Hello dumpshockers, how are we all today/tonight (depending upon geographical location)?

I was wondering (as did another couple of my players) how did one start with lots of money?
I care not for the xD6 depending upon social standing (location of "home"), I was after something in the thousands (or high hundreds).
I thought that I would come to the brains trust before I just went and home ruled something.

Thanks,
Scarius

I say it's simple.

You want to start with money at character generation? Pay 1 build point, get 5,000 or other-currency equivalent sum, deposited in the bank or other financial institution account of your choice, stored on a credstick of your choice, or in hard currency format stored in the location of your choice, or else an equivalent sum of precious metals, negotiable bearer-bonds, or other similar easily-liquidated negotiable asset, stored however you can imagine.

You after a backstory?

(spoiler wrapped in case any of my group are reading this)



The opportunities are as endless as your imagination.

Cheers guys, I was going to go with something like that but I just wanted to see if there was an actual ruling on the case

If you have High Lifestyle, you start the game with pretty decent money (even more than you paid for during character generation).

Pay 10,000¥ from your Resources for High Lifestyle.
Pay an extra 1,200¥ to gain +12 on the starting income roll.

You start the game with 4d6+12 x 500¥ (13,000¥ on average).

Bye
Thanee

13000 on average, not 26000.

How does the paying to get a bonus to your starting roll work?

That stuff is all pretty janky. I agree with ShadowDragon: if you want liquid assets, convince the GM to let you blow your BP on liquid assets. It's not really RAW, but it's not really un-RAW… and it's hard to imagine many abuses, except trading time for availability.

Erm... Math SPU malfunction?

You are right, of course.

Bye
Thanee

Oh, there are two simple reasons for wanting to carry LOTS of cash out of Character generation:

1) Adapsin. It's not available when making a character, costs 30k on it's own, and is only useful if getting at least 2 Essence worth of cyber after treatment. For the typical street sam, it is utterly useless. They haven't the money or the unused essence to make proper use of it in play. A few cyber-adepts have uses for it, however.

2) Gear with availability above starting limits. You want something really nifty for your character, but it's not on the "allowed" list for startign characters. So you port money into the game and buy it a week later.

Both cases are simply attempts to get around the restrictions for character generation.

That's what I'm saying: in both cases, you're trading in-game time to get around availability… which seems fair. You're also paying surgery and hospitalization, and Lifestyle, etc. Adapsin, specifically, requires tons of cyber *after* game starts.

I just make Adapsin available at character generation. It rolled out in 2070, and it's now 2072/2073. It's so far behind the SOTA by now that it might as well be first-generation cybereyes.

I kid, but frankly, that whole "Adapsin isn't available at character generation" thing annoys me. Either let people buy a 10% blanket essence reduction on cybertechnology with nuyen, or don't, no flimflammy, wishwashy, bullshit half-measures.

Why not just get the Adapsin treatment prior to upgrading your basic 'ware to alpha/beta/delta? Wouldn't the bonus apply to said new 'ware, thus not eating up as much of your essence hole?

Just saying that there's still a use for it, for the sam who wants to upgrade.

---

The other reason to bring lots of cash into game is to buy whatever tools you need (skillsofts, special gear, etc.) for that first run. Having a large amount of cash on hand can actually obviate some basic first runs.

Most Sam's I've seen never had the cash to upgrade their most essence-intensive 'ware.

Because the game is extremely stingy with it, for some reason, having Johnsons hiring people with a hundred and fifty thousand worth of cyberware and trying to get away with paying them only 2,000 to take a week and commit a dozen felonies in five different jurisdictions.

What is Adapsim?

Augmentation, pg. 90.

A 0.2 Essence, 30,000 genetic therapy treatment that gives you a blanket 10% Essence cost reduction on cyberware.

Err, yeah. What Eratosthenes said.

I coulda sworn I read somewhere that the more-or-less "standard" rate for a team of starting PCs was 5,000 nuyen per person, for a low-risk job.

Perhaps, but I'd think that early adventures would want to be more generous, not less, so players can shore up holes in their character sheets, before you start making them pinch pennies. Yet, On the Run, ostensibly a low-risk job, has the Johnson pay 10,000 . For a five-man band, that equates to 2,000 apiece. No wonder the wisdom of the old-hat shadowrun player in my group is to steal literally everything that isn't nailed down, and bring a claw hammer for the things that are (a wrench for the things bolted down/cutting torch for the things welded down, etcetera.) He even took a Tanamous contact specifically so he'd have a way to make money off the corpses of anybody they have to kill.


That's the behavior of someone who is absolutely convinced he needs every scrap of cash he can get.

Published adventures tend to low-ball the characters, you'll get a lot of what ShadowDragon8685 is saying. Then you'll have the odd well paying job where things are simple.

Hey thanks Erat & SD for answering my Q on Adapsim.

Yeah we seem to get jobs that pay at least 10,000 per runner, not per team. And we still look for ways to make extra cash every module..

