Some complicated negative trait ideas

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Negative traits, might be fun for challenge runs, but probably would require special coding,

Extreme motorphobia - You have a fear of vehicles some might consider irrational, both driving and being inside of them, and just being near one is difficult. While inside of a vehicle your morale will drop and you will sometimes panic and act irrationally in your attempt to avoid the metal beast. Understandably, grabbing or piloting such a device might require an extreme test of will and courage.

Junkavour - Through an excessively poor pre-cataclysm diet, you have acquired a disdain for the more mundane foods. You have difficulty keeping anything down that isn’t sufficiently processed or junkfood-y.

Nocturnal wiring - Some people are night owls, others are morning people. You, however, make vampires seem sane. For some reason, you start feeling tired as soon as the sun comes up, and will become heavily fatigued over time if you remain within its gaze. The dark is your life.

Dimension-ally Challenged - You have a horrible memory for layouts and would easily forget where you live if you didn’t write it down. Your overmap no longer reveals normally and you are forced to use found maps and jotted notes to fill it in.

Anti-Sedentary - You believe the only way to truly feel happy is to move on. So much, in fact, that the longer you stay in a place you’ve already been the more your morale drops. Conversely, discovering new places raises your morale.

CBM Rejection - For most people, CBMS were the future of mankind. Trans-humanity through mechanical adaption was neigh encroaching. For you, however, the future was not so cheery. Your body rejects these mechanical blights by having chemical problems, causing rashes, and occasional uncontrollable itching.

Squirrel-y - For most of your life, you felt an affinity for squirrels and their doings, and studied them well. You had just gotten done putting together your latest creation, a fullbody squirrel fursuit, when the Cataclysm occurred. Something inside you snapped at all the carnage and mayhem, and now you can’t bring yourself to live how did before. While you can wear a squirrel fursuit better than most and thus suffer less encumbrance from it, you also suffer morale and physical penalties for not wearing one. You also have become herbivorous and gain morale boosts from woodland-based vegetarian foods.

Food horder - Having lacked and gone without before the Cataclysm, you understand and appreciate the value of having a large supply of non-perishable food. You gain a morale bonus from seeing a large number of non-perishable food on one tile, but will suffer large morale penalties and panic increasingly for day you go without seeing such a thing.

Bigger is better! - You have a very simple need for your post-apocalyptic carnage: Big. You gain a morale bonus from wielding/throwing large weapons/explosives and rather enjoy loud bangs, nearby explosions, and excessive mutilation, but you suffer large morale penalties from being caught near hostiles without such. Spending too long having to get by with puny quiet weapons can lead you along the path to depression, negatively affecting your abilities.

Foot-in-mouth - You have problems socializing and talking with other sapient beings. It’s not that you don’t like the company and interaction, but rather that you often say things that you never intended. When conversing with others, you’ll often choose to say things completely the wrong way and suffer the results. (Ie, you chose “a” in an interaction and the game acts like you chose “c”)

What was that?! - You have a super overactive imagination and a healthy dose of paranoia. Whenever you hear a sound but cannot see a source, your mind starts imagining what it could be. (all ? marks that aren’t in visible area have a chance to create a hallucination monster or terror of some sort based on what kind of sound it is. In extreme cases, this phantasm might start trying to move on/attack/verbally frighten/threaten your character, but will disappear if it tries to step or ends up being on a visible tile)

2

i like most of those.

CBM Rejection - we need something like it

Extreme motorphobia, Nocturnal wiring, Dimension-ally Challenged, Anti-Sedentary, What was that?! - all of these sound fun to me

3

I expected Dimension-Ally Challenge. “Your years of obsessively reading Lovecraft stories and playing Call of Cthulhu has made you a friend of all those From Beyond. Unfortunately, everyone not From Beyond strongly dislikes you.” :stuck_out_tongue:

4

Ah yes that works a lot better for that name. I was just trying to come up with a fancy alternative for ‘bad at remembering spacial data’

5

That could be a lot of fun, like the risk of monsters spawning from teleglow, except constant. Or maybe not constant, but instead based on some measure of stress (damage and pain?).
Especially if the ally was always hostile by default, so that the only way it would be allied would be by being a common enemy to zeds.

6

Had a slightly similar idea on the bad ideas thread, but that one was more of a mutation idea. Sticky: Harder to throw items, but as a slight advantage weapons won’t get stuck as much. Archery would also be a problem, since the arrows refuse to leave your hand, and in general a lot of manual tasks involving your hand will have a dexterity penalty due to all the sticky-ness. Unarmed combat may also cause you to get stuck on a zombie.

