Non Permanent Starting Traits/Goals

There are some traits that could be used and not be permanent.
Common Cold (and other diseases): start the game with the common cold and a dose or two of dayquil. :smiley: G’luck!
Traumatic Event: You have recently experienced a traumatic event (loss of wife/child). This will give you a negative moodlet that will persist over time. This will slowly lower itself over time.
Illiteracy could be a non-permanent trait. (Childrens books; hooked on phonex; sp?)
Broken Limb: Self Explanatory.
Irradiated
Bite Wound
Bleeding

ETC…

Goals: A goal set for your character that they want to accomplish. Once accomplished this would give a long term positive mood applet. (not permanent) A new goal could then be set. A goal should be unchangeable until it’s accomplished.
Example:
Mechanics to 10.
Acquire 5 installed implants.
Avenge your wife: Kill 500 zombies.

The Sims: Cataclysm Pack?

Still, the starting stuff could be interesting… But morale isn’t difficult to keep at least neutral.

It might be a bit more so if you have a -50 from depression because your wife died. :stuck_out_tongue:

You know, someone posted a thing a few days ago about how we should segregate character creation into what I’m going to call “solid” and “soft” sections. Solid stuff would be stat points and traits, while professions and skills, which can all be acquired through the game, are ‘soft’. A lot of your starting stuff would go well under the soft section.

Starting with a cold lets you get a little extra equipment, but no amount of injury will let you pick another point of intelligence.

Sounds like great ideas.

It somewhat bothered me how inconsequential some of the “negatives” are

Bitten or bleeding is certainly too minor to stand on its own, if/when a more in-depth wound system happens that kind of thing would be significant. And regardless, a broken limb would be fairly significant (modulo some bug with broken limb handling we have)

Galen will be implenting a basic scenario system, which allow us to build “scenarios” that will have many of these things - temporary conditions (damage and things like spawn location) but also, perhaps more importantly, a descriptive “goal” will be possible (nothing in game is likely to enforce this unless it starts you in the middle of quest line which could be possible, but it will be described as part of the scenario either way).