The obligatory skill

[Telarus_KSC]

I agree with a lot here. My 'fixes' were to make Durability a free Discipline Talent (acquired automatically @ Circle 2 at a Rank of 1), but you would still need to spend LP to increase it. This removed it from the Talents list, and I let players pick another Talent for that slot. For Karma Ritual, I went the other direction, it was still a Talent that you got at first Circle, but the use did not burn any LP. This encouraged players to bring up the use in gameplay (no math and erasing), and we had characters entering and exiting scenes from/to their Karma Rituals. If well rested and safe, they'd get their Rank in Karma back... if stressed out or exhausted, roll Karma Ritual Step (max = Karma Ritual Rate, so a 50% chance of max karma).

I have also considered handing out Karma as rewards from the Passions for dedicated teamwork or play that gets the table excited. I sometimes hand out LP tokens during play (I usually to with 10-20% of an LP Award for the group's Circle rating per token).

[zayven]

Yeah, my players always tended to be karma horders, so I guess that's unduly influenced my opinion of the Karma Ritual talent.

In my experience, though, combat has been anything but "fast and bloody." Unless there's a significant mismatch in power level between the combatants, I've typically found battles to be long and tedious. Again, this could be the result of my failings as a GM or lack of creativity on the part of my players. I've always found it difficult to get the right balance in encounters so that the players feel like they're being challenged while still managing to feel effective. It usually ends up skewing towards the extremes of them wiping the floor with everyone or getting their asses kicked. When they are more evenly matched, battles usually end up being lengthy "slog fests" where they're not hitting often enough and not causing enough damage when they do.

Again, this isn't always the game's fault. I don't always set up encounters as well as I should, but sometimes I don't feel like the system does much to help matters.

[j0hn]

[j0hn]

[zayven]

I think the problem that I usually run into is that in an effort to give the characters a challenge, I end up trying to balance the number of opponents against a respectable/threatening damage output. As you pointed out, characters often can't sustain a lot of damage. There have been a few times where I throw a few enemies that I think will be a decent challenge, but if a few dice rolls go the wrong way, things get out of hand REALLY fast. I'll have to experiment using more D&D style encounters with large numbers of weaker enemies.

My hesitancy to do that might be linked to an odd ED experience from several years ago. Back in the late 90s, we adapted rules from a player's copy of the Heroquest board game to serve as a mass combat system so they could cut through hordes of enemies. It seemed like a fun idea until we shifted back to ED rules for major encounters and the players promptly got thrashed because they'd been conditioned to wade into any fight with reckless abandon! Needless to say, we kicked that plan to the curb. Ever since then, I think I've subconsciously tried to make most battles more challenging so the players don't get overly confident.

I'm glad to hear someone else praise the encounter system for 4e D&D. While there's certainly a lot to criticize about that game, it did a better job of balancing characters and designing combat encounters than any other game I can think of. I've never understood why people accused it of being "dumbed down" because I thought it was WAY crunchier than the previous edition (at least in terms of sheer bookkeeping). I'm a little disappointed that the 4e "Age of Legend" ED conversion never saw the light of day due to WotC's ill-advised handling of the OGL (or lack thereof) under 4e. The way that powers were set up for the different classes actually seemed like it could be easily adapted for ED disciplines and the game already had ED-ish mechanics like action points (Karma Points) and healing surges (Recovery Tests). Spellcasting still would have been an issue, though. Even though 4e doesn't use a true Vancian system, a lot of spells are still only daily or encounter level powers, which runs counter to the ED concept of having fewer spells that you can cast more often. I suppose they could have come up with something like a temporary Spell Matrix that disintegrated upon use and needed to be "reloaded" after a set amount of time, but considering that a lot of people complained about the way Savage Worlds ED handles magic, it probably would have drawn criticism regardless of how they did it.

[LADRILLON]

Threadjack!


