- Charprogression in a SR-setting without Karma would just not feel that SR-ish. Sounds silly, but I guess the point itself is conceivable.
This is a bit of a tenuous point... karma and XP aren't that far off. The biggest difference is in the number size; a team makes 4-5 karma a mission max, while a party can make a few hundred XP a quest. So you could pretty much take XP/100 and have a pretty close comparative. The only real issue is the name.
- It already has been established that Karma/XP/Charprogression should not be farmed by grinding a thousand boars ... uh ... gangers, but they should be linked to finishing missions and the way you complete them.
I thought this was a great idea too, but a friend of mine (who is an avid MMO fan) brought up a very important point: not everyone is of equal skill at a game. Hardcore players who dedicate themselves to mastering a mission might be able to pull off getting those really hard objectives to max out their karma totals, but not everyone is as awesome as me (I kid!). Grinding potentially appeals to those people who prefer to sacrifice skill and mastery for time... cas-gamers especially. An achievement system for character advancement risks alienating people who aren't skilled enough at the game to pull it off. You know you'd feel bad for a guy who spends more time playing the game than you, but has only a tenth of the karma because he doesn't have your talents.
- Granting xp for kills would result in an advantage on the 'grind'-side: You would be compelled to farm every single enemy on a map for xp if you would want to maximize your output per mission. Now, this could of course be counteracted by granting xp for enemy units left alive at the end of the scenario, but if you'd do some sort of balance-calculations in the end, you might as well just award the whole Karma/xp at the end of the mission (characterprogression doesn't usually happen at SR during the missions anyway).
Depends on how they handle it. If the XP to Karma ratio is very high (perhaps 10,000 per karma point... maybe a million?), it becomes less effective than simply mastering the missions. The trick is to figure out how to balance this dichotomy; make it so that people who are only talented enough to grind still have the potential to make a great player, while still making it so that mission mastery has a far more enticing prize.