Possible way of reworking morale?

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Ok. So Morale is widely accepted to be crappy at the moment. It has stupid effects like stopping you from crafting (why?) and it ticks so fast that you more or less have to dedicate yourself tirelessly to maintaining it for it to have anything other than an incidental effect.

Basically the morale system needs an overhaul, or it needs to go.

I was thinking, though, that the main problem with the morale system seems to be its short-term focus. After all, it’s both unrealistic and annoying that you should have to counter the effects of being wet by taking a couple of shots. It’s also odd that reading a wonderful novel makes you less happy than eating some crisps.

So rather than a short-term morale system, which makes players spend about 90% of their time at or around 0 morale, why not introduce a more long-term one?

Basically, morale could become a function of how comfortable your life is. Eating crisps won’t do much for your mood if you’ve just been rained on, but having a bag of crisps every day - i.e. having access to tasty snacks - would have a longer term positive effect on your mood.

Likewise, reading a good book probably wouldn’t make you walk away feeling happy if you’d just stabbed a child zombie in the face, but in the long-term, an active reader would probably have a healthier, happier time of it.

Essentially morale would become a measure of your character’s long-term emotional wellbeing. It would tick up or down in small increments based on any number of factors, and the challenge for the player would be to make sure that the positives outweight the negatives in the long-term, so that the morale counter ticks upwards, rather than downwards at the end of every day (or however long we choose to make it before it ticks).

So here’s an example of a typical few days for a player:

Day 1:

Eats crisps
Drinks some booze
Only tired for an hour before bed
Listens to music
Reads book
Sleeps in comfy bed
Eats cooked meat at the end of the day

BUT

Gets rained on
Is hungry for 5 hours straight
Only drinks water
Spends a lot of time in pain

Morale goes from 0 - 1, because on balance, the day was more good than bad.
XP gain is slightly increased

Day 2:

Eats crisps, chocolate, candy
Drinks beer and tequila
Smokes weed
Reads book
Stays dry
Stays quenched and full

BUT

Kills child zombie

Morale goes from 1-3, because on balance, the day was excellent.
XP gain is now at a reasonable pace

Day 3:

Drinks apple cider and orange juice
Stays dry

BUT

Gets badly hurt
Kills child zombie
Is hungry all day
Sleeps on the ground

Morale drops from 3-2
XP gain is still reasonably high

Basically, the system aims to reflect how good life is for the player on balance over time, rather than reflect momentary boosts from pretty trivial things. The actual numbers behind morale can remain more or less the same (although I think we’d need to add in some more bad effects, because at the moment those are fairly uncommon), but what has changed it the way these are reflected. The system becomes about maintaining a day-to-day quality of life for the player.

It might also be worth setting the unmodified morale change to a negative, because it’s after the apocalypse, and players shouldn’t be able to just stay super-happy if they’ve done nothing to help themselves. Likewise, it should get harder to maintain and increase morale past a certain point (much like with skill rust, actually, only less rage-inducingly frustrating :P) so that effects like euphoria (which currently lasts about 8 seconds) might last for whole days at a time, but would require careful planning and stockpiling of luxuries to sustain.

2

Looks worthwhile, and similar to the last thread. Two concerns:

  1. Anti-grinding: doing the same thing repeatedly and in a short period ought to become less effective over time, and refresh if rested. Cooked Meat every meal would get old, and an entire Park full of Child zeds might be more frightening than guilt-tripping (especially if the player had to flee).

2( Having morale dropover time, as I understand your proposal, seems like it would mean character morale eventually going to Unhappy/Depressed D: in the absence of modifiers. Seems harsh, especially if the player opted to hunker down for the winter. Suggest having morale trend to 0 instead, so Elated still times out but characters aren’t constantly staving off depression.

3

just a slightly sub-par morale (say, -1 out of 10-0-(-10)) should be the default, as you are in fact one of the last people alive, suvival is bleak and you’re fighting reanimated corpses and other monstrosities.

but simply being comfortable 1/2 of the day would bring it up to 0, no penalties or buffs. listening to the mp3 play for an hour may bump it up to 1 after a few days, etc etc.

personally i’d prefer a LONG term morale system, based over several days for accumulation rather than an afternoon, but that’s just me.

and about the exploit: Have morale buff’s and even penalties non-stackable. If you eat a bag of crisps, you get a +1. eating another gains you nothing until the next day. Being wet once does not stack with being wet, drying off and then going back outside…the -1 is only applied once.

thoughts?

