CPFH: Wealth by Level

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Post by Grek »

Sasha and your weapons closet guns are two entirely different resources with distinct advantages which should be treated differently. It should be acceptable to have neither, just one, just the other or both without any problems. And for that to happen, the marginal values on having extra guns need to be emphasized:

If you shoot a man with a gun, and then you shoot another man with that same gun in the same Network district, you run the risk of having someone compare the two ballistics results and realize that the two crimes are related. And it gets worse if magic or future tech is involved, as that might be able to track the bullet back to the gun itself. Normally, you'd get around this by switching guns between crimes, but if the gun you used is Sasha, you're left with the hard choice between using Sasha for all of those crimes and making it really obvious that there's just one heavy-machine gun wielding killer around or ditching Sasha for the rest of this run (or longer!) and effectively wasting the resources you put into it. Weapons from your weapons closet, on the other hand, are essentially disposable without actually being disposed of at any point. You can go get an AK from your room, shoot some people with it and then go back to your room and get another. You don't lose the first AK, it just goes back into your closet until the heat dies down and you feel safe to use it again for another crime or to sell it off and get another.

Second, you can afford to have lots of really specialized weapons in your weapons locker. Need a hacking chip that works on rhinoceroses? Chances are your modded out, jailbroken BrainFuck.Exe program is not, in fact, coded to do that. It would also be difficult to go obtain a copy of a rhinoceros control program from a zoo without people getting suspicious, so that option's out. But if you have an entire library of known basilisk hacks, there's a fair chance that at least one of them would work on a rhinoceros, and better yet you already have a copy and don't need to worry about finding one without tipping anyone off that there's someone in the market for anti-rhinoceros hax. The same principles also apply when you need a specific model of armoured car to fake out security with, or a wiretap that needs to be waterproof and resistant to extreme deep sea pressure. Any time you need something exotic or really out there, you want a team member that is crazy prepared enough to have one rather than needing to go get one.
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Post by Lokathor »

FrankTrollman wrote:It seems to me that the way to thread that particular needle is to get people gadget pools that they can then upgrade items out of into being signature gear. So you have your super duper named minigun because you invested in it, and you had the ability to do that because you already had "a bunch of guns".
That is basically how the Heavy from TF2 works. He's "the heavy weapons guy", and so his gun Sasha is able to fire $200 bullets.

As far as marginal utility, it wouldn't be too hard to give each gun some basic stats, and then a better quality gun gets specialist stats on top of that, but each gun has different specialist stats, and so you pull out different guns for different situations: Needlers, Tranqs, Disposable Plastic guns, Tasers/Stun Sticks, Anti-Vehicle Rifles, etc.

The other thing to think about is that, in addition to literal money, different character types need different things to do with their spare time. Mages research spells and maneuver Elan about, Hackers track down the best new software (or make it themselves) and keep up with the best new techniques, Face characters keep up with connections and stay on top of the latest news on all sorts of subjects. Normally, samurai just kinda train with weapons, and don't have much down time activity to do. Since the shadows of AT is a lot about decentralized crafting and salvage, a samurai might be assumed to have extensive crafting skills of several types, and along with a 3d printer and some tools they probably make a lot of their own items from scratch, and perform upgrades on their own items.
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Post by fectin »

Samurai traditionally have vassals. I don't see why street samurai shouldn't have something similar.
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Post by Almaz »

Grek wrote:Sasha and your weapons closet guns are two entirely different resources with distinct advantages which should be treated differently. It should be acceptable to have neither, just one, just the other or both without any problems. And for that to happen, the marginal values on having extra guns need to be emphasized:

If you shoot a man with a gun, and then you shoot another man with that same gun in the same Network district, you run the risk of having someone compare the two ballistics results and realize that the two crimes are related. And it gets worse if magic or future tech is involved, as that might be able to track the bullet back to the gun itself. Normally, you'd get around this by switching guns between crimes, but if the gun you used is Sasha, you're left with the hard choice between using Sasha for all of those crimes and making it really obvious that there's just one heavy-machine gun wielding killer around or ditching Sasha for the rest of this run (or longer!) and effectively wasting the resources you put into it. Weapons from your weapons closet, on the other hand, are essentially disposable without actually being disposed of at any point. You can go get an AK from your room, shoot some people with it and then go back to your room and get another. You don't lose the first AK, it just goes back into your closet until the heat dies down and you feel safe to use it again for another crime or to sell it off and get another.

