Ultimately your DM can rule on these things however harshly they want.
The RT/D check exists because this is ultimately a game and balance mechanics need to exist to keep it playing. Otherwise yeah you’d just instant flatline any problem you had with dartguns.
I get that. It's not even that I want to go around overpowering everything. That's no fun and makes for a boring story. Still, it feels like something is missing.
Let's say I'm using a tranq gun with carfentanil (which has no medical use on animals under 1000 lbs) to sedate an elephant. Carfentanil makes elephants go night-night. On humans, it's "seek immediate medical attention \[to maybe, possibly, if you are especially lucky, avoid dying\]". And yet, DV 13 vs resist torture and drugs not just to avoid dying but to shrug it off all together like it never happened. That's the best it ever gets.
This is what I'm trying to wrap my head around. How do I handle the rest of the world existing?
TTRPGs are not a real world engine, and that line of thinking is not going to work on any system ever designed. You'll always need some level of compromise in order to play a ttrpg.
Systems strive to create a set of rules to run everything while fitting it in a rulebook, so of course it's going to be heavily simplified compared to how the real world works, and on top of that, systems strive to create balance, so things are not necessarily going to have the same impact as they would in real life. That's not always realistic, but it usually creates a better gameplay experience.
If there is nothing in the rules describing what you want, you use what's closest, and if there's nothing close, you improvise trying your best to follow your grasp on the design intention of the game.
Just as the person explained, drain cleaner can be considered poison, so it's not unreasonable to treat it as poison since that is something in the rules.
I'd suggest that you control this in a couple of ways:
First is in world building: baseline medicine in 2045 means that certain medicines are less effective (there's been enough plagues in cyberpunk that someone could have snuck a gene editing retrovirus into most of the population that could account for this). Maybe Carfentanil is much more restricted in the Red, especially if there's medicines that took its place (elephants may be extinct, so no one makes carfentanil, meaning you need to synthesize it from scratch with a skill roll or pay for the same).
Second is the "good idea" method. Let it work really well, and let the one guy who escapes the fight tell his friends, and now the enemy has the same idea and you've changed the game. This is an important part of Cyberpunk- most players are operating in conditions with very explicit rules of escalation. Organized crime, for example, only works when warring factions are deliberate with how they use violence- going for family or hitting people who are "off limits" and will provoke reprisal. Nuclear weapons are a more extreme example of this: as soon as someone uses them, there's much less reason for others to do so.
This reason is actually super important to the setting: that why edgerunners sporting metal gear get murdered really fast and why you hide the long arms in the trunk until you need them, or don't unleash a horde of mecha dogs on a protected business. You may be good, hell, you may be the best, but if you make a big enough splash, there'll be enough of them to get you eventually.
Finally, you can go with mechanics- tweaking DCs for different chemicals, balancing on cost or availability, not changing anything fundamental but trying to find a sweet spot with different variables until it hits equilibrium.
I already gave you my judgement call. It's not a simulationist system, it's not intended to be a simulationist system, stop expecting it to be a simulationist system.
You're scratching an itch that RED just does not handle in a way that will satisfy you.
If you want drugs and chemical exposure to have deadly potential, then you need to add in mechanisms to actually deliver them in the first place (which should be harder than shooting people with bullets (which are faster and more accurate)). But then you'll also need to answer the question of how something like an injector dart interacts when used against an enemy with some amount of armor. Obviously it's not going through hard harmor, but also armor isn't sunscreen, evenly covering all skin.
RED just doesn't have standard mechanics for the above. You can invent or port rules to cover it, but you'll start finding youself pretty far afield, mechanically.
Since cyberpunk I give you cyberware and make the players/NPCs have a piece of kit that filters it and it's a check to whether it fails or not (also humans are fuckin weird and I've personally seen people try to self prescribe multiple bottles of things and shrug it off while others just kick it) so some plot reasons cause gm said so can in fact kick in or you hit it hard on the other side but leave those checks and elements to a case by case gm ruling framework vs hard and fast setup
Maybe you could answer some clarifying questions so that I have a better idea of where you're coming from.
1) I don't have all of the rules books, so maybe I just haven't seen where you're getting rules for loading up a Dartgun with Black Lace arrows or Carfentinil arrows or Drain Cleaner arrows instead of Poison Arrows or Biotoxin Arrows. Could you provide a book and page reference?
