By the way, I'd still recommend that Initiating/Submersing should require admin intervention.  The same with buying (off) Qualities.

That kinda stuff happens so infrequently per character that it shouldn't generate a tremendous workload, and since it represents a major change in a character's life it should probably have a GM present.

Personally I think every PC should either jump through a flaming hoop or cook Melkir a steak everytime they want a skill raise. Melkir, how do you like your steaks, for future reference? ?

Seriously, though. I tend to be pretty generous with skill raises in TT settings, but I usually ask the player to describe some things they do to prepare to become better at whatever. If they point out things they have done on past runs, then that is fabulous. If they make talk of things done in downtime, I usually want them to be pretty specific. If what they describe seems vague, I usually design a setup for them to use that area and can then justify the raise afterwards.

Some people are better at things than others. I know a guy who has been shooting rifles his whole life, and he is simply phenomenal with them. He seems to have a natural talent for doing it, and I imagine that he has a high skill in it, even though he probably hasn't practiced as much as other people. The thing is though, is that he is not exactly the cream of the crop in other areas, and seems to have a tough time grasping things outside of his scope.

So basically, while certain skills should not be barred from PC's if they have the karma to raise it, even to max, but don't think that every skill should be like that for everyone. If you have a PC who is centered on rifles, then expect to get grinded when you want to raise your forgery skill, as forgery is not what you are all fragged up about, and will probably need to spen some IC and downtime working on it.

There's my two cents, try not to choke on it. ?

I'd wander through all the posts and make point by point refutals, but I'd have two problems: (a) Most of the points made are valid and understandable and (b) Apparently I just got tag-teamed by the debate club.

I don't agree with many of the points raised, but at the same time I don't really have any passion for this topic. I have seen numerous cases in the past where a justification system would have been a good check to have in the system, particularly as people are raising their skills to insanely high levels. With the system in SR4 being as it is, those concerns are certainly diminished, however with people being as they are, there will still be interesting situations, and I don't believe that it makes for a good game for everyone and their brother to have multiple 6s and a 7 in skills and attributes, particularly as you expand the scope of the game from 4 people ?of tabletop to 100+(?) of an online world. At the same time, that could be what was intended, or that could be how the majority of people want to play the game. If it was, justification is pointless. I don't think it was, but I seem to be in the minority.

My focus is computer programing, yet i quickly picked up and was good at being a lacrosse goalie, a hunter, a target shooter, airsoft, i'm picking up graphic design decently quickly, I picked up pool fairly quickly, and the list of things goes on. I know many many other people like that. Yeah they have a few failings in certain area's but...just because they focus in one area doens't mean its any harder for them in other area's. And I think that the assumption that if you focus in one area, then other area's are going to be harder to get better in/raise just because they're really good in another field is rediculous.

I never said that it would be hard or take longer for everyone, just that you would need some justification. My friend tends to mess around with guns instead of working on other things, but when he puts his mind to it, he does fine, though not without putting time and effort.

You may have a knack for computer programming (maybe you studied a long time, maybe not). Actually, raising skills to decent levels is rather easy, both in a game and in RL. But would you say that you are as good of a lacrosse goalie as a computer programmer? Would you consider yourself as proficient as someone who is a professional, and may have been working on playing his whole life? How can you say you are focused in computer programming if you are just as good in other things?

You didn't just say 'wow, I know how to be a lacrosse goalie, and did nothing to do so! I just yanked it out of my hoop, this fabulous skill!' Surely you practiced and became good. Whether it took a long time or short, you didn't get that skill until you worked on it. It is the same in the game. If you are sitting behind a desk working on computer programs, and have invested a lot of time and your background into doing it, don't expect to become a better lacrosse player until you suit up and work on it. Also, people tend to learn at different rates, so for the purposes of a game setting, it would probably be best to make a median learning time, or create a curve based a mental attribute.

Oh, and no pun intended.

They're harder to raise because you've been spending all your karma on the Nintendo Duck Hunt skill. But anyway. I'm just here to point out again that queues don't take a long time anymore. Most are picked up immediately, and done before the day is out. The only ones that take more are legwork and RP queues that I have to write IC shit for. I'm not trying to make an argument for or against the system anymore, just stabbing assumptions in the face with a dinosaur. A big, pointy dinosaur.

Well, that does call for a 'woot', doesn't it?

Waffle, what a chum! 

