[Poll] Blood Thirst and Compassion
Hello everyone, Corintio here!
Today I was entertaining the idea of how to improve the feel of Kalyskah's hunger. And then I went through old documents and was reminded of something:
Kalyskah is a monster. She needs an active effort to prevent herself from acting like one.
With that in mind, I started to wonder about ways to achieve this feeling and the answer was right in front of my face: The Tendency System!
So the idea is that compassion is a slider from 0 to 100. Right now, we have that the lower her compassion, the higher her Sorcery attribute will get. I didn't know if you noticed that, but if Kalyskah reaches 0 of compassion she gets up to +5 on her sorcery attribute.
And sorcery influences not just the damage caused by her magic, but also how much blood she gets while biting a victim, and how much health she recovers while hitting an enemy while the bloodbuff is active. Yes, we have a blood steal system implemented, so the trail effect on Kalyskah's weapons gets red when she has the blood buff active.
Now on the other hand, the higher her compassion, the higher the threshold for her eyes to go red and her skin to get pale, which is her Hungry state. Right now, when she's hungry, she gets a bonus on intimidation rolls, and a penalty in persuasion rolls and that's also what triggers whether or not she'll receive damage from sunlight.
But I want more.
I want the player to feel that Kalyskah's true nature is selfish, violent, and sadistic. And that it's her rational mind and active choices to be better that prevent her from falling spiral down into a path that can turn her into a bloodthirsty beast.
And that culminated in two potential ideas that I wanted to hear your thoughts about:
Thirsty locking compassionate dialogues:
Imagine Kalyskah's current compassion rating is 60. If the player chooses a compassionate choice that adds a point on compassion up to 50, that prompts a message that says: "Compassion didn't change" and the dialogue option is displayed in white. If Kalyskah's compassion is below 50, the dialogue option will show in blue and the player will get a +1 on their compassion tendency.
With that in mind, my idea is that if Kalyskah is thirsty unless her compassion level is already above the value of that choice, she won't be able to make it. That would lock her into either neutral or monstrous\violent options when her eyes are red. This is a simple solution that will make it so that if the player plans to make Kalyskah fight her own nature, they will need to help her feed before entering a dialogue with someone they care about.
Frenzy during gameplay:
Another idea I had was that the thirstier she gets, the higher the chance of her losing control for a few seconds and grappling someone who is randomly close to her to feed. That's not something we can implement until we finish transporting the game to Unreal 5, but I would also tie this chance to her compassion. In that case, the lowest her compassion, the lowest the chances of her losing control. This means that when she's more inclined to act according to her true nature, this inner anger and frustration won't take the best of her when she doesn't want to.
The problem is: I don't like this idea. In classic vampire novels, vampires act monstrously because that's just who they are. And so is Kalyskah. This thing of losing control and attacking people at random makes it too close to the most modern portrayal of vampires in tabletop games, which is something I rather avoid. Kalyskah is inspired by vampires like Carmilla, Dracula, Lord Ruthven and the Vourdalak Family, she's evil because it's easy for her to be evil. Not because she has a beast inside of her that takes over when she loses her temper.
So with that in mind, I don't want to implement a frenzy system in the game, and I rather leave things just tied to her dialogue options.
What do you think?
Comments (19)
Just like most players mention above, we don't want the game to be complicated, it is better to have all options available, but rather thirst and huger should be related to powers, combat and sex. I have an Idea if she is hungry or thirsty, she will NOT use weapons in combat, but rather she will use hand to hand, biting and sorcery instead. also life steal automatically activated. if she is full, then she can use all the weapons and gears again. Btw, can we request a map system? I don't wanna get lost.
Why not combine Succubus and Vampire lore together? (i.e. tie a lust, compassion, and hunger meters together). So she get lustful when thirsty, if she keep on satisfying her lust only without feeding (player choice) she turn into a frenzy mode (once let's say hunger meter reach 200%). Can also simply add a perk that the player unlock and player decides which one to go. So In your case I think lust, compassion, hunger, and player choice traits/perks are variable to play with that determine outcome with a 100 and 200% value to play with.
