"Used" CBMs as analogy to "filthy clothes" mod

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

I’ve just heard on the CDDA subreddit that painkillers are needed to install CBMs. I haven’t tried the relevant experimental yet so I can’t comment on actual gameplay. The comments on that thread went into lore discussion on how much support the CBM kits give for the installation surgery. Reading that gave me an idea.

If the painkiller CBM installation becomes an official mod, why not make it like the filthy clothes mod? CBM you get from butchering zombies will have a “used” or “parts only” tag, meaning you only salvaged the functional parts, and the installation supplies such as painkillers and self-installation tools have been used up when it was originally installed. Installing these take higher skills, as well as surgery tools and painkillers, compared to current CBM installation. On the other hand, pristine CBM kits found as loot have all the supplies intact, and are much easier to install compared to current skill checks, but are of course much rarer.

Then maybe you can vary rarely find separate supplies kits in labs and hospitals, which are like soaps in filthy clothes, used to convert “used” CBMs into easy-to-use kits.

2

Should probably drop this https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/21423 on the subreddit, but then I don’t use reddit much.

3

Making salvaged CBMs a separate item type and requiring them to be prepped for installation is an option, but that doesn’t obviate the need for painkillers for installing pristine CBMs.

We could make an item that’s a CNN installation kit, that has just the right amount of painkiller in it for an installation.

4

People are assuming that CBMs do have painkillers or local anesthetics in them. Is this true?

5

No, previously it was simply abstracted away / ignored. An example of the lack is, did you have lasting pain or painkiller effect after installing a CBM? If it had actually simulated you applying painkillers and doing the surgery, it would have had these side effects.

6

How it is balanced right now is an issue, as there is no way to tell how much is enough painkillers without killing you and generally doing it by trial and error.
Which makes it seriously unbalance, something that already had very harsh punishment for failing.

And again I’m going to remark, that there’s no way to know how much total painkillers you have taken, only how much effective.
Making it so you need to know the painkiller effect of the drugs and its mechanics and the painkiller effect needed. All of which would need you to look at the source code, and generally metagame beyond what the game informs the player.

Which is horrible game design, forcing the player to look at how the game works under the hood so that she doesn’t loose a character.

I would revert the changes , and think about a sensible way of implementing it, instead of the lazily unbalanced and incomplete way it is now.

No one likes half-cocked mechanics, and this one that shouldn’t have been merged until

And as I said in the closed issue:

CBM are supposed to be a kit of the bionic and all the tools needed to install it.
A brand new CBM looted from a locked cage in a lab should not need anaesthetic or any kind of tool to install it.
A salvaged or butchered bionic out of a corpse, should need anaesthetic and tools to install

Thanks to #20892 any CBM regardless if it was hard earned through lab raiding and hacking a locked box or just killing and butchering a random technician, needs lots of painkillers.
So far installing CBM already made almost obligatory to use any kind of intelligence enhancing drug to reduce the fail chances. Which is what the majority of players did, as it has become the current metagame of installing CBMs. As the consequence of a bad installation range from a faulty bionic, mutation or death.

This seems to be a rather lazy and incomplete implementation of distinguishing between low-difficulty RNG based butchered bionics or hard-difficulty looted CBMs proper.

I understand the need between killing a zombie technician with a rock in a sock, butcher it with a pocket knife and getting a CBM; and having to get a lab card, deal with security turrets, manhacks and security bots, hack a CBM display case to get a CBM.

Plus painkillers being as vague as they are at telling the player how much is enough, and that there’s a fine line between enough painkillers and “your breath stops completely”, having specialized anaesthetic would be needed for the current state of CBMs.

If we are going to differentiate between CBMs and butchered bionic, we need a properly designed and implemented system. Instead of further penalizing all kinds of CBMs regardless of how they were acquired.

This is a serious game balance problem. As this increases the needs of hard to find painkillers and specially hard to dose, as an over-dose causes death.

I don’t think it is working as intended as that unreasonably unbalance all the CBMs regardless of how they were acquired.

Now that we have test it, I’m not the only one that think it is unbalanced, and gave plenty of arguments of why it is unbalance, and on how it can be fixed.
Including more or less what would be the expected behavior and what is the current behavior.

