Morale suggestion

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Yes I know that there are a bunch of other threads on this. Most of them are quite old and dead, and there seems to be no good consensus as to how to proceed. I would like to revive the discussion.

I will outline what I think the best strategy is here, we all know what the problems with the current system are so I won’t go into that. The strengths of this strategy are that it tackles 90% of the issues with the current system, and is also very simple to implement. You would not even need to change any values on items, which given how many there are, would be a massive chunk of work.

The suggestion:
(Please note, any numbers given here are purely examples, any such system will need to be tested and tweaked to find out what works.)

Periodically, every in game minute for example, the character’s morale value is checked, and 10% of the value is added to a running total. This total ranges from -10000 to +10000 and decays back to 0 at a rate of 100 points per day. 1% of this running total is always added to the character’s actual moral value (but ignored for the purposes of calculating itself*)

The desired result:

Basically if you character has a really shit life he/she would eventually get so depressed that he can no longer function. All the exotic cooking recipes would suddenly have a purpose. Taking drugs and alcohol and reading books would become worthwhile activities. Basically the player is rewarded for making their character happy, and punished for making him/her suffer, but not to such a degree that it takes over the game.

Optional tweaks:

It seems that people can spiral into depressions much more easily than they can become permanently elated. It might be worth tweaking the system to take this into account. The decay could get much higher with a positive total and be based on how high the value is. Also ignoring the long term morale when adding to the total each period could be changed so that negative values are not ignored. This means if your character gets depressed there would be a real danger of spiraling out of control, but without the risk that players could just spend a week bingeing on chocolate bars and comic books and becoming so deliriously optimistic that nothing can get them down anymore.

2

While im usually pretty happy to say that i support new ideas, this seems like one that would just make the game too easy, you could get a mass amount of morale and then just read a few hundred books.

Sorry if i missed something in your suggestion, but this is how i see it playing out.

3

Having a long term running “bonus” to morale based on how happy/unhappy your character has been over the past few weeks is definitely something we would like to do. That said it’ll probably be focused on the longer term, meaning you can only gain a small bonus (think maybe +/- 20 ish) that doesn’t really decay over the course of a few weeks, as opposed to a larger one that decays rapidly. This might also be followed with a side effect of making immediate morale bonuses less powerful, since they would already have a long-lasting effect they would no longer need to have a large enough bonus to last for long periods of time.

4

@i2amroy
That is exactly what this achieves:
If you want +/- 20 then set the caps to +/- 2,000 on the running total. With my example numbers above this would take 20 days to decay if you have neutral morale the whole time.

Obviously if you have an implementation already planned then ignore this thread, but I think this is a relatively simple and elegant mechanism. A more complex and realistic psychology system that takes in much more factors and variables is definitely something that I would say yes!!! to but I didn’t want to post a ‘hey why don’t you spend the next six months making me happy’ suggestion thread, so I came up with the optimal time/result strategy. The actual numbers could even be put in the options menu so people can have a brutal fight against constant despair or a permanent easy to get bonus based on their play style.

@Alpha

Actually that is how I play the game anyway, but without bothering to get the morale first. I have not noticed any significant impediment to reading all the books you have as soon as you get them apart from needing food and water.

The suggestion was designed to make bad morale have a more permanent effect, I agree that building up too much positive morale could be overpowered but that does not mean that this is not the right mechanism for the system. It can easily be tweaked as I have described so that it has a weak effect on positive morale and a strong one on negative morale. In fact I get the feeling perhaps you did miss something in the suggestion. Even with the random example numbers I threw out you would have to mantain a positive morale of +100 constantly for 16 in game hours to get the max boost, and that is without my additional suggestions at the bottom to nerf positive morale.

Additionally as I say this suggestion was actually supposed to focus on negative morale. An easy tweak would be to lower the cap so that it goes from -10000 to +1000, that means the penalty/bonus maxes out at -100/+10.

