I've been playing quite a lot of PDS outbreaks ICly, and I figured that some people may enjoy the guideline for it I wrote for myself, as I found that it makes it quite fun to play, and lets it be more consistently invasive, without being obviously PDS. So here goes!
The core of it for me is to stop thinking of PDS as a condition and start thinking of it as just… baseline.
When my character hums a corporate jingle, or gets territorial over nothing, or can't stop straightening things on a desk - from where they're standing, that's just them. That's just what they wanted to do. The PDS isn't announcing itself. There's no internal flag going up saying this is a symptom. It's the same as any other impulse - wanting a drink, getting annoyed at someone chewing loud, zoning out mid-conversation. You don't experience those as external forces acting on you. You just experience them.
So my character doesn't know when they're in an outbreak. They just know they wanted to do the thing they did.
And this extends to the bigger stuff too - the stuff the helpfile lists. Feeling superior to the people around you. Not having much patience for other people's problems. Feeling basically indestructible. Wanting to be left alone. Wanting things done your way. These don't feel like symptoms from the inside. They feel like correct assessments. Your character isn't thinking "the PDS is making me feel superior" - they're thinking that guy really is beneath them, and they're right, and it's weird they have to explain this.
That's the shift. The cyberware doesn't hand your character a new personality with a label on it. It just quietly moves where the floor is. What used to feel like an overreaction now feels proportionate. What used to feel like arrogance now feels like honest self-awareness. The baseline changed and the character calibrated to it, because that's what people do.
The retrospective moment is where it gets fun - when someone else clocks the tic, the muscle spasm, the sudden hostility with no real cause. That's when you might start connecting dots. And even then, the brain is pretty good at finding other explanations for itself.
Anyway, that's just how I approach it and honestly loving it as a result. Let me know what do you think!
