The Gaming Den

Sorry I haven't been working on this much during the last month and a half: I got married. And no, I'm not seriously suggesting a "you must be this tall to have a bank account this large" type setup. Because that would be stupid. But it is nonetheless desirable to have every type of character to have use for money. Both on a per-mission basis and on a long term character advancement basis. What we don't want is for one type of character or another to bluntly state that they don't give a shit about quest rewards because they have hit the money cap for their character type.

Ammunition
"It costs $400000 to fire this weapon... for twelve seconds."

Tracking ammunition is a pain in the ass. Furthermore, it doesn't actually make things more realistic in most cases, because the number of bullets people fire off in real fire fights is much higher than the number of attack declarations in most games. For example: in SR people end up firing off like 12 bullets in a "long" fight and killing 5 or 6 dudes with them. While in historical police shootouts, the hit rate is more like 5% and the number of bullets fired is many times that. Some sort of "buying bullets tax" is a pretty reasonable sounding way to bleed money, however.

Bullets aren't the only thing that needs money poured into it in order to function. Cars, missiles, freezing liquid, and computers all use fuel of some kind. Magical activities could very plausibly require the use of physical stuff as well.

Living Expenses

Not everyone wants to play a murder hobo. And the 21st century is highly monetized to the point where living in the wilderness is actually pretty hard (and usually surprisingly expensive). People in the near future really do have bills to pay. Food and rent are not free. However the player doesn't actually have to eat spam and sleep in a leaky apartment just because their character does - and personal hardships make for interesting stories.

The tightrope to walk then is to arrange it so that living in a rain-soaked cardboard box is possible, but not necessarily desirable. Having a more expensive lifestyle can provide concrete advantages before, during, and after a mission.

Big Spenders
"Can't buy me love. But it does seem to be able to buy a casino."

Helicopters, private islands, space travel, political campaigns, super computers, and so on and so forth are all things that people could want. And they are coincidentally things that cost a fuck tonne of money. Ideally, the very highest end of any character class' potential purchases would never be reached. At no time should any character say that they don't need to chase the SpDRs because they have everything they could ever want.

This seems to be fairly achievable as a goal. You just need to put rules in place for business, politics, and military hardware that scale up to amounts of money the players aren't going to have.

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Now obviously the big wedge on making this work is Élan. By having spirit-money, even a hard-core mystic character still has use for currency. But even so, it seems like every character type needs to have things worked around so that they have things to spend money on. Both continually (upkeep) and aspirationally (upgrades).

-Username17

Congrats on the good news! I wish you a happy time together.

What does CPFH stand for in this context? Cost per flying hour?

Congrats!

CyberPunk Fantasy Heart Breaker would be the assumption.

Having a better lifestyle should be all upside. In Shadowrun 2nd there were no mechanical benefits to having a higher lifestyle level, which encouraged the 3e "miser millionaire" syndrome while you saved up for Wired Reflexes 3. Having a list of Perks available at each lifestyle level would be a nice way of incentivising players to actually spend some of their earnings on increasing their character's quality of life.

edit: Oh, and congratulations on the wedding! I'm digging the orange shirt. Given your nightmarish experiences with Soviet Bloc red-tape hell for such things as getting a drivers license, I shudder to think what you had to go through to get married...

FrankTrollman wrote: Ammunition
"It costs $400000 to fire this weapon... for twelve seconds."

Tracking ammunition is a pain in the ass. Furthermore, it doesn't actually make things more realistic in most cases, because the number of bullets people fire off in real fire fights is much higher than the number of attack declarations in most games. For example: in SR people end up firing off like 12 bullets in a "long" fight and killing 5 or 6 dudes with them. While in historical police shootouts, the hit rate is more like 5% and the number of bullets fired is many times that. Some sort of "buying bullets tax" is a pretty reasonable sounding way to bleed money, however.

Bullets aren't the only thing that needs money poured into it in order to function. Cars, missiles, freezing liquid, and computers all use fuel of some kind. Magical activities could very plausibly require the use of physical stuff as well.

This section makes a lot of valid points. Does this imply, though, that reloading is also going the way of the dodo?

