Looking for information or references to book pages that give a better background on BTL's than RAW or Cannon Companion.

Also any role playing advise would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Shadowbeat had a section on them, I think. So did VR2.0, if I remember right?

What are you looking for?

Ive never really tired a character with a BTL addiction, though it seems quite prevalent in sixth world. I was just hoping you DS'ers could help me with some of the specific nature of BTL addiction. While all addiction has a similar root, the effects and nature of BTL addiction is slightly different from normal drugs and I feel the role playing should reflect this. Any help is greatly appreciated.

...Yeah, one of my character's basically has Matrix addiction (bought as mild addiction to online games such as Miracle Shooter etc.) although it hasn't been spelled out yet in the SR4. I know it also differs from chemical based addictions in its effects.

I would guess at a chronic disinterestedness in normal life, given how everything appears so flat. If denied BTLs, then the character may try extreme things to recapture the emotional highs experienced while BTLing. In advanced cases, there may be severe confusion about what is real and what is not, even to the point of thinking that the BTL life is the real one - it is after all "more real" than every day life.

You should also give some thought to the type of BTL's the character runs. Are they sex chips? Fantastic adventures? Confident macho power-trips or feelings of baby-like safety and security? The results of each of these might be different. The sex chip BTL'er might have no interest it real world partners or relationships, the one who loves the macho-power trips might become increasingly frightened or insecure when without.

Or I could be playing them completely differently to other people. I have one NPC who is an ex-Tir operative who betrayed his team under torture. He now habitually puts himself through torture BTL's, trying to inure himself to the experience. The spectacle of him once again handcuffing himself to the radiator, staring at the old team photo of those he lost, before slotting the chip with a three hour time out, is a pretty sad or disturbing image. He's a wreck, approaching self-destruction, and the BTLs play a part in that.

The novel 2XS was about BTL addiction (in part, I wont spoil it). If you can get hold of it, you might want to read that.

Hope this helps,

-K.

And I'm thinking that the movie 'Strange Days' can only help capture part of what it is to experience other people's lives and emotions electronically...

Another one I would through in...

Trainspotting.

'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'

"Oh god, did you eat all this acid?"
"That's right, MUSIC!"

I have to agree with Spike. If you're looking for a Shadowrun-esque movie, Strange Days is fantastic place to start.

Someone wrote a really neat short story a while back (I looked for it, couldn't find it ) about a runner that was a chiphead doing a mission. It was really smartly written. The runner in question would perform the task asked of her, and then she'd go "well, that went well, I think I'm allowed to treat myself.. just a little...", as well as slotting in to escape fear and such.

The unique thing about BTLs is that you can get 'high', and them immediately return to earth - chip in, chip out, unlike drugs, where if you take a hit, you're basically fucked up for a few hours. With BTLs, you can sneak a hit every few minutes, everytime you aren't doing something.... which would be VERY annoying to your teammates, since you have the attention span of a goldfish.

Anyway, I think BTL addicted characters are awesome. I've got to start putting in more BTL in my games.

The in and out nature of BTLs is easy to take advantage. I had a GM that worked around that by requiring a check to slot out (after all, it is an addiction) Unless someone else pulled the plug the addict would stay in.

One of my first characters was a decker that was a recovered BTL addict (back in 3rd). First run we are on, and one of the most memorable ones ever, we rescued this corp guys daughter who was in a comatose state. Turns out she was fried from BTLs and totally unresponsive. We had to get information out of her, so the

GM let me connect into her head running my cyberdeck through a simsense deck to her head. Since she wasn't tripping, she was still unresponsive, so I loaded up a BTL, restricting the Simsense input at first and slowly increasing it till she was responsive enough to get answers out of.

Each time I increased the juice, the GM made me roll increasingly hard willpower test to resist falling back into my own addiction (prior to cleaning up, it would have been considered chronic BTL addiction). the final test I made by 1 success

Also remember that there are different types of BTL chips. In addition to your regular dreamchips; you have moodchips, which just overlay an emotion; and personafixes, which change your personality without impacting your ability to function. In SR4, it is rather likely that AR dreamchips also exist, whic just give a psychedelic overlay to the real world.

BTLs and Calhots also have legitimate medical uses. For example, instead of prescribing an anti-depressant drug a psychiatrist might prescribe a 'not so miserable that I want to kill myself' moodchip or personafix.

Prescription anti-depressant chips are probably the most abused of all BTLs, which users ranging from downtrodden SINless to suburban soccer moms to Big 10 CEOs.

Anti-depressant BTLs! I love it!

Wait... this is PERFECT! I mentioned a while back I would building a grammaton cleric (equilibrium) I could have him addicted to BTLs that REDUCE emotions! :D Almost an 'anti-BTL' I wounder if that would make willpower tests easier, as I'd be less likely to give in to emotion (which, in my opinion is what willpower represents)

Prolonged "peak" exposure creates deep, deep valleys of depressed reaction once the stimulus is removed. The psyche can only sustain high levels of emotional activity for so long before damage is done. BTL's allow you to artificially enhance and extend this period of peak experience.

When the stimulus is removed, the mind is going to instinctively try to lower emotional response, to give the body a break from prolonged stimulation. Chemical substances are going to be produced to reduce the levels of dopamine, seratonin and other chemicals produced by the brain. The body is going to be completely out of whack - at first, it had far too many "uppers", now, too many natural "downers". If the addict cycles frequently enough, the body may never be able to establish a natural equilibrium.

Outside of BTL use, emotions will become muted at best, non-existent at worst. Addicts can be expected to be confused, seem out-of-sorts immediately after use and sullen if use is prohibited for a prolonged period of time.

