u/Azaltir

The rules allow for 2 free activities per Downtime phase (regardless of certain statuses, etc.).

But what if every activity required a cost in Coins or Rep? How would that change your perspective as a player and/or GM? In terms of narrative and game mechanics?

With the option to take out a loan that would have to be repaid. Well, in the event that you’re not successful in earning Coins.

p.s. In my view, in terms of game mechanics, this would increase the sense of pressure, the feeling of a constant crisis, but I can’t say for certain whether this would be for the better or the worse. It probably depends on expectations for a particular campaign. But at the same time, the growing financial independence over time would certainly feel more rewarding. Narratively, in my view, this would make more sense in a situation where 2 free activities seem to come out of nowhere.

The narrative reason is clear, but it serves more to set the tone than to be a strict requirement.

But what about the gameplay reasons? So far, the only reason I’ve spotted is to limit the amount of money the characters have on hand by constantly ‘taking it away’ to increase the crew Tier. But to me, this feels very forced.

Could it be that players don’t have many options for spending their money? And is the system therefore trying to artificially inflate the situation? Might the changes to Crew Upgrades in Deep Cuts go some way towards solving this problem?

The in-game currency system is designed to be sufficiently abstract to spare players the need to keep constant track of it. Yet the division into Stash and Coin achieves the opposite.

p.s. For me this also loses its narrative justification in other genres where money is stored in digital form.

add: I suppose the point I failed to make is this: I wasn’t suggesting remove the Lifestyle mechanic at all. I simply questioned the gameplay(!) necessity of splitting the money into two pools, when we could simply keep one pool — the savings portion of which would cover Lifestyle costs, but from which players could spend money as usual without having to do any extra calculations. I questioned (1) the need to limit the amount of ‘dirty’ money and (2) having an exchange rate.