I've had an idea for awhile now about adding illegal drugs sold on a black market to my game. I'd like for them to be functional, serving to facilitate something akin to a meta-addiction (player desires them for more power), but also detrimental to long term health of the character. The best example I can come up with thus far is a drug along the lines of PCP (consequently, angel dust already sounds like a great drug name to match a fantasy theme), wherein being under its influence could cause temporarily enhanced strength with an immunity to pain, but its usage lowers permanent maximum life points. Would the extremeness of this penalty just make players not use them? Where is the proper balance between gain and loss from the usage of the drug? Does anyone have ideas for any other specific drugs? Also, there's the option of implementing full physical substance addiction of the character, instead of relying on the meta-addiction angle. Does anyone have any suggestions for how this might work? Has anyone out there implemented anything similar to this before?

Edit: There's also the economic side to consider. Should the drugs be strictly sold and price controlled by NPCs? Or should the market be more dynamic, allowing PCs to form exclusive deals with NPC suppliers, then turn around and deal them to other PCs (and possibly NPCs) at higher prices?

Potion addiction. Track the number of quaffs of particular potions per character.
1) Increased tolerance might require the character to quaff multiple potions to get same effect.
2) More quaffing increases chances of poisoning.
3) Eventually reduce general effects/stats of character performing without potion.

We have some underground slums being finished up, and I spoke with the builder a few days ago, and he suggested a wandering drug dealer.

So I have been coding an effect to cause MOBs to change names, give wrong directions to room exits (and even entirely different descriptions) and cause other random issues. Adding a positive affect had not really occurred to me, but reading this may make it so that I use the whole "tolerance" idea, and possibly permanent chances at stat/hp/mana loss, but with added temporary stat conditions.

Interesting.

There is already a notion of "mental state" in many bases that would capture people being messed up by drugs, so that could be used/expanded to some extent.

Tolerance for potions is interesting except that it makes potions less like magic and more like chemistry, which might or might not be appropriate in your world.

In order for somebody to use something that gives them temporary gain for permanent damage, the consequences of short-term failure have to be rather dire. If I can just respawn, and say oh well, I really have no incentive to permanently damage myself. In fact, you might argue that replacing equipment is less hassle than permanent damage.

I think it'd be easier to balance short-term gain with short-term loss.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this - particularly the part about "the consequences of short term failure".

Short-term failure is a failure that occurs at a particular instant and isn't permanent. Consequences are things like losing wherever you were in your adventure and having to go back; losing your equipment and having to get it back; losing some HP that need to get healed; etc.

Basically, the point is that if you want to incentivize me to permanently damage myself, the alternative to not doing so needs to be another kind of permanent damage. Why should I ever permanently damage my character just to be stronger for one fight? Unless your game makes losing that one fight as damaging as the permanent loss, I have no reason to do this.

I was thinking of it more in terms of the drug allowing you to win a fight you normally would not be able to, thus gaining access to some reward/content sooner than your current level of development should actually allow. There are also non-combat scenarios to consider. One would be a drug that temporarily increases your character's intelligence, allowing improved abilities in skill learning or questing. As for questing, there is a lot of potential - becoming an addict to infiltrate some underground organization, perhaps?. Of course, the reward for the quest would have to be great enough to risk the permanent stat loss and potential physical addiction. In the end, it's just a risk/reward system, though one with a bit of flair.

That's exactly my point though. You're giving short-term gain in exchange for permanent damage. I would need a good reason to reduce my character's power forever just to get equipment a level or two or even ten early. Why should I really care about being better than my fellow level 15 characters, when they will be better than me at level 50 just because I was a little impatient? Why should I want to learn skills just a little faster, at the price of being less powerful anyhow in the long run?

Basically, in any game where players eventually reach some kind of final level or top skill training, short-term gain means a lot less than power at the peak, because that lasts forever.

As for becoming an addict for questing reasons, I view that as an entirely separate question, you're no longer really talking about the trade-offs of the drug's power increase vs. its damage. The drug's power is orthogonal to this question; what the drug gets you is access to a quest.

What if it's not a system where there is a peak (ie: a level cap)? What if the damage caused by the drug doesn't decrease your potential, but just makes it harder to reach that potential? An example of this, if we're still talking about a level based system, would be an increase in TNL. You're taking shortcuts now that you'll have to pay for later. Also, I never said 'learning skills faster' - I was more implying the ability to learn skills that your particular character might never have the intelligence to learn at all, if not for the drug.


