Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks


Although the central place for design discussion is ##crawl-dev on freenode, some may find it helpful to discuss requests and suggestions here first.

Dungeon Master

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 12:23

Re: Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks

ackack: Starving, as a death, is painful. The time before that can be very exciting, though, as you switch from careful exploration to a more cavalier approach, looking for food. Also, there's acquirement and god change for the really desperate. (That said, the plan isn't to make every character worried about food. As people explain at great lengths over here, food is almost never an issue. And in the form of Spriggans we all have some experience with a permafood-only game.)
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Blades Runner

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 12:52

Re: Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks

I think this proposal is very much superior to the "nutrition on kill" proposal made in another thread.
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Dungeon Master

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 12:56

Re: Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks

ackack wrote:Starvations from this change would be godawful. Many of them would happen late in the game, and many of them would be disconnected by a very long amount of time from the behaviors that were responsible for the death.

Why would that be the case? Food generation is statistically homogeneous. It's the chunks that introduce lots of variability in the food stock. When there is chunks, you can stockpile permafood. In corpsless branches, you have to dig in your stock if you spend lots of nutrition. If you have normal nutrition spending, you should already be able to survive just on normal permafodo drops.
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 15:32

Re: Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks

oh boy, will abyss become awful.
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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 16:47

Re: Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks

Hirsch I wrote:oh boy, will abyss become awful.


"become"? hah.
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 17:36

Re: Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks

abyss is my favourite branch right now '-'
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Vaults Vanquisher

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 18:03

Re: Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks

Well it would be pretty easy to test if that would be balanced, just try playing a regular race without eating chunks.

I don't really like the idea of suddenly starving a bunch of trunk characters though, I doubt anyone would like it.
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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 18:41

Re: Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks

No more dragging corpses around to reanimate on other levels...
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Tuesday, 18th February 2014, 23:31

Re: Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks

people on the sudden death challenge will LOVE it :lol:
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Temple Termagant

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Post Monday, 24th February 2014, 01:52

Re: Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks

I'm in favor of getting rid of hunger and food, its my least favorite mechanic in all roguelikes...and one reason why I like ToME. Why isn't there a mechanic for when the food has been processed? ;) Outside of probably new people to the game, how often do players actually die from hunger?

For DCSS I pretty much only play classes that either have natural gourmand, or no hunger at all. I just find it tedious and not fun having to deal with it.

As for hunger costs on spells and not wanting spells spammed, the mechanic is already in the game as the Djinns glow bar. Or high level spells could drain life force if you are not proficient at casting it. Corpses can stay for their various uses.

Blades Runner

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Post Monday, 24th February 2014, 03:53

Re: Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks

^ Djinn Glow is underwhelming, temporary mutations resulting from it are a joke. It's a very weak deterrent and one of the reasons Dj are regarded as imbalanced. Life force drain is also not that significant an effect, because a player normally won't try to cast spells that are significantly beyond safe margins -- the results can be -really- bad, worse than draining -- try banishment!. These measures would not stop me spamming Tornado, for example. With a character that has mp restoration (Veh, Sif) available, spamming Tornado would become optimal (it's one of the few spells that is strong both defensively and offensively)

Lair Larrikin

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Post Monday, 24th February 2014, 12:40

Re: Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks

Suggestion: remove death from starvation, have 'starving' status add to (say, double) attack delay, prevent HP regeneration and reduce EV. Not being able to cast spells is already deadly enough for some characters, and if melee characters have a big penalty, that they can't use abilities to get around, that makes starvation deadly for them too. This makes death from starvation still a matter of tactical skill as well as strategic planning, and removes 'unavoidable' starving deaths (although, really, the only times I've ever heard of them is from bad planning in pan or from - now removed - harpie food destruction).

Barkeep

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Post Monday, 24th February 2014, 22:53

Re: Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks

earLOBe wrote:Suggestion: remove death from starvation, have 'starving' status add to (say, double) attack delay, prevent HP regeneration and reduce EV. Not being able to cast spells is already deadly enough for some characters, and if melee characters have a big penalty, that they can't use abilities to get around, that makes starvation deadly for them too. This makes death from starvation still a matter of tactical skill as well as strategic planning, and removes 'unavoidable' starving deaths (although, really, the only times I've ever heard of them is from bad planning in pan or from - now removed - harpie food destruction).


Jelly eats all your food; you accidentally hit p over your food stash while worshiping Nemelex. I've been playing this game too damn long.

Anyway, agreed that starving shouldn't kill you, for same reason that getting super-overburdened doesn't kill you and negative stats no longer kill you.

Spider Stomper

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Post Monday, 24th February 2014, 23:05

Re: Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks

I starved to death once. Mostly just because I didn't realize starvation was an instant-kill, so I thought I still had time to look for something to kill for its tasty meats before eating permafood.
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Halls Hopper

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Post Monday, 24th February 2014, 23:50

Re: Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks

Yeah the only time I staved to death I had permafood on me, just cleared out an Ossuary went from near starving to starving on the stairs, didn't notice the status change, but did know I needed to go hunting pronto, and was also surprised that I just dropped dead at full HP.

