It seems to me that it’s very easy to keep your character content with his new meager and or dangerous lifestyle. You can go through all sorts of trauma and just pop in your headphones and then you’re totally fine. I propose that two new systems might be added to make your life a little more miserable: fear and cleanliness.
Cleanliness- Being perpetually crusted in blood and filth would be a total bummer, but your character doesn’t seem to mind at the moment. I’m thinking that bathing and laundry would be a good addition to maintaining your hygiene and sanity. After hacking through a crowd of zombies and stealing the clothes of their backs it might be a good idea to wash up and scrub those nasty rags. It wouldn’t be to difficult to find soap and buckets in houses, you wouldn’t need a whole bathtub if your base wasn’t a house. Besides a morale penalty for being greasy and grimy it could possibly add the risk of a wounded limb becoming infected even without being bitten.
Fear- It’s hard to stay happy when your life is danger. It’s also hard to focus when you’re under that sort of pressure. My idea is that having a lot of zombies in your view or having them get close to you can raise a meter that simultaneously lowers your morale and makes it a bit harder to perform skills such as shooting and driving, but also raises your movement speed a little. Of course a new character would be more affected by fear and see more of its penalties, while a hardened veteran is able to keep his cool and still get those head shots while the horde is closing in around him.
Of course these are only rough ideas I’ve been thinking about, and I don’t know how much of it is realistic for the devs to put in.
What do you guys think about having to cope with a little more mental and emotional trauma?
In regards to fear, it really depends on the person. The average person may be quite shaken by even seeing someone carrying a firearm or injuring themselves, but some aren’t. Personally, I’m the type who, when my two front teeth were knocked out in a football game with friends, was more curious about what exactly happened to them, pissed off that I might lose them, slightly annoyed at having to go to the dentist, and was laughing with my friends about the incident while trying not to bleed everywhere before I was able to get to said dentist.
Now, while a zombie apocalypse is on an entirely different level, there are plenty of people who have mentally prepared themselves for such a situation or simply have a much higher stress tolerance than average. I believe that in an ideal situation there would be a separate menu for mental stats and/or traits specifically.
Well, it’s only natural that some people are more hardened than others. But… your average random dude wouldn’t be quite as calm. I think that’s probably grounds for a sliding scale between a positive trait that protects you from fear (‘Veteran’ or similar?), the default behaviour, and a negative trait that overwhelms you with fear (possibly the not-entirely-unreasonable ‘Kinemortophobia’, fear of zombies, which could be treatable with drugs). By extension, there might also be a similar variance between a positive trait that leaves you relatively unconcerned with the prospect of dirty laundry (‘Homeless’ or similar, perhaps; if you’re used to not having clean clothes or a roof over your head, you won’t find it as distressing), default behaviour, and a negative trait that overwhelms you with fear and disgust at the prospect of being filthy (‘Mysophobia’ or similar, also treatable with drugs).
Cleanliness - Eventually it is planned to add soap/baths to the game as a positive moral bonus, but there are no current plans to add any sort of negative penalty if you don’t. After much discussion both among themselves and with the community the devs have come to the consensus that adding required bathing (or similar things such as going to the bathroom) simply forces the player to perform another task without actually gaining any sort of reward for it. Postive bonuses, on the other hand, provide an incentive to go out and obtain said objects without forcing the player to adopt their style to that of the game.
Fear - IIRC the eventual plans for fear is that it will be added into the game eventually (similar to what GryphGlyph outlines here). It will be changed by what you do in-game over time though, allowing characters to grow hardened to the trauma of the apocalypse (or similarly become scarred if something nearly kills them several times).
Also another planned thing for the morale system is to eventually have a sort of “overall” morale level that is based on the cumulative amount of bad/good things that have happened to you over the past week or so. This means that a character could become depressed if they have had a lot of bad things happen regardless of what they are currently experiencing, or happy despite their wet clothes and whatnot.
Maybe as a negative trait? (1point)
Only translation i found was ablutomania, maybe there is an easier/more common name?
Not sure if the additional coding is worth the trouble.
