The "tough" trait doesn't fit in the game, it's borderline inhuman.

[Call me Arty]

 TL;DR: Tough doesn't fit with the rest of the traits, and makes no sense in the context of human beings. It should be changed to an increase in pain tolerance, so that pawns take the same damage, but can at least stay in a fight longer or walk their dismembered, bleeding-out almost-carcass to a hospital bed.

I mean, the title says it all, really.

The tough trait just doesn't seem to fit within the game, at least for me.

Think about it compared to other perks, right? There are two kinds of traits: Trade-offs and parallels (wiki calls them general and spectrum, I don't like those terms). Trade-off perks have a good boost to one factor but balance something else, these are your night owls, brawlers, masochists, and too-smarts of the colony. Parallels can be really good, but are balanced by the fact that some other sucker can get its evil twin (and vice-versa). These would be your industrial/slothful, sanguine/depressive, and beautiful/staggeringly ugly traits.

Now, let's see. We have this one trait, "wimp". It lowers your pain threshold. There's no positive quality about it, so it must have a counter (pyromaniac and body purists not benefitting from having natural body parts notwithstanding). You could argue that it could be masochist, in the same way that teetotaler could be seen as the counter to the chemical _______ traits. However, if you were to go for a proper parallel, I'd argue that tough should fit that bill, but it needs to be changed first (for those strawmen saying "how many counters can you give to wimp?", other traits such as teetotaler are countered by two other traits, brawler is countered by careful shooter and trigger happy, and creepy breathing is essentially another ugly).

Our pawns are humans. The traits are all things you've probably seen in people. Maybe not personally, maybe only in TV or secondhand from friends or family, but you've seen them before. We know a real hard-working friend, who in-game might have an extra 20% work speed. Maybe you wanted to add your girlfriend into the game - before realizing that she was likely to die horribly - and thought "pretty" would be befitting of her. Now, who do you know could reliably take 60% less damage from everything? For clarification, that means, completely naked, they can take:

• A sniper rifle round to the heart
• Four assault rifle shots to the spine
• A charge rifle round to the brain
• A revolver round to each eye
• Two recurve bow arrows to the lung

- and be survive, walk it off in half a week. One week if you need to do a transplant or drug dosage. For most pawns, these would either mean instant death or crippling. A tough pawn? Problems minimal. A dose of luci could fix anything that scarred or got too broken, in addition to making them a weapon of war. Does that sound human anymore? Yeah, people like Phineas Gage survived a spike through the face, but they sure weren't the same afterward.

Rather, an increase in pain tolerance should be the way to go. That's perfectly human. Marines training with half their body weight in gear weighing them down in hot sun, a warehouse worker who carries heavy boxes despite that back injury that still hurts like hell, women who can function just fine after years of monthly internal torture sessions, these people exist: People who are used to dealing with pain, or just experience less than others. Think about how many times a pawn has collapsed not from a loss of legs, missing the majority of their blood, not sleep deprivation, but pain? I've had pawns who've had to be repeatedly hospitalized because they got torn to pieces in a fight, and they might have well have collapsed from a stuffy nose sickness that added +1% pain while on the way to lunch. How about the number of times that a pawn's been downed, picked up by a pirate and carried off, just to feel better, stand up, get punched once, and then get carried-off again. One extra shot could've saved them. Call it a conflict of interest, but there are alternatives to traits that can make a pawn seem more than human. Otherwise, an increased pain tolerance would be incredibly useful without having a borderline superhuman.

[XeoNovaDan]

I've personally never really given that perspective of the 'Tough trait any thought, but it's an interesting argument to be made for sure and I agree with your write-up. From the desc, it's implied that tough people are somewhat like the Hulk, which is plausible given that genetic engineering has been mentioned in the lore (i.e. vatgrown supersoldiers that get blasted to smithereens from orbit), so it could just be a reflection of that in actual gameplay.

I've definitely taken a liking to having tough colonists on the forefront of battle; they're arguably overpowered when in marine armour and coupled with something like a minigun - the trigger-happy trait being somewhat of a bonus if you're lucky enough to get this golden combination. On the contrary, I've personally never really struggled with tough enemies other than on failed naked brutality runs in the early-game, but that's because shortbows are naturally woefully underpowered in the first place.

