Sanity as a stat

[Helsing 19]

I think sanity is a very overlooked factor of survival. I'm pretty sure most people would go insane after crawling around a city full of zombies that might spot you and eat you at any given time.

Of course, nothing written here is written in a 1000 yr old monolith that cannot be edited. I will just use numbers to give people reading a general idea of the concept.

I'm not sure if sanity should have a brain icon or just be hidden like pain at the moment.

Sanity won't kill you. Instead, it will cause highly negative effects on your character and will indirectly promote friendly player interaction.

Let's assume the sanity bar starts out at 12k:

If it drops to 9k, your screen/aiming will shake a little. Not nearly as bad as pain, but you will have a really hard time holding your breath. The shaking will hardly be noticeable at first, but will eventually become unbearable as sanity drops. A lot worse than pain after ~6k

If it drops under 7k, you will begin to occasionally hear things that aren't really there. This includes faint voice of people talking,laughing and breathing. Most commonly, however, imaginary zombie sounds. These hallucinations happen more and more often and become louder and louder as your sanity drops. At around 9k-7k, you rarely hear anything and it sounds distant. As your sanity plummets to 5k and below, you will be shitting yourself constantly.

If it drops to 3k, you will begin to see things that do not exist. Zombies and survivors alike that no one else can see and do not actually hurt your life, gets worse similar to the sound hallucinations. They are scary though, and both type of hallucinations will appear hostile and about to attack you. Scary enough to make the player shoot them often in their paranoia. I understand that this might be difficult to implement. In the case that it can't be implemented, just make the sounds so scary and so close behind the player that they will be looking over their shoulder constantly. Additionally, using items might fail and be destroyed with very low sanity. This includes bandages,morphine, and other consumables. Crazy people might see worms or something on it and throw it/rip it apart. :P

If it drops to zero, you will pass out for 15 seconds and climb back up to 1k sanity when you wake up.

How to lose and gain sanity? Of course, numbers are all placeholders in this suggestion, NOTHING is set in stone.

Lose:

Having zombies in a 20m radius constantly drains your sanity by 1 per second. Non-stacking effect.

Having player corpses in a 5m radius constantly drains your sanity by 3 per second. Stacking effect. 3 corpses drain 9 sanity per second.

Killing a player causes a 3k drop in sanity.

Pitch blackness also causes a 1 sanity per 5 second drop if you lack a light source.

Getting hit by zombies causes a 50-100 sanity drop.

Gain:

Having players nearby grant you 5 sanity per second. This is a stacking effect.

*Also, the sanity regeneration from other players will never take you above the other players' sanity. For example, say there's a group of three people: player A with 10k sanity, player B with 2k, and player C with 6k. Player A will not regenerate sanity. Player C will regenerate 5 sanity per second, and player B will generate 10 sanity per second until he catches up to Player C and then both regenerate 5 sanity per second until they reach player A. Additionally, this is the only way to increase your sanity past 8k. Of course, no one will ever be completely sane at 12k with this system, except new spawns.

Killing a zombie grants you 50 sanity. Will not increase it past 8k.

Using a new, super rare item will grant you 5k sanity, but will not increase it past 8k. Found in hospitals.

Hopefully, this system makes the game more realistic and promote friendly player interactions. It also doesn't favor group-banditing since it is impossible to generate sanity if no one is sane.

[KnT47r 51]

-1

Needs to not punish people for opting to play as a bandit

[brubaker 0]

good idea, also in relation to killing a player if you have low sanity or if it is your first player kill you will see a ~5sec replay of you killing that player, there are several other related variables/variations of this like playing just the sound of you killing the player, superimposing the last moments of that player right in front of you.

I think this would be an effective way to show how being surrounded with so much death and chaos or taking human life will start to pull you into the abyss of physcosis.

[3rdparty 229]

soo many sanity/insanity threads, its clearly something peeps want implemented.

from what ive read of them however, i can see how there are peeps out there who dont like the idea of any negative effects being tied to having a large kill count, and tbh i can see where they're coming from.

Soo if a sanity stat was introduced i think both sides of the spectrum would have positives and negatives.

If it were me id make the whole porcess far more progressive that only advanced, large kill count players would begin to notice.

But seeing as the players with large kill counts are likely to be solo operating, they should probably be given some other positive to counter such life threatening negatives youve suggested (just firing a gun in this game is reason enough to become more alert), like a higher resiliance to damage (just imagining ze lone stereotypical psychopath that always seems to absorb more damage then a normal human is capable of).

buut this all still feels not quite right to me, no doubt a group of mates would link up once kill coutn was sufficient and proceed to own a servers southern shore, BLeh.

[Hawk24 94]

*Also, the sanity regeneration from other players will never take you above the other players' sanity. For example, say there's a group of three people: player A with 10k sanity, player B with 2k, and player C with 6k. Player A will not regenerate sanity. Player C will regenerate 5 sanity per second, and player B will generate 10 sanity per second until he catches up to Player C and then both regenerate 5 sanity per second until they reach player A. Additionally, this is the only way to increase your sanity past 8k. Of course, no one will ever be completely sane at 12k with this system, except new spawns.

Killing a zombie grants you 50 sanity. Will not increase it past 8k.

Using a new, super rare item will grant you 5k sanity, but will not increase it past 8k. Found in hospitals.

"won't increase past X" just means that, if you're running a group, you'll always have to leave one guy behind so he can maintain 12k sanity

Else the group will eventually peak out at a maximum sanity(determined by the highest sanity of one person) and will NEVER be able to go back to 12k again

It will only get worse

Your only chance of getting your group back to 12k would then be to have one player store his gear, hit suicide, run back to the group and slowly let the whole group regenerate back to 100%

Didn't even take me a minute to find a way to completely ignore your system through a small exploit

Try again

[iisaperson 0]

i will be truthful i hate this idea. I don't think i want something that's not there coming for me causing me to freak the crud out just to find out it wasn't even there