[ Idea ] RPG dealing with Addiction

[fanflicks]

Hello. I've been exploring an idea regarding a game where the players deal with addiction. The game would focus on the players overcoming their addictions which could take the form of "demons" or "psychological antagonists." My question is : Would this be interesting for seasoned or newcomers to rpgs? Here are some of my brainstorming ideas :

1. A meter which represents "overdosed" thru "sober" . The goal is to keep from dipping to the overdosed side but spend these "points" for additional dice during conflict resolution roles.

2. Players can collaborate "addictions" aka substances to accumilate dice pools but risk getting addicted to something new.

3. Addiction can take many forms : drugs, television, people, etc...

4. The antagonists of the game take on the form of psychological threats / demons (ex. Jacob's Ladder movie) which are only visible to the players so they must stop these things and try not to look "weird" to the normal public.

thoughts? comments? Any other questions that i should attempt to answer? Many thanks!

[baragh]

This does seem like an interesting idea to me, perhaps integrated into a larger game. Whether it would stand on its own or not I'm not really sure. Before I finished reading your post the thought was tickling my brain about these "demons" being translated literally into the game as physical entities; Your mention of "Jacob's Ladder" was better.

[Callan S.]

So far it rests on the assumption you'd just want to overcome your addictions.

Why? Why not indulge them? Isn't everthing in life just an indulgence? Just having to hug a giggling baby or just having to finish your third bottle of wine for the night? If you can so easily decide to stop the drinking, then couldn't you just decide to end the desire to hug the baby as well? If you can do that, can't you stop any passion? If you have the power to stop all of them...why don't you?

Why you keep going is why you can't stop (the addiction). I think it should have less of an assumption that the person would just want to overcome their addiction.

[stevebarkeruk]

I think the reason people want to overcome the addiction is that an addiction goes beyond being something you want to do, to becoming something you need to do, simply to function.  You increasingly need more, until it is all that you think about, it is the one thing your life revolves around to the exclusion of all else.

So you could set up a system where characters were defined by the things they were losing or had lost that are important to them; the struggle is to interact successfully with these things (people, situations, ideas, actions) to gain the will necessary to quit the addiction before being consumed by it.

I'm just thinking out loud there but what I've written sounds to me like a cross between the use of Connections and Love in My Life With Master, and the sanity-loss system of Call of Cthulhu and others.  Your goal could be to reach a Hope level of, say, 10 before your Will is consumed by the addiction, so the game is about trying to feed the addiction enough to remain functional, but not so much that it interferes with your ability to gain Will.

The way I'm putting it there sounds very bleak and probably with a high PC 'mortality' rate (becoming unplayable, if not actually dying) and it's not one I'm sure I'd want to play but I can see the appeal in it.

[Vulpinoid]

I'm just thinking out loud there but what I've written sounds to me like a cross between the use of Connections and Love in My Life With Master, and the sanity-loss system of Call of Cthulhu and others.  Your goal could be to reach a Hope level of, say, 10 before your Will is consumed by the addiction, so the game is about trying to feed the addiction enough to remain functional, but not so much that it interferes with your ability to gain Will.

This could work, but you should also consider the flip-side.

What benefit do people get from their addiction?

It is said that heroin inspireds a confidence in the user, and a junky remains addicted because they have relied on the confidence high so heavily that they lose all self confidence when they are not on the drug. Other drugs and situations also have positives and negatives. I'm not proposing that you develop a game condoning or encouraging the use of drugs (heaven knows the role-playing community has enough religious witch-hunters out there who want the hobby destroyed due to it's mention of demons).

But from the purpose of the game, there should be some kind of extra benefit from taking the drugs, or indulging the addiction (eg. +1 to one stat in exchange for -1 to another, useful in the short term until the penalty to the second stat becomes permanent).

