Game Mechanics, Traits, and a Fix for "Humanity"

[pwntrooper 7]

First off, I would like to give the Russian Community thread a nod, as their consolidated efforts gave me the inspiration for these ideas. If you haven’t checked out their thread you definitely should. It’s very long but, if you aren’t afraid of a read (which you shouldn’t be, if you’re on the suggestion forum) there is some really great and innovative stuff in there. I’ve also been reading other suggestions on this forum the past few days, so if anything I’m saying here looks like something already posted it’s more than likely because I liked the idea and it stuck somewhere in my mind to the point where I’ve incorporated it into my own ideas here.

Let me know what you guys think, and sorry for the lengthy explanations.

Summary:

DayZ is an incredibly complex mod for a variety of reasons. It operates off of ARMA, which alone is a mountain of complexity, and adds even more to that by introducing the terrors and hardships of a post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested world upon our hapless (or heavily armed) characters. The upcoming standalone seems to be pushing this to the breaking point, and I’m nothing but excited to play the full version. That being said, there are some details that seem to need more attention, things that—at least in my opinion—seem to rely heavily on human sociology, game theory, and complex decision-making. My hope here is to present my ideas that could potentially help to solve some of these issues, or at least give others ideas to tackle some of the complex challenges that face a game like this. I have a lot of experience with issues like these, having designed, tested, and executed numerous simulations for law school students on various issues, and I believe I can apply some of what has proven effective in my curriculum design here.

What I am essentially focusing on is what I see as the major components of what makes a DayZ, or any survival game, work. From these simple, established core mechanics I will show that we don’t need complex rules to encourage complex thought and action, but instead we can focus on the fundamentals of the genre to guide us and utilize this foundation in such a way that will minimize chances for systemic error. And while there will be those who think we should leave the game entirely to players, think about some of these ideas. They are meant to be unobtrusive, static, and in the background, influencing players by injecting real-world incentive into a videogame.

For DayZ, in my mind there are five pillars, five basic mechanics upon which the rest of the game’s survival takes place and from which the game draws its compelling gameplay and unique social experience:

1) Food

2) Water

3) Temperature

4) Infection

5) Health

I have incorporated these fundamentals into my own ideas and those which have been inspired by other posts on these forums in a way that I believe will be simple, straightforward, but deep in its potential for gameplay design. I will go over these in much more detail later, but for now here they are:

· Player Traits

· Incorporation and extrapolation of established mechanics

· A potential fix for the “Humanity” system

Design:

In my work and in my legal simulation designs I have found that following Occam is almost always the correct way to go. Simplicity is extremely useful for devising complex systems. In my suggestions below my aim in every case has been to simplify each suggestion as much as possible. Less moving parts means less can go wrong, the more modular these rules will be, and the easier it becomes to create complexity through stacking layers of simplicity. I have also tried to refrain from anything that is unrealistic or would not appeal to human nature or compelling gameplay. As much fun as it would be to add in any number of fantastic ideas I’ve seen there are limits to what programmers and to what online videogames can do. And because I am no programmer I have tried my hardest to remain in the realm of what I believe to be possible, which is almost certainly underestimating the skills of programmers these days. While some of these ideas are a bit wordy in their explanation, their execution would be quite simple as most of them should be possible only by adjusting mechanics already present in the game.

Focus on Core Mechanics:

Food, water, temperature, infection, and health are, in my opinion, five of the simplest forces that regulate how we in the real world act upon instinct and dictate the course of our daily lives. When we are hungry, we eat (or get grumpy, like me). When we are cold we turn up the heat or grab a coat. When we are sick, we remedy that through medicine and rest. We try our hardest to avoid pain, illness, hunger, thirst, and adverse weather, and when all of those needs are met we are better able to interact socially and build computers and McDonald’s restaurants and airplanes. Because these are instinctual forces which we feel and have grown used to in our years of living we obey them without really thinking about it. In a videogame we can’t really do that without the system telling us to, and so my first suggestion is that we focus on these core mechanics as the basis for all other actions in the game.

