This system would comprise of Traits (or Personalities, Quirks, Ethos, it does not matter). The Traits your character is able to purchase depends on the Non-incremental Skills that your character has purchased. Animal Husbandry would give you access to different Traits than Carpentry would. Traits would rely on actions done by characters or affects of the environment upon them that the game can already recognize to limit the amount of coding required by adding to modifiers and recognition (not sure how H&H is set up java wise).
- 1 - The Trait would affect either Happiness or Unhappiness and would be split into Positive and Negative traits. For every positive Trait you took, you would take a negative Trait. You would have a limit of two or three of each category, and thereby limiting the ways your character would gain or lose happiness. The trait 'Green Thumb' would give you happiness when you are committing the act of Farming (planting or harvesting crops) while the trait Claustrophobic would lower your happiness while inside of a cave.
2 - Traits would have both positive and negative affects that are opposite of the other. For example, Pacifist would give you a limited amount of happiness when your character is not in a combat, however when in combat the character would become extremely unhappy very quickly as a response as long as he is in combat.
I am personally leaning towards combined traits because it is a simple way to get the player involved with how he wants to play his character. The first option, although allows for a bit more customization involves more traits and more modifiers and work to go into it. The first is a little unwieldily for the current scope of the game, and for the rest of the post I will focus on the second idea of Traits.
Now I will move that three Traits would be better than two and four. Two seems too little and four seems like too many for the purpose I am moving that Happiness is used for.
Happiness should effect the character's abilities in a small but desirable way. This way players will want to gain happiness and choose their Traits carefully. I purpose that Happiness at 100% has the following effect:
- +10% Lp gain
+10% Quality to any item made, crop harvested, clay dug up, ore mined, et cetra
Now you can see that two traits that increase Happiness would probably not allow your character to reach 100% happiness while four traits would give you too many ways to increase and decrease your happiness. Three sits in a snug position that allows you to gain between 60% and 100% happiness depending on your choices of Action and Passive Traits which will be described below.
The next question may be this: But if you can gain Happiness by not fighting through Pacifist, won't everyone not fight and have 100% Happiness all the time?
True, you will gain happiness from not being in combat with Pacifist, but passive Traits would give happiness at a slow rate and have a cap at how much Happiness one may earn from it that is lower than a Trait that requires the player to actually do something. For a passive Trait that requires the player not to do anything, the character may gain happiness slowly to a maximum of 20 or 25% of his happiness bar while a Pacifist in combat would lose Happiness at a very fast rate to a maximum of between -40% and -50%. This would also work in reverse. If you had the trait 'Sadist' that increases happiness while in Combat or Butchering and decreases happiness when not harming something. The happiness cap for Sadist would be around 50% while the unhappiness cap would be -25% and would diminish over a longer period of time because you can only kill so quickly (and so often). This also does not encourage killing other players, but does facilitate it.
Using Traits of the aforementioned fashion players will choose Traits for their characters that respond to how they want to play in H&H. If all you want to do is farm, smoke, and drink wine there will be Traits that make you happy for doing that, however, when you are not doing those things or doing things that are found unpleasant you will become unhappy. It lets you do what you want to do and rewards you for it by giving you more Lp and better Quality items.
Comments?
EDIT: People change, so would characters. Traits would not remain stagnant and would be able to change traits once every five Personal Belief changes. That way more flexible characters would change more often while more traditional folks would stay the same and take old beliefs to heart.
