Monday, 3rd October 2016, 00:10 by Floodkiller
Hunger in Rogue existed solely as a timer system to force you to continue diving the dungeon at a consistent rate so as to prevent the player from grinding on weak monsters forever (as all monsters would continue to give you experience no matter your level, if it is a pitiful amount). Many of the 'old school' roguelikes that spawned from that seem to have lost the whole idea of the food clock by including it, but making it irrelevant in some fashion or another:
-Angband has a food system, but it's pretty much just a limiter on how long you can be in the infinte dungeon before you have to come back to town and restock, thus really just being a couple extra tedious button presses every once in a while.
-Nethack made edible corpses, and made it an important part to gaining resistances. Even if you didn't need resistances, food was so easy to generate that you can even make a monster replicate infinitely to grind it for gems while also eating the dead corpses.
-ADOM also has edible corpses with resistances, but at least had background radiation and limited mutation cures to stop anyone outside of a wish engine from keeping the game going indefinitely.
Dungeon Crawl is no exception: food will rarely run out thanks to edible corpses, and even a corpseless/chunkless conduct can still be trivially easy to maintain if the player doesn't recklessly abuse high hunger cost abilities. It serves little to no purpose as an actual clock, and is pretty much just a tactical limiter; even with that in mind, pretty much all hunger related abilites already have their own system of tactical limitation such as MP, exhaustion, contamination, piety, rod charges, etc. Food should probably be taken in one of three directions:
1)Tie food solely to a strategic level clock, and eliminate all chunks/non-permafood sources and hunger costs. Make it the definitive clock of how long the developers want you to be able to spend going through the dungeon. If abilities need an extra cost to be balanced, tie it around other existing limiter mechanics like exhaustion or contamination or something.
2)Tie food solely to a tactical meter, and eliminate starvation and hunger over time. Make it solely a meter that governs the level of use for all special abilities (spells, god powers, etc.), and replace starvation with fainting. Let the player push themselves into fainting with any ability if they choose (with the warning if they are about to do so), and the only natural regeneration of satiation is from fainting->near fainting. The developers can then choose whether they want this system to have chunks or run solely off of permafood.
3)Remove food completely. This is identical to the first point, but with the concession that a food based strategic clock isn't needed due to other systems, or new systems, doing this job instead.
No matter what option above is chosen, all would be better than the current system, which tries to impose strategic and tactical limits at the same time, while failing to do both in a serious manner.
Last edited by
Floodkiller on Monday, 3rd October 2016, 04:01, edited 1 time in total.