Remove the debuff for killing zombie children!

[TheZoneWizard]

I have a bridge solution that makes sense for balance.

How about scaling Psychopath? The more the character kills kids, the less the character cares. Becoming desensitized to killing them as they are zombies and all. Perhaps a new trait that makes the character indifferent…“Indifferent” trait?

I suspect even if I cared. The world going to pot as it were. I would grow steadily immune to pulping anyone of the undead category.

[Stone]

Isnt this how ot already works?

[TheZoneWizard]

Not unless it has been made so past 8200 or whatever the heck I have.

[Stone]

Nvm i was thinking of project zomboid and panic lol

[Excel]

The debuff won’t affect much.
Except you’re starting on School scenario.
(Holy, there’s a lot of them in there)

[UnholySaint]

Scaling is good, however there is one more aspect to this. When i and and everyone i know are being called “psychopats”, just because someones culture requires people to agree to be tamed to think this way by a bunch of “specialists” in messing with their minds under the threat of being made social outcasts i react in adequately rough way.

[Mantar]

Nobody has to be “trained” to think that way, most people have never seen a psychologist in their lives unless you count a school guidance counselor.

Historically, militaries have always had to deal with the fact that about 80-90% of their soldiers will hesitate and be unable to kill an enemy soldier even in a life or death situation. It takes extensive training to help a recruit overcome this basic human reluctance to harm another person. People who can do so on their own from the get-go are rare, and they really are sociopaths, plain and simple.

[UnholySaint]

We are not speaking of children, but of ex-children here. This is major difference. There is no Z in the game that does not fall in the ex-child category - even Z dogs have been child dogs before becoming Z’s.

[redxlaser15]

An adult is literally just a child who got older.

[redxlaser15]

I do not agree with you about the sociopath part, as it’s a freakin’ life or death scenario. I’ve heard of plenty of people that would do that right from the get-go but ended up severely depressed and such after they got out of the military.
You are a disappointment if you truly think that. At least 75% of humanity are disappointments in my opinion though, so don’t feel toooo bad. You really should still feel bad about saying that though.
My own father had to do that kind of thing. Suprisingly, he didn’t actually ever end up shooting someone, just at them. But he had the kind of accuracy that the military gave him the opportunity to be an assas-I mean scout Sniper.
My mom wouldn’t let him though.

[UnholySaint]

One more thing that will make your… education scream you have to oppose me, but i still feel obligated to mention it. For a healthy male character killing zombified woman, especially if there are traces that as human it was looking good will be much more depressing than killing zombified child even after he adapted to the new circumstances (WOW, this reminds me one of the main reason i love C:DDA - no sexual disorder perks).

[Stone]

your not wrong, i’ve seen a few articles and documentaries that support that people need to be trained to have no issues harming someone else, one documentary i watched about the wars in iraq showed that american soldiers were trained to believe that their enemy were basically less then dogs and to be treated like insects, but its been a few years since i saw it and cant recall it.

Interesting Quote

This behaviour was thought to be common in adult people only, but now scientists see that even six-year-olds are willing to take risks and make efforts just to see the unfitting individual get punished. Scientists have contemplated that this somewhat bizarre behaviour may actually be a useful mechanism for living amicably in communities. However, scientists are not saying that children and chimpanzees were feeling spite, but they were totally eager to be present when the ‘guilty’ individual, who was not cooperating, was punished. Interestingly, scientists used a puppet show to research children behaviour.
https://www.technology.org/2017/12/26/children-and-chimpanzees-love-seeing-others-get-punished-but-only-if-they-were-not-cooperating/

however i believe its impossible to tell how someone will react with 100% certainty to any situation as human nature isnt black or white, many things can affect our decisions in the moment.

[kevin.granade]

I would be 100% on-board with applying the morale debuff more evenly and in a more nuanced way, but as for eliminating it from the get-go, the options are applying the psychopath trait or hacking the game. This is not up for debate, so if you try you’re just wasting your time. I’ve had this same discussion something like a dozen times in the past few years, and it’s been a long time since someone presented anything new, so my expectation is that another round of discussion has roughly zero chance of being productive.

