Granger wrote:Happyness comes from your surrounding and the stuff you do.
I know, even if I haven't worked out all the rules yet.
Small wall of text incoming as I try to come up with something.
My point is, happiness is purely a game mechanic, not a simulation - you can't simulate a guy you control being happy or unhappy. Thus it needs to serve a game purpose. The obvious choice would be rewarding doing well (Staying well-fed, wearing high-quality clothes, having full HP) and penalizing doing badly (Going hungry, wounded, tired, low-quality clothes) - however, H&H is a game heavy on resource acquisition and management. If you're doing well, you probably have enough resources to keep doing well, you already have an advantage and don't need an even bigger advantage. Conversely, if you're doing badly, you're probably still gathering resources you need to do well and are already at a disadvantage. An extra disadvantage will only make it harder for you to go on.
It can go as a complementary system to personal beliefs and a "goal" system. Here's how it goes.
When you help your hearthling follow his personal beliefs, he becomes happier. When you make him do something opposite to his beliefs, he gets sad - quite simple, really. Night persons like to go out at night, peaceful guys don't like fighting, and so on. Also, he gets
desires - think of these as your ancestors' wishes, only on a personal scale, time-limited and dependent on personal beliefs. Desires slowly shift, and if one shifts out before you fulfil it, you get a happiness hit - and if you do fulfil it, you get a boost. Desires pop up naturally - a hunter may want to go hunt a bear, a high-change guy may want to find some new clothes - a lot of things has to be considered, including personal beliefs, skills, incremental skills' ratios, whether the hearthling has already done something (It's unlikely that a guy who hasn't killed anyone will want to, for example), items owned - it gets complicated. Even with all this stuff in place, the payback from all this should still be minor.
Another function I see is discouraging grinding. Basically, the game keeps a stack of the last 10 basic (No difference between digging for clay and digging for soil) actions a hearthling took. If he does something already in this stack, he gets a chance of a happiness hit - he's getting bored. Doing something he hasn't done in a while gives a boost. Here, you get a penalty or bonus to your learning ability based on your happiness.
In both cases, rare occurrences should give a bonus: finding a herb you have less than a 15% chance of seeing, meeting a dryad and the like.
Hope it gets some gears turning.