RimWorld

RimWorld

Psychology
Lord Quinton Jan 25, 2019 @ 1:02am
anxiety and ptsd
while i enjoy the added complexity of having long lasting impacts and managing peoples mental status, I find the rate at which people get PTSD and contract anxiety from it to be way to damn high.

my current colony has 7 of its 19 people with anxiety related issues. During the time i've been running it my pawns have experienced:

Mother accidentally shot and killed her daughter, in the same fight her son was murdered by a warg in front of her and partially eaten, no ptsd.

father atempted to calm down a son who had a mental break, son went berserk and while defending himself the father killed his son, no ptsd.

Pawn took a mortar round to the face, blowing off both arms and one leg. Also lost both eyes and an ear, as well as massive disfiguring scars all over his body, no ptsd.

Pawn worked 8 days in a row to build colony structures, only sleeping when he collapsed, spent around 5 of those days with a mood rating of 0 before finally breaking, no ptsd.

Pawn had a mood debuff because he watched 4 of his familyt members die in the space of a month, they also count as dead allies, and dead colonists, all in all, he had around a -50 mood penalty and was under serious chance of breaking at any time for over a month, no ptsd.

Pawn spent over a week hauling rotting corpses from one battle site to a dump pile, and then spent several days just burning them, no ptsd.

Now, let me describe how my pawns have gotten anxiety from traumatic stress:

Pawn was in the rain (as a pluviophile) and got the soaking wet debuff, this pushed his mood just below the minor breaking point, he immediately broke, became anti-social for about 12 hours and got permanent anxiety as a result.

Pawn slept all night, during the night became ravenously hungry, when she woke up, her mood was under the minor break limit, she broke, hid in her room, and got anxiety as a result.

Pawn had a scratch scar of 1%, when his mood went under the minor break point he broke and began cleaning nonstop, and developed anxiety.

Pawn was recreation starved, walked into the rec room which contained almost every form of recreation possible in the game, annnnnddd broke, began pigging out on food, got anxiety.

The pawns in my colony have been in nightmare scenarios, they've slaughtered hundreds of raiders, fought alien monsters hand to hand, watched their loved ones get obliterated in front of them, and been perfectly fine with it. Then they get slightly irritated and fall to pieces, does this seem♥♥♥♥♥backwards to anyone else?

Developing PTSD should really only happen for major, serious, or extreme breaks, and only if the cause is an actual serious issue. If you have a mental break because you didnt get to the pool table in time, you don't develop ptsd from that.
Last edited by Lord Quinton; Jan 25, 2019 @ 1:02am
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Showing 1-2 of 2 comments
rpayne88 Dec 27, 2019 @ 2:09pm 
100% agree.

This is almost an insult to people who have PTSD in real life.
i2ID Jan 4, 2020 @ 2:34pm 
there are some additions you might like to use with psychology mod that represent some of these examples a bit better:
pawns can change
dubs break mod
bad people
grim reality.

not to replace psychology but they suppliment it quite well
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