I don't see it as a separate question. I never intended to limit the scope of 'gain' from the drug to purely statistical metrics. It was just one example. The access to a quest is another example, but one of gaining additional content that is not accessible without taking the drug.

Even without a peak, the point remains that you need to make a strong case for why value now is better than value for the rest of my character's life. In fact, without a peak, the problem is made even worse! Every level I pay for something is yet another level where my peers will surpass me for my earlier impatience. (I use the term "level" loosely here to encompass any notion of progress.)

As for damage caused, well, the example you gave initially was permanently reducing max HP.

Questing is a separate question for the purpose of balancing the statistical metrics; trying to balance access to a quest against statistics is comparing apples and oranges. That's not to say that it's not worth thinking about, it's just that it's very different from the numerical risk/reward trade-off. You could perhaps balance the reward from the quest against the trade-offs, but just saying "you can do quests" is basically impossible to balance as a science.

Nonetheless, whenever you talk about permanently damaging a character, be it in terms of reducing a value or making any progression slower forever, you have a much more difficult case to make if you want players to actually use it. It's easy to compare short-term gain to short-term loss. Short-term gain and permanent loss are very hard to compare.

Heh, It's just like drugs in real life! I can do steroids till the cows come home, but in the long run, heart attack boots me at 40 ;) (didn't even hero, shucks)

I've seen some systems like this in games. I remember someone in (i believe it was) rehobroams Legacy made LSD (ergo tea or somethin') in the smurf village, the ansi colors went wild when ya ate it and I think it replaced all the mob and object strings with random ones that ya would "see" instead..

Players can want some strange things. In a role-play game they might want to play an addict. Who knows?

I had one player that asked if I minded if he role-played a blind man. I asked if he wanted his character to be "truly" blind, and when he said that would be "fun to try" I made him so. We even made wearable glass eyes for him, covered by eye patches (layered wear). He could still smell, hear and use the senses granted to him by his spells, but did not even receive any in-game benefit, except to his role-play and entertainment value.

But for drugs, let's say one provided a haste type affect. You could attack twice as fast. Thing is, it had a 1 in 1000 chance each time it was used to degrade your constitution by 1 point (in a game where stat points could be trained), and a 1 in 10,000 chance that it would kill you (in a game without permanent death). Would it be used? There are those that would emote runny noses, gritting teeth, twitching and scratching themselves while attacking twice as fast as they normally could. I believe so.

This is true, which is why I was limiting things to those which are objectively comparable. The question "how does one balance it?" is quite separate from the question "would somebody want to do something anyhow?".

I've already got a couple general purpose affects that do this, amongst other things - 'hallucination' and 'insanity'. They could easily be applied to drugs, but I wouldn't want them to be the only bits of functionality.


That is an excellent point. Perhaps someone wouldn't care about the long term disadvantage to the character if it makes the current experience more fun. They could even play it like a real life addict - overdose on pleasure, burn out quick and on to the next life! After all, why does anyone take drugs in real life? I highly doubt any of them don't know the harm the drugs do. They're either gambling or they just don't care.


Again, this is along the lines of what I had in mind. The short term gain significantly outweighs the long term loss. If you can attack twice as fast for the next hour at the expense of losing 1/1000th of your constitution (on average), it might seem worthwhile. Then it wears off, and you think to yourself, "One more time can't hurt…" The small losses don't seem significant, because the player is thinking like a real life addict and not taking into consideration the cumulative effect of the drug on the character.


I'd argue that it can still be balanced objectively. You just have to make the short term gain significantly outweigh the long term loss, as exemplified above.

It is also known that tapping earth nodes and ley lines for additional mana can be addicting, and eventually result in madness or permanent loss of magical ability.

We're starting to mix up our paintbrushes here, as the French would say.

I am arguing that the question "would you do it for RP reasons" is entirely separate, and cannot be objectively compared to, "would you do it for character statistic reasons".

The examples you gave are where the penalty is reduced to the extent where it's not really a penalty anymore. But really, putting numbers like "1/1000th" on this is fairly nonsensical without knowing what exactly that represents.

We implemented haste such that while you could perform twice as many actions, bleeding due to injuries was also doubled. While not an addiction, it's a good example of giving the character risk options.

If your codebase is Smaug, you could take SWR(FotE?)'s spice system and adapt it for your purposes. Then just have a mob that's a shop without a nowander flag moving around wherever.

A fourth option would be withdrawal symptoms.