I fully endorse this!

4

Definitely some good ideas, but two points of contention.

a) Since XP is tied to mood, making it take a long time to improve your mood could be pretty bad. You could disassociate XP from mood but then you have pretty limited reason to worry about mood unless it is very bad.

b) Drugs just don’t work this way. Drugs (including alcohol) very much do have a short term effect on mood. Elation and euphoria are real, immediate things which occur with many drugs. I could get into why this is, but I won’t bother other than to say: straight shot of dopamine to the brain.

You’ve given me some ideas that would require less of a drastic overhaul but would accomplish the same persistence of mood effects over time (while still allowing for short term changes), but they’re not fleshed out yet. I wrote up a formula but it didn’t satisfactorily handle a shift between positive and negative moods over time. But the general idea is that the game would track your average mood over five days and apply a modifier based averages or a shift over time. So five good days would basically make your ‘base mood’ a positive integer, rather than 0, and five bad days would make it a negative integer.

5

I totally agree that slowing changes to morale is a good way to go, your point about the unrealism of bursts of euphoria is a good one in particular. Another good point is that mood CAN be changed rapidly. Instead of chosing one, how about having both?

You have various mood-altering effects in play at any given time. (proposed change increases duration of these effects in general)
Mood is a sum of these effects, and subject to change on relatively short notice. (but it will tend to be buffered by pre-existing effects, especially as they may be longer-lasting)
Mood may have direct effects like euphoria (effctively stat boosts) or lethargy (effective stat penalties)
Morale is a long-term smoothed function of Mood, the simplest implementation would be to have Morale tick toward the current Mood on regular intervals (30 mins, once an hour, X times/day?).
Morale is what determines rate of learning potential increase (xp), as it is basically representing long-term mental health.

I was previously thinking mood should feed morale, and morale would act like the xp pool, but the more I think of it, there’s no reason to make learning per-se make you unhappy (though intensive studying does make sense as a negative mood effect), and the way around ths is to make morale -> xp a one-way effect.

RE: More negative mood effects, it seems pretty straightforward that thirst, hunger, tiredness, and pain would have negative mood effects. Though of course we have to be careful to keep them balanced.

6

I like the idea of a morale stat.

If you can imagine such a survival situation in real life, the things which promote a positive outlook (good morale) are access to things which promote stability. A warm bed, protection from the elements, an absence of wounds and overt danger, access to food (varying kinds are better) and drink (same), access to medicine and entertainment, etc.

Part of the problem with accurately judging morale is that the game is really only prepared to measure the things which your character has interacted with after-the-fact. It only knows that you have eaten a bag of chips- it doesn’t know that you have a stockpile of chips. The first might garner some temporary enjoyment, but the latter would provide some peace of mind that you will have chips available for some time.

It would be nice if there could be some way to measure these things. I mean if you are living in the world of Cataclysm, stumbling into a grocery store and filling your pack with canned goods would be cause for elation. As far as the character is concerned they have solved their food problem for several days. That is the kind of thing which would and should boost overall morale. For example, being hungry is less of a downer when you have food waiting for you at your shelter, and it can be downright depressing when you have no idea how you’re going to get your next meal. And the weather getting colder/wetter is less problematic when you know you have a warm shelter to return to and warm/dry off. But how do you represent that without heavy-handed coding?

It’s certainly easier to have a separate Morale stat and just have it constitute almost an average of your mood. But it’s not necessarily a great representation. If you spend three days doing nothing but smoking weed and reading porn you will have a high morale in the game because those activities kept your mood consistently high for a long period, but that doesn’t necessarily represent longterm mental health or outlook.

I’m not saying it’s a bad idea (my idea a couple of posts back suggested similar, just without the new morale stat), I’m just considering a flaw in the hope that there might be a solution to it.

7

Interesting idea, we might be able to do such things in an ad-hoc basis, like by having a bonus from having adequate supplies, and a penalty for the lack, carefull though, the scenario is pretty damn depressing.

That did give me an idea though, instead of setting up the system to converge to some negative morale value, just have a permanent mood effect, “It’s the apocalypse”, or “they’re dead Dave, they’re all dead”.

8

To be honest I think it needs to be slightly more long-term, but if we just increased the length of the morale XP boost duration we’d end up with crazy amounts of exp by the end of the day, (i.e, You eat 5 bags of crisps, a few shots of booze and some chocolate.)

