Remove the debuff for killing zombie children!

Game Talk The Drawing Board
102

Well I did reference my demeanor as a goofball. I wasn’t making a direct pun. But a sarcastic remark about how I think there fore I am. I also meant that you do the same. But it was a little vague. I know.

Some may consider me not a human at all and more of a light hearted “Intelligent Donkey” wink

edit:

Ahhh…I just got what you took as a slant. The part about …yeah…
“especially stuff I wasn’t expressly told to think”.

Ok you took it as being unable to think for ones self. I wrote it, of mind “I take the crap I read with a grain of salt”

So. Ok, if you were offended by that. I am sorry. Totally not what I mean though.

103

It’s cool, I gotta say it was a stimulating debate. I don’t know that we arrived at any definite conclusion , but it certainly dragged me away from boring old work, and that… means I should probably ignore the little discourse popups more often. :smiley:

104

Well believe it or not we stayed exactly on topic of the original idea for the thread. We just went WAY deeper than was needed lol

I think I came away from this as 2 sides of a game mechanic that could be discussed more when we have far more NPC depth than is present, at present.

Just imagine the NPC rabbit hole for this one topic. Jesus. I feel bad for Kevin and the other coders lol xD

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105

This? Heart me baby! lol
(wsh wsh,blows on knuckles. Yeah this bit wasn’t half bad of a human observation eh?..somebody gimme a mirror, I like myself!:rofl:)

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106

Yea its going to be interesting, I particularly look forward to the inevitable reversal when some fraction of the people currently in favor of guilt-free killing realize that their character is outnumbered and maybe it’s nice to live in a world where people have compunctions about killing each other. Maybe we’ll add a game mode where everyone’s a psychopath and see how fun that is.

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107

You mean DayZ? People already got pissy about NPCs coming up on them and dumping an entire smg mag into them. Can’t wait until psychopath NPCs snipe you with a mosin every time you leave the shelter.

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108

Would be pretty much the same game as we know it though. If everyone were a labeled psychopath, nobody would be different in terms of game changes. Nobody would care much about killing a human looking creature that is trying to tear their face off.

I DO, however, think scaling the characters that are not using the trait from the start maybe a good idea. To a more indifferent emotional state after either a combination of time and how often they kill a creature. Perhaps one or the other?

I thought about it a little more. What could be a normal beginning person dealing with the mess they are in.

Example:

Everyone not using psychopath trait may begin as a “normal” person.

Point? Morale Debuffs. I can find all manner of stuff to boost my morale. But not as many for debuffing it. For those never having ran over an NPC(which they shouldn’t steal your crap, son! Pfft! lol). You end up not being able to make stuff. Which is really a pain in the ass. But also kinda makes sense when you really are depressed.

Kill anything and get that twinge of guilt for every critter killed based on a critter score like Kevin suggested. The character cares less about creature killing(not NPC humans, that was never my point) the more they do it and over time.

Doesn’t need to get much more elaborate. Perhaps the indifference slowly fades and the more “normal” omg I just killed a humanoid guilt comes back a little bit at a time? Assuming the toon isn’t killing as much as they were.

–
Not to kick off another debate. What I was arguing was, that there are a lot of situations that would not make a person a psychopath for not feeling guilt over killing something or anything.

109

i’ll stick with dev’s idea… sometimes dev team has better way to implement and fix the problem.

110

Yes. They do. Ignoring people, despite having a good contention :wink:

111

ayy i see there winking means :smile:

yea, i have once part of an indie RPG dev team and somehow ignoring few feedbacks is necessary.

112

Not angry or anything. I just like a good debate. But I still gave good info on the topic. I mean. Really, think about it. Not everybody that some folks THINK should feel bad WILL feel bad. This doesn’t make them the guy from The Shining lol

113

true…

yeah… just want to see debate but in good positive way, not like those politic debate that always end up in WWE ending.

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114

I think most people get the problem wrong. I ts not about killing children, but about what does “Psychopath” mean. Currently C:DDA developers insist that “Psychopath” means someone who destroys dangerous creatures that kill humans. It is pretty reasonable for many people to find this statement abusive, especially in the context of a zombie related game, that by default is attractive to those, who are more likely to be insulted by such statement. If trait name is changed to something that is not direct offense much less people will find motivation to question the game mechanic itself.
For me personally trait called “Psychopath” should require one to have certain number of kills, giving constant morale penalty and temporal morale boosts (higher when killing child-like Z’s) for each kill. This is what dev’s force me to patch in my copy of the game each time i compile it. If they want me to play the game in a different way they should hardcode a suitable name for the trait.

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115

2 posts were split to a new topic: S.L.A. Marshall and getting soldiers to shoot

116

There’s already a game for “psychos”, it’s called Rust.

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117

I’d like to offer my opinion as former “edgy kid” and now currently parent.

Before I had kids, I found children just annoying.
I very much can understand the perspective of those who say “fuck Zombie kids, they want to hurt me so I kill them no prob”, they’re no different from objects that are bad and must be removed.
I did not see the other side of what children do, why they do and what their actual function is, and I didn’t care (and why should I have cared, got zero reason for it?).

Now as a parent - I try to be understandable for everyone - you put a fuckton of ressources into your kids. It might not be a “empathic” analogy, but imagine you poured months of your life, thousands of [insert your currency here] and enjoyment/love into something (a car? VR-Deck? Whatever it is that would get you high), that already begins to pay off in hours of fun and just feeling good.
Would you guard it? Of course you would.
Would you understand if other people be protective of it? Of course.

And thats just the “cold” ressource-centric side of it.

Now - I myself was quite unempathic in the past, I would not have understood how it would make me feel sad if my kid got sad. The view of people like me can be quite mechanistic at times, calls to “but think of the children!” or “how would you feel if…” would completely have bounced off.
So I can only tell the “younger-me-types”: Its a horrible feeling to think about the life of a child being taken for an normal empathic human.

Another input. Killing someone as a non-military or trained-anything-with-killing-person will normally traumatize you - yes, murderers usually traumatize themselfes with their crime.
Killing a Zombie that looks like a child, will do unrecoverable damage to a normal functioning human.
And devastate you as a former parent. Even seeing a child that “turned” will, in your quite moments, make you imagine how it happend and “lower your morale dramaticaly” speaking in in-game terms.

As a desensitized gamer / “troubled kid” / anti-social-cellar-dweller you might not feel the immediate shock as strong, but it will leave unextinguishable bad feelings that will crawl up on you in your moments of “weakness” or in your dreams.

So in essence, I think the debuff for killing child-Zeds is absolutely sensible.

In Addition basically what Mantar said - humans killing humans and being fine with it requires a serious mental illness (like psychopathy or psychosis).

And another comment to the “psychopath” - word.
”Psychopath” is not an official defined term in psychology - so basically everyone can say it is what he likes it to be. What people usually think of as a psychopath is someone with reduced empathy in addition to other neuro-divergent traits like sadistic tendencies and also things like machiavellism, narcissistic tendencies or other in the same category.

That being said. Its a pop-culture game about surviving the apocalypse and if it got too realistic, it would just suck.
If it would be realistic it would be called a simulation, not a game.

118

A mood debuff for killing the thing that is trying to kill you is stupid.

If something is trying to kill me, I just want to see it dead, zombie child or not.

Also I would probably feel a lot worse for killing the zombie dogs than some child, but even with killing the zombie dogs I would have no problem because they are more or less just mindless killer drones and not really dogs anymore.

Luckily, the debuff is pretty inconsequencial gameplaywise.