Additionally, there are systems in place which would allow us to regulate these subconscious instincts in a way that is realistic and also mechanically satisfying. Currently in the DayZ mod when our character is low on health or in pain he shakes, causing our use of firearms to become impaired and prompting us to want to seek medical aid, if only to clear the black and white screen, gasping noises, and inability to aim. This is a very simple, but very complex mechanic: you are wounded, so your arms shake, so your aim is off, so you detect this as an issue because you can’t kill zombies or other players as effectively in this state, and so you desperately hunt for a way to end it. This is just one example of ways we can encourage players in a realistic and unobtrusive manner, giving them choice and direction with a simple change to their status quo while simultaneously making the survival aspect of the game more compelling.

These include:

- Gun shaking mentioned above

- Slight movement speed penalties, enough only to make outrunning zombies harder

- Stumbling or staggering

- Falling down

With this, I suggest that food and water become resources we have to frequently check in on. If we’re being honest, most people playing the game won’t be on for more than 2-3 hours at a time, max. Therefore, at least once per session (about every hour and a half, two hours) your character should need to eat or drink something or else their state will change. This makes sense from a gameplay perspective and from a realistic perspective. We don’t normally get hungry or thirsty every hour, and in fact it’s more like 4-6 hours. However, if we factor in the fact that our characters are running everywhere with multiple pounds of gear, possibly with wounds, up mountains and hills, and occasionally sprinting away from zombie hordes (prompting an adrenaline response and the activation of every muscle in the body) that’s a lot of calories being burnt up per hour. Frankly, a can of beans only has about 200 calories in it. That isn’t a lot. Additionally, this adds weight to the necessity to scavenge and consume food and water. These times should also be low because we are playing a game; the full cycle of events should be a concern just about every time we play, but not so frequent that we find ourselves constantly chugging canteens and scarfing hotdogs. That being said, I’ll get down to what I think the mechanics of these five basics should be.

- Each of these should degenerate at a set rate, adjusted by certain specific variables.

- Each basic need should have three stages, gradually growing worse as they are not met with simple mechanical penalties attached. If these needs are not taken care of they will degenerate faster, making it more crucial to eat, drink, or stay warm the longer you go without it.

- No penalties are involved with the first stage*, only quicker degeneration.

- These needs should not kill you, only make it easier to be killed because of the realistic penalties involved.

- Penalties from needs are cumulative, up to a cap. For instance: you can have a 5% movement penalty from starving, a 5% movement penalty from freezing, and a 5% movement penalty from dehydration, but you will only be slowed a maximum of 10% from all effects.

- Simple, unobtrusive text notifications let you know what stage you are at (or icons, like we have now) such as, “You’re starting to get a bit cold…” or “You’re starving…”

1) Food

· Hungry: Every 5 hours at rest, 3 hours of constant walking, 1 hour of constant running/fighting.

o Quicker hunger degeneration

· Famished: Every 8 hours at rest, 4 hours of constant walking, 1.5 hours of constant running/fighting.

o Quicker hunger degeneration

o Minor movement speed penalty (-2% or so)

o Infrequent stumbling

· Starving: Every 10 hours at rest, 5 hours of constant walking, 2 hours of constant running/fighting

o Increased movement speed penalty (-5%)

o Unable to sprint or jump

o Frequent stumbling

o Moderate gun shaking

2) Water

·

Thirsty:

Every 4 hours at rest, 2.5 hours of constant walking, 1 hour of constant running/fighting.

o Quicker thirst degeneration

·

Parched:

Every 6 hours at rest, 3 hours of constant walking, 1.5 hours of constant running/fighting

o Minor movement speed penalty

o Minor gun shaking

·

Dehydrated:

Every 8 hours at rest, 3.5 hours of constant walking

o Unable to sprint or jump

o Increased movement speed penalty

o Infrequent falling

o Moderate gun shaking

Temperature, infection, and health are a bit more complicated and are governed by multiple factors, but these would essentially operate the same as they do now only with noticeable penalties for becoming colder, becoming sicker, and not bandaging a wound.

*Additionally, being infected by bad food, bad water, etc. should not damage health. Basically, as with real life, you’ll need to wait out your illness until the effects are over because your body will very likely become incapacitated fighting off invaders.

