More Human Than Human (Drugs in Games)

Dice roll Modifiers: To reward players we heap on bonuses. To punish players we give them negatives. This is one of the reasons that drugs in games don’t often work.
Shadowrun was always a game of prissy elves and sterilized technology, so having cybernetics that always worked and having drugs that were entirely forgettable, was fine. Shadowrun is gritty-lite.
But Cyberpunk really tried to go for a much dirty game and therefore, I blame them entirely for these same failures.
Very quickly: cyberwear was much too clean in Cyberpunk. There was never a chance that it was installed poorly, that it could wear, that it could fail or screw up and become more of a problem that it was worth. It was always superior to have cyberwear over not having it. Cyberpunk’s mechanic to avoid too much tech was a fairly weak mechanic that would lower your Empathy and once it was gone, your character was a raving lunatic (and you lose your character). The mechanic is entirely weak because the player can roll their dice for how much of a loss they take and then judge whether or not their character can take more. Once the roll was done, there was never any adjusting it. Once I hide the character’s rolls but then, a player took too much cyberwear and I was stuck. They didn’t want any more stuff but I rolled and their character became a cyberpyscho and was done for. They were the central character. So what to do? In the end, I ultimately ignored it and told the player not to take any more cyberstuff and he was perfectly happy with that.
Games that try to go for the gritty seem to also lack any moral or ethical system. I guess in the grim future, it’s become perfectly acceptable to shoot low paid security guards in the face and be fine with it later. A good player may take it upon themselves to have a moment of feeling awful, but they’ll get over it (often forgotten about by the next session).
Because of a lack of moral/ethical rules or even rules for stress, a character has no need for things that we use everyday to counter stress. Everybody in this world has a way to escape their lives (many of us pretend that we’re other people). And so too should a good and layered character has those outs. Although a lot of players tend to rely on some arguable ‘weak’ methods of escape: “My character sure does love to clean. Yes sir, after a day of murdering security guards and getting nearly killed, there really isn’t anything I like better than going home and doing something entirely safe and without consequence.”
I’m not saying that every character needs to turn to drugs, but to get into the mindset of the character, living on the gritty streets of Night City, drugs would be everywhere and they would be cheap. All your friends are doing it. People look at you like you’re a damn narc if you don’t take. But most importantly, it fits with the genre that you’ve chosen to game within.
The problem isn’t the world or the genre. It’s the players and how drugs are handled in the game. Recreational drugs almost always give some trivial bonus to skills that won’t come up and give hefty negatives to skills that are important to the game (often combat skills). And of course, right after that, the player gets to read the addition difficulty value and most of them say ‘No dice. My character is living clean.”
Ignoring the fact that booze and smokes are actually addicting drugs (but they’re legal and hence cool and can’t harm anybody), unless the system has a mechanic that handles something as ephemeral as stress, there will never be a reason or a need for a character to take recreational drugs. Games like Cyperpunk try to promote heavy combat and in combat, things that give you the aforementioned negative modifiers, especially when they are optional to begin with.
I believe that hard lives demands hard play. Part of a great Cyberpunk journey, at least the books that started the genre, was about the human part, not the cyber. Sure for the RPG they introduced more corporate hiring of street mercs to pull local black ops, but they completely dropped the ball on making their gritty world…well gritty. The Cyberpunk RPG wasn’t a journey to watch your soul slip away due to cybernetics, bad moral choices, loosing people close to you or even losing yourself into the violent world of gangs and drugs. It was D&D with guns.
In order to make these things compelling, you have to make them compelling to the type of player who wants to play Cyberpunk. You then have to construct rules that say, if you sell this piece of your soul, you get this benefit. Then you have to have the negative be there, but not completely outweigh the benefit and still have some relevance to the game. Players, after all are nothing if not efficient. The street solo (fighter) is completely willing to sacrifice all their social skills to become the bestest killer evar. And it’s all the more apparent in an RPG, because often the player never has to deal with the character on a non-adventure level (heck, nobody would ever want to live the life of this bad-ass machine who goes home and sits on his bed, waiting in quiet until the next time he’s called…it would be boring in the extreme). And furthermore you have another play handle all that ‘sort of thing’. The ‘face’ of the group who gets the contracts and the like. And this is always handled poorly and always handled in true min-maxer capacity. First there is the Face who gets the job and then the corp meets with the group. All the players address the corp equally and questions are answered. But really, you don’t think that the corp wouldn’t turn to the cybermachine character and tell him he’s not talking to a fucking toaster and then only address the ‘face’. I wish I had pulled that one of the characters. The second thing, that I *hate* is when one player shops for everybody else. Really? That’s absolutely, without a doubt, utter crap. Pick five friends. Now go do all their shopping for a month. Fuck that. It just won’t happen. Shopping for others is boring and entirely unrealistic and yet if the Charisma high character can get a price discount on stuff, everybody will take advantage of it.
Now back to my point, the killing machine with no empathy, what if you introduced an abstract system of friends and contacts. And your inhuman character no longer has people outside the group to call a friend. Without friends you have nothing to keep, say…your character’s Aspiration Stat afloat, because it’s constantly dwindling like your ammo supply. One cheap way to put your Aspiration stat above zero is to take drugs. Well now, you may have just used game mechanics to enforce the genre, but why not. We have Charisma stats to let us understand how well our character interacts with the world. I think it would be a bold system to have a stat something that represents the core motivation of a character (you say Willpower, I say Aspiration) and that with more cyber, you have less reasons to care about anything. You are dying inside and the only way to make you feel anything is through a drug.
That sounds like a damn fine story potential to me. So instead of making a D&D rip-off, why don’t game designers tailor the rules to their genre more? I wish I knew.