Thing is, pain doesn’t seem to do enough outside of combat. In combat, it decreases stats and what have you, but outside of it? Nothin’. This makes several things moot, like acid rain and cauterization, if you’re out of combat for either.
So, why shouldn’t pain reduce morale, too? (Exception: Masochist, obviously, which would remove the penalty and increase morale. Masochist should probably be a -3 or -4 point to make up for it.)
Preferably at a 1 pain = -2 or -3 morale, since losing 15 morale from cauterization is hardly an effect, while 30 is a bit more severe and 45 will keep you from crafting or reading because you just gave yourself 3rd degree burns, but I’ll leave balancing up to the devs who are probably smarter than me. And very handsome.
This makes painkillers more useful, aside from just for the sake of jumping back into combat quicker. It makes acid rain more deadly, since you’ll now get depressed at the fact your flesh is sizzling off your skin, rather than it just being harder to fight in. It also makes cauterization a less viable choice outside combat, so you actually have a reason to use all those bottles of disinfectant being stored, rather than just treating every small bite wound by setting your flesh alight, creating a toss-up between morale loss, pain, and minor damage or saving a first-aid kit for later.
It’s also realistic, and seeing as this game is pretty much a zombie survival simulator, realism is always a good thing (so long as it’s properly balanced, which I feel this is.)
I think pain does affect morale… If it doesn’t, I think this makes sense. On the topic of pain not doing anything outside of com at, movement cost penalties make it take longer to travel I believe and stat decreases can screw with crafting and other tasks.
Depends on the level of the pain and the individual. Different people deal with pain differently. Many people who get a couple of teeth knocked out playing sports or whatever might be somewhat incapacitated by the experience, but some may not.
When it happened to me a few years ago, I (a) tried to figure out what exactly the damage was and (b) was laughing with my friends about it while attempting not to bleed everywhere until I could get to a dentist. Sure, it would have impeded my effectiveness in a survival situation but it didn’t negatively impact my state of mind at all beyond knowing that it would be a right pain in the ass to have it fixed. However, it should also be noted that my brain chemistry is clinically fucked so I do not qualify as the average person when it comes to reactions to just about anything.
That said, ending up with a broken bone in a zombie apocalypse would most certainly be detrimental to the morale of anyone.
Yeah, there are pain-thresholds, adrenaline (someone in an Adrenaline Rush ought to ignore some amount of Pain penalties), speed effects (Acid Rain in an open field, no raincoat = triple-digit Pain), etc to consider. No need to stack Morale debuffs on top of pain debuffs.
I think severe pain or certain types of pain should cause morale loss. Having an infected bite or gangrene should be very demoralizing. Having your limbs completely broken should be demoralizing. It might make it better to have the morale loss only take effect after an amount of time. For example, you’re in combat, you get messed up bad, you defeat the threat and staunch the bleeding/apply first aid. However, you’re still at 30+ pain. If you don’t apply some painkillers (because you don’t have any) after about 30 minutes, you start to get depressed as the intractability of the pain becomes apparent.
I also think morale loss should become severe during starvation, dehydration, severe illness.
In general, morale loss has never been a threat to me whatsoever despite complete recklessness on my part. This needs to change. I literally watched my character burn up and die from a severe infection over the course of 24 hours, he vomited probably 30+ times and had -140 movement at the time of expiration. Yet his morale never once dipped negative. Sure I had painkillers, but come on, you’re watching your life gush out of you over a day’s time, but never once start feeling wistful? Hell, by the end I actually wanted him to shoot himself.
Pain directly affects your focus equilibrium level, canceling out morale on a 1:1 basis.
Pain lowers your stats.
Pain lowers your global speed by 0.7 moves per point up to a maximum of 60. This can be countered by painkillers.
Painkillers ALSO reduce your global speed, so you can’t always completely compensate for speed loss.
Morale affects global speed slightly and stats if you have a LOT of morale.
Morale directly affects your focus equilibrium level.
The only thing that morale affects that pain doesn’t also affect (and in a much more severe way) is whether you’re able to craft/read. Adding a morale penalty to pain would be “double-dipping.” If you think the penalty for pain isn’t high enough, that’s one thing, but basing that opinion on the fact that your morale isn’t affected doesn’t make sense. It would seriously take a lot of pain to actually affect your morale, as in a, “Just cut my head off already and stop pulling out my intestines,” level of pain.
Fine, at +70 pain start suffering morale damage. Or +100, pick a high number, whatever balances. At that level you may very well be dead anyway, so if you manage to limp away you’re going to be in for serious agony. That’s going to make you a SAD PANDA.
Again, the point of this isn’t to buff pain, which is a very dangerous already, but to make low morale actually a threat. Morale damage from agony seems a natural course, but if that can’t be balanced, fine. I just think it’s kind of funny that I can run around shooting zombie children in the face, soaking wet from acid rain, reading hospital reports, eating spam, and twigging out from nicotine withdrawal and the morale damage comes out to, I don’t know, something a ham sandwich will fix with gourmand. In other words, even while being completely negligent, suicidal even, low morale STILL isn’t threat. Lame…
I believe there are plans to make morale more of a long-term-consequences system than an instant-effect thing, i.e. it will take longer for your morale to go up or down, and it will not fall back to neutral as easily.
This was mentioned when I suggested that the player should take a morale hit when butchering (where butchering means “cutting up into steaks”) human and very-human-looking corpses, unless they had some sort of sociopath trait to prevent it. The general consensus was that it would be too big of a penalty in the current system, but might be addressed in the future morale system.
I think your idea about pain affecting morale is in that same vein.
Pain shouldn’t affect morale , it should directly make you unable to craft or do other things that require you to chill out , relax and take your time. Usually when someone is in pain , he doesn’t feel sad , his survival instinct makes him to want to live not go depressed and curl up in a ball in the corner of the room.
I can agree with that, it seems weird to me the idea of my character cutting up an entire towns worth of inhabitants into steaks and it doesn’t bother him at all. I like to assume he’s just beheading them with his machete to cover for it.
That would certainly be an improvement if they can pull it off.
You need to think through the whole scenario. Yes, getting you’re arm broken in a fight is not going to make you sad. But what about an hour after the fight, when you don’t have a splint to set it? What about six hours after the fight, when the swelling becomes very bad and you don’t have painkillers? What about 24 hours and gangrene sets in because you didn’t set it and have no painkillers and no antibiotics. “Fight or flight” is a great survival instinct, but it doesn’t last. When it ends, it ends with a crash, and if you haven’t resolved the situation by then the pain stops becoming a motivator and starts becoming a torment.
Having long term pain sap your spirit could open up neat perks. Pain resistant could also make you tolerant to morale loss from it, adrenaline rush would set the clock longer before morale damage sets in etc etc…
Morale damage kicks in only with persistent pain in injuries and when you don’t know what to do about it. But when you have more of minor wounds , like a bite wound on the arm , while it would crush your dreams of flying sky survivor fortress , just disinfecting it or cauterizing would greatly help your morale as you have hope of the infection not yet spreading. While the more of open wound injuries might make you feel dizzy from the splatter of blood , just minor treatment , like bandage makes you feel a lot safer. Other than infected wounds and broken arms (wich are a death sentence in real life survival situation(unless you’re a doctor who can set bones straight)) , there should be no moral penalty on pain on minor injuries.
When you have an infected bite wound and you let it progress , that should totally smack your character out of reality and make him the saddest little pal on the world.