Second, you can afford to have lots of really specialized weapons in your weapons locker. Need a hacking chip that works on rhinoceroses? Chances are your modded out, jailbroken BrainFuck.Exe program is not, in fact, coded to do that. It would also be difficult to go obtain a copy of a rhinoceros control program from a zoo without people getting suspicious, so that option's out. But if you have an entire library of known basilisk hacks, there's a fair chance that at least one of them would work on a rhinoceros, and better yet you already have a copy and don't need to worry about finding one without tipping anyone off that there's someone in the market for anti-rhinoceros hax. The same principles also apply when you need a specific model of armoured car to fake out security with, or a wiretap that needs to be waterproof and resistant to extreme deep sea pressure. Any time you need something exotic or really out there, you want a team member that is crazy prepared enough to have one rather than needing to go get one.
No, characters should emphatically be forced to have multiple weapons or they will not acquire them even if it makes sense to do so. I know it doesn't make sense but humans are strange beings and I have seen so many odd decisions when it comes down to how much nuyen you're spending on your weapons budget, and made some of them myself. Frank is pretty much on the mark - the weapon pool should come before you have unique tricked out weapons.
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Post by Username17 »

The big question is how to handle "mission" items as compared to "signature" items. A mission item would be like the EMP in Ocean's Eleven or the fake egg in Ocean's Twelve. They are above your payscale as far as items that you can pull out of your ass (or the hidden closet you already have), so you need to acquire them in-game through a "beg/borrow/buy/steal/find" montage before you can use them in-mission. But they are also temporary. You're not going to use the fake coronation egg on a later mission. After a mission where a mission item is used, it will be either put in a glass case as a memento or dumped to foil investigations.

A signature item is fairly similar in that it is above the payscale of the character's relevant gadget pool. It's a signature item, because and therefore it is higher quality than the other random things in their secret compartment. But unlike the mission item, the signature item stays with you from adventure to adventure and quite possibly gets upgraded at least once during that time. The signature car continues to get uptweaked and filled with gadgetry. The signature computer continues to get new software and hardware options. The signature magical sword continues to be enchanted with bigger enchantments. And so on.

But yeah, I think in order to have a signature item of an item type, you have to also have an item pool of that item type. Because we aren't doing Fallout, we're doing Heist and Action movies.

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Post by rasmuswagner »

Multimillionaires living in ratholes to avoid spending POWER is not a thing that should exist at all.

MIllionaires should only live in ratholes under two circumstances: They're laying low, or they're part of the community. Neither is cheap, though.

Laying low means you're burning false IDs and bribes at a high pace, and you can't even defend your accounts against scambots.

Being part of the community, wanting help out...anybody who's ever gone from poor to not-so-poor knows how it goes. Friends need help. If you're not contributing according to ability, not only would you not be living there, you can't actually live there. You think sitting on a pile of cash in a poor neighbourhood works out well if you don't have friends? Even if your money is untouchable, all your stuff is going to be trashed and booby-trapped by the neighbours that you're shitting all over.

Basically, being wealthy means that you're going to be spending money. Whether it's access in high circles, a remote and luxurious safehouse, or a whole block of people willing to do you illegal favors...that's your choice. But you mark off those 10k nuyen every month, chummer.
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Post by Username17 »

rasmuswagner wrote:Multimillionaires living in ratholes to avoid spending POWER is not a thing that should exist at all.
Yes.

Mo Money, Mo Problems.

The bigger your stash, the less safe it is in a sketchy neighborhood. Like in The Wire, if you have a few thousand dollars worth of heroin in some skeevy flat in The Towers, people will come after it. On the other hand, if you simply lived in a middle class neighborhood and had a few thousand dollars worth of dollars on your kitchen table in a pile, it would probably be pretty safe.

