So I had a group with a hacker/rigger who was a BTL addict. on the run he busts into a guys house who makes his own BTLs of kidnapped women being ... mistreated. after kidnapping the guy, he takes the BTLs, tells his van to drive the crew to the next destination, and loads up the BTL. Aside from the group waiting a few extra minutes for him to finish, there was no real downside. I could have come up with some fluff and said he was distracted for a while after and suffered a -2 or something, but wheres the crunch? what are the downsides for using BTL's?

Addiction, burnout, essence and stat loss?

sure, in the long term. the character would probably retire before then. I was hoping for something more along the lines of Nova coke and the like, stun damage, temperary stat loss or penalties.

Oh. I don't think there is anything like that, no. Your solution seems good, if you see the need for that kind of penalty in your game.

People using drugs can appear pretty normal for a while, with the "while" varying by the drug. I'm told people can function as heroin addicts (or alcoholics) for years without it being obvious to the casual observer, but on the other hand - meth addicts typically are clearly "strange" within a year at most. BTL's should be more like meth based on the fluff.

Well, there's personality fixing, post hypnotic suggestions, and other nasty things that you can do through BTLs. Could even slip him a psychotropic BTL (see Unwired, page 115 for some ideas) for something a little faster and potentially random.

Can i ask why you want to punish the character for using the BTL? Most of the drugs have a negative in part because they have a positive, BTL's are pretttymuch purely a roleplaying aspect, they already have horrible downsides (more then they really should IMHO). The trick is with characters who are addicted to anything is at some point their addiction is going to come up at a really bad time, you just have to look for that bad time not try and construct other things on top of it in my opinion.

BTL addiction usually comes two ways : either from regular use - after some times reality seems dull and gray compared to the vibrant, emotion-enhanced world of BTLs or through some BTLs designed with the extra signal to try to hook you on the first take.

Just sampling some BTLs of a genre he's probably not attracted to are in my opinion not enough to get him addicted. He might have a few nights of poor sleep in front of him depending upon how severe the 'mistreatment' was but I'd stay there.

IRL, addictivenes varies with the drugs and the user's personaliy, but even heroïn isn't a 'just sample a light dose out of curiosity and you're an irretrievably hooked addict' sort of drugs.

edit : and something I have forgotten : if he used the BTL chip through his comlink, did he watch it in hot or cold sim mode ? Using only the cold sim mode will tone down the signal and reduce the odds of addiction, even for chips with enhanced addictiveness.

If you wanna give them something when it's finished or wears off, just give him some dumpshock. BTLs are very different from any other drug, as they have no (immediate) physiological effect at all.

i guess the upside is the fact that the player got BP's for being addicted to BTLs . And I thought it was odd that all other drugs had a "crash" and BTL's didn't but it its true that there's no mechanical bonus while using them.

If the player doesn't have to suffer (role-playing wise) the side effects of a negative quality, then why do you allow him to keep it?

Getting the extra BP without having to "earn" it is kind of a cheat, IMHO. If you're the GM, might I suggest adding in something to your campaign that uses this player's addiction against the group? Several people on this group already had good suggestions.

I'm not saying punish the player. I'm saying give him/her something really juicy to RP that really highlights his character's problem.

It's just like a PC with SINner quality. It's a negative quality that most people have, and for most people it's something positive instead. The only bad side is that the Shadowrunner risks people (authorities or not) actually learning real information in the PC, such as home, family, personal history etc.

Also I assume there may be a risk that in a ID check where LS or someone else checks his biometrics his real Identity will pop up (maybe in addition to a fake one), although there is no hard rules on this.

I had a problem with light BTL addiction in my old game too, it almost never came up in play, and since he only needed to take one "dose" every week or so it wasn't a real drawback.

I tend to agree with the above assessment, don't sweat the above encounter not hindering him greatly let him use the BTL's in fact as long as he's poping the BTL's he sees don't react in any way in fact thank him for playing out his disadvantage......then one day when the time is right ahve a BTL chip be on the table during something crucial, in a bowl with a note that says "take one". Or have the honeypot on the corporate research system be marked "next gen BTL research".

OK, so let's just get this straight: This guy has managed to score a cash of recorded sensory experiences... essentially, memories in boxes. These memories are not just regular memories in boxes, they're the highly illegal, sense-feed jacked up way past normal safe limits kind.

These sensory experiences involve rape.

Now, we're talking illegal simsense here. This sensorium was recorded from one of two perspectives; the person committing the rape, or the victim (because someone, somewhere out there, is going to really get off on that). It was definitely not the guy sitting back on the other side of the room just watching. That would be... well... "boring".

So you've just taken the highly concentrated memories (feed jacked up past safe limits, remember?) of either a rapist, or a rape victim, and jammed them into your brain. And you'd like to know what the possible side effects could be?

I'd say it's a fair assumption that this kind of extreme hot-sim is considered dangerous because it's capable of deeply etching neural pathways. Normal sim, it's designed to fade away, partly because they want you to keep jacking it, and partly because there's a difference between watching a good movie and actually experiencing the events of that movie from that protagonist's POV with full sensory input; that's something you don't want stuck in your brain forever. To put it another way, slotting a sim where you're James Bond sounds pretty cool, right? Beating up bad guys, sipping martini's, playing poker, nailing hot chicks, getting tied to a chair then stripped naked whilst a very angry psychopath smashes your testicles into a bloody oh god no ohgodnogetitoutofmyheadgetitoutofmyaaaarrrrggghhhhh....

