"Mental State" statistic

[eagin1414@hotmail.com 0]

A lot of people complain about bandits. I'm not a carebear. In a situation such as this, people would be killing each other fairly often. However, the degree to which it occurs with no real purpose is a bit absurd. The repercussions for killing people are extremely limited due to the simple nature of things: its a game. A lot of propositions seem to lean one way or the other and to the extreme. Here is my personal opinion that I feel is fairly balanced and does not DISCOURAGE bandits, but primarily those people who are unrealistically fast on the trigger when they come across someone (as they would likely should in real life).

Essentially mental state works with the current mechanics available in the game. I'll provide an example scenario of how it would work:

1. Player A comes across Player B in the store.

2. Player A kills Player B with the common "better safe than sorry"

3. Player suffers a short period of psychological effects including:

**shock

**faster food/water consumption

**hearing noises (zombies, footsteps, etc) that do no exist

**etc.

After they calm down and "come to grips with their decision", these effects go away. The more murders a player commits, the LESS these effects impact them (after maybe 4-5 kills). This is to reflect the changing mental shift towards sociopathic behavior.

It could be added that after very long, extended periods without killing anyone, the lessening that occurs from further killing would diminish as they slowly return to a more normalized state.

ADVANTAGES:

**Helps promote the natural hesitation that would occur at the initial outbreak, rather than the hardcore "shoot first, ask later" (note: while this may not be the inital outbreak, for respawns it might as well be.)

**"Punishes" unrealistic trigger happy play and promotes teamwork and communication between strangers to avoid the negative effects.

**Creates accurate repercussions for non-trigger happy players by depicting the in game regret they feel when forced/deciding to kill an individual.

DISADVANTAGES:

**Harmful in large skirmishes involving multiple players.

**Does not accurately depict players who may start with a "sociopath" mental state.

[doom4mr 135]

and why player woun't get the same symptoms after killing a zombie?