I just want to get a general idea of how important lifestyle is to your games

Do your charactors flesh out their homes and actually give them a defined location in the world, or is it more of a relative thing where home is never more than 30 mins away if your in your main city. do your charactors split the rent a single place, or have their own homes. Is your home suseptable to break-ins and has to be secured each time they leave or is it just assumed that nothing in their will be touched.

mostly it is abstract, but if the player doesn't come up with the specifics...the GM has free license

for example, gun bunny picks medium lifestyle and states "it includes all my consumable gear"
I have a series of safety lockers like in seatac, and train station etc... scattered around the city, I sleep in a different random coffin motel every night, sometimes I splurge on a real motel. Usually I find a hotels continental breakfast to sneak in and eat breakfast from.

little things like that...

I'm just starting up a new campaign and I plan on making my players tell me as much detail about their lifestyles as I can wring out of them. I plan on using it for adventure hooks and to add more "depth" to the game. It's up to the players to decide what exactly they've got -- a series of coffin hotel rooms, apartments, squats, etc. -- whatever matches their lifestyle.

One thing I've noticed: If you buy a lifestyle free and clear, no matter what, it will find a way to get blown up.

My character's shack in the barrens in which he had his permanent low lifestyle, got hit by an airstrike. Then a magical sword that he buried nearby turned the entire area into a pool of lava, which then hardened into a circle of obsidian.

lets just say I'm renting from now on.

I would love that, my players hate it and my GM's always gloss over it.


your GM has a problem with the "me against them" he needs to lighten up.

More than that...



Sure you can lose your permanent lifestyle, but since at least some amount of that was investments to maintain it... You should be able to claim that you are entitled to something. Buying a permanent lifestyle is something that as a GM I would applaud, and except for an extreme reason (plot of a story) would never arbitrarily take from my player. In fact, if I did take it, I would make the storyline that took it give the player a way to get it back.

Then again..
..If you have a permanent Luxury lifestyle, that's a good time to retire the character and start another.

After all, if you've worked your way to multi-millionaire status, why would you risk your neck on a 'Run ??


Excepting if you're a very expensive 'Runner [¥100-250k+], and even then the runs would have to be really complex/death-trap/world risking situations.

Truthfully, many of the cannon runs are worth someone dropping a million or two on, even when they say they only want to pay to 15,000. Stealing a 20 million or 200 million research program is worth spending a 1-10% on.

It may be worth mega-bucks, but that's not what the Mr Smith will pay out
And if they are gonna drop that sort of money to hire people, it'll not be a bunch of streetpunks - no matter what they think of themeselves.


There are published runs worth a million ??
Gimme details !!


There's a Cyberpunk 2020 adventure where the Characters are given a budget and time to ruin a company..
..But you can bet they weren't paid anywhere as much as the Mr Smith was gonna make from the deal.

Survival of the Fittest can pay out at least a billion apiece.

Alternatively, Shadows of Latin America apparently has a multi-million one as well.

Heck... good ole Dreamchipper... gambling the future of the company on ¥20,000 per runner (max 4)?

I dunno, maybe your parents are dead.

For some reason this whole thread made me think of this:

This made me laugh out loud!

I feel sorry for you and your character and I don't know but the GM could have been way out of line both times.

On the other hand, as a GM, sometimes you jsut have to take back stuff. Sometimes you give out too much. I tried to handle this fairly.

Example:

My group was a bunch of professional Shadowrunners. No real "theme" to the bunch, tho individuals had some ongoing backstory stuf that would pop up now and then...more and more as time went along.

Anyway, they fnished one of hte pre-gen runs.. the one where they took down the powerful ghoul that had a cover SIN (I can not think of hte name of it now) It was a fun run and had many , many tense moments, but in the end, they managed to defeat the ghoul and assumed his (fake)identity. He had a small waste management facility cover company and they took this over as well, letting it run along and generating money. I let them do this. It was partially my fault, but they had worked up to it. *shrugs*

Eventually, I used this "assett" of theirs to get at them. In antoher adventure they had killed (as in executed) the human assassin partner of a dragon and hte dragon knew they had done this. I let that lie for a few adventures. No reprocussions.

So... as the introduction to having them start the Arcology shutdown adventure, I lured them to the building for a supposed job meet. It was actually representatives of the dragon and they showed the pc's a live feed of of their waste company blowing up... taking out the facilities, their stashed goodies, and their NPC hirelings and a contact or two they had invested in. Then they were given the message by the dragon that he considered the issue "done."

Watching their faces as the company blew up on that little trid scene was priceless. They had gotten complacent. Now, I didn't wipe out their savings, or their little stashes all over Seattle of arms and cash and such, but it was a big reminder to them that they were still pretty small fish in a big, big pond. Then, as they were sitting at the table having made the wise decision to let the dragon's reps leave first, sorting out just what the hell were they gonna do now, the lights went down. Renraku was going offline. That group of runners is still finding their way out.

So, I like backstory; I like for the characters to have defined living places. All my PC's have drawn out plans of their abodes and locations pinned on the map where they are located. Not all of them have ever come up to any great detail, but it's nice having them there for when I need to. If they blow it and get followed home, then we can have them attacked there. At the same time, if they have created intelligent defenses, I don't try to "avoid" them. Sometimes the bad guys are stupid, sometimes they are surprised. Sometimes they are really good. Just depends on a bit of dice and the story. Which, is how RPG's should be in my mind.

Vlad

You sir, are what they refer to on ENWorld as a Rat Bastard DM . I love it when different bits of a campaign come together like that.

since we're very much into role playing we go into a lot of detail about homes and cribs

Usually the guys I run with (and I always GM), about half of them just have "a place", where the other half seem to really think out their place. If ever I am playing in the game, I usually have my place completely figured out in my mind, and for some reason I am usually the only person who ever has a mass-transport vehicle. The GMC Bulldog Stepvan is amazing, I say. Usually my "place" gets used for home base for all the runs. And I keep my players on their toes, because in the off chance I am playing one of my own characters in my own game (I know this is probably bad P&P ettiquete, but when only 2 or 3 guys are signed on for a run, sometimes you need to stick in a good old street samurai to assisst in the firearms department). Of course, all of my players fear me, because I have had raids hit our planning room (aka. my characters living quarters), twice. If they know I'm not afraid to let my own character and all his stuff get blown away, then they definitely think twice before doing anything stupid.

That is exactly what I'm hoping to pull off in my game as we get rolling. I only hope such priceless moments show up from time to time.

Oh Johnny, Johnny, Johnny..
..How could they do that to you >sigh<