[Michael Chandra]

Aren't those more questions for the SR5 FAQ, rather than the Missions FAQ?

[wepv]

yup! clicked on the wrong thread! 

[wepv]

I was directed to post this here.

I'm having issues with how much work it requires to fairly and logically implement food allergies in Missions games and suggesting they be considered for removal from allowed negative qualities, or better yet, give them a lifestyle cost adjustment  to cover your dietary needs.

I'm going to talk only about sever allergy (soy) for my example to keep things simple and use the extreme case to see how bad things can get.

My issues with it are as follows:
-Food allergies, by their nature, require the person to eat them to suffer the effect(which is very similar in effect to ingesting poison at the severe level), making it very hard to do so against your will.
-Role paying people's eating habits is obviously outside the scope of Missions play and eating as a requirement for mods is not common at all (I can think of a number of times where you are served food, but you aren't being forced to eat and politely explaining that you have dietary concerns avoids any hurt feelings and -d6s to social tests).
-Dietary allergies are not things that people who have them just forget about or ignore.
-When you do suffer from the effect of your allergy, you are very likely dead. In terms of a living campaign, that seems like it is bad for the longevity of the game. GM's that introduce the allergy run the risk of killing a character and creating bad feelings if it isn't done carefully, and if they are not comfortable with bringing such a lethal disadvantage into play on the fly, the allergy is just free points, creating issues with other players feeling like they are getting the short end of the stick(at least CorpSINers have to pay taxes).
-Telling a player they screwed up and ate something they shouldn't have is forcing an absurd lack of judgement on them that is part of their basic survival. It is like telling someone who is allergic to sunlight that they forgot to wear clothes/sunblock today and spent the morning sunbathing.
-In order for a GM to bring the allergy into play they need to come up with a logical situation that creates a hard choice for the player where they either eat poison or suffer in some other way.  This is the best solution but takes too much time from the mod to be done in a way that isn't railroading a player into an action or outright dictating to a player what he is doing while he sits and listens.

So how do you adjudicate the quality fairly and logically? The (now locked) thread had a number of suggestions.

1a. roll a die, on a hit you are not suffering from your allergy. (66% chance to suffer from your allergy)
1b. roll a die, on a 1 you are suffering from your allergy. (17%ish chance to suffer from your allergy)
2. High lifestyle+ no downside, medium lifestyle sometimes it happens, low and lower you always suffer from it.
3. GM fiat
4.Lifestyle cost adjustment, most likely a flat lifestyle cost adjustment based on your chosen lifestyle (higher lifestyles having a reduced or nonexistent cost)

1: Obviously 66% is absurd and 17% of the time is still insane.  Assuming that you go on 1 run a month, you roll at the start of the mod, and within 6 mods, on average, you have died from eating poison. If you go on a run each week, you will die in a month and a half. How did this person live to be a shadowrunner if they can't regulate their diet. If all food is so cross contaminated that you can't eat it without risk of dying then there wouldn't be people with those kinds of allergies. If so, that negative quality shouldn't be allowed.

2: This would mean that only people with High lifestyle can have allergies to common foods, since at medium lifestyle (or lower), RAW makes you eat soy "sometimes". If eating soy kills you, and you have to eat it some undefined amount of time, you are dead since we don't have rules for buying food other then "buy a lifestyle, that' is your food for a month".

3: Gm Fiat telling a player they are dead is dumb.

4. A scaling cost to cover your dietary needs based on your lifestyle. for example (just an example, I'm sure these numbers are not fair or correct)
High+: no change.
Medium: +500 Nuyen/month
Low: +1200 Nuyen/month
Squatter: +2000 Nuyen/month
Street: +2300 Nuyen/month
If you ignore your allergy and go ahead an eat something that you are allergic to in game, you obviously still suffer it's effect.

Thanks for reading!

[Michael Chandra]

To quickly repeat my counter-arguments, and no I'm not interested in a debate on these, so I'm just presenting another point of view.

- Allergies don't kill so you will not die from an allergy, only the third and fourth level involve damage rather than just penalties. That's only at 15~25 karma. Adepts will be suffering from the same level of penalty as a Mild Allergy every time they enter a Background Count of 2. Cover already is a 2-dice modifier as well.

- Runs easily take an hour travelling to the Meet and then an easy hour traveltime or more between each scene. If an Allergy negative effect lasts for 1 hour, you're suffering from it for 1 scene only. If the penalty reduces with 2 per hour, Severe and Moderate are at -4 for 1 scene and -2 for another.

- There are multiple ways for a GM to easily target a food allergy, so the problem isn't whether it can be done with ease, the problem is whether it can be done with ease in a way that's fair. Given how a Mild Soy/Seafood(inc. Krill) allergy is already -10 karma, even a decent occasional hurting sounds fair to me. It's only -7 karma for having a 1/6 chance that when encountering a Spirit it hates your guts and tries to murder you, in comparison having to pick between a chance you upset the Johnson due to allergy penalties and a chance you upset him by failing your Etiquette check when declining the food he offers, or rolling at the start of a session to see whether you had bad luck when grabbing your breakfast, doesn't sound that bad.