One thing for sure though, ditch morale loss for killing child zombies. It doesn’t make much of a difference as it is anyway and to be real honest if the dead are coming back to life, fire is raining from the sky and all’s right with the world etc are you REALLY, REALLY gonna feel bad for redecorating the city with the brains of whatever horrific abomination is currently trying to eat you?
Hell no. You’d fight to survive and give precisely zero shits.

Christ, if you’re some kind of holy saint weep and take a shovel. You can bury the tainted meat (fresh).
Oh wait, child meat is chunk of meat.

It would take away almost the entire point of the heartless trait, but whoever takes that anyway?

Make Morale a more long-term thing i.e on a per-day basis. If you drop the general boost from morale-effecting items slightly but boost the duration it should work out.
e.g: The sunlight wakes you up 14:20. You are Well Rested! +50 morale.

As for negative morale… Pain, weather, temperature, bad food, raw food etc.

Personally I’d prefer a Sanity system (Not a ridiculous one-- and in general play it wouldn’t be that applicable unless you fall into a portal to the nether.)
Lower intelligence would be better for facing stuff like elder gods. Intelligence wouldn’t really make a difference during normal play-- i.e you could slaughter zombies all day without penalty.
High intelligence and you accidentally summon said elder god?
Delicious Tentacles-out-the-eyesockets Mindrape.

9

[quote=“Iosyn, post:8, topic:1091”]To be honest I think it needs to be slightly more long-term, but if we just increased the length of the morale XP boost duration we’d end up with crazy amounts of exp by the end of the day, (i.e, You eat 5 bags of crisps, a few shots of booze and some chocolate.)

One thing for sure though, ditch morale loss for killing child zombies. It doesn’t make much of a difference as it is anyway and to be real honest if the dead are coming back to life, fire is raining from the sky and all’s right with the world etc are you REALLY, REALLY gonna feel bad for redecorating the city with the brains of whatever horrific abomination is currently trying to eat you?
Hell no. You’d fight to survive and give precisely zero shits.

Christ, if you’re some kind of holy saint weep and take a shovel. You can bury the tainted meat (fresh).
Oh wait, child meat is chunk of meat.

It would take away almost the entire point of the heartless trait, but whoever takes that anyway?

Make Morale a more long-term thing i.e on a per-day basis. If you drop the general boost from morale-effecting items slightly but boost the duration it should work out.
e.g: The sunlight wakes you up 14:20. You are Well Rested! +50 morale.

As for negative morale… Pain, weather, temperature, bad food, raw food etc.

Personally I’d prefer a Sanity system (Not a ridiculous one-- and in general play it wouldn’t be that applicable unless you fall into a portal to the nether.)
Lower intelligence would be better for facing stuff like elder gods. Intelligence wouldn’t really make a difference during normal play-- i.e you could slaughter zombies all day without penalty.
High intelligence and you accidentally summon said elder god?
Delicious Tentacles-out-the-eyesockets Mindrape.[/quote]

Eh… for what it’s worth, I actually really like the child zombie penalty. I’d feel bad too, and have experienced this in Dead Space 2 a lot.

10

I’m not a heartless or cold individual, and I can say that if I saw a zombie child shambling at me, with it’s skin falling off of it, my last thought would be “poor child!” and my first thought would be “Now, where’d I leave my crowbar?”

Perhaps a negative (or neutral, once NPC’s get re-added) trait called “Empathetic” could be implemented, where killing child zombies would produce a negative mood effect? To balance it, it could increase the odds of certain speech roles whenever NPC’s come back.

11

How would you check for that though? You could have the game monitor your inventory for supplies and have a passive mood bonus for food/drink/survival equipment, and then have that decrease as you get low or drop stuff. But that doesn’t really show what you might have stockpiled. The only way I can really think to handle this is to give the player the ability to designate a building as their shelter and have the game keep track of what furniture/food/drink/items/security is inside and around it. Then just do some math to generate a passive ‘Shelter’ bonus to morale. But this is really open to exploitation; what is stopping a person from slipping into, say, a megamart and designating it his shelter? It’s full of gear. Or just any random house with plenty of junk in it.

One thought would be to simply make it so that time away from the shelter makes the bonus fade. The longer you’re away the less your character feels like they will make it back, or whatever. After 72 hours from the last time you were inside it, the bonus would be gone and the game no longer considers it your shelter until you re-designate it. But that still doesn’t stop a person from just going and setting up a new shelter in a random building every day for a new bonus.