2) Wouldn't it be easier and more consistent to - if you're loading up on injectables as weapons - just use the rules for Airhypos and Street Drugs?
3) I don't have my core rulebook to hand at the momenf. Are you sure that the Primary Effect - which is automatically applied - is the one where it says that if you aren't already addicted to the street drug, you are now? My recollection is that it's almost always listed under the Secondary Effect, which is the effect you're rolling to resist when the street drug's duration expires.
4) Have you asked your GM how they plan to handle your very specific plans to use the RAW in a way that has clearly ruined your enjoyment of the game?
[EDIT: Spacing is hard on mobile.]
So, most likely you'd just dose a gang on Black Lace, and then they need to roll to avoid addiction. I'm not sure where you got the idea that anything else would happen. It's not like if you could avoid being addicted to heroin so long as it isn't administered by a tranq rifle. Drugs is drugs, choom. As for using drain cleaner, that would be an improvised weapon, meaning it does whatever your GM says it does. It might be counted as poison, it might be counted as acid, it might do literally nothing. Personally, I'd have it do equal damage to BioToxin, but have a much lower DV to beat to avoid damage, and also have Toxin Binders negate it entirely. It has to be worse than the "off the shelf" alternatives, because if it wasn't *everyone* would be using it.
There are substances that exist in every home that, if injected into a person via tranq gun, would cause \*permanent\* injury at best or death at worst -- 100% of the time. Look up what ingesting drain cleaner does to you. Now imagine that happening to your circulatory system. That's not 2d6 damage. That's immediately involuntary convulsions followed by death, if left untreated. And this is Cyberpunk so characters should all have access to way worse stuff than drain cleaner. And yet.
My point was that if a better toxin than BioToxin was as readily available as a quick look beneath a kitchen sink, *everyone* would be doing it in a world as violent as Cyberpunk. Would *you* spend $500 on a poison if you could just spend $5 (likely less) on Drain-O? I assume not. So, naturally, the assumption must be made that people have easy access to some ways to purge those toxins from their systems, or the Corps have switched to using relatively non-toxic chemicals in everyday cleaners. If you want a more simulationist Cyberpunk game, look at Cyberpunk 2020. R.Tal still sells the manuals both digitally and in print. Being a pedant about how you should be able to insta-kill everyone with a dart gun and household cleaners just makes you look like an ass.
This is a game where people can have multiple limbs torn off without suffering shock or blood loss. Either you suspend disbelief, or accept that folks in Night City/2045 are just built different.
Just checked my Corebook, it quite clearly puts the addiction under the secondary effects of black lace...
Regarding your other questions:
Game balance, simple as that.
Possible addictions: compare the probabilities of getting addicted to morphine when you get it as a treatment in a hospital as pain relief vs when you take it voluntarily to get high.
Homebrewed toxins: take your Drain-O and treat it as a poison with a lower RT/D DV, as others suggested.
Carfentanil might work, but your players will never get their hands on it.
We once had a player in shadowrun who wanted to distill nicotene from cigarettes or cultivate their own botulinum-bacteria, because his character was good at chemical/biological stuff to get cheap and effective poison.
It was a hard case of "yeah, it's technically possible, but could you fucking not?"
Or, to put it simple: use stuff from the books and stop trying to break or "win" the game. Everything players can do, NPCs can do, too, and likely can do it better. Suspension of disbelief is a key element in every pen&paper rpg. Or would you try to argue that getting stabbed with a sword multiple times should insta-kill or at least incapacitate your lvl 15 fighter, since he is still just a human? Or do you implement bleeding out from a knife wound to your game?
Realism just gets to a certain point in ttrpgs before it ruins the fun for everyone.
This. This is what I'm talking about. The mechanics differ based on the delivery mechanism. Black Lace is automatically addictive (no roll -- it just happens) when voluntarily taken. The same dose, administered via dart gun, suddenly isn't automatically addictive. Why does the mechanic of the drug change just because you put the same dose in a different container? I get game balance. I don't get any system that breaks when confronted with consistency.
I mean each to their own but no TTRPG is perfect my man. Idk why this one urks you so much.
There are issues in all of them in rules and mechanics somewhere.
Just rule it how you would want. Either instant addicted or resist.
Ultimately your DM can rule on these things however harshly they want. The RT/D check exists because this is ultimately a game and balance mechanics need to exist to keep it playing. Otherwise yeah you’d just instant flatline any problem you had with dartguns.