I don't blame you. When you're barely making the money to keep making payments on your Middle lifestye and trying to decide whether or not to try spoofing some or all of your lifestyle costs in order to have money to buy ammo, anything going wrong - as often happens in Shadowrun - can put you in trouble with no bolt-holes or safehouses to run to, at which point you're basically on the run for your life and dodging enforcers at every street corner.

As it says in my sig, Runners aren't going to commit multiple felonies than they could get by carjacking a Ford Americar (Honda Spirit in 2072, I guess,) and having the group troll hock it for 20% to the nearest chop-shop. If you're asking them to commit dozens of felonies, you'd better be willing to pony up.

While I think 2,000 new yen/PC/run is a little too low for anything other than a straightforward milk run that can be accomplished with minimal fuss, I am not the sort of GM who panders to PCs who won't get out of bed for anything less than 10,000.

I pay around 5,000/runner for starting jobs, with the pay and risk increasing to 20,000/runner and beyond as the PCs establish a reputation. In my game Grand Theft Shadowrun has its own problems (gangs and organized crime getting pissed off about you cutting into their territory, not to mention the fact chop shops never pay more than 10% a vehicle's value on account of it being hot, requiring an overhaul to remove stealth RFIDs etc).

I guess it all depends on the playstyle and PC overheads: for example, if you play a game where burning your fake SIN every mission is de rigeur, that cost should be factored into the payoff. In my games, R4+ fake SINs won't have to be burned very often if at all (unless the PCs do something stupid and get arrested or whatever).

As to the OP's question, I wouldn't allow someone to buy liquid assets during CharGen to use in-game, but that's just me ...

You figure out a way to start with a Luxury lifestyle as cheap as possible, and 1200 unspent nuyen to bump the roll up as high as possible.

I can do it with a single build point, but the technique is probably going to make people here furious.
Half because its cheap, and half because they didn't think of it sooner.

Alright sir, I'll bite. Enrage me.

Several options.
1) Starting nuyen with advanced lifestyles is based on the rating of the lifestyle, without the qualities. Pile up negative ones to get a cheap luxury life.
2) Oodles and oodles of roommates.

Also remember that you only need a total of 21 lifestyle points for it to count as a luxury lifestyle. 15k is a lot cheaper than 100k

It's not the worst thing you've done, Udoshi. … By far!

It involves obscure text in the advanced lifestyle section in the runner's companion. Specifically, for Hotels, and paying by the day.

I'm actually pretty sure that while it looks different (at first glance) on that table, that the underlined values are the starting points for the lifestyle levels, not the end points.

i.e. anything from 10k to 90k is high, and 100k onward is luxury.

In fact, I think that those underlines are not even meant to mark the range of levels, because the advanced lifestyles do not really seem to have such a level (which is kinda silly, because some rules refer to your level of lifestyle; like the starting money, or healing times), but only to mark where the standard (non-advanced) lifestyles levels are located LP-wise.

Bye
Thanee

Not strictly true.

Remember, the advanced lifestyle system still works out to be exactly the same as the basic lifestyle system. A low lifestyle is the same as spending low in all categories and works out to be the same price as a basic low lifestyle from the core book.

This means luxury is 30+ points, because it starts at 100k/mo.

Also worth noting is some text says that qualities can't bump you up for down a grade, only influence the price, so negative qualities won't mean you start with less money.

What I mean is, there isn't anything written about how you work out your lifestyle level. It only ever talks about lifestyle costs.

Bye
Thanee

I wouldn't allow someone to buy a lifestyle for less than a month at CharGen and call it such. I also wouldn't allow paying roommates either (the Dependent quality is just that, someone you also have to shell out for). Of course, if the team gels in-game and decide to live together that is a different matter.

I am also with Thanee in that I believe the +ve/-ve qualities in the advanced lifestyle rules affect your final lifestyle "rating", although I realise that the wording is fickle enough for Udoshi to argue the opposite; in which case it is up to the individual GM to decide whether or not Udoshi's trick would work on their table.

People IRL do not lower their lifestyle if they can help it, so once characters are on the grid they will have to make a very persuasive IC reason for reducing their CharGen-chosen lifestyle; what they start with is what they cling on to for as long as possible, unless of course the money is flowing and they decide to move up in the world ...

What.

What.

RC 153, first paragraph. Page 161, under Lifestyle Qualities, first paragraph but last sentence.

Sense make you not do.




This one I'll actually quote for everyone's clarity.



Turns out 100,000 / 30 is actually pretty affordable.

Well, that says that you can simply pick one of the basic lifestyles and that those correspond to the given LP values. And that Qualities do not change that level.

But it does not say, what kind of lifestyle category LP 18 is, for example. Is that "Middle" or "High" or just "LP 18"?


Or I'm just blind, which is entirely possible... but I can't find anything there about how to work that part out (apart from the table and some guesswork).