Lifestyles can have "stash thresholds" that determine how much you can accumulate without becoming a target of opportunity. So it actually is simply cheaper to get yourself a nice apartment to put your expensive paintings in. Safer, too.

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Post by Almaz »

Also, items that are not guns and criminal tools need to also come in packages which you sometimes maintain. Medical gear, things like communication equipment, tagging equipment, and sometimes even arrays of computers such that your collective processing power is more important than any individual machine you have should be a thing. It is way too annoying to count how many fucking RFID tags I have purchased and used for accounting purposes. It is far more important for me to keep a list of names of people who I have bugged their gear and the houses thereof.
Last edited by Almaz on Sat Apr 21, 2012 7:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

Almaz wrote:Also, items that are not guns and criminal tools need to also come in packages which you sometimes maintain. Medical gear, things like communication equipment, tagging equipment, and sometimes even arrays of computers such that your collective processing power is more important than any individual machine you have should be a thing. It is way too annoying to count how many fucking RFID tags I have purchased and used for accounting purposes. It is far more important for me to keep a list of names of people who I have bugged their gear and the houses thereof.
I absolutely agree. There exist numerous items that while it may be worth keeping track of how many I have on my person, it is actually bad for the game to keep track of how many I have in my sock drawer. The obvious one of course is the socks themselves. It may be important for the scene that I am currently wearing socks, but if there are some sort of specific number of socks in the sock drawer that I am supposed to keep track of as a player - that is bullshit. But really it applies to almost every piece of gear a Lancer carries. I care if I run out of bullets in my gun, but I don't care how many bullets are in my house.

I'm thinking the Wizard model is probably where things want to go. Before missions, characters can prepare gadgetry and select tools for their operation. One thing is that the amount of "slots" you get isn't directly dependent on your level, it's dependent on how suspicious you want to look vs. how skilled you are. Also, somewhat limited by encumbrance. More skillful people can hide more and bigger weapons on their person, but they can't literally carry more things.

The issue I foresee having to deal with is how to keep investing in two kinds of gadgets from suffering the D&D multi-class-caster problem. That is: investing more into your "surveillance equipment stash" lets you outfit yourself with better and more varied electronic equipment; investing into a second stash of "communication equipment stash" would also let you outfit yourself with more varied electronic equipment. In D20 land, investing more into the surveillance equipment would be a no-brainer, because having two sets of slots that aren't good enough to get the job done is worthless. But it is actually desirable for characters to cultivate similar shticks.

Honestly, I think that equipment stash synergy should just go ahead and be a thing. Min/maxxers will get their gun bunny a sword rack, because having another weapons cache gives them +1 on their gun stash rating and it's cheaper than raising the gun cache by itself. But that is totally in-genre. Characters like Rally Vincent have a lot of guns, but their homes are also full of knives and bombs.

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Post by Neurosis »

fectin wrote:Samurai traditionally have vassals. I don't see why street samurai shouldn't have something similar.
Because it's not very street, is it?
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Post by Maxus »

Schwarzkopf wrote:
fectin wrote:Samurai traditionally have vassals. I don't see why street samurai shouldn't have something similar.
Because it's not very street, is it?
Unless I've been badly misinformed on the genre, street samurai don't have to practice samurai-like ethics and society unless they want to.

Now, your street sam will probably know a weapons guy who procures and repairs weapons. Or an old buddy in local law enforcement who tips him off.

But I doubt they're actually vassals. And I doubt they're a street samurai exclusive.
Last edited by Maxus on Sat Apr 21, 2012 10:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Lokathor »

Maxus wrote:
Schwarzkopf wrote:
fectin wrote:Samurai traditionally have vassals. I don't see why street samurai shouldn't have something similar.
Because it's not very street, is it?
Unless I've been badly misinformed on the genre, street samurai don't have to practice samurai-like ethics and society unless they want to.
1) They don't have to act like traditional samurai at all; historically accurate or mythically accurate.

2) Street Sams can't corner the market on "vassels" because vassels are just contacts that like you and will do things for you, and everyone has potential access to folks that like you.

