DIsease and Psychosis

[IDTaylor]

I was having a (polite) rant about a HTS mod when I realised I was going the wrong way about it. Modders need more options to play with, different ways in which to hit the player over the head. The only disease they have to play with is radiation sickness and the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats are over too small a range to allow for creativity.

 

All of which got me thinking about how you would design such a system. So here are a few ideas.

 

• Contagious / Non-Contagious.
  Personal I would avoid the added complication of transmisable diseases save where it was interesting in a story. Some thing like leprosy which is not very contagious but used to good effect in the film 'Kingdom of Heaven' (see the director's cut much better). Another idea for a non-contagious disease would be something like Kuru or 'laughing sickness' which is linked to ritual endocannibalism (brains, must brains). This could be given a nice Fallout twist, perhaps this is one reason raiders are so psychotic etc. If you eat to much human flesh you get a range of unusual and/or annoying perks.
   
  
• Nutritional.
  Continuing on with the food theme there is, of course, scurvy. The lack of good food can cause all kind of problems, not just the lack of vitamins but the overabundance can cause problems. Too much meat can mean to much vitamins A & D, nausea and calcium build-up which could affect aim or action points in FO3. Alcoholism can be considered an illness and the health problems it brings are fearsome. For a true alcoholic, not getting a drink means collapsing in grand mal fit. Which suggest the idea of levels of addiction. I'm not sure how this would fit into the exsisting addiction system.
   
  
• Physical / Psychological.
  Of course the basis of most addictions is in the mind. I always found it strange that you can get thrown out into a harsh new world, suffer great pain and watch you father die and have no side effects from that. Not sure how you would impliment that, perhaps an unpleasant perk which is mitigated by an addiction and rewarded if you tough it out.
  

 

I keep trying to fit this all in to game mechanics. The first idea which springs to mind is to keep this functional. Think in terms of symptoms. Drinking bad water,eating rotten food and mild radiation poisoning all cause nausea. Hunger and stimulant abuse cause shaking. I hope you get the idea. Define the symptoms and then pick the ones you want to define the disease or condition you want to create. The effects of the symptoms could be tailored to personal preferences and expanded as needed.

 

As I have only the vaugest of ideas about game settings I'm not sure how this would all work but as a preference I would use them rather than direct effects on skills or stats.

 

Anyway that my museings. Hope they provoke some thoughts, comments and ideas. Any pointer in the right direction would be appreciated.

[Khajit187]

sounds very interessting... too bad i'm not a modder, but i'd like to see this done!

[Trueform]

Pretty much anything can be done with the geck, it's just learning how that's the trick; most things can be done using creative technological trickery. This sounds like a very complicated series of scripts (potentially) and I'm a basic scripter, so I can only offer some theoretical advice, but hopefully it will point you in the right direction.

 

Look at the vanilla system, and see how it gives you negative consequences such as alcohol addiction and damaging aim when your head is crippled (perhaps you can utilize a similiar graphical effect for some of the illnesses?).

 

However, although you are right that the SPECIAL stats don't offer much variety, have you considered using the skills as penalties as well? you can do this using the DamageActor series of scripting functions. For example, a psychotic person may not be very good at repair, because he's too busy fending off the pink bunnies in his head? Just a thought.

 

Seriously addicted people collapsing? Could be done using a death animation maybe, and then making several hours (or days?) pass by, perhaps with a message notification to let you know what's happening. Levels of addiction are technically possible, you'd have to add them as a form list (I think!) and reference them in some scripts.

 

Maybe you wake up in a random place because you got too drunk and can't remember what happened? Shaking hands and suchlike can perhaps be including using some change of the screen wobble you have when you have a low small guns skill and look through a sniper scope.

 

Diseases brought on by eating human flesh is simple enough to add as a perk; you would just have to add the perk and reference the global variable 'number of corpses eaten' to recieve the negative effects.

 

I hope I helped a little.

[Yossarian22]

Your Idea is good and I had something similar in mind that I plan to do for Fallout New Vegas at some time.

[Nadin]

I've been tinkering with this idea for a few months. As I see it, the easiest way is that, as a random event or during various points in the game, there will be a random chance to obtain a new perk with the proper effects. This is probably modified by luck.

Hrrmm...what would happen if a wastelander was afflicted with korsakovia?

 

But doing a disease mod would be fun. Maybe blending it with BLTC.

[IDTaylor]

Thanks for the pointers. The idea of looking at BTLC is brilliant, there is a lot of crossover between drug effects and disease symptoms. You know fever induced halucinations that kind of stuff and a lot of effects would have to be introduced by perks. I'm not sure about this but I belive I would have to use perks to make changes to game settings that would affect specific actors and not every one.

 

Another idea is a perk called something like 'Mean Drunk', where you would do extra hand to hand damage or gain DR while drunk but where people react badly to you. I know Oblivion had some thing for NPC reaction, is the same thing in FO3? In fact this perk gives a good idea of the kind of effects I'm looking at. Using settings and indirect effects rather that adjusting skills. Of course when the disease affects something like memory then skills would affected.

 

I also like the idea of collapsing. I know there is something like this in Arwen's tweaks, I don't konw if this is done through fatiuge. If something like this is in fallout then damage/drain of fatuge would be a good way simulating the tiredness of being sick. Yes, you can move about but you can't do to much or you'll keel over.

 

Thank for banging home the power of scripting. Things like diseases from mole rats bites become a reality and different disease stages could be possible. The question then becomes how far do you want to take this and how to fit the whole thing into the overall tone of the game. Then there is the posibilities in using conditions in effects. Things like drugs having different effects depending on the disease state of the PC. An example which springs to mind is the difference between using morphine to treat pain and to get high.

 

All this needs experimentation, so I'm off to start a clean game. Thanks for all the comments and as always I hope my museing provoke thoughts, comments and ideas.