Those are good things to adapt to. You are constantly adapting to changes in the game and thats the way it should be. Then there are lesser things like getting hungry making you prioritize food, being thirsty making you look for a water source, needing ammo making you mine for lead or being sick making you look for medicine or better quality food. These are also things you react to by preparing . If we applied the dysentery rule to other things the game would be insanely annoying, like getting a bleed effect from looting a cabinet because you 'cut yourself on the counter' or something. Getting a cut from not being careful around zombies though is the right kind of bad.
While having hud bars for everything might feel too gamey and lose immersion we already have it for health and we have bars for hunger and thirst. Its really no different to those. If the game could make me feel hungry or thirsty or sick then we could remove them, but conveying stimulus like that is impossible (and im pretty certain playing a game that makes you feel horrible would be awful)
So status bars are the best compromise we can get. Its also an incredibly simple solution.
I mean we could apply that same argument to everything else on the hud, the exact argument applies to health, i could get cut up and mangled and not have any idea whether im going to survive or die. Sometimes you get tapped on the arm by a zombie and you die instantly (because you were on 1 health) but thats just the way the game works, its how you convey information to players that is incredibly important. You could hide the health bar too but you would need another way to communicate that information. The game might feel even more immersive but i imagine players would feel incredibly frustrated with no information bars to communicate health, hunger or thirst. Sickness wouldnt be any different, in fact we have debuff timers already where we know what percentage of infection we have or how many seconds left of dysentery we have. I dont think a sickness bar that consolidates some of the debuffs would really ruin immersion for anyone. (Also i originally thought of this idea as a replacement to infections which could be interesting to interact with a 'sickness' system)
I see what you are saying but i think you are making too many assumptions here. Perhaps that is my fault for not giving better examples so i will try to communicate as best i can what i mean.
I agree that its a problem that i never get dysentery, but i think making it a core part of the early game where you either go thirsty or get the runs if you are unlucky isnt great. Playing blackjack with the poor food you get at the start is more interesting, try eat as much awful food as you can without getting sick is a lot more fun than rolling a bad roll and facing consequences. Also the reward of not getting dysentery really isnt enough to ever feel like you are getting lucky, its the kind of risk/reward where you only ever feel unlucky since 5% is low enought that you feel like you shouldnt get ill but you do.
Also i suggested making zombie attacks inflict a small amount of sickness on you, this will mean that you cant just eat 4 rotten meat/murky water and be fine, you will be at high risk of getting sick from zombie attacks. I also suggested some mitigating factors early game where you can craft items that reduce it a small amount like goldenrod tea perhaps giving a buff that reduces sickness by a small amount over time (perhaps something like 10% per minute for 1 minute per drink) so you can give yourself sidequests to stay healthy instead of just gunning for the power loot.
This would actually create more decision making since you cant just cure it, you need to manage it till its gone. The way the debuffs interact with the spec could be different too, perhaps after getting to 75% sickness you get dysentery, when you go below your dysentery is cured. Id expect the way debuffs interact with a new system would be revised too, perhaps at 100% instead of getting dysentery you get infection and more sickness after that adds to infection (which could replace the current infection system)
Your mistake is thinking i want things to be easier. The fact that vitamins make you immune and goldenrod is an instant cure go completely against making dysentery a problem at all. The problem is that the sickness is too random to get and too easy to fix. At the moment its just in the realm of annoying where in the first week you get frustrated and get dysentery maybe once or twice from doing nothing wrong. I want things to be risks through the whole game, making later stages have more effective ways of avoiding and managing the problems but still being a conscious thing to mitigate and avoid. After getting the dew collecters its a non-issue, thats binary.
I just want to have better control over those things, im happy to get punished for playing poorly, but im not happy to be punished for being unlucky.
See, i kind of want it to be an issue, just an issue i can manage. Random chance just means if im unlucky im unlucky.
I was thinking that getting to 100 sickness would make you vomit and reduce you to 75%. I didnt realize vomiting was removed tbh, i genuinely want it integrated into the sickness system! Its the exact kind of punishment id expect, even worse is the idea that i play blackjack with my sickness and get to 90% sick, go into a poi, get mobbed by a few zombies that tap me up to 100% and i vomit right there in the middle of a fight. that would be horiffic.
If he is slim enough, that is.
Fun fact - 10 years ago most them had iron bars
