Karma
Earned as you play, spent on growth, pooled for rerolls.
Karma is Shadowrun's experience reward: players earn Karma points as a game goes on. In the third edition and earlier most of them go into Good Karma, which is spent to raise attributes and skills, while part feeds the Karma Pool used to reroll dice.
Quick Facts
- Type
- Experience; advancement points
- Good karma
- Spent on attributes and skills (third edition and earlier)
- Karma pool
- Rerolls of failed dice; refreshes about once per scene
Reader's Guide
Raising a skill that is already strong costs more Good Karma than improving an undeveloped one, which nudges specialised characters toward broader abilities. Every tenth point, or every twentieth for metahumans, goes into the Karma Pool instead, so Karma also makes characters stronger overall. The Karma Pool lets a player reroll dice that missed the target number and refreshes rarely, usually once a scene at most, at the game master's call; combined with dice pools it lets players decide how much a given task matters to their character, so two characters with the same statistics can perform very differently. In the 1993 SNES game, enemies drop nuyen while the hero Jake builds up karma.
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Elsewhere in Shadowrun
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