I don't get why I would bother maintaining a lifestyle above Wretched other than for purely RP reasoning. Is there any point to lifestyle other than as a cumbersome extra bit of pointless book-keeping?
akaddk wrote:
If you're asking if lifestyle gives you any attack or damage bonuses, then no, not explicitly. Nor are there any explicit rules in the ALPG specific to lifestyle and combat bonuses. However, with the DMG coming out, and with that book having rules on disease and long-term injury recovery, it would not be unreasonable if your lifestyle was the primary determinant in the DC of recovering from those effects.
Even without the DMG, any of the following would be allowable based on an implicit reading of the lifestyle rules in the Player's Handbook and the DM empowerment text included in every DDAL module (all references are from the 'Lifestyle Expenses' section of the Basic Rules (pp.52-53)) :
- Rule that characters with low-status lifestyles are unable to find buyers for items that are noted as being valuable 'to a collector' or other presumably high-status person, requiring them to settle for less gold in treasure at the end of a module. ("Living frugally might help you avoid criminals, but you are unlikely to make powerful connections.")
- Rule that a character's armor, weapons, or equipment may fail at dramatically appropriate times, due to lack of effort and expense spent maintaining them. ("Furthermore, expenses cover the cost of maintaining your equipment so you can be ready when adventure next calls.")
- If a character's log indicates a number of days spent at a Wretched or Squalid lifestyle equal to or greater than the character's Constitution modifer + 3 (BR, p.66) and the character has no other source of food, the DM may require that character to either expend a day of rations for each such period or to begin the adventure with one or more levels of exhaustion due to starvation. ("A wretched lifestyle presents abundant dangers. Violence, disease, and hunger follow you wherever you go.")
I might even go so far as to rule that a character with a Wretched lifestyle might not have access to one or more magical items during an adventure, as they were stolen by someone else and need to be recovered during downtime. ("Other wretched people covet your armor, weapons, and adventuring gear, which represent a fortune by their standards.") A DM does not have the authority to remove a magic item permanently from a character's inventory, but the ALPG does cover the situation where a character can 'lend' her magical gear to other characters, which suggests that a character losing access to a magic item for the course of a single adventure would not violate campaign rules. This would be a pretty extreme example, only really applicable to someone who spends significant amounts of downtime at a Wretched lifestyle, but it would certainly be supportable under the rules as written.
So yeah, I wouldn't consider lifestyle to be 'pointless bookkeeping'.
--
Pauper
Pauper wrote:
I have used it all the time during investigation adventures in the DnDAL. "So you want to get into to talk to the nobleman, what's your lifestyle? Wretched? No, the guard refuses to let random hobos through the door. The rich PC however, you get advantage on your Persuasion to get yourself through the door."
While I've never had anyone at my tables with the Wretched lifestyle, I'd impose Disadvantage on virtually every Charisma-based skill check, and perhaps some of the Strength- and Constitution-based ones as well. Being undernourished doesn't lend itself well to feats of strength or endurance.
In roleplaying terms, who would seek out or even trust (as Skerrit puts it) a "random hobo" to take on an important task? Many employers would be skeptical of even letting such a character come along. If you were applying for a job IRL, would you bring a random homeless person with you to the job interview? 
I should point out that I'm asking this specifically for Adventurer's League, not people's home games. The answers so far I don't even think would be AL legal. And many of them are really kind-of dickish.
Ive yet to have anyone spend ANY Lifestyle days during any of my expeditions scenarios. Ive run them all up to Drums in the Marsh. Some people have seriously large stockpiles of them .
A positive accumulation of downtime is dumb. AL should have reverted to consumed time units, what LG used to do.
akaddk wrote:
Blade2718 wrote:
Mirtek wrote:
Pauper wrote:
First off, thanks for assuming that the most speculative and extreme example given, one I even prefaced with "I might even go so far" as the one element worth critiquing.