3) The point is to have the Street Sam character himself be a person who can repair things and craft things. This gives them something to do during downtime, and gives them an auxiliary skill to pull out during runs as well.
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Post by Username17 »

Schwarzkopf wrote:
fectin wrote:Samurai traditionally have vassals. I don't see why street samurai shouldn't have something similar.
Because it's not very street, is it?
You seem to have missed out on the existence of gang culture. Go watch "The Wire", because vassalage is handled very well in that show. Long story short: criminal gangs are very feudal in structure, and a lot of missions you do are going to be for people higher on the food chain and you'll be able to send people lower on the food chain to do stuff.

The difference between a drug gang leader and a daimyo is mostly one of hat style.

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Post by Maxus »

...And now I have an image of a samurai going around with his helmet intentionally put on askew.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.

--The horror of Mario

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Post by Username17 »

So how would all this play together?

Well, the first thing we have is the idea of a Cache. These are things that allow you to prepare yourself for missions in various fields. A cache has a location, and if that location is compromised, the caches in it are likely compromised as well.

Then we have Lifestyles. A lifestyle is linked to a location (the place you live, or at least could live), and has an upkeep cost. It is essentially a cache of clothing and food and energy and probably running water and stuff that allow you to go out looking like you are a member of a certain social class. But they also come with security and the basic expectation of stability - at least so long as there isn't anything "too valuable" in them. That is to say that a lifestyle comes with a Wealth Limit, and as long as you stay under that wealth limit, your place is reasonably secure (at least as far as the random criminal element goes). If you exceed the wealth limit in your lifestyle, then you run the risk of getting burglarized as you are seen as a juicy target.

So quick check:
  • Players will tend to avoid stealing and hoarding random crap, because increasing the wealth in their home will cause them to have to either move to a richer neighborhood (costing them more per month), or making them a crime target (potentially costing them mission-critical equipment).
  • The Fox from Ocean's Twelve can in fact keep priceless art at his chateau because he lives in a luxurious estate that has a high wealth limit.
  • Barksdale's stash is in fact in constant danger of being hijacked, because his Drugs Caches are worth a lot of money relative to the lifestyles he keeps them in. However, the smaller caches he keeps in the Towers are in more danger than the larger caches he keeps in a middle class neighborhood in the suburbs.
  • Characters do not have to worry about running out of socks unless they can't go home, in which case they totally do.
  • Characters may need to go clothes shopping if they want to attend a fancy dress party or pass themselves off as a smelly hobo.
That all looks good.

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Post by Orion »

Some random thoughts and reactions

Crafting Skills
Some skills give characters the ability to create useful equipment. Shadowrun had Armorer, Software, Hardware, and so on. Traditionally these have worked by making you ask the MC exactly how many days of downtime you have and then rolling a bunch of dice to find out how many nuyen worth of stuff you made, possibly having an argument first about how many htis it takes to make a particular gun. Needless to say this is terrible in every way.

So instead some skills simplypay the maintenance costs for associated gadget pools. If you want to maintain a Tier 3 Hacking Software Suite, you EITHER need to shell out $1000/month to stay current OR you need to be rocking a Software 3 skill. On top of that it functions as a knowledge skill that can rolled in-mission to identify the source of enemy programs and all that shit.

Gating Skills
Some skills will not help you pay for your equipment, but rather be required to make optimal use of it. You can only really carry a limited number of weapons on your person such that they are accessible in a fight, but the exact number you can carry and have ready in one action is tied to your Tactics skill. Similarly, the number of programs a hacker can have available for use at one time is limited by his Computer skill as well as his Programs resource.

A Partial List of Buyable Gear Pools

Heavy Weapons
Street Weapons
Legal Weapons
Assassin Weapons
Gang Backup
Mercenaries

Street Drugs
Designer Drugs
Magic Trinkets

Medical Gear
Infiltration Gear
Survivalist Gear
Costumes and Uniforms
Society Gear
Security Software
Basilisk Software
Automotive Fleet
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Post by Username17 »

Wear and Tear

One of the biggest things that players need to spend money on is to repair things. Repair their equipment, refresh their ammunition, fix their wounds. You can of course simply choose to not pay for wear and tear, but then your stuff will be worn and torn. Essentially it's a financial judgement that comes at the end of your mission, or possibly between phases of your mission.

