The second is about enemies. If you use the same latent karma for players and foes, wouldn’t the positive karma generated by my bad roll be used up by the next character, usually a baddie? Could you perhaps change the karma sign to account for the fact the enemy got lucky which, in a zero sum game, makes me unlucky?
This is a great point; I should have better clarified this aspect! You are right; if you use the same karma score for PCs and all the NPCs, you get the weird behavior you describe. To fix this, you need to keep track of separate karma scores for each character. It could be a cumbersome operation if you are doing it pen-and-paper, but on a computer, this is a trivial modification of the original script.
The first is tied to difficulty class, as in “the actual number threshold that determines success”. Your post seems to imply that any roll above an 11 is lucky and a roll below 10 isn’t. (In your opening example, rolling a bunch of 8s and 9s in a row could be completely fine when additional bonuses are taken into account.) Is there a way to compute the latent karma scores that take into account the actual success or failure of the attempted action??
This is a more tricky question. Yes, in my post, I implied that 11 is lucky and 10 isn't because the focus was on the dice itself rather than success/failure. This was intentional, but I understand your logic: to some players, it doesn't matter whether you got 5 or 15 if, in the end, you hit the enemy. However, a method that adjusts the dice's roll based on the outcome would penalize good players and help bad players, therefore affecting the game balance. Once again, this could be okay, but it is a more intrusive operation with potentially radical consequences on the gameplay.
