Prosthetic Limbs

[Perdido Street]

I know that a system of status effects, particularly for disease and injury, is in the works, and I wonder how far it could/should be taken. I love the dynamic systems of limb health from games like Kenshi and Rimworld, with the organic stories they create, but feel uncertain on how to bring it (in a fun way) to VS. Would prosthetic limbs be a reasonable (or even a practical) addition?

Historically, as long as there have been people there have been limb replacements. While many of these prosthesis were crude pegs or hooks with attachment points for tools, looking as early as the medieval period, there were surprisingly complex mechanical devices being made. -Ex of a prosthetic hand from the 1400s and a prosthetic leg:

 

There could be craftable prosthesis that are better for particular tasks. In the context of Jonas tech in Vintage Story, I can imagine this being taken to some interesting designs:

 

So, I think that prosthetic limbs would fit into the world of Vintage Story very neatly, my only worry is about the problem of "how do limbs get lost?" If it is a fully dynamic or debilitating system then that could lead to some pretty unfair game-play situations (getting jumped by a bear is already bad, but getting jumped by a bear and losing your arms would be a whole new universe of annoying). That doesn't even get into whether or not lost limbs should carry across once a player re-spawns after death (which is admittedly something I have mixed feelings on in general with how the rest of the injury/disease system will be implemented); It would have to be adjustable in world settings, or else a start choice during character creation.

 

Edited June 21 by Perdido Street
better example picture

[Vafthrudhnir]

Cool prosthetics, but considering how the game works with the player respawning after death, they won't make sense. Also, consider being at the very beginning, VERY far from crafting even the most rudimentary limbs, and you're being mauled by a nearby wolf. You lost both arms. Now what?

 

This kind of technology makes sense when the appropriate logistics to support it already exist. At least the seraph doesn't need to worry about sepsis...

VintageStory2077 lol (according to Grok)

[Perdido Street]

1 hour ago, Vafthrudhnir said:

Cool prosthetics, but considering how the game works with the player respawning after death, they won't make sense. Also, consider being at the very beginning, VERY far from crafting even the most rudimentary limbs, and you're being mauled by a nearby wolf. You lost both arms. Now what?

That is one of the things I don't understand about how diseases and broken bones are going to be added, but the devs have said that they are on the way (I think that they said in an interview they had been looking to add this is 1.22, but decided to keep it back a little longer). I see how these could be problems when you are far away from your re-spawn, but if you can die and comeback healthy why would you bother with treatment? The only reason I can imagine is if they make injuries carry on after re-spawn, which I also have incredibly mixed feelings about.

Anyway, I hope they find a way of implementing that system that isn't just punishing the player more (losing health or dying already gets the message across if we messed up, and that's only in cases where it is actually our fault - wolf/bear rng is hardly fair). So, alongside bringing in new ways to set the player back, it really needs to be balanced with new ways to get ahead too (like herbal potions or prosthetic limbs that open up new opportunities/bonuses).

Edited June 21 by Perdido Street

[BurgerDaddy]

Not that it’s a very similar game, but Wildermyth did some pretty neat stuff with limb replacement in a way I appreciated. It felt pretty opt in, and there were both benefits and drawbacks to making the choice for one of your characters.

[LadyWYT]

2 hours ago, Perdido Street said:

Would prosthetic limbs be a reasonable (or even a practical) addition?

From a cosmetic standpoint, maybe, but from a practical standpoint? No, because of the respawn mechanic actually being canon. It makes sense that the player might be "frozen" at a certain point in time, and thus be able to "reset" back to the point at death no matter how much damage their body sustained. However, at the same time, it's worth pointing out that even with prosthetics, a missing limb is still a major disadvantage when it comes to survival situations, and many of the things that the player character does are things that really require peak conditioning. 

Spoiler

That's partly why Tobias sends the player to the Devastation to retrieve the Lens instead of making the trip himself. It's not that he's helpless--indeed he mentioned traveling parts of the world post-calamity--but it's pretty clear that he's at a distinct disadvantage regarding certain physical activities.

