Tartarus Sorceror
Posts: 1698
Joined: Saturday, 18th June 2016, 13:57
Tuesday, 20th December 2016, 13:00
Musings about food
Food.
Such a little word.
Such a catalysing subject.
Anyway, I have never been in the "remove food!" school, simply because there are a few functions that food has and are very hard to emulate in other ways. There are cases in which food is relevant, and adds to the game.
These are:
- spell hunger
- rod hunger
- hungry ghosts
- trolls
- ghouls
- vampires
- spriggans
Other situations are less important. The idea that food is needed to push people downwards isn't that good - there already are dangerous out of depth monsters whose spawn rate increases the long you remain on that floor, and these simply could not yield any XP, or drop items, or generate gold if you are with Gozag (or do they already work that way?). You could even have a signal like "the dungeon is getting restless from your waiting", and have the OOD monsters signalled somehow as e.g. "spectral", to justify the lack of drops.
So I can't but think:
- remove passive hunger (except for trolls and ghouls and possibly vampires)
- remove hunger caused by berserking (limited by exhaustion), melee fighting (it just doesn't matter), wielding a vampiric weapon (just make it make you swoon for a couple of turns instead), breath and spit (already limited by breath), blink and invisibility (already limited by contamination and glow), starting flight (it doesn't matter).
- I don't know enough about damnation and channelling to judge about these two.
- divine abilities have a better limit in piety than in food.
- make corpses inedible to most races.
- keep the limitations due to hunger level (no berserking if very hungry, no spells if starving, and so on).
- this is something I haven't fully thought of, but removal of death by hunger could be a good thing. It never happens anyway, and fainting status already has enough penalties.
This leaves the few cases I said earlier. Let's take a look at them.
- Spell and rod hunger mean that you need to make long term calculations. Keep them. It's a way to stop you from spamming high level spells like there's no tomorrow, and, if you get starving because of the spells you cast, it forces you to stop for a moment and eat something.
- Hungry ghosts are interesting as they trigger the hunger level limitations (stopping you from berserking etc). However, they should come in two variants: the normal, boring hunger ghost, as a teaching instrument for new players, and the greater hungry ghost, with a hunger-inducing passive radius, for the later dungeon.
- Spriggans could stay the way they are, just without passive hunger. It is a small (and unneeded) step up in power, but they already have a very slow metabolism. It can be countered by making bread appear less often.
- Trolls could maintain their passive hunger, and be one of the two races still allowed to eat corpses.
- Ghouls have eating meat as their shtick (curing rot and HP). But do they need passive hunger? I don't think so. They already have stat loss to worry about and force them in that direction.
- Vampires just need a rework, or at least the ability to vomit blood at will to decrease their nutrition level. (besides, as a dumb remark, vampires are supposed to drink the blood of living. What's the deal with corpses?)
Finally, one more proposal:
- allow to directly eat from corpses (before butchering), with one button stroke if possible. I always use 5 or o to eat because it's faster. Retain butchering for the advantage of ghouls.
Such a little word.
Such a catalysing subject.
Anyway, I have never been in the "remove food!" school, simply because there are a few functions that food has and are very hard to emulate in other ways. There are cases in which food is relevant, and adds to the game.
These are:
- spell hunger
- rod hunger
- hungry ghosts
- trolls
- ghouls
- vampires
- spriggans
Other situations are less important. The idea that food is needed to push people downwards isn't that good - there already are dangerous out of depth monsters whose spawn rate increases the long you remain on that floor, and these simply could not yield any XP, or drop items, or generate gold if you are with Gozag (or do they already work that way?). You could even have a signal like "the dungeon is getting restless from your waiting", and have the OOD monsters signalled somehow as e.g. "spectral", to justify the lack of drops.
So I can't but think:
- remove passive hunger (except for trolls and ghouls and possibly vampires)
- remove hunger caused by berserking (limited by exhaustion), melee fighting (it just doesn't matter), wielding a vampiric weapon (just make it make you swoon for a couple of turns instead), breath and spit (already limited by breath), blink and invisibility (already limited by contamination and glow), starting flight (it doesn't matter).
- I don't know enough about damnation and channelling to judge about these two.
- divine abilities have a better limit in piety than in food.
- make corpses inedible to most races.
- keep the limitations due to hunger level (no berserking if very hungry, no spells if starving, and so on).
- this is something I haven't fully thought of, but removal of death by hunger could be a good thing. It never happens anyway, and fainting status already has enough penalties.
This leaves the few cases I said earlier. Let's take a look at them.
- Spell and rod hunger mean that you need to make long term calculations. Keep them. It's a way to stop you from spamming high level spells like there's no tomorrow, and, if you get starving because of the spells you cast, it forces you to stop for a moment and eat something.
- Hungry ghosts are interesting as they trigger the hunger level limitations (stopping you from berserking etc). However, they should come in two variants: the normal, boring hunger ghost, as a teaching instrument for new players, and the greater hungry ghost, with a hunger-inducing passive radius, for the later dungeon.
- Spriggans could stay the way they are, just without passive hunger. It is a small (and unneeded) step up in power, but they already have a very slow metabolism. It can be countered by making bread appear less often.
- Trolls could maintain their passive hunger, and be one of the two races still allowed to eat corpses.
- Ghouls have eating meat as their shtick (curing rot and HP). But do they need passive hunger? I don't think so. They already have stat loss to worry about and force them in that direction.
- Vampires just need a rework, or at least the ability to vomit blood at will to decrease their nutrition level. (besides, as a dumb remark, vampires are supposed to drink the blood of living. What's the deal with corpses?)
Finally, one more proposal:
- allow to directly eat from corpses (before butchering), with one button stroke if possible. I always use 5 or o to eat because it's faster. Retain butchering for the advantage of ghouls.
I Feel the Need--the Need for Beer
Spoiler: show
