Proposals for Refinements and Expansions to Deadening

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Deadening is a good start to reflecting the horrors of living in a bleak world like CDDA, but it's currently just serving as a slightly more refined version of the old guilt system. There's a LOT of potential here to have a great mechanic that's fun to interact with instead of just complaining that things have changed.

Solution you would like.

1. Killing "normal" zombies (ones that aren't extremely heavily mutated beyond reason into what could more accurately be described as "monsters") should deaden the player extremely slowly.

   • These are just walking corpses but until they evolve into later forms like predators and hulks they're still rather human looking. This should do something to you right?
   • I'm thinking a SMALL trickle, along the lines of you'd have to massacre and clear out an entire mid to large sized cities worth of zombies while taking no precautions about your mental state before you max it out all the way to 100% by doing this. Assuming:
     • That it CAN bring your deadening to 100% (proposal 3 is rejected)
     • That we keep the current scale of cities (this is in question for the far future)
     • That there are future ways of mitigating the gain of deadening
   • Should include at the very least Zombies, Fat Zombies, Soldier Zombies, Swimmer Zombies, Tough Zombies, Runner Zombies, Police Zombies, Medic Zombies, Scientist Zombies, oh my god we have a lot of miscellaneous zombie types, and anymore I'm missing.
   • May be worth leaving out ones like the Firefighter, Hazmat, and SWAT zombies, the full body armor and completely covered face would likely be "dehumanizing" enough on top of the whole "they're a corpse" thing to divorce you from the act.

2. Killing Ferals (and hostile NPCs) should have similar/identical deadening rate to zombie children.

   • The way I see it, they each have a "mitigating factor" and an "exacerbating factor" in how killing one would affect your mental state in a way I think it makes sense to treat them as equal for the purposes of the game.
   • Zombie children are walking corpses but they LOOK like children and the actual practice of doing so would be visually disturbing.
   • Ferals are fully grown adults actively attacking and trying to kill you, but firstly killing in self defense is still traumatizing, and secondly they're still living breathing humans.
   • Hostile NPCs have much the similar justification to ferals. Player characters don't KNOW there's a supermassive organism making people go crazy, they just see another human attacking them much the same as a hostile NPC might.
   • People REALLY aren't wired to ever kill each other. Military boot camps are tailor designed to attempt to override this natural inclination, and it's not even 100% successful at doing that.

3. "Breakpoints" of Deadening where certain acts don't cause you to sink any further than X% to represent a "scale" of how bad it's gotten.

   • For the sake of example (and not as a serious proposal for how it should work concretely,) counting up from 0% to fully deadened:
   • Killing "normal" looking adult zombies stops incrementing Deadening at 20%. You've internalized they're just walking corpses and the damage to your psyche is done by regularly shooting things that resemble humans, but you can cope.
   • Killing in self defense (ferals, hostile NPCs) stops incrementing Deadening at 40%. Potentially much like a long serving veteran with extensive combat PTSD you don't really leave survival mode anymore, but you can compartmentalize into "us vs them" and understand when people are trying to hurt you, you have to prioritize yourself and can't just let them.
   • Killing zombie children stops incrementing Deadening at 80%. No one can really ever get used to the feeling of of violence against the societal picture of innocence and potential. You are constantly and heavily dissociating at this point and spend most of your time not thinking or feeling. On some level you rationally understand that they are just corpses. Your instincts and psyche do not care.
   • Killing of true innocents takes you all the way up to 100%. I feel like at this point you can safely say the player character is little more than a highly intelligent feral in full blob psychosis, considering you literally feel no emotionsa at all anymore.

4. Turn Deadening into a Proficiency.

   • It's not actually explained to the player at all what's causing them to accumulate "Deadened" or how to stop it, and you might have no idea why this is happening to you if you don't follow development.
   • It's possible you may desire proficiencies be kept EXCLUSIVELY to things that are positive for the player. In which case, freely disregard this proposal. However:
   • Proficiencies, like Deadening, scale from 0% to 100%
   • It provides a convenient place to explain what is happening to the player and why ("The horrors of life after the Cataclysm have numbed you to life's pleasures and agonies. Final morale, positive or negative, after modifiers is reduced. Continuing to kill things that are innocent or human-like will make it worse.")
   • The naming scheme for proficiencies is that of a skill or piece of knowledge, so in this case leave "Deadened" in the morale window as a descriptor of what's happening to your morale score and change the mechanic/proficiency name into "Emotional Detachment" or "Emotional Dissociation"

5. A new conduct, "Bright Eyed and Pure Hearted" for those with 0% deadening.

   • You might consider this to have some overlap with Pacifist, and while that's true as proposed...
   • This also points to the option to have things that aren't just killing that cause you to become numb to the apocalypse, like stealing and (necessary or unnecessary) cruelty.

Describe alternatives you have considered.

Leaving the entire project and conception to Renech and other implementers in the future, being mad about change and wanting it removed, etc.

More seriously, each proposal lists some of its own alternatives and details. In summary for each:

1. Ignoring heavily covered and masked zombies to represent the dehumanizing effect this has.
2. None, this should just be in full stop. Killing people is bad.
3. Leave all acts of deadening equal in their ability to take you all the way to being completely unfeeling. I don't like this though because to some extent you SHOULD be able to cope with some actions better than others instead of just becoming entirely unfeeling as a matter of course. You could also make each form of trauma/deadening become something the character is numb to over time, but this seems like a lot of unnecessary granularization and something that falls under the "simulation of mental health" that's been mentioned as something to avoid.
4. Leaving Proficiencies as exclusively benefits to the player, but I feel like we couldn't ask for a more perfect place to explain to the player what's happening.
5. Not doing this and just letting "Pacifist" fill this role. Adding new actions that deaden you that aren't killing.

Additional context

Hopefully a more positive and appreciative take on a feature that got a lot of undeserved flack despite being very lenient in its initial implementation is appreciated. I certainly had a lot of fun writing this up.

I might be willing to work on some of this as well, it doesn't seem like TOO much overhaul work just "hooking up" various parts of the code and EOCs to each other. It's just smart to get eyes on in-depth and detailed proposals before wasting time working on them.

Edit: I confused Pacifist and Nonviolence conducts. That's fixed.