Something like a higher pain tolerance would definitely be more believable though - basically just built-in yayo

[erdrik]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fUO3KKbAbTxMP1lqphnnodY0NPoOVblCUkDw-54MDUc/pub

The biology of humanity
...
Though almost all such xenohumans (as they are called) are recognizably descended from the original Earth stock, their morphology is highly variable. Some are giants; other are tiny or squat.
...
More alien are those xenohumans that carry genetic traits that were engineered instead of evolved.
...
Such modifications are rarely seen in their original form by anyone besides the culture that created them. However, they live on in their descendants long after their originating culture was erased by planetary catastrophes.
...
Radiological immunity is a very common adaptation
...
Soldiermorphs: ... they have large muscles and perfect eyesight
...
Mendelian traits like impossible eye shades, streaks of multicolored hair, or artistic patterns on the ski[n].
...
examples are the gravity dwarfs, 3-foot-tall xenohumans from worlds of over 2g of gravity.
...
Aquatic-adapted strains who can withstand breathing very high gas pressures and even survive days of immersion by exchanging oxygen through the skin
...
So don't be alarmed if you see someone with gills or solid orange eyeballs. They're just another kind of human, like you!

[Call me Arty]

I've personally never really given that perspective of the 'Tough trait any thought, but it's an interesting argument to be made for sure and I agree with your write-up. From the desc, it's implied that tough people are somewhat like the Hulk, which is plausible given that genetic engineering has been mentioned in the lore (i.e. vatgrown supersoldiers that get blasted to smithereens from orbit), so it could just be a reflection of that in actual gameplay.

Thanks for the support of the idea, I appreciate it!
I would've written about half a dozen more posts about inconsistencies in pawns and their backstories if I didn't care about being a hypocrite who calls other people out for posting popular ideas or criticism without searching for it first. Tough getting assigned to vat-grown soldiers? I'd have no problem with that. . . if vat-grown soldiers actually had negative social skill like the backstory implies, could compare with what Soldiermorphs were described to be, if tough pawns looked any different from ordinary pawns so you'd know it was time to bring more than a club or autopistol to the fight and didn't accidentally send your non-tough pawn out to a dangerous fight rather than your bullet sponge. . . etc. There's just never been enough care put into the trait system, in my own opinion. They've been fine for the most part, some are missing care (body purists are disgusted by bionics, shouldn't they get a mood boost from "well, I'm dismembered, but at least I'm not a monster!"), but none really feel too off. Tough just broke that for me.

Yadda yadda yadda, I didn't bother to click the last link in the original post and didn't see that Arty wrote multiple pages about Xenohumans as mentioned in the very text I'm copy-pasting from, in addition to reading through each and every backstory in the game to see if there was even a description of a xeno's fingernail clipping somewhere, and then wrote at least a paragraph about it.

Wow man, thanks for being so honest, no need to be down on yourself though.
Yes, there are xenohumans and people with some xenohuman genetics in their blood that has a pretty big effect of the physiology of a human. That's not a valid excuse, for reasons.
Muffalo don't have the same physiology as humans. Rather than arms, hands, and feet, they have a different set of parts: Front and back, left and right legs, and hooves. They don't have hooved, multiple legs, or no arms traits. It's just part of their body. That's odd, because rather than getting shot and seeing damage to a super-femur, or extra-beefy-right-arm, it's just femur, or arm.
Let's draw a comparison between humans and wolves. If we are to believe that xenohumans aren't just a forgotten detail used for flavor and thrown away, there are lots of different humans, correct? Similiarly, there are many canines in Rimworld, which we can assume were bred from wolves. They all look different from wolves, and all have different purposes. Yorkies are super weak, but great for cuddles! Wargs are tough as hell and picky eaters, but they are vicious in combat. Huskies are the way to go for good dogs that can stand the cold. How much sense would it make if wolves just had various breeds as traits, while all using the same wolf sprite and having mostly identical stats?

[erdrik]

Yadda yadda yadda, I didn't bother to click the last link in the original post and didn't see that Arty wrote multiple pages about Xenohumans as mentioned in the very text I'm copy-pasting from, in addition to reading through each and every backstory in the game to see if there was even a description of a xeno's fingernail clipping somewhere, and then wrote at least a paragraph about it.

Wow man, thanks for being so honest, no need to be down on yourself though.
...

