[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:23, topic:11514”]Junk food making people weak doesn’t make much sense.
It would just mark a whole category of food as “do not eat past first week”, as if everyone was allergic to it. Junk food would become trash not worth picking up.
It isn’t realistic either - junk food is bad because it is mostly just calories, not because it’s poisonous.
Penalizing people for HEALING damage (except by rest/mutant regen) - now that could be a thing.
Long term penalties for drugs could be a thing. It would actually make sense to bring this part of the idea to the game - just the drug penalties. Not stacking too much and not too heavy, but just enough to discourage drug usage. Could scale with the stat they’d be penalizing, so that a skeletal weakling would take 1 strength damage, but a mountain of muscle would lose 3 points for the same and consider not abusing heroin next time.
You kind of sound like you think all these activities just automatically result in stat loss
No, it’s just that I have seen how it works in other games.[/quote]
Doesn’t junk food currently penalize your health stat in game though? Is the internal health stat supposed to measure your bodies level of nutrition or is it based other factors as well? Since I’ve noticed that stuff like flu shots will increase it (over time?) the same way vitamins do, and the white cell generator bionic (I’ve forgotten the name of it…) also increases your internal health score. As long as junk food does that, it pretty much is garbage you don’t eat after the first week, unless you intend to supercharge your moral to ludicrous heights or something.
Also, I do agree with you that I’ve seen exercise done poorly in some games. However, I’ve played nethack, and I’ve found that my stats does rise through natural use at the rate that I need them too. I don’t have to push a boulder in one small area over and over again, for instance, because there is a section called sokoban, that will cause your character to rise up a few levels in strength or more by the time you’ve finished the puzzles since they involve natural boulder pushing. Fighting raises dexterity, as does being hungry but not weak from hunger. Spell casting raises your intellect, ect.
The main reason I suggested making higher level skills exercise higher end stats was to partially help justify starting with better than 0 skill in a way beyond “You’ll waste points if you don’t.” The rational was that more refined skills would demand more of the person that uses them. That may or may not however be workable and I can understand if that isn’t since it could very easily lead to grindy behavior. However there is an issue with skills taken at character creation not helping with your characters future potential beyond saving your characters time here and now, and in some instances, possibly saving your characters life? (being too situational basically) This means that if a person has to take skills, it will either be something like computer skill, or combat skills. So generally speaking, we go from the optimal build being good stats with no skills, too slightly worse stats, and that same character is combat trained somehow. Like on the level of or better than a trained member of law enforcement.
Also, penalizing people for healing damage through direct medical aid does sound strictly better than punishing them for getting damaged, now that you bring it up (I didn’t think of it like that).
The reason I bring up these criticisms is that I do actually want to see this system work. I am playing with multi point pools, and it just isn’t enough to really address the underlying problem. We need to find a way to balance the stat buffs and nerfs while still allowing characters some way to reach endgame potential. I find that being able to play one character for long periods of time is a lot more fun than playing tons of characters for a short period of time each. But only if there is some level of constant danger, like you could be killed if you get careless or unlucky.
Right now, base stats arn’t so much of a problem because you can basically boost them semi permanently (which is basically permanent if you know how to prevent unfortunate events), and then you can super boost them above that when necessary. And to balance that, we have super nerfs that go along with that, but when you come over prepared, those nerfs don’t matter. Basically, drugs, and moral boosters super buff you, and pain and status ailments nerf you. But if you can get your character off the ground, you can deal with pretty much every nerf you might come across. This is what is leading to broken end game characters and balance issues.
