Customized disease

[SekoETC]

Now there are people that might kill or weaken their characters in a way that's mysterious and doesn't look like the character's fault. If you must simulate sickness by starvation or self-damage, even if you say to yourself it's only an ooc action if your character drops food right before feeding time, forgets to gather or pick up food regularly or hits themself, it still feels like wrong.
So I was wondering could there be a customized desease added, other symptoms than the loss of strenght are rp:d, and it's not contagious. You can "order" it to one of your characters, but you cannot cancel it when it stops suiting you. In some cases it might be curable somehow but mostly you're stuck with it for the rest of your life. This could describe migraine, cancer, epilepsia, hemorrhagic disease, gout, you name it. It all depends on the frequency and dangerousness selected.
There are two attributes describing the aggressiveness, the other one is the chance of a fit or a health loss happening and the other one is the range in which health is lost when the character gets a fit.

Examples:
Frequency: 80% Range: 1 to 4. The character loses health almost every day, but if he/she keeps eating healthily there will be no danger. On bad periods the character will be required to take healing food in order to keep the health up.
Frequency: 20% Range: 20 to 50. The character seems mostly healthy. Then one day suddenly there's a terrible fit leaving them all weak. If there's a few terrible days in a row the character might even die all of a sudden.

Maybe separating a big fit from a small one would be good, in order to remove the too big gray area. But that can be done by adding two diseases to the same character, the other one being a frequent but mild one, and the other a spasmodic, critic one.

Note that if a person ends up losing health every day even after the increase because of eating comes around (people heal a bit from eating automatically, remember), the disease will turn fatal unless healing food is consumed. And some might refuse having to relay on their friends to gather them healing food, because after a while it comes taxing and especially in a small community it may slow things up a lot. So there comes a new ethic problem: Do we let our people to die or do we take care of them even if that means losing profit?

[The Industriallist]

See, this is what the game engine is about. You may feel like RPing a pitiful terminally diseased character, or think a character needs a little drama injection by giving them a disease. But cantr isn't about handing you dramatic convenience. It's about dealing with the world you're given.

I consider simulating a (damaging) disease pretty bad RP in any case, especially if the character doesn't start with it, because you're essentially upending the character's life to improve your RPing fun. Besides which, since we do have implemented disease now, it hits the 'immitating game functionality' rule, so there's no excuse. If your character doesn't start sneezing (or whatever else disease can do) on their own, then they aren't sick.

[SekoETC]

So Cantr is a wonderland of no sickness (well exept for that flu added)? They are not going to program in some rare disease just because a random 0.1% of the newspawns might have it. Leaving special cases for players that actually stick around in case of trouble and do not go deleting their characters when the first trouble arrives is a better way.

[Jos Elkink]

We're currently in the process of developing different types of diseases that have different kinds of effects plus that I slightly adjusted the one existing disease so you loose strength less fast. Don't worry - this part of the game will become more interesting soon enough ...

[The Industriallist]

A couple of proposals for symptoms...

-max health reduced to 80

-cannot eat norma (daily)l food (Might have been taken from Seko's post)

-carry 5000g less

-max health decreases by 1-2 points per year
(one point a year would be very significant, but old age will kill you first...2 means you can't possibly live past 70, not that anyone's done that yet anyhow...)

Some of these areprobably too hard to implement.