Context Dependent Nightmares

[DoctorBoomstick]

Summary

Content " adds context-dependent nightmares that change based on the player’s profession, reflecting traumatic nightmares gained from the events of the cataclysm. Also reformats existing nightmares by adding line breaks."

Purpose of change

While working on PR #71877, updating profession descriptions to reflect established lore, it often crossed my mind how little a player’s profession plays a role in the game as a whole. It determines your starting equipment and your opening skills, and that’s, essentially, it. In addition, it is often said that our player characters feel somewhat overly desensitised to the, let’s be honest, mind-shatteringly upsetting events that transpired during the Cataclysm, with a collection of shoehorned in guilt penalties for putting down undead children and non-hostile NPCs and little in the way of tangible psychological effects.
While explicitly twisting a player's arm and telling them what their character’s feeling and has been through is likely not the best way to go about things, and the endless power of role play comes in to save the day as always, I felt like there was room for traits and features that Leen into this notion a tad more, while also making a player’s profession effect more things within the game. As such, like any good JSON munky, as soon as the idea crossed my brain, I stopped working on the aforementioned PR, and like a baboon being presented with a banana on a string over a pit, I charged after this.

Describe the solution

I must, firstly, stress that not only is this PR still a proof of concept, but that I have left it as such to gain best-practice advice from those who know better than myself. Fundamentally, this PR adds a new trait to character creation, troubled sleeper, that activates a number of EOCs that check the player's profession upon falling asleep and display different sets of snippets, depending on the player’s profession. As of this PR being opened on draft, current work includes:

• 4 snippets and associated EOC to run should the player be in a profession that wouldn’t have been in a position to experience unique, traumatic events. While a police officer, a soldier, and a doctor would have, by virtue of their jobs, seen different things during the cataclysm that effected them, a used car salesman and a fast food cook had a fair chance of experiencing similar events.
• 2 snippets and related EOC to run should the player, regardless of profession, sleep within the refugee centre.
• 3 snippets and associated EOC to run should the player start their game as an active-duty soldier.
• The capability for a player to prevent their nightmares through taking antidepressant medication, as well as an EOC that prints different text when the character falls asleep on medication or not: sign-posting to the player whether they’ll be effected by nightmares.
• An EOC that prints different messages to the log when the player character enters tiredness, relaying the information that, indeed, the character isn’t jazzed over the idea of falling asleep to a nightmare of their family being reduced to meat paste.
• Adds line breaks to existing nightmare snippets to pad them out from a giant block of text and make them more readable.

What’s left to be done?

• Add EOCs and related snippets to provide nightmares that change depending on if the player’s sleeping within particular locations: one’s dreams should be affected if they’re taking a nap within a Resident Evil-style government black site, some faction locations, or the literal guts of an alien monster.
• Expand the current list of EOCs to cover more professions: police officers, doctors, pilots, relief workers, etc. Some professions will be left out, as I intend to add snippets reflecting their particular profession descriptions in PR Rewrites Lore Inconsistent Profession Descriptions #71877, and, apart from this, because I want this PR to be out sometime before the cataclysm really happens, the great majority of the professions that I want to give snippets too will probably be missed on the first framework implementation.
• Cause the nightmare EOC to affect the player’s heart rate and breathing and to make them break out into a sweat upon waking up. Considering we have the tools to simulate these, if a nightmare tells you that you wake up in a sweat, you darn well should be sweating. Disclaimer: I’m still not 100% sure how to do this, so if a generous sort could point me in the right direction to hook this stuff in, I would take off my hat to them. I don’t have a hat. I would go get a hat and then take it off. This paragraph has become completely random, and I should probably delete it. For sake of history, I will not.
• Get advice on whether my EOC syntax and method are flaming trash or not. This is my first dance with the EOC script, and I feel like I’m stomping on its toes quite a lot with how things are currently set up. I suspect what I’m getting at could be set out a lot neater if I used if statements, but I couldn’t put together how they worked. As such, I opened this on draft while still very early to get feedback on, mainly, whether the EOC functionality could be done better. I do not wish to put in shoddy code that’ll only be a mess for somebody to fix in the future. That would be quite the Doosh Canoe move.
• Write a non-pathetic amount of snippets. My brain has ideas, my keyboard has keys, but the day has 24 hours.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I originally contemplated setting the trait to be PTSD, but, learning from our experience with the schizophrenia trait, I thought it best to avoid name-dropping anything in particular. In addition, considering I’ve never had PTSD and don’t know much reliably about it, I felt like I’d do a poor job at respectfully simulating such a medical condition, and mental health is just one of those places I’m not walking into unless I’m confident that I can do it right. I wouldn’t be opposed to adding some symptoms of PTSD if we had the means to implement them for the sake of making the trait more interesting, but I would need some pointers on what could and should be added.
I considered implementing this not as a pickable trait at character generation but as a set EOC that would run for every character created. I might yet choose that latter course, but I’ve gone for the trait root, at least for now, to still leave the gate open for players who want to role play so that their characters don’t get nightmares. For the record, I think that every character, apart from hyper-particular circumstances, should suffer from trauma of some sort, but I honestly don’t want to poke the people that’d take to the comments and declare their characters to be: “SUPER BAD ASS MANLY EPIC CIGAR SMOKING MEN THAT FLEX ON THE CATACLYSM AND EAT ZOMBIES BECAUSE WE’LL KILL THE BLOB AND WHO DON’T GET NIGHTMARES BECAUSE WE’RE EITHER MANLY EPIC MEN OR SUPER NINJA JAPANESE BATTLE MAIDS OORAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

