Some changes to bite infection mechanics suggestion

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Suggestion group 1: (modification)
Have bite only indicate a chance of infection, not a guarantee.
Introduce trait to reduce chance.
Allow cleaning wounds with alcohol to prevent infection.

Suggestion group 2: (replacement)
Instead of having bites cause infection, have a “chance of infection” condition.
All injuries contribute a small amount to this, and every some many tics there is a chance of infection based on the odds. (In reality, the odds will be roughly the percent chance of being infected at the end of a given six hour period, and the displayed value will be tenths of a percent of infection)
Zombie bites contribute significantly to this, far more than other injuries. (unless those other injuries are also special sources of infection. This introduces some new and interesting gameplay potential - certain critters could be relatively non-dangerous aside from their high chance of infection.)
Infection chance reduces over time. Using first aid/alcohol/bandages can reduce chance of infection (in order of effectiveness).
No matter the seriousness of the injury, the infection odds should fade over the course of 24 hours to nothing. (this might require simply a vector of infection conditions with timeouts rather than a single infection condition with a variable, but this is a fairly trivial difference)

Example:
Character cuts themselves climbing through a window. This gives with a 1% chance of infection after 6 hours (.5% percent after 12, .2% after 18, 0% after 24).
Character is bitten by a zombie. This gives a 50% chance of infection after 6 hours. (25% chance after 12, 12.5% chance after 18, 0% after 24)
Character crawls back and forth through a bunch of rubble, and then gets bitten, all within a couple minutes. 50% plus 20 1% chances mean 70% chance after 6 hours. (35% chance after 12 hours, 16.5% chance after 18 hours, 0% chance after 24)

First Aid use eliminates the highest percent chance in the infection list at the current time.
Alcohol “clean wound” option reduces the time remaining by 50% for the highest percent chance of infection at the current time. (A bite would be reduced 12 hours, meaning the infection chance would only be 25% and you’d only have to worry about half the checks being run, for an even better effectiveness than is immediately obvious)
Bandages work like alcohol, but only reduce the time remaining by 25% instead of 50%.

2

Wait, isn’t there a “clean wound” option already when using bandages or first aid kits? (although without the need of alcohol)

3

Yes, this is a suggested change. I’d rather make it part of normal first aid/bandage treatment rather than being its own special action that somehow uses up a charge without restoring any health.

4

What about some sort of cure? If you go through a Research Lab and look at a lot of the research logs, you might notice they were close to finishing a cure. The only problem they were having was to getting it to “cure” the zombies.
Perhaps the cure adds some sort of trait that lowers the chance of infection from non-zombie bites to 0% and perhaps half the infection chance from zombies (It doesn’t cure you when you become a zombie, so clearly it shouldn’t be absolute protection).

5

The infection that you get from zombie bites is a standard bacterial infection, the player is already infected with the actual zombi-ism at the start of the game.

6

[quote=“The Darkling Wolf, post:5, topic:439”]The infection that you get from zombie bites is a standard bacterial infection, the player is already infected with the actual zombi-ism at the start of the game.[/quote]After that, spoilers. Long story short, you won’t turn into a zombie during gameplay, though a normal bacterial infection could potentially do that as it stands. But that is alleviated the same way a bacterial infection always is.

7

[quote=“Zyuta, post:4, topic:439”]What about some sort of cure? If you go through a Research Lab and look at a lot of the research logs, you might notice they were close to finishing a cure. The only problem they were having was to getting it to “cure” the zombies.
Perhaps the cure adds some sort of trait that lowers the chance of infection from non-zombie bites to 0% and perhaps half the infection chance from zombies (It doesn’t cure you when you become a zombie, so clearly it shouldn’t be absolute protection).[/quote]
If you look at a few more logs, you’ll find that they actually did find a cure, and it even works on zombies. Too bad the side effects are worse than the zombies. Just make sure that your PC gets killed by torso destruction, and you’ve done your part.

