| From: | Luke Kendall <luke@********.CANON.OZ.AU> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Karma Pool (`butt saving') |
| Date: | Wed, 21 Sep 1994 14:10:27 +1000 |
> Well, I'll be damned, I always interpreted that it could be used on any roll
> at all, not just life saving ones. Or by "butt saving" do you mean really
> critical rolls? [...many examples deleted...]
The problem with the `butt-saving' proviso is that it means every use
of karma pool requires a decision by the GM.
In my opinion, that's one thing that makes this rule a kluge.
And consider this: spending karma to reduce a Moderate wound to nothing
means that instead of having +2 on all your target numbers for a long
time, you have no modifiers. So unless you have an enormous karma pool,
if you aren't allowed to spend karma to avoid that wound, then there's
an excellent chance that you'll run out of karma, as you desperately
spend it on almost every roll to save your butt.
So it could be argued quite reasonably, that spending karma whenever
you get wounded is `butt saving'.
You see what I mean? The rule sounds fine, but is actually too vague
to be useful.
Now, some people are staunch defenders of karma pools -
Ivy runs one game where many of the characters have pools in
the hundreds. (She says that you just have to design adventures
which challenge the players. The key to this is to require lots
of tasks that have relatively high target numbers.)
This is what _we_ do: everybody has a karma pool, that refreshes each
game session (unless a session ends in the middle of a firefight
or something similar). For a group of up to 5 experienced runners,
each person has a karma pool of 4. For 8 experienced runners,
reduce this to 2.
Then people use the karma pool when _they_ think the test is
important enough to require some of that precious reusable karma.
Often, this happens when they're trying to save their butt.
Surely, that's simple enough?
> Also, what is the stance on re-rolling other PCs NPCs rolls? If I wanted to
> could I force a re-roll of the bad guys attack instead of re-rolling my
> resistance test?
Why would you want to make them re-roll their failed dice? :-)
I don't know whether you can buy failures for others in a similar
way to buying successes for yourself - but I doubt it.
luke
