The chronic pain doesn’t make sense, plus it is pretty annoying to deal with, no matter how easy. The pain should either be removed or the occurrence reduced a lot.
A medication specifically for the chem imbalance characters would be great. Let’s say a rare pill, stack of 10, effect lasts 24 hours, and it would “halve” the effects of the trait.
Chem imbalance could use more symptom variety, such as random vitamin level fluctuation, but never so that for example you couldn’t get two reductions in a row for the same vitamin. Vitamin level increase should be less frequent and less intense. This would result in more vitamin issues, correctable with the right diet or pills, although pill ingestion would in theory result in vitamin “overdose” (I forget the medical term). Chem imbalance characters could use a blood analysis method to determine their vitamin levels.
I can’t remember what the other existing symptoms there were but here are some suggestions:
- Vision problems 1: temporarily reduced Perception (halve it, round up/down)
- Vision problems 2: one turn of blindess (very rarely)
- Vision problems 3: lose vision gradually, all the way to blindness, start gaining vision again, back to normal
- Strength loss: temporarily lose one point of Strength
- Shaky hands: temporarily reduced Dexterity (halve it, round up/down)
- Dulled mind: temporarily reduced Intelligence (-2?)
- Distracted thoughts: lose 30 points of Focus (very rarely)
- Loss of breath 1 (very rarely). Lose two bars of Stamina
- Loss of breath 2 (very rarely). Lowered max Stamina
- Balance loss 1 (very rarely, once in 14 days): A single misstep in unintentional direction, adjacent to the intended direction. (should not trigger while driving, or should it?)
- Balance loss 2 (very rarely): Fall down spontaneously.
- Random variance to drug addiction chances
- Random variance to drug withdrawal duration
- Random variance to drug effect duration
- Random variance to withdrawal symptoms. Handpicked pool of existing withdrawal symptoms from which a symptom is chosen randomly for each drug dose (comedown). Alternatively, roll a permanent unique list separately for each chem imbalance character at game start, so that the player eventually learns how the various drugs affect him uniquely.
- Have combinations of drugs cause adverse effects. For example: Adderall + aspirin = headache. Roll a random list of these chosen drug interactions at game start.
