
If you are working for a mega, ask they pay you in cyber instead. Your players shouldn't just be taking their payments in money and nuyen. A good karma objective is freeing prisoners or test subjects, as they likely will have nothing to give you but will of course reward you with karma. Things that increase the danger of the mission for more money/karma. Your GM should be offering bits and pieces during missions, so you can dive in for that pay-data or sell off that weird looking proto-type gun you found. The per session payment is just a suggestion, your GM can and should be adjusting it as you go, if you work for a specific person for a group of missions, having a big pay-out at the end is great. So if a run goes for 2 sessions - 10 karma and 20k nuyen.

If you run takes more than the average 4 hours or whatever you run for, then it should be paying more. The reward system is meant per session basis. Realistically, there's several ways about this: Regardless, I'll probably be waiting for Shadowrun 6th Edition before I see anything that attempts to streamline this game! The most important thing, though, would be to streamline the busy-work while allowing the game world to still operate in a believable, realistic fashion.

These actions could bring in more karma and nuyen, provide hooks for actual missions, and breathe life into your characters and the setting.
#Shadowrun dragonfall lucky strike upgrade#
Week by week, or month by month, you could choose actions and tasks ("I want to study spells out in nature," "I want to work for my fixer and do milk-runs," "I want to recuperate and recover my wounds," "I want to replenish supplies and upgrade the armored van," etc.). One idea I had is to push all the between-session busy-work into an elaborate mini-game. In addition, I'd like to see character creation become a simpler process with fewer decisions to make ( "Just how many boxes of EX-Explosive ammo should I buy to store at the location of my second middle-income lifestyle?" isn't what I should be thinking about before I've even started playing), while character advancement absorbs the bulk of that individualizing and customizing that SR is known for. It would be nice to think that Deltaware implants and VTOL vehicles were somehow attainable outside of GM fiat. But it would be nice to see a steady progression from low-level antics to mid-level heists to high-level world-altering events while retaining some kind of balance across all the archetypes. I like the idea that a lucky shot can end the life of even a seasoned runner. I'm not saying Shadowrun needs to emulate D&D, where level 2 characters are simply twice as strong as level 1 characters. But there's something lost when we do that. We might ignore some of the the realism rules, like training and availability.

I'm also sure many GMs ignore the reward guidelines and forge their own paths by creating runs that reward many times the recommended nuyen and karma. So what's the answer then? Well, there are the much-maligned street level rules that I'm afraid aren't balanced very well. All of these factors combine to make Shadowrun very inaccessible to new players and players who want more organic characters that grow over time.

Even then, it can take weeks of in-game time to do your training, making Availability tests, and so on. If you made a mistake during character creation, if your custom drone gets blown up after a few bad rolls, or if you want to develop a new skill later in life, you're relying on a measly 10,000 nuyen and 5 karma per run (each of which could take multiple sessions to resolve) to resolve your dilemma. Similarly, you're expected to be fully kitted out and rolling decent dice pools right out the starting gate. You don't grow into a shadowrunner you start there. That's a conversation that just doesn't take place in Shadowrun table-top, because everyone already starts with 80-90% of the karma and resources they will ever acquire through the course of playing the game. He didn't know whether he should do it or not. I was playing Shadowrun Returns: Hong Kong recently and enjoyed this one conversation with Duncan about his anxiety with getting chromed up.
