Ive been giving it some thought for morale and its use and proper effects on the gameplay.
For most people it seems to be something you can disregard, and perhaps it shouldnt be something we ignore except for studying/grinding.
I know that its vital for my early game, since I balance slow learning and bad temper and addiction and fast reading and other morale-sensative traits.
Some thoughts
-Lowered threshold for stat decreases. -50 is the minimal for crafting refusal, -100 for stat lose. These are hard to reach without torrential rain or withdrawal.
-Focus related roll modifiers. Low focus applies a penalty, high with a minor boon.
-More persistant modifiers. Make boons and maluses last longer. That awesome meal I ate at breakfast is still awesome at dinner. That means a lot to me personally, as irl I certainly feel better at 5pm if I ate a solid breakfast than if I skipped it or ate garbage.
-Modifiers for eating regular meals or variety. These don’t need to be huge -at first- but theyd flavor the game more. This helps with the grinding session. People will be less capable of 2 week grind sessions if they slowly accumulate maluses from eating pemmican only.
-lower or cap the penalties from filthy clothes, allow them to last after clothing removal. You ever feel itchy after taking off a dirty shirt you’ve sweated in all day? Imagine a gore covered shirt that you pulled off a dead guy who shat himself before dying.
-Bonuses for explosions or low chance successes.
-Bonuses for human contact, and postive contact. Positive, as in trading, talking in non-agonistic manner, generally working to rebuild society, etc.
I’d suggest significantly lowering loss from rain. Right now, being caught outside in a heavy rain for a meaningful amount of time somehow causes your character to become a weeping wreck who can’t bring themselves to so much as tie a sheet into a bag.
On the topic of which, removing the “can’t craft” low-morale penalty entirely. It makes no frickin’ sense. “This rotten meat tastes so awful and this book is so depressing that I can’t even consider whether or not I can make a sword until after the taste leaves my mouth, but I feel fine for welding a motorcycle together from scrap!” It would make infinitely more sense to have crafting take longer or have a higher chance of failure as a result of sadness.
Do they really change that much do you think in nature? I ask because I have a garden. While good dark soil can turn to sand. The shape that the soil when grass grows(then hoed) will kinda just keep shape. A good example of this is forensics finding tire tracks weeks after a crime.
Nature is so slow I think I just saved you a lot of time finding out how to do it. As for WHY you would want to now
(up to you naturally)
A rather significant suggestion I’d like to make: swap the stat loss and no-craft thresholds around, such that -100 morale denies crafting, -50 is where stats start falling down.
The main reason being that crafting while low on morale can be a catch 22 situation, where your character refuses to do anything with the oatmeal but eat it raw, or refuses to make a towel to dry themselves with because they’re soaking wet, etc…
That sort of mental logic would only really make sense at very low morales, where making sense sort of got stepped on by that deformed fetus you just ate.
On top of that, the stat loss at -100 is very close to meaningless, due to how small they are, and due to how the intelligence stat means nothing at this point.
Think about it this way: What are you using int for when your training is already nixed (low focus), reading is impossible, crafting is impossible, vehicle building, and construction, all impossible?
If it were England the zombies would be far angrier, nether monsters (at least those you could actually see) would be faceless gentlemen in formalwear seeking to drag you into constant, all consuming pale mists, and the cults would be burning giant wooden effigies and training bees to kill intruders. Pits would contain hidden alien artefacts mind controlling various people and giving them telekinetic doom powers, friendly NPCs would periodically transform into murderous psychopathic abominations at night to murder you in your sleep (they’d feel really bad about it in the morning), and all the wolves would be replaced by intelligent lycanthropic hybrids.
Not to mention that “morale” would cease to be a concern, as the “stiff upper lip” trait would restrict any morale changes to at most +/- 10, and the enjoyment level on all food would be so far in the negative that any foreigner without the trait would have Shift-Q’d long before the cataclysm broke out.
[quote=“iceball3, post:13, topic:12309”]A rather significant suggestion I’d like to make: swap the stat loss and no-craft thresholds around, such that -100 morale denies crafting, -50 is where stats start falling down…
Think about it this way: What are you using int for when your training is already nixed (low focus), reading is impossible, crafting is impossible, vehicle building, and construction, all impossible?[/quote]
1: Totally agree, and 2: “Ensuring that my kung fu remains the strongest kung fu.”
Another significant morale suggestion: When checking to see whether a craft is impossible due to morale, have certain recipes tagged to ignore certain categories of morale penalties, based on needs.
Crafting towels, any clothing with waterproofing or water protection, or constructing a Lean-To, should ignore Wet morale penalties, crafting clothing with nonzero warmth should ignore cold penalties, crafting good food should ignore “ate something gross” penalties, but not “barfed” penalties, et cetera.
Feels kinda catch 22 when you’re too wet to craft a towel or a shelter.
The Crafting needs to not be a hardcap from moral, but instead be a granular decrease of levels of craftable thing and success rate. Something Like this:
-500 morale: Crying puddle of shame, waiting to be eaten, because the world is just to much
-400 morale: You spend as much as 30 minutes to do so much as make a pot of rommen or cooked oatmeal, you can’t bring yourself to make anything more complicated than Lvl 1 skill requirement projects, and have 1/4-1/2 chance of failing.
-350 morale: There is no way you can be bothered to do more than LVL 2 skill projects
-300 morale: < Level 3 skill is beyond you right now
~
V
100 morale: first stat gets debuffed
50 morale: higher chance of failing, failing gives slightly larger morale penalty for longer.
-0 moral: Failures give slight short-term penalty
+50 morale: Failure doesn’t bother you as much
+100 morale: First stat buff, failures give slight cumulative bonus for success chance and decrease craft time on same project attempts (for 1 hour/until next success of same project)
+150 morale Failure is almost irrelivent,
+200 morale: Fail bonus increased (for 1.5 hour, or next success, whichever comes first)
etc.
With them numbers, Morale effects for things that ain’t killing NPCs really need to last much longer
what the highest and lowest values you gotten without trying to max out either end?
I do agree on moving the first stat lose and boost to 50 rather then 100; might make it worth going for enjoyable food…and also make mood swings more of a noticeable thingy that isn’t … oh i just don’t want to craft anything for a bit
I’m all for the max/min being raised/ spread out to allow the little things to build up without becoming game breaking, but that was really more about the making loss of craftable things gradual rather than suddenly can’t boil water, low moral having success penalties, failure having morale penalties and making high morale have bonuses other than just faster learning
Why not just nerf crafting skill, like -1 to each for every -20 of moral you get? When your moral get terrible, you cannot do anything except maybe stuff you’re so good at it’s automatic.
