it depends... sometimes we just skip it, but the reason we already are annoyed at some of the 'growth' of the game. when we try to use money as a motivator it always falls flat, if played straight you get too much too fast. We have found at start maybe 1 or 2 sessions you end up counting every silver to get the things you need/want then boom once you saved up to get your stuff you end up with huge amounts of money to do anything wit...So here's my question: Do you worry about cost of living concerns in your game? Or do you handwave that mess in favor of high adventure? Why or why not?
i swear i have seen players give bartenders platinum coins per drink say 'keep the change' for 2 copper beer... and i don't even mean "here this will cover for the night"(but i have seen that too) i mean 'over the night i buy 5 or 6 beers so each time i throw a PP i will just mark off 6"Heck, at a certain point, we don't even bother with copper or silver or electrum pieces. Everything is paid with either gp or pp.
In some games, I will tie useful benefits to what you spend on it so that there's a specific reason to pay for the higher lifestyle tiers.
Nice. This reminds me of a Paizo AP mechanic that leans into items like lifestyle mechanics that are often left vague. So, I could definitely see this as an item that is campaign dependent. Something I have not used in the past (for D&D/Fantasy) but might want to give another shot.I'm using them right now. In addition to all of the incentives that other people have already mentioned, living expenses can also affect how other factions react to the heroes. Like...unless you are living at least a "wealthy" lifestyle, you make Charisma checks at disadvantage with the Merchant Guild faction....but if you are living an "aristocratic" lifestyle, you make those Charisma checks at advantage.
That sort of thing.
So here's my question: Do you worry about cost of living concerns in your game? Or do you handwave that mess in favor of high adventure? Why or why not?
You make the treasure chest in the next room a mimic. It's up to you to decide what happens next when the cleric casts Toll the Dead on the ordinary looking chest...After characters get their first gold piece, not really. When 1 sp is a week's wages and you just picked up a 10 gp gem off the floor in a dungeon hall (and are staring at a treasure chest in the next room), how do you make living expenses matter?
Tie the expenses to benefits and detriments, and/or make access to particular downtime activities require a higher spend on lifestyle expenses. Works like a charm in every campaign I've ran.After characters get their first gold piece, not really. When 1 sp is a week's wages and you just picked up a 10 gp gem off the floor in a dungeon hall (and are staring at a treasure chest in the next room), how do you make living expenses matter?
The point of lifestyle expenses is not to wring adventure out of them. They’re part of downtime for a reason; downtime is the opposite of adventure. It’s what you do between adventures. And the point of lifestyle expenses during downtime is to attach a concrete game action (in this case the depletion of resources) to the passage of downtime days.Petty cash issues make sense from a worldbuilding standpoint. But in practice I find that they can steal narrative attention from robbing dragons, fighting evil, and generally being big damn heroes. I suppose there's some adventure to be wrung from low-stakes, low-magic, "can we afford to make rent on the guildhall this month" plots, but those seem to get outclassed pretty quickly.
Squalid and Poor are in SPWell to be fair the Lifestyle Expenses are in gold coins not in CP or SP.
So if someone like me is using the Lifestyle Expenses, the lesser valued coins are pretty much ignored.
Do you plan to keep the time a downtime activity takes the same? I think many of them are tied to a week, which would mean many downtime activities would be Wealthy level lifestyle expense. And would it be Wealthy daily rate x 7 or just the daily rate to cover the week?The point of lifestyle expenses is not to wring adventure out of them. They’re part of downtime for a reason; downtime is the opposite of adventure. It’s what you do between adventures. And the point of lifestyle expenses during downtime is to attach a concrete game action (in this case the depletion of resources) to the passage of downtime days.
To answer the question, I have used lifestyle expenses before, but I find they don’t have enough consequence to work well. The benefits and drawbacks of each lifestyle are purely narrative, which makes them feel not worth caring about. Plus, the amount of money they cost quickly becomes trivial to PCs anyway.
I’ve got an idea I want to try with them, which is to tie downtime days (as a resource you spend to perform downtime activities) to lifestyle. Each week you buy a lifestyle, and that lifestyle determines how many days that week you can spend on downtime activities (the remainder of the week going towards working to insure your basic needs are met). Squalid gets you one downtime day, and each category above that gets you an additional day, up to all 7 days for Wealthy.