Character Advancement

From Shadowrun: Awakened

Character advancement covers the areas of making characters more powerful through application of resources including nuyen, karma, qualities, and social resources.

Game Rules Description

Advancement in Shadowrun covers the broad spectrum of making character better than they were at character generation by having the player invest time. The most obvious advancement in Shadowrun is karma to increase the rating on attribute, skills, buy and buy off qualities, etc. Purchasing superior tech, more cyber/bioware, and bigger guns are also advancement. Social assets, such as Reputation, Street Cred, and contacts are also advancement. Any reward that makes the player more effective, or can be converted into anything that makes them more effective, is character advancement.

The pacing of character advancement is very important. There will come a time after playing long enough that character will be effectively unstoppable. While this can be a great reward, it is important that it be a singular climax and not a glass ceiling the character runs up against. Before the final achievement of godhood, pacing goes a long way of determining the player's experience. The player's perception of their power level in persistent games is always synonymous with progress. If the player feels they are on a plateau in advancement, then they will feel they are on a plateau in progress and may begin to be disinterested with the game. One saving grace of Shadowrun in this respect is that there are many aspects of a character that the player can advance.

Rules concerning the expenditure of karma will be modeled after those in SR4. This will include the requirement that buying the next level of a skill or attribute carries a cost relative to the current rating. This means character need more and more karma to sustain the same increases in a particular area. Since karma is the single more powerful avenue of advancement in the game, especially for magicians, it is often the largest determinant of character power.

Items bought with nuyen are sometimes costed linearly, sometimes exponentially. Additionally, the payment of missions usually increases over time, if not with required street cred then over the course of a storyline. This means that cash payouts and costs tend to keep a linear increase. This means there should be a steady increase over time. The one downside with items is that only some archetypes require extremely expensive items to succeed. Magicians can advance by buying foci or spending karma, street samurai unequivocally need more money to upgrade cyberware.

While some social rewards, like street cred or reputation, change often, some change sporadically. Also, SR4 doesn't outline any playtested standards for applying them. This means standards for their awarding will need to be discovered as we go.

Technical Implementation

The allocations for each type of reward will be refined as the community grows and we capture empirical data concerning players. The guiding principle of this refinement will be measuring how long it takes for a character to become unstoppable, then extending or shortening this time compared to our expecations of how long a single character should be playable in the game. At the time they achieve ultimate power, it should be well timed with being offered Retirement. Also, the length of storylines may be affected by how long it takes a character to become unstoppable, since most retirement opportunities will be rewards from storylines.

One special issue about character advancement is that not all players spend the same amount of time playing the game. We must strive to maintain a character's reward for time in the game, but at the same time, we do not want a system where the hardcore players dominate the others or a system where the game only starts once you're unstoppable, meaning casual players never meaningfully participate. This means that minor missions will likely yield less of a reward than major missions. These two broad categories of players, hardcore and casual, are the two archetypes to consider when balancing advancement.

Our initial expectation for storyline length is 3 months (12 weeks) for a casual player and 1 month (4 weeks) for a hardcore to go from beginning to the end of one storyline, plus side missions and one-shots along the way.

Assume a casual player plays 90 minutes per session 3 times a week, in 12 weeks they would have played the game for 54 hours over 36 sessions, translating to about 36 missions. Casual players would ideally focus mostly on missions, but still have time for one-shots; assuming 2/3 are campaign 1/3 are one shot, that would indicate a number of about 24 missions.

Assuming a hardcore player plays 6 times a week at 2 hours a session, in 4 weeks that's 48 hours over 24 sessions. Assuming we have a rule of two missions per session, that is as many as 48 missions. This allows for a storyline of 24 missions, plus up to 24 additional missions. It is expected hardcores will be more likely to explore the world, potentially playing sessions without a mission, and are seen as more likely to pursue one-shot missions.

In order to apply the amount of time above, we also need goals for when a character becomes unstoppable. According to an old FASA publication, 250 karma is more than enough to make a player unstoppable. This benchmark seems reasonable even in SR4. Assuming our intention is for 48 missions to yield 250 karma, then the average missions should yield 5.2 karma; critical mission might yield 6 while minor missions might yield 4. Our initial observation is that maxing out a character and performing one storyline may not want to be synonymous. Two storylines may prove more satisfying to the player, in which case the average might be more like 4 and 2 for major and minor missions.