Bah rules! I like my gen freak prime runner. He's RAW ish but wack enought for the RAW to be SOTA prototype crap.

...er, I couldn't parse that. Could you ask that again?

No, you build immunity by becoming addicted, and you make an Addiction Test only once every time you dose up. If you only have the one dose in your body, you only make one Test, and so long as you pass that you'd never need more drug to compensate from an addiction you don't have.





Why bother with adrenaline? Just use dopadrine and K-10... Or the vaguely worded Natural Immunity quality/genetic enhancement.

And the reason is adrenaline is a naturally occuring substance while dopadrine and K-10 are highly synthesized, and you can only use simple chemicals and naturally occuring substances with a chemical gland.

Sorry, Neraph, I was talking about making sense, instead of RAW. AFAIK, the 'continuous dose' trick has never worked in SR3/4.

A dose of anything wears off. It doesn't matter that there's another dose ready right there. Tell your GM that you what to use an auto-injector to have 'a continuous dose' of K-10.

Correct, the first dose wears off (and you take the hit for it wearing off). You can take another dose just before the first wears off, however you will still have the crash effects of the first dose and have the benifits of the second dose at the same time.

As an experiment, try sipping coffee for 2 days with no sleep. Even though you keep taking the stimulant (continuous dose) you are still going to crash.

Dose effect is specific to the drug and dependant on lots of factors including metabolism, clearance, receptor kinetics, volume of distribution and presence of other drugs. Needless to say comparing SR rules to RL is an excercize in futility. Just use whatever rules seem easy (don't bog down the game) and balanced.

Emphasis mine. The operative words here are "constantly" and "equivalent." Those two words together changes the meanings of this sentence to "you have the bonuses of the drug and it never runs out of duration."

I have to agree that, given the description, the Adrenal Pump seems far over-costed (in terms of essence and money). Even if you assume that flooding the body with adrenaline should have the effects given by the Adrenaline Pump, SR tech would provide plenty of other (cheap) ways to flood the body with adrenaline. Really, for the cost in cash and essence, the Adrenal Pump should do provide some way of largely avoiding the nasty side effects (IE, the stun damage when you "crash"); that would follow the logic that providing the Adrenaline is cheap and easy, tolerating the bad effects, not so much.

See, that fails the 'is this reasonable?' rule. Perma-drug is abusive and makes no sense.

As mentioned, the Chemical Gland has always been a bastardization of the drug rules. 4th Edition introduced another one in the form of permanent Genetic Infusions, which are basically geneware drugs. "By the rules" neither of them suffer from the disadvantage of the drugs. Heck, I don't think you even have to make Addiction Tests with a Chemical Gland; all its really doing is making the duration permanent instead of, say, BOD Hours. It's just one long drug effect rather than a never ending supply.

Anyway, the Adrenal Pump suffers from the wrath of overcompensation by the game designers. It's a very common affliction for rules that were originally too-good-to-be-true. Adrenal Pumps used to rock, so the natural inclination of a game designer is to beat it into submission until it pales in comparison to practically any other option available in the game. The Mnemonic Enhancer and Enhanced Articulation implants suffered in much the same way. If in doubt, make it suck balls.

Don't know if anyone mentioned it (I admit I mostly skimmed the thread), but - Adrenalin Pumps are quite nice when you KNOW you are facing a mage and cannot afford to be taken down by a stunball/bolt.

if you KNOW you are facing a mage, then why didn't you shoot him with a gun instead, thus preventing him from ever casting the spell in the first place?

and frankly, thermal smoke grenades are a heck of a lot cheaper and don't come with a surprise birthday present of up to 18S unresistible damage.

Yeah, I'm not exactly sure how three extra dice on a resistance test (ie, one average hit) is going to be a better option than... pretty much anything. Especially not at the cost of 90,000 nuyen and 2.25 Essence.

Well, let's give it a little credit - it's doing the job of a lot of other mods in one package. We're talking about Muscle Augmentation, Muscle Toner, Reaction Enhancers, and Pain Editor in one package. It's practically undetectable, and as somebody pointed out, one of the only Willpower boosts in the game. In 4th edition, the brutal rules for unresisted stun make it suicidal to use it as written, but let's not pretend that the Adrenal Pump doesn't give at least as good a bonus as any other bit of gear.

