Photo Credit: FreeImages.com / Ken Thompson

It has often been suggested that players get addicted to the ease of healing that comes with “Holy Water Drip Bottle” syndrome. And that prompted me to ask what would result from making it really addictive, with all the associated problems that come with it.

In part 1, I simplified the general pattern of addiction into four stages for gaming purposes:

• The first is with social/remedial usage.
• The second signals the addiction becoming a force within the characters life, initially in small and trivial ways and progressing through to behavioral shifts severe/frequent enough for the character’s associates to become concerned, and is generally characterized by periodic consumption in excess of the social/recreational/remedial usage that defined stage 1.
• In the third stage, a minor/occasional problem becomes the defining parameter of the character’s life, taking gradual control of them until the character themselves can no longer deny that they have a problem.
• The fourth stage is when the character finally succeeds in breaking free of their addiction’s control and enters recovery. It can take real addicts dozens, hundreds, or thousands of attempts to achieve this stage in the process.

I then looked at how to adapt the specifics of each phase into in-game events – some transitory, some more long-lasting, with specific examples from the Zenith-3 campaign in which we have a mage PC becoming addicted to artificial mana-boosts.

Having established this general foundation, I then looked at the types of healing that could be addictive, and discovered that in the case of both potions and clerical healing it made total sense that addiction could take place, and in fact that it would be more surprising if it did not occur on a regular basis. Finally, I looked at three types of dependency that could occur – the usual two (physical and psychological) and one that was unique to this circumstance, which I dubbed ‘spiritual’ dependence.

Translating the Phases Of Healing Addiction

Armed with the knowledge of what the different forms of dependence would look like when the ‘substance’ of addiction is clerical healing or healing potions, we should next examine each stage of addiction for impacts based on the nature of that substance, and in particular, what in-game events would be typical.

Phase 1

This is where every character in every usually sits, quite comfortably. Get injured, get healed, no problem.

Phase 2

This is the phase in which dependence sets in. The mixture of types of dependence and their relative strengths would be different for every character, but all three would be present to some extent.

“The addict seeks, creates, or invents opportunities and reasons for further use for it’s own sake” – the three manifestations that come most readily to mind are:

• the character thinks he has encountered food poisoning (‘that meat was a little off last night’, ‘don’t you think that beer was still a little green?’);
• or, they have a mysterious ache somewhere (“I must have done something to myself without noticing it at the time”);
• or, an old injury seems to have persistent effects (“I know you healed it when you could but that shoulder wound still aches in the morning, maybe you didn’t get to it in time.

In addition, characters might anticipate getting wounded (especially if they have a vigorous practice routine with their weapons each morning ‘to stay sharp’ and imagine that a preemptive healing potion/cure wounds spell will help protect them – this is especially plausible once the ‘old injury’ excuse card is on the table.

“Addict uses to excess, resulting in unwanted problems, which the addict blames on outside factors. Excess use of healing could have any or all of several effects:

• If the character has to pay for the healing, he will always be short of money; when this starts becoming critical/chronic, he will begin to sponge off others, or penny-pinch in crucial areas. He may engage in risky gambles to raise funds, like betting an NPC in the bar that the character’s fellow-PC is stronger than the NPC, or that they can take him at Darts, or whatever. Once the character takes a loss, he will then keep chasing that loss – this is a trait of gambling addiction, but in this case the gambling is simply a means to an end and a manifestation of the real problem.
• If the healing is being provided by a member of the party, it may be that on a particularly bad day the cleric simply runs out of healing spells because this PC has used so many of them.
• The character could be so busy planning how he’s going to get more healing that he is inattentive on watch.
• The character may become slightly resistant (ignore any ‘1’ results when rolling for healing). This won’t have a noticeable effect most of the time, but every now and then it will leave the character incompletely healed, requiring an additional potion/cure wounds spell to finish the job.
• One of the scarier possibilities is that an infectious agent may become partially resistant to being healed – which neatly plays into the ‘old wound’ syndrome.
• The character may suggest/insist that religious services should include healing so that participants can feel closer to their God.
• Perhaps the most obvious one of all is simply becoming a little more reckless on the battlefield to ensure that he always gets injured in a fight.
• Increased aggressiveness or obstinateness might trigger fights that didn’t have to happen.
• While in a religious ecstasy, the character might volunteer the services of the party to the temple for something dangerous, or boring, or whatever.

