QUOTE (Ascalaphus @ Jul 30 2010, 07:10 AM)
You can hit people up with lifestyle costs after an adventure, based on their actual behavior. Did the "dullard" PC go to all manner of shows and nightclubs? When it's time to settle the Lifestyle "bill", rate Entertainment higher than the player thought he was going to - if that's what the PC actually did.
Lifestyle is a nice tool of abstraction. Personally, I find tracking petty bribes, bullets and other trivial expenses rather dull. It'd be nice to shovel those kinds of things in an equivalent, something like Runstyle. I want to see action, drama, not accountancy.
We do actually do this a lot in our games, not so much increasing lifestyle costs based on what you are doing in downtime, but more like the higher your lifestyle the more things get hand-waived while you are playing. Have a low or streets lifestyle and need to bribe a bouncer to let you into the hot new club... PAY the 50
, have a middle or better... it's absorbed by your lifestyle. This can go a long way in letting your players know that their characters are living like bums too. There are a lot of examples of this that I won'r bother you all with.
Though from the OP it does sound like this GM has a mix of player types in his group, those that want to roleplay (at least some of) the down time and those that don't. Better than average roleplay should be rewarded, but a lack of roleplay shouldn't be punished. Those that want to play up a little of their down time might earn a little extra karma, or maybe some new (low level) contacts or some other benifit for taking the extra time and effort. Those that create a character with little or no personality so that they didn't need to think about down time, or just because they thought that having a character that just went to their recharging station at the end of the mission and stood there would be fun to play can have that character too, but they shouldn't get any extra benifits from that type or roleplay. Playing the personality of a stone really isn't that hard and shouldn't be rewarded.
Another part of roleplay of your character is how different is the character's personality between play time and down time? Just ask your players..."What are your characters doing between misisons?" Any answer is a good answer, but the answers should line up at least a little with what you see during play time. I know that some characters do keep a very tight line between the personal lives and "work" and may have very different personality traits in those two environments, but those should (hopefully) be detailed out to some extent in the character's background and history. Not everyone likes this level of detail, and that's okay but more deatil can (and should be) be rewarded.
Of course all of this is my (and most of my group's) opinion, and we all know about opinions.
-D
P.S.
Sorry if this seems a littel disjointed, I'm at work and splitting my attention.