Hey. I can't help but notice the rules for real world drugs are fairly lacking. I can see some having fallen out of favor (nobody smokes opium anymore) but there are some mainstays I'd like to see statted up, in terms of bonuses/penalties. I get why they aren't included, because the last thing we need is another moral panic about RPGs, but I want to know how badly having a cold one is gonna screw my runners. Here's the list:

Caffiene
Marijuana
Alcohol
Ecstacy
Kava
Tobacco

Does anyone know if any of these have been statted up before?

Caffeine and Tobacco are considered to have no notable effects (save for, in SR4, addictiveness according to Simdreams and Nightmares). The effects of (strong) Alcohol are covered by Hurlg (p 75, Arsenal, without the cramps), MJ is covered by deepweed (p 257, SR4A, without the magical effect), MDMA/Ecstasy literally is eX (p 74, Arsenal), Cram (p 257 SR4A) is Meth for all intents and purposes, and Novacoke (p 258, SR4A) is a decent stand-in for cocaine, though it seems way overpowered. Zen seems to be a new name for LSD. Betel is, well, Betel (p 74, Arsenal).

A lot of that stuff is minor enough in effect (especially caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol) that it's generally assumed to be part of many runners' baseline existence and requires no game mechanic to represent it.

I'd disagree on alcohol (which has pretty drastic effects that deserve to be statted), but caffeine and nicotine have moderate effects at best.

Same with me regarding alcohol. We've had a few players in the past who wanted to play an alcoholic character and pretty much just had to wing it with the roleplaying (which is fine) but without any real mechanical effects to mirror that roleplaying. If you have a player who doesn't want to or can't or won't roleplay the effects (nothing in the rules says you have to) then it becomes a toothless negative quality. If we have the rules for a bunch of imaginary drugs would it have been that much extra effort to stat up real world ones?

As I said, take Hurlg intoxication without the nausea. Besides, addiction as such already imposes some pretty harsh negative modifiers, purely through the quality. If you're looking for an angle to whip your alcoholic characters' players with, use either SimDreams' (you can just import them and it's an ecellent little pdf anyway, which you should buy because the author, CanRay, also is an excellent person) or the 5E core book's addiction rules by the book. That soybeer? Addiction test. That shot? Up goes the threshold! Pretty soon they'll face permanent attribute damage, maybe even essence damage. That negative quality has teeth like a cottonmouth, and that bite hurts. You just gotta use it by the book.

And it's largely divorced from the substance's properties. Theoretically, with these rules, porn will kill you.

I just happened across this while reading through my PDF backlog:



and



for your statted alcohol needs!

Hm. Trouble with that is, A regular beer would be 1S, and some runners can reliably resist that. How's this?

One dose of alcohol is equal to an average beer, or shot of whiskey, or what have you. What we would call "One Drink". For every (Body/3) drinks you have, you incur one box of stun damage, unresisted. Toxin binders and other similar augmentations and adept powers add their rating to your Body for this purpose. In addition, you incur a -1 dicepool penalty to actions for every drink you have. This is lowered by one every (90 - (Bodyx10)) minutes (minimum ten minutes) until you are dry.

If you incur five or more boxes of stun damage, you have a hangover, giving you a penalty equal to how many drinks you had for (Drinks) hours after waking up the following day. At Gamemaster's discretion, "hangover cures" may be available, ending or alleviating the effect. The price of these is up to the GM, and may be covered by lifestyle at GM discretion. In this GM's opinion, Hangover-B-Gone (An Aztechnology Product™) is 200¥ for a box of 20 doses, and alleviates the dicepool penalty by five points, and is covered by Medium lifestyles or higher.

Sure the rule is by no means perfect (given this is both an off-the-cuff statting for a 'Pushing the Envelope' section and SR5), but with some practice, you can resist one or two beers without any notable effects even as an average Norm. A troll, for whom a standard-sized can of beer is little more than a shot-sized serving of very light American beer (2 - 3,5 %) for a Norm, probably just doesn't notice anything.Hence, an ork or troll just soaking up beer'S damage seems realistic to me (and a reason d'être for Hurlg - because they want to be drunk).

As a hangover countermeasure, I usually just use antidote (alcohol) patches for my characters. No need to reinvent the wheel.

That said, if you want your characters to be more sensitively-livered, your rule seems solid.

The player should be penalized for drinking on the job. It's unprofessional. In addition, it makes Addiction (Alcohol) less of an easy street.

Well, yes. Then again, as taking drugs on a job to augment themselves is a viable way for characters to compete, I don't see why alcohol should be singled out as universally bad for you. Also, as far as I know, addiciton tests are independent from the drug taking effect?

I suppose.

Depends, some alcoholics are perfectly functional at alcohol levels which would send an everyday person talking to the great white cyberdeck, while getting below that level would have exactly that effect.