And the time spent in lows is about three times that of highs. Even in a game it svcks to have a big hit to willpower, intelligence, endurance, etc.

As someone with ADD I can testify that it does not quite work as described by Hollywood and comics, but I can also testify that it can be pretty funny.

So my favorite sort of eccentric character is the absent minded professor/engineer/spellcaster type, who would end up staring at some glyph on the wall as pitched battle swirls all around him.

And instead of accent, this character is always talking to himself, fully unaware of the conversation around him, and may start fooling around with a device, or a spell, or whip out pen and paper, or just kind of wander off, unaware of anything but his own thoughts.

I knew someone with add an tourettes an he was one dangerous sod if left near anything combustible cause he was quite the pyro an with his tourettes on top, Made for some funny yet dangerous situations especially when he would give you the kind of look that we would give our first born child.

Very very freaky indeed.

Well behaviors are not all that driven by ADD. The way ADD works is basically that the mind is trying to multitask on all of the different things the body is experiencing instead of being able to properly focus on one thing blocking out the distraction from the other things. Now everyone can get distracted with enough noise and commotion around them, and ADD is just like that only worse, where even minor things demand your attention. It's like being in a room with 15 people in 5, 3 man groups. Each group is discussing a subject, now most everyone will be just focusing on the two people in their group and the discussion happening between them, but someone with ADD might give more attention to his or her own group, but ultimately will not be able to completely ignore the other groups and will be following their conversations as well to an extent, as well as the impatient foot tapping of one of the people, and the constant bubble gum popping of another person, and the flickering lights of the broken projector.

Now remove all of the distractions, and leave only the person with ADD with the two other people in it's group. And you'd never know the person has ADD. As it would follow the conversation without problems and have as much focus as any other person. Now throw in hyperactivity and you might get slightly different results. Bottom line being that ADD does not really influence your personality first hand but rather just indirectly (for example a kid with ADD might get horrible grades because of it and come to resent the school system because of it, but that's not a direct result of having ADD as if the kid was perhaps privately tutored in a silent environment it would have no more or less chance at a successful education than any other kid) so the pyromania would most likely have been there either way.

An example however of how someone with ADD could be amusing in a PnP setting might be like: You're sitting at a royal banquet, your adventuring party is discussing serious matters with a lord of the castle. All around servants are going around, there is pvssyr, the bards are singing and playing, a child is crying somewhere and in one corner a brawl is going on. Your character phases in and out of the conversation the party is having with the lord, knowing that pleasing him might mean the difference between life or death you try to focus but ultimately give up trusting the group leader to do the talking. A few minutes in you're just lost in your own mind not really able to focus on anything specific when you feel the one sitting to your side give you a light kick to get your attention. Turning around you say "Yes?".

Congratulations, you just responded positively to the lord trying to ask you if you were personally involved in a recent assassination attempt on the king.

Lead poisoning?

That was an still is me an people have passed it around for years wondering if i had ADD along with my dyspraxia, agoraphobia, depression, anxiety an way too many other problems.

An with my bad speling an atrocious writing my school, shrink an dr all thought i had dyslexia too but nope i just hated writing period id much rather talk about the essay then write it out.

A as for the ADD suspicions im just a curious nosy s.o.b.

Take a class discussion just like you mentioned but id have one ear on my group an another going fro the other groups not to mention watching the body language an seeing who was getting bored an frustrated to who just couldnt care about the all lesson.

For me it was like been in a candy store.

Oh! Narcolepsy! I once played a narcoleptic druid in a D&D game. It came in very handy. Whenever things got boring I would just declare my character fell asleep, usually in mid-sentence for comic effect, and then wander off to find something interesting to do for a while. Yeah, I politely declined to keep playing after the second week. They were rather tiresome folks.

The premise of this thread is just aggravating. Mental disorders are serious issues that shouldn't just be bandied about as if they don't have serious effects on people. They're called disorders for a reason.

If your friends wanted your character to have a real mental disorder, you can't just take the "good" sides of some mental disorder and discard the parts that you don't like. And if you were really serious about it, you'd actually do some research and learn that hypomania is a feature of bipolar II and is part of bipolar I and isn't some condition that has zero consequences and it is definitely not some permanent state.