Reimagining Mood: Weariness

[Itseasytosee2me]

So I've had an idea recently to reimagine mood and sanity into a system which acts less like Sims moodles and more like a stress meter that is more actively managed. A transition from making mood less of the current circumstances that your character finds themselves in and more of a gradual building up of stress that your character will eventually have to take some time relaxing to recover from. It might sound a little lame to have to worry about having to manage another meter but hear me out because I think this system can bring alot more value to the game then mood currently does.

Alright so first we are going to throw mood and sanity out of the window, instead we are going to track two other values: Weariness and Comfort. These aren't just renames they function in a way that is different from mood.

The first statistic we track is weariness. Weariness represents the amount of stress and pressure that has piled up onto your spessman over the events of the shift. Weariness is a number that starts at 0 and increases whenever something that would stress your spaceman out happens to them. Many current mood events that normally give a negative moodlet that has an expiry timer would increase your weariness, such as looking into a heretic rift, being stabbed with a knife and made to start bleeding, eating bad food, being knocked into critical condition, being set on fire, being dismembered, etc.
Likewise mood events that would previously cause positive moodles would decrease weariness, such as drinking a nice drink, eating some food you like, getting a hug, having a smoke, etc.

There would be no effects that temporarily increase or decrease weariness, all events that effect weariness would lead to permanent changes, and as such a negative event would need a positive event to counteract it.
Having low weariness would provide effects similar to the effects having high mood now provides, and having high weariness gives you the effects that having low mood would have.

The second statistic we track is comfort. Comfort represents generally how physically comfortable your spessman is at any given moment. Circumstantial things effect comfort, and no effect will ever permanently increase or decrease your comfort. For example, being in the bar, sitting in a chair, listening to good music would see spaceman with a high level of comfort. However, a spaceman trudging through cold dark hallways, covered in blood, with a broken leg would be very uncomfortable. Many mood events that are circumstantial such as being in a room with good décor would effect comfort instead is weariness. Some, such as smoking a cigarette, may effect both, comfort while you have a lit cigarette in your mouth, and a slow decrease of weariness caused by the nicotine in your system.

Comfort acts as a modifier for events that decrease your weariness, having a high level of comfort makes events that decrease your weariness more effective, a security officer who doffs their armor and goes to have a donut in the breakroom will restore more weariness than a sec officer who just munches on a donut while out on patrol. Having a low level of comfort limits how much weariness you can restore within a time window, if your leg is broken and are lying on the floor covered in blood, a cigarette is not going to do much good in cheering you up.

I believe that this makes the mood system more interactive. Instead of just having to wait around for negative moodlets to go away, you can actually do something about it to directly undo it's effects, and instead of positive moodlets being more or less useless when you are already at max sanity, you have a clear reason to do sanity restoring activities at a given time as a reaction to an event, rather than as a permanent obligation.

There is a little more depth to be seen here, but this represents the groundwork of my idea.

[BrianBackslide]

I think you're on the right track here, but I feel that the comfort gained penalty should be inversed into a bonus at extreme levels of weariness. From your example of the security officer that's on their last legs, the cigarette would give more comfort due to the circumstances and their extreme weariness instead of less. It's a fairly common trope in film and drama for a dying person to be comforted with one last smoke/drink, etc.

Weariness would also make sense to be temporarily suppressible with stimulants like coffee or nicotine, which could have a higher addiction buildup the more weariness it's suppressing. (And coffee should be addictive) Additionally, high comfort would likely mean that scenarios that cause weariness would cause more weariness. Being immaculately clean and warm and fuzzy to being suddenly covered in blood and filth would be much harsher on the psyche than coming home from a hard day of work and getting splashed with something gross before you had the chance to shower.

This would make it a game of trying to be comfortable, but not too comfortable. 'Ere you suffer some catastrophic penalty for having something bad happen to you.
Weary, but not too weary. 'Ere you suffer a stress breakdown.

Would there be any gameplay ramifications for having high weariness or high comfort, or would it be a direct port of what we already have for mood bonuses/penalties?

[Itseasytosee2me]

-snip-
Would there be any gameplay ramifications for having high weariness or high comfort, or would it be a direct port of what we already have for mood bonuses/penalties?

Good ideas here. Supposedly, this system would be more open to negative effects at very high weariness because it would be easier to counteract, but currently I imagine it doing the same thing mood does, which most significantly is speed and and crit threshold.

[kinnebian]

this would be really cool and i would love to see it

[oranges]

this will just end up like mood again because people will complain about it's impact, so congrats for reinventing the wheel.

[RedBaronFlyer]

I look forward to a mass crew mental breakdown because the chef is serving deep-fried moldy mess for the whole hour-and-a-half shifts that Manuel tends to have.

[Constellado]

How would traits like Hypersensitive and Apathetic work with it? how about Jolly or Depressed?

I like the idea. This may make the mood meter I see in game more consistent with what I have just experienced. (its weird seeing a happy mood meter right after just fighting a blob for example)

(also having a mechanical reason to ask for a break is great)

[Itseasytosee2me]

How would traits like Hypersensitive and Apathetic work with it? how about Jolly or Depressed?

I like the idea. This may make the mood meter I see in game more consistent with what I have just experienced. (its weird seeing a happy mood meter right after just fighting a blob for example)

(also having a mechanical reason to ask for a break is great)

good question. I think the simplest way to translate them while keeping their effect the same would be to have Jolly give a comfort bonus for having it, and for Depressed to have a comfort malus. Hypersensitive and Apathetic would increase or decrease the effect comfort has on weariness.
However these don't quite fit the theming of the original quirks, so they might need some other interesting effect or otherwise be reimagined.

[Itseasytosee2me]

I've begun the process of coding this. If anyone is interested in sprite work, dm me on discord.

[Bawhoppennn]

oranges gave their approval it seems

I look forward to this new system

[Pandarsenic]

While it has a lot of commonalities with existing mood, I think this may hopefully be the kind of improvement to mood we've been dreaming of

Godspeed mooncat, I hope it turns out good