I just realized recently that there are no actual game effects for being under the influence of BTLs. Every other brain-bender mentioned in the books has stats, effects for when you come down, the whole nine yards. BTLs are just another addiction in terms of game mechanics though, so mostly a BTL addict just has to worry about what happens if they can't get a fix. There are some general mentions of long-term effects, but no real mechanics to back it up. Is this an oversight, or are they going to roll BTLs into the Hacker book?

Always bugged me too. I don't think it's going to be in Unwired, but I'd love to see rules?

It would make a lot of sense for detailed BTL info to be included in unwired.

I've been jotting down ideas for some specific types of BTLs that provide the user with stat and skill bonuses or penalties, much like conventional drugs. No idea when it'll be in a presentable form though. Its really not at all fleshed out.

-paws

The thing is, when you BTL, it's like going VR into the Matrix or a Drone. You drop, senseless save for your silicon dreams.

On the bright side, Beetle-Heads aren't causing problems when chipping. On the down side, it's addictive as hell, and they'll do ANYTHING for their next fix, rather than live in the Real World any longer than they have to!

That depends on what kind of BTL your using, moodchips and personafixes commonly have the RAS override turned of so the user can move around freely.

Ah, right. Forgot it was only Dreamchips that do that. Well, that's what I think of most when BTL comes to mind.

Yeah, Dreamchips definitely seem to be the most frequently depicted BTL. I suspect that in the game-world, Dreamchip users are what most people think of when they think of beetleheads. Kind of like how the term junkie tends to conjure a particular couple of images for most people.

-paws

I'd like to see rules for them just because without rules, every player seems to load up on the drugs in Arsenal and the BBB. Personally, I think it fits the flavor of the game better if BTLs are more prevalent than actual drugs, but the way it's set up now, with BTLs doing nothing for you, that doesn't get reflected at the table. My intuition-based magician can push his Int to 8 with drugs, but shoving a chip in his datajack would just mess him up; as a result, he's into psyche and red mesc, but not BTL, which is a shame, because it's one of those dystopian cyberpunk things that I like. I just wish this bit of fluff would rear its ugly head more often.

What are the long-term effects of BTL usage, other than letting your meat body go to pot because you aren't exercising or eating? It's not like there's a chemical reaction (other than addiction, naturally) that damages your organs when you slot a chip is there? When I think of BTLs I think of the (probably apocryphal) story of the guy who died playing World of Warcraft because he refused to get up to use the toilet.

Neurological damage due to the stress that the high-powered signal that BTLs use. So you'd get twitching, uncontrollable movements, and so on.

But most users by then have had their hoops shot off by trying to stick up the Stuffer Shack to get enough for another BTL.

Edit: Oh, yes, and disassociation with reality, but that's more a psycological thing.

Hopefully.

In 3rd edition they had Winternight's "God chips." They boosted you like you were on Kamikaze, only moreso. In 4th edition, well, probably because drugs are more location specific in terms of where they can be farmed? I don't mean a grow op, I mean an actual opium farm or poppy farm or coco farm with acres of land and mass produced product...leading to setting books! Just a guess, of course. Also, drugs are more topical in the real world with visible effects to base things on and that people can identify with better. Maybe that's it.

In 4th Edition, I'm coming up with things worse than God Chips for my campaign!

Check out "Debt Of Non-Blood" for the details!

I would most want to have somekind of rules for moodchips, there are all kinds of character consepts swirling around in my head based on using differend moodchips.

Now that I think about it, isn't there a Ghost Cartels book coming out, or something? Maybe that will go into detail about these sorts of things.

that's about drug cartels and awakened drugs.

the only good chance we really have to see BTL rules in the near future is unwired, imo.

Being such a popular and prevalent drug, it's truly a shame that there are no hard mechanics for BTLs and being a chiphead.

Now if only we had game mechanics to flesh out the degenerative effects of BTLs the same way we've got negative effects from coming down off of drugs.

You could just use the drugs rules as they are written.

BTLs can just be found on any street corner.

Negative side effects would depend on which Dreamchip or Moodchip was slotted, probably.

Different dreams, different reactions waking up.

In the Madrid Audan series by George Alec Effinger, (Amazon link), Moodchips and limited Personafix chips are extremely common. Those books use chips in a 100% compatible way with Shadowrun. It makes awesome sense. But the Shadowrun rules don't really support what chips could do. I wanted to make some house rules after reading those books, but in general chips are so underused in Shadowrun that no one would use them.

Well most chips don't really change much about you. They don't actually alter your biochemistry, so they wouldn't grant any attribute boosts. As for skillboosts, that would fall under activesofts, which could possibly be coded into personafix chips, but that wouldn't require rules either.

A tripchip will alter your perceptions, so that would likely be a negative perception modifier for specific senses ("I'd be able to spot the gunman if I wasn't under water!") bit it is mostly for gamemaster fun (describing situations to a tripping shadowrunner would be hilarious fun). Moodchips are purely an RP consideration. Dreamchips zonk you out, so there's little they could do.

