Stacking Drug Modifiers..., Become a God for 10xd6 minutes! Options

[Gerald Fitzgeral...]

A brief discussion today with my friend took an interesting turn when we began comparing ShadowRun to MMORPGs. One utility in MMORPGs which we never explored in ShadowRun was a buff/debuff character.

Essentially, by using the drugs in Cannon Companion and ShadowTech, you can stack amazing buffs with only slightly less amazing drawbacks.

JAZZ: for 10xd6 minutes
+2 quickness
+1d6 initiative

KAMAKAZE: for 10xd6 minutes
+1 Body
+1 Quickness
+2 Strength
+1 Willpower
+1d6 initiative
4 boxes of pain tolerance

PSYCHE: for 12 hours - body
+1 Intel
-1 modifier for sustained spells

Those are some serious buffs for 10xd6 minutes. Of course each drug time period is mutually exclusive.

When you come down from the drugs, you suffer the following:

JAZZ: for 10xd6 minutes
8L Stun
-1 quickness
+1 modifiers for all tests

KAMAKAZE: for 10xd6 minutes
6M stun
-1 quickness
-1 willpower
Addiction after 4 uses

PSYCHE:
No drawbacks.

If you include the illegal street drugs (Novacrack gives you 10D Stun when you come down) you can nearly double some attributes.

I suppose my question is, has anyone tried this aggresive buffing tactic? Should these drugs, when used together, have more severe drawbacks? Or is this a way to make someone a combat monster for 10xd6 minutes?

I would never subject myself to these drugs. However, teammates would enjoy my "helpfulness."

What do you think?

Fitz

[Fix-it]

[hyzmarca]

Two words, adiction rules. Taking a single drag of a Marlboro will lead to your death from addiction related attribute loss within six months. Taking three or four different combat drugs is just asking for a short life.

[Edward]

It can be done, I have seen characters do it. Ultimately it will kill you (unless you manage to stop in time, but then you cant do it any more)

In fact my very sensible magical character has enough combat drugs to fry anybody’s mind and takes them on some runs, if he ever used them he would be in rehab for several months and I think there is chance of magic loss but its better than dead. He got them for his second trip into the arcology.

Edward

[FrostyNSO]

We had a guy who got hooked on Kamikaze after some "casual" use. It saved our ass a few times, but then he started spiralling downwards, losing body attribute, appearing in dwarf porn flicks that he didn't remember being in, and ordering high-priced porn on other team members' trids, we were forced to have an intervention.

[Gerald Fitzgeral...]

Say you used Jazz and kamikaze in tandem for one climactic battle. The initial bout to resist addiction would be relatively easy and, while under the effects of both drugs, you'd be crazy combat man!

I'm going to slap them on one of my teammates this Thanksgiving night and I will tell you what the results are.

Also, I am going to use Hyper Splash grenades and flash grenades in tandem on the enemy. I suspect the hyper senses compounded with the bright flash will leave them all but incapacitated!

[hyzmarca]

What you really want is an awakened herbalist contact to make certain awakened drugs for you. The crash penalties are stiffer but awakened conpounds have no addiction rating, meaning that you can take as much as you want.

Spirit's Strength provides a +Essence boost to all attributes and a +(Essence/2) boost to inititive for (Essence + 1d6) hours. If you don't have much cyber, the benefits are outstanding and you can go nearly half a day with the boosted attributes.

If you are a shapeshifter, it is even better. +8 to all attributes and +4d6 to inititive. Then channel a force 4 Great Form and get +12 attributes, +6d6 inititive, and 8 points of hardened armor.

[hyzmarca]

double post

[Demon_Bob]

[Wireknight]

This reminds me of a short adventure with throwaway characters that I observed, based on the movie Mean Guns. The characters were horrible rulesbreaking abominations designed to be one-dimensional and as lethal as possible within the character generation limits (with 100 good karma handed out for further horrors). The result of this was that one player produced a character that caused any who gazed at his sheet for longer than a few seconds at a time to claw their eyes out in horror. This was Deathguy.

Deathguy had boosted reflexes(3), reaction enhancer(6), synaptic accelerator(2), muscle toner(4), muscle augmentation(4), enhanced articulation, damage compensator(9), and a suprathyroid gland. He also had ten multi-dose drug injectors slaved to a DNI. He spent literally every single point of the 100 good karma on a single firearm skill with specialization, it ended up at something absurd like 10/20.

I don't recall the specifics of what his statistics were when he kicked in all his juice, but he was doing things like acting nine times per combat round, ignoring pain modifiers up and until the point where he was reduced to ashes and the ashes were spread to the four corners of the earth, ripping limbs off with his teeth, and shooting a half-dozen people in the face in two seconds while blinded because the gnomes in his teeth had told him his eyes were plotting against him.

Good times.

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