I've been thinking about the lifestyle rules in Shadowrun and I was wondering what part do the lifestyle rules play in your games?

I think it really depends on the downtime of missions and how you bridge the gaps. It's like DnD, in my opinion. Are there moments between runs/dungeon crawls? Is there a chance of being traced back to their home?

*Sighs* I wish.

So far in the games I've played, absolutely nothing. It's all fluff that has not effect on the game at all. If the GM wanted someone at your door step then they showed up. How much effort you spent trying to hide your house didn't matter. I spend nothing more then the bare minimum for a reasonable lifestyle. Ususally low, the rest is all a waste. Which is actually disappointing because I think there's a lot that can be done between adventures, but it usually comes down to no one wanting to sit around and wath another player run errands and doing individual character stuff between adventures.

depends on the group.

Lifestyle = basics of your characters clothing.

So if you have a low or worse lifestyle and try to blend in at say a luxury resort. You better drop some nuyen on a set of clothes for the run or you will stand out in the dregs you wear.

It also had an effect on some social interactions, kinda hard to charm a high society brat when you're smelling of BO with a street lifestyle

- Lifestyle defines a character for me. Yes, you can make do with a low lifestyle. The question why your char does with say 200k¥ annual income has to be answered.

- Just where you live decides what you can get away with in your neighborhood. Like going grocery shopping with an AR slung to your back? Go cheap then. Like support from KE against petty thieves? Move into a gated community.

- If you are attacked at home: Have you arranged for advanced warning from a gang? Do you live in a flat on the 20th floor with no working elevator or right on top of your garage?

We make use of it-it helps determine what sort of things the Player Characters have just lying around; as well for us it determines a lot of how of the basics: how well they eat, how well they look or dress. In the current campaign we're just hitting the end of the first month of prepaid lifestyle, so now it's time for them to update their lifestyles-up or down.

Yeah, the game I've been running for the past few months has been pretty unusual in that we tend to play out the downtime stuff, incorporate lifestyles and whatnot--not quite on a day-by-day basis (that's the Changeling game I'm in...). For example, one of my players picked "Feng Shui" for his apartment and workshop and then took a bunch of negatives to compensate, including "Worse Neighbors" and has a bias against Dwarves. So, he has a dwarven college dropout chemist for a neighbor--while she doesn't live there, her drug lab is down the hall, also taking advantage of the rather twisted Feng Shui this place has... There have been some excellent RP moments between the two characters, including the Coffee Of Boom ("What's in this?" "Coffee. Cream. WakeMeUps."). Another player picked "Perfect Roommate" which resulted in the creation of a boyfriend-mage character. The PC technomancer has another two (teenaged) technomancers as roomies, making him as old as both of them put together, which has led to some entertaining interactions. And so forth.