Testing

Still to be done for the most part, the PR’s in it’s baby stages.

Additional context

[DoctorBoomstick]

@GuardianDll, it’s absolutely silly how long I’ve left this PR on the burner, but life’s been rather busy as of late, and I’ve lost track working on other things. I plan to rework the current snippets, add some more to bring all categories up to a decent number, and perhaps add a couple more categories to more important areas or professions (disclaimer: I have yet to figure out what’s the most important area or profession).
@I-am-Erk, that’s a great suggestion, and it would be nice to be able to save the current snippets if people think they're good. I hesitate to shoehorn them into NPC dialogue because I’ve yet to touch NPCs, which is something I’d like to get around to eventually, but ideas are a dime a dozen. The way I see it, I suspect I could wiggle them in as dream diary logs within e_logs; I think they fit better in there than the very short survivor notes. Otherwise, if I recall rightly, there’s a branch of lab snippets that deal with psychological evaluations and related dreams, so it might be more fun dropping them in there.

[github-actions]

Spell checker encountered unrecognized words in the in-game text added in this pull request. See below for details.

Click to expand

• As the arms of a fresh dream embrace your mind, your expression contorts.\n\nMoss-infested walls enclose a cavernous space floored by steel plates bulging with veins of rust; goosebumps spread across your flesh as cold water drizzles from the roof. A low, thrumming cadence drones in your ears, vibrating through the steel underfoot — the humming of some monstrous, unseen motor at work powering the mechanism that stretches before you. Trundling from an aperture at the room's right and grinding past, a massive conveyor belt groans along; it's rubber tread Layden with a row of neatly placed bodies. As they're born along, you find yourself recognising pallid faces, staring eyes, gaping maws, and bruised flesh forming facsimiles of people you'd encountered during the last days of evacuation: refugees, soldiers, and relief workers.\n\nAs the corpses reach the end of the line and are unceremoniously dumped upon the floor, their limbs contort, cracking noises punctuating the air over the grinding of the belt as they start to flail and wriggle across the steel, worming towards you. Writhing and slithering across one another, they crawl in a loop about you, your stomach churning as the sounds of stretching flesh fill your ears as their necks stretch forth, lifting their heads level with your own. As growing numbers of blood-shot eyes fixate upon you and a forest of extending necks cocoons you, each head jabbers out a singular, unique word: a discordant muddle of phrases that grows more coherent with each body that joins the assembly.\n\n"We are all you escaped; you left us. When you wake up, we"\n\n"We are all dead; you escaped; you left us. When you wake up, we will"\n\n"We are all dead; you escaped; you left us. When you wake up, we will be there."
• Black, gel-like fluid comes up to your waste as you stumble down the refugee's basement stairs and splash into the underground level, amorphous shapes bobbing in the liquid around you. Wandering aimlessly through the space, you wade through the chest-high sludge and approach the bundles, only to find that they're all drowned corpses. At the dream's end, you're surrounded by a wall of bodies floating at eye level, and you realise… the waterline's been rising. It doesn't stop.
• Disturbing events tend to stick to your psyche, and the cataclysm has left you with more than your fair share of psychological trauma. Now, not even slumber can rest you from your fears; nightmares will plague your sleep if you don’t keep them at bay with anti-depressants.
• In your dreams, you find yourself sitting in a stationary, armoured vehicle, staring at an endless sea of zombies that crowd, gnaw, and smash upon the automobile. Every window's obscured by legions of leering faces, with the military craft's windscreen slowly spider-webbing under the crush of bodies and hands. The sound of shattering glass jolts you awake, moments after rotten hands and snapping jaws start stretching through the breached apertures.
• In your dreams, you sit in the centre's front lobby: destitute, hungry, a begger. Days of monotony wined past, the stench of filth claws at your nostrils, the scraps your allotted do nothing to sate your hunger — everyday you're mocked like an animal in a zoo as you plead for food and watch those about you grow fat on plenty.
• In your dreams, you walk down the refugee centre's basement stairs, the knowledge that you've been granted a permanent, safe bunk lightening both heart and step. This relief, however, is short-lived: dispelled as you hear the access stair's door thump shut behind you. This, however, isn't nearly as worrying as the myriad, maddened snarls that echo from the darkness below.
• In your dreams, you wander the refugee centre's halls, alone. The building looks as though the weight of years has born down upon it, the structure's dilapidated, and everywhere is overgrown by a greenish grey coating of mycelium. By the dream's end, you can't count how many human-long bones you've found woven into the mildew-carpeted walls.
• In your dreams, you're sitting within a deserted, military mess hall, the Russell of aluminium foil and smell of food greeting your senses as you find yourself gazing upon an MRE package. The smell's mouth-watering, and with a fork in hand, you go in for a bite. Suddenly, a black tentacle shoots out of the container and grasps the utensil, tugging it back into the package. This is soon followed by your entire body — you're dragged into the fanged void that used to be the MRE.
• In your sleep, you scrabble through the refugee centre, a harsh buzzing in your ears. Where every human is supposed to be, a giant, vaguely anthropoid insect looms, clacking at you with pincers and oozing mandibles. You stagger into the lobby, only to find a man-sized, writhing wasp occupying Smokes' nook and piles of eggs deposited on the benches. Moments before you jolt awake, the wasp bursts through the window.\n\n"We could do with some food," it chitters.