8

[quote=“KA101, post:7, topic:439”][quote=“Zyuta, post:4, topic:439”]What about some sort of cure? If you go through a Research Lab and look at a lot of the research logs, you might notice they were close to finishing a cure. The only problem they were having was to getting it to “cure” the zombies.
Perhaps the cure adds some sort of trait that lowers the chance of infection from non-zombie bites to 0% and perhaps half the infection chance from zombies (It doesn’t cure you when you become a zombie, so clearly it shouldn’t be absolute protection).[/quote]
If you look at a few more logs, you’ll find that they actually did find a cure, and it even works on zombies. Too bad the side effects are worse than the zombies. Just make sure that your PC gets killed by torso destruction, and you’ve done your part.[/quote]And that also, you’re already infected, but it doesn’t affect you until you die. Which is just about post-endgame which = doesn’t really matter.

9

Since first aid kits are much rare than Antibiotics and the bite wounds are guaranteed infected,
I think it doesn’t make sense that the only way to prevent infection is using first aid kits.

Taking Antibiotics and using bangages when you are bitten should be able to prevent from infection or reduces the chance of getting infected at least.
And the first aid kits are only required when you are trying to cure the infected wounds.

10

Personally I cast my vote for number 2, though in the event that we implemented that we would also want to put in the ability to use alcohol to clean wounds and prevent infection. I would also suggest that if this was implemented it keeps in mind the thing doing the damage. For example climbing over rock rubble would have virtually no infection chance, due to the fact that pretty much all wounds caused by it are of the scraping/bruising nature and thus won’t become infected. Metal wreckage injuries, on the other hand, are much more likely to cause cuts and therefore more likely to cause infection. It would probably be best then to run the counter based on exactly what has caused your damage, not on just how much damage you have plus any specific “bonuses” caused by zombie bites and the like.

11

I agree with the alcohol cleaning, but you’d have to make sure it’s only the high proof stuff.
I’d vote for number one, purely because number two was TL;DR wall of text material and it’s… 10:40AM.
Dear lord, there are two ten o’clocks in the same day…

12

I think bashing damage should generaly not cause infections.

And alcohol probably should just decrease its chance of taking a hold, depending how much alcohol there is in specific drink/substance.

One could wash the wounds with clean water for lesser effect too. Not sure about the unclean version, but it could be used too to some extenct. If your chance of infection is low or zero, wound would just get even more infected after that.

13

That’s why I said high-proof alcohol.
In comparison a lot of vodka is only 40% ABV, although that should still be enough to disinfect (although not sterilize) most light wounds.

Even better, you could boil it. Boiling wine was used as a disinfectant by the mongols after invading china.

14

Suggestion group 2.5: (wound system)
Instead of having bites cause infection, track wounds inflicted.
All injuries will create a bodypart-specific wound of some kind, and every some many tics there is a chance of each susceptable wound becoming an infected version of itself, and infected wounds can increase in severity and cause systemic infections.
Zombie bites inflict wounds that are far more likely to become infected than other injuries, and have more serious reprecussions. (unless those other injuries are also special sources of infection. This introduces some new and interesting gameplay potential - certain critters could be relatively non-dangerous aside from their high chance of infection.)
Wounds heal over time. Using first aid/alcohol/bandages can change wounds to versions less likely to become infected, with proper clean/sterilize/bandage treatment reducing it to nothing.
Wounds can be relatively long-term, but healing should be accelerated compared to “realistic” durations*, simple cuts and bruises should recover within a day, and pretty much nothing should last more than a week or so.

Example:
Character cuts themselves climbing through a window. It starts as a “clean cut”, and if ignored progresses to a “dirty cut”, then possibly “infected” etc, but there’s only a chance, it’s also healing, and may well heal completely before becoming significant;y infected.
Character is bitten by a zombie. This starts out as a “zombie bite”**, and has a very high chance of proceeding to “infected zombie bite”, which has a moderate chance of causing “fever”, “severe fever” etc and is relatively slow to heal (2 days or so).
Character crawls back and forth through a bunch of rubble, and then gets bitten, all within a couple minutes. The “scrapes” have a very low chance of infection, but if there are enough of them some have a good chance, but they’ll probably just heal anyway. The zombie bite proceeds as usual.