Perhaps side-effects could include levels of high pain tolerance, perception modifiers and other negative modifiers, composure tests (bad trips). The detachment to reality could be expressed with negative mods to intuition, logic, reaction and/or willpower.

Personally, I'm all for it being a totally RP thing.

After all, you slot "Slade the Sniper" chips too long, and suddenly you think you are him. And it's time to unload your Streetline Special into a crowd.

Just make sure you don't hit a 'Runner named Dirk, and have a Mage fireball you.

No, I don't think chips should alter your stats. In a way, tha's the job of skillwires. Which of couse would make it VERY interesting if you packaged a skillchip with a personafix...

However, some chips should give you bonuses to certain situations. The most obvious is fear. If you are chipping a Fearless Badass moodchip or personafix, that should indeed allow you to resist fear better.

<<Perhaps side-effects could include levels of high pain tolerance, perception modifiers and other negative modifiers, composure tests (bad trips). The detachment to reality could be expressed with negative mods to intuition, logic, reaction and/or willpower.>>

I like those negative mods but I have a hard time figuring out why someone would slot a BTL other than to escape reality. Perhaps you could break the BTL positive mods down by the genre:

Action/Violence/Sports - +1 to Reaction (15 min)
Erotic/Comedy - +1 to Charisma (15 min)
Horror - +1 to Perception (15 min)

Whatever the results are, I feel like the negative mods should vastly outweigh the positives.

really, by changing your brain chemistry and such, you can probably do all kinds of crazy things... just by manipulating people's emotions, and altering their perceptions.

most of things are probably really bad for you, but i would say that many things that could be done would be much like the drug rules. it should be absolutely possible to trigger an adrenaline rush, or to make you not notice pain, or to set off a berserker rage. the human body is capable of some really impressive things if you can get your brain behind it... i mean, you're not going to have some pick up a car and throw it, but you could probably get them to be more strong just because their whole mind and body would be focused together on something.

But does a BTL really change your brain chemistry? It fools your senses into thinking you're perceiving and feeling something that isn't there... which is no different from jacking into Virtual Reality except that it's beyond intense and indistinguishable from RL. It doesn't sound like there's an active component to a sim rig and BTL chip that would chemically affect you. I'm thinking of RL experiments where neurologists zap a person's skull to induce sensations. It doesn't change the brain's chemistry, it just tricks the brain. Once the stimulus is removed the brain reverts back to normal. I'm not convinced the addiction component of a BTL chip is a chemical reaction (like being genetically predisposed to something). Addiction comes into play because the BTL experience is so much better than the person's crappy life. If I could live the adventures and sex life of James Bond why would I ever come back to reality? I could see constant increased heart rate, metabolic functions, adrenaline, etc. from BTL simulation excitement damaging a person but not the actual chip and hardware itself. My theory is that a BTL stresses you to death.

Psychotropic Black ICE is a type of BTL, and it permanently affects you.

Hence BTLs can affect your brain. It's not just perception.

ASIST biofeedback can do pretty much anything a drug can do and more. SR's been at the point where deckers with enough neuroscientific knowledge could basically re-write your brain since 1st edition. Check out the PAB machines in Shadowbeat. Or, if you're not comfortable with them because they seem to have been ret-conned out of the game, look at bunraku or psychotropic IC. I can definitely see BTLs that cause you to ignore pain. I don't know about physical stat bonuses, but I see no reason BTLs shouldn't be able to temporarily raise or lower INT, WIL, LOG, or CHA.

And then there's the issue of cyberware. I can see some BTLs possibly interfacing with existing 'ware. Maybe bonuses that you only get if you have skillwires. Maybe your BTL is messing with your head while at the same time, an embedded file tricks your muscle replacements into exceeding their safety limits (sort of like red-lining a cyberlimb). Eventually, it will kill or horribly injure you because it's putting more stress on your cyberware than your cyberware was meant to handle. But, hopefully, those particular BTL's will be more of a special occasion treat than an everyday routine (unless your security employees have a really crappy union).

If you slot a chip that terrifies you by inducing fear stimulas to the section of the brain that deals with emotion ( is that that the thalmus?) it would fool the brain into producing the chemical by product of that. If you stimulate the pleasure sensors of the brain you induce Endorphins.

This is outside electrical/visual/aromatic stimuli affecting the chemical struction of the body. This is what makes BTL so dangerous.
Yes if you slot a rage chip with the emotional overtones of invincibility you are going to trigger Adreline which would make you faster and stronger.

Remember you also get the entire emotional overtones of the person on who the chip was made. All of this stimuli affects the way the brain percieves the issue and then will correspondinly ( is that a word?) change/control chemical output of the brain and glands.

Good points. I retract my theory.