There are lots of other possibilities. In general, it comes down to what the character has to do to obtain the excess that he desires, what the character should be doing but isn’t doing or isn’t doing as well as he should because he is thinking about what he has to do to satisfy his needs, and what the negative effects of actual consumption to excess might be,

“Addict begins to conceal additional supplies in regularly-frequented locations.” The character who is addicted to clerical healing might begin befriending the local priests wherever they go so that he can get them to supply additional healing “to save on party resources”. If to healing potions, he starts concealing/buying extras.

You get the idea – I’m not going to go into all of the elements of each stage of addiction.

This is all prep work for the GM; it’s an ongoing complication that he can throw into the lives of the PCs.

Game Effects & Rules – or the lack thereof

There are lots of ways of dealing with addiction in terms of game mechanics, and most of them are a bad idea.

You could require characters to save against addiction each time they get healed, for example – but that puts the notion of addiction front and center in their minds, and means that when it eventually happens, it will have all the impact of wet spaghetti.

You could specify some characteristic that indicates the potential for addiction, for example receiving more dice of healing in a day than the character has CON bonus, and only mentioning it when this limit is breached. But this is a lot of time-consuming bookwork that slows play down to no obvious benefit.

You could have an addict make a roll each hour or day or whatever to determine whether or not their addiction is going to cause a problem for them that day – then railroad the results into existence. It shouldn’t need explaining how bad an idea this is.

No, this is all best handled at a metagame level. Make a list of possible life-complications, just as I have demonstrated above, and keep an eye out for more; when an opportunity exists for one to to manifest, make a secret roll to decide whether or not it does. Or simply decide that it does, or doesn’t, based on the current state of addiction and level of dependence and how long it has been since the last time.

I plan things out as subplots in this way on a deliberately accelerating incidence curve. In a given adventure, there might be one or two or three addiction-related incidents. When addiction reaches stage-3, entire plotlines will occur because of the addiction. Keep any railroading – and there may be some – off-camera, and with the players full complicity. When something happens in-game, it’s either external to the character (“you wake up in the stables with no memory of the night before, with only 3 copper pieces in your coin pouch. Your head aches and throbs like there was a drum pounding in time with your heartbeat. You can’t remember getting robbed.”) or hand them a note (“The wound still aches, it doesn’t seem completely healed”) and let the player roleplay the situation.

You want the addiction to be just a piece of the background, something that you (and the players) have to take into account but which doesn’t totally control their lives. Use it as a plot device to get the characters into and out of dramatic situations and adventures; use it to complicate their lives; don’t use it to slow gameplay down or take control. Nudge and steer, don’t railroad.

Social Effects Of Addiction

If it is possible for a character to become addicted to healing, he won’t be the first and he won’t be the last when it does actually happen. And that means that the society around the characters will evolve in response to the phenomenon.

Stigma

Think about how public drunkenness is treated. Think about how it was regarded in the 1980s. In the 1960s. In the 1920s. During Prohibition. In the 1870s. There are similarities to them all, but there are also subtle differences. There is always a social stigma attached to addiction; the intensity of the manifestation varies from era to era and individual to individual. When I was a child, drunkenness was quite tolerable provided that your behavior while intoxicated was socially acceptable and that you weren’t so alcohol-dependent that you had thrown away your life and been reduced to living in the gutter, for example; these days, more of the focus is on moderation of consumption, and the potential for drunken misbehavior is considered the responsibility of the individual to manage. Whereas misbehavior was treated in the past as a consequence of the alcohol, and responsibility of the individual for actions while intoxicated was mitigated or diminished, these days that is no longer considered a valid defense; by consuming to excess you are deemed to have accepted responsibility for anything you might do while under the influence.