Medical treatment comes in four varieties, clean, sterilize, bandage, and antibiotics.
Cleaning is only needed for “dirty” wounds, which either comes from dirty sources (bites, rusty nails), or clean wounds you ignore too long (especially if you’re in a “dirty” location, like the sewers). Cleaning includes rinsing out the wound with water, or more extreme measures if the wound is seriously infected.
Sterilization makes a clean wound and makes it “sterile”, which will have 0% chance of infection (but can still transition to “dirty”)
Bandaging mostly keeps clean and sterile wounds from getting dirty, and might also reduce infection chance beyond that (antibiotic bandages?). “good” bandages (first aid, bandage item would be 100% effective, binding with regular rags might help somewhat)
Antibiotics reduce infection chance for all wounds, but probably never to 0.

Treatment either targets the “worst” wound, or lets you pick a wound, I’m leaning toward pick since it’s simply displaying a list.
First Aid does a full clean/sterilize/bandage sweep on the wound, and will take a while.
Alcohol “clean wound” provides cleaning + sterilization and adds pain.
Bandages provide, well, bandaging.
Antibiotics bump antibiotic level, which reduces infection chances, and decreases over time.
Probably many more items, superglue for sufficiently small cuts, stitches?

*With an option to make healing durations realistic for the truly hardcore. This also implies that the relative rate of healing should be realistic, with an explicit multiplier that we can mess with, at least as a defult.
** Probably needs a better name.

15

I’m up for 2.5! Though we would need to look carefully at the exact way that it let you choose what wound you want to treat in order to ensure that it makes sense and allows the player to easily treat which ones they want (Maybe connect it to a status screen that gives a general overview of what wounds are present on each body part? I’m just a little afraid of when I only have 1 wounds worth of sterilizing and being presented with a list of a dozen “cuts” without knowing which one came from the metal rubble and which one came from the zombie).

16

Re: listing wounds, there are several things we’d do to make what you’re worried about not happen

  1. If wounds have different, observable properties, they’ll have seperate descriptions. So you might have a whole pile of minor cuts and bruises, but the infected ones and more serious onces will have different descriptions, as well as bandaged and clean ones being pushed down.
  2. By default they’d be sorted in order of severity, and just hitting enter will treat the most severe one.
    2a. Possibly a “treat all wounds” option, which will take a lot of in-game time, but not bother you about it.
  3. Filter out wounds that you can’t treat any more, so cleaned and bandaged wounds will never show up, clean wounds won’t show up if you’re cleaning wounds, sterilized wounds won’t show if you’re using neosporin, etc…
17

I’d vote for system 2.5.
It sounds pretty good, makes injuries more significant, and promotes a faster and smarter response to injuries than “I’ll sleep it off”.

18

Confounding factor: all these new! shiny! infection mechanics require Stuff to fix them, at the same time as people are arguing that Stuff is too easy to come by and there should be less of it laying around.

Basically, let’s not require specialty medical gear at the same time as we reduce the amount of gear available.

(There’s nothing non-smart about sleeping an injury off if your system can, in fact, accommodate that–how about players with faster-healing mutations? Would Medical Nanobots clean wounds/defeat infection? Blood Filter help at all?)

19

Trouble with all this is you’re punishing characters that aren’t archer or throwing. Throwing is pretty OP as it is, but without it, all I can really do is take a week to kill a dozen zombies, or maybe scum outdoors even more than I currently do, because with 0 in levels you get stomped pretty quick by enemies, unless it’s been changed in pre-5.

The only other strategy is to meta-game parking lots and gunstores, and pray to god I get something good, which might be fun the few times it’s successful, but would end up really annoying.

I already have to deal with -5 to dodge and increased melee cost because I need to carry more than 40 volume when looking for things, what’s the point of punishing melee-ers further?

Only way I could see it manageable is if there were more armors, and armor protected against bites.

20

When something thrown hits the ground, it creates 8 noise the last I checked. In static spawn this won’t cause much trouble, but in dynamic spawn, the noise will cause more zombies to spawn around you.