Bye
Thanee

Yeah, if you make a run every day.

Bye
Thanee

Or as an up-front investment to, like he said, milk the most out of the random money.

Starting nuyen for a Luxury lifestyle is 4d6x1,000 . If you have any left over from Resources, add +1 to the dice roll for every 100 left, to a maximum of thrice the number of dice rolled. So, with one dot of resources, he can pay for a day of a Luxury lifestyle (3,334 ) and have 1,666:nuyen: left over. That's more than the 1,200 bar which is (4x3)100
So, he'd roll 4d6+12, and multiply the result by 1,000. Statistically speaking, that's an average of 26,000 , though it could range as low as 16,000; and potentially as high as 36,000

Not bad for an investment of 4,534 . Frankly, it sounds like the character would be coming down off living it high from the rewards of one of those rare really well-paying jobs that you don't get screwed on, that was pulled off so perfectly they don't know who did it.

That's only the first week, though.

Anyways...

I don't really see where that part about calculating daily rates frees you from the part in the rulebook that lifestyles are purchased in one-month increments.

And you still have to get past that "Gamemaster's Approval" part, also.

Bye
Thanee

That's a Middle lifestyle costing 8000 a month.

I would say, that from available evidence, that yes you are blind. Or not properly looking on page 153

One of their example lifestyles (the Red Hat Organic Living Co-op) has 10 paying roommates, each paying 494 . That's a fairly explicit allowance by the rules to have paying roommates. Also a good bargain is having a Perfect Roommate (2 LP), which makes for a cheaper lifestyle at most levels (20-22, as well as 1-5 are more expensive to go two steps up+10%)

Could you explain it then.

All I see there is a table where certain points that correspond with the basic lifestyles are labeled as such (and underlined).

15 LP equals Middle.

There is no information that I am seeing what 18 LP equals.

Bye
Thanee

I've never heard of these advanced lifestyle things, as I've tried to avoid Runner's Companion as much as possible. This all sounds like a steaming pile of exploitableness to me.

If someone has an 18 lp lifestyle then its going to be broken down into sections and qualities, so you're going to need to give me more information for me to decipher it.

I'm not sure why you're having so much trouble, because its a really easy system to understand.



The advanced lifestyle things are actually one of the more awesome things in the RC.

I don't know why you avoid it. On a whole its basically a great book. I care less about the Build-a-furry(surge) and Edward Clones(hmhvv) than all the other goodies in the book. The real gems in that book are the New Qualities, Group Contact Systems, Advanced Lifestyles, and the new drones/security tech explanations.

But basically the advanced lifestyles go from having basic non-descriptive generic lifestyles to things that actaully matter. Good security, poor security, access to decent food or clean water, harder rules on guidelines for when your SIN is checked for certain neighborhoods, whether you have room in your warehouse to do automotive works....
Its pretty much great.

I will point out that you can abuse basically any rule if you use it the right way. Just because something is exploitable if the gm doesn't put the foot down doesn't mean its bad.

Not really. It's just someone saying "I'll buy just one day of Luxury lifestyle, at a hotel, so I can start out with the resources you get for a Luxury lifestyle!" Most GMs would call bullshit on that, so it's not really a great exploit. The advanced lifestyle rules are pretty interesting, and not as hard to use as they look at first glance.

Another way to start out with some cash is to use PACKS. They disregard the usual rules about starting money, and tend to put the leftover cash from their gear PACKS into credsticks. Although, again, the GM will probably call bullshit if you overabuse that.

That is not really relevant for my question, but sure...

Let's say 4/4/4/3/3 with no qualities, which comes out at 18 LP.

So, is this Middle or High lifestyle? And why?



I perfectly understand how the system works. The only part where I am not 100% sure is, the part I mentioned.

Bye
Thanee

The first thing to understand is that Middle/High is now a 5-point range, not a fixed value. The starting range just happens to work out to be identical cost/effect to the core book ones.

Middle starts at 15.
High starts at 20.
18 isn't 20, so its still middle.

Now, see, I read it as:

0 = Street
1-5 = Squatter
6-10 = Low
11-15 = Middle
16-20 = High
21+ = Luxury

I.e. that the dividing lines in the chart indicated the breakpoints. And since 0 was only on the side of "Street"...

Read it from the top down. Luxury doesn't start at 15k/mo.
(or rather, from the bottom up: most expensive first)


The line denotes the point at which that category starts, and it stays at that value until the next one takes its place.

You can also tell by the increments the prices jump up by.

I interpret it like Udoshi does, but only because I am on the conservative side when it comes to rules interpretations (meaning I usually pick the more stringent interpretation). In actuality, the lines demarcating Low, Middle, etc. are only there to indicate where those standard lifestyles fall within the range, not to label the range either before or after them. In other words, someone who simply picked Middle lifestyle would have each category at 3, for a total of 15, and pay 5,000 per month.