But there are other forms of addiction that are treated far more gently – until they get out of control. Gambling addiction. Addiction to painkillers. Addiction to social media. Addiction to publicity. Addiction to sympathy. Addiction to generosity.

Humans can become addicted to any behavior that either makes them feel good, or makes them feel better than they did. Much of the rehabilitation process can be seen as transference of dependence from a socially-unacceptable form to a socially-acceptable support mechanism (often with vows of secrecy attached, in order to avoid the social stigma).

In addition, there is always a counter-movement within society when the incidence of individuals suffering from a social stigma arise – or when there is political capital to be gained. The Temperance movements at the start of the 20th century. Prohibition. The War On Drugs. Even the vegan and vegetarian movements can be considered a reaction to the excessive consumption of unhealthy fast/prepackaged foods in modern society, though that’s probably too extreme an interpretation. All of these movements were conceived with noble purposes and good intentions, and all of them (with the possible exception of the vegan/vegetarian movements) had unintended consequences that harmed societies when they became dominant influences to at least some extent – whether they did more harm than good is a whole different question, and has to be determined on a case-by-case basis.

Redemption

There is always a moral dimension attached to addiction because of the immoral activities that people may be driven to in order to satisfy their addiction. That moral dimension always lends itself to stories of redemption from the evils of excessive consumption. Ordinary people can become extraordinary role models and cautionary tales, and these stories of redemption are rendered all the more relevant, poignant, and accessible by the very ordinariness of their beginnings.

Every PC will have heard stories of such people. The societal attitude towards the addiction itself will provide an important point of context for such tales; if the problem is not viewed as widespread, and healing is considered safe for most people most of the time, the focus will be on the extremity of the circumstances that led to the addiction and less on the cautionary tale. The story will be one of unusual tragedy leading to unusual redemption, with no trace of the “it could happen to you, too” moral warnings; instead, the focus would be on seeking help when you need it and being honest with yourself. Inspiration, not Warning, and an emphasis on the positive outcome at the end.

It is in the best interests of most religious organizations to so depict any form of addiction to their services. This may well lead to the real scale of the problem being ignored or actively downplayed. To this end, religious orders may even create interventionist services to conceal the problem and get it “out of sight and hence out of mind”. Only when the problem becomes too big to ignore, too obvious, is there a shift in the nature of the stories being told from pulpits etc to the cautionary tale. In many respects, this is a natural response to the evolution of the situation; as more ordinary people become addicted, so more tales of ordinary people destroying their lives surface to provide the foundations of these morality plays. Redemption remains rare and the examples of it lauded; the incidence of afflicted to redeemed rises, but there is a broader pool for ‘the lucky few’ to be drawn from.

This places the whole concept of the ‘adventurer’ into an interesting context. There can be a perception that adventurers risk addiction to healing in order to serve the public good – separating ‘us’ from ‘them’, and implying that ‘we’ are safe from this danger, at least ordinarily. This would then manifest in Institutions for the retired adventurer, where hopeless addicts are confined “for their own good” by “a grateful populace”. As the population sub-group most likely to be afflicted with this problem, the existence of healing addiction to any substantive extent forces the GM to consider adventurers as a social class or caste with (at least a fuzzily-) defined place within society. Even if that perception did not exist, recognition of this problem makes this treatment of adventurers an inevitability.

Nobles and lawmakers always like this sort of thing because it enables them to pass special laws pertaining to adventurers, for example “Adventurers arouse threats to the community, earning great wealth in the process. For the community to be protected from these consequences is expensive, and therefore a special tax levied on adventurers is justified”.

In some campaigns, the GM will already have thought about the role of, and the public perception of, adventurers within society, and will need to adapt his approach to the healing addiction stigma accordingly; in others, he can let the tail wag the dog, establishing the social reaction to addiction that he wants and using that to define an emerging perception of adventurers as a social class.

Social Trust

Quite often, the first casualty of addiction will be a perceived betrayal of a social trust. There are certain professions which are held to a higher standard by public opinion, such as pilots, bankers, police, fire, and rescue services, doctors, and priests. Even if such individuals succumb and are redeemed, the loss of public trust can be an even harder burden to overcome.

