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

[kevin.granade]

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

That doesn’t follow, the “easy” way would be either a full surgical procedure or a clinic like setting similar to a tatoo/piercing parlor, neither of which exist any more. There is a MOD in one of the settlements that can install and remove CBMs for you, that’s the easy way.

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.

I don’t have a problem with this concept in general, but its pretty far down the road, and i think adding it right now would make things worse and the short term.

What happened between February and July?

I took another look at the issue from the point of view of painkiller use, and realized that installation would have side effects such as leaving drugs in your system after the procedure, so requiring a batch of painkillers in each kit doesn’t make sense. There are a number of reasons why you might not need to use the painkillers bundled with the kit, which includes characters that dont need it at all.

[quote=“Fris0uman, post:19, topic:14002”]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.[/quote]
That’s a good point, I was under the impression that “pregaming” before combat was fairly common, but perhaps not.

[tarburst98]

ah, another thing i thought of is accounting for pain altering mutations like Deadened.

[NFossil]

Wow this really blew up. I didn’t mean to.

I still haven’t played the relevant change. Reading the thread gave me the impression that the following might be part of the problem:

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:10, topic:14002”][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]

Waiting for medicine to take effect might be common sense in real life, but is rarely a factor in video game logic. Of course it is right at home in a game as detailed as CDDA, but the problem is that the rest of the game does not “train” the player to expect this, and often even expresses the opposite impression that medicines here work just like regular video game logic.

When you take food, your fullness changes instantly after eating (I don’t know if there’s a hidden nutrient value that increases gradually). First aid kits instantly cure infections after use. Vitamin pills instantly cure scurvy after use. Maybe I haven’t been taking enough painkillers to be aware of the gradual effect, but other more commonly used consumables work instantly. I literally only knew that “waiting for effect” is a thing through this post.

I see that there’s a failure message that reminds the player of waiting. How about moving the reminder to the Y/N prompt before installation, especially when or after the CBM installation process is being fleshed out?

[Alec_White]

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

Then that makes the mechanic a “trial and error” kind, with the fact that “error” in this case means instantaneous death.

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.

What I assume or not is irrelevant to the fact that you haven’t answered any of my totally on-topic questions.
And the fact that you opted to brush it aside, may or may make me believe, that you implied that it wasn’t the right thing to do.
Of course all this could be solved if you answered my question, but as you didn’t I can only make up my opinion based on the way you chose to not answer them.

And being this thread about the CBM topic, and the questions I made being entirely on-topic. In my opinion is even more rude to not answered them, and on top of that imply that even the mere fact of asking on-topic question in the first place is “downright rude”.

I apologize if the questions felt rude. But if the mere fact of asking question of the thread’s topic, about in-game mechanic are not going to be answered because somehow they are “rude”, how can we even have constructive discussion about it if we can’t even ask questions about it?

The questions put in doubt the rationale and reasons of the game mechanic. Is it not allowed to question the game mechanics now?

Because if now questioning the game mechanics is going to be taken as “rude”, we might as well delete the whole forum. As it will be impossible to have any discussion about the game, that isn’t to agree with the game mechanics.

I’m sorry if I’m reading too much into it. But my questions were not answered and were even called rude, which is frustrating. But that’s what I understood out of the dismissal.

[Valiant]

If anyone interested, I added info on maximum painkiller intensity on the wiki: (http://cddawiki.chezzo.com/cdda_wiki/index.php?title=Hidden_stats#Painkillers).

[Knossos]

What about a medical tool that tells you how much of a substance you have in your system? Ordinarily, this would require blood analysis which is not instant. But, being that the game also has future age CBMs, a future age medical tool would make sense.

It could also be super rare.

[dovla]

Any particular reason Sensory Dulling CBM doesn’t seem to allow for CBM installation?

Your nervous system is wired to allow you to inhibit the signals of pain, allowing you to dull your senses at will. However, the use of this system may cause delayed reaction time and drowsiness.

Sounds pretty much ideal for this purpose but I tried installing it, then flipping the thing on and even waiting a while but I wasn’t able to install new CBMs.

[Coolthulhu]

Any particular reason Sensory Dulling CBM doesn’t seem to allow for CBM installation?

No, just an omission. Will probably be allowed soon.

[Azrad]

Would self-aware provide help in letting you know with better accuracy with regards to having enough painkillers in your survivor?

[Valiant]

Would self-aware provide help in letting you know with better accuracy with regards to having enough painkillers in your survivor?

Not likely, I think higher skills in first aid, medical profession and maybe higher intelligence would fit better for this.

[kevin.granade]

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.

Numbness is a good candidate for this, and would give feedback about the gradual nature of painkillers.

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

The hidden health stat is hidden on purpose, not because were short of room on the menu.

Waiting for medicine to take effect might be common sense in real life, but is rarely a factor in video game logic. Of course it is right at home in a game as detailed as CDDA, but the problem is that the rest of the game does not “train” the player to expect this, and often even expresses the opposite impression that medicines here work just like regular video game logic.

We did have some concern that people wouldn’t be familiar with it, which is why installation attempts warn you about the delay when suggesting you take more painkiller. It seems that the reminder that the delay exists was insufficient for some people though.

