Survival mechanisms... concepts?

[Pussycat669]

[chance.thirteen]

Many cyberpunk games had adding machinery to your body reducing some element, humanity, empathy, stability.

Vampire and Nightlife both had similar moral degeneration for acting inhuman.

Unknown Armies had several Madness Meters, where you not only lost various evocative features of your personality, while at the same time becoming hardened to the source of the trauma. This is my favorite version of a degeneration from any game, by splitting up various traits into their own meters, you really got a choice of types of loss, with more specific triggers and results for your characters. At one point I refitted it for the cyberpunk elements.

If you'd like to know more about any of these systems, let me know.

One thing that Call of Cthulhu did was exchanged some "benefit" for the loss. I like the idea of degeneration to a degree, it fit with some theories around the pulp era that came from the Victorian era, but also like transformation, replacing one thing with another.

[AJ_Flowers]

In the standard cRPG the character gets stronger the more I play. In your game it seems like no matter what, I get weaker the more I play.  It's bold, it's daring, but, as a gamer, what's my motivation to continue playing?  Do stats go up as well, on a different axis?

The mechanic as you describe reminds me of the hunger mechanic in NetHack or other Roguelike games.  I enjoy Mystery Dungeon Shiren. In this game, you get hungrier as you take action turns, and certain equipment can also make you more or less hungry as you equip it.  If you eat food, you keep your hunger meter up, but if it drops to zero, you can lose 'strength' or HP, and will eventually die.

[flossy]

Just remembered that in Exalted, the more Essence you had, the more chance of you hitting your limit and breaking you had.

Basically you have an Essence score, the higher it was the more in tune with creation you are. In game play you would get points of limit which would cause you to 'break' if the limit points you had plus your essence points equaled ten.

[Pussycat669]