This is the reason why institutions and support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous are so strict about preserving the secrecy around the identities of attendees – to preserve the social trust of individuals wrestling with a problem.

Of course, this is always fraught with danger, as a policy. It means that people may be in positions of trust who cannot be trusted in those positions, and this is regarded as a necessary price to protect those in positions of trust who would not be trusted but who can nevertheless still discharge their public trusts with dignity and honor.

There is no easy social solution to this dilemma, and never has been. The best compromise that has been found is to protect secrecy up to the point of actual betrayal of that social trust without possibility of correction or restitution, at which point discovery of this failure ‘outs’ the sufferer. It’s not perfect, but it more or less works.

In any fantasy RPG, there is a reasonable expectation that ‘adventurers’ might be added to such a list. They are often granted extraordinary freedoms and latitudes; they may receive adulation as the ‘rock stars’ of their day. They may be held up as role models to others, as examples to which others should aspire. This would amplify greatly any social stigma attached to addiction; as much as pity and sympathy, there would also be a sense of betrayal of trust in some cases. The more your society lets adventurers simply ‘get on with adventuring’, the greater the level of trust being placed in adventurers to do the right thing and police their own numbers accordingly. Should they manifestly fail to do so, external controls will be enacted.

This opens up a whole new branch of plotlines to the GM in which the PCs are confronted with an NPC adventurer who may have betrayed that trust and who are required to apply and enforce appropriate discipline, or to investigate for possible breaches. Such plotlines also give the GM a ready conduit for providing the players with the social background and context that have been discussed. The offender need not be an addiction sufferer; he may be accused of cheating on his taxes, or taking advantage of the public, or seducing the daughter of the Count or the Mayor, or any of a dozen other transgressions. But as a way of educating players in the social treatment and expectations of adventurers, it’s hard to beat.

Theology

Theologians in fantasy societies are, or at least should be, frequently called upon to make moral judgments on behalf of the broader community when those judgments are beyond the capacities of that community. In theory, they can see the bigger picture, and there is a theological network by which problems can be escalated until they reach the proper level for a solution. Clouding this idyllic picture is the specter of self-interest and conflicts of interest, and the scandals of pedophilia in the priesthood have shown that organized religion has a very poor track record in such cases. History also shows that politics has proven equally corruptive.

When you consider the reactions of organized religion to Healing Addiction, you get some very interesting thoughts presenting themselves. An internal policy that is quite different from the public posture of the theology is almost certain to emerge; the very notion that healing can be addictive threatens the trust that the public places in their religious institutions. It may even be a mandated requirement of the priesthood that such addictions be supplied with as much as they need, in total secrecy, until the sufferer can be quietly withdrawn from society.

But I would not then put it past some to willfully addict nobles and others of high rank in order to give the church leverage over the civil authorities. I am completely convinced that there would have been the occasional such corruption in the campaigns’ history, carefully swept under the carpet. Healing Addiction requires the GM to think carefully about the role of religious institutions within their game world – something they should do anyway, but this makes it imperative.

Beyond that, theologians would have their own explanations for the phenomenon and would base the treatment they appear to provide to sufferers accordingly.

Radical Variant: The Gift Of Devils?

While I was planning this article, an original idea came to mind. Given all the social harm and disruption that can manifest, there is a solid case to be made for Clerical Healing to have been a “gift” from the Devils, a systematically-corruptive influence that is tolerated by the theologies of the world because the benefits appear to outweigh the harm – which is exactly the sort of moral judgment that I had in mind when writing the preceding section.

This is a secret that churchmen would be required to take to the grave – if they ever learned it in the first place. A PC undergoing such a revelation might well lead to Clerical Healing in all forms being banned, permanently ending the “Holy Drip Bottle” syndrome. And provided that you were prepared to let the PC make his own decision about what to do with this discovery, and the chips fall where they may, no player in that campaign would ever be in any doubt that their characters make a difference within the game world.

Not saying that’s the way it has to have happened, just saying that the idea raises interesting possibilities – ones that would obviously be a focal point of the campaign.

