Diseases in PE

[TRX850]

I'm not sure I'm a fan of these types of solutions. The problem is that some people find disease mechanics onerous and they reload because it's not fun for them. I think we need to look for solutions that make people not want to reload, rather than prevent them from doing it entirely. Having quest related diseases is one way, having diseased until rest i think also works, it abstracts away the recovery period and isn't too onerous as long as the disease effects are handled properly.

 

I think this is/was true of earlier IE games and others like NWN1&2.  And I kinda liked it that way in those games.  But the cure always felt trivialised by sleeping it off, as if the disease itself was somehow pointless in the first place.

 

In 2013, I'm wondering if the player base has evolved enough to deal with it differently, and view it as part of their own story?  There are many other enemies in the game that the player is forced to overcome to progress the story.  Can't disease be elevated into this threat category now? Maybe?

 

Also, there should be a certain amount of sensible strategy too.  If you're facing mummies or giant rats or beasts that feed on carrion, the player's first priority should be to avoid melee as much as possible.  Ranged weapons, fire, acid, and small nuclear devices should be your first strike.

[maggotheart]

 

I'm not sure I'm a fan of these types of solutions. The problem is that some people find disease mechanics onerous and they reload because it's not fun for them. I think we need to look for solutions that make people not want to reload, rather than prevent them from doing it entirely. Having quest related diseases is one way, having diseased until rest i think also works, it abstracts away the recovery period and isn't too onerous as long as the disease effects are handled properly.

 

I think this is/was true of earlier IE games and others like NWN1&2.  And I kinda liked it that way in those games.  But the cure always felt trivialised by sleeping it off, as if the disease itself was somehow pointless in the first place.

 

In 2013, I'm wondering if the player base has evolved enough to deal with it differently, and view it as part of their own story?  There are many other enemies in the game that the player is forced to overcome to progress the story.  Can't disease be elevated into this threat category now? Maybe?

 

Also, there should be a certain amount of sensible strategy too.  If you're facing mummies or giant rats or beasts that feed on carrion, the player's first priority should be to avoid melee as much as possible.  Ranged weapons, fire, acid, and small nuclear devices should be your first strike.

 

Good points, for me personally I'll be playing the game on Ironman and I do wish more people were on board with some of the more challenging gameplay mechanics. They have said there will be many options, so maybe we will get a disease toggle or something

[Wirdjos]

Also, there should be a certain amount of sensible strategy too.  If you're facing mummies or giant rats or beasts that feed on carrion, the player's first priority should be to avoid melee as much as possible.  Ranged weapons, fire, acid, and small nuclear devices should be your first strike.

 

These are the sort of reasons I would prefer disease to a regular debuff or curse. A contagious disease, especially if it can hop between the player's party members (as maggotheart suggested), forces you make different tactical decisions. If the disease develops quick enough, it could change the entire course of the encounter.

 

Say this particular rat spreads a disease on contact that lowers intelligence and wisdom. You can easily cure the disease after the battle, so you send your fighter up front and let him take the hit. Int and Wis don't affect his ability to attack so it's fine, just keep it away from wizard. Over the course of the battle, there's an ambush from the back. The wizard is now in danger and needs the fighter to be a meat shield for him. However, if the fighter comes to the wizard's defense, the wizard will be quickly rendered useless by the disease.

Now you have to make a very tactical decision. Is it more important to keep the wizard pumping out high damage/strategically necessary spells and possibly take an injury(or die based on difficulty) or should you effectively remove the wizard from the battle and save him for the next encounter?

 

That sort of situation sounds like it would significantly add to the game in the form of more interesting/exciting combat rather than becoming an annoyance that calls for a reload. This would of course require disease transmission to be an almost certain thing when entering the infected's melee zone and for the disease's rules to be explained properly beforehand. I really think this form of disease is a good idea, maybe even a great one, but I wouldn't want to be the guy charged with implementing it.

[Darkpriest]

I say, that it's better to have no diseases if they are to be nothing more than 5 second annoyances.

 

Either do them right - so you need some form of a cure, like in Real Life, and they also can start out from mild annoyance and end up even with death if not treated -  or do not do them at all...

 

I can be perfectly fine if there are only things like poison and bleeding, bruised - which can realistically be per combat only.

[TRX850]

If the method of transmission was intuitive:

Touch - Glancing blow, handshake, merchant transaction.
Bloodstream - Struck/damaged with natural weapons, or while wounded/bloodied.
Airborne - Inhaled spores or gas, conversation?
Waterborne - Infected potions, watery environments/encounters.