There should, however, be a separate type of infection that deals health damage and represents the zombie virus. *

3) Temperature

· Chilly:

o Increases temperature degeneration without a fire, being inside, or proper clothing

· Cold:

o Minor gun shaking without a fire or proper clothing

· Freezing:

o Violent gun shaking; you’ll need a fire

4) Infection*

· Ailing: 1 hour after becoming infected by bad food, water, etc. without antibiotics

o Minor gun shaking

o Minor movement speed penalty

· Ill: 2 hours after becoming infected by bad food, water, etc. without antibiotics

o Gun shaking

o Hit to hunger, thirst, temperature (to represent vomiting, diarrhea, fever respectively)

o Increased movement speed penalty

o Frequent stumbling

· Diseased: 2.5 hours after becoming infected by bad food, water, etc. without antibiotics, removed after 10 minutes of 3^rd tier effects (it’s out of your system)

o Violent gun shaking

o Hit to hunger, thirst, temperature (to represent vomiting, diarrhea, fever respectively)

o Unable to sprint or jump

o Frequent falling

5) Health

· Scratched: 10 minutes after sustaining an unbandaged hit that opens a cut

o Slight health degeneration

· Bleeding: 15 minutes after sustaining an unbandaged hit that opens a cut

o Moderate health degeneration

o Minor gun shaking

· Gushing: 20 minutes after sustaining an unbandaged hit that opens a cut

o Major health degeneration

o Moderate gun shaking

While some of these are already basically in place I believe just giving these five mechanics three tiers, nullified and prevented by the obvious choices (eating, drinking, antibiotics, wearing a coat…) is simple enough but effective enough to provide impetus for players to scavenge and feel more like they’re surviving the world as well as the zombies and other players. While playing DayZ I’ve had times where I barely noticed that my hunger and thirst bars were deep red, never noticing any adverse effects or penalties for not maintaining myself in a survival situation. Likewise, temperature should play a bigger role, especially at night and while exposed. The times here would be constant but able to be adjusted by any items that are put in. Coats slow temperature degeneration, Pepto Bismol (maybe? =P) slows down illness, etc. This is the basis on which everything else would rest. When you’re avoiding zombies and players like a pro you still have to get into town or hunt for food, find clothing to replace your damaged or worn coats, shoes, etc., and you’ll have to really think twice about eating bad food or drinking unpurified water. Hell, you could even have items do different things, like soda quickly quenching thirst but after a time actually increasing your thirst degeneration because of the sugar.

Player Traits and “Humanity”

Before I move forward with this I will admit that in order for these upcoming ideas to work there would have to be a few small features added to the game.

1) Trading: Like in most established MMOs, a simple system for two nearby players to trade. Open up a tab with offers and counter-offers, both players hit accept, deal is complete instead of what we do now where we drop something on the ground and have the other guy pick it up.

2) Random Loot: Although it may seem stupid at first, and having a random rare chance at a better item when you loot a zombie is sort of already in the game, there should be a system that by default for players is turned off but can be turned on through “player traits”, which I’ll get to in a minute. Essentially, instead of a 0% chance of getting a rarer or better item when you open up a zombie with certain traits you’ll now have a 2% chance of finding medical supplies, small car parts, important crafting items, even the awesome gun that the poor sap ran out of ammo for before he was eaten.

3) A “Team Up” System: Basically in-game parties that the game tracks. While I do like that right now you can organically be in a party without pressing any buttons just by finding a random stranger, this will be important for my proposed fix to “Humanity.” Stick with me. My idea is that while teamed up you might get slight (very slight) static bonuses to movement, less damage from zombies, increased chance of random loot, whatever. No advantages directly against other players, but being in a group even if you both just need to cross a city should be better than not being in a group, if only slightly. It basically represents your morale boost at finding another living human being who isn’t (immediately) out to shoot you in the back and steal your stuff.

