[X] My Assistant

[ornot]

I still don't think paying lifestyle costs twice for a dos you hardly live in is a good idea. You don't eat twice as much after all, or wear twice as many clothes, or catch twice as many buses.

Sure if your safehouse is a nice condo in a good neighbourhood, your neighbours might notice that the house is mostly always empty although I don't think they'd actually poke into it much. It'd be impolite, and they'd probably be grateful the tenant wasn't some loud orc or troll, bringing down the houseprices and having loud parties.

I also get the impression that there are multiple utility providers, and things are charged on an as used basis, so you could have an account with a provider and only get charged the base rate. The company itself is going to have far too many customers to really bother about a frugal consumer. Think about it, when was the last time your gas provider called you up to say "Hi, we notice you haven't been heating your house as much lately. Is everything alright?"

The whole "there's something fishy about that place" effect would be mostly negated by having a safehouse in a nasty place like the Barrens where there are far more suspicious/interesting things going on than a dos that's not in heavy use. Or the dos might be in a warehouse or similar place where people do not, as a rule, live.

[Aaron]

[Edward]

[Eryk the Red]

I made the rule work by keeping it as simple as it was written. You buy one lifestyle. That sets this vague limit on the quality of your lifestyle. Want a low-equivalent safehouse with your Middle apartment? Fine. That's cool by me. But your buddy's Middle apartment might have nicer stuff.

I probably run a different kind of game than many, but this stuff just isn't important enough for us to worry too much about. It's enough to know roughly what kind of lifestyle you have and if you have an apartment, a warehouse space, etc. If they ask for too much, I tell them it counts as a higher lifestyle.

No muss, no fuss.

[Cang]

I just use the 3rd edition lifesytle builder in one of the sourcebooks.. sprawl survival i think. If you want a safe house.. add points for low lifestyle, if you want some chairs in that apartment, then add some more points for low lifestyle furnishing. Makes it easy and you can give a personal lifestyle cost. Ofcourse, i know how somepeople feel about solving SR4 problems with SR3.

[Eryk the Red]

You're damn right I'm opposed to solving SR4 problems with SR3!

That'd require me going and buying old books. ;)

[fool]

THe way that seems to work best in my mind is to have a lifestyle.. medium say, then rent your safe houses (most likely not at the 500/d cost listed in the book,) buy extra sins to rent them under. You have to negotiate this cost with the player/gm, usually it's a percentage of the lifestyle that you want the digs at.
In sr3 the guide survival guide had good guidelines for making up lifestyles. I'm pretty sure its available on pdf through trading. :D

[Aaron]

[Nim]

[Edward]

I like the fact that you can get a short term safe house but sometimes you just don’t want to trust somebody.

Its not a matter of pony over 500 nuyen and you get it. you paid that money to somebody, and somebody probably put you in contact with that person, and the person that last used this safe house knows that it is used as a safe house.

And the paperwork out of character for having a second lifestyle was farley minor. You have one more monthly bill.

[Eyeless Blond]

Lifestyle paperwork is peanuts compared to character gear anyway, SR4 or SR3. Even with the SSG's extra-complicated rules I typically spend more time on my character's clothing than his house, at least the mechanical aspects of each.

But it's the lifestyle rules that get cut. Lifestyle rules which for me make up part of the charm of Shadowrun: no matter what kind of character you make he's always got to have one (or more than one) home, that means he is a part of society, even if he is rebelling against it. In this way lifestyle is, or at least can be, the essential difference between adolescence and adulthood.

The nature of adolescence is that the adolescent is disconnected from society. The adolescent hero changes the world around him while remaining essentially seperate from it. D&D, in this way, is a game of adolescence, with itinerant adventurers wandering the globe, battling monsters and doing heroic deeds, and living out of inns with your group of buddies because you're young, upwardly-mobile, and have nothing better to do.

And all for the price of a couple calculations and a simple monthly bill. :)

[Aaron]

I'm not sure if someone made this point already, but isn't having a "permanent safe house" an exercise in irony? Doesn't the permanent safe house have the exact same traits that makes your permanent regular house susceptible to being tracked down and discovered (e.g. utility bills, neighbors, traffic camera/drone footage of you entering and/or exiting on multiple occasions, etc.)? Isn't the ability to discard a place inherent in a good safe house?

Consider also: how many runs do you do in a month? I've heard one or two, but let's say four, just so we can say one a week. If you get a safe house after each one (usually you'll only need it afterward, since in theory nobody knows you're going to do something illegal until after you've done it, but your proverbial mileage may vary). So once a week, 500¥ a pop, that's 2000¥ per month, the same as a Low lifestyle. And probably with better amenities (like security and obscurity; it's a safe house, after all).

Just my 2¥.