I see that there’s a failure message that reminds the player of waiting. How about moving the reminder to the Y/N prompt before installation, especially when or after the CBM installation process is being fleshed out?

The warning is displayed when you attempt to install a CBM, it cancels the attempt, but doesn’t use any resources. In other words, it comes before the Y/N prompt.

Looking at the feedback, there’s definitely an issue with the interface for this new feature, it works as intended if you know about some key mechanics, like delay time for painkiller effect, and painkiller OF. If you aren’t aware of these it’s dangerous to use.

Some of the options for addressing this:

1. Be specific about how long painkillers can take to reach full effect, i.e. “painkillers can take up to an hour to reach full effect”. This is the most minimal fix and targets the specific misunderstanding that leads to player death, that waiting 5-10 minutes is sufficient for painkillers to kick in fully.
2. Display feedback about “numbness level” in addition to pain level somewhere. This attempts to make the delay mechanic more apparent, more directly, but seems fragile for this particular issue, because it’s one more piece of interface you need to understand in order for it to work. It’s good to have information anyway, so it might be worth doing independent of this issue.
3. Display onset times in painkiller item descriptions, and possibly in messages when taking them. This is another general solution that has some risk of not being noticed in this particular case. This one is also worthwhile independent of CBM installation.
4. Add a craftable “surgery prep kit” that has the right amount of painkiller in it to get an average person ready for surgery. This gives people a safe option for installations, but isn’t a one size fits all solution.
5. Make the “you need painkillers” prompt lead to a menu for selecting painkillers to take, the minimal version would just let you select painkillers and it would take them on a schedule to determine the necessary dosage for your character. This is the most radical change, and would more or less eliminate the risk of taking the painkillers for this purpose. It’s also a bit complicated to implement.

[Litppunk]

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

The hidden health stat is hidden on purpose, not because were short of room on the menu.

I did not mean to fully reveal it, only give it a place to have the latest wake-up message in regards to it. Something like: Alertness comes to you easier these mornings. etc…

Nothing that tells the player anything they shouldn’t already know. But useful for play-throughs that last long enough to get broken up by real-life enough, or for long enough to cause save-point disorientation.

Maybe keep it even more vague then the wakeup messages, without the self aware perk.

[Mantar]

Painkillers really ought to have a “recommended safe dosage” on their label. IE in the description.

[kevin.granade]

I did not mean to fully reveal it, only give it a place to have the latest wake-up message in regards to it. Something like: Alertness comes to you easier these mornings. etc…

Oh right, that is a good idea.

[akhier_the_dragon_he]

Just thought of something in regard to this. Knowing the dosage requirements for things like painkillers are generally in the domain of being a doctor. Along with that a lot of drugs you would find aren’t going to have a “don’t take this much” label on them, especially if it was a homemade drug. Instead of putting this info in the description, what if you go with an options like you do when waiting? Way back when I suggested that you should be able to wait for things like the sunrise. Now I am suggestion that when taking medicine you get an option menu with things like “minor pain”, “moderate pain”, and “major pain” and the higher your first aid skill is (and thus the more you know about medicine) the more specific the options get (like how having a watch lets you be more specific on how long you wait) up to being told how much pain it will relieve and what effects it will have. In fact lets add more to the wait options (this will actually fix the problem of not knowing when the drugs kicked in) and include the ability to wait till the drugs you have taken are fully in effect or fully out of their system, and though it might clutter the wait screen maybe have the option for each specific drug.

[Tamior]

Since we are on the subject of CBM’s, might as well ask the following.

What would be more practical way to implement tool, time and consumables requirements for CBM installation:

1. Keep installation as a “use-action” of whatever bionic component.
2. Change installation into a crafting recipe that produces a pseudo-item that is immediately auto-activated to perform the actual installation.

I mean, is it even possible to code an item with a “use-action” that checks for tools and consumables, then keeps the character “busy” for a few hours, then uses the consumables, then performs the “success-check” and produces the resulting effect? All without glaring problems with implementation?

Or would it be more practical to use the existing crafting system to handle the tool, time and consumables requirements parts and make it produce a pseudo-item that is imminently applied and performs an installation check the same way CBM’s are currently installed?

[Arkenstone]

One would think with a high enough first aid/medical skill, the character should be aware that he or she is about to do something dangerous. If nothing else, then perhaps a medical book that is focused on painkilling to assist?

[Litppunk]

I think the numbness and other general mild info should be a good first step. It can always be pushed further if it still doesn’t feel like enough.

[Arkenstone]

I should add that I’ve been playing the game for years and I never fully understood how medicine worked until I looked into the code. The game is extremely unintuitive on this; as Alec mentioned, most things in the game act immediately so the notion of “pre-gaming” for combat doesn’t even occur to me. I mean, my buffs will just wear off within moments, no?

Not to mention, IRL, for example, I do take asprin if I’m in pain and only if I’m already hurting. I used to take painkillers for workouts, and it never occurred to me to take it before; only afterward, and if I was hurting exceptionally so.

More clarity would help greatly.