Reloading is generally just another set of calculations to do that is often annoying from a player's perspective, but I almost think that a semirealistic game with guns in that does not at all feature reloading mechanics might actually strain verisimilitude.

An easy way out would be text along the lines of, "In the future, gun mechanisms are sufficiently developed and computer assisted such that reloading takes a minimal amount of time."

A slightly more taxing idea would be to give each gun a "Reload Threshold." For the first x rounds of any encounter, characters don't worry about reloading. But after those rounds, there's a chance that that character's gun will have to reload, which would take time. Upgrades like larger magazines would increase a gun's Reload Threshold, and actions like Full Burst would make the Threshold approach faster.

Congratulations on the wedding! I actually got married last year in Ostrava, so (relatively speaking), that makes us wedding neighbors.

In any event, congratulations again.

Red_Rob wrote:CyberPunk Fantasy Heart Breaker would be the assumption.

Having a better lifestyle should be all upside. In Shadowrun 2nd there were no mechanical benefits to having a higher lifestyle level, which encouraged the 3e "miser millionaire" syndrome while you saved up for Wired Reflexes 3. Having a list of Perks available at each lifestyle level would be a nice way of incentivising players to actually spend some of their earnings on increasing their character's quality of life.

Agreed. In Shadowrun there were some perks you could buy for a lifestyle by paying extra, but due to the way the cost was figured, you would end up either paying a ridiculous amount for them, or be basically living as a hobo with these random upgrade benefits, while still paying for a moderate lifestyle.

Having some of the same kind of perks, but coming for free just by virtue of having a better lifestyle, is a good idea. Even if they're just little things like a couple bonus dice on your *insert downtime activity here* check, or reduced availability for some items, that kind of thing.

Congratulations! May your family be blessed with peace and love for all generations.

There's slightly less orange than I was expecting: only the shirt, tie, flowers, balloons, and umbrella? Totally pulled it off, though; you both look fantastic and so does the ceremony. Congratulations!

I haven't been following this project, but I wanted to say congrats Frank!

Congrats!

Congratulations.

Lovely venue, too.

Where did you find an orange shirt and tie, though?

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As for the CPFH bit, I like the idea of abstracting role-essential supplies--just having a "I pay 10k a month for equipment, supplies, and my standing contract with the vehicle rental place and my insurance company" for basic roles. Maybe some price guides for what you can get per-month.

That players are just assumed to have some portion of their resources devoted to their essential gear. Hackers can be assumed to have their computer, their choice password crackers/filesharing programs, and their legal defense team always ready to come into play at a moment's notice. Muscle men can be assumed to have more guns on their person than they have limbs, along with a few grenades and a knife. Or being a costumed vigilante will mean you spend X resources to have equipment stashes set up around town, so you can get to backups and extras within twenty minutes if you really need them.

Congrats. I hope whenever I bind some poor woman to me in matrimony that my own set up is at least half as nice as that.

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On topic.
Ammunition is something I decided to gloss over for my ruleset. There's a solid % of your income you are assumed to pay regularly to keep your shit going. I throw minor repair costs, upkeep, ammunition and the like under there and leave it alone. People don't like bean counting much so I wanna keep it at a minimum.

Now what I'm on the fence about is "living expenses". I completely understand the idea of having living in a shit hole be possible but not desirable but how much effect would you want that to have on a character? I'd assume that whatever bonus it would give would be minor in nature but even that seems like its just begging for balance issues.

Congratulations, Frank. I wish you and your wife all the best. Hopefully, she inspires you to do more design work.

MGuy wrote: Now what I'm on the fence about is "living expenses". I completely understand the idea of having living in a shit hole be possible but not desirable but how much effect would you want that to have on a character? I'd assume that whatever bonus it would give would be minor in nature but even that seems like its just begging for balance issues.

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Well, living in a status address could give you more leeway with law enforcement and civic figures. So it's a resource/benefit like any other and paid for accordingly out of character points.

So you'd have at least three scales of living expenses.

*Shithole--low-security but hard to find the exact spot. Get hassled by cops for being in a damn slum or on the streets, on the plus side, other people living in shitholes are somewhat more kindly disposed to you. Sometimes.