• Still reposed in sleep, a whimper escapes your throat as a dream encroaches upon your mind.\n\nPlumes of mist coil about you as you find yourself staggering through the haze — a flowing wall of silvery grey. Underfoot, splintered shards of asphalt slice at your bare soles, your steps growing more sodden and sticky as each tread peals flesh and blood froths. however, it is nothing to the raw, throbbing agony at your abdomen, the skin of your belly hanging open like a jacket's lapels, pale coils of intestine spilling forth. Between your clenched fists, a stretch of gut hangs from the opening, its end leading into the mist ahead like a guiding thread.\n\nShuffling along, a flicker of recognition whispers at the back of your mind as you hobble between the hulks of recked vehicles that loom in the fog to either side, your guiding line occasionally requiring you to collapse upon hands and knees and crawl under a car. Following the last such obstacle, as you rise, your shredded foot slides from beneath you, sending you collapsing — the gathered bundle of organs you'd managed to stuff back within yourself cascading forth. As your cheeks grow damp, you look up from the mess of splintered roadwork and throbbing guts — up — at the sprawling bulk of a collapsed homestead that rises from the fog before you.\n\nThrough the mist, you can see the pallid coils that compose the structure and the shuffling, anthropomorphic figures wandering within, glistening wetly. As you watch, one of the humanoids wobbles from a sagging aperture and stands, its oblong head (composed of layers of coiled strands) turning to face you. Under your prone body, your intestines pulsate. The facsimile of your form pulses in unison. The copy of your home pulses in unison.\n\nYou scream.
• Surrendering yourself to the arms of sleep, you hope your medication will let you have a good night’s rest.
• You have a dream about being a loaf of stale, plastic-wrapped bread sitting in languid purgatory within a dark cupboard. Instinctively, you know that the food's run out within the refugee centre, and, as you hear footfalls rapidly approaching, you brace yourself. You regret the fact that you have no mouth with which to screen as the door is yanked open and multiple sets of filthy, withered hands descend on you.
• You have a dream about covertly creeping through the evacuation centre, the floors littered with the refugees' sprawled bodies and shadows etching doorways in black. Echoing through the building, you can hear something's heavy, metallic footfalls: prowling, searching, hunting you. You awake in a cold sweat moments after rounding a bend and finding a set of opalescent, camera-like eyes meeting your own from a very, very great height.
• You have a dream about franticly digging long trench lines before the refugee centre, elbow to elbow with the building's denizens, as increasing waves of the dead funnel down the access road. The zombies crash upon your makeshift battlements as though it's the First World War, and bayonets, bullets, and your own shovel do little to stop the onslaught.
• You have a dream about playing with a set of toy soldiers until, suddenly, you find them slipping from your grasp and swarming about your feet. Peering nearer, you realise that they're each a miniature member of your former unit — their screams reaching you as squads of them are splattered below. Wakefulness crashes upon you when you glance at yourself, only to find an oozing mass writhing before your eyes.
• You open your eyes and find yourself within one of the refugee centre's backrooms — to your surprise, there's a wedding in swing. Pushing through the crowd, you attempt to gain a look at the newlyweds. You startle awake as soon as you find two decaying, demonically twisted countenances staring back at you, their mutated tongues fused together and teeth gnashing at one another's bloody skulls.
• You open your eyes, and your stomach lurches as you're sent flailing through the pitching cabin of a helicopter, warning Clackson's blaring as a roulette wheel of sky, clouds, and oily water windmills past the windows. Moments before the aircraft crashes into the lazily undulating sea, you see a giant, inky-black shadow darkening the water's surface. A shriek of metal, an explosion of glass, and the cold sting of water rip you back to wakefulness.
• Your arms tighten about your form as you sleep — the past returning to haunt you.\n\nAs the dreamscape assumes materiality, your ears and nerves alike are put under duress as a high-pitched, plaintive wailing bawls through your mind, your knuckles turning white as you grip the folding armrests of the bucket seat you find yourself within. Staring ahead yields the dishevelled vista of a bus's interior, the stench of Greece, and body odour clawing at your nostrils. Bedraggled, hunched, with faces creased by fear, people huddle within every seat abord, each perfectly silent and, to a passenger, staring ahead at the vehicle's tinted windscreen. As the infantile crying continues unabated, you glance out of your own window.\n\nYou vainly try to convince yourself that the fleshy, metre-tall thing your eyes land upon beyond the glass, half stalking and half slithering towards the bus, couldn't have once been human. Nothing with an internal skeleton should be able to wriggle its entire head in such a manner or slouch across the ground as though walking on rubberized legs.\n\nRegardless, as the aberrant monstrosity draws nearer, it becomes evident that the creature's march towards the transport isn't guided by its eyes: berried within floppy slits exuding a green mucus. Rather, the way its squid-like head twists and turns as it walks, pauses, and then reassumes its stride could only signal the alure of sound — the wailing. Yet, your attention's suddenly diverted by the plastic creek of the bus's aisleway as, turning, you find a soldier stomping past, making a B-line aft, towards the infant's increasingly animal-like screams.\n\nEveryone aboard mutely cowers as the military man storms down the passage. The hard look on his face and the glint of a drawn bayonet don't escape your notice before you follow your compatriots' example.\n\nA few, terrible seconds later, your dream lapses into wakefulness: cut, as though by a blade through tender flesh.
• Your eyes fly open as the sounds of battle crash across your ears — screams, gunfire — the centre's under attack, though by who or what, you don't know. Racing through the corridors, all you find are wound-riddled bodies, gouts of blood flowing like rivers, and bullet holes chewing through the walls. You round a bend, and suddenly:\n\n"BLAM"\n\nYou startle awake, your hands flying to your face. It takes you moments to assure yourself that your skull's free of an extra hole.