Over time, a shrewd player would get to know the signs before it became a problem.
 

[AGX-17]

Being there is no healing or curative technology in the PE universe I prefer not having something else force me back to a rest spot. If it must be in then I choose option one above, that it only lasts the duration of combat. Between no in the field heath recovery, getting a disability every time you get knocked out and possibly persistant diseases, I think that would be too much.

I thought it'd been established that there will be healing magic of some kind.

 

Besides, on the subject of "technology," modern medicine can't "cure" most diseases. And I can't think of a single disease that can be treated with "technology." Pretty much every disease that requires significant medical treatment is treated with biological remedies or chemicals of some type. Yes, it frequently takes technology to synthesize or isolate these substances (radioactive isotopes and chemotherapy chemicals for cancer treatment are injected, as are vaccines.) For the most part it's about alleviating symptoms and aiding/boosting the patient's immune system. They don't have machines that just cure disease. It ultimately falls to your own internal biological processes to solve the problem of disease.

 

If there are disease, there ought to be a certain degree of disease resistance associated with various attributes (a high constitution, i.e. good health, would grant higher resistance to disease, for instance; or a background of living in a disease-ridden area in which the people have adapted biologically and pass on antibodies from mother to child, thereby granting increased disease resistance,) preventative remedies (possibly primitive vaccines, but unlikely,) and the solution to them would ultimately be to rest until the infection has run its course if some kind of treatment is unavailable. Ignoring the need for rest and recuperation would result in the disease worsening due to exertion (your immune system is at its strongest while asleep, and it's generally a given that rest makes illnesses go away faster and physical exertion makes them worse.)

Edited February 8, 2013 by AGX-17

[PrimeJunta]

I can't think of too many ways in which diseases would contribute anything meaningful to the game. If disease is just another relatively short-duration status effect, then yeah fine I guess, but that's about as exciting as catching a cold. OTOH if it's genuinely scary (think plague, mummy rot, leprosy, cancer) then it's most likely just another trigger for ragequit and/or revert-to-previous save. The only positive would be to make plague zombies (or whatever) that much scarier.

 

There are some specific circumstances where it could work. Becoming infected with something and having to get the cure is a legit quest hook, and having to beat the clock because the disease is progressing adds urgency. Or, alternatively, having someone else become infected and having to get the cure and beat the clock to save them. If done well, that can make for some good gameplay, even if it's a bit of a cliché already. (Morrowind much?)

 

But that wouldn't be a systemic feature; it's a scripted one.

 

So I'd vote nay on disease. Do something more fun instead. Curses, lycanthropy, mutation, whatever.

[TRX850]

^^ The rage-quit option is a valid concern.  But that is probably based on learned behaviour from older IE games, when it comes to eye-rolling effects like poison or disease.

 

If players were furnished with the right information up front about how to handle disease, it could make all the difference between a nuisance feature and a compelling player-generated side-quest.  Who knows, it might even make the character *less susceptible* to that same type of disease as the game unfolds.  Would that be a useful feature?

[maggotheart]

It's possible that getting a disease could trigger a reload, but when the player reloads he will most likely change his tactics to avoid getting infected by that monster - so I think it does have value insofar that it generates different combat behavior.

 

There could also be diseases that don't affect combat and are not tied to a quest, but are just there to add some flavor:

 

Promancers Itch as Avellones revenge

Cotton Head gives you dumb dialogue options

Pale Fever changes your skin tone

Swamplung Syndrome makes you cough (like how when you get cursed in PS:T)

[Lephys]

What if we saw soul-affecting diseases? You know, kind of a new take on them, rather than "OMG your foot's rotting off, and you suffer DEX penalty, and your lung is melting."

 

I think the annoying thing about diseases in most RPGs is that they tend to manifest PURELY in stat/gameplay detriments. What if they affected some aspect that was annoying, at worst (like... your ability ranges are reduced in combat, for example? So you have to spend more effort positioning that character but you're not doing less damage or missing more, etc.), and that had very heavy storyline/reactionary ramifications? Maybe the people in a given city are desperate to keep an epidemic from breaking out in their city, so the fact that someone in your party has it would have to be kept hidden from them, lest they throw that person in prison, or worse, try to kill them.

 

It would almost function like reputation variances. It could effect a lot of things, but your combat effectiveness and move speed and all that wouldn't take a huge hit.

