[PauloAM]

Hello guys,

1) Are any of you using the expanded lifestyle rules from Run Faster? What are your impressions? How are you using them? Did your players like them? Talk about it.

2) I personally think that some of the Entertainment options (assets/services/outings) are just for flavor/roleplay giving no benefits in game, but they still charge points for it...what do you think about that? I think players will just skip those...

3) As a GM, I wanted my players to really feel what is like to BE their characters, living in the 2070s sprawls. Do any of you GMs aim for that too? How do you do it? I'm thinking about filling downtime between runs with lots of roleplaying, for example:
    a) going to the supermarket to buy groceries
    b) having a snack (alone or with friends) in some fast food chain
    c) a guy points a gun in the character's face and demands his valuables
    d) character catches a cold
It would be mostly just for roleplaying and feeling like a living breathing character in the cyberpunk future. Any of you already do that?


Thanks for the attention! 

[CyberWomble]

3) As a GM, I wanted my players to really feel what is like to BE their characters, living in the 2070s sprawls. Do any of you GMs aim for that too? How do you do it? I'm thinking about filling downtime between runs with lots of roleplaying, for example:
    a) going to the supermarket to buy groceries
    b) having a snack (alone or with friends) in some fast food chain
    c) a guy points a gun in the character's face and demands his valuables
    d) character catches a cold
It would be mostly just for roleplaying and feeling like a living breathing character in the cyberpunk future. Any of you already do that?

1.) No
2.) No

3.) I don't do this because I guess my players don't use RPG's to simulate real life. Perhaps in a single player game this might be different but having 6 players all going and doing grocery shopping won't be fun for them or me as the GM.

However... I do integrate the feeling of living in a 2070's sprawl in different ways.
- Players who live in crappy areas get robbed at least once per month
- Meetings with Mr Johnson or contacts happen at locations that I can use to infuse the game with more background. (A sports venue, a fast food chain, an abandoned corporate facility, etc...)
- I also use downtime notes between runes to give each character a small handout with rumours and information that has come their way via their contacts. This gives the players a bit more of a connection to their contacts.
- So I integrate the 2070's into the session as part of the scene planning but not as a separate activity.

[Tecumseh]

1) I'm just starting to dip my toe into these. My initial reaction is unenthusiastic. Right now I'm thinking that I like the advanced lifestyle rules from Runner's Companion (4E) better, but I'm going to reserve final judgement until I've had some more time to work with the rules from Run Faster.

2) This is one of the reasons why lifestyles can be tricky. Sometimes there are no crunch benefits (just fluff benefits) while there are real drawbacks, namely a higher monthly cost that can drain needed nuyen. I often try to add minor benefits to encourage players to do things that their character would want to do, namely live a better life between runs. This could be a whole separate topic/thread though, and has been in the past.

3) Personally, I really like this and strive to do it, but as CyberWomble says it can be difficult in a group setting. Often I try to do it with inter-session RP. These can be separate e-mails back and forth between the GM and the player as to what they're doing during their downtime and what life is like on a day-to-day basis. I'm experimenting more with one-on-one games where I try to inject more "life in the 2070s" flavor into the setting. For me, a couple ways I do this are with Shadowrun slang and with Shadowrun product names. I find that anything which is vaguely familiar but also clearly different from our 2016 world really helps differentiate between now and then. Another thing I've used is a shared wiki/blog where I post neighborhood happenings and rumors, which might be pure flavor or might be seeds for future plots.

[brasso]

Some of our table's players have dived right in and detailed their lifestyle, while others aren't too bothered. They have a shared warehouse, which is mainly a drone store, so some flop there as well. I guess it's something for the players to customise for their characters. Where they live has come up in-game a few times (like when the mafia came round and tried to petrol bomb them), and we actually spent quite a bit of a session with the runners just cruising round Seattle looking for a group base.

Our table's runners do spend quite a bit of time running around doing non-run roleplaying, and it can be quite entertaining. We have one runner who is trying to join Club 77 to gain influence, another owns a burlesque nightclub but has just kicked a severe alcohol addiction, and another is trying to kitbash a VTOL, so they all have reasons to go mooching round the sprawl chatting to folks. I've also got them to outline backgrounds, eg. where they were born and raised, where are their parents, brothers, sisters, etc. are now, so family can become involved as well.

On critical glitch podcast, interviewing Bull the ork decker, he was telling of when they first started playing shadowrun, of how much of their time was spent just roleplaying their characters outside of runs, even getting the call during a run, that his wife was in labour. On the arcology podcast, the characters sometimes go shopping for drones, etc. and once went on a run to rob Home Depot to get construction equipment to build their base. I guess this could get kind of exasperating for some GMs, but I do really enjoy it.