Less-radical Variant: The addiction sickness

An alternative idea might be that there is a sickness that is resistant to clerical healing – again, perhaps released by some inimical agency – that some people are occasionally afflicted with, and that it is this sickness that makes people susceptible to Healing Addiction. This is a convenient idea in many ways because it removes the ‘blame’ element from the addiction syndrome; anyone can come down with this problem if they are unlucky enough. Perhaps some healers are “typhoid maries” spreading the addiction potential even as they heal the sick and injured. Because adventurers need to be healed far more frequently than ordinary people, they are especially susceptible as a class to this disease, which has not yet even been recognized, let alone a cure found.

Because this is far less systematic and far more random and anarchic in its’ causation, this would be appropriate as the Demonic equivalent of the Devilish origins of the problem. And it would yield a completely different campaign if this were one of the centerpieces. Again, food for thought.

Shame

The other side of social stigma is always shame. Some will feel it keenly, others not at all, but most will feel at least moderately ashamed of having let themselves, their friends, their supporters, and the public, down. Even if there is no act of public redemption, and the addiction is kept completely secret, that sense of shame should be an influence on the character in the future as the character strives to make amends.

Photo Credit: FreeImages.com / Thiago Rezende

The absence of old adventurers?

Any mathematical analysis of relative numbers of characters of a given character level makes it clear that the numbers on any encounter table are vastly out of whack, referring specifically to the number of low-level characters relative to high-level characters.

If there is a 50% chance of surviving long enough to achieve the next character level, then for every member of character level X, there needs to be 2 characters of character level X-1.

That means that for each representative of character level X anywhere in the game, there needs to be 2 to the power of X-1 first level characters. For each character of 20th level, for example, there need to be 524,288 first level characters who are actively adventuring.

If the chances of survival are worse, this rises alarmingly – a 25% survival rate, level-on-level, increases the 2 to a 4. For every 20th level character, there need to be 274,877,906,944 first level characters! If the levels are more in line with typical PC experiences – 80% survival rate, or 90%, or even 95% – they drop, and the high-level population rises. At 80%, the ratio is 69.39:1 (1st:20th); at 90%, it’s 7.4:1 (1st:20th); and at 95%, it’s 2.65:1 (1st:20th).

But 50% is the level we aim for, because the goal set by most encounter systems is to match PCs and opposition power levels, on average, and by definition, that’s a 50-50 challenge as the standard. The problems start with relative wealth by level, which gives a different ratio when analyzed (and one that’s variable level-on-level); and only deepen with most encounter tables, in which higher-level characters are over-represented in some and under-represented in others. Going into details is vastly beyond the scope of this article – I started working on an e-book years ago that crashed-and-burned dramatically three times on these problems before being abandoned as something I just didn’t have time to work on. I had come to the conclusion that there needed to be something other than death that forced adventurers to retire, a risk that grew with increasing character level (unlike most risks, which decrease). Unable to think of one, the whole project dead-ended.

Addictive Healing could be the answer. It actively reduces the occurrence rate of higher-level adventurers, becomes more likely with accumulated exposure to healing (i.e. increasing character levels), and impacts on available character wealth along the way. Because there is one thing for sure: Addictive Healing would reduce the incidence of high-level adventurers, increasing the ‘rock-star’ potential of those who make it unscathed (or who beat their addiction and are able to stay in-the-game) – which SHOULD include any PCs. But I’ll get that that point in a minute.

It means that there should be a number of encounters with ‘ordinary people’ along the way who are ex-adventurers, who probably miss that life, and who want to relive it vicariously by either telling their stories to others or by hearing the latest stories from those who are still active. Such characters often feature in fantasy campaigns anyway, but there is always an unanswered question of why they had to give up adventuring. This proposal answers that question.

There is even a form of semi-retirement possible in which a character can adventure, in a limited way, but has to rely on natural healing afterwards – unless the situation is really life-and-death dire. Of course, natural healing has its own risks – things not healing properly, limbs being lost, etc – so this is a very precarious choice. Spacing the risks out – an annual adventure – mitigates that risk and hopefully delays the inevitable.

