Cost of Living

Life in 2090 isn’t cheap (Hell, life today isn’t cheap). Your characters have all sorts of issues that crop up in their daily lives that can only be address by spending their hard-earned credits. There’s rent to pay, food and clothing to buy, fuel and maintenance costs for that VTOL car that seems to break down every other week. Characters need weapons, ammunition for those weapons, and (if they want them) cybernetics.
All of these can things add up to a hefty price tag, especially if your character is keeping up with the state of the art in gear. Having your characters pay these costs on a regular basis is an easy way to help keep money from getting out of control in your game. But Interface Zero 2.0 isn’t meant to be a lesson in money management. The idea of needing a spreadsheet just to keep track of everything your character might have to pay for in 2090 is going to kill a game just as fast as letting things get out of control will. With this in mind, we’ve created a simple chart that represents the character’s lifestyle. Players choose what type of life style they want to adopt, and every time you begin a new game session (not a continuation of an existing job), they pay the cost associated with that lifestyle. The more extravagant the lifestyle, the higher the cost. Incidentally, this is a pretty good motivator for characters to seek higher paying (and more dangerous) contracts. Gotta pay them bills, neh?
The character’s lifestyle covers things like paying rent, buying food, paying utilities, maintaining gear and vehicles (or paying for public transportation), maintaining personal health, etc. What it doesn’t cover, however, is the cost of purchasing cybernetics, buying new weapons, purchasing new vehicles such as VTOL aircraft, jump bikes, golemmechs, drones, etc. Put simply, if the character wants to make a purchase that gives her some sort of mechanical bonus, it isn’t covered by the character’s lifestyle.
Like anything, this can be abused. As characters start making more and more credits, they are more likely to improve their lifestyle without necessarily realizing it. They buy better clothes, cooler, faster cars, get a nice crib to doss down, go to fancy night clubs every night and generally throw money around like there’s no end to it. As the Game Master, it’s up to you to let the players know when their characters start living a better lifestyle and enforce that upgrade.

OCCUPATIONS AND CHARACTER LIFESTYLES

The character lifestyles rules are designed with work in conjunction with a character’s occupation. Since characters receive an infusion of credits every month from their occupation they can use those credits to offset some of the money they need to pay every month.
Some credits gained from the character’s occupation might be eaten up immediately because a character is living above her means, while other occupations easily provide the requisite credits the character needs to maintain her lifestyle and have some cash left over. This is a quick way to gauge how well or poorly the character is living without needing an itemized list of every possible expense.

Lifestyle

Upkeep

Destitute

500 credits

Poor

1,000 credits

Modest

2,500 credits

Moderately Well Off

5,000 credits

Wealthy

10,000 credits

Filthy Rich

20,000 credits