[Crash_00]

No Neighbors +1 (this lets you bypass the need to pay for a neighborhood, since there isn't any)

It does not allow you to bypass buying your neighborhood, it just means you have no neighbors around.
The primary definition of a Neighborhood is: A district or area with distinctive characteristics.
Whether you have Neighbors or not, your lifestyle is in a specific district, otherwise its all in your head and you're really living on the street paying cram dealer 120k a year to keep you doped so high you can taste the rainbow.

According to the rules, your lp gets you a free car. Make it a Eurocar Westwind 3k. Then buy a hydrofoil boat, and a susuzki mirage. Take all your vehicles and modify them to have as much speed an acceleration as you can get on them.

You can't begin play with your lifestyle vehicles upgraded.

[All4BigGuns]

No Neighbors +1 (this lets you bypass the need to pay for a neighborhood, since there isn't any)

It does not allow you to bypass buying your neighborhood, it just means you have no neighbors around.
The primary definition of a Neighborhood is: A district or area with distinctive characteristics.
Whether you have Neighbors or not, your lifestyle is in a specific district, otherwise its all in your head and you're really living on the street paying cram dealer 120k a year to keep you doped so high you can taste the rainbow.

According to the rules, your lp gets you a free car. Make it a Eurocar Westwind 3k. Then buy a hydrofoil boat, and a susuzki mirage. Take all your vehicles and modify them to have as much speed an acceleration as you can get on them.

You can't begin play with your lifestyle vehicles upgraded.

Wouldn't having your home out in the boonies outside of the sprawl be considered "street" level neighborhood?

[Crash_00]

That really depends on which particular out in the boonies you're referring to. If you open your door to devil rats, wolves and other nasties trying to eat your face, have to hop the toxic puddles to make it down the walk to your car, and are constantly having to shoot racoons to get your rolex back I might say its equivalent to a street level.

If its a nice area out in the boonies, peaceful and mostly quite, with only the occasional nuisance, then I'd say it would be closer to mid level at the least. After all fresh air, lack of acid rain, and lack of danger are all major pluses for the neighborhood. Keep in mind that a neighborhood out in the boonies with Luxury Security is more likely to be right on the edge of a state park or the like which I would personally put at the high level.

[All4BigGuns]

That really depends on which particular out in the boonies you're referring to. If you open your door to devil rats, wolves and other nasties trying to eat your face, have to hop the toxic puddles to make it down the walk to your car, and are constantly having to shoot racoons to get your rolex back I might say its equivalent to a street level.

If its a nice area out in the boonies, peaceful and mostly quite, with only the occasional nuisance, then I'd say it would be closer to mid level at the least. After all fresh air, lack of acid rain, and lack of danger are all major pluses for the neighborhood. Keep in mind that a neighborhood out in the boonies with Luxury Security is more likely to be right on the edge of a state park or the like which I would personally put at the high level.

Yeah...no. There's a reason they made two different "street" level neighborhood options, Crash. What you described is more the Z-zone than just Street.

[Crash_00]

Street Level

are a miserable, dangerous place to live

Z-zone

These are the worst areas possible on Earth, the most dangerous of barrens, the vicious slums of a feral city, the lawless spread of destroyed and uninhabitable tenements or urban blight.

Racoons, Devil Rats, and Wolves and a little toxic rain are hardly any part of the worst areas on earth (they'd get eaten by the stuff that's considered prey in the worst places on earth). Sure, they're dangerous, but more of a nuisance than anything else. Just a constant dangerous nuisance like hanging out in Touristville, Redmond.

There is a reason they separated the Neighborhood into two 0 sections. One is far far worse than what I described.

