The more I read of "cool, style, etc" the more I think of that abomination of a so called game known as cyberpunk 2020 aka cybershit that only losers who watched The Matrix 10+ times a week play.

As for any +pay system. There is Firan, go get it and enjoy your wonderful everything is coded for you, you need not do a thing game.

Firan has coded Rape.

No, I'm not being facetious.

Lovely game.

Bitter, hostile, and pointless as usual, I see.

Thanks for everyone else who made a serious reply 

This all could be stuff that relates to smallbiz rp, which i believe beta will not include?


Bring on the condoms and tampons! There are keisters to be plugged! Both continually and consistantly.




"Eww, gross dude."

So deary, you want a game that is your way. Played by those you consider to be principled. Where people are encouraged to do what you think is right. And if a person does not fall into your narrow view they do not need to participate. Well sweatheart no one gets a wish granted, so suck it up with the rest of us and wait in line for whatever comes to pass.

The current currency system is just fine the way it is. If we try and code the game to take into affect each and every little detail about what we spend be it clothing or a candy bar we take away from the one point which brings all here. A place to relax and enjoy our selves.  Aside from that the grid hasn't even been opened yet so adding more code to the work load will only increase the amount of time we must wait. I agree with Absinthe. Added code whether or not it is used voluntarily or forced to handle something that has been handled in the past just fine with RP and RP alone is not only not necessary but detrimental  and time consuming.

My stance on the issues at hand:

For the record, I don't care what happens.  Noor has said there will be no +pay, and I'm taking that at face value.  I just had an idea that I wanted to explore, and I think we've done that pretty well.

Except you've forgotten a lot of important information.

There's a simple rule:

If you want your character's mood hair to effect gameplay (I.E. Help disguise/stealth checks) you either need to get a custom piece of gear approved, paid for and installed by a GM, or you need to find said gear in the books.  If neither of those work out, too bad, it doesn't effect dice pools no matter how realistic it happens to be.

When a GM decides to charge you for something you do in TableTop its because you are there, RPing with another person.  When you are off on your own thinking up your description (especially in the beginning) there's nothing NOT EVEN most GMs who will state, "You better pay for that slick jacket with a light show attached or else remove it from your description, oh and did you pay for that hair cut to get it into a mohawk?  No?  Too bad, better take that out of chargen resources."  It becomes an endless, exhaustive list of pointlessness.  It in fact, removes from the creativity of the people because they have to spend a lot of time getting stuff: looked at, approved, and otherwise spent money on before they can know if it will have game effects.  They need to doublecheck at every corner about common sense items, to see if its something they need to pay for.  "Oh, shit, I didn't buy that cup of coffee I RPed last weekend with +pay, am I going to get a talking to?"  Of course not, because your time and your efforts should never be wasted on things that can otherwise be simply handled by RP or already in place systems.

If you WANT your clothes to be designer, and potentially give a bonus to dice pools in certain environments, then you better make sure its approved.  But we have a queue system for that, or GMs to ask for that, and +notes to be added to your character for various descriptions.  If a person lives in a low lifestyle building, and RPs going to the local gym every day (or even the not so local gym) then they should be able to desc themselves as clean.  Why?  Not because they ACTUALLY go out and RP necessarily in that Gym, but because it makes worthy enough sense.  Do they have to pay for Gym access?  No.  That'd be dumb.

So, I'd like to officially separate the list of things that you can do from the list of things you ought to do.  And this is one of those things that you can do, but is most assuredly not a thing you ought to do.  If the whole game world was going to be coded like that, where haircuts were kept track of, and you had to go to local barbers and get them done from NPCs, and you had to feed yourself or your exhaustion meter would change, and you had to drink regularly, and alcoholic beverages automatically rolled against your Body stat (taking into account all Edges and Flaws, plus muscle to fat ratios) before dropping dice pools, THEN OF COURSE I'd be for such things.

However, just deciding that this would enhance style and its importance because of no actual facts other than a MUD-esque environment (where, I might add, pretty much everything IS CODED already and clear system results are also in every piece of 'cool' gear) is a little... wishy-washy for my tastes.  And to do it, you'd have to go all the way... otherwise people would begin to wonder why you coded in one thing and not another and you'd go off on an increasing spiral of +paid for stuff that would be similar to Houserule complications.  No where in SR4 does it tell me I have to buy my jacket that can also play my tunes.  In fact it simply tells me as part of the theme that my jacket is ALREADY wireless and can hook up as DATA storage if I wanted, or whatnot, and there is no available list of costs.  Why?  Cause SR4, in Tear's own words, is the game of, "Yes you can!"  Can I make my hair into a mohawk? "Yes you can."  Is it already that my biker jacket has spikes which have cool LED lights in the tips?  "Yes you can."  Can my commlink send my current mood to my fiber optic hair based upon reading brain waves from my trodes?  "Yes, why, yes, you can."

Simple.  Easy.  Less complicated.  All these mean the same thing, but three times cause I like the number 3.  It is the one thing which makes games successful, fun, and all around able to appeal to the most amount of people.  Why the hell do you think people still play, and adore, PONG?  Cause its rad to the bone.

Pong, it rocks my socks.

Er, actually, I paid for gym access on SRS. But for me it was a matter of making the right people happy ICly. And was well worth the nuyen spent.

Point taken, though.

