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A few good reasons for spell hunger to not exist:

(a) It serves no purpose at all. Casting spells is already constrained by a mechanism specifically designed for this purpose: MP.
(b) It's completely useless at whatever purpose it is supposed to serve, because chunks exist.
(c) Spell hunger is incredibly obnoxious when playing as a blaster caster.

Good reasons for spell hunger to exist:
(a) There isn't one, unless you count a mindless carryover mechanism from nethack.

Of course, it would be good to remove food altogether, but that's not likely to happen any time soon; so I am asking for removal of an obviously bad and obnoxious mechanic.

Another reason to remove spell hunger: if the reason for food is to be a clock that requires you going forward then food consumption really should not depend on your build type, that is, casters or warriors should need the same amount of food.

While you may argue that melee also cost food or that casters receive less damage in general (resulting in less resting and less food), I think these are not good arguments. They just make the food consumption rate unnecessarily complicated so we cannot balance it as a clock. Also, if casters receive less damage than this is a balance problem and food is not good to get into this question.

It prevents low intelligence characters from multiple attempts to cast a higher level spell with a low success rate. It also works like an alternate (but different) form of mana for pure casters. It gives necromancy users more things to consider. It gives intelligence and spellcasting more reason to exist. Kiku deliver corpses...etc., etc., etc.

To be clear, I don't think that spell hunger is perfect, and maybe it needs some review (like many other game mechanics), but it is far too simplistic to just say "it does nothing" and remove it. If we just hack out enough mechanics, well, just play Powder on your phone or something.

I agree, spellhunger does lots of things. It makes spamming high-level spells difficult, forces mages to take risks to get food if they want to keep using their most powerful spells, makes Int more important, and ruines a mage^Zin.
It's one of the main reasons to use a Staff of Energy, which exasperates the effect of RNG on characters who have food problems.
I really noticed how much spell hunger had handicapps my usual mages when I played a mummy^Vehm - the effect of ignoring spell hunger was enormous.
Most of the effects mentioned above I find it annoying though.

svendre wrote:It prevents low intelligence characters from multiple attempts to cast a higher level spell with a low success rate. It also works like an alternate (but different) form of mana for pure casters. It gives necromancy users more things to consider. It gives intelligence and spellcasting more reason to exist. Kiku deliver corpses...etc., etc., etc.

There are better solutions than spell hunger here.
1) Remove/reform those buffs (DMsl I guess). I doubt someone is casting low success spells in a fight. It is useless in easy fights and suicide in dangerous ones.
2) Spell hunger still does not help. You can cast DMsl after killing some monsters, a single corpse is enough for 5+ attempts.

To be clear, I don't think that spell hunger is perfect, and maybe it needs some review (like many other game mechanics), but it is far too simplistic to just say "it does nothing" and remove it. If we just hack out enough mechanics, well, just play Powder on your phone or something.

It does nothing except annoys players who want to play casters.

DMsl isn't cast enough for spell hunger to be a meaningful effect, especially when compared to conjurations which are cast multiple times per encounter. I'd say the only reason for spell hunger to exist right now is that it gives a reason to cast lower level spells (e.g. throw flame if you can cast fireball, fireball if you can cast firestorm). On top of that a randomly spawned staff of energy will entirely negate spell hunger with no character investment, so spell hunger can't even work consistently towards the aims in this thread.

As it stands spell hunger mostly exists as a newbie trap.

It is my view that spell hunger is of no (real) consequence except annoyance. The effect is mostly psychological (and it's not a good psychological effect either). I have played a ton of blaster casters over the years, and I can recall very few situations where I had to choose a different spell to conserve food.

People might be interested in this calculation I did a couple of years ago in Dungeon Crawling Advice, where I went through real-world morgues of a player who believed that spell hunger mattered, and tried to show that it doesn't.

It's fine to have a game-timer forcing you to go forward. It's also fine to have a resource that's spent to cast spells, that you can choose to consume extra of to have more of a buffer at key moments. It's not really very good for those to be the same resource. Separate "food-as-clock" and "food-as-MP" into two resources, hunger and thirst, and then we can talk about them independently like everyone tries to do. If they stay the same, you're forever compromising one goal for the other.

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