So making it an optional feature would work for both sides, no?
It only makes logical sense to do this.
Only people heavily mutated into the slime category should be able to heal on a dime.
And people with nano-bot regeneration.
Bandages are no alternative to Sci-fi medical ampules either.
Healing from sleeping is fine the way I see it. Since an ingame day is pretty much 1 week real life scaling.
No.
I don’t get why everything needs to be an optional feature - we’re going to end up with hundreds of optional features and no way forward (as for every optional feature, gameplay has to be balanced to work with it on or off). This makes progress impossible, and this idea REALLY MAKES SENSE from a balance point of view.
You wouldn’t have to hide in your shelter to heal. Being bandaged would cause a healing over time effect, so you could still explore, gather supplies, etc.
If you’re on the edge of death then that’s a different story, usually bandages are for when you take a few hits and want to keep going… and even if you do end up having to hole up in some random house and heal, then a) waiting for a few hours is three button presses away, and b) having to hide in a house for a few hours because you got beaten up by zombies makes for a pretty damn interesting narrative. It could mess your plans - like maybe you wanted to be back at your shelter before dark, and because you had to hide and heal now it’s after dark and you have to decide between making your way back in the dark or hiding out until morning. Those kinds of situations are not a problem, they’re awesome. It’s what makes games like this more interesting than Left 4 Dead.
Bandages and sleeping should stack, of course. So if you bandage up and sleep you get the healing benefits of both activities at the same time.
And no to optional features. Every time there’s some disagreement someone chimes in with ‘make it an option.’ It’s probably not going to happen; Kevin and Gryph have commented that they want to reduce the number of game mechanic toggles, not increase them (not to be confused with worldgen options). Sometimes it makes sense to have options, but usually it doesn’t. Binky is right: you can’t balance the game against five hundred options, it just can’t be done.
Ah well, same old story: it’ll make early game harder.
Sounds fun to me, but I know my way around the game.
[quote=“GrizzlyAdamz, post:25, topic:4433”]Ah well, same old story: it’ll make early game harder.
Sounds fun to me, but I know my way around the game.[/quote]
It won’t specifically make the beginning harder other than that you will have to be more cautious as you can’t heal mid fight. I don’t see that as being a problem and feel it would add to the tactics of the game as you can’t just run in and hit stuff and then use x10 first aid kits and to keep going till you’ve defeated everything.
As Hyena Grin says, you’d still be able to do stuff whilst you heal, and it’d put you a lot more on edge rather than just being able to charge around and mash the heal key.
Early game you’re usually stuck trying to build up FA supplies anyway. I don’t see how that’ll hurt it any more. HoT is a better system in my opinion.
Oops, I accidentally deleted PAquito’s post instead of replying to it, why those two buttons are so close to each other I have no idea 
… Luckily it was still in my browser cache, so here it is.
[quote=“Paquito”]Remember that this isn’t a simulator. “Realism” is included in the game because it’s fun. Would this change make the game more challenging in a way that’s entertaining, or would it add more
"maintenance" work for the player to handle that detracts from the fun elements of this game? Also, it’s tricky to argue that “first aid” should be handled more realistically in an environment where
body parts have “hit points”, which is pretty fundamentally unrealistic.
Not that I’m against any nerfs to first-aid (it does seem a bit overpowered), but I’d be careful how far we’d go with it.[/quote]
Actually as far as I am concerned, it IS a simulator. I start from “what can happen in this scenario?”, and try to make that mechanically fun, not the other way around. The goal is still to maintain a banance between realism and gameplay, so totally boring or pointless things may not be included in the simulation (wear on items used as intended) or happen in the background (e.g. weapon maintenance).
Also long-term I’m planning on supplanting HP anyway, so that argument falls apart as well.
Well, I’m happy that weapon maintenance and item wear and tear won’t be a thing, at least. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a good idea about how to implement them.
Oi, that’s off-topic, and I disagree.
On-topic, it makes the early game harder in the sense that you can’t dodge into a bathroom and apply a 3x stack of first aid. HoT would make the game more punishing for those that get hit- new characters that don’t have skill/armor & the new players behind those new characters who don’t know how to fight zombies.
Like I said, it sounds like fun, but I know how to play. /leshrug
Well there’d be a rebalance involved, if you can only use one bandage per bodypart at a time, it might heal more HP total. IIRC bandages heal a pretty tiny number of HP, so there might be room to increase it a bit.
[quote=“GrizzlyAdamz, post:30, topic:4433”]On-topic, it makes the early game harder in the sense that you can’t dodge into a bathroom and apply a 3x stack of first aid. HoT would make the game more punishing for those that get hit- new characters that don’t have skill/armor & the new players behind those new characters who don’t know how to fight zombies.
Like I said, it sounds like fun, but I know how to play. /leshrug[/quote]
Surely learning is part/all of the fun? The main thing all RLs are renowned for is their frequent deaths (and permadeath) and the learning/figuring things out that comes from them. I don’t think on the grand scale of things if a player dies a few times from not realising it’s HoT and that they need to be cautious that it’s particularly ‘punishing’ or going to put them off.