See, that's why sim has safe limits for BTL to exceed in the first place. Because they deliberately tune out stuff like the pain of getting shot, or running across broken glass (cause that remake of Die Hard would start to seem real stupid otherwise). They design all this stuff to be safe, and unreal, something that you won't mistake for a real part of your sensory experience.

BTL has none of those safeties.

So for a start, this guy's going to be having dreams about this... well... forever. Hell, he's going to have days where he flat out forgets that this memory now floating around in his head isn't real. That it wasn't him who raped a woman. Even if the details don't match, over time they will; given the seed of a memory, the essential bones, our brains construct the details. Known fact. Ask a psychologist. Even if he's a guy who slotted memories of a female rape victim, the details will change to make it all fit.

Now we get to the really scary part; this memory is, for all intents and purposes, real. It's there, in his head. He just has to deal with it. Now dealing with horrible memories is basically 95% of what lands people in therapist's offices. Either he's going to somehow internalise the fact that he's a rapist, with either a massive guilt complex, or by shuffling around his moral values enough that he can justify it (and you're thinking that's got some really scary implications then you're on the right track here), or he's going to be carrying around the fact that he got raped, leading to all kinds of possible phobias, dementias, dependencies, or god knows what else. You want a study on how being raped can fuck someone up for life, you won't have to look too hard.

There's your negative side-effects. Quite frankly, unless this guy's been sampling this kind of sim before, and has learned how to deal with it (because yes, some people will be sufficiently dissassociated, through years of BTL abuse, from their own memories that they can just divide them up into chunks and mark little mental check boxes saying "Sim", and "Not Sim". Of course, these people will basically be something like psychopaths, or at least horribly broken in a dozen other ways), he's going to struggle to even function as a human being in the aftermath of that experience, and be in therapy for a good while after that.

Good suggestions. You could also go the other route and put him in a run or situation where he has to go without for a while. The negative effects of BTL addiction can kick in when he can't get hold of them any more.

K.

Plus, he will have to keep paying for them. They won't always just fall into his lap. So have some street war between the dealers mean that no one knows where to get them and so anyone who DOES, will charge extortionate fees for it. Also, an addiction is just one more way for someone (say Mr. Johnson or a syndicate) can manipulate him. When Johnson starts paying with low-level BTLs, this char will build up a tolerance and keep going back for more and stronger sims. And so on and so forth until burnout.

That is another good option.

A bit of a tangent here, i never much begrudge my players their negative disadvantage points for all but the most munchkiny choices, I tend to see them as a roleplaying and character defining bribe. Observe the mechanical rules certainly, but don't set out to beat them up often just because they got some points, beat them up when it matters for the story.

I had missed the 'was an addict' part. I suppose that 'was' means he's a recovered adict. In my opinion, being a hacker, hot mode hacking is probably enough to keep him away from BTL chips. Hotsim is jacked up to BTL levels afterall.

slotting the chips expose him to th risk of relapse, though as a former chiphead, I suppose he won't have too much trouble keeping in mind that what he experienced was a BTL fancy. And even if he mixes it up, depending on what was recorded, it seems he accesed only teh 'warmup' bits of the recording - unless he jumped straight to the more 'stimulating' bits.

What I would to though would be to ask him for an addiction test, to see if his lapse in BTL indulgence will kick his former addiction back in. With all the nasty consequences others have mentioned.

Dr. Funrock has a good point about memory and consequences. And if the BTL was from the perspective of the victims, this could prove quite interesting.

Think about this. In the middle of a meet with a Johnson or a fight, suddenly the Hacker "remembers" the brutality of the event and panics, shying away from raised hands or loud voices. Panicking and unable to move or fight back in voilent situations or going totally postal on someone who reminds the Hacker of the rapist.

Basically, reactions that would totally mess with important meetings or subtle missions, etc. that's more than just a "unresponsive" modifier.

There's a lot of drugs in SR4 that don't involve a crash afterwards.
Yes, the main combat boosters are different from that, there's a few other examples, but there's still plenty of stuff around that has very little side effects (at least in the short term).
And actually, BTLs take this one step further : you log out, you're sober again.
You cannot simply remove a drug from your bloodstream once you don't want to feel it's effects anymore, but for BTLs, there's always the option just to reach for that Off switch.
To me, this has always appeared as one of the main selling points of BTLs (even though downloads are making it more and more pointless to actually try to sell them nowadays).

Of course, this does not include the long term side effects.
The Scorched negative quality is the best example rules-wise.

There might be other issues as well, such as flashbacks (especially with heavy use of dreamchips), sensory disturbances akin to HPPD (especially with the use of tripchips), mood swings (especially with the use of moodchips) or drastic personality changes (especially with the use of pfixes).

Ok, let's get one thing straight. Virtually everyone is addicted to something, but it's just not a problem for most people. How many people do you know who are just horrible people... until they get their first cup of coffee for the day? How many people "need" to log into a forum daily to see what's happening and if they missed something?

But, for most people, these little addictions aren't really a problem -- they don't really impact the rest of your life.

Rape BTL chips, though... as Dr Funfrock posted, will mess a person up, kind of like repeated rape porn in real life, but it's like being strapped to a table with your eyelids jacked open and having that flash straight into your brain.