And I would like to ask please to hear the reasons and rationale behind having this in its current state, and of why any of my arguments and reasoning would be wrong.

7

Is this really a problem?

IRc you need 100 painkiller points to install bionics, and you die at 250. It seems like enough leeway to be pretty safe.

My guess is that people who have died just continously ate pills until it worked and OD, instead of waiting and checking between pills

8

[quote=“John Candlebury, post:7, topic:14002”]Is this really a problem?

IRc you need 100 painkiller points to install bionics, and you die at 250. It seems like enough leeway to be pretty safe.

My guess is that people who have died just continously ate pills until it worked and OD, instead of waiting and checking between pills[/quote]

You need to have more than 120 painkiller.

And it is a real problem, the game doesn’t tell you your total and effective painkiller. You only know you need half the painkiller cap if you have check the source code, and you can calculate the needed amount if you look at the painkiller code for effective painkiller effect and at the JSONs for how much painkiller each drugs gives you.

Simply that is a horrible game design flaw. No game should force you to look under the hood for information.
Now couple that with the fact of making all the CBMs harder regardless of its origin, and you have a lazily incompletely implemented game mechanic.

So yes, it is really a problem, and is a problem in several levels.

9

That is a symptom of the problem, though:
Player only gets “do drugs” message, but doesn’t get any “doing another heroin may get you to OD” one.
Since the painkiller effect - “opiates in bloodstream” - is not shown anywhere and painkiller mechanics are significantly different from general effect mechanics, players can easily misunderstand what is happening.

Typical effect works like this: you take 1 pill, you get +1 level of effect
Painkillers work like this: you take 1 pill, you get 3 different effects which slowly give you points in a hidden stat that you can only track by checking speed penalties

And then there is the part where OD isn’t just few hours of unconsciousness, vomiting and a day of headache, but instant death with no warning.

10

[quote=“Alec White, post:6, topic:14002”]How it is balanced right now is an issue, as there is no way to tell how much is enough painkillers without killing you and generally doing it by trial and error.
Which makes it seriously unbalance, something that already had very harsh punishment for failing.[/quote]
Can you outline the actual sequence of actions you took that led to death? You geet fedback about whether you have enough painkiller each time you attempt to install a CBM, so if you just do:
Take painkiller, wait, attempt installation
repeat.

It will just work.
If you skip the “wait” part, it’s not going to end well, which is why the CBM failure installation messages warn that painkillers might not have fully taken effect yet.

[quote=“Alec White, post:6, topic:14002”]CBM are supposed to be a kit of the bionic and all the tools needed to install it.
A brand new CBM looted from a locked cage in a lab should not need anaesthetic or any kind of tool to install it.
A salvaged or butchered bionic out of a corpse, should need anaesthetic and tools to install[/quote]
This is your opinion, and not one I agree with, the whole concept of “self-installing CBM” or “self-contained CBM installation kit” is going away, the only reason it was implimented that way was because it was simpler to do it that way, and now we’re adding elements that flesh out the concept instead of everything being abstracted out.

Yea this needs to be fixed too, especially considering the absurd examples of “inteligence-enhancing drugs” the game uses.

[quote=“Alec White, post:6, topic:14002”]This seems to be a rather lazy and incomplete implementation of distinguishing between low-difficulty RNG based butchered bionics or hard-difficulty looted CBMs proper.

I understand the need between killing a zombie technician with a rock in a sock, butcher it with a pocket knife and getting a CBM; and having to get a lab card, deal with security turrets, manhacks and security bots, hack a CBM display case to get a CBM.[/quote]
That’s not what the change is about, it’s about fleshing out CBM from realism and resource consumption points of view, it was massively over-abstract in both areas.

The threshold for CBM installation is 100, the threshold for death is 240, you have to take 2.4x as many painkillers as needed in order to reach the death threshold. I tested (I know, shocking, right?) with several different sets of drugs, and every time, simply alternating taking a dose and waiting 5 minutes before trying to install led to successful installation with no death. Outside of a specific and repeatable example of death from a seemingly safe approach, I have to assume you’re either being careless, not respecting the painkiller ramp-up delay, or being paranoid about the potential for death as opposed to actually encountering it.