4) “Player Looting” Virus: This is the most important one. Whenever you loot a player’s body you have a slight chance to catch the zombie virus, a virus that does health damage and can only be cured with the elusive antibiotics (or an immunization shot; it’s weird that antibiotics cure a zombie virus…). For most people this chance is so rare (.5%) it really isn’t a concern. For those characters that the server has deemed bandits, however, the chance is higher, making killing and looting other players a built-in static high-risk, high-reward scenario. It isn’t meant to be entirely “realistic;” after all, we’re playing a videogame set in a fictitious zombie apocalypse, there can be any number of reasons for it happening. Maybe rifling through their stuff an open wound on your hand comes in contact with the dead player’s own open wound, or it represents the growing instability of bandit players who are hyper-aggressive because they’re already infected; looting the juicy corpse just pushes them over the edge. This basically leads into my fix for humanity.

“Humanity” and the "Hero" system didn’t really work, because bandits will always bandit. That’s just a fact of the medium; there will always be videogame players who just want to have their fun that way, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’s part of what makes DayZ so exciting. However, a lack of a mechanism to essentially represent morality isn’t present, and it’s difficult to put one in without hamstringing players or messing with damage immunity, player agreements, whatever. But what if we introduced a way to make killing helpless survivors as the bandit king even more of a game of its own? If we have the dangerous zombie virus having a much higher (probably 5%/player corpse loot) chance of being contracted by a bandit—someone who killed another player without provocation—then we’re one step closer. It even makes threatening and robbing people (so you don’t have to loot them and risk infection) more enticing. The next step? Static player traits.

These traits aren’t skills that you train, but rather random things that would have a chance to trigger based on what you’re doing. It’s random, so you might get it on your first try or never, and when you do it’s just a permanent, static effect that you know is there but don’t have to pay much attention to. Depending on your status in the server (Survivor or Bandit) your chances might be different, and the traits you receive might be different. And you don’t get some popup or a skill tree, just a simple, unobtrusive, fitting text notification that lets you know the server now tracks you slightly differently. They aren’t mutually exclusive; you can be good at everything. Some examples that would be for every player (I’ll get to bandits specifically in a minute):

- Doctor “Who needs med school…?”

o Trigger: Small chance every time you use a bandage, pain pills, blood bags; anything medicine-related to get trait

o Effect: Small chance every time you use something medicine-related to not use up the item

Basically, people with this perk have figured out that sometimes they don’t need to take six pain pills, that the other guy hasn’t lost a full blood bag’s worth of blood, or you’re really not so sick that you have to take all the antibiotics…

- Mechanic “Ahh, so that’s where that goes…”

o Small chance every time you repair, tune-up, build a vehicle

o Chance to randomly find small vehicle parts (wires, etc.) on looted zombies

Really, this could do just about anything vehicle-related as a perk. Vehicles you build are stronger, repairs are quicker/better, vehicles you drive use less fuel, whatever.

- Ally “Stick with me, we’ll get through this…”

o Small chance every time you “team up”

o Double bonuses for you and your allies while teamed up

- Scavenger “One man’s trash…”

o Very small chance every time you loot a zombie corpse

o Chance of finding random “rare” loot on zombie corpses

Things like this are small and broad, simple but can make you feel sort of specialized in a way. They all happen throughout the course of the game without any need for farming points or experience or buying skills or feats or talents or whatever. They’re just random and make you feel like your character’s life is more important once you get them, because your next character or the five after that may never get to reuse antibiotics or get bonus loot off of random zombies.

As for bandits, it seemed like a good idea that in order to further make their role in the world high-risk, high-reward they would need their own traits. After all, even with the player loot virus you could just kill people and never loot a body, right? Now we’re back where we started. But what if your character was penalized for not looting the body because he’s greedy? What if you even get a brief bonus for teaming up with a survivor then shooting them in the back? The bandit traits I’ve come up with essentially represent the character’s mental instability after the normal, ordered world has gone to pot. Some people crack after they accidentally kill their best friend (I know I’ve been axed in the back on accident a few times), some people are taking advantage of the zombie apocalypse for their own anachronistic ends, and still others are simply insane, thriving on the chaos of the new world order where their penchant for violent, unstable behavior makes them the top dogs. I like the idea that bandit traits would encourage them to take more risks for a higher payoff, and that they could even be a fun way to challenge yourself after your third month of taking pot shots on respawned players at the beach. There will always be campers, griefers, trolls, you name it, but having a system that gives them their own little brand of insanity would make things a lot more interesting. Besides, the most interesting post-apocalyptic villains always have something creepy and twisted wrong with them. You can balance wanton murder flavorfully.