[Edward]

My usual safe house was a low lifestyle in a bad part of town. So no cameras, hacked utility accounts and no sin on the property, so long as once a month the money shows up in the landlords account he doesn’t care that I am not there. I probably told him I wanted somewhere I could take my joyboys to my own pad with the things I want without upsetting the wife or regular girl friend (nothing like giving somebody a little conspiracy to stop them asking questions). All payments made in cash, and no questions asked. None of my regular contacts no this person, I found the place in the newspaper (or similar). Once I have the barest inkling the place has been blown (including taking somebody I don’t trust implicitly to use it) I abandon it stop paying its littlie cost and start a new one with similar set up.

The locks wont be as good as a dedicated safe house, and there wont be CCTV on the entry points unless I set it up myself but if I want a dedicated safe house on a daily basis and short notice I have to go to somebody and tell them I want a place to hide, and then they know that a runner is hiding there, what he looks like and probably my street name. somebody puts the word out they want me and they have all the information they need to sell me out. If I was being hunted I would feel better checking into a cheep motel, affecting drunk with a similar state partner on my arm (sex immaterial) ands slip the attendant an extra 50 nuyen cash

“I seem to have /misplased/ my ID” jacket falls away to expose gun as I turn to partner, giggle “was there anything else we needed”
partner “have candles, need a box of matches” lean in close, whisper to you
you turn to attendant, do you have any ice cubes, and an electrical cord.
With gun visible slap down another 50, “we will expect privacy.” In a mildly threatening tone of voice.

[Edward]

If your getting your safe house in a more up market naberhood you will need a sin but you can claim to be a businessman with a lot of meetings in this town, you want a small place in town that will always be ready for you and just how you left it.

The landlord won’t be in the least suspicious when you almost never use it and will be very happy to have a tenant that won’t wear out the furnishings.

This would need to be associated with a fake sin however

Edward

[Crusher Bob]

Checking into a hotel.motel is probably only a third best option:

The cops (or whoever is looking for you) will probably go over the hotels/motels. You still have to go out to get food, medical supplies, or whatever. If your face is on the TV, going out to buy food and stuff can get you caught.

A safehouse should have all the stuff you need alrady (preserved food, medical supplies, etc) so that you don't have to leave for a least a week, if not two, so that you will have time to heal, have the heat die down, or whatever.

[Edward]

True, a hotel/motel only works for short term, when you don’t need things like medical supplies. Food can be arranged with disguises and such. But being wounded would make people suspicious.

Edward

[Cain]

Safe houses can represent a lot of different things, only limited by your imagination. Disallowing multiple lifestyles to represent these safehouses is just a bad idea. It worked out very smoothly in practice, and was flexible enough to accomodate virtually everything.

A safehouse, by definition, is more private and secure than your normal residence. It's going to cost somewhat more to maintain than a normal doss. I found it much easier to simply abstract the additional costs into the lifestyle rules; the savings from food and transportation were approximately equal to the extra costs.

The problem with using one higher lifestyle to represent several lower ones is this: what happens when a character can't meet the payments? Would he lose them all? Or only the highest one? Or just the one he was using? What happens if the amount he can come up with doesn't manage to properly fit the price categories?

[knasser]

How about a very simple rule. If a lifestyle is active (primary lifestyle, currently used) then you pay the normal lifestyle cost. If a lifestyle is dormant (secondary lifestyle, primary lifestyle but away on extended business), then it comes at a reduced 20% cost.

Let the players indulge in as many homes as they like. If it keeps that Northrup Wasp out of their hands, then so much the better for me.

The game's called Shadowrun not Accountingrun.

[Cain]

Why bother with the discount? In all the years I've used the extra-lifestyles-as-safehouse rules, I've never had a single player complain about paying full price. There's no need for even that extra bit of math; I can just see the character with digestive expansion trying to fight this.

[knasser]

[Thorn Black]

And I love that idea.

[Nim]

[Demon_Bob]

Ya Edward I had problems with that bit in the logic also.

Aside from buying a hotel/Motel Room for every day of the month I didn't really see any way of getting around that "one Lifestyle" rule.

Yes there are people who due to really bad credit and other reasons are forsed to live day to day in a hotel room.

There is still the option of going to the GM and asking "how Much a month to have a second place, tack it onto monthly costs and not call it a lifestlye.
Realizng that you may come back some day and find that some hoodlums have broken in and used it for thier parties.

[Teulisch]

well, if your back-up is nice enough, you could have a live-in maid, someone who keeps the place nice and tidy until you need it. Im sure theres lots of folk who would love the idea of house-sitting for a decent wage. I can see it working for middle lifestyle and above. you just have to pay 10% extra for the house-sitter, plus whatever wage you agreed on (probably that 10%).

generaly, you have 3 types of lifestyles. You have the regular living, the prepared safehouse, and then the long term storage or shop. for the storage, you just buy a permanent squatter lifestyle for a small shed with good security, and put a ton of illegal goods in it, as well as a medkit, change of clothes, and fake ID with some certified credits. bonus points if you hide it in a dead or static zone.