Preferences, Morale, and Exposure

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

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”.

2

I like the idea, but I still think it should (At some point) get to a point where you’re losing morale from eating the same stuff endlessly.

3

Agreed that it should have the potential to go negative.

As I said in the candy/junk food thread, I’m not convinced that this is going to do anything for min/maxing, and this looks pretty invasive as far as having to categorize everything.

I can see balancing it by either making the adjustment wildly disproportionate, like setting everything to hate only giving you a few points, or just capping the # of points you can get for reducing like categories.
Neither of those addresses the busywork of adding like/dislike parameters to a bunch of things, or adding a whole new like/dislike heirarchy that we have to maintain going forward. I’m skeptical that it’s going to be worth the effort.

4

It’s an interesting system and I’d enjoy playing with it. But I have to admit, now that Kevin has mentioned it, it does look like a lot of work for relatively minimal return.

I think it would be more efficient (if less fine-grained) to simply track what items a character has eaten and adjust the morale bonus according to that (eating too much of something lowers the morale bonus and has the potential to make it a negative). It doesn’t address initial preferences, however. Which is definitely something I’d like to see in the game, I’m just not sure how it could be done without a huge amount of work.

5

Personally I’d balance this by making points for preferences a completely different set of points than those used for stats/professions/skills. That would remove a lot of min/maxing right there, since no matter how many things you hate it won’t buy you another point in STR.

As for the busywork/system work, one potential thing that might work to get around the system is putting it into it’s own JSON file, similar to the itemgroup file. Then each new item only has to be added as 1-2 more lines once the system is already in place, a fairly easy process to do (and not that difficult to install in the first place either).

6

Even if you isolate the “preference points” from the regular chargen points, you still have the issue that you can basically set all the foods you will actually be eating to max and set foods you will not be eating to min. The opportunity cost for hating a bunch of items is just vanishingly small. Like I said, if the exchange rate is 100/1 for dislike/like, or of you only get points for disliking a few things, it works out, but straight up -1/+1 or anything remotely close will undermine the whole system.

Another way to put it is that for players to do anything other than maxing out their liking for the most common staples (meat, cooked meat, cans of beans, MREs perhaps), they have to intentionally “take a dive”. There is a clear best choice, and that coice is counter to the behavior we want to encourage (liking a variety of different foods).

7

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:6, topic:3620”]Even if you isolate the “preference points” from the regular chargen points, you still have the issue that you can basically set all the foods you will actually be eating to max and set foods you will not be eating to min. The opportunity cost for hating a bunch of items is just vanishingly small. Like I said, if the exchange rate is 100/1 for dislike/like, or of you only get points for disliking a few things, it works out, but straight up -1/+1 or anything remotely close will undermine the whole system.

Another way to put it is that for players to do anything other than maxing out their liking for the most common staples (meat, cooked meat, cans of beans, MREs perhaps), they have to intentionally “take a dive”. There is a clear best choice, and that coice is counter to the behavior we want to encourage (liking a variety of different foods).[/quote]

What about using the existing “Enjoyablity” as a baseline? EG MREs won’t start Neutral, they’ll start at a ‘dislike’ and so on, as well as only being able to set a certain number (25%?) of “Favorite” “Least Favorite” foods?

8

The reason I don’t think people don’t want to do this is because

[size=10pt]Morale doesn’t matter very much.[/size]

Sure, you can be too unhappy to craft, but you sleep off that unhappiness in a few hours.

I’m still banking on morale actually affecting your everyday life, constantly.

I love this system, but until then, it’ll be a waste, as others have said.

9

I’m assuming that’s the starting point, but it’s still the clear winner for everything but roleplay to figure out which foods have the best combination of availability, fun, and health, and set them to the highest level you can. There’s no tradeoff, that’s just the only sensible thing to do, and it’s exactly what we don’t want to encourage.

10

I like the idea of scaling down benefits a bit with exposure, as long as it isn’t too extreme. It makes sense to promote variety so that players are rewarded for exploring the full range of game content. Plus it’s realistic in a way… people take things for granted if they are too common. Meat for dinner again!

Gryph, you are full of good ideas, so I don’t really want to disagree with what you’re proposing, but I’m not sure CataDDA would be improved by this right now. What is the intended contribution to overall gameplay? Right now morale acts as a “thermostat” for indirectly scaling how quickly characters learn things. In the thread talking about practicing, it’s pretty clear that most players oppose grinding. As things stand in the game, most of gameplay revolves around building up your skills until you can do the other fun stuff you want to do (construct a base, build a death-mobile, explore mines, tailor a perfect set of armor, etc.). CataDDA is really fun (I obviously like it!), but if anything, the emphasis on building up skills and crafting is a bit heavy. I think adding a whole bunch of complexity to the morale system will just force players to micromanage morale so that they can micromanage practice so they can finally get to the game content they really want to do. A more granular morale system will probably make sense in CataDDA eventually, but I’m with Kevin that we have to finish baking the cake before we can put on the icing.

