How would you handle drug addiction?

By Tom Cruise, in Genesys

I've got a handful of different combat drugs in my Dark Heresy conversion, but what I'm lacking at the moment is any rules to develop addictions to them; it's all handled narratively as is.

How would you handle drug addiction in Genesys? I'm struggling, because there's no Obligation like in EotE, which was my go-to for Star Wars games, and I don't have drug use involve a roll (I try to avoid bloating the game with too many excess rolls), so there's no room for threat and despair to be spent on forming an addiction.

Edited by Tom Cruise

Rehab.

You could simply incorporate a mechanic like Obligation, where the value builds from 05 to 100, and at the start of each session you roll a percentile to see whether the addiction flares up in a noticeable and impacting way. This means that you can still include the addiction from an RP point of view, but it affects the character mechanically (perhaps by lowering Strain Threshold for the session) if the value is rolled.

Working to kick the addiction, by refraining from the drug use for a while or otherwise trying to remove them from your life, could begin lowering the value down to 05 (but never lower), and the opposite is true.

I can't imagine it would be terribly difficult to lift the Obligation mechanic from Edge of the Empire and slip it right into your game. That aside, a stress track might be a suitable mechanism as well if there is a desire for it to be more ingrained into play.

20 hours ago, Tom Cruise said:

I've got a handful of different combat drugs in my Dark Heresy conversion, but what I'm lacking at the moment is any rules to develop addictions to them; it's all handled narratively as is.

How would you handle drug addiction in Genesys? I'm struggling, because there's no Obligation like in EotE, which was my go-to for Star Wars games, and I don't have drug use involve a roll (I try to avoid bloating the game with too many excess rolls), so there's no room for threat and despair to be spent on forming an addiction.

I'd base it off of the stamina rules (pg. 244).

Every time they use a combat drug, roll a Discipline or Resilience check with a difficulty based on the drug used. On a failure, the character "steps up" the trauma severity. Each additional use causes another roll. Just change the effects to be "whenever the character is denied their drug of choice, the following :threat:/:despair: options are available to the GM."

Once each week the player can make a Discipline or Resilience check with a difficulty of the severity of the trauma. On a success, they downgrade the severity. A :triumph: can be spent to improve one more step up.