It might be wickedly amusing to make the character pass a willpower roll when in close proximity to the local apothecary or drug dealer. If they fail attach a script that forces them to buy and quaff/use a potion/drug. And if they don't have the cash, make them pawn a random item. ;-)

Yes. Now I am going to have to add that. And if the player tries to stay away from the dealer or fights the compulsion (script) to buy the drug, he or she begins suffering withdrawal symptoms…

Of course it borders on nonsensical, as the sentence was a quick hypothetical meant to spark discussion, not a thought out and proposed system. It started with "But for drugs, let's say one provided a haste type affect.". Notice it did not say "One should be a haste type affect.".

I imagine you knew that, but I figured to address it, just in case.

My point was just that if the problem is reduced to a near triviality by having tinytinytiny penalties, the discussion is very different from the one where penalties have a more immediately noticeable effect. It's hard to evaluate anything that's been said really because nobody has a specific and more importantly shared context and we're all probably talking past each other to some extent. :wink:

Purely your opinion.

Let's look at the proposed hypothetical with a 1 out 1000 chance of lowering constitution, which you termed "fairly nonsensical", and seem to be using as a basis for a point of "tinytinytiny penalties".

The lowering of the stat could happen the first time the user uses the "drug", or never. It could happen every time they take it, or they could take it over the course of their adventuring career and never notice any change. It becomes a matter of chance based on the code and the outcome of the RNG.

In a game where statistics actually matter a loss of a point of constitution could have a major impact on the long term development of the character. The loss of several points definitely could affect them. Poison saves, hit point gain and other systems that use constitution would use a variable that was lower then if the character had never used (or had used but not been affected by) the substance.

Many games (with trains and stat training) have a straight "1 train point per 1 point of stat gain". The impact in these games might be less then games that have a tiered system of stat training.

Our game, for example:
If stat is | Cost
less then 13 | 1
less then 16 | 2
less then 19 | 3
less then 22 | 4
less then 25 | 5
less then 28 | 6
less then 31 | 7

In our game the impact of one point of constitution loss would be dependent upon how high the stat was before the loss. A con of 18 (dropped to 17) would take at least 2 levels before they could have the trains to train it back to its former state. That could mean forgoing learning a couple skills, as well as not training other statistics during that time. Add in save bonus loss that could result in death (and a further loss of time), and a loss of hit points while training those levels to get the 2 trains, and many players would not consider it "tinytinytiny penalties".

Time is important to many players. A loss that costs extra time to reach goals is usually not viewed as trivial by most players I have met. That would depend on the player-type and how goal/time oriented they were, of course.

In the end it is up to the designer of each game to make the choices on risk/reward. As games vary greatly in design, what may seem a trivial loss in one may not be considered so trivial in another game.

I particularly liked the Fallout penalties. If you used a drug more than X times, you got addicted. While on the drug, you had no penalties (but constantly staying jacked up required buying an awful lot of drugs, given their relatively short effect times), but off the drug you suffered several point penalties to a stat (depending on the drug). Given that stats are 1-10, a single -1 really means something. The addiction could be cured for a price by a doctor, which was really the weakest part of the system – in later stages of the game, getting an addiction cured was a non-issue. Making removing the addiction hard would – combined with the rest of the approach – make for a compelling reason to avoid drugs. Especially if withdrawal symptoms worsen with time (maybe on a realistic curve – it gets worse and worse until it crescendos, then it gets better and better until the character has broken the addiction).

In the end, it's a game, make it fun. Realistic addiction and withdrawal symptoms don't make for a good game. (I have several family members with an extensive drug history, and my previous girlfriend had recovered from cocaine, heroine, and acid addictions – believe me, curing a drug addiction is something that takes a truly, remarkably immense amount of willpower, a lot of time, extensive lifestyle changes, and you're always going to have a risk of relapsing. I wouldn't wish an addiction like that on anybody, except maybe Hitler. Hell, I can't even break my caffeine addiction without relapsing within 6 months… time to suck down another latte, brb.)

