The new Blight behaviour is great. Now make 'Breaks' act the same way.

[tchiseen]

I love the new Blight behaviour, because it lets you interact with it.

Before, it would just happen, wipe out your crops randomly, and it'd feel like RNG just boned you for no reason. Now in A18, you can interact with Blight. You can adjust your work priorities and restrictions, pay attention to where the Blight is, and root it out. That's interactive and fun game design, meaningfully challenging and rewarding/punishing a players actions. As a design consideration, I love it.

I'd love mental breaks to behave in a similar fashion. Pawns could have a 'last straw' when their mood is low. In the same way that someone is always responsible for a break now (Pawn is wandering. Reason: ate raw food), I think breaks should be like Blights. The break should have a trigger that can be treated (in most cases). For example:

" I am going to burn this place to the ground if I don't sleep on a good bed tonight "

or

" I am going to kill all these animals if someone doesn't clean this place up "

or

" I am going to punch everyone in the face if I see another rotting corpse "

or

" I am going to lose it if I have to eat more raw human meat "

Essentially the 'break' event would happen, but instead of a pawn just immediately murdering all your animals, or setting everything on fire, the player would have the opportunity to interact and prevent the spree by doing something; re-assigning beds, cleaning, burying corpses, cooking food, etc. If the player succeeded, then maybe the pawn would have a smaller 'catharsis' type buff that'd boost mood as a reward for the player paying attention to the pawns needs.

I think this would be a good mechanic, because some of the less worrying breaks might not be worth the cost of avoiding, and some of the worst breaks might be too hard to avoid, meaning that breaks will still happen, but the player will feel that their actions had much more impact on their occurrence.

[Limdood]

isn't that already simulated out with minor, major, and extreme break "risks?"

you currently get warnings when a pawn mood is low, as well as a list of all pawns at minor break or below.  You could easily then take action and work to cheer them up...make them a lavish meal, assign them to joy, spruce up their bedroom.

I think the way you're asking for it would he hell to keep track of in even a moderately sized colony.

Case-in-point: Randy Random sent 3 raids in extremely rapid succession at me, literally my first person hadn't woken up from emergency surgery from raid 1 before  raid 2 showed up...raid 3 saw me fighting it with 2 out of 12 pawns uninjured, most of them actively bleeding at the start.  By the end of that, i had numerous extreme break risks, and of course, that was expected in that situation.  Could you imagine the sheer number of, for lack of a better term, baby-tantrum-ultimatums (i'm gonna do X if you don't give me Y!) the game would be throwing at me for the next 3 in-game days?  Instead, using the current system, I was able to see the break level of each person, ignore the minor breaks, address the major breaks of my doctors so they didn't go dazed during treatment, and work on cheering up or pre-emptively disarming the extreme breaks.

The mood system may need some work, but I don't agree at all that the work needed is in the warning.

[Lightzy]

Great idea.

But I wonder how it'll work in practice. I mean, won't it be too easy? You just send a pawn to clean the room etc and no more breaks? And it's also something you'd want to do anyway so it's not like it's a time/resource sacrifice.
It's not like the game doesn't warn you that a pawn is likely to go psycho already

You should alter the idea to make it more of a sacrifice to prevent a neglected pawn's break