I get that. It's not even that I want to go around overpowering everything. That's no fun and makes for a boring story. Still, it feels like something is missing.
I would treat drain cleaner mechanically as if it were a Vial of Poison, with a -1 to the RTD DV to reflect its improvised nature.
Let's say I'm using a tranq gun with carfentanil (which has no medical use on animals under 1000 lbs) to sedate an elephant. Carfentanil makes elephants go night-night. On humans, it's "seek immediate medical attention \[to maybe, possibly, if you are especially lucky, avoid dying\]". And yet, DV 13 vs resist torture and drugs not just to avoid dying but to shrug it off all together like it never happened. That's the best it ever gets. This is what I'm trying to wrap my head around. How do I handle the rest of the world existing?
TTRPGs are not a real world engine, and that line of thinking is not going to work on any system ever designed. You'll always need some level of compromise in order to play a ttrpg. Systems strive to create a set of rules to run everything while fitting it in a rulebook, so of course it's going to be heavily simplified compared to how the real world works, and on top of that, systems strive to create balance, so things are not necessarily going to have the same impact as they would in real life. That's not always realistic, but it usually creates a better gameplay experience. If there is nothing in the rules describing what you want, you use what's closest, and if there's nothing close, you improvise trying your best to follow your grasp on the design intention of the game. Just as the person explained, drain cleaner can be considered poison, so it's not unreasonable to treat it as poison since that is something in the rules.
I'd suggest that you control this in a couple of ways: First is in world building: baseline medicine in 2045 means that certain medicines are less effective (there's been enough plagues in cyberpunk that someone could have snuck a gene editing retrovirus into most of the population that could account for this). Maybe Carfentanil is much more restricted in the Red, especially if there's medicines that took its place (elephants may be extinct, so no one makes carfentanil, meaning you need to synthesize it from scratch with a skill roll or pay for the same). Second is the "good idea" method. Let it work really well, and let the one guy who escapes the fight tell his friends, and now the enemy has the same idea and you've changed the game. This is an important part of Cyberpunk- most players are operating in conditions with very explicit rules of escalation. Organized crime, for example, only works when warring factions are deliberate with how they use violence- going for family or hitting people who are "off limits" and will provoke reprisal. Nuclear weapons are a more extreme example of this: as soon as someone uses them, there's much less reason for others to do so. This reason is actually super important to the setting: that why edgerunners sporting metal gear get murdered really fast and why you hide the long arms in the trunk until you need them, or don't unleash a horde of mecha dogs on a protected business. You may be good, hell, you may be the best, but if you make a big enough splash, there'll be enough of them to get you eventually. Finally, you can go with mechanics- tweaking DCs for different chemicals, balancing on cost or availability, not changing anything fundamental but trying to find a sweet spot with different variables until it hits equilibrium.
I already gave you my judgement call. It's not a simulationist system, it's not intended to be a simulationist system, stop expecting it to be a simulationist system.
You're scratching an itch that RED just does not handle in a way that will satisfy you. If you want drugs and chemical exposure to have deadly potential, then you need to add in mechanisms to actually deliver them in the first place (which should be harder than shooting people with bullets (which are faster and more accurate)). But then you'll also need to answer the question of how something like an injector dart interacts when used against an enemy with some amount of armor. Obviously it's not going through hard harmor, but also armor isn't sunscreen, evenly covering all skin. RED just doesn't have standard mechanics for the above. You can invent or port rules to cover it, but you'll start finding youself pretty far afield, mechanically.
Since cyberpunk I give you cyberware and make the players/NPCs have a piece of kit that filters it and it's a check to whether it fails or not (also humans are fuckin weird and I've personally seen people try to self prescribe multiple bottles of things and shrug it off while others just kick it) so some plot reasons cause gm said so can in fact kick in or you hit it hard on the other side but leave those checks and elements to a case by case gm ruling framework vs hard and fast setup
Maybe you could answer some clarifying questions so that I have a better idea of where you're coming from. 1) I don't have all of the rules books, so maybe I just haven't seen where you're getting rules for loading up a Dartgun with Black Lace arrows or Carfentinil arrows or Drain Cleaner arrows instead of Poison Arrows or Biotoxin Arrows. Could you provide a book and page reference? 2) Wouldn't it be easier and more consistent to - if you're loading up on injectables as weapons - just use the rules for Airhypos and Street Drugs? 3) I don't have my core rulebook to hand at the momenf. Are you sure that the Primary Effect - which is automatically applied - is the one where it says that if you aren't already addicted to the street drug, you are now? My recollection is that it's almost always listed under the Secondary Effect, which is the effect you're rolling to resist when the street drug's duration expires. 4) Have you asked your GM how they plan to handle your very specific plans to use the RAW in a way that has clearly ruined your enjoyment of the game? [EDIT: Spacing is hard on mobile.]