11

I agree that every single person would end up just loving cooked meat, and that’s an issue.

The fact is that favorite foods and hated foods are often inconvenient.

So maybe just do it randomly. All food starts at base value, then are randomly adjusted by the chargen so that the number of positives and negatives applied equal zero. Then use perks and maybe professions to adjust from there.

12

Except if you look at the actual system proposed, loving “cooked meat” would… not actually be a good strategy. The morale bonus from cooked meat is probably fairly low to begin with, and since it’s such a staple food you’d never see any benefit from it.

13

Please clarify, is the proposed bonus/malus from preference related to the magnatude of the “fun” stat for the existing item, or independent of it?
If it’s related, then this system doesn’t apply to items with a small fun value? That seems odd since you can take something all the way from “love” to “hate” and vice versa.
On the other hand, if it’s independent, how does cooked meat have a smaller bonus than other foods?

Either way it doesn’t change the fact that the ideal strategy is to pump up easy-to-acquire foods with a high bonus from this system, and rotate among eating them and dump on everything else. The fundamental problem is the exceedingly low opportunity cost for bringing down the level of rarely eaten foods.
I’m not seeing any way that this addressing that problem.

14

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:13, topic:3620”]Please clarify, is the proposed bonus/malus from preference related to the magnatude of the “fun” stat for the existing item, or independent of it?
If it’s related, then this system doesn’t apply to items with a small fun value? That seems odd since you can take something all the way from “love” to “hate” and vice versa.
On the other hand, if it’s independent, how does cooked meat have a smaller bonus than other foods?

Either way it doesn’t change the fact that the ideal strategy is to pump up easy-to-acquire foods with a high bonus from this system, and rotate among eating them and dump on everything else. The fundamental problem is the exceedingly low opportunity cost for bringing down the level of rarely eaten foods.
I’m not seeing any way that this addressing that problem.[/quote]

Personally, I’d just say limit them to one favorite food, one favorite drink, and one least favorite food, and one least favorite drink, randomize the rest. As far as activities are concerned I dunno what to say there.

15

Last I knew, Cooked Meat was +10 morale. “Hot meal” may or may not apply but is available. In practice, Ka’lol can’t eat enough Cooked Meat to get him over 25 morale. Between cooking time, fullness, and morale caps, it just ain’t happening.

So, since there’s no actual bonus to “Loves”, as I read this–it doesn’t make the Meat any better for morale, it just doesn’t dock the morale bonus because GlyphGryph–I don’t see Loving Cooked Meat as a problem of itself.

Kevin: agreed that not-Loving Cooked Meat is probably worth a fair amount of points, chiefly because it’s the most common (certainly the most plentiful, and arguably the only indefinitely-sustainable) food in the game.

Quickest way to fix that would be to make other food long-term sustainable. Underbrush & veggies is close but uness you’re raiding a Triffid Grove, it ain’t gonna last. Even then, the Queens will eventually make life problematic for you.

Random morale-effects encourages rerolling and IMO should be avoided for that reason. I have the same objection to roleplaying a character with Fears By GlyphGryph as I do to Favorites By GlyphGryph.

Those ain’t mine.

16

This is a really tough call, I have to admit. A great of percentage of the western people is spoiled nowadays, for that matter; or name them city folk, if you wish. I mean, if we ruled out all the artificial flavours that are out there today, we just might have the clear picture. There is also the fact that the lacks of foods renders you insensitive to the specific types. But then, there are stories of people that have had a prolonged experience with a specific “dish” and resented it afterwards (upon returning to civilization) and there are stories of people loving that memory.
There is also the line of diet to the story; if you had pork, venison and chicken all the time and you eventually introduced some baked flour products, this would lift your spirits towards any variety - including present one. Only then would some homemade cookies and smooth liquor punch in a real difference. It’s just that you have to think of the essentials - eggs, dairy products, meats, grains and certain greens - the nutrition base that shouldn’t be lacking but it also shouldn’t fill in the blanks for the bonuses.

17

Significantly more elegant solution than I expected coming out of that last, somewhat haphazard thread. You never fail to satisfy… but does that mean I will gain less and less morale from reading about awesome new catafeatures? D: