Please have a bit of mercy for naked brutality players

[Ilya]

Naked brutality is my favorite way to play the game. Even before it was officially a thing, I used to make a similar scenario in the editor. I often lose my pawn in the first year due to mistakes of my own fault, and that's fine. What I have a hard time accepting, though, is when the game just goes "there, your only pawn is gonna die and there's nothing you can do about it". For example, today, I got the plague only 15 days into my game. My pawn had level 7 skill in doctoring, and a medicine dropped by a dead raider. I got fairly lucky and he managed to tend himself with 56% success. After that, I let him go out a bit to collect 5 herbal meds so he could tend to himself later, then had him bed rest for the entirety of his time except for when he had to eat or tend to himself. I also kept the room as clean as possible. Despite all of this, he died. There was nothing I could have done here except for getting insanely lucky with the tendings, which is obviously out of my control. I'm normally fine with losing pawns unfairly, but could we tone it down a bit for lone pawns, especially those who are not even a year into the game?

[Ser Kitteh]

Imma be real with you fam, you knew exactly what you were going into.

My current naked brutality run pawn can't cook to save her life, can't mine the iron 12 tiles away from her shack, almost died to a rat. She's struggling but that's what I signed up for.

Making it easier seems to defeat the point of naked brutality. You SHOULD get lucky, that's what makes things more memorable.

[Blato]

Not to mention that the game itself warns you that the naked brutality scenario is by design unfair. Considering that it's extremely difficult for one single pawn to be able to do everything.

My own naked bruatility pawn started with no passion in both medicine and research. By sheer luck of rerolling, I got one with "Fast Learner" trait, which helped immensely, but still, a mere flu had him bedridden and the immunity was just 15% ahead of the sickness.

The game is not designed to be possible for just one pawn, so you really do rely on luck more than in any other scenario.

[krinkels69]

I haven't played Naked brutality yet... I'll probably keep it that way ('^_^)

[RicRider]

I've learned with the Naked Brutality scenario that it's not actually a survival mode like classic survival games. It's survival with a RimWorld twist.

In your typical survival game you have one character and thus the game is designed around realism and fairness with less RNG involved. In RimWorld however, even if you're playing Naked Brutality the AI is programmed to literally throw other colonists your way. Have you ever tried playing without rescuing anyone on a transport pod? I'm asking because within 15 days usually my map is littered with the rotting corpses of space refugees that I've been ignoring because I wanted to continue to solo.

So what I'm saying is that if you want to play this game mode as a solo survival thing you might have to go into the scenario editor and remove things like the plague.

Another thing I often do (since it's a single player game and nobody's around to care that I 'cheated'), is if Randy throws something that will kill my fun and I actually feel like continuing to play, I'll open the dev tools and remove whatever condition it was. You can just remove the plague with the 'Remove hediff' tool and pretend it never happened!

Overall what I'm saying is that RimWorld is more about the base and the colony rather than the individual characters. You need more than one person to deal with some threats, plague being one of those threats. That's just the way the game is designed.

[Ilya]

In your typical survival game you have one character and thus the game is designed around realism and fairness with less RNG involved. In RimWorld however, even if you're playing Naked Brutality the AI is programmed to literally throw other colonists your way. Have you ever tried playing without rescuing anyone on a transport pod? I'm asking because within 15 days usually my map is littered with the rotting corpses of space refugees that I've been ignoring because I wanted to continue to solo

Yes, I have. Every time, in fact. I disable all the "free colonists" events in the editor because I hate how I get flooded with free pawns. It feels very artificial, and if I'm immediately going to get given people, then I might as well not play naked brutality and just start with more from the beginning. The only exception is the chased refugee one, because this one happens much more rarely and at least you have to fight for it.

Yes, I know what I'm getting into with all of these rules that I choose to set, but that doesn't mean that I can't wish that the storytellers would be a bit different. I love challenge, and I love losing, but I just hate being destroyed right from the beginning by an event that I could do nothing to avoid and nothing to fix. The plague isn't like the flu at all. The plague is debilitating and completely ruins your ability to even tend to yourself, so even with a really good doctor, I would have probably died. I could open the dev tool and remove it, and maybe I will, but I always feels bad about doing things like that. Continuing to play after cheating makes the rest of the game feel not quite right.

[RicRider]

I get your perspective, I totally do. That's why RimWorld is such a great game, because it's not just a game, it's really a story development environment that lets you not only customise scenarios, but you have an amazing set of development tools that can help you create the story you want to create. Messing about with the developer tools eventually got me into messing about with the XML files and customising my experience how I wanted and it has also helped me get inspired into actually learning how to code things properly.

I see no difference between disabling plague in the scenario editor and removing it as a hediff if it would end your game and you want to continue playing it. If you play RimWorld with mods you will learn to love the developer tools as sometimes mods will break your game literally and the only thing you can do to fix it without starting again is to use the destroy tool to get rid of bugged events. Sometimes mods will also cause traders to loiter around the map in -40C and freeze to death (obviously not intended) so forcing them to leave the map with the Job Giver tool will let you keep playing without taking a massive hit to your reputation and ending any trade opportunities in the future.