*slow clap*

Thanks. No seriously.
You could have just pointed out my mistake bluntly instead of going out of your way to
a) snidely put words in my mouth
b) insult my intelligence

I made a mistake. If you can't get over yourself enough to prevent yourself from insulting others for the mistakes they make then I have no need, time, or interest in any of your comments or suggestions.

So yes, thank you for showing yourself to be a rude jack ass that I don't have to pay attention to.

[Call me Arty]

*slow clap*
Thanks. No seriously.
You could have just pointed out my mistake bluntly instead of going out of your way to
a) snidely put words in my mouth
b) insult my intelligence
I made a mistake. If you can't get over yourself to point of not insulting people of mistakes they make then I have no need time or interest in any of your comments or suggestions.
So yes, thank you for showing yourself to be a rude jack ass that I don't have to pay attention to.

I mean, you did scroll past my explicit mention of things that make people more than human highlighted in obvious yellow text to copy-paste ten snippets from the CRB that describe ways in which a pawn may be more than human, rather than just using one original sentence to say "with all the xenohumans, someone probably just got a little bit of g-dwarf or soldiermorph in their family tree". Pretty sure you couldn't qualify reading through a pamphlet, copying and pasting it into a box, formatting it, and clicking post as a mistake. Besides, I could easily cut Xeo's post down to a more manageable size so half this page wouldn't be quoted text, but I had to cut yours down to a seventh of the size to make it manageable. Otherwise, I'd have to quote twenty-one lines of quoted text, which is like, 6.5² lines of quoted text in total. That's just unnecessary.

I don't want to veer this thread off track - and I disagree with the following - but you could've sighted traits such as great memory, super immune, tunneler, jogger, beautiful, and whatever else you want to group in there as things passed-down from designer babies or xenohuman blood. I'd imagine that if you were going to send colonists to a jungle planet or a plague was moving through a densely populated Urbworld, giving some people a great immune system would be a great asset, and would probably be modded into people. Same could be said of sending a tough guy to a planet with raiders and insects and robots (oh my!).

[Call me Arty]

 Welp, it's official now. Time to hold-out for a green-thumb treatment.

[bobucles]

The problem with giving pawns a reduced sensitivity to pain is as easy to see as giving them go juice. The only thing it does is make them fight until they lose a leg or die. Pain is the main mechanic that stops your pawns from dying.

[Namsan]

I think people with tough traits are biologically modified or something.

[TrapsterJ]

Maybe by tough it means they're physically built or hardened to the point that they're like Logan who can just grunt bullets out of his body or more realistically they're just someone more adapted to taking harm and takes more to actually damage them like a way a soldier would tough it through with adrenaline and training.

[Third_Of_Five]

Is it a common trait? If not I could see it being explained away as being the result of genetic modification or whatever.

Like on a scale of 1 to 10 how rare is it?

[Kirby23590]

Well it's like the perk Toughness from the Fallout games.

Some people can take a beating, but can still stand. Some people can in IRL even stand from a bullet wound. A 9mm pistol takes 3 shots to kill a person when aiming that's not the head. Some might take 4 shots to the chest before they go down calling for a emergency first aid.

So either way in video games or in other forms of media. Yea people can even take 10 or 20 shots to the chest from a assault rifle, even if it doesn't make sense or is downright unrealistic unless he or she was wearing body armor or power armor.

However i stand in disbelief and don't have any issues since this is a video game a form of entertainment of wasting our times having fun with. He or she might have been a clone or has the blood of arnold schwarzenegger in him or her, making him/her a half-soldiermorph eating some bullets or squirrel bites before he/she falls. Besides nobody in games likes to die in 3 shots or in 1 shot from a little dinky pistol that's not a revolver or a desert eagle from a computer controlled enemy, it adds frustration throwing you back to your last checkpoint or were you last saved.

[Call me Arty]

I think people with tough traits are biologically modified or something.

Is it a common trait? If not I could see it being explained away as being the result of genetic modification or whatever.
. . .

Maybe by tough it means they're physically built or hardened to the point that they're like Logan who can just grunt bullets out of his body or more realistically they're just someone more adapted to taking harm and takes more to actually damage them like a way a soldier would tough it through with adrenaline and training.

. . .
However i stand in disbelief and don't have any issues since this is a video game a form of entertainment of wasting our times having fun with. He or she might have been a clone or has the blood of arnold schwarzenegger in him or her, making him/her a half-soldiermorph eating some bullets or squirrel bites before he/she falls. Besides nobody in games likes to die in 3 shots or in 1 shot from a little dinky pistol that's not a revolver or a desert eagle from a computer controlled enemy, it adds frustration throwing you back to your last checkpoint or were you last saved.

