I feel adding such a system to the game could make it more interesting, having it affect you, NPC’S (Which technically have one I guess) and certain monsters and wildlife. Any ideas on how to implement?
there is already a fear system. certain intelligent wildlife like wolves will flee if damaged enough.
although I feel like the fear engine for humans could use a little work as it always seemed kind of goofy somebody would let a person with over 2050 bionic power and a few slight mutations enter their secure refugee area. Then again they were probably too terrified to lift a finger against me as I stank of death and kept on shouting all the time.
However I feel like if enough people from a faction get killed their anger should eventually turn into fear, especially after all the times I butchered their corpses.
As Bio said, fear exists. Yell at the hostile animals that are following you, they might leave you alone. Mi-gos run away when they approach death. Most ‘intelligent’ (not zombie/fungi/triffid?) enemies can do this self-preservation behaviour. If your character appears threatening (heavily armoured, weapon drawn, terrifying/ugly trait) random NPCs might automatically be fearful and flee from you. Some are more cowardly than others, and will run from you regardless of how intimidating you seem.
Hardcoded NPCs like the refugee centre denizens don’t seem to be affected by fear (or any other NPC opinion) until combat. Not that anything other than fear affects combat.
Maybe prices shift when negotiating with the trader. I never think to test that.
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I think he meant for the playable character more or less, and referrenced npcs and others as sorta what to base it on.
It could add to either the character in a developing trait of “flight or fight” as the more enemies you kill the more “fight” respsonse you develop. As the “flight” response in the beginning of the game as like a decent sized speed boost to seeing enemy values over an amount, while having more miss chances to miss or graze-
“Your weapon barely swats the enemy” “you sieze up before landing a hit because of your fear”
While end game your character would go into basically like martial trances from Dwarf Fortress where your weapon accuracy and damage goes up but you move slightly slower because of focusing on attacks rather than moving.
Or which is more likely to happen is: have a small base game boost to both weapon proficiency and speed, and have two positive traits that are “flight” and “flight” that give bonuses to one side, while have a negative trait as a “careless” where the base game bonuses are way smaller if not completely gone.
Maybe something based on theat level of enemies, give each enemy an intimidation value that that stacks up, too much and your survivor becomes afraid. Then reduce the intimidation value over time based on how many of them you have killed, coupled with traits for “Brave” and “Cowardly” could make for an interesting system.
Technically Amigara Horrors already use fear against the PC, but the way they do makes them terribly powerful (a 1d20 roll vs the players int, if the player losses the roll then become paralyzed with fear for a turn).
I personally don’t think we really need a complicated fear system for the player. Dangerous things like top tier zombies and shogoths are already enough dangerous without the need to debuff the player further. And when you are strong enough to fight them on even ground I don’t see a reason the player should fear them.
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Well it still woukd have it’s quirks, but even if I had stood on mountains of zombies a gelatinous ooze full of assorted limbs and such would still freak the shit out of me