An example of Z-zone is Kowloon where the Yami Kings (high force free shadow spirits) like to play around, people die and rot in the streets like flies, and rape and murder are more common than jobs. The only thing that overpowers that sickly sweet smell of carrion is the shit filling the gutters right next to the local taco stand that sells Yesterday's Bob specials and the only thing that keeps the population from lying down and just dying is the need to steal enough money to buy tomorrows BTL or the itch will come back again. Your alarm clock is whenever a gun shot goes off relatively nearby, which means you don't get more than ten minutes of consecutive sleep, and the bullets tend to pass through two buildings worth of rusted out corrugrated shanty walls, meaning you never know if it's going to hit you or not. You've had to shoot three people in the past hour just to keep your gun from being stolen and you woke up two hours ago to an addict trying to cut out your kidney. Meanwhile you're thanking whatever power you believe in that it wasn't Tanamous because they would have had the foresight to slit your throat first so they could get much much more than your kidney. That is, of course, on a beautiful day in the neighborhood. On a bad day someone offers chips for triad badges and the world explodes into war. You might as well kiss your ass goodbye on those days, because if a stray bullet doesn't get you, a hungry Yami will.

[Walder]

Ah. I see.

Well, I guess the lack of vehicle mods just makes it better. In that case, you can opt for the high neighborhood, get rid the no-neighbors quality, and just opt for 6 or 7 months of that lifestyle.

[All4BigGuns]

Street Level

are a miserable, dangerous place to live

Z-zone

These are the worst areas possible on Earth, the most dangerous of barrens, the vicious slums of a feral city, the lawless spread of destroyed and uninhabitable tenements or urban blight.

Racoons, Devil Rats, and Wolves and a little toxic rain are hardly any part of the worst areas on earth (they'd get eaten by the stuff that's considered prey in the worst places on earth). Sure, they're dangerous, but more of a nuisance than anything else. Just a constant dangerous nuisance like hanging out in Touristville, Redmond.

There is a reason they separated the Neighborhood into two 0 sections. One is far far worse than what I described.

An example of Z-zone is Kowloon where the Yami Kings (high force free shadow spirits) like to play around, people die and rot in the streets like flies, and rape and murder are more common than jobs. The only thing that overpowers that sickly sweet smell of carrion is the shit filling the gutters right next to the local taco stand that sells Yesterday's Bob specials and the only thing that keeps the population from lying down and just dying is the need to steal enough money to buy tomorrows BTL or the itch will come back again. Your alarm clock is whenever a gun shot goes off relatively nearby, which means you don't get more than ten minutes of consecutive sleep, and the bullets tend to pass through two buildings worth of rusted out corrugrated shanty walls, meaning you never know if it's going to hit you or not. You've had to shoot three people in the past hour just to keep your gun from being stolen and you woke up two hours ago to an addict trying to cut out your kidney. Meanwhile you're thanking whatever power you believe in that it wasn't Tanamous because they would have had the foresight to slit your throat first so they could get much much more than your kidney. That is, of course, on a beautiful day in the neighborhood. On a bad day someone offers chips for triad badges and the world explodes into war. You might as well kiss your ass goodbye on those days, because if a stray bullet doesn't get you, a hungry Yami will.

Honestly, that's taking things way too far and showing little if any care for if the players are actually having fun or not.

[Crash_00]

You can live on the streets (that's right 0¥ a month) without being in a Z-zone neighborhood. If a player chooses a Z-zone neighborhood, its because he/she wants to have their character live in a place that is, to quote the book, uninhabitable. If that's what the player wants, how is it making that way, showing no care for the player's wants? That makes no sense. If the player doesn't want to live in a place like that, it literally costs them nothing. If the players decide they want their characters to hole up and lie low in a place like that, well I guarantee I could make it a hole heap of fun for my players and keep it just that depressing, dangerous, and uninhabitable.

Choices are about consequences.

[All4BigGuns]

You can live on the streets (that's right 0¥ a month) without being in a Z-zone neighborhood. If a player chooses a Z-zone neighborhood, its because he/she wants to have their character live in a place that is, to quote the book, uninhabitable. If that's what the player wants, how is it making that way, showing no care for the player's wants? That makes no sense. If the player doesn't want to live in a place like that, it literally costs them nothing. If the players decide they want their characters to hole up and lie low in a place like that, well I guarantee I could make it a hole heap of fun for my players and keep it just that depressing, dangerous, and uninhabitable.

Choices are about consequences.

