Kickstarter Thread - The Kickstarter is being fulfilled

[Taraq]

This quietly slipped into the experimentals a few days ago. The guilt penalty degrades linearly until you’ve killed 100 of the guilt-causing monster, at which point it no longer causes guilt.

Now we’ll have to start farming elementary schools for child killing guilt reduction…

[Nighthawk]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:379, topic:1854”]This quietly slipped into the experimentals a few days ago. The guilt penalty degrades linearly until you’ve killed 100 of the guilt-causing monster, at which point it no longer causes guilt.

Now we’ll have to start farming elementary schools for child killing guilt reduction…[/quote]
Actually, one school usually contains almost a hundred of 'em. I once lured them all out and ran over every single one with my truck. Morale was around -400-something.

I think guilt should decrease only from repeated exposure to immoral acts over a long period of time, to make sure that people don’t do like I did and just mass-murder an entire elementary school to have no more guilt after that. In reality, killing that many at once would be a single heavily-traumatizing event which would not necessarily make you immune to the effects of guilt.

Dunno if it’d be worth it to implement a more complex system, but that’s my two cents, anyway.

[xLemor]

It should only affect you the first few times, they are zombies after all. If something was trying to eat me alive I sure won’t feel any guilt.

[TheGrifter]

I think a sanity system would be nice. You know how in the Sims, there’s an environment mood thingy? Well, if your safehouse is covered in blood and guts, corpses, and such, maybe you could get a penalty to morale, or something. Perhaps you could get messages like in schizophrenia, but more depressive. “You begin thinking dark thoughts.” “You think about putting a gun in your mouth.”. No forced suicide or anything though.

When fighting the Lovecraft monsters, there ought to be a lasting “paranoid” mutation, which would work something like insomnia, or schizophrenia. Messages like when you see a monster, and it asks you to stop crafting, but the message would say something more vague, like “You THINK you hear a monster. Would you like to stop crafting? Y/N”.

Nothing too gameplay breaking, but the mental aspect needs fleshing out. That, and NPCs.

[Taraq]

[quote=“TheGrifter, post:384, topic:1854”]I think a sanity system would be nice. You know how in the Sims, there’s an environment mood thingy? Well, if your safehouse is covered in blood and guts, corpses, and such, maybe you could get a penalty to morale, or something. Perhaps you could get messages like in schizophrenia, but more depressive. “You begin thinking dark thoughts.” “You think about putting a gun in your mouth.”. No forced suicide or anything though.

When fighting the Lovecraft monsters, there ought to be a lasting “paranoid” mutation, which would work something like insomnia, or schizophrenia. Messages like when you see a monster, and it asks you to stop crafting, but the message would say something more vague, like “You THINK you hear a monster. Would you like to stop crafting? Y/N”.

Nothing too gameplay breaking, but the mental aspect needs fleshing out. That, and NPCs.[/quote]

We might need a way to clean up all the blood, guts, and lovecraftian horrors I end up spilling in my house before this gets implemented. Preferably not with DF’s infinitely spreading contaminants.

[xLemor]

Ghosts of slain npcs would be nice to have, like they could haunt the area the npc died and affect you in various ways like waking you up or spook you once in a while

[system]

Ghosts of slain npcs would be nice to have, like they could haunt the area the npc died and affect you in various ways like waking you up or spook you once in a while

I wouldn’t say having them haunt the area like a real ghost. But seeing their face before they died while you sleep, or hearing their last words repeat in your head would work great for the guilt of NPC killing. I think that would be a great way to implement a “ghost”.

[ArgusTheCat]

[quote=“TheGrifter, post:384, topic:1854”]“You begin thinking dark thoughts.” “You think about putting a gun in your mouth.”. No forced suicide or anything though.

“You THINK you hear a monster. Would you like to stop crafting? Y/N”.

Nothing too gameplay breaking, but the mental aspect needs fleshing out. That, and NPCs.[/quote]

Why not?

The problem with sanity systems that give you weird messages is that once you know what they are, they don’t mess with you as a player anymore. If there’s no actual game disruption, then there’s no real motivation for an experienced player to not just shake it off and keep doing business as normal.

