Paint yourself red: With the blood of your enemies

[Prism]

Pardon me if it's already been suggested elsewhere, -- buuuut.

We have the chance to get our clothes bloody/dirty at the moment when skinning/farming/digging and doing other messy activities. (Like cleaning stables)

It'd be just lovely if we had the random chance to get clothes/body parts/armor sprayed with various levels of blood/gore as we go about our murdering. Bonus points for different flavors of horror dependent on damage/enemy type.

Proposed level of bloodiness/goriness: Three tiers for each, bonus points for associated sanity/morale hits for prolonged soaks.

Speckled: A light dusting. A few drops of blood, the odd fragment of bone or tooth. Doesn't effect sanity, but might make morale tick down .25X faster?
Spattered: A significant dusting. Multiple, heavy or distinct blood stains from drops/sprays of brain and chunks of things. -10/15 sanity hit when the threshold is reached on the upper body and lower body on a cooldown timer of like, an hour. individually. Makes morale tick down .5X faster if you're upper or lower body is at the threshold, totaling a decrease of morale 2X as fast as the average Joe if you're upper and lower body are soaked. If it's just one or the other-- it'd be 1.5X as fast as the average. I propose you take a -10 sanity hit every time you take a blood spray/gore spray of this magnitude to the head. Or at least more often than the upper or lower body, because. Well. It's your face. And your hair. I think the morale hit for having your head that spattered with remains should be an additional 1X morale penalty. So if you're coated literally head to toe in spattered blood and gore, you'll be losing morale 3X as fast as the average joe, and you'll have lost a total of 30 sanity.
Soaked: As it sounds. Mor bloody than clean. A thorough, lingering evidence of crime. Big ol' pieces and chunks, or so much that it's hard to tell what exactly it is. Double the associated penalties for reaching this threshold at the individual level for each-- if you're soaked in blood and gore head to toe, you'll have lost an additional 30 sanity, and your morale will be ticking down 6X as fast as the average untraumatized Joe. For perspective, if you go from totally clean to totally soaked in blood and viscera-- you'll have lost 60 sanity, and some morale along the way. So maybe we bump that sanity penalty down a bit to like, a total of 40 so people aren't jibbering mad from going out and killing. (But personally? I'd enjoy that.)

Why?: The reason is threefold.

1): Immersion. I like immersion. Getting soaked in my murderous rampage is more immersive an experience. And it's more of a power trip, admittedly. Power is good.

2) With all of this extra fancy soap floating around, people should have a reason to use it more, too! Plus it'd give the physickers more to be hailed for. Both out of, and on the battlefield. Therapy is valuable, people. (Bards too.)

3) It'll freak people out when they fight infested and you'll have everyone scrambling to strip down and powerscrub their armor after every jaunt into Dusklamp. It'll be priceless.

Thanks for hearing me out on my sociopathic musings. Feedback appreciated. (But you know you love it, too.)

Love,
Prism

[Prism]

P.S: This is what I envision this looking like.

You see a very tall muscular ebon-haired youthful man with tan skin and hazel eyes (yourself!).
He is about six and a quarter feet tall and appears to be youthful. He has short scruffy ebon hair and intense hazel eyes. His skin is tan and build is muscular.
No obvious wounds or maladies.
His head is soaked in blood and gore
His upper body is spattered with blood and speckled with gore
His lower body is speckled with blood
He is wearing an expressionless ivory mask painted with grey around the eyeholes (blood-soaked, gore-soaked), an elaborate necklace of heavy gold chain cradling a rust crystal (somewhat faded) , a fine ivory silk tabard adorned with a snarling mongoose (bloody, gorey), a fine azure silk formal shirt with silver waves crashing about the collar (bloody), a silver ring (x2), a gold ring (x2), an iron ring, some obsidian silk dress pants with silver-banded pockets (bloody)bound by a fine wolf leather belt (with a wechuge leather scabbard, a canvas-covered iron canteen of briny seawater (open), a soft leather coin purse (closed), and a tooled hard black leather case (open) attached), a wolf leather thigh sheath, and a pair of bronze-buckled leather shoes (bloody).
He smells clean and fragrant, with a hint of juniper-berry.

[Navi]

Might be nifty if while adrenaline rush is active the morale drain is reversed and tics up ever so slightly the more you are coated. Just to give warriors a method of sustaining longer fights before having to wash. Currently, there aren't any other ways to become covered in blood or gore other than being hit hard enough that you bleed, and butchering.

If characters do get covered by gore and blood at some point in the future, it would be a nice touch if various damage types sprayed different amounts of blood. Crushing weapons might not cover you too much, but a well executed slashing or piercing attack might drench you pretty quickly. I'm a fan of the original concept though.

[Gorth]

I like this a whole lot. It could get vaguely verbose and spammy, but I'm alright with that, personally.

I have another reason to add this, as well:

4. People will sit in Combat Zones for literally an hour or more, and just slaughter, me included. I think it's a little silly to come out of that vaguely blood spattered, or still smelling of soap. Additionally, it very well might help some people with RP about like...holy crap, I just slaughtered a bunch of people and now I'm dripping in blood. That was a bit..crazy. I think we have a large hole in the RP with Combat Zone grinding, where people just kind of turn there back to it, cause there's little statistical drawback from it.

[Lexx416]

I'm pretty neutral about the overall suggestion (pretty cool! but it won't impact me very much) - except I do love the idea of consequences for walking around covered in blood and gore. It's a bit jarring to walk around Shadgard seeing people covered in blood, carrying bloody weapons and tools, and having some kind of morale (or even sanity) hit as a consequence for being covered in viscera seems like a decent way to curb that.

edited to add: At a glance, the suggested penalties seem a bit harsh, I'd maybe have it start out as a minor cap to your morale ceiling that scales with how much blood you're covered in (similar to the sanity ceiling penalty that happens for maintaining druidic spells) - and have that ceiling cap restore itself to full over the course of a few minutes (depending on the level of gore/viscera present).

[Cal]

I'm a big fan of this idea. I'd also like it if the (bloody) adjective on clothing etc. were colored red, to highlight it and make it more distinct from "bloodstained". Not because I want rainbow character descriptions, but I feel like having blood all over your clothes should be a whole thing rather than a side-note.

I don't have a scale for how harsh the penalties are so I can't remark on those, but I'd also like to toss in a suggestion of a class or two having a learnable ability that would mitigate the penalties - a learned tolerance for blood and gore, essentially. Maybe Berserker, for example? Something that would suit having a vibe of "Every Day is Excessive Brutal Violence Day".

[Teri]

I am all for some level of that, and in a related thought, bleeding wounds staining clothes/armor that are covering those areas for pc's and npc's. The one time I witnessed similar with a npc it had quite an impact ic and ooc, but also having a bleeding hand wound and gloves not getting covered by blood made me stare at the gloves for a bit going... how?

[Prism]

Just a quick shoutout that I really enjoy the change that can cover us in blood/gore.

Even without the morale changes, I, at least, find it to be a pleasant little bit of immersion. It be satisfying. Thank you!

[Lexx416]

Just a quick shoutout that I really enjoy the change that can cover us in blood/gore.

Even without the morale changes, I, at least, find it to be a pleasant little bit of immersion. It be satisfying. Thank you!

Agreed. I have a more combat involved alt now, and this change has been a hoot. A good way to make things feel a bit more grim in the Lost Lands, without needing to make it a miserable place to play in.