And has no negatives. As soon as you add a substantial negative it becomes imminently more effective to just carry a set of tools in your car or something.
Like I edited in, 10 points of encumbrance on one arm is a relative negative. My character wears a shield, I don’t care at all about that but I do care about torso encumbrance.
It’s kind of besides the point anyway, bionics slots is what we should focus on and implement. Adding some encumbrance to some bionics is neither here not there. 
I agree, that was why the bulk of my post said that.
Part of bionic slots is that it needs to be possible to remove and exchange bionics anyway, which means that having one add encumbrance or cause some other drawback is no longer an irreversible issue. It’s likely just going to be harder than putting on or removing clothes.
One issue being that the slot limit method is a hard cap to the amount of bionics you can install, and those aren’t as much fun. You can’t actually make a bionic monster of any kind and the player is heavily limited, plus, there’s no way to build in such a way that you can get more bionics. It’s just a flat “the player can install X slots worth of bionics”.
If you do the weight system, or something similar to the weight system, or the slot system with the weight system once all free slots are filled, then there’s only a soft limit in terms of what the player is willing to put up with. If you want to make a bionic monster with every bionic in the game then you CAN, BUT you’ll suffer some pretty substantial consequences. It’s similar to min-maxing in balance terms. You don’t really want to get rid of it entirely, but you don’t want it to be standard play, and you definitely want there to be downsides.
1 Like
3 posts were split to a new topic: Flag early, flag often
Personally I see no problem with a hard cap on bionics. If it were up to me I’d nerf them to oblivion, and they would still be very desirable.
Re shady zombies - they seem a fairly transparent way to add a small (beginning of game only) element of danger to nighttime. I think it points to the fact that the average player has a huge advantage at night given how easy it is to see in the dark.
Hmm. What if bionics had their own new form of encumbrance, sort of a bioencumbrance?
You get x number of bionic slots. You can fill those up without problem, just like you can wear gear unhindered.
When you exceed your basic bionic slots, you start to gain bioencumbrance. Penalties might be things like slower pain recovery, increased need for sleep/food/drink, decreased movement, chance of attacks against you damaging your bionics … Also ugliness and visibility similar to mutations, though that’s minor. The key here is that it’s independent from normal encumbrance, and that it only kicks in if you overdo it on bionics. It would resemble the negative mutations that are the similar drawback to becoming a mutant… Many mechanics could come from there.
That’s not a bad take. I’m big into Shadowrun, so I hear this and I immediately start thinking cyberpsychosis. Sure, you can jam as much tech in you as you want, but there are consequences for becoming more than, or less than, human.
1 Like
Sounds promising, but too insubstantial without an actual game-mechanic proposed.
I mean, “classic” cyberpsychosis is kind of moot in the world of DDA.
You could try conversing about it instead of just saying it’s too nonspecific. I gave some loose examples, but I’m not exactly in the code making changes right now… This is a discussion thread
I would much rather see us refine bionic slots and push it into main.
That’s precisely what we’re discussing.
Issue: bionic slots prevent building a “bionic monster” kind of character, unless the cap is so high as to be meaningless.
Solution: perhaps rather than existing weight and encumbrance mechanics, bionics should have their own form of encumbrance, taking effect when you exceed the slot limit. I suggested a few sorts of penalties they might introduce.
Furthering the idea:
There could be a few bioencumbrance effects, similar to negative mutations, with each bionic maybe choosing randomly from a list when first installed, but always applying the same effect afterwards to prevent scumming
Ideas: all of these can stack
- Reduced sense of taste. Joy penalties and bonuses from food reduced (effect on bonuses is more pronounced)
- Metabolic dulling: reduce joy from drugs and alcohol
- Muscle hindrance: move speed reduced
- Geargrind: chance per turn of making a noise at random
- System burden: chance per turn of gaining fatigue for no reason
- System strain: chance per turn of gaining pain for no reason
- Bionic malaise: flat penalty to happiness
- System shock: reduce max HP of the limb the bionic is installed in
- Out of space: add encumbrance to the limb the bionic is installed in
- Exposed systems: the bionic can be damaged by attacks, like worn gear, with potentially bad side effects.
- Constantly clicking: harder to fall asleep, stay asleep, get meaningful rest.
Not every bionic would possibly spawn all of these, and they can all be avoided by not overdoing it, but if you want to be a bionic monster I think this would mostly just add to the fun, just like negative mutations do
3 Likes
That sounds pretty good to me, actually. Adding a few bionics would be no big deal, but as you pile them on the minor annoyances start to add up to be a real nuisance.
I think this would need endless tinkering and would be a royal pain to balance. I’d prefer a Deus Ex style simpler system with specific body part slots and a selection of bionics that you could install. Once the slot is used you can’t install anything else there.
Why would it be such a pain to balance? It can more or less steal values directly from similar negative mutations for the most part.
There would be a lot of values to juggle and get right. Not saying it’s a bad system, just I prefer to keep bionics without drawbacks, but severely limit them in quality/quantity, rather than have a system where you can pile on as many as you want and have to balance with drawbacks. For me, it’s clunky and a hell of a lot of work to implement and balance.
Bear in mind that what I’m proposing doesn’t kick in until you’ve used up your slots. The penalties still need some balancing, but significantly less, because the answer to them is as simple as the answer to negative mutations.
Negative mutations got you down? Purify it all away.
Bionic drawbacks got you down? Remove bionics until you’re no longer bioencumbered.