Grabbing, biting and manipulating other characters

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Since the time of Gothic (First one) I always wanted to see a game that made animals [G]rab you with their teeth and rip you to shreds. Instead I was given “slashing” attacks with teeth.

So here I present a suggestion that will add a lot to the combat system of Cataclysm. And since it’s already implemented for furniture, it should be easy enough to port it for other entities.

Point one. Grabbing = biting.

Biting is the act of grabbing something with your teeth. This is the primary form of attack for majority of life on earth, same for the zombies.
But just biting doesn’t deal much damage. Biting and holding the bite while moving your head causes the tissues to rip and shred, leading to a severe blood loss.
This is why animals are dangerous and this is why they should be dangerous in a cataclysm. (Zombies too.)

On the attempt of grabbing, if successful, the toothed assailant should deal a little damage and gain a hold on it’s prey. Then each turn the prey should attempt to wrest free of the bite, and if failed it should suffer a lot of damage from the bite tearing it’s flesh with a high chance of severe bleeding.

Of course the animals or zombies, when maintaining a bite exposes themselves to attacks. We’ve seen it all in movies. The animal bites and holds while it’s stabbed repeatedly with a knife in it’s side or head. And we all want to see things like what we would see in movies randomly happen during game, no? :wink:

Point two. Homo-sapiens advantage.

We are humans, and nothing like butt cheeks says it. Except maybe for opposable thumbs.

Being the player we get to have hands (Or tentacles) which make manipulating objects really easy. Basically, grabbing is where we shine!
The use of grabbing an opponent in combat has wide uses. Such as pushing them away so they don’t present threat, pushing them out of the way so you can pass, holding for easy attacks, and lastly, pushing them into obstacles. You could push them into a bush to slow them down, into a trap to kill them or into a hole to bury them. When cornered while taking a dump whilst you forgot your gun in your safe house, you could grab a zombie and repeatedly smash it against a tree (How furniture collides with an object every time we push it in it’s direction.) in order to kill it.

Point three. The necro-sapiens advantage.

A zombie. A rotten, walking corpse. Doesn’t pose a threat to an able individual on it’s own, but in a group it will chase you down and eat your insides. The imminent threat of zombies is in their numbers. But their numbers don’t matter if you can easily outrun and outmanoeuvre them irregardless of the size of the horde.

But let’s imagine a scenario - you are running away from a group of zombies, steadily gaining ground. From behind the corner of a building a single zombie surprises you but it doesn’t scare you. “One zombie? What threat dost it pose to me?” you think to yourself as you smash it with your trusty wood axe. But as powerful as your blow was, it didn’t discard the shambling corpse in the instant and now in lunges upon you grabbing you by your arms, readying it’s teeth to tear the flesh from the bone. You try to push and pull and hit it again but you can’t manage to release it’s iron grip and the horde that was chasing you catches up and joins the feast of greedy, pale palms and a rotten tooth.

Addendum; When I read World War Z, one image and a particular description that remained with me, was the iron grip. It was described as a cold, unwavering force crushing your flesh as the zombie clings to get to you. It is also the most usual end of a survivor in a zombie apocalypse - hidden under a roof of reaching arms ready to pull the entrails out of the victims screaming womb. In short - it’s the single most important feature of any and all zombie survival… anything! And as such I believe it to be the single most important, and probably the easiest to implement of features that Cataclysm requires to become the ultimate, authentic, apocalyptic survival, roguelike-storytelling game of all time! And the animals! Please, the animals! Mak’em bite… [size=4pt]and hold, and rip and shred.[/size] :s

2

The only flaw in ease of implementation is that furniture and people are handled differently, so dragging a player is a lot more complex. Holding in place, however, would merely be stunning/incapacitating the player (which we already have), while still allowing them the use of weapons.

I feel like it would be very difficult to hit an opponent grappling you with a two-handed weapon rather than a knife.

Love the idea though, just might need some balancing, melee doesn’t need any other reason to suck.

3

It is indeed going to be more complex than grabbing furniture, but it should be easy enough to do, as compared with, say, Z-levels, biomes and polished NPC’s.
When it comes to two-handed weapons, the game doesn’t seem to consider the items length, and I’m not sure how it would so there’s no reason to make it any more difficult when players entrails are being torn out by a hungry zombie.

And honestly, I believe this would give more opportunities for a melee character. Fighting a whole horde? Push that zombie into that other zombie making them stumble, smash this zombies head and move to the next one! Using zombies as a thrown weapon if you are strong enough would be… awesome? (!)

4

Manually manipulating zombie positions is unavoidably fiddly, and for that reason alone, hitting zombies with weapons should be better. It would be “awesome” to read a story written about someone repeated shoving zombies around, but it would be tedious to actually execute in-game.

5

Well obviously hitting them with weapons is better than hitting them with themselves and saying “stop hitting yourself” repeatedly.

That’s intended for when you don’t have a weapon, and as such it’s both awesome and potentially life-saving, not tedious.

6

[quote=“Pakislav, post:5, topic:5422”]Well obviously hitting them with weapons is better than hitting them with themselves and saying “stop hitting yourself” repeatedly.

That’s intended for when you don’t have a weapon, and as such it’s both awesome and potentially life-saving, not tedious.[/quote]
If you don’t have a weapon, whether yourself or an object, you’re doing it wrong. You can literally pick up a stick and use it as a passable weapon, even more so if you sharpen it.

7

Unless you just started as a shower victim, your weapon broke, got lodged in what ever you hit or you just decided to take a stroll without your trusty spoon of death and got jumped. Or just for the show, or a wide variety of what-evers.

Why do you guys concentrate on “winning” the game instead of playing it. >.>

8

[quote=“Pakislav, post:7, topic:5422”]Unless you just started as a shower victim, your weapon broke, got lodged in what ever you hit or you just decided to take a stroll without your trusty spoon of death and got jumped. Or just for the show, or a wide variety of what-evers.

Why do you guys concentrate on “winning” the game instead of playing it. >.>[/quote]
Because I would rather neutralize the threat instead of pushing it. Just my personal preference.

9

Pushing it into a pit sounds neutralized enough to me. <,<

10
11

It’s an interesting idea, though knockback is already a thing in-game, and it’s MA style and/or weapon territory.

For a generic, untrained & unarmed hand-to-hand character, I could imagine “knockback that moves me along with the zed” or “knockback that gives the zed a free counter-hit”, though I’m not sure either would be something I’d want to do in-game.

12

Pushing a zed out of the door to close them and save your life from a horde is something you can’t do with weapons, now is it?

And this idea, as outlined in the first post, is for the most part aimed AGAINST the player by making zombies and animals immobilize the player, as they should. Zombies don’t “hit” you, they grab you, hold you and eat you. Animals go straight to eating. That’s all this is about.