The drug/addiction rules don't allow the body metabolism to get rid of the drug, which leads to silly things. If you have a drug with addiction rating 2, and pre-addiction edge of 2, and use one dose every 5 years, your addiction rating will be 6 after 35 years, and bang, you might well get addicted. I know runners won't have a life-expectancy of 35 years, but the example is just trying to point out the non-existence of any possibility of reasonable drug use.

I haven't yet thought this out completely, but I'd like to see addiction rating decreasing over time, if you haven't been addicted yet. After addiction just stick to the rules of (forced) withdrawal.

Let's say the addiction rating will decrease after 10 x addiction rating in days. Of course the addiction rating couldn't drop below the original. Take Kamikaze for example. It has addiction rating of 5, and pre-addiction edge of 2. So, you could take 2 doses of Kamikaze, your addiction rating would increase to 6, and after waiting for 60 days (10 x current addiction ratting) it would drop back to 5. Naturally taking more doses would cancel the waiting period, even if the addiction rating doesn't increase.

This all is meant for physically addictive drugs. Mental addiction works differently in real life, but for simplicity I might try using this for mental addiction rating also.

Use Natural Immunity: Drug of Choice. At the 3 pt level, the PC gets to ignore the ill effects of an artificial drug.

One way or another, your waiting period is way too low IMO. I'm up in the air as to whether it should drop at all. Keep in mind that these things are more on the scale of ultra-morphine than any modern street drug I'm aware of.

~J

I don't think drugs are meant to be used nicely and rationnally.

It's one thing for a player to think, 'hmm, my PC is being tracked by two Yakuza hitmen. But if I use my kamikaze now, the addiction is currently 6 and I face a high risk of failure while if I wait two more weeks it will drop back to 5... I think I can take them. Without the Kamikaze'

But for a character to have the same reasoning is madness. That character would be scared. Having used Kamikaze in the past to win fights, he probably starts to doubt his ability to pull out of dangerous situations without it, even before the addiction kicks in.

It's pretty much impossible to force a player to separate metagaming from roleplaying. But at least you can, in that particular case, prevent the worse offense by not allowing for a decrease in the addiction.

Drug use is meant to have a price otherwise it wouldn't be very cyberpunkish. IMO.

And a lot of drugs (crack, alcohol, heroin) keep the used addicted for life once they try it. People who have been clean for years will "fall off the wagon" under stress, often quite easily. I don't think the lack of a reduction is unreasonable at all, and the Metagaming doesn't bother me at all.

except that, despite what Nancy Reagan wants you to think, there are lots and lots of lots of people who use crack, alchohol, and heroin regularly, yet never let it get out of control. in SR, that's simply not possible. i think the edge ratings of SR drugs should be multiplied by about 5, and that users should be able to make a body or willpower test to reduce the edge rating, if they go for a fix factor without using.

Again, I submit that the SR drugs have effects on the body very significantly more pronounced than crack, alcohol, or heroin.

~J

okay. but where are the crack, alcohol, and heroin rules, then?

I'm arguing that there aren't any present in Shadowrun.

~J

so... there's no casual drug use in SR, then? i don't buy that.

In the Shadowrun rules. Actually, canon is that BTLs have edged out traditional drugs, but I don't buy that either; I do buy that traditional drugs do not have a significant enough effect to need to be enforced beyond roleplaying.

~J

eh. i'm a completist. if you're going to have rules for a thing, have rules for it.

You're right, there are references to drug use still being in the game. However, it also says

It honestly depends on the type of drug. Opiates (i.e. heroin) and alcohol, for example, produce irreversible changes in neurochemistry that make the addict physiologically addicted to the substance, as well as increase the tolerance to the effect. While physiological addiction can be overcome, the tolerance and the potential for addiction never decrease. However, once you are at that point, your body starts to crap out anyway... most of the traditional therapies focus on the Mental addiction component which is harder to kick BUT treatable. There are a lot of genetic factors involved as well... most of the good studies involve alcoholics and inheritance of the susceptibility to alcoholism.

I'd say that using genetech to "cleanse" the body can reduce addiction factors, but the body's "metabolism" (which is an inaccurate term in the context of addiction medicine) never does. In other words, I'd uphold the ruling in the book.

As far as current drugs, just use the Street Drugs table and find the appropriate analog. I think that every class of drug is represented on that table, with reasonable effects compared to modern-day drugs.

Bliss = Opiate-based Drugs (heroin, painkillers)
Burn = large doses of Alcohol
Cram/Kamikaze = Meth, amphetamines
Novacoke = Cocaine
Zen = LSD, other hallucinogens, prescription anti-psychotic abuse
Deepweed = Duh.

the problem is, as i recall, BTLs are just as deadly as street drugs. low edge rating, low fix factor, high addiction rating.

Some arguments were made that addictions lasts for life, and that the drugs make irreversible changes to the addicts neural system. But I was looking for a way to avoid automatically getting addicted because of endlessly increasing TN's, by using the substances seldom enough. I agree I set the conditions on lowering addiction rating too low, but that was meant to give an idea of what I was thinking about.

And about metagaming, it happens if it happens. In other words, a single rule won't suddenly make metagamers pop out of nowhere, they could already take couple doses of any useful drug, and move to next drug, to avoid higher TN's.

yes, werendigo, but you hate players with a passion normally reserved for nazis and boiled spinach. under normal circumstances, someone with a mild coke habit shouldn't always end up OD'ing and cacking out within five years.

Incorrect. I love players with the love of a crotchetty Grampa with a really large inheritance going to someone and trying to figure out how much to give each since a few will make good use of it while others would blow the whole thing on a trip to vegas.

