Remove the debuff for killing zombie children!

[redxlaser15]

Hmm. That makes a lot of sense. After all, you are still getting used to the apocalypse. If the forums ever feel like letting me edit the poll, I’ll add that as an option.
Doing that seems like it would provide a decent balance for both arguments.
Although I’d totally just beat the crap out of them personally.

[kevin.granade]

I can’t fix it, and I don’t want to fix it, so that’s nice.

Posting a poll about popularity of a feature is a bad idea, don’t do it.

This site is about discussion, and random popularity contests don’t help with that.

[redxlaser15]

Well, if it’s like that, you might as well just close this thread I suppose. I’ll remember all this for future reference, I didn’t know it would be considered ‘bad’ or anything like that.
Is it at all possible to close your own thread?

[Daeros13]

For what its worth. My 2 cents: i understand and agree with the overall idea of what you are saying, but as far as the game is setup currently, i don’t see it as adding anything significant to gameplay. As the game stands now with the debuff is ok with me.

[airova]

My two cents: aside from what kevin.granade has already said about making polls like this, the original post and several of the replies are quite sexist. Not all the players are male, and suggesting that people who would feel empathy for something that is described as looking identical to a living child are weak or “unmanly” is pretty offensive. I know that this forum has rules about being respectful to others and I was surprised to read this kind of wording here. Please keep this in mind in the future. Thank you.

Personally, I like the fact that CDDA takes such emotions into account. It’s not just a hack and slash video game, it’s a survival simulation. Doing what you have to to survive, even when it causes you emotional trauma, is part of that. Killing, even animals or zombies, causes emotional trauma in all who have empathy (which is most people), so really, the game is being generous by having a debuff only for killing the children. And anyone who thinks their character should not have empathy can simply choose the psychopath trait in character creation. I’d also be fine with it if guilt over killing slowly decreased as the number of kills increases and the emotional trauma transforms into long-term psychological changes - that seems in line with reality. But I also don’t have a problem with the way it is now.

[Weyrling]

Once you’ve killed enough of them the debuff DOES go away. Specifically, once you’ve killed 100 of them.

If anything, maybe reduce this number a bit, a hundred is a lot.
I imagine that once you’ve survived the post apocalyptic hell long enough to kill dozens of zombie children, you’d get over it.

On the other hand adding a debuff for killing your first few zombies wouldn’t be out of place either, the vast majority of people haven’t killed anything even remotely human.
Also maybe throw in a debuff for the first few times you smash up a body to prevent it from reviving, as splattering blood and guts everywhere isn’t something the average person is acclimated to.

Main thing is to have these problems become lesser and then go away as you survive. This would help simulate the shock of getting tossed into a post apocalyptic hellhole as a modern person.
Maybe throw in a Desensitized trait that mitigates the morale penalties and can be added to military starts, since if you’ve actually been in combat you’d be far better equipped to deal with humanoid enemies, but you aren’t necessarily a psychopath.

[airova]

Oh, I like that, the desensitized trait. And I agree, some kind of debuff the first few times you kill any zombie and especially smash them to bits sounds very realistic. I didn’t realize the debuff stops occurring after 100 kills - maybe I haven’t survived that long yet.

[Bobdole44]

If I could put forth a fourth idea. Except for maybe psychos, military personnel, and SOF classes give a morale debuff for EVERY zombie killed. There should be a multi-tiered personality trait you gain for every so many blobbers/zambies killed, each level reducing the debuff. So you can go from smoking crack and drinking like a Fookboi to barely stay sane,probably lamenting the previous lives of every shambling SOB killed. And within a few hundred pulpings they will be humming along with their MP3 playlist because they’ve throughly acclimated to or found a way to totally deny their new existence.

[Bobdole44]

Killing can be a ridiculous adventure. I still remember my stepdad yelling at me to stop shooting my first rabbit after letting go 8 .22s from the rifle at it
"For God’s sake its dead --------! Stop shooting!
“But I don’t want it to suffer!”, I exclaimed with emotion, firing once more. Btw, game rabbit BBQ’d with homemade sauce, scrumptious.
By the next year I was calmly aiming a .470 rifle at and hitting a deer from over half a football field away. Well…once but still, the desensitizing of the first few hunts tempered my demeanor drastically.
So it is a bit silly some schoolchild or office worker can slaughter a dog, cat. deer, or chicken no prob, something culture and society would have ingrained into them as empathetic, loving creatures, as easily as the day or days old corpses of adults. If we could have a ‘former parent’ trait then the guilt with zambie children would completely make sense and add to roleplay.

[redxlaser15]

I wasn’t being sexist, I’ve never been as such in my life. I guess I should have cleared up the wording though. I was more referring to the ‘adult’ part, not gender. I’m a man and I tend to cry. I was just inserting a gender in there.
Sorry if that offended anyone, I tend to frequently be very misunderstood. I know what I’m trying to say, doesn’t mean everyone else does.

