Pragmatist Trait idea

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

The pragmatist trait is based on the idea of lowering mood debuffs from a variety of sources.
“It’s the apocalypse, I don’t like what I need to do, but I need to do it.”

This would do things like reduce (not remove) the debuff for things like killing, cannibalism, and trait related mood debuffs.
For example, with the Nomad trait the mood debuff would accumulate slower, hating books will give less of a debuff for reading, hating certain foods will give less of a debuff, etc.
This also allow the player to be more willing to do certain tasks at low mood, albeit slower than before.

If paired with traits that completely remove or give mood bonuses for certain tasks, such as cannibal, or psychopath, those take a priority.

Due the wide variety of benefits and the fact it can reduce mood penalties from various other traits I imagine this would be relatively expensive to use.

2

The biggest problem I see with this is you need to be able to set goals for it to work. You don’t NEED to read this book to fix your death mobile. You don’t even NEED the deathmobile necessarily - you have feet/tentacles. You don’t NEED to kill anything - you can run away or go vegan.

Those are all goals you set for yourself/your character. There’s no personal goal system in the game I’m aware of, so how would you quantify how necessary whatever action was to adjust buffs/debuffs? Or how much the buff/debuff would get adjusted?

It’s a good idea, but if the game can’t determine your goal or motive for doing something, I can’t see how this trait could ever be measured.