Character permanently high (LARP)

[Socksy]

Right, I'm on mobile, so expect strange formatting.

After defeating the boss battle in an underground tunnel, we decide to burn its body, since it's undead and we have at least a small amount of common sense.

PC 1: (ooc) I pour the alcohol from my hip flask onto the corpse!
DM: You mean the highly potent hallucinogen strong enough to affect even you? (PC 1 has poison immunity)
PC 1:Yeah!

They pour it, set it on fire, and we start running.
My character fails her save against ridiculously potent hallucinogenic smoke.

DM: Everyone who failed the save, you are on a trip for the next week. It's a good trip, but you're still tripping balls. Also, it's potent enough that some of it will remain in your system forever, granting you a small, constant high.


So the question is: how do I roleplay this without being a liability and really annoying to the other players? Fortunately I deal 1hp damage at a time and only have defensive spells, but still. Spellcaster + large battle axe + hallucinations = disaster, surely?

[Kid Jake]

Unless it's supposed to offer an actual mechanical disadvantage, I think I'd try to downplay it. Randomly stare off into space like you're watching something, giggle and then when you notice somebody looking at you immediately straighten up like nothing's happening. Randomly reach out like you're trying to sneak up on something and then realize it's all in your head and stretch awkwardly instead.

The funnest part of anyone that's perpetually high is watching them try to act like they aren't.

[daremetoidareyo]

Hallucinagenics are an SOB.

When you feel insecure, you feel very, very insecure. You will flee. You will need to be convinced of whom is "with you" and who is "against you."

When you feel safe, you will feel normal + grateful for the people who maintain that safety around you. You feel nice...Like dancing is actually fun and you don't give an eff...kind of nice. You will connect any idea to any other idea and paint the chain of ideas that link the two together.

Being angry is intoxicating. It's like riding a whole different thought-whale.

[Regwon]

Hallucinations can manifest themselves in a huge variety of ways.

Visual hallucinations can range from seeing colours more vividly, through seeing swirling or hexagonal patterns in everything, to seeing people or things that arent there. Seeing outlines of people dancing in trees is fairly common, for example.

Auditory hallucinations may mean bird song or faint music, or maybe wispers or instructions. Maybe even the sounds of a battle or a monster lurking just out of sight.

Tactile hallucinations can make your skin feel wet or make everything feel beautifully soft. Sometimes your may feel like you are covered in ants or your fingers are turning into tentacles.

There is a lot of variety, and can range from the pleasant to the debilitating. Talk to your DM about the form they take and how much they affect your character. Also read up on hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD) for information about the long term results for constant hallucinations.

[Fri]

You're sure your dog can talk to you and bring him along to solve mysteries with you.

[Mr.Moron]

Seems like it's on the GM to describe what your hallucinations are then just reacting to them honestly.

[Socksy]

Something else I've realised - Alaria (my character) worships Aesthetics, a goddess focused on the perfection of body, mind, and soul.
However, she's realised that Aesthetics sits there and does nothing whereas the Sea God, who does exactly what it says on the tin, has helped out the Adventurer's Guild frequently. In fact, his high priest, another PC, has saved Alaria's life on multiple occasions.
In addition, her mind has taken a hit from the drugs, her body is now scarred from being a PC, and the person she likes and trusts the most in the guild has no soul.
So she planned on talking to this other PC, as soon as physically possible, about the Sea God and stuff.

Option 1: She goes through with her plan of talking to him, and since he physically resembles an avatar of the sea god, hallucinations happen and he appears to actually BE an avatar
Option 2: She is smart enough to sit in a corner and not do or say anything significant that might change the destination of her soul after she dies
Option 3: She goes through with her plan of talking to him, but approaches another character - perhaps the other Sea God cleric, who she doesn't trust at all - believing them to be him.
Option 4: Somehow, despite the hallucinations still being strong as the thing hasn't faded yet, nothing goes wrong at all.
Option 5: Something else??

Her stats, D&D style, are around STR 8, DEX 14, CON 10, INT 8, WIS 14, CHA 11.

I have never used any kind of hallucinogen before - I haven't even smoked weed - and I'm very book smart but not so wise at all, so it's hard for me to picture what might happen.
Ideas, playground?

EDIT: The GMs do not describe the hallucinations - several characters have had hallucinations, but from an entirely different type of drug, and it was just up to them what they saw.

[Octopusapult]

You're sure your dog can talk to you and bring him along to solve mysteries with you.

I see what you did there.

In regards to changing gods, talking to the followers of the Sea God isn't a bad idea, especially if there's already more than one in the group and the Sea God is already proving that he's interested in keeping you alive. It's perfectly reasonable to change sides now. If your only problem doing that is the hallucinations, and the hallucinations are entirely up to you, then so long as you make it entertaining for everyone else I'd imagine you can do whatever you wanted.

