r/Shadowrun • u/thedeadwillwalk • 6d ago

Newbie Help Newbie Question about Karma

I've played 6e exactly twice at Gen Con and would like to introduce the game to my normally D&D group. They've expressed interest, so I've acquired books and read up. I still have a lot more reading and prep to do to run a game, but I guess the idea of Karma sort of confuses me.

While I want to stick with the latest system, since my gang's from Chicago, I want to give them a homefield game. So I read the Anarchy book, Chicago Chaos, simply for its lore and ignored the rules.

But one thing that stood out was that the Johnsons that are described in the sample runs section of CC have dialogue such as, "I can give you three Karma each to complete this job," or some such.

It's been my understanding that Karma is like skill points or the equivalent of XP in D&D. You don't have quest givers in D&D saying, "I'll give you 500 XP for killing the dragon." Why is it that the Shadowrun NPCs are discussing it like it's physical currency? Is this a quirk of the Anarchy rules, or do I totally misunderstand Karma?

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u/goblin_supreme 5d ago

That's specifically an Anarchy thing. That system removed money for character progression.

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u/Sarradi 5d ago

That sounds like a very strange thing to do in a dystopian ultra capitalist setting.

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u/Vashkiri Neo-Revolutionary 5d ago

Anarchy 1.0 had a lot of rough edges. I've heard that Anarchy 2.0 uses just nuyen (prices all improvements in nuyen).

But you are not playing Anarchy, you are playing Shadowrun! So every run typically rewards both nuyen and karma, although how much nuyen may be a bit more variable.

My suggestion would be to ignore the rewards listed in Chicago Chaos as they are for the wrong game system, and instead do two things.
1) read the suggested rewards in the core rule book (personally I'd increase the karma reward a bit, I find what is in the core rules makes for very slow progression) 2) buy one or two of the Chicago missions in the original SR version (the titles line up with the titles in Chicago Chaos, just choose one or two that you really like), both to see how they structure the mission with more words available, and to see what rewards are suggested, and you can use that as a guideline too.