Let me use an analogy here to describe what I think about the time waiting idea for the +spendkarma command.

Let's say you're driving your ferrarri. ?You're driving it with the pedal all the way down. ?You are going too fast. ?After doing this for too long, you start to smash into things and experience engine problems, and then you crash and burn. ?That's what happens on an SR3 mux- everything is too fast, it leads to problems.

Now, your ferrarri is toast, so you go ahead and downgrade to a low powered moped with a top speed of 40 mph. ?No matter how hard you jam that accelerator, you're not gonna go too fast. ?You won't crash, or experience engine failure, you'll just cruise along at a reasonable clip. ?That's SR4 with the pretty extensive limits on karma gain.

What you're proposing in terms of a time limit, Mark, is that we drive our low powered moped with the breaks on. ?Now we're not gonna go anywhere at all; we're going to watch ants crawl along the side of the road faster than us.

What I'm saying is, now that we've put a really serious damper on the speed of karma growth, why pull the e-break on character advancement? ?It seems like you're creating a dichotomy between karma gain and character advancement, but they are the same thing. ?It's easy to get into the SR3 line of thinking the two as different, since karma affected both your karma pool and your stats. ?However, karma is now useful for nothing at all whatsoever other than raising skills and attributes (and technically reputation stuff, but we'll overlook that ) ?So, let me paraphrase your above quote, substituting a more appropriate definition of what karma really is, that is raw character advancement potential:

This, coupled with the slow character advancement award trickle, will prevent anyone from advancing too quickly.

We've slowed down character advancement, so combined with our slowdown of character advancement, character advancement will be slower! ?If we do it that way, we're essentially taking what's already been done to curb karma bloat and modulate advancement speed, and then doubling it (if not more.) ?If it takes you a full year to accumulate 68 karma, then great. ?That's one hell of a damper. ?I see no reason why you'd need to take another year (or year and five months from your example, but I realize you didn't necessarily mean that we HAD to use that standard) to do another raise. ?Yes, MUXes are a long term thing, but I'd like to have my character advance over periods of months, not decades. ?+karmaspend = good, +waituntilyoudie = bad.

So much energy wasted on wild hyperbole.

Change the time unit of "weeks" into "days," then.  Or "X days."  As I said, the admins should decide what temporal rate feels comfortable to them: fast enough to make it fun for the players yet slow enough to at least somewhat resemble reality.

The boogieman of advancement speed has always been the fear that Joe Novice is going to turn into Joe Expert overnight just because he's stored up a lot of karma. Obviously there needs to be some sort of temporal bottleneck to govern the advancement rate; it's much more preferable to a bottleneck saying you can earn only so much karma over a given period of time.

But if Joe Novice, during those weeks of time, had actually been spending his karma he could by the same date be equally skilled.  Lemme explain.

1) Joe Novice waits 6 months worth of karma to raise a skill from 0 to 4.  Much less useful to him, but he's finally sure of where he wants his character to go.  0 to 4 in 6 months.

2) Joe Novice spends his karma regularly, using a delayed system of governance over the course of 6 months to get a skill of 4 from 0.  0 to 4 in 6 months.

There's two options and advantages to both.

First example, Joe Novice can alleviate some of his nervousness about spending his karma by working out a growth chart for his character and how he wants it to advance.  Roleplaying his character in subtle different ways to see if a social skill or combat skill might be more beneficial (which includes fun, and thematic benefits as well as +roll).

Second example, Joe Novice gains the use of another skill over the period of 6 months till the point of his dedicated karma to such a venture.  So over the first few months a skill of 1 isn't so useful, but prevents defaulting, and than up from there till having a 3 for quite some time to gain a huge benefit from having already put points into that skill (cause now its actually an useful amount of dice) until finally reaching the apex of 4 where the character wants to leave ths skill.

I would much rather do option 2, I know pretty much where I'm going to spend my karma, so I'll spend it as soon as I get it in a methodical, already worked out fashion, modified by Roleplay situations that might crop up to change my character's focus.  I dislike just having karma sitting around on my +sheet, its pretty wasteful, and moreso in SR4.  So if someone wants to hinder themselves for 6 months and suddenly go from 0 to 4, I don't see why we shouldn't let them, by all means we ought to advise them on how better to use their karma.

Verisimilitude.