Mirtek wrote:
There's also the advantage of more influential friends. A favor from an influential noble or official seems much more beneficial than a favor from someone begging for scraps on a street corner. Or at least different in the options within the power of the person from whom the favor is requested or obtained. Friends in high places and all that, or possibly political power in some game styles.
Pauper wrote:
I agree with akaddk: Going from no consequences to living a wretched or similarly low-class lifestyle to the consequences being the loss (even temporary) of a feat or magic item that the player obtained fairly is just a foolish and pointless switch to the opposite extreme. There have to be good ways to make lifestyle choices count which don't cripple a PC. I do like the idea of having NPC's react differently based on a PC's lifestyle, though. That seems entirely acceptable.
If I were playing at an AL table where the DM wouldn't allow me to use an item or feat I obtained legitimately simply due to my lifestyle choice I would get up, walk away, and not play at that table again.
In Adventure League there will most likely be scenarios where having somebody with a wealthy lifestyle will give you access to NPCs that you may otherwise not have access to, I suppose there may be instances where they may do the same for those who live a wretched lifestyle. Perhaps the beggar will only talk to other beggars, but I do know that if you want access to high society, you probably need to have a wealthy lifestyle, and that will very likely be implemented in some of the scenarios.
Mirtek wrote:
Pauper wrote:
Mirtek wrote:
Isnt this addtion kinda heavy on DM fiat? Its acutally one of the things i like. If you want more or less realistic campagin styles, its really easy to just fluff and change things to match your desired style. I know that orginized play is suppose to be RAW with very little/no house ruling, but this edition leaves a lot open to interpertation, weather by purpose or not.
If a DM at a public play event I was organizing told a player that their character was permanently dead and couldn't be raised under the rules that the player has access to, and the DM had nothing more than "I permanently killed a PC on purpose by declaring that a ghoul ate his head, when all the mod said was 'Fight some ghouls'", I'd apologize to the players and never invite the DM back.
TheBreen wrote:
akaddk wrote:
I ask character life style and assign minus according to life styles none poor= -5 on all cha check for socail
socail and rp task
wretch:-10 to score with dis
squalid : -5 to score
poor: -2 to score (possible disadvantage)
mod: none
comfort: +2 with advantage
wealty +5 with advantage
art: +10 with advantage
---------------------------------------------
advantage depends on weath lvl of person talking to.
Noon wrote:
For some people it's more than pointless book-keeping.
If you want your play style to be respected, maybe recognise lifestyle has it's place in other play styles and calling it 'pointless book-keeping' was badwrongfun BS to begin with.
Noon wrote:
Dungeons & Dragons is a role playing game. The basics of RPGs is this formula:
The players make decisions.
The characters take in-game actions.
The DM decides what happens next.
There are tens of thousands of words published to help the DM decide what happens next. But ultimately, it is the DM who decides how those words apply—or don't apply—to this particular situation. That's the whole point of having a DM. If all the rules were absolute, it would be a wargame or a board game.
If the DM decides some result is different from what the other players would expect, then ideally that difference would be explained. It may not be explained at the moment of the decision, because there might be information the PCs don't know, and divulging that early could spoil a surprise. But if there's something radically different from what the players were lead to expect, the decision should definitely be explained.
There's no such thing as "fluff text" in a role playing game. It's all description to help a DM decide how to handle various situations. In the case of "lifestyle," the point is to help the DM decide what effects befall the PC as a result of their lifestyle choice. If a player didn't expect poor results from a wretched lifestyle, I'd say that was pretty unreasonable. This is easy to see in any culture that's ever existed; it's the reason the lifestyle is called "wretched," after all.
The same is true for other choices the player/character makes. The character does something and the DM explains the consequences (good or bad). A kindly DM will help a new player by explaining the likely types of consequences before the character actually takes the action.
Player: "I attack the halfling."
DM: "You realize that the halfling is the proprietor of this establishment, is well-liked, and the inn is full of other adventurers. There's a table in the corner where six of the town constables are sitting. Are you sure you want to attack?"
or:
Player: "I cast animate dead on the bad guy we just killed."
