Mitigator with side effects

[aesir23]

Originally Posted by Anders

So what do you think of my proposed cost?

I think it's problematic. On the medication you have a -10 point disadvantage, off the medication you have a -10 point disadvantage. Your solution ends up as as only -5 points.

The canonical way to handle something similar to this is Split Personality. With Split Personality, you have two sets of disadvantages of equal cost and you get full value for them (plus the value of Split Personality).

Originally Posted by Anders

But what do I do when they're not of the same value. Ideally, the resulting disadvantage should be worth less than the original one.

As someone else said, you could take both disadvantages with a mitigator.

If you set the value of the mitigator at -50% for both, then the cost of having one of 2 different 10 point disadvantages is -10, and the total cost is always the mean of the two disadvantages. So Paranoia with a Laziness Side Effect is -10, but Paranoia with a Shyness side effect is -8, and Paranoia with Chronic Depression is -13.

This seems mostly fair. You could justify a Quirk for the reaction penalty from people who notice the change in your personality and a Perk for, essentially, having some control over which disadvantage you have at any given time. But the easiest thing would be for these two costs to cancel out.