Heres my problem with the economy at large, and this is a question I carry over from Seattle's current incarnation. Rent.

Okay, here me out. With lifestyle costs, its generally assumed that some character has to either do some runs, waste hard earned Karma on nuyen that really goes no where, OOCly. Now, I know we've all had the experience where, whether its because Admin runs dryed up, we were out of karma, or we just idled because of RL, our hard earned apartments or lifestyles ran out of time and dissapeared.

I don't really /have/ a viable solution, but maybe someone could point one out? How can we stop wasting 5,000 'yen a month on middle lifestyle that we'd like to just abstract? Because quite honestly, in a smaller game, is keeping up with the 'rent' really necessary? Couldn't this just be RP'd. Because as a guy who plays a character who doesn't go on every run that comes along because most of them seem to involve killing a poorly armed Security Guard who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, it gets kinda annoying to say he's living in a coffin.

You're complaining that you can't pay rent on a Shadowrun Mush because your PC doesn't do most shadowruns...

Brilliant.

On the same note, if you don't have to pay rent, what are you running the shadows for? New gear? For what? To not use on a run?

I see Rheiv's point. If you're not a Shadowrunner, then you're screwed when it comes to rent. Unless you put all of your resources into a small business and cater to those making the big bucks, the Shadowrunners. This seem like a solution?

The game is meant to be played. Some effort applied to get what you want. Survival is the name of the game. Play accordingly.

There's always a squatter lifestyle if you don't....

-Hades

So you'd like a place for free?

I don't like this for a couple reasons.

1) Forcing people to pay rent forces them to do /something/ to gain money as oopposed to idle for eternity.
2) What's wrong with someone not earning the nuyen, living in a coffin?

Quite simply, the concern here is that a character's not just sitting staring at a blank wall when I'm logged off. He's out doing things. Things I can Rp about later, whether its something as small as, "I was tracking this corper's wife, and found out she was into some really kinky things." if my character has a 'real' job, as a private detective.

As for a reason my character might be doing shadowruns, if not for the money? He's a Rad, Hooder, or otherwise Goodie Two Shoes who helps folks out a little at a time. Or he could be in it for the Rush. Or he could be in it cause hes a psychopath. The books make it seem like every shadowrunner or person who might delve into the shadows from time to time is always like, 5 days overdue on rent, and about to starve when his or her fixer calls him up. But theres /other/ ways to play the game. Frankly, a lot of characters might 'support' shadowrunners or shadow communities, and some might do it *Gasp* out of the goodness of their heart or something other then money.

Now, if the only way you can keep players 'active' in the game is by making them pay 5000 nuyen a month from sometimes /non-existent/ staff runs (Not blaming anyone here, staff get busy.) I think you've got your priorities set in the wrong place. People should want to go on Shadowruns or do plots because its /RP/. Not because, "Ooooh. Money and Karma." Karma and money is a nice sideeffect (esp. Karma. Mmmmmm. Karma). But the fact that I want to RP a hooder or rad who makes enough cash as a legal PI/Bounty Hunter/Executive Security to scrounge out a middle lifestyle... why is that so wrong?

I acknowledge that if you give folks stuff like this for free, at least in this game (Where the character selection is somewhat limited. In other games, I could easily just RP being upper, middle, or lower class). But getting idled out is a little... ick. What about a 'lifestyle tax' ? RP that most characters at least can scrounge squatter without any trouble, and then just garnish any Run or Karma2Cash nuyen by a certain percentige, continiously, or up to the price of the lifestyle a month. They're paying for it, and don't have all sorts of money to spend on gear as they might, but if they just don't log on during a lot of runs, or get swamped by RL, they don't lose their apartment. Furthermore, restrict this to Low and Middle Lifestyles, with High only receiving such attention if the character is roleplayed properly and has prepositione assets (Buys part of it). As well, encourage characters to look into what class their character would be staying in ICly.

Eh, just my two cents. I know its probably not going to happen.

Well,  one solution to this is to buy permanent Lifestyle.   Which starting characters, even with the right background,  may not be able to do, plausibly,  but I think it's the solution to things like your Medicine Lodge going away if you can't log on for a few weeks. 