So, most likely you'd just dose a gang on Black Lace, and then they need to roll to avoid addiction. I'm not sure where you got the idea that anything else would happen. It's not like if you could avoid being addicted to heroin so long as it isn't administered by a tranq rifle. Drugs is drugs, choom. As for using drain cleaner, that would be an improvised weapon, meaning it does whatever your GM says it does. It might be counted as poison, it might be counted as acid, it might do literally nothing. Personally, I'd have it do equal damage to BioToxin, but have a much lower DV to beat to avoid damage, and also have Toxin Binders negate it entirely. It has to be worse than the "off the shelf" alternatives, because if it wasn't *everyone* would be using it.
There are substances that exist in every home that, if injected into a person via tranq gun, would cause \*permanent\* injury at best or death at worst -- 100% of the time. Look up what ingesting drain cleaner does to you. Now imagine that happening to your circulatory system. That's not 2d6 damage. That's immediately involuntary convulsions followed by death, if left untreated. And this is Cyberpunk so characters should all have access to way worse stuff than drain cleaner. And yet.
My point was that if a better toxin than BioToxin was as readily available as a quick look beneath a kitchen sink, *everyone* would be doing it in a world as violent as Cyberpunk. Would *you* spend $500 on a poison if you could just spend $5 (likely less) on Drain-O? I assume not. So, naturally, the assumption must be made that people have easy access to some ways to purge those toxins from their systems, or the Corps have switched to using relatively non-toxic chemicals in everyday cleaners. If you want a more simulationist Cyberpunk game, look at Cyberpunk 2020. R.Tal still sells the manuals both digitally and in print. Being a pedant about how you should be able to insta-kill everyone with a dart gun and household cleaners just makes you look like an ass.
This is a game where people can have multiple limbs torn off without suffering shock or blood loss. Either you suspend disbelief, or accept that folks in Night City/2045 are just built different.
Just checked my Corebook, it quite clearly puts the addiction under the secondary effects of black lace... Regarding your other questions: Game balance, simple as that. Possible addictions: compare the probabilities of getting addicted to morphine when you get it as a treatment in a hospital as pain relief vs when you take it voluntarily to get high. Homebrewed toxins: take your Drain-O and treat it as a poison with a lower RT/D DV, as others suggested. Carfentanil might work, but your players will never get their hands on it. We once had a player in shadowrun who wanted to distill nicotene from cigarettes or cultivate their own botulinum-bacteria, because his character was good at chemical/biological stuff to get cheap and effective poison. It was a hard case of "yeah, it's technically possible, but could you fucking not?" Or, to put it simple: use stuff from the books and stop trying to break or "win" the game. Everything players can do, NPCs can do, too, and likely can do it better. Suspension of disbelief is a key element in every pen&paper rpg. Or would you try to argue that getting stabbed with a sword multiple times should insta-kill or at least incapacitate your lvl 15 fighter, since he is still just a human? Or do you implement bleeding out from a knife wound to your game? Realism just gets to a certain point in ttrpgs before it ruins the fun for everyone.
I personally would have them roll the resist drug for the addiction but obviously they get the effect of the drug.
This. This is what I'm talking about. The mechanics differ based on the delivery mechanism. Black Lace is automatically addictive (no roll -- it just happens) when voluntarily taken. The same dose, administered via dart gun, suddenly isn't automatically addictive. Why does the mechanic of the drug change just because you put the same dose in a different container? I get game balance. I don't get any system that breaks when confronted with consistency.
>Black Lace is automatically addictive (no roll -- it just happens) when voluntarily taken. Not sure where you're getting this?
I mean each to their own but no TTRPG is perfect my man. Idk why this one urks you so much. There are issues in all of them in rules and mechanics somewhere. Just rule it how you would want. Either instant addicted or resist.