Okay, so, news: Having spent the last couple of days working on drugs, I'm happy to say I have a solid system in place. All that's left is designing them. I've run a few drugs past people so far, and everyone's given positive feedback.
Drugs balance four different things: Benefits, Duration, side effects, and cost. All of them are closely bound to each other. Strength drugs, for instance, are cheaper, but have a shorter duration. Side effects are based on drug "value per minute": the more a drug does over a longer time period (for cheaper), the more side effects the drug will have. A cheap drug with a lot of benefits that lasts a good while will have
many side effects.
Side effects work in three ways:
- Normal side effects: things that happen while you're taking the drug. These are typically pretty light and easy to deal with. Side effects stack over different drugs and may grow more extreme.
- Overdose effects: When you take too many drugs in a short amount of time, you get a mixture of the overdose effects of all the drugs you've taken. Any drugs you take while overdosed increase or add to the symptoms. Overdose effects are particularly severe and can even include a chance of death, but can also include hallucinations, paranoia, and more. Nasty stuff. Overdosing is bad, m'kay.
- Withdrawal effects: Every time you take a drug, your chance of becoming addicted to one of them increases slightly. This chance-of-addiction is a hidden value that spans all the drugs you've taken in the past few hours. If you continue taking drugs, you can become addicted to the other ones you've taken (if taken recently). Withdrawal is simple: If you take another of the particular medicine, the withdrawal effects go away. Otherwise, after the mission is over, you'll find yourself with a variety of symptoms - based on the drug, these may range from headaches, to nausea, to insomnia, to stat decreases, to a lack of ability to concentrate, and many more. These effects will last until after the end of the next mission you go on. If you can wait out the symptoms an entire mission, you've overcome the addiction and get to live a normal life again.
The side effects will include both stat decreases and, more commonly, different ailments/effects that should be fun and interesting to roleplay. It should also be noted: everyone's body is different! Humanity has had a lot of time to disperse and multiply over the past thousand years. Physiology and drug symptoms are not a hard science, and it affects everyone differently. For most side effects/symptoms there is a range percentage for how likely it is to occur. For instance, you may find a drug where the withdrawal symptom of "headaches" occurs "35-65% of the time" - in a case like this, I would roll to see whether or not your character actually has that symptom.
Different drugs will have distinctive "visual effects" - for instance, I would be able to write something like, "The man's lips are drawn back over his teeth in a feral grimace, and he watches you, hunched low to the ground" - and you would be able to immediately know that those are the telltale signs of a drug called "ghoul" which means you ought to be careful of his strength and agility - putting some distance between you might be wise! Likewise, enemies will often be able to tell what kind of drug you've taken.
As to aliens, I imagine most drugs would have a very different effect on them. I'm not entirely sure what to do about that just yet, but I'll figure that out when I get to it.
FOR NOW: I need to get that next REKT post done! For anyone worrying about the gaps between posts: I feel like it's important to get as much done as possible before the mission ends, because whatever I don't finish now, I'll have to finish later. It's easier to wait during the mission, when things are happening, than after the mission when things are somewhat more... quiet, for lack of a better word. I have a LOT I need to take care of and finish up fixing/adding. A LOT. But I'm trying to get as much done as I can now instead of later.