Basically what I am suggesting is a simple mechanism with example balancing. If you are worried about it being too easy how about the following example:
caps -20000/+0
decay 0
morale total added every in game second
positive moral adds 1%
negative morale adds 200%

This would mean if you get -1 moral for x time you would need to get +200 morale for x time or +20 for 10x to lose the penalty, and no bonus is ever possible.

(offtopic) Does morale really effect book reading? In what way? How come I never noticed? I just read a whole library on my character only stopping every two days to hunt.

5

[quote=“Duncan, post:4, topic:5763”]@Alpha

Actually that is how I play the game anyway, but without bothering to get the morale first. I have not noticed any significant impediment to reading all the books you have as soon as you get them apart from needing food and water.

The suggestion was designed to make bad morale have a more permanent effect, I agree that building up too much positive morale could be overpowered but that does not mean that this is not the right mechanism for the system. It can easily be tweaked as I have described so that it has a weak effect on positive morale and a strong one on negative morale. In fact I get the feeling perhaps you did miss something in the suggestion. Even with the random example numbers I threw out you would have to mantain a positive morale of +100 constantly for 16 in game hours to get the max boost, and that is without my additional suggestions at the bottom to nerf positive morale.

Additionally as I say this suggestion was actually supposed to focus on negative morale. An easy tweak would be to lower the cap so that it goes from -10000 to +1000, that means the penalty/bonus maxes out at -100/+10.

Basically what I am suggesting is a simple mechanism with example balancing. If you are worried about it being too easy how about the following example:
caps -20000/+0
decay 0
morale total added every in game second
positive moral adds 1%
negative morale adds 200%

This would mean if you get -1 moral for x time you would need to get +200 morale for x time or +20 for 10x to lose the penalty, and no bonus is ever possible.

(offtopic) Does morale really effect book reading? In what way? How come I never noticed? I just read a whole library on my character only stopping every two days to hunt.

@i2amroy
That is exactly what this achieves:
If you want +/- 20 then set the caps to +/- 2,000 on the running total. With my example numbers above this would take 20 days to decay if you have neutral morale the whole time.

Obviously if you have an implementation already planned then ignore this thread, but I think this is a relatively simple and elegant mechanism. A more complex and realistic psychology system that takes in much more factors and variables is definitely something that I would say yes!!! to but I didn’t want to post a ‘hey why don’t you spend the next six months making me happy’ suggestion thread, so I came up with the optimal time/result strategy. The actual numbers could even be put in the options menu so people can have a brutal fight against constant despair or a permanent easy to get bonus based on their play style.[/quote]
Every time i try to read a full book and dont get the recipe i need i eat and drink then read it again, then i dont get the recipe again, i go to read it again “your morale is too low to read this book” or something to that degree. Not sure how you managed to read a whole library

And i abstain from this suggestion as i have re-looked what you are suggesting and decided that it would be nice to see but i also wouldn’t mind not seeing it.

6

Well it wasn’t a very good library. SCIP was the only one where my morale got so low I had to stop reading. I just do something else for an hour and then come back. Most of the books I was reading had no morale penalty.

7

Are you perhaps playing with an extremely OP character… meaning high starting points… Not judging , nor do i really care but if you are going off default than getting no morale penalty just doesn’t add up. Or maybe it does and im just cataclysming wrong

8

Well I myself find it possible to read at least medium degree books without getting morale difficulties (up to 5 in a skill), and I use the standard amount of starting points, but I put at least points into intelligence untill I hit 11-12 even if it means that I have to take negative traits or “jobs” (shower victim, light weight etc.). And if I read some harder books I put my MP3 player on or eat some happiness boosting food beforehand. And yes I prefer to play Chars with high focus on intelligence, so I can get “upgrades” faster/learn skills faster. And yes it HAS drawbacks, it happens more than 75% that I don’t survive the first 3 days, mostly beacuse of zombies/dangerous animals