in the game i am playing in i play a british partyboy with a penchant for pulling guns on people, chasing women and enjoying more than a little bit of novacoke. as he likes to put it 'helps me focus, keeps my head in the game.'

novacoke has an addiction of 6M/5P. so my british gunfighter has to make a willpower check of 6 each time he medicates and a body check of 5. my confusion is the tolerance. novacoke is tolerance 2. how does that come into play?

the edge makes sense to me. after 5 doses the check for addiction goes up by 1. and if i understand it all right it will not go up again until he hits 50? is that right?

i believe the tolerance 2 is the target number for your body to see if you've developed a tolerance to it every (edge) uses.

If you’re going to take that stuff you may as well take the flaw living on borrowed time. The drug will kill you inside a year anyway.

Edward

Maybe, but I remember this really old guy from a band long time ago.use to do more coke then I can figure up, even with my math implant...something richards...I think hes still around.

Yeah, but he wasn't a Shadowrun character. That means (a) he wasn't trying to make his living as a professional criminal, able to deal properly with stressfull situations, details, etc, etc, and (b) he wasn't using the Shadowrun drug rules, was he?

Take a look at the combat drugs thread form a few weeks back, had points in that about tolerances etc. Coz they are for winners! *sniff*

torz

Keith Richards, from the Rolling Stones. Supposed to have done more drugs than Hunter S. Thompson.

Keith Richards did their drugs.

there is allso ozzy osborne, more or less a wreck.

yes the drug rules in sr may be over the top but then so, i have a feel, are the drugs. the stuff have become improved to give a bigger kick. why? the competition from btl, that can most likely simulate the effects of most of the streetdrugs we have today and then some. and you dont have to mess around with inhalators or needles, just chip and enjoy.

just look at some of the stuff showing up lately, stuff like extacy that can drive you into a coma or kill you based on dehydration. lately i have heard about a liquid drug, looks like most alcohols but is damn concentrated stuff. from what i understand, one bottletop is all thats needed to drop you.

sure, stuff like canabis (or whatever its called. you smoke it) may have a effect compareable to a beer or two. but the higher end stuff is anything but a fun experience. fail to take it regulary and you can go all crasy from the need. so i question the idea that the sr drug rules are overkill. they may be, but maybe not by much...

SR drug rules suggest that the dealers only care about the punters next score.

If you had any business sence you would design your drugs to be highly addictive while doing minimal damage to the user beyond addiction.

Which would you sell (if you where that type of person), a 90% addictive drug that will give you regular clients for 20 years or a 99% addictive drug that will kill the user within 18 months. Remember getting new punters takes effort and each one could bring heat down on you.

It doesn’t surprise me that some dealers choose the quick cash option but so many that every drug listed in eth books (including BTLs) will kill a addict within 6 months. Sounds like the writers wanted to say "drugs are bad, mkay".

Edward

Indeed.

Just try using the SR drugs rules to simulate Tobacco, for example.

Sure, it _might_ give you cancer IRL (indeed, depending on who you ask, that _might_ can be very probably or nothing to worry about...).

If you use the SR drugs rules to simulate any addictive drug, then you invariably end up with characters dying pretty soon, regardless of its realism.

The real horror of highly addictive drugs is not that they kill you, it's that they do you harm...and you need them anyway.
Some such drugs are ultimately fatal if you continually use them, but they tend to sell themselves out of the market, if you think about it.

Cyberpunk is liberally laced with drug references, because drugs in the future have expanded in a lot of different ways. Which makes a certain amount of sense, there's always a market for getting high, no matter what the damage. Hell, in Neuromancer and his other works Gibson typically has a major character use (and sometimes abuse) drugs for personal and professional reasons. They help out, or they get 'em high, or some combination of the two.

It's true most, if not all, RPG's have shied away from pill-popping and other drug use, even technically legal uses of most commercial drugs. After all, this isn't Fallout, these are impressionable gamers...