V

[fanflicks]

Thank you for the suggestions so far. I like how most of you mentioned that a balance between "feeding" the addiction but not allowing it to overcome the character's sensibilities could work out. I want to incorporate "time travel" into it . Perhaps the PC is forever existing in two or more time settings due to the addiction being used as a way of escapism. The goal is to live out one of the time lines which is the correct one for them but only the storyteller knows. So by being overwhelmed by the addiction traps the player in multiple time lines whereas getting "sober" focuses on ascending and finding one's self in the correct "zone." This goes back to the Jacob's Ladder movie where Tim Robbins is in an alternate time line unlike the one he should be in.

[dindenver]

Hi!
  I've thought about this mechanically before. I think there are multiple factors that have to be considered:
Stress: I find that some addictions are triggered by Stress. Everyone seems to be stressed by different things. Seems like great fodder for a good RPG
Social: Peers, friends, etc. may directly or indirectly influence decisions to indulge in addictions. Also, there is that idea that your perception of what is "normal" behavior is influenced by the people you hang out with.
Romance: Many Addictions have myths behind them to encourage them to have a sort of romantic appeal. For instance, alcohol and Writers who think back romantically of Earnest Hemingway and feel that maybe they would be a better writer if they indulged a little.
Mental: Once the addiction is indulged, many addictions use a mental component to keep you addicted. Also, many addicts continue to indulge out of habit or as a way to maintain some status quo in their life. In other words, Not indulging causes Stress.
Physical: Once the addiction is indulged, many addictions use a physical component to keep you addicted. Again, more stress if they don't indulge...
Rock Bottom: An Addict will continue to indulge until a specific Rock Bottom Situation is hit. No matter how much it effects their life.

  So, it seems like something happens to the char where they are stressed out. Do something desperate to relieve the Stress, but its like s Stress-Reliever Loan Shark, you have to pay it back plus the vig...

[David Berg]

Thank you for the suggestions so far. I like how most of you mentioned that a balance between "feeding" the addiction but not allowing it to overcome the character's sensibilities could work out. I want to incorporate "time travel" into it . Perhaps the PC is forever existing in two or more time settings due to the addiction being used as a way of escapism. The goal is to live out one of the time lines which is the correct one for them but only the storyteller knows. So by being overwhelmed by the addiction traps the player in multiple time lines whereas getting "sober" focuses on ascending and finding one's self in the correct "zone." This goes back to the Jacob's Ladder movie where Tim Robbins is in an alternate time line unlike the one he should be in.

The choice of persisting in a fun hallucination vs confronting reality (a la Fisher King) might be fun to roleplay, but it'd be pretty damn obvious which reality was which.  In order for there to be an "only the storyteller knows" dynamic, there would need to be a plausible alternative explanation for the timeline-jumping...

The "boring reality" timeline would need to be suspicious... like maybe that was the halluciation for some reason... but what reason...

Dude, have you see La Jetee?  If not, then the movie inspired by it, 12 Monkeys?  A futuristic government gives a guy powerful psychoactive drugs as a means of sending him on a mission, and the place he goes to ends up seeming more "real" than the place he came from...

Here's a game concept:
One storyteller plus two or more players.  Each player is playing either a deluded junkie who needs to shake his addiction or an secret agent who needs certain drugs to complete his mission.  Each game has at least one actual secret mission that needs doing and at least one actual case of drug-induced schizophrenia that needs curing.  Only the storyteller knows which character(s) has the actual addiction(s) and which character(s) is on the actual mission(s)!

That was fun; I hope it was also useful...

[Vulpinoid]

This kind of concept could also be played from a William S. Burroughs/Naked Lunch perspective.

V

[fanflicks]

David Berg :
Dude, have you see La Jetee?  If not, then the movie inspired by it, 12 Monkeys?  A futuristic government gives a guy powerful psychoactive drugs as a means of sending him on a mission, and the place he goes to ends up seeming more "real" than the place he came from...

Here's a game concept:
One storyteller plus two or more players.  Each player is playing either a deluded junkie who needs to shake his addiction or an secret agent who needs certain drugs to complete his mission.  Each game has at least one actual secret mission that needs doing and at least one actual case of drug-induced schizophrenia that needs curing.  Only the storyteller knows which character(s) has the actual addiction(s) and which character(s) is on the actual mission(s)!

