Hi, great work! Question: it seems starting karma is 10 times lower than the original game, but its effect on dice roll is the same (+1 to percentile dice roll). Aren't street-level characters going to fail a lot ?
Viewing post in Astonishing Super Heroes Book 1: Basic Rulebook comments
In our playtests, the ability to rack up Karma via the Profiles plus the "free" milestone of "Quote superhero media in a contextually appropriate way" generated Karma at pretty massive rates. Our system also runs RAW as an immediate reward, whereas the original FASERIP's reward system had some rewards operate on specific time-frames like a weekly reward or the like.
But YMMV. It's trivial to house-rule that it starts the same as Resolve. Additionally, I suspect a good number of tables are going to prefer to remove the "quote superhero media" milestone since it's a bit too meta for many folks coming to what is otherwise a (somewhat) simulationist game system. I encourage tables to find a flow that works best for them over a couple game sessions.
For some behind the scenes knowledge, we tested a straight lift from Cortex (1, 3, and 10 Karma), and a much bigger scale (I believe it was something like 10, 15, 25 Karma). What we landed on in the final game seemed to work best across all our play groups, though I'll readily admit that it did mean you saw lower-power-level characters scrounging for bonuses from Talents, temporary Gear (often acquired through roleplay and Contacts), and calling in Contacts for help. In many ways, this felt as-intended. I liken it to Daredevil Season 1: the highlights might be DD's big one-against-many fight scenes, but don't forget how early he meets Claire Temple, and how quickly others figure out that Matt's regularly getting beaten up (or "walking into stuff"). He pretty regularly needs backup...or else long recovery times!