Like it or not, that bottleneck is already here to stay, see the +awards thread.  We've already traded the ferrarri for a scooter and there's no going back.

Justifications aren't based on how well you write the justification, they were based on the content, not language.   And if you can write that long a post, you could write an approved justification.

Second, the guidelines on backgrounds have nothing to do with whether the person can write a good story. Once again, it's about content. 

Third, if you're on a MUSH, you are here to write.

And it may be a scooter, but it's the flyest, most blinged-out scooter around. Spinnaz!

Really? I can think of plenty of ways to raise attributes. It's just that it's a long, painful process of introspection, self-criticism, and difficult, conscious effort. If you're deficient, or even average in a mental attribute, seeing a psychiatrist would help. This applies particularly to charisma, where you can work on self-esteem and confidence issues, but also to intuition?understanding the self is the key to understanding the world around you?and willpower, to develop your self-control. Logic might benefit a little from it, but strengthening your skills of intellectual rigor would be better executed by attending an institution of higher learning, and doing fuckloads of logic puzzles and lateral thinking problems. Of course, if you're already above average, it's harder. You've got to work a lot harder, which is partly explained by the increase in karma needed. Your character also needs a motivation to try and become better; after all, they can't see their +sheet or the +rolls. Maybe they have a family history of addiction, and see themselves potentially falling into the same trap. There's a reason to want to raise Willpower right there. They key is, these are all much more RP-intensive sorts of things than raising skills.

That was kind of a jumble, but at the end what I'm trying to say is that raising attributes has to be a character thing, more than any other way of spending karma. The unfortunate truth is that most people don't change much once they reach a certain point; they're comfortable with the way they are, even if the way they are is fucked up. You need an IC reason to even want to raise it, and getting there requires lots of little steps along the way every day. Mustering up the courage to talk to the cute boy/girl at the bar, listening to the voice inside you when it says to go left instead of right. All of these are the sorts of things that you need to RP out, and that's what raising attributes is.

I have, self-admittedly, never ever ever written an @queue request that ever once, not never, ever ever was for myself.  It didn't help my character, it didn't improve my RP, it didn't make me 'think' about what I wanted to spend my karma on.  I know that stuff from the character, I feel the character's ways of moving, and that's how I pose.  I don't have to sit down and think about 'What would my character do?'  I just get into a 'mode', a yoga if you will.

My character would be better if I gave her tight-rope walking.  Why?  Well, I dunno, she was interested in it when she saw Jack do it the other day.  So what's she gonna do to learn it?  Roleplay, I'm going to go out and ROLEPLAY all about it, my sublte increase in interest, my magazine reading, lots of poses that infer my character's been looking it up online.  And when I feel I'm ready, I want that skill raise.  I'm not going to be bothered to share that with a staffer, why?  Cause they only care if its game balancing, they don't nor can, care about my character its a fictional being.  They can't know my character like I know my character.  So, when justifications are required, I write something vague and limited.  I've had a 90+% success rate doing things that way, getting whatever increase I felt was necessary for my character, doing a justification that the particular, individual, staffer thought was equivalent to the total.

At some point you just have to give up, and bite the bullet.  I let the staffer in charge of my @queue tell me exactly what is necessary to get the justification, I jump through whatever hoop they want me to, and than I can continue to develop the rich story surrounding my character once all that hubbub is done.  That's why when I GM, no matter if the person is a great RPer or someone who'd pose 3 word garbage sentences, I let them get whatever increase they want.  The game is just as much fun for me as a GM, and the players have just as much fun.  Challenges still abound at the appropriate level to be difficult but not impossible.  It doesn't matter if the campaign lasts a year or 2 weeks, it all still works out.

With SR4 being as it is, I do not see any reason to require justifications.  The book barely asks, it doesn't give guidelines per level, but says that GMs should let them through but might require you to say something like, "I go to the shooting range."  It doesn't say that won't fly for an increase from 6 to 7.  The examples in that section are all worthless to type up, wait for, and even look at for the MUX as a whole.  Why bother doing it?  I'll jump through the hoops if you make them required, as I'm sure anyone else will, but that's just hoops to jump through.  Why not just let us play, trusting that we're gonna do whatever justifications we need to in our RP?  That can't really be abused in SR4, you can get at most a 7 in a skill, qualities still need staffers to hand out (as the book says GMs should only hand those out sparringly).  So the only possible area of abuse, can't be abused.