Not wanting to sound combative or anything (at all) but it sounds as though you’re basically saying ‘players shouldn’t be able to die because dying is not fun’. I know you’re not exactly saying that, but really, without a game having threatening circumstances it’s not much fun for anyone.
A revision that foregoes HP in general would be awesome. I’ve always disliked hitpoints as a system. I think there’s a lot of unexplored territory in a system that tracks wounds as unique status effects (that cripple and hinder movement and actions), and what kills you would actually be accumulated blood loss and/or organ damage.
At least that’s where my mind goes when I think of a system without HP. Mileage may vary.
Anyway, I don’t think a heal-over-time effect is going to be a huge shock to anyone. HoT is kind of a staple of gaming these days (though most include instant heals as well). As long as there is a status effect on the @ page that lists 'Bandaged ’ and gives a brief note that the affected bodypart will heal over time until the status effect wears off, I can’t see it confusing anyone who is even passingly able to navigate Cata’s interface.
I quite like the notion that damage should be something to be avoided at all costs, rather than simply a drain on your resources. As long as you have medical gear that can instantly heal you, the threat enemies pose will be minimal at best.
I think the same way. There are no medical potions, and makes the player be too overpowered depending on its inventory. If we are supposed to act like in real life we would, i am not going to attack a zombear even with 99 first aid kits.
[quote=“Hyena Grin, post:33, topic:4433”]A revision that foregoes HP in general would be awesome. I’ve always disliked hitpoints as a system. I think there’s a lot of unexplored territory in a system that tracks wounds as unique status effects (that cripple and hinder movement and actions), and what kills you would actually be accumulated blood loss and/or organ damage.
At least that’s where my mind goes when I think of a system without HP. Mileage may vary.[/quote]
This is precisely what I want to do, individual wounds accumulate and debilitate you, interfering with your ability to defend yourself, and once it passes a certain point, the severity of the wounds climbs until you get taken out. The individual wounds could be treated in various ways to make them heal faster and/or to avoid complications (like infection).
I’m a bit surprised really, even Diablo, the benchmark for non-roguelike rogulelikeness has HoT.
I think HoT just makes more sense to everyone from a ‘realism’ standpoint (as all serious games, no matter the genre, seem to be striving to be more realistic) - nothing is instantly healed in real life so it makes more intuitive sense I suppose.
I really like the idea of wounds, but as something to think about, I imagine it’d be very difficult to display with the current sidebar configuration/without a health screen, and it’s something you do need to be easily visible. If you had a completely linear system for wounding (bruised->cut->broken->shattered) then that’d be easy to display, but I’m assuming that you’d want a more complicated system, and I feel that’d be difficult to display/keep track of if you had an arm that was ‘badly bruised, bleeding and shattered’ for instance.
I also agree with the healing over time. While I tend to prefer gameplay over realism, in this case I figure the change would improve both. A large stack of first aid kits makes me feel far to secure when surrounded by enemies, for I can heal all damage any time I want.
Also wanted to say that going away from HP sounds awesome. The main enjoyment of DF Adventure Mode has always been the damage screen (uh, that sounds kinda twisted I suppose). But with all the content we already have such a fundamental rewrite would be a HUGE undertaking.
Yea that’s the plan, but it’s going to take a while.
To be fully implemented, every source of damage has to have a range of wounds defined for it, each of which will need effects, descriptions, resistances, and healing methods,
For the main screen there will be some kind of summary, probably the same thing we have now, but there will also be a menu of some kind to display every single cut, scratch and bruise. When applying medicinal aid, it’ll auto-target the “worst” wound that it can treat, but you can retarget it if you want in case you’re doing something weird (e.g. you have a cut (minor) and a gash(major), applying alchohol (as a disenfectant) would auto-target the gash since it’s more serious, but you might want to clean the cut instead because you have a first-aid kit back at base and you want to use that on the gash).
The other question is making it player-only, applying it to NPCs too (probably would just leave them dumb and always treat the “worst” wound until they run out of medicine), or applying it to all creatures (who just get natural healing, but it’d probably be faster), and then the open question of how it interacts with weird stuff like zombies and insects
I am in full support of that idea.
Also, I sort of also find this game to be more of a simulator then a game, or rather a lot of both.
In fact, dieing is fun.
Having a proper healing screen and having wounds, bruises, and cuts is gonna be so awesome, even if it is slowly added, bit by bit.
Also, will first aid kits, allow us to heal multiple scratches or wounds? Or like, First aid kits have multiple charges?
But for the moment, Healing over time sounds like a good idea. For the fear of death, combat, and the balancing of the game too.
Though, I generally avoid fighting when I can, anyway.
Also, on a slightly related topic, my honest opinion in healing rate is sleeping heals too much. Though, I have never really played witht he thought in mind that a day is equal to a week… I always assumed a day was a day, and weather patterns and seasons were just screwed up.
I don’t know why everyone seems to be so eager to play ‘Moping around base simulator 9000’. If there were more methods to heal yourself quickly, but maybe with the cost of giving you mutations or something, or perhaps more stuff to do when just sitting around, that’d be one thing, but as it stands the current sleeping healing rate is fine.