A Redditor just built something that will mess with your head! It’s called the Family Hardship Scale, and it scores how hard any situation hits a family, from 0 (not a hardship at all) to 10 (losing your entire family). The creator, Reddit user u/guille2777, posted it on r/PromptEngineering, and it’s already on version 25.
I ran a few family dramas through it myself, real ones and some I made up, and a handful of the scores genuinely stopped me for a second. That’s the real test of a tool like this. Not whether the math checks out on paper, but whether the number it spits back matches the gut feeling you already had sitting in your chest. A few times it did. A few times it didn’t, and that gap is where this thing gets interesting.
🎯 Here’s the idea
Most hardship scales just ask “how bad was the event.” This one goes deeper. It also scores the months of not knowing how something will end, the shame when the person who caused the damage is your own family member, and the trauma of getting hurt by someone outside the family. Three layers stacked into one number.
The original poster built the whole thing in a single day, then patched it every time a test case broke the logic. Two of those fixes came straight from Reddit commenters who caught something the scale got wrong. That’s basically crowdsourced QA happening in real time, in the comments of a subreddit, for free. Most people would call that a weakness. I’d call it the fastest feedback loop you’re going to find for something this subjective.
A few results from the post show how it actually plays out:
- A house fire where everyone’s safe: 3.0
- Parents divorcing after 25 years together: 4.3
- A kid surviving cancer after a year of treatment: 7.9
- A parent dying suddenly: 9.5
- A brother getting a life sentence for murder: 9.73
That last pair is the one that stops people. A sudden parent death scores lower than a sibling’s murder conviction. Here’s why that’s not a bug.
📉 The order isn’t about gut feeling, it’s about math. A parent dying is grief. Clean, brutal, but it has an end point. A brother convicted of murder stacks guilt by association, years of court dates, and a mark on the family name that never fully lifts. The scale adds those layers up instead of just asking “which one hurts more to hear.” Run the numbers yourself and you’ll notice the pattern holds across every example in the thread: open-ended situations with no clear finish line consistently out-score single, contained tragedies, even when the single tragedy sounds worse on its face.
😶 It scores what you can’t see on the surface. Pain isn’t only the headline event. The scale tracks the slow burn too: the year of not knowing if a diagnosis will go well, the shame of cleaning up after a relative’s choices, the fact that getting hurt by someone else carries a different weight than an accident does. That’s why a house fire with zero injuries still lands at 3.0 instead of 0. Nobody got hurt, nobody died, but there’s still the smell of smoke in every room, the insurance calls, the nights in a hotel. The scale counts that residue instead of pretending a near-miss is a non-event.
🛠️ It’s basically open source at this point. Version 25 after one day means this Redditor is treating every comment like a bug report. Drop a scenario in the thread, and if the score looks wrong, the fix lands in the next version, with credit to whoever caught it. That’s a different way to build something like this. Most people would’ve shipped version 1 and called it done. This one’s still getting stress-tested by strangers, which honestly makes it more trustworthy, not less.
🚀 Steal the prompt for your own situation
Want to run your own scenario through it? Here’s the move:
- Grab the full prompt from the original post.
- Paste it into ChatGPT or Claude.
- Describe any situation, real or invented, in plain language.
- Read the score and the reasoning behind it.
That’s it. No sign-up, no install, just a prompt and whatever model you’ve already got open. You can run it on your own family, a friend’s situation, or even a scenario from a book or a movie just to see where the scale lands. It’s a quick way to stress-test your own instincts against a system that’s actually trying to account for the layers you might be skipping over in the moment.
If you think a score is off, say so. The creator is actively asking for the scenarios that break it, and fixes get credited in the next version. Go find the thread, drop your weirdest family scenario, and see what number comes back!
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How does the scale handle non-traditional families or unusual setups?
Good catch. Right now it works best with traditional family structures, but that’s not how real families work, blended families, older parents with young kids, single parents everywhere. Use it as a framework and adjust for your actual situation. The more edge cases people test it with, the better the next version gets.
Q: Can the same event really score the same for everyone? Doesn’t impact depend on the person?
Yeah, it does. A job loss might be a 2 for one family and a 6 for another depending on savings, support, and resilience. This scale shows general hardship patterns, but your specific impact will always be unique. Think of it as a reference point, not a diagnosis.
Q: Why does a sibling getting life for murder score higher than a parent dying?
Because it’s not just the loss, it’s everything that comes after. A parent’s death is devastating but it’s “clean” grief families can process together. A sibling’s crime means years of explaining, wondering if you missed something, and carrying that weight on your family name. The scale factors in all that ongoing burden.
Q: What if I think a score is wrong?
Tell the creator. It’s already on version 25 from user feedback. Drop the scenario in the comments and if you’re right, it gets fixed in the next version. You get credit, too.
I built a scale that rates how hard any event hits a family. It says your brother getting life for murder is worse than a parent dying. Drop a situation and I’ll score it.
by u/guille2777 in PromptEngineering