This alert is automatically generated. You can simply disregard if this is inaccurate, or (optionally) you can also add the new words to tools/spell_checker/dictionary.txt so they will not trigger an alert next time.

Hints for adding a new word to the dictionary

• If the word is normally in all lowercase, such as the noun word or the verb does, add it in its lower-case form; if the word is a proper noun, such as the surname George, add it in its initial-caps form; if the word is an acronym or has special letter case, such as the acronym CDDA or the unit mW, add it by preserving the case of all the letters. A word in the dictionary will also match its initial-caps form (if the word is in all lowercase) and all-uppercase form, so a word should be added to the dictionary in its normal letter case even if used in a different letter case in a sentence.
• For a word to be added to the dictionary, it should either be a real, properly-spelled modern American English word, a foreign loan word (including romanized foreign names), or a foreign or made-up word that is used consistently and commonly enough in the game. Intentional misspelling (including eye dialect) of a word should not be added unless it has become a common terminology in the game, because while someone may have a legitimate use for it, another person may spell it that way accidentally.

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions. Please do not bump or comment on this issue unless you are actively working on it. Stale issues, and stale issues that are closed are still considered.

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions. Please do not bump or comment on this issue unless you are actively working on it. Stale issues, and stale issues that are closed are still considered.

[DukePaulAtreid3s]

Ooooooo; is this still being worked on?

[Night-Pryanik]

Closing as stale. If you wish to continue working on this, ping me to reopen.