Pain management, adrenaline, fight or flight

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Hello everyone, I’ve been playing cata for some time now, really enjoying the experimentals. One thing I want to talk about is pain and fight or flight response.

I enjoy the difficulty of the early game in the most recent experimentals, but I think there are a few issues regarding the pain system.

Pain, as it accumulates, effects your primary attributes as well as your move speed. This makes sense and is a mechanic I enjoy, but often results in being a death sentence for early characters that have a run in with say a skeletal or even a zombdog. Once you have taken a few wounds, you quickly lose the ability to fight AND run. While I know many wish to keep the difficulty (including myself), I think there can be some small additions that change the dynamic of the pain system.

The first thing I would like to suggest is the implementation of a fight or flight response. Essentially, a modified version of the adrenaline surge that activates if you take a significant portion of your health as damage in a small amount of time. The effect of this would temporarily mask the symptoms of pain, at the expense of a large expenditure of energy (fatigue) as well a “state of shock” after the encounter. Even average people are capable of great feats as endorphins and adrenaline flood their body in dangerous situations. This can easily be balanced in a number of ways, including the amount of times it will occur in a given time span, the intensity of the pain masking, the intensity and penalties of “shock”. The goal of this is to simulate the average persons response to danger and allow for survival while still penalizing poor decisions.

The second suggestions would be a light form of pain tolerance that can be developed over time. In essence, the more damage you have taken and survived the more resistance to pain you develop. This would be very minor, but would serve to emulate someone who has encountered numerous scratches, bites, acid sprays, electric shocks, and more. Pain resistant trait will of course stack and be far superior.

Anyways, that’s it. Typing from a tablet so if there are any errors I apologize. Thoughts?

2

Rendering you unable to fight or run is precisely the purpose of pain.
The way to handle encounters, especially early in the game, is to limit the damage in the first place.
Only take on one enemy at a time and lure it away from other enemies to deal with it, carry painkillers once you have some, but only use them to disengage from a fight. Retreat and heal up before the damage gets serious enough to hinder your fighting abilities.

3

Absolutely, I’m familiar with the methods you mentioned, this wasn’t quite a thread for me to rant about how I can’t handle it, as doing what you said people can survive just fine. It was moreso when I encountered these situations, mechanically it didn’t quite feel right. I want to keep the spirit of the idea, that is pain incapacitates, but change the dynamic.

At any rate, thanks for the reply.

4

What im thinking of is sort of a small rework for pain system like when receiving pain from damage and such i can imaging there being more initial pain but would be mostly superficial then it would quickly fade to a lesser value. though im not sure how that would work.

also mind over matter trait and or combat style… based on your intelligence score you can ignore a certain amount of pain… and your intelligence is harder to reduce due to pain