For a 2 point flaw, chemical imbalance is currently extremely damaging. While it says it occasionally causes random effects, it manifests them once every few minutes ingame, which is significantly less time than it takes to recover from them. I’ve had it bring me to 25 pain and -40 mood with no other contributing factors, which can easily be lethal if it happens during a bad time. It also effectively permanently nerfs your intelligence by a point, because there is almost never a time when you’re without some pain except when you’ve just woken up. Not to mention the extremely annoying “Something hurts! Stop crafting?” dialogue that pops up when crafting anything, often multiple times.
The effects other than pain and mood can be largely ignored, but those two alone happen far too frequently in my opinion. If it was made to proc less often, or have a limit to how many times it’s effects can stack, I think it would be more reasonable. A drug to mitigate it’s effects temporarily would also be welcome.
It’s well within 2 points of value. You can buy pain resistance for that and take aspirin once in a while and mechanically the trait becomes a non-issue.
The only thing that really needs fixing is the annoyance of random interruptions and having to regularly take (cheap) meds when using intelligence.
[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:2, topic:12582”]It’s well within 2 points of value. You can buy pain resistance for that and take aspirin once in a while and mechanically the trait becomes a non-issue.
The only thing that really needs fixing is the annoyance of random interruptions and having to regularly take (cheap) meds when using intelligence.[/quote]
Eh, fair enough. I would be very happy if the pain notification during extended actions could be removed though.
The chronic pain doesn’t make sense, plus it is pretty annoying to deal with, no matter how easy. The pain should either be removed or the occurrence reduced a lot.
A medication specifically for the chem imbalance characters would be great. Let’s say a rare pill, stack of 10, effect lasts 24 hours, and it would “halve” the effects of the trait.
Chem imbalance could use more symptom variety, such as random vitamin level fluctuation, but never so that for example you couldn’t get two reductions in a row for the same vitamin. Vitamin level increase should be less frequent and less intense. This would result in more vitamin issues, correctable with the right diet or pills, although pill ingestion would in theory result in vitamin “overdose” (I forget the medical term). Chem imbalance characters could use a blood analysis method to determine their vitamin levels.
I can’t remember what the other existing symptoms there were but here are some suggestions:
- Vision problems 1: temporarily reduced Perception (halve it, round up/down)
- Vision problems 2: one turn of blindess (very rarely)
- Vision problems 3: lose vision gradually, all the way to blindness, start gaining vision again, back to normal
- Strength loss: temporarily lose one point of Strength
- Shaky hands: temporarily reduced Dexterity (halve it, round up/down)
- Dulled mind: temporarily reduced Intelligence (-2?)
- Distracted thoughts: lose 30 points of Focus (very rarely)
- Loss of breath 1 (very rarely). Lose two bars of Stamina
- Loss of breath 2 (very rarely). Lowered max Stamina
- Balance loss 1 (very rarely, once in 14 days): A single misstep in unintentional direction, adjacent to the intended direction. (should not trigger while driving, or should it?)
- Balance loss 2 (very rarely): Fall down spontaneously.
- Random variance to drug addiction chances
- Random variance to drug withdrawal duration
- Random variance to drug effect duration
- Random variance to withdrawal symptoms. Handpicked pool of existing withdrawal symptoms from which a symptom is chosen randomly for each drug dose (comedown). Alternatively, roll a permanent unique list separately for each chem imbalance character at game start, so that the player eventually learns how the various drugs affect him uniquely.
- Have combinations of drugs cause adverse effects. For example: Adderall + aspirin = headache. Roll a random list of these chosen drug interactions at game start.
Maybe I just have a high tolerance for bullshitery, but having played several planned pre-Medical characters I never had much issue starting with both Chemical Imbalance and Schizophrenic. You gotta learn to live with the side effects or medicate them appropriately, aspirin for minor pain which you should have boatloads of anyway and morale boosters for when things get low.
Never had pain from it get above 15 while actively medicating. I guess if you got an extra dose of it on top of already being in pretty banged up that could leave you in a bad spot. But you should really plan for that happening with somekind of contingency in the first place.