You guys sure have missed a lot of those “The Sims” episodes in the past… the grumpy co-op over the clogged dirty toilet was my favourite. Too bad these characters are dead, and they’ve just eaten your ginger kitten outside.
I mean, there are 20 or so different types of materials in game already. You can build a catapult out of silk underwear and a foot crank and then rain HELL all along with “The ride of the Valkyries” throbbing from your earset. I wanna turn my char into an unearthly mutated freak that wields a radio tower with its 10-feet long tentacles; you wanna clip its toenails, and that’s fine with me.
small bonuses and small reductions in mood really do add up in the long run, and adding a use for things that are already in the game just fleshes it out that much more, making it more fun to play.
Really? No matter how real a RPG game is or feels like, you only get to choose a hair style yet you find no scissors/razor in your inventory as to “tend” to it. Do you really need five different types of cleaning chems in your CataDDA house to be the same dairy queen as in real life? I really think this is a survival game, not a washing machine OpenGL simulator.
While I agree with you pretty strongly that these things would have their place in this game, any time that I have tried to bring this or similar ideas up in the forums, they have usually been met with very strong opposition.
Personally I think that these things could be valuable for morale, but what people have responded to my ideas essentially with the position that once the apocalypse happened, societal comforts became irrelevant to the character’s motivation once their existence was stripped to an almost-purely survival basis.
While certain elements of the game exist for player aesthetic, such as clothing styles and character names, the overriding opinion is still that these things aren’t important enough to have someone working on implementing into the game. The big stance is that people mainly want more content that enhances the survival aspect of gameplay more so than the player preference in aesthetic elements of the game.
This seems like a decent idea, as a large portion of the way we actually handle problems in real life is handled in a similar way. Ever hear the phrase about straw and camels? It’s true, at least to some degree. The little shit does add up, and having it add up to some degree isn’t actually a bad way to simulate the shit we call ‘moods’. Sleeping in a good bed should probably make you feel a little better upon waking up, and sleeping curled up on a concrete floor should probably give you a minor speed penalty from back pain. Unless, of course, your character was/is an outdoorsman (Hey, that’s where traits come in!), or something similar.
You mention people commenting on survival. Survival isn’t necessarily just about shit trying to kill you. Staying sane, or going off the deep end into depression/psychosis, is as much a part of survival horror as the zombies trying to eat your face. And that is, effectively, what we’re playing to some degree. It’d also give some use to all of the random shit we can build using the mostly pointless construction menu. I use it mostly for clearing windows and turning tables into delicious wood. Beds, occasionally, if I can’t find a tent/rollmat, but that’s a situation that’s so rare I can probably count occurrences on the hand of a frostbite victim.
It doesn’t seem like this sort of thing would be hard to implement, it just upsets the applecart by highlighting how very shit the morale system is for simulating something approaching human emotions. A robust system of daily uplifts vs daily annoyances might work, idk, and the reason your morale dips when you get wet or scarf too many ant eggs is because the system becomes unbalanced to one side, ergo depression or euphoria.