 

49 minutes ago, Perdido Street said:

That is one of the things I don't understand about how diseases and broken bones are going to be added, but the devs have said that they are on the way (I think that they said in an interview they had been looking to add this is 1.22, but decided to keep it back a little longer). I see how these could be problems when you are far away from your re-spawn, but if you can die and comeback healthy why would you bother with treatment? The only reason I can imagine is if they make injuries carry on after re-spawn, which I also have incredibly mixed feelings about.

You don't need to make the injuries carry over after respawn to discourage the player from resorting to death to fix things instead of proper medical treatment, although to be fair, handling it that way is a pretty strong deterrent. A simpler solution is to give the player a fresh start but impose "resurrection sickness" for a while after they respawn, debuffing some of the player's stats for several hours/a couple of days so they'll need to take it easy rather than participate in strenuous activities. There should be a short grace period though--a few real life minutes--to ensure that if the player died in combat, they have a chance to get their stuff back before suffering penalties from resurrection sickness.

World of Warcraft used resurrection sickness to push players to run back to their bodies if they died in the open world, rather than just take the convenience of the graveyard healer every time. The graveyard healer was still useful in the event you couldn't make it back to your body for some reason, but the resulting debuff meant you were going to be taking a short break from your adventures to recover your health and strength. If you tried adventuring with that debuff, you were going to be fighting at a significant disadvantage.

[BurgerDaddy]

I agree w LadyWYT on the “reset to a fixed state at death” vibes, and from that point of view it make sense to me that if it existed it would be as a cosmetic choice, something that was part of character creation, and if it made any stat alterations they would work similar to the way choosing a class does.

While you could implement things that cause a player to lose a limb (or regrow one, heck I dunno), it seems like those things should reset back to the characters initial state at death, which then makes them feel like they do not really work for this game.

It seems very fitting for being in one of those mods that add leveling up and skills and stuff like that, since your character changes over the life of the server/world already.

I think it’s cool, the linked art makes me want to play around with it also because it seems like it could lend to some fun gameplay.

[LadyWYT]

Another angle I forgot to mention in regards to how penalties could work--I modded my Skyrim files to have an injury system, and the general penalty of those is decreasing player health/stamina/magicka/movement speed as appropriate until the injury is treated or heals. Treating the injury can clear up some, but not all of the penalties, and failing to treat the injury properly can potentially lead to it getting worse. The more serious injuries, like broken bones, heal very slowly and can prevent players from moving quickly or wielding physical weapons, but splinting the bone can restore some movement(allowing the player to use things in that hand) as well as help the break heal faster. Of course, there are also potions that will heal injuries instantly, but the system feels rather insignificant if one can just make instant cures.

I could see a similar system working for Vintage Story, in that illness and wounds will heal on their own over time, but will heal much faster with proper care. Serious injuries will need more diligent care lest they become worse, like a gash becoming infected because the player couldn't be bothered to clean and bandage the wound. 

[MKMoose]

12 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

You don't need to make the injuries carry over after respawn to discourage the player from resorting to death to fix things instead of proper medical treatment, although to be fair, handling it that way is a pretty strong deterrent. A simpler solution is to give the player a fresh start but impose "resurrection sickness" for a while after they respawn, debuffing some of the player's stats for several hours/a couple of days so they'll need to take it easy rather than participate in strenuous activities. There should be a short grace period though--a few real life minutes--to ensure that if the player died in combat, they have a chance to get their stuff back before suffering penalties from resurrection sickness.

It seems to me that having the injuries carry over would be significantly more interesting in the long run, mainly because then the player would have to treat each injury with the means appropriate to it instead of having everything reduced to a generic debuff. A lot depends on how complex and interesting that resurrection penalty could be made, of course, but you'd have to really put in the effort to make it more interesting than standard treatments for a variety of different injuries.

There are naturally some things that would have to be accounted for, like poisons, bleeding and the like which probably shouldn't carry over, at least not fully. I think it would also be quite reasonable to roll the player's health state back in time at least a couple seconds (though a lot of fine-tuning would be necessary here and gradual decay or onset may be useful), so that a sudden death from something like falling into a cave shaft wouldn't be excessively punishing, while a drawn-out death caused by something like starvation wouldn't let the player recover too quickly to the point of being desirable.

 

15 hours ago, Perdido Street said:

Would prosthetic limbs be a reasonable (or even a practical) addition?