On a further note, there are some fun things you can do besides stat penalties for withdrawal symptoms, which can be found in a lot of modern graphical games and even old roguelikes. Things like confusion (show players as monsters), garbled hearing (filter over any speech), or garbled sight (filter over room descriptions and exit names).

You can even go so far as to make certain drugs required for some parts of the game while still giving them addiction/withdrawal penalties if overused. Kind of like a tribal spirit quest sort of thing. Need to lick the Frog of Visions in order to see the Ancestral Spirit so you can kill it and take its stuff.

PS, I think Tyche was half joking anyway, but forcing a player character to perform actions is kind of lame for an RP-based game. It's far better to just give the actual player every incentive to buy, pawn, or steal the drug to avoid the withdrawal penalties.

What could work very well is severely decreasing natural healing once a player gets hooked on healing potions, which would subsequently result in needing more and more healing potions till natural healing is blocked entirely - and if the economy is balanced - finding money to buy healing potions might become an issue for addicted players. This might simulate a real life addiction quite well. If combined with harvesting and processing the juice from the popo tree to create healing potions you could also create a drug dealing and producing mini game. If in turn popo trees can only grow in pk zones you'd likely end up with a home grown mafia - given you manage to create the right money sinks.

So… like I said. It's fairly nonsensical to evaluate specific arguments made without specific contexts, because any number of things "could" be true.

Basically, the specifics of a game are required before it's even remotely sensible to evaluate what losing 1/1000th of a point or one point or 1000 points on some statistic.


I believe we are in vehement agreement, yes…

That was the meta-addiction angle I was aiming for in the beginning. However, I don't think Tyche was joking - he's evil like that. Besides, his suggestion would apply nicely to a non-RP-based game.

Honestly, I don't think it applies well to ANY game. The player should always be in control, unless it's a heavily story-oriented game. Even then, the whole experience ends up being 1/2 game and 1/2 movie.

Just saying "hey player the server makes decisions for you" isn't a game, and it isn't fun. It's also a copout, because with a little more effort you really can just make the player decide of his own will to do the exact same thing. :)

For example, if a player is near a drug and is sufferiing from withdrawl, triple the effects of the withdrawal symptoms, and leave them tripled for X amount of time even after moving away from the drug. Players are going to do just about anything to get their hands on a drug if they accidentally walk past the apothecary, all without actually taking control away from the player.

But, isn't part of the whole drug experience the fact that you're NOT necessarily in control of yourself? This is one of those things that kinda has layers to it, with implications both in-game and meta-game.


Of course, that is also an excellent idea. The whole reason I started this thread is to get a variety of opinions and ideas - so far so good. In the end, I'll take the ones I like most and synthesize them with my own ideas to create a system that fits my personality and my game. Hopefully other people are getting something out of this discussion, too.

In real life, yes. In a game, it's unclear that this is something you really want.

Yes, forcing the character to do something is taking away choice. Lack of choice is detrimental to gameplay. However, I think it depends on the magnitude of the forced action. There are already a number of similar situations in many games where the character may be forced to take some action without the player being given a choice. An example of this would be getting drug into combat against an aggressive monster. Yes, you could argue that the player chose to be in the same area as the monster. Then again, you could make the same argument in the drug case - the player chose to go near the drug dealer. Also, the player chose to take the drug to begin with. So, it's apparently not completely divorced from choice…

Well, I agree that if the consequences aren't so bad, it's not so detrimental, and even rather funny. Kind of like drunk characters who get lots of random socials forced on them. I would be against forcing the player into doing something that could have long-lasting negative effects, unless it's very clear that that's part of the deal.

Well, see, I would consider that bad gameplay too. In most games where a monster can force a player to do something, the player is given an opportunity to cancel the action, essentially turning it into a very-mini game.