 

I think, in this way, the problem with how diseases are typically handled is similar to the problem with item degradation. That's why in another thread I compared item degradation to debuffs. If you get hit with Weaken, you don't ragequit the game or reload, because you know you can just change your tactics for the time being, and the state of Weakness on that character will go away shortly. But with item degradation, your stuff is now crappier, and is crappier every second of every battle that you go through between now and when you get to repair it.

 

It's the difference between a cut on your hand, and a cut on your tongue. If it's on your hand, you bandage it, and you have to make sure you don't use your hand too much, and you change bandages out, etc., until it's healed. But your tongue? Try not moving your tongue all day. You speak with your tongue, you swallow with your tongue, you can't bandage your tongue... it just hurts ALL the time until it eventually heals, and you HAVE to use your tongue to eat and such. So, same exact cut, 7,000 times more annoying and troublesome.

 

I definitely think the combat-related effects of any diseases should be minor. You move 10% slower (in-combat, only), every 30 seconds, in combat, you get dazed for 2 seconds. Stuff like that. Things that let you know "Hey, you've got this disease," to which you say "Yeah, that's not cool." But things to which you don't say "OMG! I CAN'T EVEN PLAY THE FRIGGIN' GAME NOW UNTIL I GET THIS HEALED! I'd rather they blinded my whole party than this friggin' constant health degeneration and this -12 to-hit penalty! GYAH!"

 

And, like I said, more lore/story/question/reactionary relevance and effect.

[PrimeJunta]

@maggotheart, design for save-and-reload has to be executed and buried at a crossroads with a stake through its heart. It's a lazy way to add the illusion of challenge where it adds nothing but frustration.

[Wirdjos]

@maggotheart, design for save-and-reload has to be executed and buried at a crossroads with a stake through its heart. It's a lazy way to add the illusion of challenge where it adds nothing but frustration.

 

I agree with this sentiment, but it requires a little examination. This is what Maggotheart said in relation to reloads.

 

It's possible that getting a disease could trigger a reload, but when the player reloads he will most likely change his tactics to avoid getting infected by that monster - so I think it does have value insofar that it generates different combat behavior.

 

Now I agree that noticing a mechanic is causing reloads, expecting the player to act that way and doing nothing, is lazy design. However, that doesn't automatically mean the mechanic is a poor one and should be replaced. In the case Maggotheart puts forth, the player gets frustrated, but learns something and changes play style after reloading. Now the latter half of that is good design. The player learns something about the game and actually changes behavior. That should be maintained. It seems to me that the more effective change here would be to forecast this information early, have NPCs or the questgiver warn the player about disease and (with lore appropriate terms) explain the mechanics of disease. This way even if the player needs the game to punish him with the mechanic before he learns, when he is punished he'll remember what we was taught and change tactics. So the only way the mechanic was lazy before was that the game failed to warn you about it prior to punishing you with it, not because it was punishing/annoying and should have been changed to something less challenging. This of course requires the effect to be fairly constant and not random so the player is not tempted to reload for a 'better dice roll' thus avoiding the mechanic entirely.

[Alexjh]

@maggotheart, design for save-and-reload has to be executed and buried at a crossroads with a stake through its heart. It's a lazy way to add the illusion of challenge where it adds nothing but frustration.

 

The problem is that there are only 2 ways to really get around that entirely:

 

1) Make the game easy

2) Restrict saving somehow

 

Outside of those two, there is no real way to avoid the problem entirely because that's just how some people play it.  In regards to disease, I kind of see it as just one tactical problem, if you are fighting say, the P:E equivelant of a carrion crawler, odds are getting bitten by something that sticks its face in dead bodies all day is going to be a bad thing to bite you.  So the trick here is that players should vary their tactics to avoid getting bitten: keep at range, use heavy armour etc.  This should be flagged up before hand, say, a companions goes "careful, these guys have all kinds of diseases, dont let them bite you" and then if you don'y follow that advice, or don't have an alternative, then you aren't really playing the game tactically.

[PrimeJunta]

@Alexjh, no, there's a third way, and you and @Wirdjos just described it -- give the player enough information that if he's paying attention he won't innocently get himself killed. Players who aren't paying attention have it coming, of course.

[Wirdjos]

Players who aren't paying attention have it coming, of course.

 

The internet makes it difficult for me to figure out sarcasm. Is this sarcasm or not?

 

I assume giving the information to the player before hitting them with the mechanic would prevent a good number of ragequits and reloads because it would have that effect on me. I would feel like I deserved the damage and move on from there. I'm interested to know if it would have the same effect on many other players. Yourself included, PrimeJunta.

