Characters being able to feel fear

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.

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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

This is one of those difficult spaces where the actual player, and the player character, blur and also tend to be at odds. What you describe with people being afraid to go fight a zombie with just a pipe or the like? It is exactly what happens to new players already, faced with dangerous enemies they don’t know how to handle. They will react with fear to preserve their characters life, or overconfidence that leads to death if they fail to accurately judge the enemy.

The problem is that once a player gets experienced, that fear goes away. I know very, very well what can and cannot be taken on with certain gear and skills, but its player knowledge, not character knowledge. A very common version of this is discovering kiting through windows/doors, or kiting with reach weapons, stuff the player knows makes many enemies much easier to take down even with inferior gear.

When you try to systematize it to represent something the character is feeling, you end up with a major problem. If the player is new, and afraid, but the character is not, then the player starts to use the characters own reactions to judge their abilities - Which easily backfires, when the player character expresses confidence in a situation that gets them absolutely killed because the player didn’t know how to handle it the way the fear system expected when it rated if the character should be scared.

It gets worse when the player is experienced, because the player knows ways to do things that the fear system most likely won’t account for. All you end up doing is annoying the experienced player with seemingly artificial stat reductions that they can’t really do anything to mitigate, based on a system that will inevitably feel arbitrary.

The actual solution to this isn’t to try and put a system in place to ‘punish’ the player for fighting scary things by placing artificial handicaps on them, but to actually make the enemies in question dangerous enough that the player themselves has fear reactions regardless of skill.

I do believe that we will march indirectly towards addressing the fearlessness of players with the coming health and wounds system changes, where injury goes from simple HP and more towards meaningful measurable damage, allowing more varied consequences that aren’t just immediately “Player Dies”. Right now, a really scary enemy is only really scary because they can obliterate HP, and then its not a really interesting enemy. If the enemy can instead deal a harsh wound that is survivable, but has long term consequences. Then it becomes a matter of designing the right wounds and consequences for enemies to become feared even for experienced players. Not because of immediate ability to kill you, but the fact that engaging them carelessly or even getting a bit unluckly could impact your save for much longer than the usual “Sleep it off, or you’re dead” mix.

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Guys, you are making such a good work with this game… I did not know that health system’s overhaul is coming. That is what I was talking about. Making combat more grounded

We’ve talked a lot about fear before and it is very hard to model. If we ever implemented it for the player I think the only way we’ve thought of that is kind of acceptable for player agency would be to drop movement cost if you’re moving away from the thing you’re afraid of, and increase them if you’re moving closer. Otherwise, we just dont believe in telling taking over too much control.

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