There are exceptions, yes. I think the Left 4 Dead monsters that grab the player (Smokers and Hunters) are fantastic gameplay elements… but they have a very specific purpose for their existence, and the general idea behind the game is that it's a teamwork game. If you get paralyzed and you aren't freed almost instantly by a partner, you know you (or your teammates) did something wrong… e.g., you split off from the group, or you let yourselves get surrounded. Even still, L4D gives the player plenty of opportunity to avoid being grabbed. You have sevral seconds to shoot a Smoker after he tongue-grabs you, and you can pistol whip a Hunter as he's leaping onto you. Basically, being grabbed is an immediate consequence for a mistake, not something that just randomly happens because of a long-term condition. And being grabbed really has no long-term consequences other than damage (and possibly death), which is the same consequence as any other combat mistake in an action game – it won't result in the player losing money, items, being branded a thief, or whatever.

Monsters like those in Resident Evil (I like shooting zombies in the face, can you tell?) will grab the player, but the player has a chance to break free by smashing a button repeatedly as fast as he can. It's a silly little action that doesn't really do much, but it makes the player _feel_ in control. Which is kind of important.

The feel of the game really does have a lot more to do with things than actual mechanics, funnily enough. For example, many games de-randomize their random number generator to make it feel more random. I shit you not. A true random number generator might generate lucky hits for the enemy 10 times in a row. Rare, but it can happen. Because of how the human mind tends to work, though, the player will always notice those unlucky streaks, but they'll quickly forget when they have a lucky streak. Bad memories stick with you the strongest, as one of my math professors said (followed by making the whole class perform a goofy-ass dance to make us remember the process for integrating a division… which, I have to admit, did the trick). Anyways, players keep remembering all those unlucky streaks and forgetting the lucky ones, and eventually start getting pissed and claim that the game is cheating. So many games will detect if the player is getting an unlucky streak and then cheat in the player's favor, defeating the randomization (in the player's favor) so that the player doesn't think it's defeating the randomization in the computer's favor.

… I really am just rambling at this point. I shut up now.

No I wasn't joking. I was tempted to reprise an essay on the many differences of role-playing game styles, but made my saving throw.
Let's just say that players of hack-n-slash, adventure, and RPI games do share a common reverence for the SYSTEM. The are far less likely to balk at a temporary loss of character control if the SYSTEM is behind it as opposed to the STAFF or another PLAYER. :-)

Yes, until other PLAYERs can exploit loss due to the SYSTEM taking over their CHARACTER by forcing them to type words in UPPERCASE far too OFTEN. :wink: (There actually is a SERIOUS point in this post, btw.)

I have only read a few posts on this thread so far, but I'm wondering if anybody has taken a look at the spice addiction and refining features of swr. This could easily be altered to be used for cocaine and weed and all that. This system is still a bit primitive and could use a good rewrite by a skilled coder, but it's a good start for the system mentioned in the OP's post.

Just because I _might_ hang out near the mud school handing out free drugs to newbies is *no* reason not to implement.

So I've heard, usually from TinyMUD fans arguing against non-consentual combat. "Other players shouldn't be allowed to kill you without your consent!"

Personally I think that's rubbish. Too much choice is just as detrimental to gameplay as too little. Can you imagine playing a game of chess where you couldn't take your opponent's playing pieces unless they agreed? Or how about a game of Monopoly where you could choose to ignore the results of the dice, and refuse to pay other players for landing on their property?

How many of the MUD owners in this thread don't "force" PCs to die when they run out of hp?

A game is defined by its rules. Rules, by their very nature, restrict choice. If you don't force any rules upon the players or their characters, you won't have any gameplay, because you won't have a "game", just a social environment. It'd be like playing Cowboys & Indians as a little kid again…"I shot you!", "No, I shot you first!", "Didn't!", "Did so!", "No you didn't!", "Yes I did!", etc, etc.

In regard to the whole addiction thing, I did something similar for vampires in my old WoD MUD. If you didn't feed for a while, and your blood points dropped low enough, you would enter a mindless rage - all other characters would appear as "an enemy" (rather than being named) and you'd start attacking nearby people at random. Nobody ever complained about it, because the loss of control was an accepted (and thematic) part of the game - in fact you actually have even less control in the tabletop RPG.