That's just it, the whole deal of "depressing gritty" and scraping the bottom of the barrel just to make ends meet on living day to day is not fun in the slightest. If most people want that sort of thing, they can just record their normal life rather than play a game.

[Crash_00]

Well two issues with that theory:
A.) That's a matter of opinion. It may not be fun to you at all, but I thoroughly enjoy it (both when GMing and Playing). I like some gut wrenching grit and darkness beneath the metallic gleam in my cyberpunk. I'm not by any means reaching through the internet and forcing you to play my games (my wife won't even allow me to force people here to play my games or I'd have a mini-unit full of roleplayers). Then again, I don't find my normal life depressing or gritty either, so I don't really know where that comment comes from. That said, that leads us right into...

B.) If, as I used in the example, the player chooses (because there is no downside to choose anywhere else) to live in an area like that, or the players choose to lie low in an area like that (again, it's far from the only viable choice), that tells me that they do want the dark gritty game and have fun with it. Why else would they choose it?

And how bad the areas are really doesn't have any impact on the power level of the game you're playing either. A group of million dollar men lying low in Kowloon are going to be living in the same drek that the runners who just had a huge 3k payday are living in when they lie low there.

[Red]

If we're strictly talking about gear...

(Some of this is repeated from above, so just consider it my two cents)

Plastic restraints, the zip-tie ones.

Tranq Patches. You can NEVER have enough of those for quiet takedowns. With Sleight of Hand, you can even get a handshake and take someone down with it.

Licensees. Every little thing you can authorize a SIN to do can come in handy. We had a SIN that had authorization and papers for real estate that not only saved us a bad fight, but ended up turning us a big profit.

Gifts for contacts, if you bother with role-playing contact maintenance.

Stock. You can buy into corps and potentially play the market for spare nuyen, but on top of that, you get access to meetings inside the corp for some insight. Year of the Comet taught me that trick, and it's a good one to give circumstantial bonuses for Corporate Rumors, Politics, and get those Right Place, Right Time and Moving the Story Along karma.

Glue sprayer. I have never had any piece of gear so useful as a glue sprayer. You can tie hands together, fasten a bandage quickly, reinforce a door... It's ALMOST better than duct tape.

More ammo. Always more ammo. And grenades. They are cheap, and a flash bang doesn't always need to be thrown accurately so much as dropped at the right place or time (down stairs, elevator shaft, just on the floor as you run to hit the people chasing.)

Sensors. You can get a lot of sensor packages cheap, and there's no reason you can't set them up remotely to provide a little extra security or surveillance when you need it.

Disguises. And keep in mind a good mage with the Fashion spell and Disguise can refit damn near anything into anything else of equal mass. But if you don't have that, keep a few easy outfits. Any good runner can look like a street tough, a suit, a norm, a club kid and a hobo, at the very least.

Anything you can one-time-purchase to make a safehouse a little more comfortable, useful, or safe (in ascending order of importance).

A spare anything. Extra gun. Extra flak jacket. Spare bug drone.


Anyway, just my initial thoughts.

[snowRaven]

Honestly, that's taking things way too far and showing little if any care for if the players are actually having fun or not.

Life in a Z-Zone is not supposed to be 'fun'...

[CanRay]

Honestly, that's taking things way too far and showing little if any care for if the players are actually having fun or not.

Life in a Z-Zone is not supposed to be 'fun'...

Depends on your definition of "Fun". 

[Angelone]

*laughs* Ain't war hell! *fires a SAW*

[Red]

Honestly, that's taking things way too far and showing little if any care for if the players are actually having fun or not.

Life in a Z-Zone is not supposed to be 'fun'...

Depends on your definition of "Fun". 

Have to agree with CanRay, here. I've run groups that liked to jump right in the run and skip meeting the Johnson, others who just want to blow stuff up. Someone on these boards likes the idea of playing a heavily cybered samurai who basically sleeps in a storage unit and subsists on soy packs and electrolyte drinks. My current group seems to like talking their way through first, sneaking second, and killing everything third, then going back to the yacht to relax. Very spy-style.

Never think there is only one way to enjoy Shadowrun.