Morale Penalties For Chopping Up Duders/Children

[system]

If eating human meat causes morale damage, maybe chopping up a human body should also cause some distress. I suppose you could say shooting walking dead bodies all day makes you somewhat inured to field dissection, but on the other hand shooting zombie children upsets you, so clearly you aren’t a complete sociopath. Perhaps butchering children should also distress you? And maybe having a high medical skill could make butchering them less stressful?

[grisamentum]

I agree, there’s something to this.

Especially chopping up children zombies. Killing them is already stressful; shouldn’t dismembering them be extremely stressful?

Perhaps butchering a zombie should give the same penalty as killing a child zombie. I mean, as it is, butchering zombies is pretty much just a tedious task that makes revivification mechanics pointless.

[Bladerock]

[quote=“grisamentum, post:2, topic:1966”]Perhaps butchering a zombie should give the same penalty as killing a child zombie. I mean, as it is, butchering zombies is pretty much just a tedious task that makes revivification mechanics pointless.[/quote]Originally, it meant that taking a vehicle to wipe up zombies was going to be followed by having to butcher HUNDREDS of corpses, heavily reducing the viability of clearing large swaths of city in one go.

However, my understanding is that bodies being damaged by vehicles into non-reviving kinda got rid of that too. So, yeah, cutting up reviving zombies is just busy work.

This doesn’t fix that in any way, though. “My morale will go down for chopping up the dudes i already killed and got my experience for” is hardly any kind of disadvantage.

[esran]

honestly i think corpses being damaged is stupid, they should either remove corpses getting up again or remove intant gibbing. having both of them is stupid and does nothing but force melee characters to do busy work.

[system]

Hmm not what I intended by raising this point but yes you’re all right it is kind of pointless to have a revification problem solvable by simple butchering. I really, really like the threat of reviving zombies, so that means butchering needs to be made more dangerous to provide a risk tradeoff. Make the player say “do I risk leaving them intact to rise again, or do I risk cutting them up?”

Perhaps butchering zombies could result in infection, contamination, morale loss. In the case of advanced zombies there could be advanced risks, spitter zombies causing acid burns, shockers causing electrocution, hulk zombies being reactivated by jamming a knife in them. Or maybe butchering certain zombies requires an advanced survival/medical skill.

[KA101]

We already had this discussion in the Github issue tracker: https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/1680

Taking morale hits for something that’s extremely commonplace, without any way to become inured to them, seems a pretty gamebreaking idea. Once the morale mechanics get set up so characters can have shifting likes & dislikes, then having characters have to get used to butchering humans could be interesting. As is, having Focus go through the floor isn’t interesting or a trade-off: it just craps on players who want to do non-recreational things after combat.

Oppose.