You could make it so that you need to sleep in a building before it will allow you designate it a shelter. Or you may have to do some manner of construction before it will allow you. Maybe it needs to be sealed off; no broken doors or smashed windows. Maybe it can’t have any corpses in it, so you need to move any zombie bodies out before you can set it. Maybe it absolutely needs a sleeping surface (rollmatt/cot/bed/tent?) before it can be designated, and if the sleeping surface is removed at all then the shelter designation will reset. So unless a person can keep finding rollmatts then they can’t really exploit it.

Alternatively, each time you sleep, the game could take stock of what is in the vicinity, and build a Shelter bonus based on the stuff in that area, and based on how many times you’ve slept in the same location. The first night you sleep there might give a very mild bonus, but each successive night adds to it until it maxes out. If you stop sleeping there the shelter bonus fades. And if supplies dry up in the shelter then the bonus suffers as well, but even just having a roof and a bed to go back to is better than nothing.

Just some thoughts. I fully realize that the way the game works may not allow for (m)any of these ideas to work. I wish I had a better working understanding of the code so that I could make directly applicable suggestions. But y’know.

12

Hmm. Not quite. Assuming there were negative returns, the drop would eventually level off with no modifiers.

So, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain an upward trend of morale, but increasingly easy to break a downward trend, basically. Eventually there would be no unmodified potential for a downward drop (probably at about -8ish, which, if +8 is the result of a few days of lavish comfort, seems like a reasonable level of sadness to reach from doing nothing but get by with no comforts at all after about a week)

I get what you mean. So a really good day would be less effective in a week of bad days than off the back of another week of good days.

and about the exploit: Have morale buff's and even penalties non-stackable. If you eat a bag of crisps, you get a +1. eating another gains you nothing until the next day. Being wet once does not stack with being wet, drying off and then going back outside...the -1 is only applied once.

Or, more realistically, make them have diminishing returns (-20% effectiveness per occurence?) and for effects like being wet or cold, make it a function of how much time is spent under the effect, rather than the number of times you cross the threshhold into the effect.

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:5, topic:1091”]You have various mood-altering effects in play at any given time. (proposed change increases duration of these effects in general)
Mood is a sum of these effects, and subject to change on relatively short notice. (but it will tend to be buffered by pre-existing effects, especially as they may be longer-lasting)
Mood may have direct effects like euphoria (effctively stat boosts) or lethargy (effective stat penalties)
Morale is a long-term smoothed function of Mood, the simplest implementation would be to have Morale tick toward the current Mood on regular intervals (30 mins, once an hour, X times/day?).
Morale is what determines rate of learning potential increase (xp), as it is basically representing long-term mental health.[/quote]

I agree with all of this, bar the bit about euphoria effects.

Wouldn’t it make more sense (and make them more worthwhile) if euphoria effects were the result of morale? Otherwise they’re just far too short-lived to be worth achieving.

Obviously they would need some balancing to account for their longer-lasting effect, but they’d still be a much more noticeable aspect of gameplay this way.

13

oh, and I really should have added this before but a Sanity system should be kept separate from a morale system, although certain things would affect one another.

As for morale dropping over time, have it cap at a neutral level in absence of modifiers.

14

Why? Neutral morale is, from a player’s perspective, a good thing. If you are not in negative morale, you are functioning as you should be.

I don’t see why we should allow players to remain in basically ‘good’ condition without any input. From a gameplay perspective, keeping up good morale is an everyday distraction which, if properly managed, can become a boost to player performance. It’s a new and interesting dimension to gameplay, and if we allow players to safely ignore it, then it loses its interest, imo.

Also, from a realism perspective, your mood does not just gravitate to “meh” if you do nothing to keep yourself mentally healthy.

15

Also, from a realism perspective, your mood does not just gravitate to “meh” if you do nothing to keep yourself mentally healthy.[/quote]
I don’t think the zombie apocalypse is good for one’s mental health either, so a natural tendency towards a slightly negative morale might be realistic for anybody without the Optimist trait.

16

[quote=“Iosyn, post:13, topic:1091”]oh, and I really should have added this before but a Sanity system should be kept separate from a morale system, although certain things would affect one another.

As for morale dropping over time, have it cap at a neutral level in absence of modifiers.[/quote]

A fleshed out Sanity system would be amazing. This makes me think of the Call of Cthulhu game, which did it in a believable way. Something like that would be awesome, and really compliment the existing schiso code.

