Buff food vs Food for Survival -- (Dev) Replied

Carrot.. on a stick. There should be something called "starving" as well as thirst and I'd sure like to see fatigue. An average person eats 3 times a day(so they say). It should be based on online hour, not global timeline. There should be a small buff, like we have. Certain fruits have certain vitamins and so on. So players should really focus on quality food and type of food.

-Desert could give extra fatigue for 2 hours or less.
-Soup can effect thirst as well.
-Pastry should keep you fed longer but give too little buff.
-Meat should may give more health.
-Salad could give extra mana.

Ofc. this is all general simple and quick ideas. Cooking skill may effect the buff quality (such as Cooking 25 out of 100, meat food gives %5 health but master chef's meat food gives %20 or so). And there should be effects of too much eating. Too much eating without getting hungry makes you fat in weight(preferably with visuak effect, big fat belly), you could be out of shape. Too much eat in one go may make you sick and you can throw up and get a debuff "Nousea" for 10 minutes which gives.. I don't know something bad like minus %5 to everything?

"Hungry" debuff should rise up slowly in 12 hours. Starts 2 hours after your buff from the last meal ends. And slowly works it way up to %50. After that you.. Simply die I suppose?

Is this a bad system? Surely someone can smooth this up better me

 

In addition to food, there should be a hydration gauge that empties over time. Unlike lack of food, dehydration should apply severe debuffs that rapidly escalate to player death. Foods rich in water like fruits, and drinks should help refill the gauge.

Travelling through desert in the daytime will rapidly drain it. Transiting hexes with a water source will keep the gauge from falling, and refill it over time.

This opens a multiple different approaches to gameplay. Areas of the world will be off limits due to environmental effects. The ability (skill) to subsist on less water/sustenance will allow deeper penetration into the wilderness, as will strategic travel during cooler hours.

Folk will have to balance themselves when going dungeon delving. Enterprising and resourceful merchants might start making water/food runs in environmentally hostile areas to support adventurers and travellers alike.

Watering holes will naturally become areas of high player traffic, and impromptu trade hubs may spring up in wild areas where folk can seek refuge.

 

What I like is that food and water are livelihoods. Have a banana in the bag that gives +2% to the chances of a successful lockpicking, THAT doesn't make me dream. It's about realism, for sure, and it's also a question of logic : Shroud of the avatar is a RPG game. I've read that developpers are not interested in a game where all is statistic matters. Lack of food having negative effects on the skills, why not? But more importantly, the lack of food must lead to death.

With Ultima 7, when my character was hungry, I was almost hungry with him. When I was seeing all the food brought by the NPC on their plate, it made my stomach rumbling. I did not even mention the fact that it was fun to choose the food I gave to the avatar and his companions. It may sound silly, but RPG is that : forcing people to be free to face the need.

Finally, if the food and the drinks are necessary for life, they will become an important element in the economy of the game and not just another trash in the bag.

 

Nice to hear hunger/thirst mentioned in the hangout and I am still hoping this gets in. Would love to hunger or thirst affect our character by applying "debuffing" like Owain mentioned. Although I think that you should be able to die, I would not mind if this was non-lethal with heavy penalties. It should be easy to get/make food although some areas this would be easier than others.

 

@Umbrae,

Yea, its cool that they're considering it. Its something very high on my wishlist, as most reading the forums know

And yea, I'd like to see the debuffs/penalties continued to grow over time of not eating you, to the point of debilitating you, even if they don't kill you. Dying then would then be an extra possibility.

Either way, it wouldn't be as hardcore as Akalabeth, because it could take a long time for you to get to that stage. In Akalabeth you instantly died when you ran out of food.

 

I really like the debuff idea that Owain mentioned (other people seem to like it as well)
You could even do something similar for sleeping.

I think as long as the debuffs are only annoying and not crippling or fatal.

One thing you could do that wouldnt punish combat too much but would still be a pain in the ass... (maybe too much so) A movement speed penalty.