[redxlaser15]

I don’t mean to sound rude, but cats are not ‘empathetic, loving creatures.’ Not the ones I’ve seen anyway. Someone I know had to go to the hospital because of their own cat, and I’ve seen how they treat that thing, that stupid cat does not deserve so much love. There are some good cats, I’ll give you that, but not enough that I’d consider them to be ‘loving creatures’ overall.
But maybe I’m just biased, I dunno. Personally, I prefer snakes

[ArchTerran]

Unless the comments have either been deleted or edited I have no idea how you came to the conclusion that the arguments were “quite sexist” nor do I see where the others claimed that all players are male or that the act of killling a zombie child is “weak or unmanly”. i can see it being a quesiton about if it’s logical for the character to be greatly affected by killing them though atleast in the later part of the game seems fine to have as is in early game.

Unfortunately I take offense by what I see as you making an assumtion which if that’s not the case & someone did make those remarks which later got removed I apologise but I can’t tell otherwise since I see no context to it.

I like the idea Krisu made & I can see it working pretty nicely with the feature already in the game with the debuff no longer applying after killing 100 of them. Helps with making it seem like your character is slowly adjusting to their new circumstance.

[Mantar]

Editing a poll after it goes up would be a bad option for any forum software. Imagine that some guy makes a poll and then gets mad that it doesn’t go the way he wants, so he edits the text so all those people voted for “Hitler did nothing wrong” or something.

[redxlaser15]

Fair enough. You make a good point. I just wanted to phrase it in such a way that it wasn’t so biased.

[kevin.granade]

The gist of the OP was that the player shouldn’t feel guilt for their actions because “I’m a full grown man!”. @redxlaser15 said after the fact that they were just defaulting to saying “man” instead of “adult”, but frankly I’m super sceptical of that because this whole discussion reeks of toxic masculinity. “I’m a big tough MAN that doesn’t feel emotions unless I want to”.

This is pretty much textbook sexism, an assertion that in order to be male you should act or feel a certain way.

Editing a poll after it goes up would be a bad option for any forum software.

Nail on the head here. If you want to fix it, the only option that doesn’t give the author the power to put words in other people’s mouths is to start a new poll. However, don’t restart this one, because it shouldn’t have been a poll in the first place.

[Trigon]

Well considering you usually find zombie children at a school I think any reasonable (IE not a psychopath) should probably feel sick going to a school and shooting it up or hacking their way through waves with a machete. They don’t look too explicitly monsterous from the description either and they’re not even rotten like in typical zombie media.

You really should feel bad about it. Granted you can distract yourself with candy, drugs, booze, and the like. It’s part of gameplay. We have morale boosting items to counteract the horrible things you do or that happen to you in the apocalypse. The system works. Don’t like it? Play a psychopath.

[ArchTerran]

I can agree with you about @redxlaser15 showing his own version of masculinity although I took it as a singular statement versus blanket statement when he says “I’m a man!” pumping himself up sort of like when someone says, “I/You can do this!”. I may of misinterpret his statement.

I’ll have to disagree about the entire topic being around ‘toxic masculinity’ though (perhaps the start atleast). Then there’s still the aspect of how someone potentialy made the claim that, “all players are male”. I only see that being the case if we really try to read between the lines but what we read between is just an assumption till the @redxlaser15 clarifies it.

Although thanks to @redxlaser15 making this topic I at least got to see some interesting ways of changing a aspect of a debuff. Not that any of the ideas will get implemented but it gets me excited for the possiblilties. Got me a bit more eager to focus on the rp part of the game versus meta-gaming.

I’m starting to get scepitcal about my interpretation though. Took the whole ‘getting the job done’ or ‘maculinity’ thing as a life aspect applied to everyone based on circumstance especially after my grandma had me help ‘finish off’ raccoons that got in the walls out at the indian campsite, got to see a flimingo out on the lake afterwards which helped me move on from what we did (was around 6-7yrs old at the time). Now that I think about it she just had me down there to watch it happen, I didn’t do anything besides hand her more ammo. (Sorry about my little life-story being long)

Thank you for taking the time to read & respond to me. I gotta go read up more on the guidelines to make sure I don’t break any, made my account today as I’ve started playing this game yesterday (very little).

[Bobdole44]

You got me there about the cats. I have two but I can say that probably the reason they are so well behaved is due to fear of discipline. I humbly renounce my addition of cats to that example, lol. Snakes can be surprisingly affectionate, I like them. I’ve honestly always wanted a pet fox, one of those Russian ones they breed to not be scared of humans.

[Ricky_Van]

well then, after reconsidering this whole debuff killing zombie child… i just stick with the old function that killing zombie child will depress my character unless i put some dank psycopath on my character trait.

sometimes a change in basic function like this can lead to bigger problem.

[UnholySaint]

It was the first change i made to the game when i started to play it several years ago and i keep making it after each checkout. I edit the logic to replace the debuff for non-psychopaths with a buff for psychopaths. In my understanding this represents perfectly how things work outside USA. Of cause i know gameplay is placed in USA, however in my opinion with the social pressure gone and the army of psychologists that messed with their minds turned into Z’s survivors will have to return to normal thinking pretty fast (or will cease to be survivors just as fast).