While it's difficult to really justify them in regular gameplay, I think it would be very interesting to see permanent limb damage and prosthetics in a hardcore setting. More than limbs is also an option, albeit more difficult to reasonably implement at the technology levels of VS.

With infinite lives, though, making conventional prosthetics really make sense in a realistic way would probably require to (1) introduce death penalties significant enough that it would be preferable to keep living with a prosthetic rather than just die and get back the healthy limbs, and/or (2) make the prosthetics feel like something useful in their own right rather than just a halfway-fix for a debuff, and yet not useful enough that it becomes worthwhile to deliberately lose limbs and replace them with prosthetics. Both are pretty tricky.

I frankly can't think of a possible function of prosthetics that doesn't seem like it could be better fulfilled by regular Jonas tech that doesn't rely on losing limbs, and I think that's where it would have to land: useful mechanical limbs which can be worn both like prosthetics and as augmentations to a healthy body. Though that isn't really prosthetics anymore, and also a massive can of worms when considering the required technology level, lore implications and early-game problems.

[sleeves]

A nice compromise, I think, would be to restore limbs on respawn but apply a penalty depending on which ones were regrown. For instance, mining speed could be reduced for each arm lost, and movement speed for each leg. This could be explained as a limitation of the technology or even confused muscle memory. Moreover, it would incentivize using the mentioned prosthetics, as they would assumedly be about as effective as the originals. The problem with this approach is that a player could simply die twice in a row to disperse the regrowth penalty too, so perhaps it should be on a timer or something rather than resetting on the next death.

[Seyko]

Thinking about Rimworld...

[Perdido Street]

I think that it's fair to say, at this point, prosthetic limbs could be a nice aesthetic choice during character customization, but probably wouldn't work with a dynamic system in VS because of the limb-loss issue.

- -

Going back to where this started, this discussion has been very informative for my thinking about how the new injury system should be implemented. It seems to be the consensus that having major-debilitating types of injuries would be too unbalanced, even with the possibility of counter-play. In more fast paced games and RPGs, having injuries slow the player down can be useful for shifting up game play (taking a break from fighting to do more gathering or trading); whereas, in a slow-paced game like VS (where the main loop is already about gathering and trading), these types of roadblocks just slow things down rather than move play in a different direction. And, while being a slow-meditative experience is what makes Vintage Story so good, that is because it has a very well balanced progression (for the most part).

Even for very long or complex crafting recipes, the challenge is balanced with the amount of new opportunities created by going through it. Yeah, metal working is hard, but the system is loved because it is proportionally rewarding. Even the way that hunger is implemented is made enjoyable by the fact that having a varied diet gives health bonuses, so it's not just that the player will be punished for engaging with it "wrong," they also get rewarded for doing it well. 

The challenge that any potential injury or disease system faces is that while its very easy to say when a player is doing poorly (losing fights, falling in holes, or being too long in the cold), it is hard to know what doing well means in this context, or translate that into rewards. Whereas the opposite of being hungry is being well fed, the opposite of being sick is usually just not being sick, and the opposite of being injured is just not being injured. Implemented like this, injuries and disease would just be doubling down on punishing the player (and, yeah, some people might be in to that, but more people like being challenged than tortured by a game).

To balance things out, Injury and disease will need more than just counter play, but an alternative (for lack of a better term) "Wellness" status.

• If being in a cold-damp environment can cause illnesses that applies a negative effect, then being in a dry-warm room should build-up a positive effect (separate from just making you less likely to get sick).

Broken limbs and other injures should not be something that happens when you are already on the back foot. A better way would be:

•  if you have over 75% health for a long enough period, and you suddenly receive an amount of damage that would just barely have killed you, instead you drop to 50% and receive an injury. That way the Injury System actually balances against sudden deaths from RNG, instead of just being a "you lose more" effect. (I get that might sound a little weird at first, but keep in mind that it's much better to take a bad fall on your legs than to your head. Being injured is an alternative, not an addition, to being dead).

This is only me spit-balling, and there should be counter play in the form of herbal remedies and bone splints/walking-crutches, but if there is anything that this thread has shown me (in addition to prosthesis in-game being a doomed idea) the injury/disease system needs to balance problems with rewards, and those rewards have to be more than just the absence of the problems.

Edited July 1 by Perdido Street
grammar