Should Tobacco stats be changed?

[Gully]

Tobacco is currently listed in Book 1 as:
Addiction: Moderate
Harmfulness: Mild
Dependency: Strong
(please see the description of the two dependencies at the bottom of post)

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While tobacco can be a very tough habit to kick, I think listing its Dependency as "Strong" is problematic for three reasons.

1) Strong doesn't accurately describe tobacco addiction. The difference between the two dependencies (mild v. strong) is not how difficult it is to kick the habit, but how bad the repercussions are. Strong is described as "He becomes aggressive and is ready to spend high sums of money or commit crimes to get his hands on his favorite drug." I've known plenty of people who have tried to kick the habit of tobacco, and none reached this level of aggression. There is no stronger category, so this is as bad as a drug gets.

2) Mild does accurately describe tobacco addiction ... "He is in a bad mood, irritable, and has trouble sleeping." This corresponds to my experiences.

3) Mild is described as an option, but none of the drugs listed in Book 1 have this effect. It seems to me if any where going to be mild then tobacco is the most likely candidate. This might be an oversight in the original book that hasn't yet been errata'd?

Of course, I can change it for my campaign, but I wanted to bring it to the communities attention, so if others agreed it could be changed in future editions.

Thoughts?

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p. 243

Mild Dependency: if the Character does not have his product at disposal, he will try to acquire some. He is in a bad mood, irritable, and has trouble sleeping. He suffers a -2 penalty on all of his actions during the weaning period.

Strong Dependency: the Character develops different symptoms depending on the drug (headaches, insomnia, shaking, nausea, etc.) He becomes aggressive and is ready to spend high sums of money or commit crimes to get his hands on his favorite drug. He will focus on obtaining his dose, to the exclusion of any other project. Every action except the ones related to acquiring the drug suffers a -4 penalty.

[Dragoslav]

Maybe it's really, really strong tobacco that they have on the peninsula.

[Gully]

Maybe it's really, really strong tobacco that they have on the peninsula.

Thats what I first told my player, who is using Sid

[iznurda]

Well, in fact it's not really tabacco, the plant won't grow on the tri-kazel climat ^^ This is a mixture of different smoking herbs and they can be stronger than our tabacco. The advantage : we can consider different mixtures exist with different effects, weaker or stronger. But be free to adopt the modification you proposed.

Reminder: smoking is forbidden in Gwidre.

iz

[Gully]

Thanks Iznurda,

I thought it was more likely a mistake but I don't have a problem with tobacco being more virulent in Tri-Kazel.

I would be interested in finding some drugs that had Mild Dependency in order to have a more varied world.

[Pierstoval]

First rule of RPG : If you don't like the rules, change it !
Second rule : If you don't have the rule, create it !

[broken-serenity]

Third: no rule survives first contact with players.

[Iris]

Hello !

1. Strong drugs : I think it's due to give real handicaps... you can link it to the survival points which are not very "powerful" in the official and actual version. The goal is to give a very dangerous life and a gritty gamestyle...

Still, if you want to lower a little bit this element, in order maybe, that the characters live longer (I can understand that, I like to see a long evolution and a little bit of heroism...), that's easy and does not bother the universe


2. More drugs : Some solutions :

• mushrooms !
• plant that are poison and medecine (it depends on the dose)
• experimental magientist medecine

Hope it can help you !

[tamsyn]

Thanks the these threads our group now has a running joke about lighting up n the Gwidre border.