may perform his Karma Ritual once per day." It also takes a half hour and must be certain conditions (a scout can't - or SHOULDN'T - allow himself to be made lost in the middle of a dungeon where more enemies might be roaming.

Per RAW, it is still possible to spend Karma leftover from yesterday today, which sort of means that doing your Karma Ritual in the morning is a terrible plan, which is annoying since most Adepts want to do their Karma Ritual in the morning.

[CPFCPF]

Thanks, you are right, the karmaritual is a once per day thing (I was remembering that wrong).
But the initial problem of characters performing their karma ritual during a dungeon crawl or something similar is srtill persistant. Even a scout can come up with a self designed karma ritual which is possible during a kaer exploration.
But thats's not the point. The point is constant interruptions of players during 'some activity' when they run low or out of karma.

So I wanted to have that in the morning with everyone automatically performing ist. So effectively when you refresh your recovery tests, you refresh your karma, too. You even don't have to mention, that you perform your karma ritual because it is assumed, that you did it.

[The Undying]

If it works for you, more power to your table. I find that a little nudging by the GM tends to take care of this: "you are in a dangerous place, so you won't be able to guarantee a half hour to complete this (same goes for rest ahead of a recovery test)" or "you're currently pursuing some, and good chance S/he will escape, fortify, destroy evidence, whatever if you stop for half an hour (or full hour for recovery)", etc

[Dyrmagnos]

Another house rule for our Earthdawn campaign is the following: karma ritual is only possible once a day. And in addition to that, all accumulated karma is gone, when you sleep (get your recovery tests filled up).

It incredibly hurt higher circles adepts - famous really powerful warden warrior can use his karma 3-4 more times than common 5-6 circle fighter.
Additionally fighting disciplines cant even use their full potencial because karma cap is too low - wood skin + tiger spring + anticipate blow + meele attack + avoid blow vs 1 opponent and 5-th circle adept is using his all available karma points in 1 round of fight for only 1-st circle talents.

It promotes utility/mages disciplines that are using abilities outside of combat and are almost as useful as designers made them but fighters have only higher durability because cant use all of their talents in right way.

It makes skills much more powerful and situation when skilled non adept is beating 3-rd circle adept would be common.

If it fills your vision of ED its great but it promote a really big disproportion in rules.

In our game we solved this problem just with lack of time during action and remember that astral space in ED world is corrupted in some way and karma ritual in abandoned kaer could hurt a lot.

[The Undying]

Karma isn't meant to be a "apply it in every single instance you can, period." Its meant to be a little extra gas on the flame, that little extra oomph to get the job done or get out of a sticky situation. It's a nitro boost. If a close combatant is tearing through all their Karma in a few turns because they're using it at every single opportunity they can in a combat, this is either a boss battle, they're screwed in some way (lots of wounds, one character down, back against the wall, etc), or they aren't properly weighing the concept of a limited resource. It's comparable to a character healing IMMEDIATELY when they suffer damage, regardless of how much damage they have, despite the fact that they have a very small number of Recoveries.

It makes skills much more powerful and situation when skilled non adept is beating 3-rd circle adept would be common.

I must be missing something here. A battle between an Adept with DEX 7, STR 7, Melee Weapon [Talent] 3, and a dagger with zero Forging up against a non-adept with DEX 7, STR 7, Melee Weapon [Skill] 3, and a dagger with zero Forging, and assuming that there are no wounds or damage and the non-adept somehow has the same Health Ratings (which shouldn't normally be the case), then one of two things happens: (1) they are evenly matched because the Adept blew all his Karma before hand, or (2) the Adept has the upper hand because he still has Karma available. I cannot think of a situation where, all stats and conditions being equal, that the non-adept would have the upper hand.

[CPFCPF]

If it works for you, more power to your table. I find that a little nudging by the GM tends to take care of this: "you are in a dangerous place, so you won't be able to guarantee a half hour to complete this (same goes for rest ahead of a recovery test)" or "you're currently pursuing some, and good chance S/he will escape, fortify, destroy evidence, whatever if you stop for half an hour (or full hour for recovery)", etc

We came up with this solution as a team, everybody agreed and until now, nobody was facing drastic lack of karma which could be changed through a different timing of the ritual. So: works fine for about 50 gaming sessions so far.