I’ve been playing Ben Crowshaw’s new game, Consuming Shadow, lately. And you know what it does? If your sanity drops too low, you WILL kill yourself. It starts replacing buttons with a ‘shoot yourself’ option, which becomes harder and harder to avoid. It is a DAMN good motivation to not go insane. And I think if we’re gonna put sanity in, we need something like that. We need characters getting terrified and outright ruining whatever they’re crafting. We need drivers to freak the fuck out and swerve wildly to avoid things, regardless of the presence of trees or absence or road. We need to see monsters as loved ones, and be actually unable to attack them. And, yes, we need to have character commit suicide if they go too far.

Anything else is toothless and doesn’t belong in this game where drinking from the wrong source can be your death.

[vache]

Only problem is people seem to be split between wanting a difficult game and one that displays a confirmation prompt every time you take an action that might result in you getting hurt. Putting something in that might force you to kill yourself probably won’t be well received by a large group of cata’s audience, even though I think the feeling of losing control of your character’s actions is probably a good reflection of how your character itself might be feeling.

[system]

Only problem is people seem to be split between wanting a difficult game and one that displays a confirmation prompt every time you take an action that might result in you getting hurt. Putting something in that might force you to kill yourself probably won’t be well received by a large group of cata’s audience, even though I think the feeling of losing control of your character’s actions is probably a good reflection of how your character itself might be feeling.

I would say do it like Eternal Darkness did. Instead of an action saying something like “Butcher Corpse? Y/N”, it could say “Butcher Self Y/Y”. You wont get hurt but you will lose get a negative moral penalty, how do we improve sanity? Playboys? MP3’s? Drugs? Fried Spam?

[ArgusTheCat]

Mind you, I’m not saying that we should replace prompts with suicide options. That’s not gonna work in this style of game. What I’m saying is that if we HAVE sanity, then we need actual penalties for being insane. Things that confuse the PLAYER aren’t really penalties, when an experienced player can just ignore the ones that they know are false.

The forced suicide thing would be for if you were at, say, 20% sanity and -40 morale. You just… give up. It’s hard to get there, but if you do, then it’s just as bad as letting your health drop to zero. Players don’t complain when they die because they ran out of hitpoints, and it makes sense that running out of the will to live is just as bad.

[Taraq]

We could just add extreme morale penalties for reaching that threshold - if your character can’t learn anything and is severely penalized for being that sad, it would still force the player to try to avoid it without a “Suicide? Y/N” prompt.

[dwarfkoala]

Also, I can reach that -40 threshhold by eating one piece of paper or 2 pieces of uncooked meat (IIRC)

It’s gotta be at least -200, as severe alcohol deprivation leads you to -120.

[FunsizeNinja123]

I had -90023 moral once.

Don’t ask me what I did.

[ArgusTheCat]

[quote=“FunsizeNinja123, post:394, topic:1854”]I had -90023 moral once.

Don’t ask me what I did.[/quote]

WHAT DID YOU DO.

[Nighthawk]

-90023 morale?

Shit, man, that’s a lot of mutated fetuses.

[FunsizeNinja123]

[quote=“Nighthawk, post:396, topic:1854”]-90023 morale?

Shit, man, that’s a lot of mutated fetuses.[/quote]

Found quite the collection of arms and legs in an anthill, then decided to clear out the school nearby. Then I saw that I was thirstly, then I tried to drink my water but I was carrying some bleach…

And this was around the time of the “Letter dupe glitch”. Plus I did a few more things.

[Grendus]

One way to work with a sanity/morale issue would be to remove options as the survivor’s sanity/morale degrades. For example, currently if your morale is too low you can’t craft. At lower sanity/morale, it may not allow you to take actions that cause a morale penalty (eating spoiled or unpleasant food), then it blocks actions that don’t give a morale boost (can’t eat a tin of ravioli or drink clean water), then actions that don’t give enough of a morale boost (and since you can’t cook, you need to have comfort foods pre-prepared). Eventually other actions stop working as well - the survivor slows down, begins to do less damage and fire less accurately as he/she simply no longer cares about self preservation. At the final stage full on catatonia kicks in and the survivor will stop acting for long periods of time regardless of dangers - he/she could starve to death because he/she can’t think of a reason to eat.

[infectedmochi]

Nice idea, that would be plausible solution I think. At low enough morale the survivor will stop caring even when faced with zombies and just stand there, frozen, and let the zombies munch him.

[Nighthawk]

Actually, speed reduction would make a lot of sense if you had low morale. Think about it - if you’re not motivated, are you going to move at maximum speed anywhere? No - you’re going to slump along, nowhere near energized enough to make an effort.