Character resources are tracked abstractly through Lifestyle and explicitly through Cash.
Lifestyle represents a character’s regular lifestyle expenses, including food, rent/mortgage, clothes, and other comfort monthly expenses. Higher Lifestyles allow players to avoid spending cash for general levels of comfort, meaning a rich PC will likely spend less cash on clothing and food than a poor PC. Furthermore, NPCs may treat characters differently depending on their lifestyle.
Cash represents a character’s available money to spend, both in physical paper and coin and through electronic means (credit cards, checks, etc). Cash is equivalent to the player’s modern currency, with many items costing close to their real-life costs. Cash can be split between “worn” and “stashed” locations. For ease of use, this website uses USD for cash values.
Lifestyle and Cash are semi-interchangeable. At any point, a PC may choose sell their assets and lower their Lifestyle level to acquire 5,000 Cash per level lost after resting. Alternatively, a PC may choose to spend 10,000 Cash to increase their assets and raise their Lifestyle. Both options are likely to impact the relationships in a PC’s backstory, for better or worse. They also represent a change to a character’s income source (such as a promotion, new source of income, demotion, etc).
Lifestyle Levels
When starting a campaign, the GM sets a Lifestyle that all characters can start at by default. A player can then choose to take a Flaw to decrease their lifestyle, or a Merit to increase their lifestyle. (Writer’s Note: The phrasing here makes me realize I should reword ‘Flaw’ as to not to imply any inferiority of characters with a flaw.)
A character’s lifestyle covers general living expenses such that when a character purchases food or other general living goods (clothes, cleaning supplies, etc) that are at or below their lifestyle expectations they do not need to spend any cash.
Monthly Expenses
| Lifestyle | Level | Perks |
| Homeless | Free | It’s free and you don’t need to worry about sweeping. However, even the cheapest clothing and restaurant food needs some general budgeting for you. As such, you likely manage to get by mostly off of instant ramen and whatever else you come across. |
| Poverty | 1 | You have a shelter with a mostly working shower, and maybe some slow unstable internet access. There’s no real privacy in the small thin walled room, It’s small, the area is not the safest, and you’re on your own if anything starts to break or go wrong. At least you have somewhere to sleep and store things.
You can afford fast food, cheap clothing, and to stay at a trodden motel when traveling, but you don’t dine out often and your wardrobe is mostly secondhand. |
| Low-income housing | 2 | Your apartment is fairly serviceable, with a living room, kitchen, and bedroom all distinct from each other. You might even have a spare room to use as an office or for storage. The area feels pretty safe too, as long as you keep the doors and windows locked and don’t take midnight strolls. It’s definitely a bit crowded with the family though. You may have an old used vehicle to travel around in.
You don’t need to worry about paying for cheap clothing, groceries, or fast food, but you still consider anything over $20 fancy, costing 1 resource to get “nicer” food and clothing. |
| Middle-class | 3 | The life of comfort and complacency. Your home or apartment has plenty of extra space and a few spare rooms. The local area feels safe and might even have a neighborhood watch. Some fenced in neighborhoods even higher security to watch the gate. You eat regular healthy meals that taste good too. You own your own transportation. You may have a nice used vehicle or an affordable new car.
You get the local groceries that you want and can eat out at nicer restaurants occasionally. Only a few pieces of clothing are more than 4 years old and most of it is work-place presentable, or at least nice enough that people aren’t concerned. You only need to spend resources on lifestyle expenses when at a high-end restaurant or when buying a suit. |
| High Life | 4 | Good food, safety, and enough space to have guest or family inside without ever running into them. Housekeeping does the chores and you don’t worry about the cost of utilities and have the highest internet speeds available. The local police and hired security both regularly patrol the area to keep anything from going amiss. You likely an expensive car that you keep well maintained.
You don’t ever need to spend resources on lifestyle expenses, but are often balancing excess funds with excess debts. |
General Cost Guidelines
Though players are encouraged to use local values to track the costs of items and services, the below tables can help players determine the costs of unusual purchases players might request and how to alter the price of requests.
Gear:
| Cost | Items |
| ~ $10 – $50 | Cheap, easy to acquire items, makeshift armor, and general goods. |
| ~ $100- $200 | Poor quality melee weapons, Bulk goods, Non-lethal guns, Shields, leather armor, |
| ~ $300- $600 | Low Quality (low ammo) guns, Tickets to an expensive event, Partial Kevlar armor or Gambeson |
| ~ $900- $1500 | High quality weapons, Automatic Guns (guns capable of Auto-fire), full sets of armor |
General Price Adjustments
| Adjustment | Items |
| -10/20% price | Broken, Chance of misfire, Some inherent risk in owning. |
| ~$50 | Non-frivolous one-time-use magic items |
| ~$10 | Per specialized ammo |
| +20/30% price | Illegal/Black-market goods, custom work involved or one-time magical effect added. |
| +100% price | Rare, hard to acquire commodity Constant, light magical effect. |
| +300% price | Unique, one of a kind, Constant, powerful magical effect Exceptionally dangerous |