- Corps don't care about allergies when it comes to the cheap food and it takes Middle (50%) or High (100%) to eat real food that does not involve Soy/Krill/Algae. As such, it's not a matter of whether the character screwed up, it's simply a matter of whether the character had bad luck with their food and happened to have triggered their allergy with their last meal as the run starts.

[Fedifensor]

-Food allergies, by their nature, require the person to eat them to suffer the effect(which is very similar in effect to ingesting poison at the severe level), making it very hard to do so against your will.

I would take a look at real-world peanut allergies.  Especially with the more severe reactions, it doesn't take much to set it off.  Many schools require people with peanut allergies to be at a separate table or in a separate room during lunchtime, or outright ban foods containing peanuts.

[wepv]

I have a food allergy in real life, I am well aware of what it takes, though peanut allergy is on a whole different level of sucky.

Severe and extreme levels do kill you. You take 1 unresisted damage every 30s/1m. You die in minutes if no one can apply medical aid to you.

As a gm, I do not want to look at a character sheet and then decide how to fairly kill a player. Ingested food also has the issue of needing to be removed from the person or it will continue to hurt them. Untrained people are just not able to help them, not to mention you will most likely be in your home, by yourself, when you suffer from the allergy.

Where are you getting the rules for fading modifiers for the allergy?( not finding it but I may be missing it.)

I would love to hear what the fair ways that force a player to eat something they are allergic to are. In terms of game balance, players should pay for the free karma they got, so yes it should affect them, but in terms of what is fair to a player as an action taken by a gm ( I.e. not dictating the players actions or using off camera hand-waveium to tell them how they had a lapse of judgment in their daily routine, when such a lapse could kill them, etc.).

I don't buy the "you ate something that was contaminated" argument. Sure, you go out to a resturaunt and eat food prepared by someone, human error can get you( hapened to me while at the beach two weeks ago) but mass produced food, not going to happen. It requires the world to be so hostile to people with deadly allergies that they don't survive to be shadowrunners. Corps may not care about poor people but they care about money.  When thousands of people die or are hospitalized from anaphylaxis the corps will get wrecked by bad publicity. Corps don't process soy in the same building they process seafood. It's not like they harvest it all in one warehouse, so there isn't some cost barrier to producing food without one or the other. The cost of one extra production plant is easily worth the profit from special needs diets for the millions of people with food allergies that must exist by the 2070s (15 million-ish in the US as of 2011), since you can charge more for the "extra care" put into the specialty food. Ignoring such a huge market seems like something corps would not do.

[ZeConster]

I have a food allergy in real life, I am we'll aware of what it takes, though peanut allergy is on a whole different level of sucky.

Severe and extreme levels do kill you. You take 1 unresisted damage every 30s/1m. You die in minutes if no one can apply medical aid to you.

They also give 20 or 25 Karma if it's to something common. This is on par with a Severe or Burnout Addiction (need to score every week/hour, -4/-6 on tests while in withdrawal, -2/-3 on all social tests always), or a Corporate Born SINner ("if your teammates or a Johnson find out, they'll kill you").

I suggest we stop posting about this matter in here now: we already had a discussion in another topic, and this one is just to ask Bull for his opinion on the matter. Both sides have argued their case, so anything beyond that is just redundant clutter.

[martinchaen]

The document lists Unarmed as being limited to only three specializations; blocking, striking, and subduing. What about characters who use cyber-implant weapons; is Unarmed (Cyber Implants) not allowed in SRM?

[ZeConster]

Speaking of Unarmed Combat, how exactly does the "Striking (+2 defense when attacking)" specialization the Missions FAQ introduces work?

[SMDVogrin]

Speaking of Unarmed Combat, how exactly does the "Striking (+2 defense when attacking)" specialization the Missions FAQ introduces work?

Pretty sure that's supposed to be +2 DICE when attacking.  That's what I managed to read it as, anyways - didn't notice the difference in wording.

[ZeConster]

The FAQ mentions that if you pool money to buy something, there's one actual owner, and if that person isn't present, neither is the item. What happens if the person is there, but has to GM instead of play?

[Bull]

it's by character, not player.  So the owning character must be present.

[martinchaen]

Feral Cities, page 13:
"Power usually comes in the form of rechargeable batteries, suncells, or small gas or bio-diesel generators—no power points in Chicago."

I hope this is not considered to be 100% true from an SRM Season 5 point of view, or my shock hand's wireless bonus suddenly became a lot more useful. Unless I have to roll to see if the grid is strong enough to support wireless power induction, that is?