Do Lifestyles Matter?

 Board Enterprises has spent a lot of time working out “Lifestyles”.  To us, a Lifestyle is the details about how a character lives.  Where do they live?  How do they eat?  How do they dress?  What kind of stuff do they have at their home?  The point is, we think we are giving you a whole bunch of this type of information, while only asking the player to make a few decisions based on some charts.  Easy is a HUGE part of this!

But do they matter?  Some players think they are just a device for the GM to pull money off the character sheet.  Because, yes, you need to pay rent, and for food, and to replace worn out clothing.  Yes, there is a cost to it.  There is also supposed to be a payroll to it if the character has a part-time job between adventures.

We all know there are a lot of players out there who would prefer it if their characters were put into cryogenic sleep immediately after every adventure, and then woken on the doorstep of the next dungeon.  That isn’t all that crazy, because it is how some of our most famous action heroes live.  The first time we saw James Bond’s home was after like 30 years of books and movies, and then they blew it up.  Not a lot of home life there!

But we do think it matters.  It is difficult to lay out reasons without just getting into examples, so let’s at least start there.  You are an adventurer.  Your party has been eradicating the city’s assassins’ guild for the last three months of game time.  Now you have won, and they are gone.  Really?  None of them escaped?  Come on, some of them escaped, and they are now looking for the people who killed all their buddies.

How does the GM handle the assassins coming after the PCs?  Does he just decide how they live?  That is going to cause huge arguments, because the players will insist all sorts of harebrained things.  “No, my character lives at the top of a 20 story tower and you have to teleport to get up there.”  “No, my character never goes to the market.  I have a service where the imps/fairies bring all my groceries to me.”  “No, I have never been in a tavern before in my life, unless I was dressed in my most powerful armor, with my ten most powerful weapons, and my pet hellhound.”  Yeah, we wish we were just making this stuff up.

Knowing where and how the player lives, the Lifestyle, allows the GM to know what is going on in the player’s life.  This gives everyone the fair chance of spotting a tail on the way how from the bar, granting the PCs contacts in the marketplace, and knowing what would be available if a fight erupts in the PC’s home.  Not knowing these things makes urban adventures nearly impossible.  Even urban adventures in another city, still require knowing about the PCs’ hotel.

For that matter, how would a party fight against an assassins’ guild on the guild’s home turf without knowing these types of things.  Did the assassins really sit in their headquarters like it was a dungeon setting?  There were several in each room and they waited patiently to be slaughtered by the invading adventuring party, just like good little monsters.  We know there are players who don’t think they care about any of these Lifestyle issues, but isn’t it time to bring a little reality into a role-playing game?  We’re not pre-teens anymore.