The Tavern

Probably like lots of people, I want to remove hunger, but I also like the role hunger is supposed to play in theory (but doesn't), as a pseudo-finite resource to be managed strategically. I think a stress/sanity system could play this role better, with a lot more flavor and a lot less UI hassle. Here is a rough sketch:

• The player has a "stress" total, which starts at 0 but can increase indefinitely, although stress only actually does anything once it passes a certain limit. Your current stress in proportion to your limit is represented in the UI as a bar, just like piety.
• You get stress from the same things that increased your hunger (apart from moving, resting, and fighting)--going berserk, casting spells, evoking items, using special abilities. All these things fray your nerves. Naturally, things that gave you more hunger give you more stress--berserkers and mages are notoriously unhinged, after all.
• You lose stress by earning XP.
• Your stress limit constitutes your psychological breaking point. Once you pass it, you begin to acquire certain bad mutations which represent your mounting insanity. These could include *Rage, *Confuse (obviously), *Slow (depression & lethargy), shouting, blurred vision (you can't focus on what you read), and perhaps others. (For instance, you might occasionally become afraid of/mesmerized by some random monster in LOS.)
• You keep these mutations until your stress goes all the way back to 0.

As a bonus, once this system was in place, it could interact with other game elements in cool ways. Monsters that increased hunger would now increase stress, probably resulting in a place for this ability past early game. Maybe Crazy Yiuf could massively stress you out. Maybe Gozag prevents you from losing stress the normal way, and instead causes you to only lose stress when you spend money. (Retail therapy!) Obviously, Xom would find it hilarious when the player goes insane, and perhaps to that end help the player along.

*Rage probably isn't a good mutation, as it would cause a "stress spiral."

It is an interesting idea, but it is a very radical change to the game. Way more radical than food removal.

I think if you were going to implement something like this, you would still need to take a hard look at what incurs a sanity cost, and what doesn't. I do not think that moving everything with a hunger cost to a sanity cost would work too well.

I'm also not sure how well this would work in light of the "popcorn problem" in Crawl. Fairly often, you have encounters that don't really present a challenge. Because nutrition is not actually a meaningfully limited resource, you can handle these encounters in whatever manner is the most convenient. It would be pretty annoying to poke river rats to death with 0 skill melee in order to minimize your character's stress because you haven't gotten Fireball to "no stress" cost yet. (Assuming that spellcasting and int lowered stress of spells in the new system.)

In the context of Crawl, I do think it would be cool to try out "sanity" as a resource in the form of a god or species. I am very skeptical of how well it would work as a general feature, though I agree it is a neat idea.

Ia! Ia!

That, plus: remind yourself that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer!

Is that a reference to something?

Darkest Dungeon's narrator(DD has a stress system which seems very similar to what OP is proposing. tbh I think it fits DD much better because basically the whole game's theming and flavor is built around it, personally I just want Crawl to either have no food or a permafood-only food clock where the only hunger cost is turns spent)

Personally, I find even the "you are feeling hungry" messages strike too close to home much too often. "You feel you are on the edge of a nervous breakdown" type messages would be way over the line, in my opinion.

this looks insanely cool on paper but i dont feel it would mesh well with crawl

Call of Crawlthulhu?

Seriously... that message makes my stomach growl sometimes...