ambrosia is just weed

[rrrrrr]

Hi! Engagement bait-y title aside, I think that "ambrosia" --- the in-universe, weed-but-not-actually-weed plant, should be deprecated in favor of just calling it what it is. It's weed. It's marijuana. Presumably, in the year 2467, weed is legal. A sci-fi drug is not, in this case, necessary! "Plant you smoke to relax" already exists on Earth.

This is pretty brief. I will also promise, if this suggestion is approved, to do the legwork necessary to make weed real in Aurora via the requisite PR replacing ambrosia with weed... and also, I guess, spriting a classical looking "leaf o' weed," the kind you see depicted but never actually see in real life... y'know, like this.

 

[evandorf]

This might be an American centric perspective, but there is too much baggage associated with weed IRL and it would overshadow the plant’s lore in our setting. I don’t have any opinions good or bad on weed itself but I’d personally avoid opening the gate to things like weed culture because I can honestly see it going LRP pretty quick.

[Shimmer]

I'd prefer to avoid references to real life drugs as much as possible. Keep ambrosia as ambrosia, at this point straight up weed would feel very out of place.

[GeneralCamo]

I'm neutral, but I've always been of the opinion that IRL drugs should exist alongside "fantasy" space drugs, to reflect our extremely wide setting and depth of lore. I see no reason why the two cannot co-exist. People obsess over small differences IRL, a whole new alien species with similar effects being big in the market is not that farfetched if we consider it from that perspective.

[Mr.Popper]

I understand the hesitancy toward real life drugs but weed is just so mainstream and normalized,at least where I live. Refusing to depict it is about as ridiculous as censoring nicotine or whiskey; we're not talking about complicated medicines that might be misrepresented nor hardcore drugs that kill people, it's an everyday part of pop culture. Do you know what is a hardcore drug that kills ~30,000 Americans a year? Cocaine, which is literally integral to an entire origin and regularly memed on by the community in and out of character. I'm not saying we should remove coke, but it's crazy to go after weed when we have that precedent.

If ambrosia isn't changed to weed, it at the very least needs a more colloquial, slang name. Not just for worldbuilding—it's super jarring seeing "potheads" call a drug by its scientific name in everyday convo, about as weird as seeing a stoner in real life talk about smoking "cannabis"—but also for new player friendliness. I remember as a newbie botanist was one of my first jobs. Admittedly, I think I still had the Goonian goal of being the stoner botanist, yet when I went to find the seed in the machine it wasn't there; unbeknownst to me, weed was arbitrarily renamed "ambrosia vulgaris" which sounds like some nondescript medicine. This misleads newbies into any number of false assumptions, like recreational drugs being illegal in Biesel, while gatekeeping... um... getting stoned. It's not the hugest of deals but it's still bad design. Changing the item to a shorthand and more representative name like "vine", "juice", "puff", "shrub", etc. where it both sounds credible and is recognizable as a weed stand-in would kill both birds.

Still, I prefer going full mask off as "weed" just for the sake of reducing the number of IRL things we have to dance around; how often are the timeline cutoff and lack of pop culture references brought up? Especially for new players who don't quite grasp where reality ends and Aurora begins?

5 hours ago, evandorf said:

This might be an American centric perspective, but there is too much baggage associated with weed IRL and it would overshadow the plant’s lore in our setting. I don’t have any opinions good or bad on weed itself but I’d personally avoid opening the gate to things like weed culture because I can honestly see it going LRP pretty quick.

Weed culture pretty much already exists; a lot of characters regularly talk about their ambrosia escapades, and there's a more broad nonchalance over drugs with the aforementioned cocaine origin. Maybe you see IRL stoners differently or ambrosia stoners roleplay it different to reality, but if anything that's a sign that ambrosia isn't being properly associated with it's IRL counterpart and needs to be more recognizable. It's way easier to draw on real life experience, whether you're roleplaying a pothead eating everything at the kitchen or the grandma tweaking her nose at those Goddarned dank smelling teenagers, than it is to retrain your brain to work with something completely made up.

