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[Izual]

Yes, like some people here I think that drugs effect should last longer, maybe forever, but the drawbacks should become worse and worse over time. Taking another dose of your drug would set drawbacks back to normal status.

For example...

Jet effects as they are right now :
Immediate:  +3 to Maximum Action Points, +1 to Strength, +1 to Perception.
After 3 hours:  -4 to Maximum Action Points, -2 to Strength, -2 to Perception .
After 6 hours: +1 to Maximum Action Points, +1 to Strength, +1 to Perception.

Of course, this is in-game time. I am too lazy to calculate, but the worse drawback (after 6 hours) is like after 15 minutes in real life. So "good" drug effect lasts like 5-10 minutes, drugged characters know this better than me.
With my idea of a longer good effect, and increased drawbacks over time, it could be like this (with a removal to SPECIAL bonuses for good side effects, as it would last longer).
Immediate:  +3 to Maximum Action Points, -1 to Perception, -20 kgs to Maximum Carry weight.
After 20 hours:  -4 to Maximum Action Points, -1 to Strength.
After 40 hours: -1 to Maximum Action Points, -2 to Perception.
After 70 hours: -2 to Strenght, -2 to Perception, -2 to Charisma.
After 120 hours: -1 to Maximum Action Points, -2 to Perception.
This way after 120 hours (that's very approximately about 5 hours real time) without taking a single dose, you would have severe drawbacks and would become a poor, almost helpless junkie.

Taking one dose at any time would remove all the effects and set instead the "Immediate" one. Of course it is only an example here. Together with these changes, jet doses should be rarer, drugs combinations could maybe be removed, etc. Also, the "After X hours" are just random values, like the drawbacks here. I just think the future of the drugs is in a long effect of them.

[HertogJan]

I'm don't think the duration of the positive drugs' effect needs to be changed.
However addiction should suffer severer consequences and they should last for active playing hours and not real-time hours.
Further more I'm not sure there's a drug that needs nerving.

Combinations of drugs and drugs used while enduring drawbacks or even addiction should be nerved.
For instance if you have taken psycho, stims, super stims and healing powders should have a seriously reduced effect (by roughly 60-80%).
More psycho taken or under a psycho addiction means stims, etc. have even lesser effects.

Combinations of drugs should also be able to lead to death.
If you take serveral different kind of drugs which cause you to get extra action points, it could lead to a fatal heart attack.
I'm in favor of some kind of formula which gives you an x amount of chance to die when you take your 2nd kind of drug on top of 1 or 2 of a the first kind taken.
Doctor and FA skill could and current addiction(s) should be of influence here.

The chance of an addiction could be influenced by your FA en doctor skill.
The lower they are, the higher the chance you become addicted.

Perhaps there's a way alcohol could play a role in boosting or reducing the effects of certain drugs and skills?
For instance 1 or 2 beers could lower the IN you get from mentats, but could raise the charisma it gives you.
On the same time however it would reduce your fighting skills, doc and FA a bit, whereas it increases your speech and barter.
Off course alcohol would have it's own chance of addiction.

I also like Izual's suggestion.

[Gatling]

Just because you are knowledgeable about the drugs and the effects should not have any effect on your addiction chance. Biology is biology, and your know-how won't alter it if you take a drug and your body likes it, telling you to take MOAR.

[HertogJan]

Yes, but having knowledge means you already know the side effects and might have taken some precautions which reduces addiction chances.
Also you would be able to know the symptoms and are therefore better of recognizing drawback symptoms which means you're less likely to give into that as you know what will  happen.
Perhaps have FA and doctors skill nerve drugs stats for those reasons.

[Pozzo]

It could be fun to add some "crazy" effects to drugs. If you take Jet or Psycho your character got psychological problems. If you tell your character to attack for example, he may do nothing instead, or he may drop his weapon or attack a friend ^^

[gordulan]

or he might run away for his whole turn, I mean for 10 seconds

[Gatling]

Yes, but having knowledge means you already know the side effects and might have taken some precautions which reduces addiction chances.
Also you would be able to know the symptoms and are therefore better of recognizing drawback symptoms which means you're less likely to give into that as you know what will  happen.

.... What?  Lower his addiction chances?  How does that work now?  To my knowledge, a doctor takes crack, he's gonna be messed up unless through extreme willpower he gets someone to help him before he ruins himself.  This is not a morning cup of coffee, this is about an addiction that destroys everything about a person. 

Some people here have some very vanilla and flaky views on drugs it seems. I wonder if the pansy drawbacks in games are to blame...

[JustGreat]

Two things:

First, if a drug is going to give you a positive effect, lets say +3 Endurance, it also must give you a negative effect of equal magnitude, for example -3 Perception.

Second, if you become an addict you get "Addiction Points" (call it whatever you wish). So, lets say I used Jet and the effect wore off. Now for every hour (real life) you get 1 Addiction Point, say I PvPed and then came back 10 hours later, to get back the "positive" effects of Jet I have to use 10 Jets.
Of course numbers can change for balance, it was just an example.

[Kilgore]

This way after 120 hours (that's very approximately about 5 hours real time) without taking a single dose, you would have severe drawbacks and would become

So I would have to make 5-10 copies of every of my powerbuilds to be able to fight?

[Izual]

I have to say I don't really understand your counter-argument

[Badger]

Only one drug in your system at any time. You know it makes sense.

[Hololasima]

I have one idea. After wipe just dont implement Psycho to game. We would try game without Psychos.
They destroying variable BG builds.

[Solar]

The two problems with drugs currently are:

1. Time they last. This forces fights to be short bursts where everyone is drugged up and do nothing for the rest of the time (Or switch to a fresh set of alts and repeat the process).

2. The effects are way too strong, especially when taken cumulatively. This means that instead of someone having a slight advantage in an area they are supermen compared to the normal person, for those 10 minutes where all action actually takes place.



The solution isn't to punish players by making taking drugs make you useless for massive amounts of time and it isn't about nerfing them to hell to mean they are no use whatsoever.

When the time comes for us to balance drugs I will be pushing for a large simplification of effects (only one time effect), downsides to go with the good for those effects (to make taking a cocktail of them counter productive) and lengthening the time the work for by a lot (as well as their cost).

You will then get people using drugs for much smaller bonuses, generally picking which effect they want and then being able to actually play the game for a significant period of time on the same character without having a legion of alts.

[Badger]

That works. The uptime-downtime system just makes for bad gameplay. Nobody wants to wait fifteen minutes as their character lies sweating in a puddle of their own piss. Even the original games didn't get drugs balanced at all.

[Kilgore]

Fortunately, Solar understands what is the problem with drugs and has some good ideas how to solve it.

Izual, what I mean is that I'd need to create 10 copies of one powerbuild, because of withdrawal being too long.