Having your emotions artificially manipulated also means that your mind will begin to learn a new set of triggers, Pavlovian responses to certain stimuli that can continue past the use of the BTL in question. Furthermore, if such conditioning becomes deeply imbeded, the addict may loose the ability to consciously direct his emotions.

It's a lonely, confusing world outside of those chips - a lonely, uncertain world.

It's when I come across threads like this, that I start banging my head against the desk in chronic frustration that shadowrunrpg.com hasn't published my web-fiction yet...

*Ngggghhhhhh*

The end-of-the-line for BTL is 24x7 chipping, which leads to the user neglecting his bodily needs - he won't eat, drink, go to the bathroom, etc. Die in euphoria.

Short form is that there're three aspects: A psychological addiction, where you need to crawl back into teh chip, a physical addiction, from the endorphins and other body chemicals that are produced, and a "Flat world" problem common to all types of abuse.

The "Flat World" is due to your enjoyment 'sensors' of your brain going, say, from 1 to 100. A cheeseburger maybe rates a 3, really good sex a 20, and so on. Trouble is, drugs (Or Beetles) don't just spike the meter, they *leave* it spiked, which burns the sensors out. If, say, the first five sensors are burned out, sex only 'reads' as a 15, so isn't as fun unless you smoke/slot a chip afterwards, while a cheeseburger doesn't even register. This also means that, over time, as more 'sensors' burn out, the same 50 rush that a chip used to give you only gives 45, then less, then less, eventually dropping to, say, a 30 as 20 sensors are gone for good. To make up for it, you have to get something even *stronger*, which, of course, leads to faster burnout ... a viscious cycle.

Really, really short form, there.

Well. BTLs are illegal. That means that while corps like Ares, through it's entertainement divisions, may sponsor BTL shops and reap profits, they are going to have to be very, very discreet about it. And having every chiphead the cops arrest blabber on about how great Ares is, is sort of a giveaway...

With a pro-Ares brainwash program also much less strong. Though I do agree it's probably SOP. You just sort of end up liking one brand more than another - ARES Moody Blue, ARES Cool Mint, ARES Confident Commander, etc. I don't even think anyone would be upset at that. People would just accept that hey, it's good marketing. Some of the more fringe pirate radio and activist groups would be up in arms, but most people would just shrug and slot their favourite brand of chips.

By the way, the George Alec Effinger's Marid Audran trilogy (When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, The Exile Kiss) are all about chips, they will give you GREAT ideas about where to take your simsense in your games. Really recommendable cyberpunk series.

Some other ways to screw with the chipheads in your campaign, there is always the matter of trust.

How much do you trust the street-scum selling you the illegal chip to plug into your brain? What kind of quality control was involved in making the chip? I just bought a SD memory card for my PDA and it doesn't read at all. What would happen if you plugged a bad chip with a short circuit or something into your head?

What about "Black Beetles"? Send the signals into your brain that you are dying often enough, how long will it take your brain to make it so?

The do-it-yourself brainwasher could probably easily make a chip with some subliminal programming to make you totally trust someone. "Say chummer, got a few thousand nuyen I can borrow?"

Chip addiction is probably yet another slippery slope. You start with maybe some standard "got it at the Stuffer Shack" sims, then maybe move on to mild Cal-Hots, then BTL's of stronger and stronger types, until you get to something that kills you, or leaves you lobotomized.

Does anyone hate the character enough to arrange a delivery of a bad chip to one of his/her trusted sources? If it's known to enemies that you have a chip habit, you better take the time to run that diagnostic first, before you slot it.

...then there's personafix chips. Today you can be the chef, tomorrow the sniper. Just don't get them mixed up.

These were also the root of the old Incomplete Deprogramming flaw.

From a Shadowrunner perspective, the biggest dangers of BTLs are the hotsim module.

Any invading hacker can kill you or incapacitate you in a matter of seconds by uploading a BTL-level simsense track once they've hacked in your PAN.

...so would a snuff BTL from the POV of the victim induce strong enough trauma that ir could kill the person who slotted it?

I got around this with a chiphead by taking skills and getting the equipment to make my own chips. When it comes to addictions, its one of the easiest to produce, since it is, for the most part, capturing the data and programming the chip. No worries about dangerous chemicals, lab equipment, etc.

Wonder how long it will be till there is 'hot' AR. From how it seems, current AR is mainly just visual. Think of having everything that IS real being that much more real. Your food would taste better, the air could smell different, change the perceived temperature. Enhance how everything feels, change the actual feel of things. Solid objects could feel soft, water could feel solid.

I might have to make my 'grammaton cleric' an ex-chip head that has changed his addiction to emotion reduction chips, specially made. And yeah, its going to be interesting to pull him off his meds.

Making BTls aren't that easy. You need talent who have been simrigged and the equipment to capture the data given by the actors. Then you need the equipment to tweak the data, then mix it all down into a program.

Reliable talent is the hardest part. You can't just give a bum a simrig and get a good feed, it takes something special to get someone who can give you a good reading on an emotion.

Is there any official material on making BTLs? I've always seen it done as "Capture simsense track, tweek the feed and boost the parts you want through the roof. You don't need an overly strong emotion track to start in order to push it through the roof. Dependent on the type of BTL you don't even need an actor. Horror chips are excessively easy, just kidnap someone, hook them to a simsense recorder and scare the hell out of them. not to say its morally right... but again, you are producing BTLs...

IIRC, Shadowbeat had something about producing them.

Shadowbeat is what I'm referencing.

That's what I figured.

I needa hunt a copy of this down!

Cannon Companion, of all things, is the BIG source on all things chip.