Mines Malingerer
Posts: 50
Joined: Monday, 31st January 2011, 03:23
Sunday, 27th February 2011, 03:55
Suggestions regarding chunk management
Inspired by the discussion near the end of the "What in crawl isn't fun" thread. The ideas follow in increasing order of radicalness.
For me, one of the most annoying aspects of the food system is chunk management. Even though they eventually rot away, you've still got multiple chunks from multiple enemies in multiple states of decomposition (normal and rotted) clogging up your inventory. Is there really a reason to distinguish which enemies these chunks came from? There's no difference between eating a bat chunk and a rat chunk. Your inventory should just aggregate all chunks of a common status into single stacks, so you only might have a stack of regular chunks, contaminated chunks, and maybe rotted chunks.
Second and slightly more radical - condense all chunks you have into a single stack (meat chunks) that keeps track of the counts of each type of chunk. The chunks can always be ordered in terms of their appeal (normal > contaminated > all others, rotted > normal > contaminated as a ghoul, etc), so it's not a problem to only present the user with the most appealing chunk in the stack (still reporting the counts of each type of chunk you've got, maybe when the stack is inspected). An exception to this is mutagenic chunks, but they could just be handled in a separate stack.
Finally, how about just getting rid of chunks altogether? 95% of the time, a player's use of chunks consists of butchering an enemy, eating all of the chunks from the enemy that they can, and moving on. When butchering an enemy, why not just allow for this process to happen automatically ("Would you like to butcher and consume the meat from this corpse?")? This would get rid of a lot of the keystrokes involved in the normal process (butchering, eating chunks individually, all of the inventory management related to chunks). Corpses would essentially produce virtual chunks that are immediately consumed by the character - trolls for example will basically eat until the supply is exhausted, while other characters will eat until not hungry (just imagine the leftovers from a corpse are discarded). The process would be very similar to how a vampire drinks blood, except that butchering tools would still be required.
Here are some aspects of gameplay that are and aren't affected:
-RE: Chunk types. You could get the same gameplay effects by applying the properties while you're eating "virtual chunks" from a corpse. Some of the mechanics would have to change slightly, as you're eating all of the chunks in one go vs. one at a time. Sickness and nutrition gained from eating a contaminated corpse would follow some sort of continuum.
-Sublimation of blood. Perhaps allow the spell to work on corpses. Some rebalancing would be required here since you couldn't just have sublimation on a corpse equal the sum of casting sublimation on each of the chunks that'd result (giving a full MP bar in one turn, say), and there's still some annoying inventory management involved (could be resolved by merging all corpses into a single stack of flesh). One way to balance it might be to have the spell automatically convert corpse flesh in the inventory into MP over a number of turns, sort of like MP bar regeneration that's fueled by corpse weight your inventory (consuming the weight as it goes, with limited duration).
-Time spent consuming multiple "virtual" chunks. You would be interrupted if anything interesting were to come into view. You could either resume your consumption where you left off, or have the rest of the corpse go to waste (as with vampires).
-Certain aspects of chunk management. Carrying chunks for later use, so that you have a buffer in case you fall into hungry, or really need to cast lots of spells or berserk. It's true, these sort of things would be totally gone, and it's probably the biggest loss from this system. Could be made up for by carrying corpses. Corpses are less granular in weight than chunks, so corpse management might end up being even more annoying than chunk management. Initially, I was thinking that carrying corpses around would be impractical enough that no one would bother doing it, but that's probably not the case. Unfortunately, I think this point alone probably kills this idea, unless you just completely forbid the picking up of corpses...
In retrospect, I think I like idea #2 the best (merge all chunks into a single stack). Although it'd be nice if the interface provided an easy way to instantly butcher and consume all chunks from a corpse.
For me, one of the most annoying aspects of the food system is chunk management. Even though they eventually rot away, you've still got multiple chunks from multiple enemies in multiple states of decomposition (normal and rotted) clogging up your inventory. Is there really a reason to distinguish which enemies these chunks came from? There's no difference between eating a bat chunk and a rat chunk. Your inventory should just aggregate all chunks of a common status into single stacks, so you only might have a stack of regular chunks, contaminated chunks, and maybe rotted chunks.
Second and slightly more radical - condense all chunks you have into a single stack (meat chunks) that keeps track of the counts of each type of chunk. The chunks can always be ordered in terms of their appeal (normal > contaminated > all others, rotted > normal > contaminated as a ghoul, etc), so it's not a problem to only present the user with the most appealing chunk in the stack (still reporting the counts of each type of chunk you've got, maybe when the stack is inspected). An exception to this is mutagenic chunks, but they could just be handled in a separate stack.
Finally, how about just getting rid of chunks altogether? 95% of the time, a player's use of chunks consists of butchering an enemy, eating all of the chunks from the enemy that they can, and moving on. When butchering an enemy, why not just allow for this process to happen automatically ("Would you like to butcher and consume the meat from this corpse?")? This would get rid of a lot of the keystrokes involved in the normal process (butchering, eating chunks individually, all of the inventory management related to chunks). Corpses would essentially produce virtual chunks that are immediately consumed by the character - trolls for example will basically eat until the supply is exhausted, while other characters will eat until not hungry (just imagine the leftovers from a corpse are discarded). The process would be very similar to how a vampire drinks blood, except that butchering tools would still be required.
Here are some aspects of gameplay that are and aren't affected:
-RE: Chunk types. You could get the same gameplay effects by applying the properties while you're eating "virtual chunks" from a corpse. Some of the mechanics would have to change slightly, as you're eating all of the chunks in one go vs. one at a time. Sickness and nutrition gained from eating a contaminated corpse would follow some sort of continuum.
-Sublimation of blood. Perhaps allow the spell to work on corpses. Some rebalancing would be required here since you couldn't just have sublimation on a corpse equal the sum of casting sublimation on each of the chunks that'd result (giving a full MP bar in one turn, say), and there's still some annoying inventory management involved (could be resolved by merging all corpses into a single stack of flesh). One way to balance it might be to have the spell automatically convert corpse flesh in the inventory into MP over a number of turns, sort of like MP bar regeneration that's fueled by corpse weight your inventory (consuming the weight as it goes, with limited duration).
-Time spent consuming multiple "virtual" chunks. You would be interrupted if anything interesting were to come into view. You could either resume your consumption where you left off, or have the rest of the corpse go to waste (as with vampires).
-Certain aspects of chunk management. Carrying chunks for later use, so that you have a buffer in case you fall into hungry, or really need to cast lots of spells or berserk. It's true, these sort of things would be totally gone, and it's probably the biggest loss from this system. Could be made up for by carrying corpses. Corpses are less granular in weight than chunks, so corpse management might end up being even more annoying than chunk management. Initially, I was thinking that carrying corpses around would be impractical enough that no one would bother doing it, but that's probably not the case. Unfortunately, I think this point alone probably kills this idea, unless you just completely forbid the picking up of corpses...
In retrospect, I think I like idea #2 the best (merge all chunks into a single stack). Although it'd be nice if the interface provided an easy way to instantly butcher and consume all chunks from a corpse.