And we all know people like that, who once a year hang up their aprons and their day jobs and go out camping in the wilderness or white-water rafting or, well, you name it. They spend that entire year leading up to those events preparing themselves, both financially and physically, for the holiday of a lifetime – because they never know which one will be their last chance. Old age happens to us all, in the end.

The Metagame

So let’s talk a bit more about the metagame aspects of introducing Addictive Healing. It’s quite one thing to threaten the PCs with Healing Addiction, and to populate their world with a sprinkling of individuals and institutions affected by it; but there is an element from the player side of the table of “it will never happen to us”. PCs are, after all, to at least a certain extent, protected animals – at least in comparison to NPCs. There are things that you, as GM, can do to an NPC that you could never contemplate doing to a PC, and most of your players will assume that this is one of them.

This can completely undermine your GMing credibility; you have issued a threat but are seen as never being willing-and-able to back it up. It also confers a sense of security to the players; they might avoid healing for relatively small hit point losses (as a percentage of total hit point) but otherwise would still take it when they needed it. In the end, not a whole lot would be seen to be different.

Until you lower the boom on one of them. Actually, it shouldn’t be like lowering the boom; it should be a slow meander down the garden path of temptation, until the target takes one step too far.

Player Approval

If you are going to mess with a PC so fundamentally, even to the point of risking their ability to continue within the game, you really need to have the player’s approval. If they are fighting against the tide, you can still force the issue, but the whole thing stops being fun for everyone. That means that you need to select your target carefully, and make sure that it is worth their while to play along.

You need to be able to guarantee to the player that if they go along, their character will be one of the lucky ones who make a full recovery in the end (provided the character survives, of course).

On top of that, because you are taking something that players take for granted and willfully barring one specific character from enjoying it for the rest of their adventuring life, there needs to be some counterbalancing benefit to the character. This is NOT a bribe, but it can be an inducement to play ball – for example, setting things up so that the character achieves some life-long ambition as a result of their condition or recovery from it.

If your players trust you sufficiently, you may not need to get specific – I haven’t told Runeweaver’s player what reward the character will earn by participating in the mage-addicted-to-magic plotline that is underway in the Zenith-3 universe, only that the experience won’t permanently impair the character and will be instrumental in achieving something that the character really wants to achieve. Or, more to the point, that it will permit the character to achieve something that the player has said that the character really wants to achieve.

Final Advice

I started this proposal as a way of permitting clerical characters to step out from behind the shadow of being the party’s healer. It certainly achieves that, but it also fundamentally alters the shape of the game around such characters. This is not a mistake or a coincidence; that’s what you should expect when you alter something so profound and fundamental.

If Healing Addiction is real, however rare, in your game world, then I would expect profound implications at all levels. You may need to space adventures out more, creating a more episodic look-and-feel to the game, so as to permit time for the PCs to heal between adventures; that’s a metagame impact. You may need to be a little more liberal and generous in interpreting the conditions under which characters can heal naturally. You may need to throw a little more cash the player’s way in your rewards, enabling them to hire protectors so that they can be defended while recuperating ‘on the road’.

You’re fundamentally changing the paradigm of the adventuring world around the PCs. How they attempt to accommodate and adapt to that change is up to them; you should expect that most solutions will have been tried before, and found to be at least partially successful. Keep an open mind and let the players adjust to the changes – then evolve and adapt your gaming style accordingly. Occasionally exploit flaws or limitations in their approach, but only once it has been established that it does work. Say ‘yes, but…’ to whatever ideas they have in how to cope with the situation.

Addictive Healing is scarily plausible, more than enough so to be a perpetual feature of every campaign that you run; but don’t use it every time just because you can. This is the fifth solution I’ve offered to the problem of the “holy water drip bottle”, and there are others besides – the approach used in Assassin’s Amulet is ‘none of the above’, for example, and equates to a sixth solution.

Finding a different answer each time results in each campaign assuming its own identity, its own uniqueness. The trick is always making sure that the adventures you run and the world that you set them in are in sync, that they combine to form a campaign that is greater than the sum of its parts, and make sure that it’s fun for everybody, and it will be a success.