[Loba]

I take a much more... narrative (for lack of a better term) approach to combat in my games. Not that I don't use the rules, or anything like that, but rather I don't need to have rules to enforce something that makes sense within the narrative of a combat encounter.

We agree.
I think this is true in life as well. We make all too many rules instead of guidelines.

Essentially - if a Warrior is guarding an area to keep the unpleasantries off the Archer and the Airsailor says "I'll jump over the Warrior to hit that paltry nickel-and-diming Archer where she deserves it." - assuming the Warrior has no reasonable counter - I respond with a colorful description of that (or allow the player to make one) and before they do I warn them that they'll be putting their back to the Warrior.

No need for rules... if you truly made rules to simulate combat - it would have to be millisecond by millisecond (video game) instead of heroically narrative. You know, there IS a game like that. I don't know if people here have played "Role Master" - but I have - and they have an action point system that goes to nearly 300 (per round).

I have played miniature games which always felt a bit clunky to me if you follow the rules verbatim.

[BRW]

One optional rule I would really love to see is some guidelines for the continued advancement which is not capped at any point. In particular, a possibility to advance talents past rank 15.

Since getting to so high numbers takes very long time in ED, I would expect that such rules should not totally destroy the system (and they would be optional after all), especially since the cost of advancement would be really large after some point (it's Fibonacci anyway, so it's roughly exponential, so it explodes).

Setting-wise, I think that there is nothing that should really make a static cap for talents necessary. Its a high fantasy setting, with an option for really legendary stories and nice in-game explanation of why adepts' talents exceed any mundane limitations.

I know this seems like an invitation to munchkinism (and may seem in bad company with analogous rules in certain other systems), but personally I think that one of nicest things about ED is that it makes what would otherwise be munchkinism actually quite classy. There is a bunch of other games which serves the purpose of telling down-to-earth stories much better. And yet again, it would be optional.

What I would especially like to see is some general advice of what to do once you reach 15th circle, which would explore possibilities of further reinforcing legend of the characters without it getting dull "you may further advance ranks of talents." Maybe some general advice for talent knack design allowing Swordmaster to work out their unique style, and the Bard to come up with new songs never heard?

I understand that the 15th circle is extremely hard to reach anyway, but i think that for such an epic game it would be nice to know that there is something even beyond that, up to GM's discretion.

[The Undying]

For what it's worth, keep in mind that there's still PLENTY of things that an Adept can advance in once they've hit Rank 15 in their Discipline Talents. At this point, they have 15 Option Talents, many or most of which are likely nowhere near Rank 15. There's also Thread Items - some Adepts may have some lackluster Novice/Journeyman items that they've been carrying around for a while, but now, especially with no other real LP sinks demanding their attention, they can go on adventures seeking out legends of truly incredible items and replace those old items (yeah, you lose the LP, but you're talking a few thousand ... that's pocket change now).

So, that would be my personal recommendation. HOWEVER, barring that, if you want some truly epic Ranks, I would say that you don't really need an Optional Rule.

Earthdawn uses the Fibonacci sequence to determine LP costs. Each tier (Novice, Journeyman, Warden, Master) offsets the cost by one. The math is pretty easy, but for your convenience, I've gone ahead and included the numbers. Go forth, mold Barsaive into what you will!!!!

----- Novice -----
16 159700
17 258400
18 418100
19 676500
20 1094600
21 1771100
22 2865700
23 4636800
24 7502500
25 12139300

----- Journeyman -----
16 258400
17 418100
18 676500
19 1094600
20 1771100
21 2865700
22 4636800
23 7502500
24 12139300
25 19641800

----- Warden -----
16 418100
17 676500
18 1094600
19 1771100
20 2865700
21 4636800
22 7502500
23 12139300
24 19641800
25 31781100

----- Master -----
16 676500
17 1094600
18 1771100
19 2865700
20 4636800
21 7502500
22 12139300
23 19641800
24 31781100
25 51422900

Bear in mind, the down side is that LP awards will likely increase as well, making basically all Thread Item advancement 100% trivial. That is a very likely problem.