Nothing will get people eating drinking and sleeping like a movement speed debuff

 

If I had to choose from carrot or stick.
I'd choose stick.

Don't know much about theses systems.
I did a search on google and found this article.
http://nightmaremode.net/2012/12/eating-in-a-game-should-mean-more-than-just-food-23752/

One thing that stood out was this.
<i>Fantasy RPGs could learn a lot from survival games with creative recipes. Dead Rising 2 has a few bizarre drink combinations, where drinking onion milk makes zombies avoid you. Maybe a fantasy world could have similar strange combinations.</i>

 

In WoW, you you used to have to feed your pets or the wouldn't like you and perform badly. This was basically the stick. But right after you gave it some food it really liked, it would have an extra "happiness" buff for a short amount of time. (The whole system was strapped because people hated having a stick at all.)

I bring it up because I'm still concerned that if there is no carrot people will always seek out the cheapest, lightest, least likely to spoil food and never go to the high end muffin shop. And if they don't, no one will become a baking expert. And if no one does this, there will be no reason to sent adventurers off to far corners of the map to steal dragon eggs.

A lot of games have "rested xp" when you log out in town and haven't played for a while, you progress a little faster for a few hours. I don't see xp grind in this game, but I generally like the idea of good things happening to people who've eaten a variety of higher end food. Some bonus to happiness / well fed that either makes them more likable, improves reputation / karma rewards, makes hp or mana regen faster...something that encourages people to seek out better and more diverse food that makes cooking a viable profession.

 

From oldschool EQ: milk and muffins!

+1 to PrimeRib's observations

 

Also we could find recipes on quests or just out hunting.
The recipe would require you to have so many skill points in cooking to use.
That food could give you a buff or effect the creatures in different ways.
Maybe instead of killing the wolves you could give the NPC some food that will drives the wolves off because they hate the smell.

 

Food and drink being required adds to the game and makes farms, inns and taverns, farming and cooking skills, as well as all the needed supplies for the inns, farms, and skills to be in constant demand. I vote for stick.

I remember playing "Dungeon MAster" exploring a dungeon with a party of four....part of the game was keeping food and drink in your possession, as deeper down there was a lack of water, and sometines food. It made eating or drinking an urgent need. No need to go TOO far with it, but if you neither eat nor drink for a long period, you should have a debuff. Once you are full, neutral. Certain food and drink could provide a buff.

 

I've come to terms with the fact that having to eat food all the time gets annoying, even though I like it. Hilariously I used to love it when U7 came out, and was more annoyed by it when I played U7 last month. I still don't favor carrot over stick though, so I'd like a happy medium, like you'd have a food bar that drained as natural healing took place, and natural healing would halt or crawl when your satiety ran out. It'd be enough to make you carry food around and actually eat it, but not so much that lack of food becomes an emergency situation. I just skimmed the thread, so I don't know what other people suggested, but I think this is a good compromise so I would back similar suggestions.

 

@PrimeRib -

In NWN some modules had a Hunger/Thirst/Exhaustion counters. Clean water reduced your thirst count more than dirty water and some water had a chance to poison you or hit your exhaustion counter. Food also had a range of quality where carrots reduced your hunger less than mutton, and crafted food was the best and gave temp buffs. Food also spoiled at different rates which made having player-made only rations valuable.

Exhaustion was nice too. This was made better by resting or walking and degraded when running (more so in armor). Once completely exhausted your character could not run and would stop to catch their breath every so often.

These systems worked very well and created the need for crafted food and lead to great RP where creating camp was important.

 

@Umbrae

Exhaustion is an interesting idea, with Heavy armor having some type of penalty to movement or running endurance.

It would be pretty cool to have poisoned/rotten food. Maybe you drank some nasty stagnant swamp water? Maybe it "cures" your thirst temporarily, but gives you a DoT or something.

