What about a series, troops, spells, or traits that is around mental health?

You should still be excited about your idea. Try not to let a bunch of strangers take the winds from out your sails — especially when they’re not trying to attack you or your ideas.

For the most part what I’ve seen on this topic are people that agree with you in spirit but not in practice. And that should be okay — not every productive conversation will be easy, or without conflict. If you came to this discussion board hoping for your ideas to be met with nothing but applause then you didn’t really come for discussion, which is the purpose of these forums in the first place.

Anyway, good luck to you, and to your guild (I’d suggest you make a recruitment thread with the appropriate platform tag if you want to attract members — the call will probably go unnoticed buried within these posts).

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Individual game mechanics ideas are very difficult to balance. “Flavorful” moves don’t aways translate to good gameplay. There’s never a mechanism that’s universally liked. Don’t let that some people ran pretty hard with your example knock you down.

However, I think that’s a good reason why introducing troops to raise awareness or what-have-you isn’t the best of ideas. Not everyone’s struggle is the same, and while some people would be excited to see their issues represented by a troop, others could be deeply hurt. It would take a lot of effort and consultation to do it in a sensitive way, which translates to “it’d cost a lot of extra time and money for the devs.”

But it might be nice to see the game periodically choose worthy causes and raise awareness via links to resources and donating some of sale proceeds to relevant charities. That’d be less thorny and it’s harder to make people angry with it.

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Wow. I’m confused. I think I like my games without the mental health aspect. I deal with that daily already. I can’t believe you got mad. Do you not know how the internet works? :joy:

Put 2 and 2 together and have a little empathy.

OP hinted at having some mental health struggles, and fixated on ADHD. One thing people misunderstand about ADHD is that, like autism, it has a spectrum and numerous symptoms. It’s much more complex than “lol I can’t finish a task”. It’s more like “an entire universe of symptoms where the brain’s task → reward system malfunctions and produces unhealthy behavior”.

One common aspect of even mild ADHD is rejection sensitivity. People with this trait respond much more negatively than “normal” when their ideas or their personality is rejected. The tons of internet memes about being nervous when a friend hasn’t texted back in an hour? That’s a form of rejection sensitivity. It gets worse though, people suffering from this often set goals they can’t meet to “push themselves”, then feel worse because they didn’t meet the goals, and repeat the cycle. The worst forms are “rejection sensitive dysphoria”, where the emotional response to rejection is so powerful it leads to self-harm. (“Dysphoria” is also the word used to describe the feelings transgendered people feel when their psyche rejects their body’s projected gender (I won’t say “biological” here because any qualified biologist can tell you that ‘genetic gender’ is a really bogus concept with 10 pages of footnotes for every sentence.) Untreated dysphoria is more likely to result in death than many cancers.)

With treatment, and often with therapy, a person can learn to recognize the cycles that feed it and handle rejection more healthily. But it’s also kind of sad there are people out there who have to struggle harder just to live a normal life. That’s why I strongly supported the “awareness” aspect. Your response to a person broadcasting “I have a mental illness” is still “lol act like a normal person u baby”. Would you say it to a person with cerebral palsy? What about an amputee?

That’s a big problem we have. We only barely accept physical disability as an understandable handicap. We treat mental disabilities like they don’t exist. That’s what OP wants to see GoW help try to change.

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Not sure if you talking to me. But I have plenty of empathy. I still don’t want mental health awareness brought into this game though. And I don’t care about the fact of mental health issues when it comes to the Internet. If you can’t handle it here. Then this might not be the best place to be. Obviously the people are not stupid. So do the smart thing and tread lightly on the internet. It’s not my fault my rebuttal was unsatisfactory for some.