That is a symptom of the problem, though:
Player only gets “do drugs” message, but doesn’t get any “doing another heroin may get you to OD” one.[/quote]
That’s working as intended, you don’t get a “doing another heroin may get you to OD” IRL, it’s one of the major risks faced by users of narcotics in particular. In fact our model is many times kinder than IRL since we don’t have bad drugs, drug tolerance, dosage mstakes, compulsive drug use, allergies, drug interactions, embolisms, or a number of other potentially fatal issues related to drug use.

THIS is an actual problem, tracked here: Early onset symptoms for drug OD. · Issue #1291 · CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA · GitHub
I just promoted it to 0.D blocker, it should have been before, but it is now.

11

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:10, topic:14002”]Can you outline the actual sequence of actions you took that led to death? You geet fedback about whether you have enough painkiller each time you attempt to install a CBM, so if you just do:
Take painkiller, wait, attempt installation
repeat.[/quote]

Had a character that looted a lab, got plenty of morphine and some CBMs so I decided to use it.

Took a shot, waited 5 minutes, checked it asked for more, repeat operation 3 more times, managed to install CBM, half an hour later the character was dead.

If that was the intention, adding realism. Why not add proper local anesthetic? Why not add proper surgical tools? Why not even add hospital/lab surgery robots/NPCs?
And in general why not first take a look at CBMs and think about all the possible ways of making it more realistic, and how those changes will affect the gameplay?

That’s what makes me think it was a half-cocked way of trying to add realism for CBMs. Which came out as penalizing CBMs gratuitously without any regards for realism.
As it was said before, if it was for the sake of realism, there would be local anesthetics, as it is done in surgeries, and not using painkiller mechanics which its poor player feedback.

Local anesthetics is to avoid pain, painkillers are for when you are already in pain. And the current painkiller mechanics are not up to be used as local anesthetics substitute.
That’s why it is and should be a tracked issue.

Also why are we now fleshing out CBMs from realism and resource consumption points of view? I thought we were in a feature freeze.

12

Just a random question with regards to installing them. In the outpost/ranch there’s a doctor that can help assist in installing/removing bionics. In that case, perhaps that option of installing/removing bionics with the help of that doctor has the doctor automatically apply painkillers for less risk of death, or somesuch?

13

if you want realism then you need an easy way as well as a hard way because the pre-cataclysm world wouldn’t only have had the hard way, so like a hospital can rarely spawn with a “bionic installation system” or something, that gives you a much much higher chance on installing bionics. as a cost you can have it literally knock you out for 6 hours or so, so you need to make sure the area is secure before using it otherwise a zombie could just walk up and nom your brains out while you are strapped to an operating table. also maybe it needs a lot of power so you need a fully charged UPS to plug it into to make it work. (and it eats ALL of the charge)

also, maybe scale painkillers with difficulty? the easy ones don’t require nearly enough cutting to warrant 100 painkiller. like cranial flashlight, you make one incision on your forehead, stick an LED in there and seal it up, maybe a little painful but i doubt that is 100 painful.

14

  1. As for something like “CBM installation kits” - we already had a rather big discussion (https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/20383) on this matter. In short: good idea, but only after 0.D.

  2. As for local anesthetics - adding them would be great IMO, but sometimes (for a bigger and complex medical operations like eyes surgery, or thermal climate control, or replacing your stomach) local anesthetics wouldn’t be enough, you can’t inject anesthetics into your eyes or inject them into every part of your body and become fully numb.

15

Wait a sec. Quote by Kevin on Feb 26th, in the Github linked in the above comment (https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/20383)

" kevingranade commented on Feb 26
There has been discussion of requiring install kits for harvested cbms,
which is a great idea. That requires deciding where to spawn the
installation kits and perhaps making a crafting recipe for them, basically
some medical gear.

We’d probably treat dropped cbms more or less the same as harvested ones.
Only the ones in labs or vaults would cone with installation kits. "

“Meh, don’t care one way or the other, could easily be abstracted away by saying the install kit has the necessary antiseptics.”

Then, Kevin does a complete 180:

http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=14746.msg302408#msg302408

What happened between February and July? We had many well thought out solutions presented by the players. They would have been tedious to implement, sure, but could be implemented within existing and well understood game mechanics. Why the jump to requiring painkillers? Painkillers aren’t even that rare by mid-late game, so it’s not like they balance anything.