I have no issue with tanking bullets, arrows, fireballs - whatever - in most videogames, as they do not explain things or go into care the same way that Rimworld may. You and your enemies in Skyrim grow tougher "because you're the Dragonborn or somethin', Idunno. Now go and get kill that raider who still wants to fight after you decapitated six of his friends". Doom doesn't tell you how much health an enemy has or how much damage a gun does, you just know you have to hit a Cacodemon around seven times with the shotgun to kill it. Meanwhile: Rimworld does go into that detail. Your pawn isn't just "good with a gun", they're good with the gun because they had to learn to shoot as they grew-up on an apocalyptic planet (which was apoctalyptic because of mass climate change, unlike a Mario World that's icy or sandy just because). It was a useful skill to have, so they learned it and practiced it. The same applies to traits: Masochists are wired differently, pyromaniacs start fires because they love them, cannibals once tried and liked human, there is no "just because".

I dislike tough because it feels like a pawn is tough "just because" with no background to it, even though Rimworld is filled with plenty of reasons. Soldiermorphs are designed for combat, Gravity Dwarves are naturally a bit tougher, messing with your genes for fashion is a known phenomenon and could logically mean that carbon nanofibers under your skin or chitin was like, totally in on the planet the pawn came from. If either of these were the case, I would hope for more playable pawns that are different breeds of human, or for the trait to say something like "Sam's father comes from a long line of Gravity Dwarves, and has passed down some of their tough bones and muscle". Hell, I'd even accept "lucky" over "tough", because action heroes are still human. If someone on the street dies from one gunshot but Johnny Action takes half the capacity of a submachinegun, it's because the single bullet hit a major artery or organ. Johnny Action is either poorly written, or has a remarkable pain threshold and took the bullets in a lot of nonvital places that perfectly outline the things you really don't want shot. No amount of training or practice helps you survive getting shot, you either have more muscle or fat around the area that may slow the bullet, are more accustomed to pain so that you are more prepared to get shot (bullets still leave holes, pain changes nothing), or you have enough adrenaline to keep you awake long enough to not pass-out from blood loss as fast. We know that storytellers and psychic forces exist like deities, so saying "Stewart has always been naturally lucky. Where other would break a leg, he would land just right and gets away with a sprained ankle." Therefor, another pawn might get a direct hit, while a lucky pawn could get grazed, or have their heart one centimeter to the left, so it only gets scratched instead of stabbed.

TL;DR: If a pawn or someone in their bloodline has been genetically engineered, selectively bred, or subject to a series of mutations, it should be mentioned in their background or the "tough" trait itself. If not, then the existence of supernatural forces in the universe could justify the trait being changed to "Lucky", implying that bullets are just innacurate enough to keep the pawn alive where other pawns may die. If you had an infinite number of twins who took identical gunshots, one would never survive a lethal shot due to the fact that they were once in an action movie, or felt less pain.

[Call me Arty]

The problem with giving pawns a reduced sensitivity to pain is as easy to see as giving them go juice. The only thing it does is make them fight until they lose a leg or die. Pain is the main mechanic that stops your pawns from dying.

Well you see: that's exactly the trade-off. -25% to aiming accuracy, "man that sucks". -25% to aiming accuracy, -50% to aiming time, "oh man, now it's a risk". Same with the balances of work speed and mental break threshold with neurotic, the mood bonus at the cost of defense with nudist, and gourmands eating enough for another half of a colonist while having an increased cooking skill. Yes, your pawn can fight longer, and that little bit longer may be the difference in repelling a group of pirates, saving a vital structure, or keeping a fellow pawn from being abducted. However, that same bonus can keep them from falling over after a certain amount of pain or blood loss, which means that they may be more likely to die as a result of injuries you didn't know were as severe as they were, or a disease that would have downed a normal pawn, but meant they walked around just enough to provoke it into progressing to the next stage. Maybe they collapse at critical damage and have pirates ignore them, only to get executed with one shot due to their incredibly low health once they get up again. It is your responsibility as the overseer of a "tough" pawn to ensure that they receive special attention, like your nervous doctor or bloodlusting gardener, or any of the other pawns who are good with a twist.