That was fun; I hope it was also useful...

yes thank you for that suggestion. In fact i was describing the game to a co-worker today and used 12 Monkeys as a reference point. Perhaps the players prefer getting a "fix" to avoid going back to the polluted world to which they left from while trying to perform a mission. This could serve as a story idea for the storyteller to be inspired by.


Vulpinoid wrote:

This kind of concept could also be played from a William S. Burroughs/Naked Lunch perspective.

As a matter of fact i am a big burroughs fan. I used to write to him back in the 1990s and he even wrote back once. The way Naked Lunch was compiled was by taking the many typed pages and put them in a somewhat order which resulted in text that was suppose to showed up in the end of the story, actually showed up earlier. So this served as a flashback scenario in the book.

My goal is to present the game in two formats : short one-shot stories and extended campaigns so it can appeal to a variety of players and storytellers. The one-shot could be the players trying to find their right time line AND go sober. The extended game could be the players questioning which timeline is correct while eluding narcotic agents, "the man" , "men in black" aka authority.

[fanflicks]

Within the last few days I've managed to write up several pages for the game. The name of the game, tentatively, is called Trip. Here is what I've come up with so far. Hopefully I will have a rough draft by next week to spring upon my local players and then possibly for everyone else to playtest.

Here are the highlights :
Trip uses 10 sided dice. Most rolls require the player to roll multiple dice based on their dice pool. The Storyteller will assign a target number for the player to roll above in order to succeed. For each success beyond the first, the greater the outcome is for the user's action for the scene.

Each player has access to Junk Dice and Sober Dice pools. This is measured by a horizontal chart with 11 boxes called the Life Meter. Players start off at the 6th box and can slide left or right. Left side is the Junk Dice, the right side is the Sober Dice.

Junk Dice : Junk Dice are acquired if the PC's life meter is moving to the left. The closer they are to ODing, the more bonus dice they have to accomplish reality crashing. However if they fail with these type of dice, they move even closer to the ODing side for each failed attempt. If they succeed, they lose the junk dice for every success which moves them one step closer to the sober side on the life meter. Players can borrow up to 3 Junk Dice per turn. The term "Reality Crashing" refers to a player's way of warping reality. The bigger the effect, the more Junk Dice needed. Reality Crashing is similar to the concept from DC Vertigo Comics "Shade the Changeling Man" where Shade was able to control and distort reality. In the game, someone who is "hallucinating" on their drug of choice thinks they are in control which would explain how from their perspective, reality seems distorted.

Sober Dice : Sober Dice are acquired for every point closer to the sober end of the life meter to the right. These dice are used to help with ordinary rolls (non reality crashing ones). If these dice fail, the player moves back to the left side near junk which explains that when they fail, they resort to getting a "fix" in order to cut off reality. The move to the left for each failed attempt and lose a sober die for every move to the left of the life meter.

I still haven't explored the role of addiction and the different types of addictions. Nor have i decided how alternate time lines will work and how to escape from one (possibly by accumilating enough sober dice).

[Danny_K]

Cool idea.  It's sort of like someone took Dipsomancy, from Unknown Armies, and turned it into its own game. 

(Brief summary: Dispomancers get power by getting and staying drunk, and lose everything if they sober up.  But they also suffer the usual penalties due to being drunk all the time, so they should be constantly seesawing between "too drunk" and "not drunk enough."  In practice, the system doesn't really support this, and they get even more power from finding magically empowered things to drink out of, so the game doesn't really play out that way.)

If you haven't read Zod Wallop and Irrational Fears, both by William Browning Spencer, you really need to.  Especially the first one, which involves a Phllip-K-Dickian experimental psychoactive drug that can remake reality, a depressed children's book author, and the dark children's fantasy story that he wrote. 