*You have to already be a bandit to gain a bandit trait

- Greedy “I’ll just be taking that…”

o Small chance whenever killing a player as a bandit

o Higher chance of finding random loot on player bodies, but whenever you kill a player you get (penalty to be determined) if you don’t loot the corpse within (x) amount of time

Not sure how timing would work for killing a player, if at all, but I think this would make bandits with the trait more likely to risk getting the player loot virus both because they might find something nice and because they’d be easier pickings for other players if they don’t.

- Turncoat “I didn’t need him anyway…”

o Small chance on killing someone you’ve “teamed up” with

o You no longer receive bonuses for teaming up. Instead, whenever you kill a player you’re teamed up with you get double the team bonus for (x) amount of time

If there’s no system in place for easily identifying bandits this could be an interesting way of getting your loots and moving faster, especially if teaming up gives you a chance at random loot. The choice here is really up to you and allows you to be tricky with your timing. You may team up with someone and be nowhere near a good area for loot and have to hang out with them until you reach a city or they’re surrounded by zombies.

- Cannibal “Mmmmm, I wonder…”

o Small chance when killing a player

o You now receive 1/3 the benefit of normal food, but double the benefit from eating flesh off of slain players.

Just something fun, flavorful, mechanically simple and 100% static that would adjust the bandit’s playstyle and perhaps make them even more aggressive. You may just wake up one day with rumblies only hands can satisfy.

- Addict “Jonesin’ for a fix…”

o Small chance when using a medical item

o You gain double the effect from medical items but begin to slowly gain infection until your next use of a medical item

A new reason to hunt through towns for supplies, a new reason to rob and kill players in the hopes that they’ll have painkillers…

Really, these could be anything. The whole point of my idea for the bandit traits, really, is to encourage those players who don’t care about morality or finding other people to survive with to go over the top but also have risks involved with doing so. It’s flavorful, sure, but on the other hand it also makes constant killing have a drawback that makes sense; you can still do it, but you’re losing some of your composure and sanity in the process. Being a greedy cannibal means you almost have to go loot player corpses to survive.

I do realize that a lot of players want DayZ SA to be just like the mod, but so much more can be done that isn’t obtrusive in the slightest. At some point we have to sit down and accept that we’re playing a videogame, and if something isn’t working out for a lot of players (like the difficulty in banding together with other survivors because of the kill on sight mentality that’s been bred into the game; it isn't even PvP, just that we've been trained to be suspicious) then there should be a fix. I’m sure a lot of people won’t like my ideas, and that’s fine, but I think they’re an elegant background solution that silently nudge players towards mini-goals throughout their gametime.

Edited June 22, 2013 by PWNtrooper

[EndEffeKt 87]

Sorry for the late post but I didnt have much time and wanted to really read it all through. Great suggestions you got here and I personally like the subtile character-development and the new penalties on food/water. Seems pretty authentic to me and I would be fully into such kind of things. Thanks for all the work.

[Farkinob 19]

Will bookmark and get back to you

[pwntrooper 7]

One thing I have been tinkering with a bit in my head is that killing a player could also add a growing increase to the bandit's chance to get the player virus, up to a point, for a certain time. It would make rampages a bit less appealing and perhaps even make them think a bit more about whether or not they want to kill someone who doesn't look like they have loot on them. And, if the person's weapon doesn't look threatening, robbery would be the best alternative in these situations.

[pwntrooper 7]

Oh, and come to think of it there should be noise penalties for the five basic necessities. It would make sense that when you're starving and dehydrated that you'd be slightly less concerned with/able to keep quiet. When your teeth are chattering and your breath coming in gasps from cold you're making more sound, when you're coughing and vomiting from being ill zombies are more likely to be picking up on that. Could be interesting...