Adrenaline for everyone! (traits)

Game Talk The Drawing Board
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It would be natural to fall into a combat state during danger and without the High Adrenaline (HA) trait, because by default we have a character with working kidneys/adrenal glands; in addition, the name HA itself suggests what this perk should do: make the effect of the release of adrenaline in the blood stronger.

I suggest making the effect of adrenaline weaker and giving it to everyone, and trait will increase its effect to what it is in the game now. I’m not good at code, but in theory it’s almost copy-paste (something like rename trait HA into A (Adrenaline) and make it invisible and activated by default for everyone (for 0 points), changing all checks for it to a new name (A), and if the HA trait is active, replace checks with the code that is already implemented).

One can also go further and reject HA as a positive trait and do something like “If you haven’t had an adrenaline rush in a long time, you feel depressed” and call it “Chasing Adrenaline” or one can add this negative debuff to HA as a side effect of stronger adrenaline.

One can also, if trait changes, add the disease “Adrenal Gland Atrophy” (AGA) with the description "Once you had an accident and your kidney failed. Sitting on artificial hormones, your remaining kidney has ceased to fully perform its function… " and disable checks for any adrenaline. Or trait “Pheochromocytoma” with the same as AGA but slightly increased thirst, but less than from the corresponding trait to increase thirst.

The combination Masochist + HA prompted me to think about all this: one can cauterize himself with a knife and fall into an adrenaline rush, but when I tried to cauterize myself without the masochist trait to cause an adrenaline rush, the game simply refused to cooperate :cry: (and by the way, one can still cauterize without tools for heating, just with a knife! but one can’t just burn himrself with a lighter…).

By the way, there was a trait like Trigger Happy that was made invisible. A minute of silence waiting for the heroes who will bring her back…

  • Adrenaline to everyone!
  • I’m happy with the current one.
  • Your offer is not interesting.
  • Someone remembered about Trigger Happy!

0 voters

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From Kevin on reddit:

If anything having the effect at all is the problem, if it’s kicking in any time you have a flight or fight response, you can just assume it’s part of your natural stats and not have an explicit effect for it.

Source.

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I do agree that it shouldn’t always kick in (a hardened survivor isn’t going to have any reaction to a normal zombie) but this type of response would be reasonable and very handy if a skeletal brute suddenly appears form around the corner.

What should also be noted is that adrenaline rushes are part of the fight or flight response. and not all the reactions of this response are nesseceraly beneficial. It might make you freeze and be phisically unable to act or it might give you shakes and reduce your accuracy. The worst case might be that you faint. Other reactions include screaming when frightened or a reduction in the running speed movement cost from stamina loss (nothing morivates running more than fear does).

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@anothersimulacrum Does this mean that the frustration of waiting for the adrenaline at low health will spoil the experience of the game or the gameplay? I don’t think anyone will think about it that way when he see it - it will be taken for granted.

Besides, it is not necessary to do exactly what I wrote: the idea itself is importan. When I was writing the original post, I just quickly sketched out a outline where somebody could immediately implement the idea in the game, trying only to spend less coder time.

here, for example, is a good addition of @spicyshadow : it would be reasonable, depending on the creatures killed and the survival time, to make different conditions for triggering adrenaline and make different versions of it, depending, for example, on the level of thirst, because when the body is exhausted, gradually, but begins to develop apathy, prostration - the loss of everything desire to react to the environment, even instinctively: reflexes are dulled, vision worsens, and, of course, the functioning of the kidneys and pituitary gland worsens, and without, for example, HA, hopes for high adrenaline becomes pointless. Also a large beast could be the cause of the blowout, such as a juggernaut, located nearby (and when thinking about big creatures comes to mind the psychopath trait, that could be made so that he ignores the big critters and could not have such an outburst, and, after that, it could be transferred to the list of bad ones in this regard (and in general, it’s strange that a trait with such a name is on the list of positive ones, although the buffs from this choice are obvious; masochist then could be transferred to the list of negative with the addition of the desire to periodically arrange pain for himself)) and so on.

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Told you i had a point.

The idea of not necessarily receiving positive effects is a great idea for both realism and to help balance - after all there is fight, flight or freezing up irl, screaming, shakes which would definitely affect accuracy, maybe panicking making unable to attack for a couple turns or increase action cost or something, a Stress mechanic with Weariness being the physical midterm debilitation and Stress being the mental. Etc.

Could also tie Adrenaline into the Weariness system - if you’re in combat survival mode with adrenaline fighting things all day, it’s going to take it out of you especially on the come-down afterward. Based on things like the amount of action and damage taken - a jump in weariness, a jump in pain, maybe stat reduction, something you know will be coming up when adrenaline wears off to account for and play around, getting somewhere safe to recover as in real life etc.

Could also be another way to balance clearing hordes if you get ahead of the curve and try to take on too much too often. You might have started as a fully kitted out Cyborg Ninja Warrior, but you’re still a human subject to human chemicals and flaws.

Either way, Adrenaline being a character trait or CBM isn’t realistic.

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I don’t see how this relates to the quote I posted. I am simply quoting the project lead’s take on the idea.

My interpretation of that quote goes as such:
If, every time you are in a dangerous situation your adrenaline kicks in, then it’s not worth simulating.
It’s not worth simulating because if it happens every time you’re in danger, and the things it affects don’t matter so much when you’re outside of danger, then it may as well be constantly applied - nothing changes when you’re outside of danger, and when you are, it’s the exact same.

With no offence meant to you or your idea(s), I disagree with this statement.
Ideas, in isolation, are effectively valueless. Ideas, when attached to an implementation or someone willing to make an implementation, are valuable.
This is just due to some simple math - the number of ideas a person can make multiplied by the number of people who can make ideas far outstretches the number of people who can implement ideas, and that gets even bleaker when you take into account the number of ideas that those people can implement.
This is not to say that this

is valueless, just that it doesn’t have value until someone who is interested in implementing it comes along, which may happen, or may never happen. Additionally, if the idea is rejected, it has value as an examination of why the project is not interested in it or in problems with future similar ideas.

Yeah, this is more of a response to the quote - it’s a little thing that kicks in when you’re in a new experience, so maybe it shows up the first time you fight zombies, but only the first time, or maybe the first few times, meaning it’s a getaway device or a sudden boost for a new hostile situation, but when it becomes mundane it’s no longer going to effect you.

Frankly, I don’t care when you’re just going to troll reddit on a few different accounts about it. Like I said above, implementations are what matter, and your passive-aggressive trolling on reddit is going to get the opposite. You are not attached to an implementation at all, you said so yourself.

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