One thing I noticed in The Hunger Games was that people are totally OK with futuristic nano-paste healing people really rapidly. And as such: it actually is completely OK for bullet wounds from getting shot in the chest to be fixed by the same "go to the store and throw some money at it" system as you might use to replace the shirt that was ruined by the same bullets. Healing can just go ahead and take "realistic" (that is to say: fucking long) amounts of time and not have a complex die roll system. Because what players will actually do is have bullet wounds deducted from their bank accounts to heal up over night.

So basically using gear, getting attacked, and breaking the law causes your cleanup costs to go up. That last one may need a bit of explaining. But basically when you get stars on you, you have stuff that you need to either ditch or accumulate interpol paper trails. If you take the ditch option, you pay money to replace your stuff, and if you take the paper trail option you run increasing risks of having the popos take an interest in you (which may compromise caches you have, causing you to lose everything).

Costs of Doing Business

It's more expensive to eat out, even if all you're doing is eating Chinese food in your car on a stake out. Getting the seat you want may require slipping the hostess some cheese. If you don't go home, you'll need to get new clothes from somewhere if you don't want to start hoboing up.

Basically, missions themselves will involve spending money on them. My initial suggestion would be to have characters have Wallets - an amount of money that you walk around with, ready to spend. Having more money in your wallet makes money drain out of your account faster, but also lets you handle larger incidental expenses. If a guy wants a hundred SpDR bribe, that's a stone wall to someone whose wallet isn't big enough, and it's a handwave action for a character whose wallet is big enough.

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Post by fectin »

How detailed are you planning to make this? The systems you're describing are potentially well designed and all, but that's a lot of tracking just to figure out whether you already have a gun or if you need to go buy a new one. It's starting to sound like a bigger burden than just tracking individual $piders and equipments.

This isn't "your system is bad" it's "does your system meet it's design goals?"
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Post by Username17 »

fectin wrote:How detailed are you planning to make this? The systems you're describing are potentially well designed and all, but that's a lot of tracking just to figure out whether you already have a gun or if you need to go buy a new one. It's starting to sound like a bigger burden than just tracking individual $piders and equipments.

This isn't "your system is bad" it's "does your system meet it's design goals?"
The thing is that the system has to handle more than simply how much money you have and how much a pack of gum costs. The system has to address how much money disappears between adventures. You can't simply "track expenditures" because lots of things the character spends money on happen off screen.

The system is attempting to cover:
  • How much people own.
  • How much people have with them.
  • How much people spend over time.
  • How much people lose if thieves ransack their home.
  • How likely thieves are to do that.
It's a lot of ground, and simply giving people a pile of SpDRs and a price list doesn't begin to cover it. I agree that things need to be simple enough to use, but I honestly think that caches and wallets can be simpler than raw catalog work.

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Post by DrPraetor »

This is a sufficiently-important aspect of character's lives that I think it deserves this level of detail. Also, this enables you to have realistic events which seldom happen in SR games because:
GM: "So, you return to find your house has been ransacked by mobsters!"
Player: "Ah, okay, so which gear do I have to replace? "
GM: Looks down page-long list of gadgets of varying sizes, fragility and portability; some of which the player may have been carrying while he was out. "Uh...."
Player: "Also, some of my weapons are going to be in the Rigger's garage from the previous run, right?"

So the whole category of highly-realistic and relevant "the mob hits you at home where it hurts" story arc was a practically impossible amount of paperwork.

Now, another question - you can have both signature gear (this awesome Shotgun) as well as, or as a function of, your locker full of guns. Is the same thing true of *cyberware*? Or even *magic spells*? I'm going to guess not, although such a system would have it's advantages.
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Post by Dogbert »

Congratulations Frank! Health and good fortune to your family!
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Post by Username17 »

One of the few places that Shadowrun actually had a cache system was Lodges and magical libraries. And I think that system was pretty good - although obviously it should be integrated with the rest of the system.