[TRX850]

There is a fourth way, as I mentioned before; add a timer delay on disease notification.  Moving away from abstraction into reality for a sec, you wouldn't know the exact moment you contracted a disease in real life. Incubation periods differ wildly for all sorts of nasty illnesses.  If anything, you'd probably notice the first effects while attempting to rest, and end up having a terrible night's sleep.  Or if you weren't able to rest (in the game) for a while, then sure, the effects would appear some time after the initial infection.

 

Even if the disease you caught wasn't part of the overall game quest, it could become a mini-quest in itself.  If your party members react accordingly, with dialogue and suggestions for a cure, it could maintain the illusion that it was all part of the main story.  So adding it all up: you were warned about the possible dangers of disease in advance, plus your party members warn you in combat to stay back, plus it's obvious the creatures you're fighting are disease carriers, and if you ignore all those warnings and go steaming on in to melee, then the end results are a delayed notification and a mini-quest.  Either way, you'll have learned something from that encounter/experience and will possibly change your behaviour next time.

 

Edit:

 

Meant to say, ....AND....there wouldn't be a reload to avoid the effect.

 

Edit:

 

AND....you may also build up a resistance to that particular disease. Maybe each time you contract it, the chance of a future infection is halved? 100%, 50%, 25%, 12.5% etc.

Edited February 9, 2013 by TRX850

[PrimeJunta]

@Wirdjos, nope, not sarcasm. I was being serious. I'm only objecting to the very common and very lazy game design where there's no way to know how to win against an enemy or a particular encounter except through trial and error, by playing it through multiple times.

[Wirdjos]

Even if the disease you caught wasn't part of the overall game quest, it could become a mini-quest in itself.  If your party members react accordingly, with dialogue and suggestions for a cure, it could maintain the illusion that it was all part of the main story.  So adding it all up: you were warned about the possible dangers of disease in advance, plus your party members warn you in combat to stay back, plus it's obvious the creatures you're fighting are disease carriers, and if you ignore all those warnings and go steaming on in to melee, then the end results are a delayed notification and a mini-quest.  Either way, you'll have learned something from that encounter/experience and will possibly change your behaviour next time.

 

This sounds amazing. If this were the case, I would avoid it in my first playthrough, discover this were the case through metagame knowledge, and purposefully get infected to experience this content in a second playthrough. The only issue I have with it, and it's one I'll ignore to get what you describe, is that disease would have to be relatively rare to avoid becoming a maddening nuisance. I did like the idea of different diseases being a somewhat common tool to spice up combat and force players out of using the same tactic for (nearly) every battle.

 

What do you invision as far as the mini-quest? Is it a world travelling attempt to make a cure, a knowledge seeking quest to diagnose the disease and easily cure it(avoidable through metagaming), or something completely different?

[TRX850]

One of the important factors that stood out for me from reading these posts is the notion of disease foreknowledge.  That might be because on the way to the location where you caught the disease, you encountered a druid or healer type NPC with useful info.  Maybe you can talk them into giving you a tome with curative recipes, or you just go back and talk to them and they diagnose it for you, then suggest curative ingredients.

 

But yes, the diseases should be very specific, and possibly vary slightly from infection to infection, otherwise, as you say, it could become a nuisance.  It also implies there'd be no Cure Disease spell, so you couldn't even buy your way out of it at a temple.

 

And rather than the curative ingredients be found at locations with the sole purpose of providing a remedy, those ingredients could just be part of regular quests or side-quests, so you gather up components along the way, without really knowing what they're for. But I'd also suggest that at least one of the ingredients was more rare than the others. Whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, the party would need to use their adventuring knowledge to find it.  A bit like the Nashkel steel problem in BG1, all metal weapons had a disease with a timer delay on them, and whilst it was slightly annoying, you never felt like you couldn't complete the quest, which took a few hours of game play.  Not that I'm saying it should take that long to find a disease cure, but if it did, once you finally cured the disease, it would be such a relief and would *definitely* make you more careful next time.  And if the next disease was different, requiring different ingredients, it would lead you to different places on the map, so it shouldn't seem as tedious and repetitive each time.

 

I'll add some other ideas once I've "road tested" them a bit more.

[Wirdjos]

And rather than the curative ingredients be found at locations with the sole purpose of providing a remedy, those ingredients could just be part of regular quests or side-quests, so you gather up components along the way, without really knowing what they're for.