[Socksy]

Yep, the only problem is the hallucinations. So either it somehow goes right, or she chickens out because she doesn't want to risk anything (unlikely, since the other high PC and I were told it also made us very happy), or it goes hilariously wrong. I need help thinking of ways for it to potentially go wrong (because that's what is probably going to happen)


As for the rest of the hallucinations... I'm gonna roll on the Grog of Substantial Whimsy table for ideas for what she sees happen.

[Thrudd]

To roleplay a small, constant high: You aren't hallucinating, that would not be a small high. You find some things slightly funnier than you normally would, you giggle sometimes. Stupid jokes and phrases that normally wouldn't make you laugh seem funny for some reason. Things seem a little louder, a little brighter, colors are slightly more vibrant. Things you might not normally pay attention to seem more beautiful, like a sunbeam or a rainbow or a tree. "Did you guys see how beautiful that tree was? It was so cool..."

[Socksy]

She's still tripping balls during the next guild night; it's only afterwards that it's a small, mild high.

Giggling and colours being more vibrant seems easy enough to do :)

[Mr.Moron]

I have never used any kind of hallucinogen before - I haven't even smoked weed - and I'm very book smart but not so wise at all, so it's hard for me to picture what might happen.
Ideas, playground?

EDIT: The GMs do not describe the hallucinations - several characters have had hallucinations, but from an entirely different type of drug, and it was just up to them what they saw.

A hallucination is simply perceiving something that isn't caused by an actual external stimulus. They could literally be anything. Like you could just see a dog that isn't really there, your parents could come out and suddenly start chiding you, the person to you left might catch on fire. Basically a hallucination can be anything that isn't really there at the time.

Since you were described as "Tripping Balls" and "Good" we can assume there are several properties these halluciations have:


They're constant
They're vivid
They're extremely detached from your current context
They're pleasant


This means that whatever you choose to see it should be strange, and very much disconnected from your current reality but something you'd enjoy. For example maybe when you make camp the rocky ground feels incredibly soft and fluffy to you. The rocks are pillow-like. Alternatively there could be soft and furry friendly animals all around standing on their hind legs and begging for treats like a dog. Maybe your trail rations suddenly taste like candy.

Who knows? The instructions you got were very open-ended. Clearer guidance on what the drug actually does (Auditory/Visual/etc..) and how (pulls out memories, invents scenarios, just distorts senses) would be useful.

[daremetoidareyo]

EDIT: The GMs do not describe the hallucinations - several characters have had hallucinations, but from an entirely different type of drug, and it was just up to them what they saw.


Trust me, what I wrote earlier is very much the case:


When you feel insecure, you feel very, very insecure. You will flee. You will need to be convinced of whom is "with you" and who is "against you."

When you feel safe, you will feel normal + grateful for the people who maintain that safety around you. You feel nice...Like dancing is actually fun and you don't give an eff...kind of nice. You will connect any idea to any other idea and paint the chain of ideas that link the two together.

Being angry is intoxicating. It's like riding a whole different thought-whale.

When you feel insecure, which can be triggered from someone being frustrated with you or using a nasty tone, it makes your mind race around the concept of how you are negatively affecting others. Especially if they are correct in what feels like their "bad treatment of you". If they are wrong, however...

You blame them for their bad feelings. Depending on the hallucinogen, what is typical is their face melting to reveal a skull or a slow transformation of the other persons facial features into something more and more monstrous. It's not that they look like that monster and you know that you are having a hallucination. It's that you convince yourself that they are truly this monster all along, and now you can see it. Typically, the first reaction is to put distance between yourself and that monster, but if you have a long history of what feels like one sided abuse coming in your direction...and it's not your fault, it's theirs:


You hulk-smash. It immediately feels good to be violent. Like the relief when you finally pull off that scab you've been picking at for the last week X1000. The satisfaction of swatting a mosquito and it popping into a little splotch of blood.


Again, when you are hallucinating, your security is what makes the difference between you acting normal and acting aberrantly. 80% of your consciousness is devoted to reveling in your security. You evaluate everything around in reference to how secure it makes you feel. The only behavior difference when you feel secure is that you sometimes think you've responded to others, when in reality all you've done is think about what you should say and became satisfied that that was enough to fulfill your social requirement.

When you finally have enough "evidence" to feel insecure, that is when your behavior becomes wildly unpredictable.


This is what all hallucinogens do to your mental state. If you have been given a drug to compare it to, we can differentiate the typical experience from there. Like PCP comes with so much confidence and power but when you become insecure, you become a monster. LSD has a lot more euphoria frontloaded into the experience, but you really dislike behaviors that you see as socially dysfunctional. PCP is a fight response. LSD is a flight response.

Mushrooms and LSD activate the spiritual centers of your brain, so you find yourself feeling connected to all things. There is a lot of love associated with these drugs because of that.