I think starvation should be able to kill you and be balanced so that inexperienced players will loose a cherished character or two along the way and that the habits of any players with less than android like analytical approaches should be shaped by this trauma.
To me imposing (clearly announced) penalties at near-starving seems like a good way to go, possibly looking at the burdened threshold or else just attacking stats directly (as a percentage rounded to rule out stat death). Healing rate also seems appropriate to be linked to nutrition level, the effect would obviously be much less pronounced than for vampires only being significant at near starving. I'd also stop insta-killing characters at starving just have them periodically loose large, randomized chunks of their health (which might well induce the desired trauma while actually being more survivable due to the clear warning and heal wounds/curing being able to prolong your suffering long enough to get yourself to the nearest bat carcass).
Less sensibly I've always liked the idea of fat and skinny being "mutations" acquired/cured by having your nutrition level remain at extremes for prolonged periods.

Dungeon Master

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Post Tuesday, 25th February 2014, 00:05

Re: Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks

It is premature to talk about how to make starving not a sudden death (which would of course happen if this change is tested and decided to stay). Treatment will be similar to stats: very painful effects that make clear you're in a bad shape, death long enough so you can react a bit, but not long enough to make you suffer in your seat.

However, I came up with that specific proposal because it can be tested easily: change a single rule; tweak a single major knob (permafood generation rate). There are some other minor knobs (sustenance, permafood in certain branches) but it will suffice for playtesting.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Tuesday, 25th February 2014, 08:29

Re: Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks

For some time now I've felt that spriggan nutrition is the best overall system, and I agree all (normal) races should be moved to it. The question then becomes what to do with spriggans, as they'd have basically no food clock at all with increased permafood generation. Could leave them alone and let hunger costs matter much less to them, I'd probably just nerf them to slow metabolism 1, should be about equal to slow meta 2 and less permafood.

So +1 for chunk removal and increased rations, in short. Possibly adjust spriggans.

Swamp Slogger

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Post Wednesday, 5th March 2014, 01:10

Re: Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks

Add another vote to the pile of just getting rid of food entirely.

dpeg's idea of getting rid of chunks is already a big improvement over the status quo. Take for example my current game, where I'm playing a DECj. Getting rid of chunks removes the following:
- Having to butcher corpses
- Autoexplore whining about not being able to pick up all the chunks at my current location (messing with options like auto_butcher might help with that, but I tend to leave them at the defaults save for setting all the delays to -1)
- Switching between my amulet of conservation and my amulet of the gourmand whenever my hunger bar drops to 'full' (Yes, I freely admit to being far more paranoid about food than is even remotely necessary. I always finish with enough permafood left to fill a small supermarket)
- Having to drop rotting chunks because I want to pick something else up and my carrying weight limit has been reached for the bazillionth time (I'd love it if carrying capacity was decoupled from STR so Deep Elves and their noodle-like arms wouldn't have to go back to their stash and drop the two bread rations that are weighing them down every five minutes, but that's a discussion for another topic)

So yeah, getting rid of chunks would clear up a large amount of boring, fiddly interface management. But let's go further. What does food actually add to the game?

- Prevents scumming. There's already an OOD timer. Plus, the race most likely to scum doesn't have a food clock anyway.
- Discourages casting of powerful spells. We already have miscast effects and limited MP to do that.
- Some races have a more prominent interaction with food. In my opinion, the only good one of those are vampires, since determining your satiation level is an actual tactical decision. The others just need to pay more attention to one of crawl's least fun mechanics.
- It adds starvation as a potential source of death, which happens very rarely and isn't fun when it does.
- More stash interaction to keep the food safe from jellies and to free up carrying capacity/inventory slots (while flavorful, having 23 different types of food is rather annoying from an interface standpoint). Yes, it's overly paranoid. Yes, plenty of players (including myself) do it. I think we can all agree that less stash interaction is a good thing.
- (Very rarely) a drive to explore faster than you're comfortable with in order to find food to keep yourself alive. This is one of the few instances in which food actually results in interesting gameplay. Having said that, the same feeling is achieved much more reliably with timed portals. Perhaps it would be an idea to add something like a traveling merchant, which works similar to a bazaar, but with only one or two shops, but occurs much more frequently (say, three times over the course of a 3-rune game)

Anyway, just my two cents.
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Shoals Surfer

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Post Wednesday, 5th March 2014, 04:28

Re: Remove chunks and butchering, have corpses act as chunks

Few notes.

The chopping corpses isn't really necessary for carnivores, before engorged becomes hungry all the food would have rotten away. We could just increase amount carnivores can eat so instead of chunks they store satiation. This way you could just eat corpses directly when you need food.

Also if we remove turning corpses to chunks we might also want to introduce hunger cost to gaining piety. (which i think could be used to make god more interesting, as pitety is something is very plentiful for most god with current system, and it's hard to use it more than you gain.)
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