Lifestyle

Whenever you log out, your character is ICly still in the world, performing daily tasks, pursuing interests and jobs, or engaging in other off-screen activities. Maybe they're just blandly following their normal humdrum routines, but they could be afflicted with illness, debilitated by injury or emotional trauma, or suffering the interesting consequences of whatever they've gotten up to in-game lately. Sometimes these alterations in lifestyle may be solely related to your recent roleplay, or other times you might want to create some kind of explanation for what your character is up to when dreaded Real Life takes you away from Avaria for a while. The lifestyle system, and its associated LIFESTYLE command, helps you describe your character's present routines in a concise way that ties in with their story.

Lifestyle Basics

Setting Basic Behaviors

It's very simple to set up and view a lifestyle. When setting options, most types of behavior, such as sleeping, eating, or drinking, are a simple toggle -- you are either doing them normally, or not. You start out performing all these basic activities normally; therefore if you enter lifestyle eating that will toggle your eating off and you will get the message You are not eating.. Entering the same command will return your eating to normal. This functions the same way for drinking and sleeping.

Setting a Routine

In addition to these fundamental life activities, you can set a description of your routine that gives a small amount of additional information about your present habits. This is done by using lifestyle routine, followed immediately by a short description of your current activities. You can enter a string of up to 200 characters to describe what your character is doing while off-screen. Note that this limit exists because if there is something that others may be interested in or worried about, you should not put all the information about your current plot hook in your lifestyle routine blurb, but rather scatter clues like this around the game world in a fun way for people to find.

Examples:
>lifestyle routine Aleph has been absent for several days.
>lifestyle routine Aleph works at the chimaera factory every day at noon.
>lifestyle routine Aleph is at work all the time lately.

These kinds of messages can convey different things in a simple, IC way. For the first example, there should be some concern. Where did Aleph go?? For the second one, perhaps someone looking for Aleph should go to the chimaera factory at noon. Putting in a specific time is a good way to point out where you can be found most often. The last routine message makes it look as if Aleph is quite busy and may not be hanging around with friends much these days, but there is nothing to be worried about. Other characters may find out this information if they ASK around about you.

Viewing Your Lifestyle

You can see your current lifestyle settings by entering lifestyle by itself:

 Your Habits
 -----------------------------------------------------------
 eating:    yes
 drinking:  yes
 sleeping:  yes
 routine:   working
 -----------------------------------------------------------

Effects of Lifestyle

The lifestyle you set can have tangible effects on your character and their experience of the world. Eating, drinking, and sleeping normally (the default) are neutral, but doing these things more or less can be beneficial or detrimental to your stats. Also, you will generally not ever feel hungry/thirsty/sleepy, or actually need to eat/drink/sleep on-screen, so long as you have your lifestyle set normally. But if your lifestyle has you, for example, eating too little, you will begin to suffer hunger in-game. If you do not sleep, you will not be able to receive dreams. Deprivation of food, drink, and sleep may additionally have deleterious effects on your health and make you susceptible to illness. There may be other effects from lifestyle which you can find out as you play!

Lifestyle Commands

• LIFESTYLE
• LIFESTYLE <behavior>
• LIFESTYLE ROUTINE <description>