It's even more apparent in short stories like John Shirley's Stonehenge.

and from my understnading thats a appropriate figure. thing is tho that you only notice that your addicted when your supply gets cut for some time. with tobacco you can go for some time before the body realy starts to demand its fill. but a good pusher will want stuff that demand you go buy a new fill the moment after you come down from the last. the problem is that to do that you have to boost the effect of the drug, leading to bigger risks of overdose and a shorter time before you get the "longterm" effects...

there is allso the question about knowledge. yes we have all the numbers in front of us and can calculate risk, but could a real addict do the same?

and then there is the qestion of layers. the higher layers may know about the frightfull effects of the drugs but play them down for the street level pushers and the middlemen that do the shipping. and those higher layer people are the ones that are pulling in the real money.

and yes the dehydration "problem" of e is hooked to the enviroment its taken in, but without the drug you would feel the bodys need for rest and liquids sooner and stronger.

drugs in a controled enviroment, and in controled doses may be just as safe as alcohol (and we all know how safe that is...). right now nothing around them are controled, and this makes them a good deal more dangerus then they have to be. but i dont belive that they are as safe as some here seems to think they are either. messing around with alcohol alone can tell you that. and going with something that have maybe 10 times the chance to make one addicted and so on dont realy appeal to me...

its all a question of control, and out on the street you dont know what the hell your getting. even from your trusted sources.

so i wonder, what would happen if we made drugs a over the counter deal? similar to how alcohol is today? with brands that are tested and verified as "safe" then its up to the people to make up their mind about them. some may experiemtn and crash badly. some may balance the edge and lead productive lifes, and some may never bother.

allso, the strength of the drug taken may be seen as a indicator on how heavy a life one lives. heavyer life means the need for a stronger escape, leading one to take stronger drugs.

oh and what is the chance that in sr the tobacco you can get your hands at have been modified by the companys to give you a stronger experience? that may well explain the bigger chance to get addicted

the thing is that we dont fully understand why the body and the mind gets addicted to chemicals. add to that the international stand that drugs are bad, period, and one can see that the rpg companys cant go out and present drugs are even near safe as then it would be a public outrage that would drown out the religious outcry over the presentation of magic in fantasy rpgs its one thing to get religion after you, its a totaly diffrent thing to get the goverment after you (unless they are one and the same )...

Call it what you will, hobgoblin, but like I say, do the research first. There's plenty of evidence that certain drugs aren't "as safe" as alcohol; rather, they're orders of magnitude safer. I don't know if you're actually 100% clear what you mean by "addicted;" have you made the distinction between "wow, I'd really like another hit" and "I cannot clear neurotransmitters from my synaptic clefts without another hit?" For example.

And I'd love a reference to "the international stand that drugs are bad." To quote the net kiddies of today, OMG WTF?

Personally, as I previously mentioned, I'd expect the corps of the SR world would absolutely love to get a piece of the lucrative drug trade. They'd push very heavily for deregulation, and probably get their way (if previous megacorporate-government dealings are any indication). To say nothing of the potential for combat-drugs evening the odds against cybersammies, for a corp or government concerned with the bottom line... Hell, doesn't canon mention that one of the combat drugs from M'n'M was developed by Lone Star?

Yup, Jazz was developed and is (widely) used by lonestar isn't it?

Truth is Alcohol causes far more healthproblems on the national level than any other intoxicant (witht the possible exception of tobacco in some cultures). On the personal level however, hard drugs are certainly worse. What some people tend to ignore however is exactly how bad for you alcohol is, just because it's legalised and socially accepted people forget that it's actually more toxic than a lot of the softer drugs.

Most of you seem to agree that corps and dealers would want drugs that made you addicted without killing you, have any of you written any houserules to this effect?

when i typed "the international stand that drugs are bad." i was thinking about the fact that most any developed contry have tagged drugs as illegal. and yes im aware that there are stuff out there thats safer then alcohol. hell even alcohol is addictive. usualy they are called alcoholics tho, not addicts.

the thing is that if its drinkable and based on either fermented fruit juices or distilled corn its suddenly legal, alltho most of the time for adults only. say thank you for this oddball to our cultural inheritance.

hmm, burn and zen dont look to bad. the only real problem i can find is that the addiction target number dont drop if you go x number of days without takeing something without being addicted. the problem would then more or less go away as most addicts dont get it from one dose but by getting into contact reguraly over time until the body and mind is so used to it that it cant go without it. other thing is that you dont go from high up and happy to gutter style addict. yes your body wants it but i keep picking up storys about people that live normal lifes and hides their addiction from the people around them.

the thing is that the word addict have become a charged word, when people read or hear it they automaticly think about the poor guy on the street, not some top shelf exec that have to snort coke to keep his nerves steady.

only time you realy see how badly addicted some people have become is when they try to shake it of...