First off, I brought up the lifestyle & cleanliness thing because it's a pet peeve of mine. Lifestyles, both in mushes and in table top sessions, are often pushed to the wayside and rarely considered as anything but a way to determine starting nuyen. I don't really expect that to ever change. Many people consider lifestyle an acceptable casualty in the name of streamlining gameplay, and I can live with that. It really can be more trouble than it's worth, after all. But I do feel that at least in principle, a character should have to pay for extra showers and other little luxuries if they're a lowlifer or worse. Things in the Shadowrun world aren't free, they just become a painless, invisible part of your lifestyle payments. The lower your lifestyle is, the more things are considered luxuries and no longer fall under the umbrella of lifestyle costs. Hot water and laundry detergent aren't staples for a street person, they're luxuries, and as such you're going to have to go through some hassle to get your greasy paws clean if you aren't dropping some monthly cred. Again, I won't argue that this kind of thing is worth the trouble, but I will be really disappointed if some of you squatter characters out there don't smell like a sweaty troll's jock strap occasionally. Shadowrunners work to climb out of the gutter for a reason, you know.


Edited because even I couldn't stand trying to read it. Pretty scary considering how low my standards are.

One more thing:

IF DRINKS COST MONEY MAYBE PEOPLE WOULD STOP LIVING IN BARS! RAAAGH!

Seriously, I would like to see some diversity in +hangouts on the new grid.  I know there will be more than just bars, but in my experience everyone just goes to the bars because you can sit around and talk there for free.  There has always been some deviation from the normal barfly routine, but if bars weren't all free then we might be able to increase that.

And for the last time, I wouldn't be in favor of a hard and fast 'you must pay or the GMs will beat you down' system.  If there was a +pay, I'd want it to be discretionary.  The only difference between existing systems and the one I want would be a policy saying you should pay for things that you think are not covered by your lifestyle.  This would be in place of the regular "everything is free but +pay if you're an idiot" policy on other MUXes.  That's it.  No adding layers of things to keep track of.  No draconian enforcement.  No slippery slope.  I know we're not having a +pay system, but if we're going to continue to discuss my idea people need to understand what the hell it is already, after my third time reiterating it >.<

The problem is, taking your idea without those arguments, is taking the idea to a magical fantasy land where mice have tea with rabbits and wear poofy hats.

(For example, your idea, with no enforcement, would lead me to just ignore paying for smaller things, because I find it abhorrent and annoying. Such things are part of lifestyles or rent, if I pay those, and pay for all my gear shit that is listed in the book, I'm not paying for anything else unless it's in a run.)

In a Tabletop game, there's generally a level of common sense about Nuyen spending. I'm sure that the GM can see the little box with lists of things like meals, services, tattoos, and hookers, and if I decide to get one for or on a run, he'll charge, same thing with if I just want to look totally different, but this isn't tabletop, and people just can't be trusted to police themselves. If there is enforcement, people are upset, if there is no enforcement, the idea is moot.

"Don't tell me what's wrong with my idea, just tell me it's awesome." Would that be an accurate assessment?

First of all, no.  I was asking people to discuss my idea, not some idea I didn't have.  The idea didn't have was the draconian system of enforcing payments for tic tacs which everyone is railing against.  And so far, that seems to be the only thing that's been discussed.

As for your point that the idea is moot without enforcement, I disagree.  It might be moot for you, but you might well be an intractable old salt set in your ways, and not representative of the MUXing population.  I think that the majority of MUXers have an honest desire to comply with the policies of the game, and an honest desire do avoid doing anything that might be percieved as cheating.  An unenforced policy would not compel anyone to do anything, but the fact that it's policy would convince some people to go along with it.  After all, I've seen people +pay for stuff on systems where the official policy was that +pay was totally unecessary.  If some people do it under those circumstances, I think more would do it if the policy were changed.

You seem to be assuming that players are incapable of self-enforcement and that their natural predisposition is towards milking every advantage they can out of a system.  If you're right about the players of this game in particular, it will most likely turn out to be a crappy game.  So I hope you're mistaken.  The fact is, MUXers are very used to self-policing, since all kinds of situations that require GM decisions happen all the time when no staffers are around.  Just regular interactions like noticing if somoeone has concealed weapons, deciding how to react to a social roll, overhearing something at a nearby table all happen on an honor system.  In general, people do not intentionally cheat.  I've never seen someone set a TN of 20 because they didn't want me to overhear their conversation, and the vast majority of people seem to welcome a chance for someone to notice their guns or whatnot, since that tends to let the RP segue out of a boring "two average joes in a bar" into a more interesting "two killers in a bar" situation.  On the basis of that experience, I think that enforcement of a +pay system is unecessary to make the system work towards being a positive influence on RP.  Your experience might be totally different, which begs the question why you're still a MUXer despite all the PC's being viscious scofflaws.

Anyway, I'm not certain that my idea works, we'd have to try it to find out.  But the objections register more in the shrieking range than in the debate range, and don't really seem to address the primary issue.  The problem is that everyone has been attacking something that I didn't propose, so we've hardly gotten anywhere.

Since you end up with an honor system either way, I think it'd be much easier to simply encourage people to take higher end lifestyles if they want to be stylish rather than put in a +pay system. Lifestyle is all relative, which is why I take issue with NES's gym example. Lifestyles costs don't just represent rent, it's a snapshot of your quality of life and the resources regularly available to you. I don't care if you sleep in a coffin hotel or a cardboard box; if you have the equivalent of a gym membership, a secure place to stow your gear and the facilities to keep yourself and your tres chic club gear clean and you go dancing at the Inferno every weekend, then your monthly expenditures surely exceed that of a squatter.