Reworking Motives (I’ve got the Joy edition)

[Sundance]

I massively disagree with motives that once past a certain threshold require more extreme (medical) fixes. I'm fine with certain treatments being able to "jumpstart" someone out of an ailment, but if they're the only way to get rid of the ailment then things are going to get somewhat ugly real quick when none of the treatments prescribed are easily available outside of medbay.

Being unable to eat food/drink water to fix hunger/dehydration is very counter intuitive. While it might be "real" in some cases, never let reality get in the way of gameplay. If I have a status effect called "Starving", I'm going to be wondering why I can't fix it with food.

The intent was to effectively add a "crit" status to motives, in that they required a separate medicine other than what was based off the source to cure the ailment.  Nutrients, Saline and Halo are the epis of the motives world so to speak, it wasn't much to do with reality but rather uniformity with current design.

In my defense, there is also cures outside of medbay, with DD Vitamins and Isotonic Drink and botany alternatives.

That said, I agree that it appears counter intuitive, and could do with a tweak (starting with calling starving -> malnourished). I'mma think on that.

Stress as described is objectively lethal - An explosion that takes off one of your limbs and puts you into crit could tack on 20 stress with no real warning, and then slipping in your own blood adds more on top of that (for slipping, and also for now dirtying your clothes). Once you're in crit you're taking oxy damage with would now have a chance of applying cardiac arrest.

I do not think that any of these should have "death" as a consequence. Big negative debuffs? Sure. Just take death off the table.

Actually, the problem with Stress as a concept right now is that there isn't enough stress things to make people actually reach the 80 mark, or I'm being to lenient on the grading. While stress isn't fixed as easy as eating a burger, there's lots of outlets for decreasing stress. 

We'll take your example. Let's say you're at currently 40 stress. How you got to that, idk, you've been in some real shady shit. Explosion. Results: 1 lost limb, 1 cardiac arrest, 1 slippage, 3-4 dirty clothes items. 
Added, that's +5 +10 +2 +16 + 40 = 73 stress. So even with a stressful start, you still come out teetering on the edge, but ok. 

But again, I agree with your final sentiment that adding death as the final consequence may be a bit too heavy handed and could be dialed back a notch. I did not like the random death that occured in the past and I can see why adding a much slower ramping death isn't much better.