Health system rework proposal

Game Talk The Garage
1

Current health system has 5 more or less major flaws:

[ol][li]Food health value becomes obsolete once you acquire vitamins[/li]
[li]Optimal gameplay (popping pills once every x hours) is tedious rather than skill-based[/li]
[li]Changes take long time, meaning recovering from low health can take years[/li]
[li]Very low health totally disables regeneration during sleep and this can be highly dangerous for some characters[/li]
[li]It heavily rewards the kind of game knowledge a regular player is unlikely to have[/li][/ol]

Since vitamins give whooping 50 point of health mod, one pill can undo enough alcohol to get wasted. No regular food can do miracles like this.
My idea is: popping vitamins opens a menu

[ul][li]Pop a single pill[/li]
[li]Start taking pills regularly[/li]
[li]Stop taking pills regularly[/li][/ul]

Taking a single pill would give a vitamin disease (or boost existing one’s time if it’s below cap), which would boost health or health mod separately from food, but only if it’s low enough (“supplements aren’t a substitute for a varied diet”).
The second option would add a disease/mutation/state/whatever that would make the player pop pills at optimal time (maybe even during sleep) for no move points (to avoid “I automatically grabbed pills and tank smashed me, thanks devs!”) like inhaler works for asthmatics.

As for points 3 and up: if you’ve played a survivor with the leaky bionic (bionic monster has it AFAIR), it keeps health_mod low (unless you eat lots of vitamins). If it manages to bring health to -100, your character will stop regenerating during sleep. At first I thought this is was bug, I had to read the source to understand what is going on.
My idea of fixing this would be:

[ul][li]At very low health, player gets informed why regeneration is slow (“You’re very malnourished, your body heals slowly”)[/li]
[li]Extreme values move towards 0 during sleep regeneration[/li][/ul]

Quick google search shows that part of treating malnutrition is bed rest, so this makes sense to me. As for high health going down - this one could be changed to only trigger when you’re wounded, because wounds aren’t healthy. Or maybe it should stay, so that you get out of that damn bed and go for a jog.

I can write all those changes myself, I just need to get them approved. It doesn’t sound like much work, but as with all projects, it will take much more time than it looks like it will.

2

Vitamins/flu shot are definitely a drawback in the current health system and really need to be reworked. Vitamins should probably be nerfed a bit and ideally would have an automatic setting, as you noted. Flu shots, on the other hand, probably shouldn’t be touching the health system at all, but instead just give a short-term additional disease resistance.

As for the other notes:

3. Changes take long time, meaning recovering from low health can take years
This one is totally intended. It takes an equal amount of time (capped at 25 days to go from -100 to 0 IIRC) to get back to normal from whatever hole you dug yourself into as it did to take you to dig the hole. If you spent an entire year ruining your health than it's supposed to take some time to get back to a normal healthy level.
4. Very low health totally disables regeneration during sleep and this can be highly dangerous for some characters
The regeneration hit is also intended, though it should probably be capped to something like 25% regeneration instead of 0%. Healthy people will heal better and those who are suffering from extremely bad health heal slower, just like in the real world. This should also probably give some sort of message (maybe when the player wakes up?) about the reason why they didn't heal much.

(As a note the health system isn’t really nutrition, but is rather more of a generic “Health” system. As such it will be influenced by malnutrition, but it could also be influenced by other things as well.)

For pills probably the best thing to do is to look into making them some sort of active item. An even better thing would be creating a system that allowed for periodic use of any item/comestible that still took time, but would either query the player if in a dangerous situation or just pause the taking with a message until the player was in a safe area again. What you don’t want to do is put in a messy hack through the trait or effect system. Neither one is going to be able to do what you want in any sort of a good implementation.

3

So against disease-based automatic dosing hack, but is the idea of vitamin disease (like painkillers) good?
I’d say +5 health_mod (capped at about 25) triggering 10 times per day, lasting a full day per pill.
That would make it significant for unhealthy characters, significantly weaker than now (no way to just pop a pill and negate a drinking binge), useful for moderately healthy characters, but useless for very healthy ones (supplements can only fill the gaps).

Possibly some more fuzzy system, like 5 - (health/100), to stress the supplements part and remove the hard cap.

As for automatic dosing, my idea of is to remove the entire metagame associated with it, so that having it on automatic isn’t any worse than doing it manually.
The way I see it being realized with an active item would be:
Active item activates every x turns, but not every activation decrements the counter - only those that are made when vitamin effect is relatively near timeout.
Would that be OK (and possible)?

