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[Iduno]

The topic about cyberdeck prices made me think about the price of everything in the shadows, especially upgrading. Wall of text incoming.

It's a conceit in the game that you are poor and downtrodden, but also somehow have insanely expensive gear. The major question that keeps coming up is why does anyone even run? If you can afford even a mid-level deck for a quarter of a million nuyen, get a side job instead and live off the money you already have. The powers that be in-game should be aware enough of that possibility to make it easy to get just one more upgrade to get a little better, and to put up barriers to prevent improving your life any other way. Out of character, it is a lot more enjoyable to be able to feel like the character is improving and has a purpose. Better, a lot of the information is in the fluff.

The old Decker freeware game did a pretty decent job of that. You needed to make enough money each month to make rent, and there were benefits to getting good enough to make enough each month to pay higher rent. It's a terrible cycle that only benefits the people in charge, but it doesn't feel that way from the character's point of view. Shadowrun doesn't have much reason to have a higher lifestyle. Maybe you'll get shaken down or robbed at a street lifestyle if your GM remembers or just wants to punish you, but there aren't any rules for it. Likewise, you may be able to pay for ammo or bad weather gear or other things through lifestyle if you make the case for it or your GM thinks about it, but again no rules that I have seen. Using lifestyle to determine availability of gear or ease of travel (who builds or maintains a highway into the barrens?) would make sense, and shouldn't be terribly difficult to make rules for. The rules already exist for getting favors from contacts, and could be adjusted to make sense for getting minor legal gear through lifestyle costs. That would add one more system, but lower the amount of gear-tracking necessary. Nobody wants to go shopping for rope and a raincoat. I'm sure someone can come up with other useful benefits/problems with different lifestyles. Disease? Neighbors who call the cops? Landlord changing the rules if they don't think you can afford a good enough lawyer to fight them?

More on upgrading: cyberware upgrade paths in a book instead of houseruled would also be nice. Wired 1 -> 2 -> 3 should happen often enough that someone could have written down "x% more than the difference between the 2 pieces of ware, to cover surgery costs and replacing bottlenecks. Must be the same grade. These other pieces can also be upgraded/added to this other type of ware for x addition cost." Enough of a cost that it's cheaper to get the best right now, but cheap enough that most people will still just upgrade. And it's not like cyberware is so new that nobody has figured out how to upgrade it yet.

Cyberdecks and programs should be the same. Fluff has said that people build their own decks, upgrade what they build/buy/find, and program at least some of their own (trade/buy the rest). 4th edition tried to make rules for that (with 6 month interval extended tests for a single piece of software), but didn't get them right. Maybe make static-attribute decks that cost less and have reasonable home-building times and costs. Static attributes would allow piecemeal upgrading and specialist decks. Can only afford one upgrade right now? Why not get better at stealth and let attack lag behind (or whichever you prefer)? Less generic, lower barrier to entry, continual upgrades possible, and the current system is still available. It also allows hand-me-downs. Maybe grey ICE burnt out the best chip in a specialist decker's deck before the unlucky runner got a bullet in his/her brain, but with a cheap replacement on that one chip it's good enough at everything else for some street kid.

The other barrier to keep you hungry but able to upgrade to military-grade gear is also in the fluff. Runners can be paid in corp script, resources, favors, tradeable gear (a crate of Ak-97s), and other forms of barter or currency that works in the shadows but can't pay rent or grocery bills. This could require the most rules and complexity (not necessarily), but would answer one of the questions that comes up pretty frequently. Handwave the money you have as fitting into nuyen and shadow currency made up of whatever you got paid in. It's one more number to track without any tangible benefits, but would add flavor and an in-game explanation to the game world. Again, you have the ability to improve your gear, but not retire. Your only ability to improve your lot in life is to use the shadow currency to improve yourself/gear, and work better as a freelancer for the people in charge. They'll pay you a bit more nuyen, and you might get a nicer apartment while they profit off your work.

Thoughts?