Even if it is, the fact that X-Star states it gives it a lot of credence no matter who said it first.

~J

Well...

I just hope that none of you are holding your breath waiting for a rules clarification on this stuff or an errata. It just seems like it could turn into a big PR nightmare to go any further with that stuff. They seem dangerous enough to me that I won't probably ever make a character that uses any of them extensively.

What's scary (to me, anyway) is how dirt cheap and available BTLs are. On page 296 of BBB, 250 nuyen for a Direct Input Chip, or you can go the Simdeck (250 nuyen)/Dreamchip(100 nuyen) for more "cost effective" purchases. These are about equivalent to Rating 4 chips in Cannon Companion (which goes into exhaustive detail about How To Use BTLs on p65). Most have an availability of 3/12 hours. This is significantly easier to get than some of the Street Drugs. The Street Drugs win out with even cheaper prices, but it costs a lot more to buy, say, a datajack than it does to buy a supply of BTLs to burn you out in sim-bliss.

mfb, props on the nazi/boiled spinach comment. I actually laughed out loud on that one.

Personally, I think its a bit silly how they wrote the rules for drugs. I've done my fair share of experimentation with a variety of substances in my college days. While a few had a subtle addiction factor to them, most were nothing more than a shift in perception and feeling. I don't have a problem talking about it, because I haven't touched the stuff in years, as well as having kicked other legal vices (smoking/drinking, both of which were far harder to kick).

The drug AF system is pretty out of touch with reality in this regard. But then again, it's abstract right from the get-go, so what am I bitching about?

Have you ever had +1d6 to Reaction or three points of Adept Pain Resistance?

~J

Yes to both.

The time to reduce the addiction rating should be proportional to the fix factor and or pree addiction edge rating.

The hyper addictive nature of the street drugs makes since (they where engineered that way) but the combat drugs should have had some effort made to make them less addictive. 7300

It is very true that somebody that has been addicted and goten of most drugs will likely be instantly addicted if he takes another dose but hat about a moderately addictive drug (I think speed qualifies)

Person A takes speed every 2-3 months for 10 years. Total of 50 doses.
Person B takes speed almost every weekend for a year total 50 doses.

Person C drinks 2 standard drinks every night with diner for 10 years total 7300 standard drinks.
Person D drinks a bottle of vodka (30 standard drinks) 2 times a week and 4 beers (6 standard drinks) on other nights for 18 months. Total 7300 standard drinks.

In each paring assuming all other factors (body mass, genetics) are equal witch person will be more likely to develop an addiction. In the case of alcohol I know it will be person D by a very large margin. I suspect the same for speed or any other drug not liklly to get you on the first few hits.

For any drug using the SR rules the likelihood of addiction will be exactly the same in each case.

As to the availability of drugs BTLs have many advantages to the dealers, they come with an entertainment track so you don’t need to go to a club to get full effect (bored lonely and on drugs usually becomes board loanly and depressed/suicidal on drugs, until you get the really hard stuff), the equipment to create BTLs is legal and making them dose not create suspicious odours or explosions, BTLs are highly addictive so you enure repeat custom. With BTLs it is a lot easier to create something “special” and “different” it is a lot easier to put a lizard tail on the girl in the porn BTL than a similarly memorable change to heroin. Thus you can more easily make your product stand out from the crowd. And when stoped by a cop the chip is externally indistinguishable from a legal sim sense recording.

Edward

I know once you are addicted and get clean a single hit will usually put you right back where you where at your worst.

And although genetic variance means everybody will react differently it is easy enough to find people that react similarly (although you can only know this after exposing them to the same stimulus).

The alcohol example I gave pits a glass and a half of red wine a night (recommended by many medical practitioners as good for the heart and almost negligible risk of addiction) resulting in alcohol only being in your blood for 2 hours a day over a 10 year period. To a heavy drinker with regular binges (by the statistics I have seen the highest risk drinking pattern for alcoholism) in this drinking pattern your probably only sober for 36-48 hours of the week. Doing this for 18 months is the same number of doses as above.

Under SR rules the chance of addiction is exactly the same. Science and statistics shows us that if you give the body time to clean itself and repair between doses addiction is less likely than if you take the same number of doses without waiting until the body has recovered before taking more. This dose not apply once a physiological addiction has been achieved

Edward

remember now that there is more in wine then just alcohol. the medical effect may well be connected to some other property of wine and could show up in nonalcoholic types. most likely it is as alcohol is the same no matter what drink it comes from.

allso, dont forget the blood filter, it should be able to bind and remove alcohol before it kicks in. stoping the chance of getting addicted dead in its tracks.

one could allso guess that the drug rules in sr is written so that they didnt get marked as telling kids that drugs are safe...

or, it could be that an average-sized glass of most wines holds the amount of alcohol that is healthiest for most adults. or, perhaps other types of alcoholic beverage contain unhealthy ingredients that wine doesn't. or maybe it's just an example of groupthink working just as well on doctors as it does on everyone else.

About the BTL chips and them being so cheap. I forgot where it covered it, but the reason BTL's are cheap is because they burn out so fast, they're easy to make, and when you've got someone who does nothing but jack into BTL's all day, where do you expect them to make money?

The reason they burn out is because if they didn't you'd get people who'd jack into a chip and then rot and die because they never jacked out.

Someone already covered the production factor of it.

And BTL's come in all different prices. You can bet that the CEO is popping some mondo expensive BTL's that are even better (and I bet a little healthier) then the common street trash that floats around. On the flip side you can get a BTL of "Betty does everything in sight" for 100 , just don't be surprised when the BTL burns out just when it gets good...

That's how I understand it at least. I think the books back me up somewhere but I can't remember.