This is a proposal for a new system to change how much morale you gain from items and situations in game.
During character creation, you are presented with a “preferences” tab, which lists a variety of categories, the defaults for the likes and dislikes of your character, and the extremes to which they like or dislike them. The options are Loves, Likes, Neutral, Dislikes, and Abhors. Some categories may have a limited selection of these options.
Items and activities will come with two preference related values - Morale Bonus, and Morale Penalty. If you Love something, the morale bonus applies. If you Abhor it, the penalty applies instead. Likes means that your player will gain roughly 2/3rs of the listed morale bonus for an item, and Dislikes 2/3rds the penalty. While this may seem like “Loving” and “Abhoring” things isn’t valuable enough (or in the case of Abhors, terrible enough), there is another factor to consider.
Acclimation. As the player is exposed to things in-game, the players preference is shifted towards neutral. A period with lack of exposure will slowly bring it back to the “ideal” state for this character. Characters at the extremes of Loves and Abhors will take more exposure to become neutral on a situation, and will return to their ideal state in the same amount of time as a character who merely likes or dislikes something (meaning a much quicker return to liking or hating the object in question).
As an example of how this system would work:
Music: Loves -> Likes (.5 points gained, reduces morale benefit of music)
Reading: Likes -> Abhors (1.5 points gained, severe morale penalty from reading books, esp. skillbooks)
Candy: Likes -> Dislikes (severe morale penalty for eating, 1 point gained. This covers all sweets, not just the literal candy item.)
Porn: Likes -> Neutral (.5 points gained, maximum drop since it’s trivial to avoid)
Rain: Dislikes -> Abhors (.5 points)
Cannibalism: Abhors -> Loves (costs 4 points, with the points gained from changing the above values, big morale boost from cannablism)
For our gameplay example, lets pull two of these items out: Cannablism and Candy. In game, these will actually have several “steps”. On the following scales, imagine the “|” represents our current preference, and the “O” represents the state where we are neutral on something. The “X” is merely to demonstrate where we would start if we merely “liked” something.
[tt]Candy:
Disikes O----|
Cannibalism: |----X----O
[/tt]
For reference, we will have 10 preference slots total, and the percent of max morale is respectively 13,26,39,52,65 (Likes), 72, 79, 86, 93, 100(Loves)
The player then spends an entire day eating nothing but candy and long pork. We’ll say he has three servings of candy and six of long pork. Now he finds himself at:
[tt]Candy:
Disikes O-|—
Cannibalism: -----X|—O
[/tt]
If we partake in candy at this point, the morale hit will be 26% of the max morale hit. If we partake in cannibalism, the bonus will be 52% of the max bonus.
If we go 12 hours without partaking in either, our Candy preference will shift a point towards “Dislikes” and our Cannibalism will shift 2 points towards “Loves”, putting us at a 39% morale hit for candy and a 72% bonus for Cannibalism.
As you can see, variety is the spice of life! You’re much better off dabbling in your preferences (keeping them as close as possible to their max benefit) than bingeing, but constant exposure to things you hate makes you just give up on caring and accept it as a fact of life!
Categories might be fairly broad or even overlapping (some prepared meals may mix several items and count for several groups) in which case the preference is average. Repeatedly devouring the same low level cooked meat will eventually make you neutral on all meat - meaning that even if you make a really fancy meat, your character will still mostly be “I would love something that WASN’T meat right now”. This provides incentives to make the foods you “Love” rarer foods, that you won’t actually be eating as a staple, to get the maximum benefit from them. Liking a wide variety of foods means you’ll achieve much higher bonuses from the complicated meals that actually provide decent morale to begin with.
It’s actually pretty effective at making true min-maxing unattractive, especially since changing things to “like” costs more than setting them to “dislike”.