L

[ukhata]

how can anyone not use karma?
as a circle 7 purifier you can use 3 karma on 1 damage roll.
body control, crushing blow, circle 7 discipline bonus.
that's 3 d6 on damage. that's a lot of extra damage!
i am one of those that spend it like water as does every single player among me.
basically for our DMs its like this.
if the players don't spend karma then the encounters (be it combat or social of something other) are way to easy. a good encounter is where every player spend approximately half their karma. assuming they have a way of spending it in large quantities.

i know this isn't a very useful addition to the thread but this is simply my 2 cents on the whole karma issue.
karma rit is useful and necessary. you can only spend as much karma each round as your ritual rank. and as you progress in circles you will get more ways to spend it more then twice a round.

Ukhata

[zayven]

Half their karma per encounter? Good grief. That seems like WAY too much, even when characters have more ways to spend it. You're essentially saying that characters are, at all power levels, inadequate and can only accomplish their goals by constantly relying on a pool of bonus dice. This seems to place far too much emphasis on the role of karma in the game setting. The Adept's Way sourcebook, for example, only mentions using Karma one time (when an Archer describes using True Shot, which actually requires karma to be used). I never got the sense from any of the fluff that adepts are constantly resorting to karma to get them through every conflict. I've always interpreted karma as something that adepts can use to push their abilities above and beyond what they're normally capable of doing. The ability to use talents already puts them a step above normal Namegivers; having to use karma ALL the time for even basic encounters seems to cheapen this idea a bit in my view.

I suppose the bigger question is what function karma serves from a metagame standpoint. If the idea is to have a bonus dice pool that allows characters to do cool stuff in fights and encounters, then it should be something that should be refreshed automatically after a set period of time (be it after each day, each encounter, or each game session, whichever one is most in line with your interpretation of karma). It would make a bit more sense for it to be a talent in this case because you would essentially be opting to increase a bonus dice pool. But you should still get a flat per-circle increase. Every adept should get increasing benefits of karma as they advance, but you should still have the option to focus on getting more.

But if the purpose is to regulate the number of encounters per game session, then it should be strictly tied to circle progression and not be an individual talent that can vary wildly between players. For instance, if players are expected to spend 50% of their karma per encounter (as ukhata mentions) then having one player with 25% more karma than the other three totally throws off the encounter frequency. The player with more karma is either never getting the benefits of having more karma because the GM is basing the encounter frequency off the lower karma players or the players with less karma are getting outclassed every two fights by the player with more karma.

I'm probably overthinking this, I'd just like to know what karma is supposed to do as a game mechanic rather than a setting concept. There are a multitude of ways to implement karma based on the description of it in the game world. What I want to understand is what function THIS rules implementation of karma is supposed to serve from a design standpoint. Why does this version of karma facilitate gameplay better than others? What kind of gameplay experience does it foster and does that best reflect the experience that the game as a whole seeks to provide?

[treorai]

[zayven]

That karma expenditure is just crazy! I mean, do your characters tell the world to wait on them to do their karma rituals after every battle? How does that not shatter any semblance of flow in the adventure? Heck, for some disciplines it's not even possible to perform a karma ritual just anywhere.

I'm more convinced than ever that the whole conception of the karma system needs to be rethought. It's ridiculous that characters should have to burn ALL of their karma to get through a SINGLE encounter. And if one discipline is MORE karma dependent than others, then that's a serious balancing issue. If you have to use all of your karma for every battle, then what's the point of even having it? Just from a game design standpoint, you should be able to get through an encounter without having to exhaust every last drop of your character's expendable resources.

Now, if karma refreshed completely or partially after every battle without having to take the time to perform a karma ritual, then that's a different matter. But the whole point of the Karma Ritual seems to be to put a barrier between the characters and karma. The game forces you to take that in-game time (which is not always possible to do in the middle of an adventure) to refresh it, which suggests that it's supposed to be a somewhat limited or scarce resource, not something that you HAVE to exhaust completely every encounter or two.

Are those of you burning all of this karma in every fight following the rules to the letter about the time it takes to perform your Karma Ritual? The 3rd edition rules state that it not only takes 1/2 hour to perform the ritual (and it's not a simple meditation, it's a complex ritual that clearly cannot be performed in all places), but also that you can only use it once per day. How on earth are you getting through adventures where you're burning through ALL or HALF of your karma? Is it just a matter of telling the GM that you're performing your Karma Ritual and all the details are getting hand waved?