Mushrooms make you hate 90 degree angles. Don't know why. But you love atypical architecture. No one on shrooms likes corners, especially shady corners. Things that you like you will want to be close to. You'll find yourself saying things like, "I don't like this lamp. Turn it off. Isn't that so much better? Actually I really like the light from the lamp, but i just don't like the boxy shape of the lamp. Lamp, LAMP, can you hear me? I don't like your shape. I still like you and what you do, though. I'm sorry I don't like what you look like, it's not my fault, I just don't like it. I'll turn you back on now, because that corner will be less scary when you do your thing."

Salvia slows down time. One minute of salvia time feels like 20 minutes real time. During this short term hallucination you go through a series of unconnected hallucinogenic events, separated by a fluttering, often compared to the striations of treebark or the flipping of book pages. You spend a lot of time fearing the transition to the next hallucinatory vignette, and then feeling immediate relief when the vignette switches. Salvia can make you forget who you are entirely, and have to put it together through context clues about who is around you. Example:

You imagine yourself walking into a mousehole in the floorboard cartoon style. You feel a fluttering and you're back to normal and you feel relief. But why is that girl laughing at you? Well, let's put it together. You're on a bed with her, and judging by the posters on the wall she's in her mid 20s, and the TV is pouring sand into the room, but she doesn't care...the sand is filling the whole room, why doesn't she care about that instead of laughing at me? Wait, I think that she's my girlfriend. She is holding a water pipe. We just did drugs. WHY DID WE JUST DO DRUGS! *fluttering* Someone loves me, I have a girlfriend that i feel secure enough to drugs around. This sand thing is terrible conundrum though, Goddamn it, if I weren't so high, I could totally address this getting buried in sand situation. But I'm a little to messed up. Wait, maybe i'm imagining it. *fluttering* Yeah....I'm just imagining it. It was obviously how I was perceiving this music and it made me visualize that. Wait a second, that happened during the chorus. The verse is almost over. Here comes the chorus...Oh no... MORE SAND?! **** ****, "we really need to address this sand problem" you say outloud. Your apparent girlfriend laughs at you again. WHY IS SHE LAUGHING: CAN'T SHE SEE THAT WE'RE GONNA BE BURIED IN SAND? Maybe I'm wrong and she's right. *fluttering* I sure am grateful that my girlfriend understood that the sand wasn't real. I love her. This is one of many reasons and the only one that I can think of right now of why I love her. But will that last forever? One of us has to die first. How will I handle that? How will she handle that? She trusts me enough to do DRUGS. That's like a big deal to me, so it must be a big deal to her. She'll be broken if one of us dies. I feel sad. *flutters* You only live once, everyone loses someone. Things will work out fine. I'll keep some of this sand to bury her with in order to commemorate the experience. We really need to address this sand, though. *fluttering* Wait, I just remembered it's not real. Whew...that song is finally over.

Meanwhile, like 2 minutes has passed, but you've had like the same close call with fake death ten times in a row, so it feels like it's been hours.

[Socksy]

[A whole bunch of really helpful stuff!]

From the way it was usually consumed by the PC who had it on him, probably closest to LSD, but it might not fall in line with any real world drug. I basically have free rein to do what I want with this, within the parameters of "Really strong for a week and then only tripping slightly, but forever" and "Makes me more happy than I otherwise would be, it is a good trip, and after the week is up I still feel more happy in general"

[goto124]

Maybe your trail rations suddenly taste like candy.

Maybe your teammate tastes like candy.

"Why do you keep licking me?"

[Socksy]

Maybe your teammate tastes like candy.

"Why do you keep licking me?"

Hehe, we all wear too much face paint for that to be a viable option.

[Douche]

Talk about how everything is a metaphor

Think you can peer through the veil of reality to the infinite chaos of the nether

Stare at walls and say you can see faces or patterns in them (if you can convince your DM you are staring intently enough, you might even accidentally find a secret door or switch)

Be silly and tell your enemies there's no need to fight, let's just chill and talk about the mysteries of the multiverse. Or you can have lowered inhibitions and reveal information to people that your party would be better off keeping as a secret.

Randomly decide your armor is too restricting and tear all your clothes off, then yell how free you feel

Whatever you do - DO NOT look at yourself in the mirror, or you will be stuck there for hours

[Socksy]

Randomly decide your armor is too restricting and tear all your clothes off, then yell how free you feel

In a LARP?!
I do not think I will be doing that! XD

[goto124]

Wear skin-colored clothes underneath.

[Douche]

In a LARP?!
I do not think I will be doing that! XD

Oh, didn't catch that part. Just tear off your armor and keep your clothes on then, lol... Unless you're like a mage or something

[Socksy]

I'm a mage!
So there will be no tearing off clothes for me.
Except maybe my cloak, but I don't generally wear that in the guild hall anyway, because it has too many radiators too much latent heat magic, or something.