So you can have a magical library cache that is miscellaneously full of magic books, herbs, and strange artifacts. Having one can allow you to prepare up a time consuming ritual. The spells you can dump through a marker in seconds are something you buy separately, but if you want to conjure up an outsider or make a marker or something, you need a library.

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Post by rasmuswagner »

FrankTrollman wrote:Wear and Tear
Costs of Doing Business

It's more expensive to eat out, even if all you're doing is eating Chinese food in your car on a stake out. Getting the seat you want may require slipping the hostess some cheese. If you don't go home, you'll need to get new clothes from somewhere if you don't want to start hoboing up.

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As an aside, as you go into lifestyle costs, you should probably make the semi-transient, fastfood every day lifestyle the norm, not an additional expense.
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Post by Endovior »

rasmuswagner wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:Wear and Tear
Costs of Doing Business

It's more expensive to eat out, even if all you're doing is eating Chinese food in your car on a stake out. Getting the seat you want may require slipping the hostess some cheese. If you don't go home, you'll need to get new clothes from somewhere if you don't want to start hoboing up.

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As an aside, as you go into lifestyle costs, you should probably make the semi-transient, fastfood every day lifestyle the norm, not an additional expense.
I wouldn't say THE norm, more of one option among many. Runner types would tend to gravitate in that direction, since it involves minimal restrictions.

If you're paying 'cash' to spend your time crashing in shitty motels and eating artificial fast food, then you're fairly anonymous and untraceable. So, you're not taking outright social penalties like some kind of hobo would, but you're not getting any social bonuses either... at the same time, though, you get some bonuses to staying anonymous and avoiding notice... so long as you're not planning on keeping much more in the way of gear then you can carry on your person or in your vehicle. And it better not be all that nice a vehicle, since there's not much in the way of security in a shitty motel's parking lot.

If you want to keep a more secure stash, you need a more permanent base of operations; if you go that route, you trade your anonymity for stash room and maybe some social bonuses, depending on whether you've got a nice place you can invite folks over to, or a rathole of an apartment that you don't stay at more then necessary.

Naturally, since runners need nice equipment pools to work at their best, the transient types tend to be the low-level guys, since they can't safely haul their stash around with them to different places. They might keep a shitty apartment somewhere to store things AND live a transient life for flexibility and to avoid notice; these stack to some degree, but involve paying more. On the other hand, if you're really serious about optimizing your lifestyle for not leaving traces, AND want to have places to neatly stow the nice gear, you can instead pay lots of money and set up caches in various places. If you're willing to pay for it, you can totally just have a bunch of storage units that you pay cash for, and keep your guns there, alternating between them as fits convenience, security, and operational needs. That actually winds up being more expensive then just living in a nice place with good security, though.
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Username17
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Post by Username17 »

Endovior wrote:Naturally, since runners need nice equipment pools to work at their best, the transient types tend to be the low-level guys, since they can't safely haul their stash around with them to different places. They might keep a shitty apartment somewhere to store things AND live a transient life for flexibility and to avoid notice; these stack to some degree, but involve paying more. On the other hand, if you're really serious about optimizing your lifestyle for not leaving traces, AND want to have places to neatly stow the nice gear, you can instead pay lots of money and set up caches in various places. If you're willing to pay for it, you can totally just have a bunch of storage units that you pay cash for, and keep your guns there, alternating between them as fits convenience, security, and operational needs. That actually winds up being more expensive then just living in a nice place with good security, though.
This is about what we're looking for, yeah. There is probably also room for "secured locations" - low profile/high luxury gated communities which promote anonymity and luxury. You know, like the places that Dick Cheney hides out in. Also the mansions of Colombian drug lords and the Caribbean retirement homes of successful embezzlers.

But basically, having a higher lifestyle will increase your social status and cache limits, but it will also cost more money and raise your profile. You can drop the profile back down, but the things you do to accomplish that (living out of hotels, paying your bills through holding companies, parking your car in a secret garage, and so on) cost even more money.

What that boils down to is a lifestyle cost chart that looks like a triangle. At the low end, you pay one rate and get a low profile. But at the high end, you have several profile levels to choose from, with increasing costs for low profiles. If you want high lifestyle with a low profile, you pay through the nose.

-Username17
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