[PauloAM]

I agree that in a group it would be kinda tedious. That's why I thought about 2 solutions:

1) Make these parts purely narrated a.k.a "Tell it to them straight"

2) It's an online table thourgh Skype, just schedule individual short sessions 


As for the expanded lifestyle rules....I'm more and more inclined to just not use them...

[Prodigy]

I enjoy the new system, but enjoy the 4th ed one better.

[All4BigGuns]

1) I'm just starting to dip my toe into these. My initial reaction is unenthusiastic. Right now I'm thinking that I like the advanced lifestyle rules from Runner's Companion (4E) better, but I'm going to reserve final judgement until I've had some more time to work with the rules from Run Faster.

The new one is far too limited to really be all that useful. It was better to just tabulate how many LP a lifestyle was and determine the cost from there rather than just giving a handful of customization points that can't be exceeded.

[Herr Brackhaus]

The lifestyle points can be exceeded; that was clarified on these very boards, or in one of the FAQs. I'll see if I can find the source.

[All4BigGuns]

The lifestyle points can be exceeded; that was clarified on these very boards, or in one of the FAQs. I'll see if I can find the source.

Then they need to inform the Hero Lab people of this to get it set up as such there for those of us using it.

[Novocrane]

Each lifestyle has preset levels for these four categories, plus a set of points that can be spent to raise individual levels or buy entertainment options.
Lifestyle categories cannot be lowered (unless, of course, you switch to a lower lifestyle level).
Each lifestyle also has a category limit, listed in brackets next to the base level. The category cannot be raised higher than this limit.

That looks like a hard maximum to me.

2) I personally think that some of the Entertainment options (assets/services/outings) are just for flavor/roleplay giving no benefits in game, but they still charge points for it...what do you think about that? I think players will just skip those...

Anything specific? Options like Patron Of The Arts or Railway Pass are ways to get out of spending nuyen during a meet or run, impressing a client, etc and should be cheaper than not having them as part of your lifestyle, if it comes up.

[Herr Brackhaus]

Clarification: the points should be fixed, as should the category maximums. You should be able to purchase lifestyle qualities without spending points, however. So yes, more restrictive than in 4th but nothing stops your from just houseruling the 4th Edition version right in, given that a lot of those rules are wholly compatible with 5th. Just get your GM to sign off on it.

[Glyph]

One thing I liked better about the SR4/Runner's Companion version was that it described each lifestyle category at each level - in other words, you got a more concrete depiction of what low lifestyle Comforts, or high lifestyle Necessities, looked like.

[Fabe]

 Yeah the 4th edition advanced lifestyle rules were far superior to the current ones. I liked the way the 4th edtion rules broke a lifestyle into fo
categories Comforts, entertainment,Necessities, Neighborhood and Security and then let you select a level for each one based on the original lifestyle levels . That plus more positive and negative qualities allowed players to make truly unique homes for their characters.  I just don't think the new rules allow for that.

 How ever I don't think its the fault of the person who wrote the new advanced lifestyle rules though.It seems more like lifestyle rules were not a priority in run faster so they were not giving the space they needed for rules equal to the 4th editions ones.

[Fabe]

Yeah the 4th edition advanced lifestyle rules were far superior to the current ones. I liked the way the 4th edtion rules broke a lifestyle into four
categories Comforts, entertainment,Necessities, Neighborhood and Security and then let you select a level for each one based on the original lifestyle levels . That plus more positive and negative qualities allowed players to make truly unique homes for their characters.  I just don't think the new rules allow for that.

 How ever I don't think its the fault of the person who wrote the new advanced lifestyle rules though.It seems more like lifestyle rules were not a priority in run faster so they were not giving the space they needed for rules equal to the 4th editions ones.

[AwesomenessDog]

If you think a player is trying to skim on lifestyle cost, you could always tell him that for every day of the week he doesn't go running on average rounded up (minimum 0 for those not-so-hard workers), that's a minimum entertainment point cost reduced by a weekly composure test to "sit idle twiddling your thumbs" that reduces the number by the number of successes as a minus to that total and then apply the cap of the necessities/neighborhood choice. So Twitchie claims she is only going to spend on a street level of entertainment and expects her GM to believe someone with a name like Twitchie could do so. Twitchie only tends to be running or doing legwork around 3 days a week. So she has a Base 4 entertainment cost or medium and a composure DP of 4 reducing her total on average to 3 or low lifestyle entertainment. As it turns out, Twitchie has a low neighborhood and necessities and the GM tells her that it is too unlikely that Twitchie's character could go without some form of readily available entertainment and must have a low entertainment quality. Best done as an out of session thing.