Spider Stomper
Posts: 236
Joined: Saturday, 2nd July 2016, 13:16
"Gourmand -> "Sustenance
Justification: Except for a few edge cases which don't matter and/or could easily be handled individually, these would have identical effects to amulets of the gourmand in practice except for being (a) simpler and less tedious, and (b) not abusable.
Amulets of the gourmand are abusable because they encourage the most degenerate and laborious kind of swapping. (The attunement period is virtually a non-factor here.) If you're going to use an amulet of the gourmand, the optimal way to use it is to only put it on when you're running low on nutrition, wear it for a couple of fights against popcorn (which maybe you encountered earlier and kept alive for this very purpose), eat until you're engorged, switch back to another amulet, and rinse and repeat.
An amulet that just removed hunger entirely when worn would prevent this. (You could still abuse it by putting it on before resting or exploring, but this could be easily prevented by giving it a big one-time hunger cost like with vampiric weapons, or by setting your satiation to starving when you take it off.) Since amulets of the gourmand mean you virtually never have to resort to permafood regardless of how much you cast or berserk, the result would be identical in practice except in the following edge cases:
- Extended: clearly doesn't matter. Despite the relative paucity of edible corpses, food supply is only anywhere close being an issue in extended if you're really lazy, really sloppy, or like to grind, but these are exactly the kind of players who will go out of their way to get Necromutation anyway. (I speak from experience.)
- Necromancers: it's true that you can only reanimate what you don't eat, but in practice this only adds tedium since you just have to be a little choosy about what you cut up. Safe to ignore.
- Spriggans: if it's essential that they always have to rely on permafood, just prevent them from wearing the amulet and hand-wave a reason why. imo probably fine to just let them wear it though.
- Gozag: same thing as spriggans. In practice, amulets of sustenance would work a lot like amulets of piety for Gozag worshippers. I could see why someone might worry about this but honestly I bet it would be fine and in any case you could hand-wave a restriction ("too anti-consumerist!")
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* this originally was going to be a reply to this similar post, but I think it deserves its own topic. also it seems likely that this idea has been put forward before, maybe multiple times, possibly by me on an occasion I forgot about. if so, apologies.