Maybe I have missed something, but is there no "Cost of Living" in Starfinder?
I have players who're slightly annoyed at tracking their credits, but who still want it to feel "real" - so was wondering if there was something similar to the "Cost of Living" in Pathfinder?
Finding the prices of the individual things isn't a problem, but we're trying to minimize the actual bookkeeping while keeping the "realism" feel.
Thanks in advance. :)
there really isn't. I think the game assumes pcs will live on their ship.
Housing and food costs work out to be realistic for staying at a hotel and eating out, but break down to you're gonna starve if they're assumed to be for long term living.
Dining, Poor Chain: 2 credits
Sleep Pod: 1 per night
At least 7 credits per day.
No rules for owning a home or buying groceries, yet.
I would hardly call 10 credits a day for a suite realistic.
Because....?
You can get double your skill check result in credits a week.
Bob the janitor has a +5 (1 rank 3 trained 1 int)
He takes 10 for a 15 making 30 credits a week
40 hour work week X 12 dollars an hour= 480
480/30= X/10 = 160 bucks a night for a hotel with kitchen. A little low but not crazy. But there isn't a one bed with your own shower listed as a hotel option, it goes from a hostel to a nicer room.
How mob NPCs make a living:
Professional Freelancer: Skill Bonus x 2 per day
Unskilled Labor: 4 per day or 1 per hour
But a CR 1/3 NPC has a +7 master skill and two +3 goods skills, so hiring unskilled labor is just being a cheapskate.
--
And this one is pretty bad:
Starship Crew, Standard: 20 per week
I'm guessing the NPC is allowed to earn extra money while on the ship... drift telemarketing or something.
Yeah, the math doesn't check out between the ability to actually earn credits, and what bits of cost of living are presented in the book.
I chose to play an Icon, and got everything I possibly could to be the best rockstar I could be (save Skill Focus, cause my table would probably lynch me for wasting a feat, and I've already got 3 other skill focuses). I can make between 22-41 credits after a week of work at level 6. That doesn't even pay for a week of hotel stays.
Now I get it, the wanted to nip profession in the bud to maintain WBL, especially since it's not the point of the game to be the best potato farmer in the universe (our Mystic has Profession: Herbalist, and our Operative has Brewer, we pretty much all have alternative jobs). However, if a celebrity can't pay the bills of the average Joe, you've kinda shot immersion in the foot for the sake of balance.
My best way to justify it is that your profits from profession are after the basics. The rent for your hovel on your homeworld, your phone bill to keep using your comm unit, extranet fees, etcetera that are automatically deducted from your account at the end of the month. Docking fees for the ship would also be in there. And there's a small, imperceptible percentage of your adventuring rewards that also goes toward this behind the scenes bookkeeping.
Cause yeah, it's fun for world building and immersion, but at the end of the day it's bookkeeping that isn't relevant to the game as a whole to keep it moving.
Part of the reason, in my mind, that we don't have a firm cost of living in Starfinder is because cost of living would vary from planet to planet and region to region.
Lets take Absalom and Akiton as examples. Absalom is as variable in it's standard of living as New York City is. Meanwhile Akiton is largely wilderness. Drop your prefab house anywhere on the planet and if a megacorp owns it or if a Shobhad clan tells you to leave, load your shot gun and fight it out.
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Part of the reason, in my mind, that we don't have a firm cost of living in Starfinder is because cost of living would vary from planet to planet and region to region.
Lets take Absalom and Akiton as examples. Absalom is as variable in it's standard of living as New York City is. Meanwhile Akiton is largely wilderness. Drop your prefab house anywhere on the planet and if a megacorp owns it or if a Shobhad clan tells you to leave, load your shot gun and fight it out.
Shobad watches a giant Abadar Prime drone dropping a giant habitrail house
"Ysoki moving in. There goes the neighborhood"