Saturday, 15th October 2011, 06:44 by Thasero
To get back on track... the question is how to make brown chunks different from non-brown chunks.
I would actually go in the other direction: Just eliminate the difference between contaminated and clean chunks. Any possible penalty given to contaminated chunks must be light enough that food-challenged species can afford to ignore it when playing through branches that only have contaminated chunks. At the same time, if the penalty is too light, then players just eat contaminated chunks anyway like they have done historically. Rather than try to finesse this balance, why not just get rid of the whole thing?
"More different kinds of corpses" is not a potential feature we would be excited to implement now, as Galehar points out above. In the aftermath of the original food reform the one lesson that seems to be agreed on is that increasing the number of subdivisions of food and differences between them does not increase fun. "Simple" is an objective for remaining food reform implementables. All of this suggests that good design points toward fewer kinds of food, not more.
The debate over the possible penalties of brown chunks has, to my mind, gotten into a rather odd rabbit hole when arguing specifics. The average Crawl character falls down 0 shafts and is a magic-user, not a Trog-worshipper, so neither berserking nor shafting is critically central to the question of brown chunk penalties. The fact that we have to come up with comparatively unusual situations in order to make the brown chunk penalty appear to matter suggests that it mostly doesn't matter and isn't a useful gameplay mechanic.
Even if we accept as a given that making contamination matter is the correct decision, the penalty has its own problems. The penalty must be small enough that food-challenged characters can survive it. It cannot be a kind of penalty that makes new players think eating contaminated chunks is always non-optimal, so contaminated chunks must at least grant nutrition and solve the player's immediate problem. The issue with the nausea proposal is that it tries to tack on a food penalty after we've already set the precondition that contaminated chunks must give you enough food: if the chunk's nutrition lasts for X turns, the nausea must last for less than X turns, so you'll be able to eat a chunk again when you get hungry again anyway. In other words, under normal conditions the penalty doesn't matter at all. Because the value of X must be set with the possibility of high-hunger species in mind, normal-hunger characters will have at least a 40% time buffer.
I don't think it would be useful to tie the satiation status to the regeneration rate, because mechanics that lets well-fed players get higher regeneration already exist - wearing a Ring of Regeneration, or casting the Regeneration spell. In general, if we have to tie on secondary benefits to make food choice matter, that suggests to me that food choice is not a very useful game mechanic. A good mechanic should provide support to other parts of the game, rather than needing to draw support in order to achieve its own goals. I think that the original food reform had problems in part because it took the not-fun part of the food clock - having to manage gain and loss of a long-term resource in several categories, like some kind of Dungeon Accountant - and spread that not-fun around to other parts of the game, such as mutations.
Given that the choice between eating a worm or eating a cockroach just isn't great epic fantasy to begin with, and that any possible impact of that choice must be watered down for the safety of newbies and centaurs, I propose officially making the choice trivial by eliminating the 2 kinds of chunks entirely. All monsters that currently produce contaminated chunks produce clean chunks instead.
- For this message the author Thasero has received thanks: 2
- dolphin, ElectricAlbatross