 

This could be used to further emphasize what I imagine would be the lesson of the whole mechanic. Pay attention! Infections scream it at you by punishing you for not listening to questgivers and party members. The diseases themselves then punish you for not noticing that one of more party members is getting weaker and weaker. Finally the solution to the problem could be that if you paid attention to 'trash drops' and bothered to read their descriptions before tossing them out, you would have noticed what they were used for and already had the cure in your pocket. I really think this mechanic has a lot of potential to create some really enjoyable experiences.

[Nonek]

Yeah bring on disease and poisons, nice way to knock a confident party off their high horses, visibly show them the danger inherent through interaction with the afflicted. If they don't take sensible (and sometimes harsh) precautions, then feel free to decimate the party. Oh and those plague doctors with the masked snouts full of pleasant smelling herbs always look so oddly threatening.

Edited February 9, 2013 by Nonek

[Doppelschwert]

From Update 24, just as Gfted1 pointed out:

Common Mortality

Project Eternity's world is one with limited medicine and medical understanding. Unlike many fantasy settings, there is very little access to curative magic. Remedies for health problems often have only a palliative or placebo effect at best, owing their continued use more to folk beliefs and tradition than any basis in scientific methodology. Though soul-based magic has helped the great exploring cultures from suffering massive pandemics and has helped some individuals overcome illness over the long-term, there is no quick magical "cure" for disease or illness. Most people go through life and death in the ordinary way -- unless they put themselves in harm's way, that is.

I don't think diseases that you can contract during combat and which are easily curable afterwards work in this setting, so I'd rather not have them. I get sick in real life about 2-4 times a year, I don't draw additional "pleasure" from having to deal with sickness while playing games as well.

 

Besides, magical debuffs can fill the same role, just as has been pointed out by PrimeJunta. But I also agree with him on having them as quest hook, which is really all I'd like them to be in this game.

Edited February 9, 2013 by Doppelschwert

[TRX850]

They don't have to be crippling though. Disease symptoms, in their simplest form, could be any combination of known states:

- Fatigue
- Nausea
- Blind
- Deaf
- Enfeebled
- Slowed
- Unlucky
- Silenced
- Doomed

Even though they wouldn't be individual "icon states", a resourceful party could temporarily relieve some of the symptoms with counter spells/buffs. Certain symptoms like blind, deaf and silenced can't get any worse, but other effects could worsen for every hour or every day the character went without a cure.

So even if the disease itself sounds truly awful, like "filth fever" or "slimy doom", they might only be a combination of the above effects, made slightly worse, but the player could at least attempt to offset them while finding a cure.  It's all part of the challenge of an RPG, rather than having full HP and abilities the whole time.  The worse a situation gets, the more memorable it is.
 

Edited February 9, 2013 by TRX850

[TRX850]

The afflicted character could also have a minor stinking cloud effect on them, which would mean close proximity to party members would make them nauseous if a Fortitude save was failed, but would wear off once the sickened character moved away for a while.  Maybe party members could even say something appropriate (or inappropriate) whenever the disease-stink bothered them.

[Doppelschwert]

They don't have to be crippling though. Disease symptoms, in their simplest form, could be any combination of known states:

 

- Fatigue

- Nausea

- Blind

- Deaf

- Enfeebled

- Slowed

- Unlucky

- Silenced

- Doomed

 

Even though they wouldn't be individual "icon states", a resourceful party could temporarily relieve some of the symptoms with counter spells/buffs. Certain symptoms like blind, deaf and silenced can't get any worse, but other effects could worsen for every hour or every day the character went without a cure.

 

So even if the disease itself sounds truly awful, like "filth fever" or "slimy doom", they might only be a combination of the above effects, made slightly worse, but the player could at least attempt to offset them while finding a cure.  It's all part of the challenge of an RPG, rather than having full HP and abilities the whole time.  The worse a situation gets, the more memorable it is.

I'm not arguing about removing the challenge but about making it work with the setting. All the above things you mentioned could be achieved with a curse as well, except the contagious part and the incubation period (whereas the later is debatable).

If the setting has the medical skills of the middle ages - which it seems to have - I expect people to die from influenza or even a cold and I don't think it makes much sense for the party to shrug anything off after a good nights sleep. And as mentioned in my quote above, short term cures do not exist in the setting, so how would the party be able to cure a disease once they contracted it, without being inplausible to this setting? I just don't see it.

 

So I think mechanic wise, the question is rather how we can have the mechanics described by you without breaking the setting and without being annoying.

 

Apart from being contagious, I know of no quality of diseases that are exclusive compared to other methods of debuffing, so why should they be in the game as a mechanic despite being contradictory to the settings premise?

Edited February 9, 2013 by Doppelschwert