As for people taking offence that they’re being called a psychopath, that falls into two categories:

1. Most likely, you would feel bad if you were to kill a human-like creature, and your estimation of your level of “not caring” is inflated by societal expectations and exposure.
2. You would have no compunctions or guilt about killing something that looks like a person, you’re a psychopath, deal with it.

As for what “more nuance” looks like in practice:

1. Resistance to “killed something that looks like a person” should be unified. So you accumulate resistance to it whether you kill any adult zombie or any child zombie, unless you’ve already passed the threshold for that type of monster (see below).
2. Zombies (and possibly some other monsters?) get a score indicating how human-like they appear to be. Monstrous aberrations or heavily mutated individuals get a low score, monsters that can mostly pass as a living human other than their behaviour get a very high score. This would be further adjusted for child zombies for the usual reasons.
   2.a. Monsters with a very high score would elicit large amounts of guilt for killing them, monsters with a low score would elicit little guilt.
   2.b. The amount of guilt resistance a player acquires would be proportional to the amount of guilt suffered. So killing many of the same zombie would increase resistance rapidly at first, but then fall off as the amount of guilt drops. Once killing a particular monster no longer elicits guilt, it will not increase guilt resistance either.
3. Shift some amount of the penalty to a “squeamishness” effect for butchering and pulping both monstrous and ordinary animals. This would fade much faster than the killing penalty, and would most likely come with one or more traits that eliminates or mitigate it (clearly hunters and medical professionals are going to have encountered this issue already).

[redxlaser15]

Me likey, I hope you or someone else implements this.
I’d possibly do it myself, but I have extremely limited knowledge with this sort of thing.

[Mantar]

One more thing that will make your… education scream you have to oppose me

Careful with that edge, you might cut yourself.

[TheZoneWizard]

There are many who have each their own situation and reason for why they would not feel guilt over murder or killing anything. A person is not inherently a psychopath as a result of such actions and being indifferent.

A few examples:
Military service. Police service. Self Defense.

Other forms of guilt free killing:
Slaughter house worker. Animal Hunter(people often take pleasure in this one).

Also, the irony of the topic of Sociopathic behavior and Kevin’s commentary >_>

…which naturally makes me right and he wrong. We aren’t going to discuss it further. So deal with it.(sarcasm)

[Mantar]

Would not and should not are two different things. Ask any random police officer who’s killed someone, and odds are he’ll tell you he feels bad about it, and the fact that he had no choice is just what helps him sleep at night.
If you can kill another human being and feel absolutely nothing, then you are definitely NOT normal. There’s not really an argument to be made here, because all the available evidence I see here agrees with my position.
That is to say, if you’ve got evidence that there is no instinctive inhibition against killing other people in the human psyche, I’m willing to hear it, but I’m not hearing much that’s worth consideration so far.

[TheZoneWizard]

You don’t understand humans very well if you think this.

Try anger. Not a great emotion and yet you can feel a great relief of killing someone. Try any historical person that was universally hated. When they were murdered. People rejoiced. Must make most Americans a bunch of savages I guess.

[Mantar]

Killing at a distance is entirely different. Why would those people feel guilty that somebody else killed the unpopular figure? They didn’t do it, and thus never had to overcome any such inhibition.

Have you ever killed someone? You seem to think that having a justification would make it super easy and leave you with no guilt whatsoever, but a casual inquiry will show you countless people’s firsthand experiences that show otherwise.

[TheZoneWizard]

Killing at a distance. How about people watching a person on death row have their sentence carried out? Lotta cold ass people in the world. Not all of those people have a mental disorder and can still not feel a thing even if they had to first hand “throw the switch” so to speak.

Parents of murdered kids is a good example. Years in court over something terrible that happens. You could still witness a parent kill the criminal in a heart beat without flinching.

No I am not a murderer. But when you work around lawyers enough. You see a lot of people who have no mental illness and would have zero problems killing. I’ve also had fair amount of folks around me in the military. Plus my uncle was a police chief. Lotta stories there too.

edit:

Short version. You are trying to work out things in your head. That is fine. The point I am making is that the moral compass you WANT to apply to others is not always so easy or cut and dry. Some people just don’t give a damn and don’t have a mental disorder. That is not something you can debate. Peace.