The real problem with trying to have the coded rent-paying thing as IC,   is that the closer to the wire a runner actually *is,*  the more likely it is that something *OOC* (like RL)  will mess it up:   once you've made a big score or two, you can usually cover the rent of a Low lifestyle  for a very long time. 

Now,  once you do *this,*   you may be able to RP getting by on working divorce cases as a PI,  or some other non-RP'ed (or really Rpable)    legitimate or illegitimate means of support... 


Now,  clearly, this MUSH is primarily about shadowrunners...   But,  I'd hope that if the place really thrives again, that there's room again for media types and organizations and all.    People really seem to *enjoy*   having someone to talk to, interact with,  befriend,  intimidate,  whatever,  ...that's not necessarily in the life.   

Now, one suggestion I have (bearing in mind I have yet to really examine starting character economics,)    might be making available a simple Flaw:   the name that springs to mind is:  Something To Lose.   

What this Flaw would do is *offset the cost of certain resources.* (I'm thinking:  lifestyle and contacts, primarily.)     Say,  you can have a relatively-stable  business,  but this business relies on your participation,   your good reputation, and your not getting caught breaking the law...   

Say,  you can live in a co-operative urban tribal situation, but this relies on your participation, contributions, and good graces with whatever tribal rules the place has. 

You can be a mild-mannered computer nerd living in your Mom's basement by day,  but by night you are Mr. Masked Shadow-Hacker Guy... as long as Mom doesn't find out...    Mr. Anderson... 


So,  what you'd do is make a write-up of the situation, what it's worth in BP,  what keeps it going,  and how insecure it is,   and the Flaw gives a break on the cost,  depending,  say,  on both how tenuous the situation is....   Mr. Masked Shadow-Hacker might get a huge discount on his upper-middle class lifestyle,   cause,   well,   that's just not gonna last too long,   maybe a business  that money can fix the problems of how you get the money is worth a quarter of what you''d pay,  ...whatever keeps interesting things in reach of starting players.   


And eevil staffers.  










 

Actually, I would make the suggestion that a PC's Private Space not be deleted once Rent is run out. It simply locks itself so they can't get in until they pay the rent.  This would leave your stuff intact. If you decide to 'move' to a better or worse lifestyle, then your junk is placed in your invantory and you rerent the same Private Space (same DB#,etc.) at the new Lifestyle (different attribute and desc). Your private space stays with you the entire lifespan of your PC. If you no longer exist, your private space goes away.

If you have more than one Private Space... Well, let us call all the other Private Spaces you own Secondary to your Primary Private Space.

Your Secondary Private Spaces will do as intended and disappear when you forgot/fail to pay rent. Any gear there is sent either to your inventory, or to your Primary Space, or deleted as Staff sees fit.

This will allow all PCs to have One Primary Private Space. If you can't afford rent, then you live in an alley and store your gear in a trashcan or bus locker or whatever you prefer. You'll always have a place to go and your stuff will be safe. Maybe.

This should solve some of the problems. However, if you really want a Middle Lifestyle forever, do as Harper suggested and BUY one in Chargen.

Its not like you'll need all that other gear.

My main gripe about 'Support' PCs is, most of the time they want more support than they themselves offer. I'm all for them. Support PCs kick ass. But if you play one, don't expect the game to change the way its played just for you.

-Hades

I would expect that the game should change how its run because its a MUSH.. And, uhh, as far as I know, a Middle lifestyle costs... 500,000 nuyen. Which is /impossible/ to buy in chargen due to rules imposed that you can only use 50 BP in resources. Wanna raise the limit to 100 BP in resources? Okay. Except now thats all you have, so your character has no ware, no equipment, and severly limitied skills and/or attributes because you wasted 100 BP in resources buying a lifestyle and nothing else. Want just a low lifestyle. 200K. Well, you could do that and still have enough for... mabye good peice of ware or two. No guns or anything beyond the basics though. So, its rather impossible to /buy/ a lifestyle in Chargen unless we introduce something like Harper mentioned. A Flaw called Something to Lose. Or bring back 'day job', and have that pay for Lifestyle. I like the idea of a permenant private space. That allows me to consider a downgrade in Lifestyle to be perhaps cutting back on good or real food, canceling my matrix subsciption, and not paying for insurence or something like that. But I still think the problem exists.