*Normal house/apartment. Medium security/difficulty finding.

*Status address. Higher security, easier to find. Cops and political establishments like to go the extra mile to keep you happy.

I like the black and white pictures. They look good.

And great news on CPFH not being dead!

Doing away with ammo tallies is always a good thing. I suppose if you want ammunition/its cost to matter you could:
[*]Slap some kind of ammo tax onto a general "expenditures" after missions.
[*]Do the thing you did in Warp Cult where you have an Ammo Roll (was it the error threshold thing? "X dice need to be not-1 otherwise you run out of ammo"?) And then have people spend money to "have ammo" for that gun again or spend heaps of money to "have lots of ammo" (get a certain number of automatic "not a one but not a hit either" results for a while).

And as for housing and such, yeah, just have "You must at least live in a registered apartment to be able to buy/rent a ___, you must live in your own privately owned condo tower in order to get invited to ___" as well as some simple perks for living it large.

And then shit like nuclear submarines to save up for.

Oh, and it's very important that people be able to pimp their rides and guns. The one useful thing DH taught me was that everyone wants to be able to make their assault rifle long-barrelled, with a scope, laser sight, recoil suppressor, flash suppressor, autoloader, custom paint job, monofilament bayonet, underslung grenade launcher, and hidden compartment that contains alcohol.

Congratulations to the both of you as well.

Seerow wrote:Agreed. In Shadowrun there were some perks you could buy for a lifestyle by paying extra, but due to the way the cost was figured, you would end up either paying a ridiculous amount for them, or be basically living as a hobo with these random upgrade benefits, while still paying for a moderate lifestyle.

Having some of the same kind of perks, but coming for free just by virtue of having a better lifestyle, is a good idea. Even if they're just little things like a couple bonus dice on your *insert downtime activity here* check, or reduced availability for some items, that kind of thing.

Certainly one thing I am thinking about is to have lifestyles be explicitly made up of the perks they give you. The part of your lifestyle where you have nice clothes and bathe regularly gets you respectability. While you can disguise your respectability up or down, if you want to get anything accomplished in law, politics, media, corporate, or organized crime - you gotta be able to pass respectability smell tests. Your Mafia hitman character is going to want to start living expensively because he literally cannot rise in the ranks beyond a certain low level until he does.

Meanwhile, other things like having a James Bond gadget pool or keeping a super car in working order would be similar packages.

Maxus wrote:As for the CPFH bit, I like the idea of abstracting role-essential supplies--just having a "I pay 10k a month for equipment, supplies, and my standing contract with the vehicle rental place and my insurance company" for basic roles. Maybe some price guides for what you can get per-month.

That players are just assumed to have some portion of their resources devoted to their essential gear. Hackers can be assumed to have their computer, their choice password crackers/filesharing programs, and their legal defense team always ready to come into play at a moment's notice. Muscle men can be assumed to have more guns on their person than they have limbs, along with a few grenades and a knife. Or being a costumed vigilante will mean you spend X resources to have equipment stashes set up around town, so you can get to backups and extras within twenty minutes if you really need them.

yeah, kind of like that. Rather than having people worry about how many dataline taps and laser mics they own, players would buy into a gadget pool and "prepare" gadgets for specific missions. To encourage characters to actually have the kinds of "weapons closets". Like these ones:

-Username17

So, first off, congrats to Frank on getting married. Way to go, man!

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Second, it seems like CPFH wants to emphasize the heist film aspect of the genre, which means that we want scenes where the characters need to get some high ticket item(s) specially tailored for the mission and go to meet up with an arms dealer in a parking lot at midnight, or bluff their way into the back room of a front establishment in order to make the deal. This should probably be modelled as a roll against a threshold of the item's availablity in order to find a seller, where failure means you can't find any, success means you can find a seller, net successes mean a discount and faults mean you end up in a sting operation or otherwise attracting unwanted attention.

