Characters’ readiness to fight toe-to-toe with deadly mutants is absolutely ridiculous to me. Most people would be too scared to fight off a mature pitbull, not to mention a mutant that is few times heavier than them.
I know that fighting monsters is an important gameplay feature, but come on… There should be at least an “evolution of courage”. Slowly working on character’s confidence by killing basic zombies with a spear. Trying to overcome fear. The very first encounter with a brute should make our adrenalin pumping.
I am aware that CDDA community (mostly from Reddit) may lose their shit if such feature was implemented. Lets be honest, most players do not care about realism, and survival. They want “fun”, and I see their point. But enough is enough IMHO. Even Project Zomboid features some form of fear
You’d have to come up with a mechanism for how it would work rather than request that someone else does it.
You’d need some kind of implementation that doesn’t rip the control out of the players’ hands and doesn’t get the PC killed (freeze and scream is certainly not a viable implementation…).
Also note that the design of the game is such that trying to run away can easily get you killed, since stamina runs out very quickly (especially when starting out), and quite a few monsters are faster than the PC at walking speed (e.g. zombie dogs).
There’s a fairly lackluster mechanism for dealing with the killing of zombie children, if you want some kind of reference to a “similar” feature.
And I assume it would be rather easy to add a “fearless” feat to select at character creation for people who don’t want to deal with this obstacle.
Also remember that those who completely succumbed to fear are already dead, so we have a survival bias here.
I am sorry that my post was quite misleading. English is not my first language, and I often struggle to express my thoughts. To be more clear: that was not a request for a new mechanism / system. I could easily “roleplay” this instead. That would not be a big deal.
My post was about changing the whole attitude towards fighting. Similar huge change already happened when stamina system was implemented. I remember how furious some part of the community was. They were not able to easily kill an entire horde with a cudgel anymore.
Since then, realism in CDDA skyrocketed. Game is becoming more, and more difficult each year. This is unpopular, but making game much better.
Maybe it is the time to start thinking about next huge change? That was the aim of my post. Not as a request, but more “food for thoughts” about how ridiculous fighting mutated monsters is. Slow, and clumsy zombies would be easy to kill, but fighting something that shocks us with electricity, burns with acid, punches us through a wall? That is a completely different thing IMHO.
Making fighting them with melee weapons much harder, would make ranged weapons more useful