I don’t see a good way of telling whether the player is safe or not, but I think in this case it can be skipped. Since vitamins could be taken within a large time window, it could be handwaved as just taking it later. Most supplements are taken at most 3 times a day.

4

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:1, topic:7604”]Current health system has 5 more or less major flaws:

[ol][li]Food health value becomes obsolete once you acquire vitamins[/li]
[li]Optimal gameplay (popping pills once every x hours) is tedious rather than skill-based[/li]
[li]Changes take long time, meaning recovering from low health can take years[/li]
[li]Very low health totally disables regeneration during sleep and this can be highly dangerous for some characters[/li]
[li]It heavily rewards the kind of game knowledge a regular player is unlikely to have[/li][/ol][/quote]

  1. Is a problem, and a simple nerf is the answer.
  2. Is kind of a problem, but you’re exaggerating the tedium a bit, once every x hours is a pretty long time, it’s a bit hard to take the argument that doing something once every 2,000+ turns is tedious. Just do it twice a day or something like in real life. I wouldn’t accept an invasive “fix” for this, only a very simple one.
    3 and 4 Are intended, and you haven’t made a case for them being bad things.
  3. I don’t see this, optimal play is literally “eat healthy food, avoid unhealthy things and take vitamins regularly”

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:1, topic:7604”]My idea is: popping vitamins opens a menu

[ul][li]Pop a single pill[/li]
[li]Start taking pills regularly[/li]
[li]Stop taking pills regularly[/li][/ul]

Taking a single pill would give a vitamin disease (or boost existing one’s time if it’s below cap), which would boost health or health mod separately from food, but only if it’s low enough (“supplements aren’t a substitute for a varied diet”).
The second option would add a disease/mutation/state/whatever that would make the player pop pills at optimal time (maybe even during sleep) for no move points (to avoid “I automatically grabbed pills and tank smashed me, thanks devs!”) like inhaler works for asthmatics.[/quote]
This is way overcomplicated for such a simple issue. If we do decide to do something about it, which I’m not convinced needs to happen, it would be to adjust how vitamins work such that something simple like taking one a day is optimal, and has a wide margin such that there’s no reason to stick to a specific schedule.

This doesn’t need fixing, this is one of the intended drawbacks of that build.

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:1, topic:7604”]My idea of fixing this would be:

[ul][li]At very low health, player gets informed why regeneration is slow (“You’re very malnourished, your body heals slowly”)[/li]
[li]Extreme values move towards 0 during sleep regeneration[/li][/ul][/quote]
A message informing you that your health is poor is fine, but that’s way over-specific.
If you eat crappy food you “feel bad”, you don’t “feel like you’re healing slowly”.
ONE of the things that helps with malnutrition is sleep, try some of the other things, like eating healthy food and not being a cybernetic abomination.

5

Healthiness could be based on the morale system. If you do healthy things, it goes up, regeneration is hastened and likelihood of sickness goes down. Doing unhealthy things subtracts, increasing chance of infection and the specific item may trigger an unhealthiness effect, like ulcers/nausea for alcohol, “vein injury” from injection drug use, flat impairs regen and causes pain, “burnt sinuses” from inhalable/insufflable drugs which costs movement points. This could be incorporated into a lot of drugs/traits to influence chances and severity of effects, like comedowns and relief from addiction.

6

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:4, topic:7604”]2. Is kind of a problem, but you’re exaggerating the tedium a bit, once every x hours is a pretty long time, it’s a bit hard to take the argument that doing something once every 2,000+ turns is tedious. Just do it twice a day or something like in real life. I wouldn’t accept an invasive “fix” for this, only a very simple one.
3 and 4 Are intended, and you haven’t made a case for them being bad things.
5. I don’t see this, optimal play is literally “eat healthy food, avoid unhealthy things and take vitamins regularly”[/quote]

Unless I misread something in the source, the actual optimal way to play is “eat all junk, negate it all with vitamins”. The way I see current solution is: food and vitamins both change health_mod. An alcohol binge topped with meth can be undone with a handful of miracle supplements (unless drugs cause addiction). Also, a player who doesn’t know how vitamins work may want to overdose on vitamins or otherwise apply all sorts of game logic or real life logic. Until I read the forums, I thought that eating 5 pills at once (they spawn in large numbers) 5 times a day is a good idea.

As for tedium: this is a mechanism that reward “oh I should pop a pill right now” kind of thoughts. This is a very simple action that doesn’t result in any visible feedback. It is also easy to forget. While it is not tedious in the sense you repeat same button presses 30 times, it is “mental clutter”, a part of to-do list that could be easily moved into game.