DM: "You remember that in this town the clergy of Kelemvor are very powerful, and creating undead is the thing they hate the most. They've been known to kill to prevent this. Are you sure you want to do that?"
Note that in neither case is the action disallowed. These are "perfectly legal" (by Adventure League / D&D rules) actions. They do, however, have potentially unpleasant consequences within the context of the setting. Those consequences could be severe, depending on the situation. (In the second example, if the action took place out in the swamp the Kelemvorites might never need to know about it.)
In no case would a player's argument that "it's allowed by the D&D/AL rules, so I can do it if I want and you can't have anything bad happen to me" be persuasive. It is always the DM that decides the consequences, not the players.
I would postulate that the amount of "rules flexibility" inherent in DM-Fiat that is permissable through AL might, in the end, come back to actually contradict the fundamental virtues of an organized play system. Familiarity and understanding of common rulings is a lynchpin of what makes organized play what it is. While the freedoms DMs have at their disposal to "personalize" their own tables and flesh out rules can be considered a good thing, too much individuality can result in players never knowing what they're getting into while travelling from table to table. Which is contradictory to organized play, as a common rules set that enables "transferability" from one gaming location to another (or even table to table at the same store) is implicit in the paradigm.
Having open-ended rules (like Lifestyle) that can be fleshed out in a variety of different ways (or not) implies that players are at the mercy of jumping from table to table until they find a DM that enforces rules in a manner they prefer. Which, in the end, means that either players find a DM and stop playing anywhere else--the exact opposite of what organized play has been understood to facilitate in the past--or simply give up on any table consistency from one gaming experience to another.
It also means that the burden falls on the players themselves to actually play a game with that DM to find out what their interpretations of the open-ended rules (like Lifestyle) actually are. Not knowing how rules will be "enforced" seems contradictory to the organized play experience as it has come to be commonly understood.
At my store, we reached a point long ago where players began self-segregating themselves to specfic DMs. The combination of wildly different play experiences, sandbox content of the mods that is (as I understand it) purposefully over abundant, an Encounters program where it is impossible to schedule consistent session experiences from table to table, and powerful DM-Fiat policy results in an OP that, in my opinion, actually discourages PC transferability.
If Lifestyle can be interpreted so loosely, it would behoove the Campaign Organizers to explicity state it. In the absence of recognizeable and articulated rules, it needs to be much clearer what DM-Fiat actually means and the permutations it can take. While it may already be stated, it is obviously not clear enough, as evidenced by multiple threads debating the veracity of various rulings and policies.
I will continue to DM my Encounters tables as I understand the rules and policies AL has in place, but I make it explicity clear to my table when I am using DM-Fiat or fleshing out a rule. I make sure they're all on board with it, and we take time out to meta-game our specific tables policies and proceedures and reasonings so we are all on the same page and on board with each other. And then we continue to play. This makes it almost impossible to welcome new players to our Enounters table unless we make a specific "table guide" so they aren't surprised by the decisions we've made together. I won't "inflict" my interpretation of the rules on unsuspecting players simply because I'm the DM and they haven't been playing with us before and it's their dumb luck they showed up that night. That is unfair to them. And it's a cop-out on my part. I want them to enjoy their experience gaming and feel empowered as a collaborative player, not a slave to my whims. In combination with the "Casual Play" concept, it feels like it's resulting in a whole series of "homeplay" games forced into playing at a store. And that's very very frustrating. I some times feel like I'm participating in AL despite the OP.
If it's expected that DMs need to "flesh out" rules like Lifestyle, I'd appreciate a heads up from the Campaign Organizers, instead of being expected to read between the lines and create policies that can affect a player's PC from table to table. At this point, I will gladly DM an AL table, but I'd have to think twice about actually playing and expecting any of my PCs to logistically be playable at a table where I don't know the DM.