Temporary Traits

[Croak90]

Edit due to a few replies complaining about realism: THIS IS FOCUSED MORE ON GAMEPLAY, LESS ON REALISM. SAME AS HOW CROPS GROW IN A WEEK OR TWO RATHER THAN MONTHS. Please do not spam replies relating to the lack of realism.

 

Edit's edit for the anal retentive: These are some random ideas regarding the mechanic in general. I'm hoping people suggest their own ideas that I hadn't thought of, so seriously, stop telling me it's a bad idea because you don't like the idea of the eye glasses. Just consider the damn things an example if you must.

 

Had the idea when I raided the mall and found the store with loads of eye glasses. How about some moodles or temporary traits that affect the traits we pick for our character? Such as the glasses that can only be found in the mall giving a vision improvement to our character, making short sightedness return to normal and normal vision turn into the eagle eyed trait. Now being someone that wears them, glasses aren't a permanent thing. They'll break, get scratched up, and eventually wear out. Hell, wearing them when you don't need them (Normal -> Eagle Eye) can even make your vision degrade over time.

 

Another one: The fish we catch we can eat raw without any threat. Add a tapeworm moodle/temporary trait. For simplicity's sake, a tapeworm eats what you eat, forcing you to need more food to actually get sustenance. Therefore while carrying a tapeworm your character would temporarily have the hearty eater trait. Then if you eat raw fish or pork you have a chance to get a tape worm and become much hungrier until it passes.

 

Another still, maybe hearing aids to boost your hearing ability, but they would need batteries to operate.

 

Maybe even add four leaf clovers that you can rarely collect by digging with a trowel, and must be equipped in a primary or secondary slot to give you a luck boost (Of course, if the luck trait feeds into the world's loot on world creation, this might be pointless).

[SuperJack]

I do like the sounds of what your saying, perhaps a bit of polishing!

 

I heard that currently traits to change very slowly.

 

You can lose weight and get stronger if I read somewhere correctly.

[bvhv]

Um tapeworms stay in your system for quiet a while o.o

 

also hearing aids wouldn't boost your hearing ability only if you were deaf same for glasses.

 

Also I'm not sure you know how glasses work they have to have the right prescription or else they are not that great. 

[Strang]

You can actually harm your eyes by using glasses that are not the exact kind you need

[Croak90]

I know exactly how glasses work as I own a very expensive pair since I'm basically blind as a mole without them. Thing is, IF the devs were to add something like this gameplay would sit above realism for this particular part. So can we please move on from the "Glasses don't work like that" now?

 

As long as it isn't an integrated hearing aid anyone can use it, it acts like a microphone that receives instead of transmits.

 

On the subject of the tapeworms staying in you for quite a while, crops take a few months to grow. Want that to be exactly realistic too?

[migulao]

I know exactly how glasses work as I own a very expensive pair since I'm basically blind as a mole without them. Thing is, IF the devs were to add something like this gameplay would sit above realism for this particular part. So can we please move on from the "Glasses don't work like that" now?

 

As long as it isn't an integrated hearing aid anyone can use it, it acts like a microphone that receives instead of transmits.

 

On the subject of the tapeworms staying in you for quite a while, crops take a few months to grow. Want that to be exactly realistic too?

I agree, I read the same thing in the other thread except it wasn't about glasses, it was about that thing that you put around your legs if you have a broken limb ( I dont remember what they are called), that if it wasn't the right size, it couldn't be used.

[Realmkeeper]

Even after your edit, I feel the need to address why you're getting criticism for the 'unrealism' of your idea(s).

Food is an essential of survival, and growing your own is a way of adding balance to that point in the game where you're all out of fresh, and there's limited canned stuff left. Being a (zombie) survival game, an everlasting or renewable source of the essentials is, well, essential - regardless of realism. (that 'point' occurring weeks into your survival, not months - thus the hastened growing cycle)

 

Putting on a pair of glasses to give your character a buff, indeed, an unrealistic buff is not essential to surviving, and therefore not essential to the game itself. It's like, why add it at all, except to make the game easier??

The same can be said of a Hearing Aid, realistically you cannot simply 'turn them up' to hear things better as all you end up with is a lot of interference and an unbalanced ratio of background/foreground noise. Without a properly balanced hearing aid, you cannot 'focus' on a single sound, and you'd almost be better off slightly deaf and without a hearing aid, than have crystal clear hearing and try wearing a hearing aid. Again, it's not essential to survival, and the only real purpose is a character buff.

 

Tapeworms are a very real possibility, but how does one know when you've got a tapeworm, besides feeling more hungry than usual (well, not realistically), or getting hungry quicker. There's already a hunger moodle to indicate hungriness, and although having tapeworm may present a challenge to your character's survival, not having tapeworm is not essential to survival (which would probably make it more suited to a Mod, in fact, I kind of like the idea).

 

Hopefully this clears up why your suggestion is being hammered for the 'unrealistic' point a little bit, perhaps if you re-wrote it to involve binoculars (vision enhancement for both eagle-eyed and half-blind people), and more risks to eating raw food besides just tapeworms, you'd get a better reception.