Poison Bread is also a must

Maybe doing the "(H)ole up and camp" requires food/drink/wood/bedroll? Or maybe you gain more health back with better food and water?

 

I vote for the Carrot

The Stick approach is more realistic and fun from an RP point of view but as both Urganite and PrimeRib point out, after the initial "Oh cool you have to eat just like real life!" wears off it just becomes a cumbersome system which ends up annoying players. Stick approaches with food run the risk of being as exciting as having to watch your character sleep for 20 minutes after every 40 minutes of play (equivalent of 8 hours of sleep and 16 hours of awake time), needing sleep is realistic but having to watch your character do it over and over is boring. Food and eating is one of those places where going for full realism seems like a good idea but probably isn't from a design point of view.

I don't know if it fits here but I did enjoy like the cooking &amp; food system in LoTRO, Fortifying food increases your resistances and Trail food that gives you stat like buffs (plus it has multiple kinds of wine / ale / pipe-weed for RP flavor). It had things that were useful for everyone, punished no one for avoiding it, and I made a fair bit of gold selling my cooks food as a result.

I don't see any issue with eating player crafted meals allowing natural health regeneration to work at an accelerated rate, as long as not eating never brings regeneration to 0 or causes harm to the player.

 

Dang... you folks are hardcore. Stick. Stick. Stick.

I personally think you can get all the crafting and RP benefits from a buff based system without the eventual annoyance that comes with a survival system. It something we can debate as nothing is set in stone. We might be able to play test basics of both system in alpha/beta since the differences in implementation are pretty light.

 

Would love to test that in the Alpha/Beta!

Its not so much about the stick its about the RP of preparing for a task. It can make things feel more epic when you have to check your supplies. Exhaustion, Starving and Thirst add another level of strategy and preparedness to the game. Food and water can be easy to find most of the time with deer, rabbit, streams, etc. Dessert travel becomes something to be prepared for and respected.

Some of my best moments in NWN were failures like getting lost in the dessert without food or water.

 

I think you can derive some role-playing benefits from food for buff only, I just think it ends up making it role-playing-optional rather than role-playing-mandatory.

Often the path you see with games these days is the developers start to take out things that stand in the way of instant gratification. Wish you could travel between cities in an instant? Fine, fast travel. Wish you didn't have to eat? Fine, food for buffs. Wish you could heal in the middle of battle? Fine, inventory pauses the game, or heal with a hotkey. Wish you had more powerful items? Fine, wolves carry magic weapons. Wish you could have a lot of money? Fine, make crafting really profitable.

Its rational to want to reduce tedium, I just think modern games have gone to far.

@Umbrae, remember the hunting/rationing in Oregon trail?

 

Debuffs ONLY and food is auto consumed if available. Having buffs from food is just ridiculous because you're either saying one of two things. People can eat unlimited amounts of food or people will be forced to wait before a sanctioned duel because "I've got to get hungry bro."

 

I wish I saw this earlier. +1 to the stick crowd.

Debuff: Yes
Auto-consume: Yes
One other idea I've mentioned elsewhere: Hunger accumulates much quicker while traveling, making it mainly an issue with travel. That way, the only time you're really thinking about food is when you're going on a journey, and you need to pack for it. This way, people have more reason to visit small towns and villages on their way to their destination, to "restock". It also makes journeying feel more like an undertaking - your resources get worn down, and when you finally make it back to civilization, you feel more "refreshed" after having refilled your food bag.

It shouldn't be tedious - you just quickly run to the shop and grab food and place it in the food bag or food slot or whatever, but then it's a nice new dimension to concern yourself with while traveling.

Crafters could have the advantage of making light, highly nutritious food, which would be highly valued for long journeys since you would be able to pack more "food points" per weight unit. This helps the economy and crafters.

I've talked about some of these ideas in more depth in other topics:
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?topic=hunger
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?topic=eatingsleepingweatheretc-stats