[evandorf]

25 minutes ago, Mr.Popper said:

I understand the hesitancy toward real life drugs but weed is just so mainstream and normalized,at least where I live. Refusing to depict it is about as ridiculous as censoring nicotine or whiskey; we're not talking about complicated medicines that might be misrepresented nor hardcore drugs that kill people, it's an everyday part of pop culture. Do you know what is a hardcore drug that kills ~30,000 Americans a year? Cocaine, which is literally integral to an entire origin and regularly memed on by the community in and out of character. I'm not saying we should remove coke, but it's crazy to go after weed when we have that precedent.

If ambrosia isn't changed to weed, it at the very least needs a more colloquial, slang name. Not just for worldbuilding—it's super jarring seeing "potheads" call a drug by its scientific name in everyday convo, about as weird as seeing a stoner in real life talk about smoking "cannabis"—but also for new player friendliness. I remember as a newbie botanist was one of my first jobs. Admittedly, I think I still had the Goonian goal of being the stoner botanist, yet when I went to find the seed in the machine it wasn't there; unbeknownst to me, weed was arbitrarily renamed "ambrosia vulgaris" which sounds like some nondescript medicine. This misleads newbies into any number of false assumptions, like recreational drugs being illegal in Biesel, while gatekeeping... um... getting stoned. It's not the hugest of deals but it's still bad design. Changing the item to a shorthand and more representative name like "vine", "juice", "puff", "shrub", etc. where it both sounds credible and is recognizable as a weed stand-in would kill both birds.

Still, I prefer going full mask off as "weed" just for the sake of reducing the number of IRL things we have to dance around; how often are the timeline cutoff and lack of pop culture references brought up? Especially for new players who don't quite grasp where reality ends and Aurora begins?

Weed culture pretty much already exists; a lot of characters regularly talk about their ambrosia escapades, and there's a more broad nonchalance over drugs with the aforementioned cocaine origin. Maybe you see IRL stoners differently or ambrosia stoners roleplay it different to reality, but if anything that's a sign that ambrosia isn't being properly associated with it's IRL counterpart and needs to be more recognizable. It's way easier to draw on real life experience, whether you're roleplaying a pothead eating everything at the kitchen or the grandma tweaking her nose at those Goddarned dank smelling teenagers, than it is to retrain your brain to work with something completely made up.

IMO, the main difference between weed and other drugs is that weed is more easily memed. The venn-diagram of weed smokers and video game players has much more of an overlap than cocaine users, for example, and familiarity leads to in-jokes, references, ect. Even people who aren't in the culture are familiar with the funny weed number which gets used all the time, ironically or not. To be fair there's similar things with drinking and other substances and we crack down on LRP behavior with them too, but I don't see the benefits outweighing the drawbacks in the weed situation.

[FlamingLily]

Honestly? I've been thinking over how I feel on this one.

My take is that I honestly don't mind if we go all in on real drugs, all in on sci-fi drugs, or do a little bit of what we have with coke- where the base version is the real drug, but more advanced derivatives are sci-fi versions. But what needs to happen, imho, is full commitment to one of those three options. (And, like, drugs based in non-human lore will inherently be sci-fi versions).

I don't mean every drug needs to be like cocaine to sparkle/spotlight/whatever, but I think a solid way to do it is by making the sci-fi variants related to the real world variants, in lore.

Right now, Ambrosia is the weed allegory. Everyone roleplays it like weed, that's the point of this very post. It's weed. The thing we should do, imo, is to make that allegory a fact in the lore. Ambrosia is no longer a legally distinct plant that everyone plays like weed, maybe it's a 2460s strain or a plant found elsewhere that has a very THC-like compound in it. Maybe it triggers the same parts of the brain.

We already do this with Reishi (even though that's the name of a real, non-hallucinogenic mushroom as well...) This version of Reishi is a distinct plant found not on earth, yet it still naturally forms psilocybin (the real chemical magic mushrooms contain). We also do it with our painkillers- they're all opioids, even the ones that aren't just morphine. It's kind of what we do with the cocaine variants, too.

All of this to say: We can just flavour ambrosia extract as THC or something similar (some generic cannaboid) and I think that's the best solution here. Also yeah for the love of god we need more slang names.