Let's talk about Sanity

General discussion about the world and lore of COGG.
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Ephemeralis
Posts: 87
Joined: Fri Oct 16, 2020 10:29 am

Let's talk about Sanity

Post by Ephemeralis »

I had my first brush with bottomed out (insane) sanity today after a series of very unfortunate events and two deaths in rapid succession. It wasn't a lot of fun. Punishing mechanics can be fun, but not like the way they are set up currently.

For those who haven't, when your sanity bottoms out, it stays that way for good. Every few minutes, you'll tick a paranoia or fear effect that will pretty much remove any of the natural regeneration (if there even is any at that point). Your only hope is to pray there's a physicker available with sanity therapy available. So far, this is all fine and good.

However, the whole sanity therapy experience is clearly oriented around inducing a reason to roleplay with your physicker. This is all fine and good again, except for one thing:

Sanity forces you to stutter or murmur at a very high chance whenever you speak, often scrambling what you say to the point of it being completely illegible. This means that to feasibly roleplay, you either repeat yourself dozens of times and pray that the extremely aggressive scrambling algorithm leaves a few keywords alone, speak in single words, or emote things out. I tried to play around it as best I could, but found that the system was actively impeding my ability to roleplay rather than supporting it.

To give an example of how bad the scrambling is:

Code: Select all

esp Yes. No. Maybe. Octum is unkind.
You find it difficult to put words together coherently ...
Roundtime: 5 seconds.

You mutter, "Yes. er yb.eMa Omcut is unkind.,."
Your filigree silver bracelet dangling a series of iris crystal teardrops (opaque) pulses as your
speech mentally echoes over the ESP network.

  [ESP-GRAY]: An iris entity mutters, "Yes. er yb.eMa Omcut is unkind.,."
The scrambling seems to work by just cutting up segments of what you say and threading them at random. This includes punctuation too, which looks horrible and is almost certain to cause people with screenreaders to have difficulty figuring out anything.

Here's a few short suggestions to get the ball rolling on this:
  • Remove the scrambling part of low sanity entirely. Keep the forced murmuring and rambling say prefixes and the stuttering effect, those are great, just make what I say codedly legible, please! People can roleplay being absolutely incomprehensible if they want to, the system shouldn't force them to do this.
  • Consider giving alcoholic drinks a sanity heal mechanic. At high levels of sanity, drinking just helps you recover it faster. Getting drunk on hard liquor would give you a temporary sanity boost at low levels of sanity, only to cause you to lose *more* once it wears off. Good reason to keep a canteen of hard liquor in your pack when delving into ruins or dealing with the occult.
  • Make it quicker to reach a baseline level of middling sanity but harder to be totally sane.
  • Perhaps add a passive sanity regeneration boost component to the Meditation skill. Or special rooms with soothing locales that aid in sanity recovery - especially important for Druids who might really need these spaces to get over the innate trauma of shapeshifting and the like
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Zombilicious
Posts: 63
Joined: Sun Mar 10, 2019 3:51 pm
Location: Under her bed somewhere.

Re: Let's talk about Sanity

Post by Zombilicious »

You generally don't want to bottom out your Sanity. While I know it's exciting to go try new toys, the reason there's a sanity risk is that those things are Dangerous, beyond mortal kenning, and powerful.

I definitely agree that the scrambling may need to be looked at to better work with people using screen-readers, but I don't agree that alcohol should give a sanity boost -- kind of sends a bad message, "drink and you get clarity", when alcohol really does the opposite to the human body.

I've never gone further than Anxious, so I can't say much on the rest, regarding sanity regeneration.
:verungnr_tentacles: :vodr_trident:
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