Pain-Based Illness

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

I brought this up in a thread about having conditions like broken bones, but wouldn’t it be possible to install a disease that gives a minimum threshold for pain? If you are below that threshold, it procs the pain up to the given level, so that you are never below that amount. Painkillers could nullify it for a while, but it could come back if the cause isn’t treated, and perhaps escalate into something worse.

You could use this for a lot of different things to emulate many different conditions. For instance, getting stung by a giant bee? That would suck. Technically that should probably kill a person, but at the very least whatever you got stung in would ache like a bitch. You could also emulate broken bones like this - put a cap on the HP of that particular limb to emulate the severity of that break and put a minimum pain level on it based on how bad it is. If it’s completely shattered (ie ‘broken’ currently) it hurts quite a bit and the limb is utterly unusable. A fracture could probably be healed naturally without any kind of treatment but it’d still hurt for a little while.

This could also be used to emulate bruising, stomach aches, and things that really just should hurt a bit longer than they do. A shattered leg should ALWAYS hurt and should never fall to zero just because it’s been a while for the pain to die down.

Painkillers and the like would also increase in value because of this. Currently there’s no reason to take them just because the pain will fall all on its own. It’s also a bit more realistic this way.

2

Yes, effects do support raising pain up to a point.

If we were to have pain scale up to damage, someone would have to chalk up a good system for that. How much pain does 1 broken limb cause, how much for entire body at 10% hp etc.

Also, different kinds of damage currently hurt differently. For example, acid burns are 33% more painful than blunt damage.
If this were to scale too, it would be harder, because you’d have to store the “damage composition” somewhere.

I disagree about painkillers being useless. Even the lowly aspirin has its uses (15 pain still hurts).

A basic system wouldn’t be hard to write. We’d have to add “silent” pain application, so that “dull” pain from an old scar doesn’t interrupt crafting and sleep, but other than that it’s 10 minutes of work. The implementation, that is - not thinking up good numbers for it.

3

Scaling pain to damage wouldn’t work very well without overhauling how bandages and medkits work. As it stands, they directly and immediately repair damage, meaning damage-scaled pain would vanish the moment you healed things. That would render painkillers far less valuable if you could just apply a bandaid instead, unless you made pain time out slowly after hp was restored to a bodypart. It would time out at the same speed regardless of injury type though, and that’s not modelling things much more realistically than we currently have. Unless you really want to start tracking injury types, which seems… much harder.

I like the idea of certain attacks applying effects though. The immediate injury and hp loss could have its temporary addition of pain, and you’d treat those as we currently do - bandages etc would remain the hp-fixers. However, the ‘disease’ applied would have its own effect until it wears off or is treated. For instance, a spitter hits you with acid. It hurts and you take some damage, and you get an Acid Burn disease/effect which adds its own further pain. You could apply water or baking soda to an Acid Burn ‘disease’ to neutralize the condition immediately, or you could take your aspirin and wait it out if you’d prefer to save your water. It’s potentially doable.

I like the thought of making acid attacks from spitters cause a condition to the player, since …last I heard, melting everything dropped on acid tiles has been nerfed? I dunno, depends if you want spitter zombies to be gear-wreckers or player-cripplers, I guess.

I had a complaint elsewhere about how food intolerances cause a morale penalty rather than pain or nausea as some of their descriptions imply. If the morale system gets tweaked, new diseases modifying the player’s pain could take the place of those morale penalties. Plus then you couldn’t stuff yourself with potato chips and cola to offset uncomfortable dairy consumption, which makes zero sense. Heck, you could use that barf-on-command function from the nausea mutation to remove the new intolerance ‘disease’ instead. It’d suck, but it’d also make way more sense as a solution.

The nice side effect of this would be that I could look at my character stats and instead of seeing PAIN: 85, I’d see that, and under effects: Bee Sting, Acid Burn, Food poisoning, Broken Arm. It wouldn’t show me how much pain each is contributing, but it’d be a hell of a lot more informative as to why the hell my pain is so high so as to ruin my movement speed, as not all of that could possibly be pinned on food poisoning alone. I can always surmise that a limb with 0hp is causing me a lot of pain, but the less digging around to understand why everything hurts, the better.

4

At the moment it seems as if the pain just fades away over time.
Maybe it would be a good idear to only let it decrease naturally to acertain amount based un the current damage.
You could decrease it further with painkillers, but after some time it would rise again until you are healed again.

Also, getting hit on damaged bodyparts should cause more pain than getting hit on fine ones.

5

Lingering pain, eh?
(Think I brought this up earlier in some other topic…)
Having a bit variation would be intresting, but there needs to be careful balancing making cure as common as is the cause EVEN if it wouldn’t be totally realistic, basically medkit of 2048 should fix all the superficial injuries.

6

The pain shouldn´t be able to rise too much on its own.
Maybe 1 “passive” pain per 10% of health on a bodypart missing.
So you got for example 10 for a broken arm.
It wouldn´t be crippling but still resulting in a realistic debuff.

7

You’re not giving a reason for why that would be a good thing, and I don’t think there is one.
Lingering pain that you just have to wait out is a perfectly reasonable thing to have happen.
Now there are various painkillers that can suppress the pain, but those of course have fun side effects.