Would be nice to have Thirst to open more dialogue options, not only locking existing ones...
It's actually planned to unlock a few interactions. For example, if on the legacy version, you go talk with Jessie for the first time while thirsty, she'll ask if Kalyskah is sick and Kalyskah can lie about it to get blood bottles. Fara will also comment on Kalyskah's appearance if you speak with her while visibly thirsty. This is part of the quirks we are adding to the game =)
I think showing Kalyskah's struggle with her vampire nature and wanting to be good and even more humane is good to show in her nature, the way she acts, and her speech. I think it's more realistic and exciting to have her slip occasionally going really berserk in a frenzy. I am glad you are taking the time to develop a personality for Kalyskah!
Kalyskah's personality is the anchor of the project. And yeah, these moments of anger are something we are thinking about how to add more often to the game. And tying it to her thirsty seems like the best approach!
Frenzy I'm against, for example if you randomly attack someone in the street what happens then? Presumably you want to come back to the town later, and they just watched you drink someone's blood in broad daylight... if you can reset it by just running away and coming back then that feels a bit silly. On a character level I don't like it either, she is thousands of years old, should be very experienced at managing her vampire tendencies. I get that a fledgling vampire could go crazy but I feel like Kalyskah should be above losing control like that. As for dialogue choices, I sort of like the idea but only if the subject of the dialogue is directly related to Kalyskah's thirst. For instance when the massage servant offers to let you drink from her, if you're locked into saying yes with high thirst, that makes sense to me. But if for instance if the compassion choice is "help this kid find his parents" or you can "leave him to fend for himself" then I don't see why you should have choices locked by your thirst level.
We'll keep that in mind! I think we have a similar line of thought. =)
Don't like either. Can understand and I think it is good the idea that when she is "thirsty" she may have difficulties, and need a stronger effort, to control the instinct to "drink", a bit like for us when we are thirsty and we get a bottle of water. But the first option would in reality eliminate the struggle, it would become somehow a mechanical yes/no. For the second, and more in general, originally she was the representative of the storm of life, thus a vital force, her fear of dying young is what brought her to do the first action, but nonetheless against someone that can be classified as "bad guy" and helping his wife, and then, when her village reacted and killed her, she felt wronged and a rage reacted badly, and despite her vampiric nature, in her dialogue in her prologue can be seen that she still does feel she did it only because she want on a rampage and not because she consider it natural and a right, and that she still has the fear of that young girl that was afraid of dying. The way you are describing, means there is nothing left of that, so she really becomes just a beast that follows her basic instinct of nutrition or barely contains it. Also, at that point, you can completely eliminate any kind of submissive behaviour - it is true that one can be submissive toward some and dominating towards others, but a pure predator that just contains the aggressivity because temporarily satiated, will not be submissive in any case. If in the prologue the player makes certains choses and follows a certain line, it could even have a certain logic that after that is the case, but in the prologue, everything points to the fact she is still doubtful and struggling with that, so, should have the possibility of choosing, even if at a cost (even long term, if she is a raging beast radiating aggressivity, even if temporarily satiated, she will certainly need more magic to be seductive, that if she is different), and then that can influence more how she is after the prologue.
You could take a page out of Vampire the Masquerade for this. All vampires have a "Humanity" stat, whenever you do acts like attacking innocents or non-hostile NPCs, your humanity will go down, while compassionate acts will raise your humanity. Humanity can also go down with dialog choices. Like tricking an NPC into doing something dangerous or deliberately convincing an NPC into going somewhere where they will die, etc. Humanity also goes down if your blood level is low and you haven't fed in a long time. Humanity going too low will make your character lose control and frenzy, doing more damage but with a chance to harm anyone nearby openly, resulting in a response from law enforcement or vampire hunters.
