So according to shadow fluff, acid rain eats the paint off your ford americar during your Seattle to Tacoma commute and if you plan on going out for the day without a rebreather? Take up smoking instead, for your health.

We have rules for fluctuations in the manasphere, such as background count, mana warps, mana storms etc. how about the weather? Anyone got any rules on pollution's effects on the unprotected citizen? Anyone want to help me brainstorm some out?

I like my future a little gritty so I require a body test(4) for weather exposure for each full hour that people are exposed to the elements without protective gear (respirators and acid resistant clothing). If they get no successes they take 1 stun from not being able to breath or from burns to their skin. If they glitch they take 1 Physical representing getting their eyes burned or getting a lung infection or something like that.

There is a reason people will kill each other for a cardboard box or your coat in the Barrens. Without good shelter and clothing your dead in a month.

I have a tendancy to beleive that most of the every-day pollution that people deal with has been cleaned up, at least for the most visible to the public pollution effects. Any industrial scale pollution will be hidden away in those industrial centers far away from cities.

Runner Havens and Corporate Enclaves say otherwise. The air is pretty gross in the sprawls. Don't breathe too deeply!

I would probably handle it as a Power 1 or 2 Inhalation Toxin, requiring a minimum exposure period - resisted, say, every 30 minutes.

Coming from a city where the air will peel paint off a car, I can tell you that there are days when you just don't even want to leave the house. Any heavy exercise will exert you. For the young and elder, light exercise will. Anyone with breathing issues will need oxygen just to get through the day (Sucks to be you if you took Asthma!).

Most people have respirators for those days in-game, and I wish we had 'em IRL.

Much happier that I moved to a cleaner city!

Out of curiousity CanRay, what city is that? And how many years ago?

Dogsoup once asked me to host his Makeshift Weather Generator v2.0. I thought it might be relevant. Enjoy.

Sudbury, Ontario. A Mining and Smelting City dealing mostly with Nickel, but also other precious metals.

To be honest, the air isn't bad ALL the time, only when there's no wind. Then the smelter's pollutants just drop back down because they can't get out of the Valley the city is in. "Fallout" it's called, and it does eat paint off cars, where the Mining Companies pay to respray cars (Almost every bodyshop in town adertises that they take the claims and deal with the paperwork.).

Most of the time, it gets dropped on Toronto. Which is even worse than home for air conditions.

And how many years ago? Well, I lived there three years ago, and have visited numerous times, remaking at how badly everything smells now. Luckily, I have never been there during a Fallout Day.

My state has horrible air pollution. Most people think that kind of thing only affects the elderly but it's affected me as well. I'm a fit young person. However I also have an extremely sensitive liver. Indiana's lax air standards has resulted in toxic sensitivity in me which mimics insulin resistance (the first step in the daisy chain of diabetes, which I'm working to avoid). So now I take supplements to flush the airborne gunk out of me. Approximately half of Indiana's residents suffer from some sort of toxic liver syndrome and don't even know it. We are dumb.

Pretty cool.

I'm a smoker, but I can't say I've ever peeled the paint off a car with my breath.

Also, speaking of polluted areas; I just watched a bit of a small VBS.tv indie documentary called "Toxic Linfen". Linfen is a coal mining town in China. The voiceover on the story said "After a week in Linfen, my eyes were itching, my throat was dry and sore, and when I picked my nose, what came out was black."

Too much information. But on the other hand... After a week? That's intense.

Reminds me of my night on a train, on top of iron ore (in some kind of sand form, not rocks). My skin was black too.

When I moved to Winnipeg (Where I currently live), the change in atmosphere literally caused my lungs to burn for three months.

On the bright side, I have slightly better wind here.

Phew, I'm glad that I live in Washington then. Tacoma used to have what we consider pretty bad air when I was younger (the infamous "Tacoma Aroma") from the smoke stacks, but they shut them down years ago and it's pretty good now all told.

I've heard of places which are bad (and since the Olmpics in China, now we've all seen such a place), but I've never heard of peeling paint off the cars. What does that do to a human being? I assume people have to go outside.

Back in the 90's the air in Mexico City was so bad that birds you to drop out of the sky dead to the world.

Never been particularly motivated to visit since (the whole "Kidnap capital of the world" doesn't help)

I'd say that while environmental pollution abound in SR4 cities, I would say that the average person in those cities do not suffer ill-effects from it. However should the pollution reach toxic levels (or enough that the background mana has become toxic due to the physical toxicity of the pollution), then people will start becoming sick from it. But this is just for the average person.

If someone were to have Allergy: Pollution for instance, then he would suffer ill-effects long before a normal person would.

I never really spent time in Tacoma proper, but on the other side of the water, the Port Angeles paper mill puts up an aromatic "background count" that you can pick up just passing on the freeway.

It's funny, and maybe a little sad, to hear people in LA say, "I can see the hills. I wonder if it rained last night."

There was something in the Dominion Tank Police anime about most people being immune to pollution and others being "pure" and having no immunities (someone help me with this, it's been a long time).

From a playability perspective the pollution is fluff and shouldn't require checks, except in Toxic Zones or when mechanically significant, but I agree that some special attention should be payed to describing how bad an area smells, how you can't see the stars, and how you need to wash that armored coat when you get home.

How often you change the filters in your respirator.

Blech, paper mills. I would visit my older brother when I was younger in Tacoma, and to me the whole city smelled like "the valley." (I grew up in the country, and driving places you had to pass cow farms. Ick.)

Yeah, LA, China, CanRay's stuff... super super wierd. I quoted some of the stories here to my girlfriend last night, and she had a full wtf double take. And she grew up in a city (Bellevue).

For non Washingtonian folks, we talk about the weather being nice when "the mountain is out." (Or the sun, but that's a different story.) Where alot of places that would be a smog reference, for us it's just because normally the clouds don't let you see very far.

"You might be from Washington...
If you know the term 'Sun Break,' and can use it in a sentense.
If you consider a floating bridge a pain in the arse, and not a engeneering marvel.
If you hate California for messing up your taffic, destroying manners, and making people rude."