16

Regarding “new” CBMs with install kits, how about make them like MREs? Disassemble to get the bionic, and the needed amount of painkiller/anesthetic and whatever else that might be needed. Or somesuch.

17

While I am not an expert, here is my idea / suggestion.

As technology is always improving why not have varying degrees of cbm’s. The better the grade the less of a pain penalty You suffer after the implantation.

The lab type cbm’s might be “experimental” they could have a moderate pain penalty for the “uncommon” type And the “common” ones could have no penalty.

Normal cbm’s might have a average to low penalty these would be the ones you could buy off the rack with enough money before the cataclysm.

Low quality ones would be the ones you dig out of the zombies. High pain penalty and might require additional tools.

This is just my opinion but I think it would be a reasonable middle ground between the no painkillers group and my understanding of what Kevin Granade wants as the developer.

18

[quote=“Alec White, post:11, topic:14002”]Had a character that looted a lab, got plenty of morphine and some CBMs so I decided to use it.

Took a shot, waited 5 minutes, checked it asked for more, repeat operation 3 more times, managed to install CBM, half an hour later the character was dead.[/quote]
Indeed, this will kill you, 4 doses of morphine will take you over the limit.

Follow up, did you read the messages when you were doing this, or just reflexively clear them? When I followed your directions, I did, “apply morphine, wait 5 min, check CBM install” three times, the third time I noticed the message changed to “You aren’t quite numb enough” instead of “You need to be a lot more numb”, so my inclination was to wait longer to be safe, but I was mechanically following your directions, so ignored this concern, which led to the outcome you predicted. I tried again with just one more 5 minute wait once the feedback changed to “You aren’t quite numb enough”, and survived.

I was wondering if the difference between “enough to install” and “enough to kill you” was really just one ampule of morphine, so I checked by waiting longer, it turns out two ampules is sufficient if you wait much longer for it to take effect. Perhaps we can have some better feedback about this, but frankly, it is working as intended. If you treat morphine with the respect it deserves, you’ll be fine.

[quote=“Alec White, post:11, topic:14002”]If that was the intention, adding realism. Why not add proper local anesthetic? Why not add proper surgical tools? Why not even add hospital/lab surgery robots/NPCs?
And in general why not first take a look at CBMs and think about all the possible ways of making it more realistic, and how those changes will affect the gameplay?[/quote]
You’re asking a lot of leading questions here that assume what the “correct” answer is and pretty much assert that the contributors to this issue didn’t put enough thought into it, that’s downright rude.

Check the status thread, if it doesn’t say we’re in feature freeze, we’re not, that’s the reason it’s there.

19

What I get from this discussion so far is that the painkiller mechanic would be an ok one with more feedback to the player.

One of the problem with painkillers seems to be that it does a lot of hidden stuff that can lead you to accidentaly OD, and you don’t really learn how those hidden stuff work through a game because you never have to use painkiller with no pain. Usually you’re in pain, you take a pill and wait for the pain to go down , you have an indication of the effect via the pain meter and a rough idea of the painkiller strength from description/real life.

But with the cbm you’re not in pain so the only way to follow the effect of the pill is to blindy wait and check the cbm installation prompt from time to time, that seems to be a bit annoying and confusing because you have no idea how long to wait or how much is too much.

So the game could give you a “numbness meter” that could give you an idea of the progress of the pill effect, and/or the cbm installation prompt could be more precise about how much painkiller/numbness you need to install. Since IRL it’s not obvious either to know these things the amount of info you get could depend of your level in first aid, if you’re a surgeon you get very accurate info, if you have no skill you just know that you’re numb and how painfull the installation looks.

The fact that doing self surgery on your eyes while high on codeine is not very reallistic is probably another problem that will get solved progressively by the addition of cbm installation kit, robot surgeon, NPC surgeon etc

20

A section in @ for various “hidden” stats (minor stat effects tab?) where vague character feelings could be a useful tool while keeping it from being OP… might be a good solution.

Messages in the message log are often easy to miss especially for noobs who should realize that guzzling meds effects your character, but frequently assume that as a game there will be no cumulative drawbacks or penalties especially long term.

would make keeping track of your ‘vague hidden health’ level and other stats easier, without cluttering the ‘major’ stat effects section.