Also, from a realism perspective, your mood does not just gravitate to “meh” if you do nothing to keep yourself mentally healthy.[/quote]
I don’t think the zombie apocalypse is good for one’s mental health either, so a natural tendency towards a slightly negative morale might be realistic for anybody without the Optimist trait.[/quote]

I agree with that. I habitually pick “Optimist” because I try and do a self-insert as a character, but I don’t think non-optimists should be cheery while looting houses, eating crap and fighting off the walking dead.

On the other hand, could that be limiting as morale is tied to XP?

17
On the other hand, could that be limiting as morale is tied to XP?

Yes, it would and should be limiting.

XP is a questionable system at best, but I think one of the reasons why it’s so flawed is because it’s currently so jarringly unrealistic. You do stuff to get morale solely for the sake of increasing XP gains. A more fluid, long-term morale system might go some way towards remedying that, in that players might feel that their mood and their ability to learn were more obviously interlinked, and morale would be more than just a way to get more XP - there’d be other potential bonuses, and the XP gains/losses would be longer term.

So yeah, there’d be times when your character would be low on XP for a long period of time, but that’s a good thing, because it means that bad choices made by the player (not keeping happy) lead to negative outcomes - it creates a sense that there are consequences to in-game actions, which is precisely what makes roguelikes so enjoyable!

18

On the other hand, could that be limiting as morale is tied to XP?
[/quote]

I read somewhere that fatigue was going to come in to play (so people can’t eradicate a town full of zombies from a well positioned window). when this comes in i imagine/hope it will free up the tie between xp and morale a bit in the sense that it will be fatigue that will stop you hammering heads in all day rather than an empty xp pool. i like dinocat’s spin on morale in his mod…

“skill advancement depends on morale - the higher a character’s morale, the larger the increment. Conversely, a large negative morale would mean no skill increment - the character is in no mood to learn anything new.”

… which i think is more realistic than all of a sudden you stop advancing until you find some alone time with some sweet tunes and mama hooch.

as for morale in general, i like the idea of long term effects - especially if you set yourself up in a sweet impenetrable fortress with dolby sound and endless weed and snacks.

19

Maybe you could add something where if you live lavishly for a while, but run out of all your batteries for your mp3, or no more chips, or no good bed to sleep in, you get a noticable moral drop. Maybe moral could effect speed as well? I know if i was depressed i wouldn’t want to walk my normal speed. And, if you stay depressed for a long time, maybe you character starts thinking about suicide. with the ocasional message like “You consider suicide briefly as a posibility” or " Suicide seems more real to you, and you feel brave enough to atempt it now." and (i know this may sound emo) “You start cutting your self in sadness, hurting yourself.” all the way to “Your suicidal thoughts have brought you to the edge. It seems your only option is death.” Which basicly means in a few hours you comitt suicide unless your raise your moral signifigintly. if you do “You look back on your suicidal thoughts and fear sadness more than before.” Which makes you suffer worse effects form negitive moral. If you get to the worse effects from moral state with optimist, lose lose the trait but suffer nothing else.

20

[quote=“Disarcade, post:16, topic:1091”][quote=“Iosyn, post:13, topic:1091”]oh, and I really should have added this before but a Sanity system should be kept separate from a morale system, although certain things would affect one another.

As for morale dropping over time, have it cap at a neutral level in absence of modifiers.[/quote]

A fleshed out Sanity system would be amazing. This makes me think of the Call of Cthulhu game, which did it in a believable way. Something like that would be awesome, and really compliment the existing schiso code.[/quote]

Yeah, it would really need to be fleshed out-- but if it was, and then you took the schizo trait…
Holy fuck. Shit gets worse.

Also that Call of Cthulhu game is to date the only game (other than amnesia the dark descent) That has actually manage to scare the living shit out of me.

You see a dream. Armed people (with nasty axes and rusty, bloodied cleavers) are coming up the stairs. You wake up coughing and hear battering at the door. You slide the lock shut quickly, but it’s hanging by a few screws. it won’t last long. You run into the next room, lock latches on those doors and slide furniture behind them before running to the next. You reach a window as they follow close behind and try to push it open, but it’s a trial. You finally get it open and some guy with a shotgun bursts through and starts taking potshots. It doesn’t even stop there. You have to avoid them and hide like a little bitch, since you don’t even have weapons.
Another good one is anything on a ship. If you could condense terror into a compact disc, it would bear the name Call of Cthulhu.