But you don't want to do that for every item, so there should be an alternative way to get items where you'd pay a bunch of money into getting resources and be able to get items that way. So, for example, one character might want to spend 10000$ on a weapons closet, and thus be able to show up to every mission any collection of availablity 2 or lower weapons totaling 2000$ or less in total value. Respectablity from living expenses could honestly work the same way, except instead of needing an assault rifle to shoot your way into a bank, you need an acceptable suit to get into the party and instead of getting it out of your weapons closet, you get it out of your regular closet.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Seerow wrote:Agreed. In Shadowrun there were some perks you could buy for a lifestyle by paying extra, but due to the way the cost was figured, you would end up either paying a ridiculous amount for them, or be basically living as a hobo with these random upgrade benefits, while still paying for a moderate lifestyle.

Having some of the same kind of perks, but coming for free just by virtue of having a better lifestyle, is a good idea. Even if they're just little things like a couple bonus dice on your *insert downtime activity here* check, or reduced availability for some items, that kind of thing.

Certainly one thing I am thinking about is to have lifestyles be explicitly made up of the perks they give you. The part of your lifestyle where you have nice clothes and bathe regularly gets you respectability. While you can disguise your respectability up or down, if you want to get anything accomplished in law, politics, media, corporate, or organized crime - you gotta be able to pass respectability smell tests. Your Mafia hitman character is going to want to start living expensively because he literally cannot rise in the ranks beyond a certain low level until he does.

Meanwhile, other things like having a James Bond gadget pool or keeping a super car in working order would be similar packages.

Well some of these sound like they'd be one time purchases. For example paying to get access to a weapons closet is something you really shouldn't be paying for constantly. I could see maybe one time charge to get a weapons closet, then a upkeep fee to make sure the stuff in there is always state of the art (and thus better quality), but the state of the art upkeep fee should be optional there.

Congratulations, Frank!

What types of incentives to you want to offer the Big Spenders other than rule-of-cool? Obviously things like helicopters might make an objective easier, which seems to make it fall under both Fun Things to Have and Valuable Mission Resources.

[edit]Missed your response to Seerow.[/edit]

DSMatticus wrote:There's slightly less orange than I was expecting: only the shirt, tie, flowers, balloons, and umbrella? Totally pulled it off, though; you both look fantastic and so does the ceremony. Congratulations!

Yeah, the orange flowers were a nice touch. I wasn't expecting an orange tux or anything, but the thought of that is hillarious.

RobbyPants wrote:

DSMatticus wrote:There's slightly less orange than I was expecting: only the shirt, tie, flowers, balloons, and umbrella? Totally pulled it off, though; you both look fantastic and so does the ceremony. Congratulations!

Yeah, the orange flowers were a nice touch. I wasn't expecting an orange tux or anything, but the thought of that is hillarious.

Yes, that would be funny to see...

That guy looks like the orange version of a leprechaun.

Congratulations on your marriage, and I look forward to hearing more about Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker. I played After Sundown to some amusement, and I think I'll have fun with this game too! A lot of my friends want to play in a Shadowrun game, and while I'm currently playing in one, I can't bring myself to run it - the rules are pretty damn labyrinthine. Actually thinking about it I should post a review of my play experience with After Sundown...

Shadowrun hilariously already uses "after the mission you must refill it" logic for certain items like Medkits in particular, with a note that referee discretion can cause some variance (probably intended to cap people from attempting to medkit the party a hundred times every time anyone gets a booboo or the Mage fucks up and gets Drained, in practice more likely a good way to get screwed over).

One of the fun experiences in Shadowrun is playing the "pimp my gear" game, and modding out a weapon. While some weapons should probably still be purchased individually (Heavy buys Sasha as a one-time thing for example), I definitely would have more fun with buying weapons as a group which I then might pull a tricked out gun from.

So I see two competing issues on the gear front. The first is that having a super pimped out weapon that has a name that you pull out from time to time is totally awesome. But the other is that having weapon enthusiasts who only have one weapon because the marginal utility of having another pistol or rifle or something when you already have a tricked out MP-X is very low. And that same tug of war goes for computers, motorcycles, surveillance equipment, and every other thing that player characters could specialize in. From med kits to lockpicks to climbing gear.

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".

-Username17