[quote=“Scheuche, post:7, topic:1801”]Maybe as a negative trait? (1point)
Only translation i found was ablutomania, maybe there is an easier/more common name?
Not sure if the additional coding is worth the trouble.[/quote]
I think that this would actually be a pretty cool idea if cleaning oneself will confer a morale bonus as described above. You could call it something like “Germaphobe”, “Clean-Freak” or the mentioned ablutomaniac. It could basically work like an permanent addiction to cleaning oneself, where every so often your character just feels dirty and has an obsessive need to scrub him/herself, with morale penalties for putting it off. Could be controlled with drugs if need be, just like Hoarder and Schizophrenic.
While I personally really like the idea of having to clean myself every so often to prevent various negative effects, I understand that not everyone will enjoy that kind of gameplay, so working it in as a negative trait would be a nice compromise, in my opinion.
Yeah probably forcing a bath a day to avoid a penalty would be irritating, but rather than just make it some sort of OCD madness, there might be monsters that dirty you up as a status effect which must be removed by cleaning. Like Boomered could, even after you can see again, leave a status effect (‘bile-soaked’) that causes a hefty morale penalty until you either get caught in the rain or wash off somehow. Walking over the Marloss fungus could also leave you ‘dusted in spores’, which might cause not only a morale penalty but also serve as fair warning for the terminal problems this can cause. Seriously, that’s a nasty, if exciting, way to lose a character.
This way, the game’s not just making you do a mundane chore over and over again all the time, but rather encouraging you to avoid things you probably should be avoiding.
There should also be morale penalties attached to suffering zombie attacks or being woken in the night by noise.
IDk about you guys but I pray for the zombie apoc. Time where all the dumb people get eaten and the smartest and fittest survive? I think I’d be pretty happy in a Zombie apoc. So to me I would feel happy… but then again i’m slightly crazy so maybe it’s just me?
Until you get unlucky, twist your ankle and become a crouching zombie snack or sth. similar
Tbh i think it’d get boring too fast (don’t think i’d last a year) if you are alone, and way too complicated with other survivors.
Rather than having to bathe daily, it might be reaonable to have extrordinary events (bile/acid covered, splattered with blood, etc) cause issues, and be removable either situationally (in rain, swimming) or by explicitly taking a bath.
Add to the cleanliness and stuff the likes and dislikes, and you can abuse the idea by getting “likes being covered in blood and gore”, giving you huge morale bonuses for murdering everything in your path as messily as possible!
You might change your mind if it turned out you weren’t as smart and fit as you imagined.[/quote]
Not to mention that even if you are, there is the simple factor of luck. Even dismissing for the moment that you might get bitten and/or eaten by an undead surprise, there would be a hell of a lot of other things out to kill you as well.
You could get hit by a car, the driver panicked and failing to notice you.
You could be hit by a stray bullet, of which more will probably be flying during the initial stages of a zombie apocalypse.
You could be mistaken for a zombie and shot intentionally.
An explosion from natural gas, gasoline, or some industrial process gone wrong could drastically cut your survival chances
Etc. Etc.
And don’t forget about the zombies.
Having said that, the core of the argument is still sound. A zombie apocalypse would be likely to kill off the dumb and incompetent and swiftly turn governments, bureaucracy, and society as a whole on its head. In the long run, this is not necessarily a bad thing. If termites have eaten too far into the frame of a house, no amount of insect poison will fix the underlying structural problem. Decay will set in, and either the owners of the house will wise up and get rid of it or it will eventually cave in on their heads. Regardless, the house is doomed. Either it will be bulldozed and replaced with a new one or it will slowly rot and collapse back into the earth from whence it came.
The argument is in no way sound, and nothing about a zombie apocalypse is good. People who lament their humdrum lives and truly believe they’d be happier in a cataclysm of massive proportions are silly. If you think governments, bureaucracy and society as a whole are screwing you over right now, you haven’t really given enough thought to how much extremely desperate people in the middle of a crisis would screw you over. It’s all too easy to imagine that living like an animal is nicer than dealing with society when you’ve never actually been forced out of it.