I really like Vampire the Masquerade as a roleplaying game. But in that case, I do prefer how Vampire the Requiem approached humanity, which is more tied to how your character can relate to humans. Surviving deadly injuries and seeing new trends that didn't exist when you were human, causes a breaking point on that system. But Kalyskah has already passed that point. She's at least 15 thousand years old by the time the prologue starts and she doesn't even remember what it was like to be human. But the truth is that as much as I like the concept of Humanity as a stat and it works well in a tabletop game, I don't think it works for the purpose we have here. I like to think that Kalyskah is, deep down, a very jaded woman who jumps from thrill to thrill to fill this void of feelings that she has, and that violence is her way of doing so. It's not that she's sad or depressed, it's just that she doesn't really care. She knows she's very hard to kill or even immortal, so she lives an unlife with few lasting consequences (During the prologue). Before the player's input to help her redeem herself and learn compassion and altruism, she already *likes* to watch things die when she feels that this is a fate it deserves. But she holds back trying to cling to a sense of decency or maybe even honour that she might have (which is why Loyalty is a separate tendency stat) And I feel like giving her a state of frenzy might take away her agency when she *chooses* to act according to her base instincts for the thrill it might give to her void existence... or so she believes.
I voted neither but more meaning i like parts of both. The idea of struggling more in dialogue sounds great but struggling not locked out. She is still sentient and can try and act civilized but her growing blood craze should lower the chances of people responding well.
Then also could the blood frenzy be a buff/ debuff? Incentivize deferent types of gameplay through higher or lower levels. when fed you can do the classic aristocrat vamp, convince, seduce ext. but when frenzied you can abduct, mindbreak, assault. even maybe have skills that develop along the two lines. would mean that different playthroughs could play more individually. For instance in two playthroughs you meet the same person but in one you seduce them and they act relatively normal, but in the frenzied play they are broken down slaves that follow your whim.
Well, it looks like I'm outvoted anyhow, but here's why I don't care for either: I'm more interested in Kalyskah's submission and subjugation. I get it, she's a vampire. I don't expect that sort of thing happening to her being easy. But, you guys want a Thirsty mechanic, so looks like it's happening.
We need to work on every front of the game. The sex scenes are important and we already have a clear direction of where this system will go. But we need to make fine tunes in the other sides of the narrative so then everything can come together and the player can feel that there's more to Kalyskah's character arc than just that. There are two parts of the story that we have planned for her to go on a submissive path, one in the prologue, the other in the puppeteers questline after the prologue.
I kinda like and dislike both. I don't really like the idea that your compassion rating would lock you out of choosing something compassionate BUT if it is countered by actually not being thirsty - so you can be compassionate beyond your rating as long as you aren't thirsty, so you can choose to be better as long as you manage yourself, which means that you aren't going to just be unable to make the choices you want to. But I also like the idea of a bit of a frenzy system because that actively makes the gameplay feel like you need to struggle with yourself. I wouldn't want it to be the only system because it would be more likely to lock out roleplay options then, but having a frenzy specifically for combat and only if you've been hungry for x amount of time and if you are you will kill your target by biting them to feast. I would also be interested in having an option of refraining from feeding for an extended period of time but still be begrudgingly compassionate. Like you can go through the motions but it just doesn't *sound* right. You say the right words but in the wrong way. - so this is why I kinda don't like either option because it cuts out a complete avenue of personification but this would require another level of voice acting too, so that would be a lot to add. Super interesting though to see that as a level of storytelling.
That's the idea. She can be compassionate beyond her rating while not thirsty, this is how she increases her compassion level. I don't think I understood very well what you mean about refraining from feeding. What are your thoughts?
sorry google translate : For me the representation of the Vampire is above all in a lore close to the Stories of Drakula. - A vampire is a monster (cursed by god in the context of Drakula) - a Vampire cannot escape the day, he dies. - a vampire is a creature that attracts its prey towards them (within the framework that it cannot enter other people's homes) - a vampire must take the earth from his country because otherwise he cannot regenerate. In the context of Kalyskah I don't really know where it is possible to go but for me a vampire lacking blood is a weak vampire but not a vampire who is losing his means.
I think thirsty would make Kalyskah stressed and lash out on people, but she wouldn't stop being herself. Like that term in English, Hangry, when someone is hungry and starts to get easily angry. That's why I think kaly wouldn't bother about being too compassionate when she's thirsty