As for other trait ideas… how about a mute trait? Like the effectiveness of speaking is greatly reduced, and a lot of dialogue options with NPCs would be changed or removed since all you can do for the most part are hand gestures. The ever so popular flipping the bird is the response for NPCs telling you to drop your weapon.

And, maybe a sleepwalker trait? Sleep on one place, wake up on another.

A pyromaniac one could be somewhat nice. Morale boost if there’s a fire near you; big morale boost if there’s a lot of fire near you. On the flipside, morale penalties after a while of not setting things on fire. A small fire won’t do much help in some cases.

And something like the food intolerant traits. Teetotaler/straight edge; you can take booze, drugs, and smoke, but you get a morale penalty for doing so.

7

Vow of poverty - Never be allowed to transport items worth more than X. (Or do allow transportation but inflict morale penalties)
Greedy/Vain - Either carry items worth at least X at all times, or face morale penalties.
Pressed nerve - Experience occasional additional random pain, with a small chance of stun.
Diabetic - Require insulin (to be found in hospitals, pharmacies, etc.). The lack of it leads to stat penalties, shock (stun, with an involuntary attempt to sleep), and eventually death. Add the ability to manufacture insulin. Thwart off the initial penalties with appropriate food.
Cancer patient - Requires specialized medical treatment every 6-9 months (= 2-3 seasons), found only in hospitals. Mutagens could turn the cancer around…
Hates computers - Computers skill locked to zero. Gets morale bonuses for smashing consoles.
Hates hard labor - Morale penalties from doing construction jobs, (doing any task in the * menu), including vehicle construction.
Sex addict or Pervert - Requires erotic literature and sex-related paraphernalia.
Transgender or ‘Born into a wrong body’- Needs to wear the clothes of the opposite sex. (certain clothing items would need gender tags, such as bras, panties, bikinis, skirts)
Blind - Permanently blind until vision gained by mutations or specialized CBMs.
Alcoholic - Requires alcohol. Talks or sings to himself every now and then when drunk, sometimes loudly.
Loves animals - Morale penalties every time when witnessing the death of an animal. Bonuses for the presence of a cat or a dog near the player.
Albino - Severe sight penalty and pain when standing in sunlight.
Hydrophobic - Freaks out near large bodies of water, not only causing substantial morale penalties but an occasional stun as well, simulating paralyzing fear.
Agoraphobic - Freaks out outdoors, not only receiving morale penalties but losing balance as well, sometimes causing missteps to an adjacent direction than intended. (minefields - not even once)
Claustrophobic - Freaks out indoors, sometimes paralyzing for several turns.
Arachnophobic - Can’t attack any spiders directly, nor any floor/ground tile in a 2-square radius of a spider, nor any tile behind the spider (using line of vision as reference, just as with trees). Can’t step on the said tiles either. Stun for one turn upon seeing a spider if it appears inside a 10-square radius. (blindfold to the rescue? teleport? concussive explosives?)
Mortician or Undertaker - Respects the dead. Respects the regular dead zombies and zombie children, as they were only recently people, being unable to smash their corpses or butcher them directly. Needs to bury a zombie body once per season in order to maintain sanity. (dig hole, place corpse, construct sign - all within one day, on the same tile)
Loved children - Unable to attack zombie children directly. (see Arachnophobia)

8

For your dimensionally-challenged trait, the name most fitting it medically would be “Environmental agnosia”. Wikipedia sadly does not have a full entry on it, but under Agnosia, it is described as “[…]the inability to locate a specific room or building that one is familiar with, as well as the inability to provide directions for how to arrive at a particular location. These individuals experience difficulty with learning routes.”

You could potentially call it spatial amnesia, but this is much less accurate (though more understandable by users maybe).

A character I wrote up for an rp ages ago suffered from this, and indeed, it was hard as heck to work around it with manual notes and maps. Just getting from kitchen to medbay was a potential risk for getting lost. I would play with this flaw in CDDA if it became available, but holy moley I would probably misplace so many stashed goods.

Beerbeer: not enough gendered clothing to fairly make a trans character work. I’d love representation but it’s just too hard to represent with clothing and objects alone. Too complicated to get right. We’ve tried this alley before. Same happened with trying to figure out how to make diabetes work without being underwhelmingly blah or overwhelmingly complicated. Food has only it’s type-tag for nutrition, so modelling blood sugar becomes a mess.

The mortician and undertaker ideas are very roleplay heavy but that appeals to me.
Hates computers makes me smile and might be entertaining to try.
Loves animals might be easy enough to model and would add something to guilt over besides killing zombie children.
The idea of phobias removing the ability to attack directly is intriguing and probably very damn hard to play with. But I kinda like it? That seems to model the aversion decently, as opposed to just morale penalties.