Or if you explained why these additions would be beneficial to the gameplay itself, rather than just stating they would be.

That's just my 2cents though, others may feel differently.

[Croak90]

Or you could have simply said you think it's too long a stretch instead of telling me what I already know again.

[Realmkeeper]

Or you could have simply said you think it's too long a stretch instead of telling me what I already know again.

It's not too long a stretch, it's more that it would be unproductive use of Developer time and resources compared with the resulting benefit to the game.

 

There's a strong modding community within PZ, maybe you could tap into that to get some of your ideas realised.

[Strang]

Personally i agree that there should be a line between realism and gameplay value. But like taking your "crops take a week to grow rather than 2 months" , this is part of mid game core gameplay and the game could get boring without it. Eyeglasses and hearing aids would not really affect the game in any way, even if they did affect core gameplay.  I like the idea of tapeworms though, and the lucky charms would be better suited for a  mod

[ApolloDiaspora]

Tapeworm idea? Seems interesting. Might need a new moodle though. Say, recolour the sickness moodles to shades of yellow, and change the prompt text.

 

For example, 'Queasy: Feeling a little off. Perhaps it was something you ate?' Then 'tapeworm' becomes a catch-all for any sort of parasite/mild infection you could get after eating unprepared food, or food that wasn't cooked thoroughly enough. The nasty, crippling stuff you get from eating raw steak, for example, would keep the sick moodle we have now, as it wouldn't be a long, weeks long affair.

 

Lucky clover/spiffo/lighter? Perhaps it gives an extremely low enhancement to luck, or only some weak happiness/calming buffs to the player. After all, they've got their grandad's lucky lighter! The one that got them through the war! So, more player-character attachment to a personal item than anything.

 

As for the eyeglasses idea, I've often thought about that myself. I'm blind as a bat without my glasses, which would be a real liability in an apocalyptic situation. Provided your character knows what prescription they take, you could nick the glasses you find at the optometrist. The ones that they load with different grade lenses to see what works best. Failing that, you could pick and choose glasses you find lying around or on corpses. After wearing them for a while, if they're the wrong prescription, you could get a headache moodle or something.

 

Actually, for a happy mid-ground with the glasses, perhaps implementing reading glasses would be a better idea. No fooling around with the players field of view or perception. You take a negative trait at character creation, and it would take longer for your character to read books. Equip reading glasses before going through the book and you'd read at the normal speed. The best part about this is that reading glasses are just magnifiers. You can pick them up all over the place, flea markets, petrol stations, etc. No need to bugger around with matching prescription glasses to your character's eyesight. As an added bonus, the magnifying lenses of the reading glasses could serve as a magnifying glass for starting a fire.

[Croak90]

The thing about arguing that there are better uses of the devs' time is that this is simply a suggestion for them to hopefully see and maybe consider if they think it is interesting, as well as a thread for other community members to post their own ideas on the subject to. I'm not saying none of you are allowed to express negative opinions relating to it, but for god's sake limit the criticism to the idea itself, and don't repeat it so much. I'm not saying "Hey devs add this for the next update, it'd be cool so the game should have it." I know that there's still a TON of things for the devs to add, and this sort of stuff wouldn't be too difficult to implement so long as it feeds off the current traits and there are already items in the game for it. I'm not speaking out of assumption, I'm speaking from experience in programming. Yes there is a modding community, I don't need a reminder of that on every reply. I would enjoy the suggestion making it into the vanilla game, hence why I made a thread in the suggestions. Here's the questions Rathlord put in his pinned "How To Write a Good Suggestion" thread:

Q: Is it SOMEWHAT realistic?

A: Yes, yes it is somewhat realistic. Maybe the glasses are bordering more on somewhat than realistic, but Christ, someone whose been wearing the damn things his entire life doesn't need to be lectured on how they work 3 replies in a row.

Q: Does it fit with the spirit of PZ?

A: Yes, it feeds off a system that's already implemented.

Q: Would it make the game too easy?

A: Do tapeworms sound easy to you?

Q: Would it require rewriting the entire game?

A: God no. A couple new classes and objects then quick edits to the methods of character traits (if statements and all that jazz).

Q: Would it add enough to the gameplay that it would be worth taking the time to add?

A: In my personal opinion, for the ease of this type of implementation I think the added diversity of the trait system would be beneficial in a fun gameplay type of way.

Q: Would it be found in Muldraugh, Kentucky common enough to be added?

A: It's already there.

Q: For zombies...

A: N/A

 

Apollo, always love to see one of your replies

[ApolloDiaspora]

Hehe. Thanks Croak. Didn't know I was making a name for myself here

 

Out of all the things I slapped up here, I think reading glasses would be the easiest to implement, and a happy mid ground in terms of gameplay impact/difficulty. Taking longer to read a book wouldn't really make it difficult to play, but should prove enough of an irritation that finding reading glasses would end up being a player objective.

[Croak90]

Only thing on the reading glasses is that they shouldn't only be found at the mall like the normal glasses. Generally by the time I'm ready to attack the mall I have all if not most my skill book related skills at 4-5.

[Atoxwarrior]

would be great to use some serious binoculars quite useful