I think you could make a pretty cool Zod Wallop-style game out of this, with the characters both empowered and endangered by their addiction and the reality warps it causes. 

But I don't know that you really need the idea of timelines.  That seems to lessen the impact and immediacy of the situation, if there are timelines that you can jump between.  It would be simpler and scarier if there were just one reality, the character's reality, and that it changes over time.  If they don't like living in a world with monsters under the bed, they'd better change the world.  Or get used to sleeping on the couch.

[fanflicks]

But I don't know that you really need the idea of timelines.  That seems to lessen the impact and immediacy of the situation, if there are timelines that you can jump between.  It would be simpler and scarier if there were just one reality, the character's reality, and that it changes over time.  If they don't like living in a world with monsters under the bed, they'd better change the world.  Or get used to sleeping on the couch.

Yes I agree. The timeline jumping may be a possible plot device. I'll save it for the Storyteller chapter under "Sample Game Ideas." In the meantime I have the basic rules finished so hopefully in the next few days I will have a rough draft for people to playtest.

To summarize, the game will use D10s with a target number to meet and exceed. The more successes, the greater the outcome. There are two dice pools (Junk Dice which are used to perform "reality crashing" events) and Sober Dice (used to perform human-limited actions). These two dice pools can be borrowed to help with most rolls and a Life Meter which has a range from 1 (over dosed) through 11 (sober) with the middle number 6 as (buzzed). If a player borrows dice from the Junk Dice Pool they move closer to the overdosed side of the Life Meter. If a player earns Sober Dice then they can perform human-believable actions and not get close to ODing.

[David Berg]

Does Reality Crashing (cool name, BTW; evokes both crashing parties and crashing computers) allow you to (potentially) do anything you want?  If so, that would pretty much ruin any suspense about whether you're actually hallucinating or actually magic, right?  I mean, we know you're not locked up in some cell somewhere daydreaming... you're "out there in the real world" at least to the extent of being able to actually do junk and get Junk Dice.  So if you're out there in the real world, and, say, you fall off a 50-story building onto cement and try to Reality Crash a soft landing -- if you succeed, you're magic, and that's that.

I see little incentive to pile on sober dice to do sober things if playing God is the alternative.

Obviously, this issue is not a problem if you have a set difficulty number in mind for any possible task, and the only question is where the character is getting their bonus dice from.  In that case, a high-Junk character has the same capabilities as a high-Sober character.  I just got the impression this isn't what you had in mind, and rather that Junk Dice and Sober Dice would help in different die-rolling situations.

Maybe your idea would be clearer to me if I remembered Shade, but I only read like 2 issues...

If playing God does become a problem, one way you could limit it is via plausibility -- the more "coincidental" the reality warp seems, the more likely you can pull it off (a la Mage and probably many other games).

[fanflicks]

One of the topics that I am trying to work out is how much power is there behind the Junk Dice Pool to envoke a reality crashing event. Is it true magic or illusion? Perhaps to the character it is true magic / spectacle but to the world around him, he is just a junky out of control. Maybe the mundane reality "covers" the player so every reality crashing act is seen as coincidental but to the player character it seems real. This is an off-shoot approach to Mage : The Ascension where players have to mask their magic abilities to appear coincidental or suffer paradox. In this game, it is told from the addict's perspective so they can get away with it. Surviving a 50 story drop would require a high target number, and a handful of D10s from their Junk Pool and Action Dice to get enough successes but I suppose they could survive if they rolled well. (Ex. their fall is slowed down by winds or another object on the way down which allows them to slow down. Sounds impossible but then again it is changing reality.)

The Sober Dice need to have a good incentive or yes, why bother? Tapping into the junk is good for temporary but effective effects but maybe the Sober Dice have a much longer "impression." I'll have to work on that.

Also, the whole topic of Addiction could be a majority of the game. What kinds of addictions and how can they interact with the character and  the game? If someone had a food addiction, would they have to eat and then throw it up to somehow tie in a reality crashing event? The more they eat the closer to the OD side of the Life Meter.