I like support chars too, but I think we shouldn't shun them, or make them impractical to play. We're not gonna have any Media types, detectives, or all out hooders unless we say, "Hey, you don't have to do dangerous and morally compromising runs to meet OOC requirments to RP a certain way. I mean, can we trust the players a little?

If the game, as is, does not support your personal type of play, then it would seem that the game is not for you and you should move on to one that is tailor made just for you.

I'm not for doing anything that isn't supported by the core rules of the game. If you or anyone else can provide SR4 rules that let you have a Middle Lifestyle for FREE, then by all means, post it.

If not, I suggest you learn to cope, deal, bend or get over it. There are ways you can maintain a Middle Lifestyle. You're just going to have to WORK FOR IT.

- Hades

You know, there are rules that let you get away with missing a month or two of payments. You don't even have to pay it back, as (P.262, SR4) "The character?s credit (which is part of the cost of the lifestyle) absorbs the missed payment. If she makes the next payment, everything is fine."

Doesn't flat-out solve the issue, but certainly mitigates its severity.

*rubs his head* Its a MUSH. We're not a Table top environment where we can look to see what works. The rules weren't /made/ for a MU. Its my belief that certain changes need to made. It might sound like bitching, and well, it is, but its getting the 'problem' out there. I just don't think that some of the tabletop rules for SR4, or SR3 for that matter, are conducsive to the day-to-day RP in a MU.

Anywho, seems like things have been closed. I've made my point, or tried to, at least. Waffle brings up a good point, though I musta missed that in the book. Do you have a page number I could look at, Waffle?

Page 262, Keeping Up The Payments

Thankee. 

Hades, telling people that they should leave if they don't like a policy is not very helpful, -especially- when the whole point of these boards and the new game is to break with the same ol'-same ol' broken policies that killed Seattle in the first place. The entire point of us being here is to discuss new ideas to make the game better, rather than blindly follow all the old ones.

That said, here are several ideas that I think would be much better than the coded money-hole system we have now. The first would be to just let PCs pick their own lifestyle and RP it. The idea of having to pay in-game (as opposed to off-camera assumed resources) nuyen for an apartment is a legacy of our old 'never trust the PC, he's gonna twink out and cheat!' system. It assumes that everyone is OOCly desperately scrabbling to get that luxe lifestyle, when in reality, players come up with what they think is a cool idea for a PC, and then play it. I don't want to play a high lifestyle character... but it's because it doesn't fit my idea of what I like to play, rather than being a function of some OOC inability to rub enough money chits together.

A second, more radical, idea would be to simply get rid of coded apartments altogether. Place some storage code on PC objects to carry around all that gear you're stashing, and stop playing, 'Haha! Gotcha! You left your gun at home!' with PCs. Private apartment-type RP done in the PrP Room (a really cool piece of code no one used as much as we should have), and less hassle over paying OOCly-punitive rents. You really can run a working game without thousands of coded-for-one-person hideouts to idle in.

We've discussed the PC storage idea. It met with a lot of player resistance. People here want to have a space of their own; thus Kynan came up with the current plan. Hades' idea for a permanent private space is very similar to storage idea, though, I believe.

Again, you're assuming that we're thinking players will cheat. This is not the case. I think the debate here is actually over what's the motivation to run if you don't need to pay the rent?

Look at it this way, has anybody ever had to take jobs IRL that they didn't want so they could put food on the table? For the vast majority of us, the answer would be yes. So why is the grid any different? The game is about hard choices. What do you need to do to survive. If you can't afford middle lifestyle, then you move on to something lower that you can afford. That said, we have faced a problem with a dearth of money-making opportunities on the grid. That's another issue entirely.

Sorry about that. I posted about rent in this thread before I read the 'virtual' private places on Kynan's other thread. That's what I get from going down the list of unread posts.

The new policy obviates most of my last response, and I really like the new system.

My only remaining concern is of the ideas that players somehow only go on runs to pay the rent. ICly, that may or may not be true for any individual PC. OOCly, I think it'll be a sad, sad day when we have to force players to go on 'runs so that they can satisfy an automated game mechanic. If we got rid of lifestyle payments, I don't think people are going to turn around and tell judges to keep their runs to themselves.

At the end of the day, people will always go on runs because they're fun, it's what we play Shadowrun for. Shoving nuyen down the maw of a game mechanic that doesn't fit the MUSH environment is just a PITA.