In fact, if the side effects were mitigated somehow, it would be an incredible advantage for a low-profile infiltrator. Guy walks in, MAD scanners show him as completely unwired, he gets to the Boss' office, then BAM, Agility 9 and Reaction 9, and doesn't stop till he's dead or you are. Not a perfect solution, obviously, but I'd consider it on a Face character...if it wasn't suicidal.

Now, it's much less suicidal if you have both a biomonitor to tell you how wounded you are, and an autoinjector with the inhibitor so you can turn off the Adrenaline pump at will. Since the damage is known (1S/combat turn, but taken all at once), you can tailor the amount of stun you take so that you don't kill yourself with overflow.

If all you need is 3-4 turns of awesome... 3-4S unresisted might not be too high a price to pay.

Yes, given the ability to stop it at will.

The main problem with Adrenaline is it burns up all your bodies reserves of blood sugar and oxegen. What if you used oxy-rush and smart carcerands to provide them? Say, some sort of nanite system that lets you ignore the first (nanite system rating) boxes of stun the AP causes, but is reduced by (AP rating) each time?
That, plus the ability to have it trigger / not trigger on will (really, no so complex, make it a voluntary muscle or even electrically controlled via PAN / DNI, with no nervous connection) and to cut the effect (via releasing some counter-agent to the adrenaline) would make it a pretty sweet piece of gear. Pricey, niche gear, but still. And nanites are about as hard to detect as bioware, so still good for an infiltrator...

Oh. Can you show me that rule? I'll bet you just show me the "GM Fiat" rule.

I just did. It's quoted in that sentence.

You doing all right, Neraph? You've been sounding kind of pissed off for the last few days.

Been stressed. Losing faith in humanity, which I guess isn't that bad a thing. I need to place more faith in something better.

In any event, thanks for proving me. You quoted the "GM Fiat" rule.

GM Fiat is when the GM, for reasons unknown to the players, declares something to be true regardless of evidence to the contrary and without any dice rolling. By definition, the players are not required to agree.

The rule I quoted says that this is a team sport, and everyone needs to agree. If a ruling is unreasonable, as Yerameyahu said, and everyone agrees, then you don't need to use it at your table. If anything, this is Game Table Fiat - the rules work for us, not the other way around.

Not to add to your stress, I just feel like Yerameyahu's idea of being reasonable is common courtesy, and wanted to show where in the book that idea was supported.

The perma durg abuse char needs immunity to said drugs in some form. As other wise they are still capable of at least addiction. As this is a char concept of pure RAW abuse. I'm immune to K-10 thus it only gives me the positives as I see them. How ever done right it makes for a fun prime runner with experimental gene-tech. As a PC its 40-50BP for 4IPs and loads of +s to the majority of stats for a total cost of around 0.2-0.5 essence.

How someone can get addicted to one's heart going into fibrulation post-rush is beyond me.

Addiction isn't purely mental and even when it is it doesn't have to be rational.

Again, it's hard for a body to become addicted to a substance that causes near-death on every dose, virtually guaranteed.

If someone brings a character to my table with a K-10 addiction, I'd probably disallow it on the grounds that such a junkie wouldn't have much in the way of mental acumen in the first place.

Not to mention he'd quite likely be broke. I need to figure out a way to sneak mah books into work so I can verify the cost of that particular drug (as well as a myriad of other matters).

Just stick your PDFs on a datastick and bring that, Doc.

I'd just lug my laptop in, TBH. I'd rather not put my delicious PDF's on the company thin client - I'm liable to bring down the whole server with an infusion of that much awesome.

As far as I'm concerned, the Immunity cheat doesn't work *anyway*, because immunity means immune to positive and negative effects. After all, they're the same effects: a super-charged body is a body destroying all its energy reserves, etc.

Why would addiction be a problem when you always have one doses worth the chemical in your system.
And anyway you cant get a chemical cland that produses a combat drug, as none of those a naturally occuring chemicals.

To exemplify Dumori's comment; Crystal meth.

Bah but its not RAW!

RAW clearly say the illeffects if the substance. Hell immunity water would make you inumme to pressure and hypothermia and drowning in water. Yes that quality is stupid.