In multiplayer games the balance is up to the developers completely (and is probably the reason why most MMOs haven't really succeeded, because it's so taxing on the developers to keep up with what players want). But in single player games the balance is up to you. If you limit yourself by not using the developer tools to do things that you can't do in the scenario editor, yes, you're going to be frustrated when your colony dies. This is just a fact. If you're going to let Loki smash you without fighting back and controlling it the way you want, you're going to feel like you've been squashed by the gods.

Heck, I disable insects in most of my games too because I think they're impossible to deal with until you get some real guns (or have crazy kiting skills like the latest video from Gaming by Gaslight with a bit of luck thrown in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HamnKnGGkkY&t=0s). Speaking of YouTube Let's Plays, I don't think it would be possible without developer tools or setting the scenario you want. You want a story that last for 25+ episodes and entertains thousands of viewers, not a frustrating experience that's probably more suited to a livestream on a Saturday afternoon.

But sometimes the story you want to tell is not the story that's being thrown at you by the Gods of the Random Number Generator so you have to tell the game what you want. (Alternatively you can get the Medieval Times mod and build a Shrine to this bastard and hope that he rewards you with luck!)

The Naked Brutality scenario is largely balanced around the idea of building a colony that survives, not a single pawn that survives. Without the Prepare Carefully Mod for example (or setting pawn skills with the Skill Set developer tool; which is a quicker way of doing the same thing), you're going to take anywhere between 10 minutes to hours before you randomly roll a character that has 3 construction (need for traps), 2 crafting (need for making a short bow), 6 cooking (reduce chance of food poisoning) and at least 6 medical, not to mention all the other things like 'non violent' and 'gourmand' which will literally kill you in the first few days of your colony. Why spend hours rolling randomly when you can just do it quickly and play the game you want?

Last thing about plague, imagine if it was even more realistic and the plague would spread to the other pawns and the animals? This is in no way realistic and is just there to create drama in a colony. 3 out of 10 pawns dying from the plague is obviously not the same as 1 out of 1 pawn dying from the plague. Why put yourself through this frustration? Just disable it and don't feel guilty about it!

[giltirn]

Heck, I disable insects in most of my games too because I think they're impossible to deal with until you get some real guns (or have crazy kiting skills like the latest video from Gaming by Gaslight with a bit of luck thrown in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HamnKnGGkkY&t=0s).

Give em another go in 0.19. The armor changes seem to have made a big difference in melee survivability. I had 2 guys in marine armor and one in plate hold off an insect armada using a door funnel (3 guys behind an open doorway that allows only one insect at a time to engage) equipped only with steel maces with only bruises to show for it.

[RicRider]

OK, you got me. I can't wait to finish work today so I can try building a mountain base in B19. I'm already envisioning hallways with turrets and sandbags, rooms separated by panic rooms and internal trap systems. I'm game!

[zizard]

Some non RNG strategies were found in the unstable, but they were purged extremely quickly. Therefore the intention seems to be that the mode is about RNG. Lesson learned is only say strats if you are ok with not being able to use them again. The upside is that NB can be played with any web browser: https://www.random.org/dice/

[RicRider]

Zizard, your signature. Priceless!

[Zombull]

The power of mercy is in your own hands. It's called Dev Mode.

If you don't feel guilty about asking to have RNG instant death removed from the scenario then you shouldn't feel guilty about using Dev Mode to be your own deus ex machina.

[Kirby23590]

I don't know how i feel but unless you don't wanna cheat what zombull said. but i haven't played that Scenario but wow it looks tough, but mercifully you do have starting research which are electricity and air conditioning and clothes, if they wern't available for Naked Brutality, tThat might be asking too much unless your some experienced or some super veteran rimworld player.

Their is a easier version of Naked Brutality. It's called The Rich Explorer, which i used to be a fan of but still kind of fun to play as,
but it's still based on a dice roll if randy thinks you should get a prize or get punished so randy can get amused from it.

[spidermonk]

It's just 15 in-game days, not a big loss, just start again. Most of my NB runs have no problems going through the early game, and NB early game is the most fun I had with this game. Please don't make it simpler!

[BLACK_FR]

Hi for all people that like Naked Brutality (I also played it before it became custom scenario on max difficulty with disabled "good" events and actually won).
I even made a guide for it (but it's for b18, so it's obsoleted in some places) - https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=41992 . I plan to do same thing for B19 some time later. By the way, do you find that guide useful?

Problem of diseases is the second one that you have to solve after raids. As with all problems you have to prepare for it BEFORE it arrives.
1. Gather herbal medicine beforehand.
2. Get some real meds (some times you have some silver before disease and random visitor have ~4 meds for sell).
3. Train your med skills (get prisoner and start to gain 4k xp in doctoring every day; for that you have to gather even more herbal meds.
4. Make some pemmican to not worry about making food while disease is going.
5. Wooden beds is usually second thing I research after complex clothing. If you are in warm biome it can be first.
6. I research drug table before electricity and first thing after that is penoxycyline. And after that all my pawns are under it effect all the time.
7. If you get that disease before penoxycyline - than you just go 99% time in the bed (get up only to eat because hunger slows immunity gain), using best meds (better meds first because you have better manipulation) and hope for the best.
With all those precautions I still die sometime, but most of the time I can recover. And than I get penoxycyline and that problem is basically solved.