As for disabled regeneration being intended: it is really confusing when it happens. As I said, at first I thought it’s a bug. There’s nothing in the game that prepares you for it, no information, no nothing, just suddenly the character stops regenerating with no warning. Not everyone knows the source code and leaky bionic’s description certainly isn’t descriptive enough to make it obvious what is going on.

Back to my idea of fix: slow-release (painkiller style) vitamins with optional automatic taking that doesn’t use move points. Possibly with a scaling to make it more useful for less healthy characters and less for the more healthy. Is it a good idea for the fix?

7

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:4, topic:7604”][quote=“Coolthulhu, post:1, topic:7604”]My idea is: popping vitamins opens a menu

[ul][li]Pop a single pill[/li]
[li]Start taking pills regularly[/li]
[li]Stop taking pills regularly[/li][/ul]

Taking a single pill would give a vitamin disease (or boost existing one’s time if it’s below cap), which would boost health or health mod separately from food, but only if it’s low enough (“supplements aren’t a substitute for a varied diet”).
The second option would add a disease/mutation/state/whatever that would make the player pop pills at optimal time (maybe even during sleep) for no move points (to avoid “I automatically grabbed pills and tank smashed me, thanks devs!”) like inhaler works for asthmatics.[/quote]
This is way overcomplicated for such a simple issue. If we do decide to do something about it, which I’m not convinced needs to happen, it would be to adjust how vitamins work such that something simple like taking one a day is optimal, and has a wide margin such that there’s no reason to stick to a specific schedule.[/quote]

8

How about the solution i2amroy suggested - active items
Is that overcomplicated too?

I’d give up on the idea of fixing it, but current vitamins essentially reduce the entire huge health system to bloat. It’s a big waste, since the health system otherwise looks rather well developed and probably took a lot of work.
Removing the vitamins totally could also fix it.

9

So here’s the basic idea I was having for vitamins now that I’ve looked into it a bit more.

  1. Reduce vitamin spawn numbers. This means that older characters would have a bit of an oversupply, but it should make it more balanced over time.
  2. Vitamins lay an effect that provides occasional health_mod points (maybe 40 over the course of the day, so 10 per health roll). This effect lasts for a whole day from one pill and is capped at that amount, meaning taking more than one per day doesn’t help, it just resets your effect timer to 24 hours. (If this waits until after the effect rewrite hits it will be trivial to implement).
  3. Change the name to “One-a-day vitamins” or something similar and maybe change the description to indicate that they are intended to be taken once per day.

The end result should be that it is something that gives a small capped amount of health and informs the player of that fact. It also would bypass any sort of hack, once the effect rewrite lands this will be precisely the type of thing that it will be designed to handle.

10

Yea that sounds like it has the behavior I was looking for.

11

Me, I’d like some basic wear and tear when it comes to health. Going below 20% HP and then fixing yourself up with ramshackle medical supplies (a million cotton balls)… now that’s probably gonna leave some scars in more ways than one.

Get hurt enough and your max health goes down. Could slowly regenerate over time, maybe even toughening you up some (slightly more max HP). Proper medical care (first-aid, doctor’s bag, medical CBMs) would speed things along.
Or, you know, just have your max health trickle down with every severe injury.

And do gimp the vitamins. A lot. They just seem like untouched pre-DDA relics at this point.

12

Gotta admit, I’ve found bandages more useful than first aid kits. At Level 3 first aid you get (seemingly) more “heal” than a single first aid kit, and in a lot less time.

13

This outcome is something I want eventually, track individual wounds and your treatment of them, if they don’t heal just right you might end up with a scar, which can cause some issues (less flexibility, maybe some chronic pain), but make some things easier (with enough scar tissue and repeated healing, you can get physically tougher, this is why martial artists hit hard things repeatedly, over time it calcifies their bones, making them stronger and heavier, and creates callouses and scar tissue, which is likewise more resistant to damage). With more severe injuries, normal healing might never make it 100%, leading to chronic injuries that plague you for the rest of the game (possibly outside some super-rare mega-heal thing, maybe the stemcell treatment?)

[quote=“Slax, post:11, topic:7604”]Get hurt enough and your max health goes down. Could slowly regenerate over time, maybe even toughening you up some (slightly more max HP). Proper medical care (first-aid, doctor’s bag, medical CBMs) would speed things along.
Or, you know, just have your max health trickle down with every severe injury.[/quote]
Not a fan of having max health degrade over time as such, but as I outlined above, you’d accumulate chronic injuries over time.

14

3 posts were split to a new topic: Overnight healing is too fast

15

A post was merged into an existing topic: Overnight healing is too fast