You know, I've been playing SR since 1st edition, and I've thought about BTLs a lot. But I just realized something very creepy that would probably be true of the BTL industry that I'd never thought of before for some reason. I bet that the most in-demand producers of BTLs are people who don't really feel emotions, so the BTL will come as close as possible to being just the effect it was programmed for. If you're slotting a chip that makes you see a world made out of chocolate, you don't want to slog through the subconscious feelings of anxiety of someone who maybe had a brother choke to death on a Crunch bar or something. And any sort of environment-type chip, like one that made you think you were on a shadowrun (BTLs are still illegal, but this would be MUCH safer for your average suburban teenager than actually GOING on a shadowrun), you're not going to want one made by a shadowrunner that liked his job; you're going to want one made by someone who was totally indifferent, so you can feel your own emotions (also, you're not going to want one where someone gets scared by gunfire--you'll probably be scared enough on your own without adding someone else's fear on top). So if you think about this, it means that a lot of the stars in the BTL industry are going to be emotionless, because they were selected for that very reason. That's dystopian, especially if the same applies to legitimate simsense. The most popular stars will be ones that are very pretty and can act well, but have no soul to speak of.

Then what's the use of the SIM RIG? It records the emotional track as well as the physical. If I slot a Porno Chip of me doing Nadia Daviar then I want the complete emotional and physical package as well. I want it to be me or us or whatever..... You know what I mean.

The SIM RIG would give you the ability to make your own recording. If you were doing that, you'd probably want to keep your own emotional tracks. But if someone were to hand it to you, you'd probably want them to edit out their own emotional track, so you can experience your own emotions while doing it with Ms. Daviar, rather than someone else's. If you were skeevy and wanted to overide the ASIST cutouts to turn your little tryst into a BTL, you probably wouldn't want to bother editing it, because you'd want to get your product out on the street in as little times as possible. That's when you'd want someone who didn't really need to be edited out.

Shadowbeat has a section on BTL abuse. There are passing notes in some fiction of people who slot too many "Neil the Ork Barbarian" or "Slade the Sniper" chips and can't really tell where reality and fantasy meet.

There will be a forthcoming book that updates what was found in Shadowbeat for the 4ed. Synner mentioned in it in the last chat session. It should drop next year.

Alright! The Kapow-Kapow Shadowteens are back!!!

Hell, I DON'T have BTLs (being that I actually exist, and all), and I sometimes get a little carried away thinking about Neil the Ork Barbarian. Axes are kewl.

So...wait: no rules regarding the dangers of BTL abuse until next year? A cornerstone of the fluff in the game, which has been talked about since the core book? Seriously? Wow, what a great time to be a chiphead. No harm, no foul, at least until next year.

Would it be a good thing for their to be rules on how the player should play their PC personality?

If BTLs did something mechanical in the game to begin with, then I can see a need for rules. But do I need rules for slotting the Happy BTL versus the Sad BTL?

Isn't it changing Role Play into Roll Play?

True, sadchips probably need no rules. Nor do happychips.
But NeiltheOrkBarbarianchips that boost your adrenaline and prevent you from feeling pain....

Some P-Fix chips should give you influence skills and bonuses to composure tests. Like for instance the "workaholic" chip in one of the recent shadowrun fiction contests probably gives you influence 2, while the "soldier of fortune" chip might give you +3 dice to composure tests, intimidation 3, and leadership 3.

They shouldn't be capable of a skill rating more than 3 and should have the effect of making you do things you otherwise would not want to do, but they would work really well as the "poor man's skillwires" for social skills.

Yes and I sometimes imagine shooting a particularly obtuse client-after they're back in their car- but neither you nor I actually slip a gear and take out that annoying waiter in the honest belief he's really an enemy agent about to assassinate the King of Zog.

Well in that case, why have rules for drugs? Or pain modifiers? Shouldn't we just e the players roleplay how they think it would be if they were shot, or high on deepweed? I'm so tired of hearing this argument whenever someone complains about the developers leaving out an obvious set of rules. Supposedly, according to the fluff, BTLs can have serious, game-affecting mental effects on people who use it. As it is now, a BTL addict is apparently perfectly functional, no matter how much of it they use. Hell, you could go shadowrunning while slotting two of them, and be none the worse for wear.

Maybe I do. You don't know me.

Okay seriously...the reason that this is a problem is that the Addiction negative quality says that it requires a substance that has a negative effect on the user. That's why drugs count, but coffee and cigarettes (which have no in-game bad effects) don't. BTLs supposedly count, but there are no negative effect for using them, so it's kinda like free points...or a license for your GM to screw you more than the points you paid for is worth because the effects just aren't defined.

It's sloppy writing.

Does the nuyen you pay for your regular fix count? Spending X amount of nuyen every y days seems to me a negative effect already.

I would say that it's entirely possible a BTL could cause some attribute modifiers, but because of how varied BTLs can be, it's pretty much a GM's call. Nailing down rules on BTL effects is a difficult task, because there are so many different kinds of BTLs. I think official rules like that would only limit GMs.

Add to that specialist types of BTLs like God Chips and 2XS.

Or, of course, something nasty and new...

I would agree, except that other drugs have the cost *and* negative game effects. And if those rules aren't overly constraining GMs, why would BTL rules do so? I'm just baffled how something so intrinsic to the setting is completely undefined by game rules. It'd be like not having stats for dragons, or if we didn't have hacking rules.

Which brings us back to coffee and cigarettes: do we need to start treating them under the addiction rules just like BTLs are, since cost alone can be considered a negative affect worth receiving buildpoints for, or are both of those now free under this setting?



We have hacking rules?