Hallucinations that can hurt you

Game Talk The Drawing Board
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This is exactly what I was trying to get at. The game, as of now, sacrifices the realism and immersion of even including hallucinations, because every player can tell if they are hallucinating or not. Realistically, the point of hallucinations is that you can’t tell whether they are real or not.
I’m not saying we should screw up the code or throw random crap at players without it being warranted, but if you take some pink tablets, it’s literally just an aesthetic effect in-game that does nothing to gameplay whatsoever. Hell, you can get the same things done hallucinating that you can when you’re not, it’s just more interesting with a bunch of random monsters running around. Why even have hallucinations as a gameplay effect if it does nothing to the player but create a visual effect? The actual character is the only one dealing with the real effects, and you can just push him along to ignore them for the most part. It might as well be as useful as making vomit appear in-world when the player gets sick. At least that has some gameplay effect, it stops gameplay for a bit, while hallucinations do nothing to the gameplay, making the vomit visual more justified than hallucinations.
And just to say, none of us want the vomit visual included in the game. None of us.

Hallucinations are easy to avoid anyways, and they wouldn’t be any harder to avoid if we stacked some gameplay effects on them. Pretty much the only way you have hallucinations in-game is if you either go out of your way to do so by eating something weird, or have the Schizophrenic trait, both of which are player-decided actions that entail the possibility of hallucinations. I’ve done both of those options, and I stopped because I got bored of it after a few times, because there’s no real gameplay effect and it’s just kind of annoying after a while to have pointless colored text flipping around in the world adding to your feed when you attack them. I don’t even justify them as monsters, because they’re not, as it stands now.
The realism that you get by even having a hallucination possibility is right out the window once you actually get into the hallucinating part.

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FWIW you can get hallucinations from teleglow. Flaming eye stares at you too long, you may see some Weird Stuff on your way back to base to wait it out.

-KA101, who doesn’t much care to deal with hallucinations kthx

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I think hallucinations could do with a bit of a change, right now it’s pretty harmless.

Instead of a catch-all hallucination status, set up multiple levels of hallucinations.

Low-level hallucinations could be:

  • Hearing sounds
  • Monsters appearing a few tiles away from their actual location (displacement)
  • A hallucination that disappears after a single turn.

Mid-level hallucinations could be the above and:
Hallucinated monsters work as they do and disappear after a hit.
Existing monsters are hallucinated as something else of a similar size class.
Existing items may be hallucinated as something of similar volume. Say, you pick up a hallucinated flashlight, it would give you the “You pick up the flashlight” message, but a aluminum can would be in your inventory when you check it.
Existing terrain may be altered, particularly things you can interact with like doors, windows, and traps.

High-Level hallucinations could be the above and:
Hallucinated monsters appear like regular monsters and do phantom damage but and a some pain. If the HP of a body part with phantom damage would be reduced to 0, the player is knocked back and downed but heals all phantom damage for that body part.
Phantom damage regenerates much faster than regular damage.
Non-existant items may be generated. “You reach for the X but it disappears!”