@johlstei, @Hirsch I, @archaeo, @and into
johlstei wrote:I'm all for removing corpse saccing too, I think that "choice" is deceptively uninteresting. Is the choice ever more complicated than "Am I hungry? Eat the most nutritious thing and repeat, if not sacrifice"? It is something that is relatively simple to code in an rcfile already.
Or you could sacrifice the strongest monster to Okawaru and eat the popcorn; or rip the skeleton out of a dragon, eat a chunk and save the rest for simulacrum; chop up the biggest critter to get more food out of your kill and make the popcorn rot to have a lot of fodder for Fedhas' evolution; twisted resurrection requires that you forgo food sources in order to create more powerful and versatile undead servants; you can play a kobold of Fedhas and gorge yourself while at the same time saving all the food which is otherwise useless to you... etc.
Corpse-feeding in general isn't very interesting, corpse-feeding when coupled with granted abilities, necromancy and/or diets actually requires making compromises when balancing and min-maxing the different uses of a resource that is neither completely renewable nor strictly limited. This layer of thinking, moving, and acting before corpses become unusable for different purposes (at different stages: fresh/rotten/skeleton/gone) would be rendered completely or mostly moot, and also erase some comparative advantages and disadvantages that diets can bring.
Bottom line of my position:
1) Butchering can be legitimately considered a hassle, even if I personally like it.
2) Auto-eating on kill brings a lot of consequences that can be considered undesirable, unreasonable, or inconsistent.
3) The more streamlined the food minigame becomes, the less special "weird diet" races become, or go from special through problematic to straight special-cased. If most species had auto-nutrition, leaving ghouls with their current system would mean giving them an "impaired interface" of sorts even if it makes sense, but then - what about trolls, kobolds and felids? The most extreme example of this would be removing the food clock entirely, where all species would be mostly like mummies (mummies' thing would become disabled potions). The second most extreme would be removing all food save for permafood, where all species would be a lot closer to spriggans.
Hirsch I wrote:while you arguments are good, I'd ask you to calm down. we are discussing a possibility, and I am trying my best to help this game to be a better one.
My apologies, I tend to be rantful and long-winded. Considering it rationally, there is no reason whatsoever for anybody to put forth a suggestion that
they consider would make the game worse.
Thanks for the acknowledgement, I think I have already acknowledged your suggestion, even if under a negative light, by taking the pains to argue against it in detail, I just happen to disagree deeply with your suggestion. I don't think it is a bad suggestion in account of it's quality, I think it's a good suggestion that risks axing for an aspect of the game that I actually enjoy and that I think it's too often disregarded as a mere hassle instead of legitimate middle-term resource management.
now, that said:
if this makes little sense on combat, we could make the nutrition be distributed after a while. the potential nutrition you get from a kill is added to a pool, that holds a limited amount, and given to you when there are no monsters in sight.
That would make more sense in-game than plain nutrition on kill, but substitutes a mechanic mostly in control of the player which also has visual feedback for a behind-the-curtains operation. How much nutrition did I gain from killing that porcupine? Will it last enough to reach my stash without needing another snack? At least now we know how many chunks we get, and have the added risk of a monster not leaving a corpse - which I also think is weird, if I had things my way, a corpse would always be produced for corpse-leaving monsters, but I rationalize it out thinking that the corpse doesn't mysteriously disappear, it's just too badly mangled to be used for anything useful.
With a system like the one you propose, permafood and walking food would also become wholly disparate.
also, the reason to remove butchering is that way one can focus on the most interesting aspects of the game.
I'll try to fix my proposal, based on your feedback. thank you.
If my feedback has served you to reflect on your suggestion, it's consequences and improve it, it has already been useful for something other than voicing my own opinion =D
archaeo wrote:Without really commenting on the merits of this proposal, I don't think it's worthwhile to let "common sense" stuff get in the way of good game design. Any paradigm for satiation is necessarily going to be an abstraction, and we can come up with the rationalizations after we come up with something that's actually fun to play.
Sorry but, my "common sense" as you call it has been substantiated into particular points of criticism. Common sense is a poorly defined concept as much as good game design. Any model for anything is going to be an abstraction, that's why it is a model: it mimicks and represents something else while simplifying it, but that doesn't mean we have to abstract everything to the point of full automation (go give Progress Quest a try, it's the embodiment of this particular slippery slope).
What is fun for any two given Crawl players probably doesn't overlap 100% even in the closest matches, so assuming that something in particular is unfun is just defending your view (which is legitimate) with pretensions of universality (which isn't legitimate) but it's not like I am, or anybody else is for that matter, completely innocent of that particular mistake.
Oh, and trumping established assumptions and expectations also gets in the way of good game design.
and into wrote:Well sorry if the part of Crawl that you really enjoy is hitting ceX and seeing the "This raw flesh tastes terrible" message and seeing the little yellow Hungry sign go away. At least people can keep butchering corpses needlessly if it makes you feel hardcore and you enjoy the game more that way. However with this change everyone who mostly plays Crawl because they enjoy the tactical and strategic considerations doesn't have to wear out the poor c and e keys on their keyboard so fast. Not quite a win-win, I suppose, but perhaps a win for nearly everyone and a draw for the tiny number of people who mainly play DCSS in order to role play that they are eating elves?
It's not THE part I really enjoy, it's a part that I really enjoy ALONG with the vast majority of everything else in crawl.
Consider your attempt at belittling and ridicule thoroughly ineffectual, Mr. Blue Name
Now aside from that the only actual game play difference is the "no choice" between sacrificing corpses, eating them, and zombifying them. But as others have already pointed out this is an exceedingly uninteresting choice that in the insane overwhelming majority of cases has exactly 1 correct answer, and an answer that is pretty damn obvious: Eat the weakest corpse available when you are hungry. So it is not actually a choice. And aside from the tedium of butchering, this "choice" means that you now should take care not to butcher that hill giant carcass if a rat or quoka or something was also killed nearby. And it is even worse if the rat and hill giant died on the same blasted tile.
See the first paragraph in this post for elaboration on why the choice of corpse use is greatly underrated... underrating which seems to grow more common as you go up in the pecking ladder of crawl players, which probably means that it is not required for successful play; but wich can also mean it stems from habits developed over the course of playing 300000 games instead of only 10000 (pulling the numbers out of my arse here, you get my drift) and probably related to the "need" of reaching Pan in X moves and minutes less.
None of the other stuff listed by Psiweapon are precluded by the OP's recommendation. To be fair, Hirsch didn't go into those things very explicitly in the OP, but they were mentioned in the other thread and everyone (I think) was agreed that chunks would remain in game and that 1.) species with weird or special relationships to chunks would retain those relationships (ghoul troll kobold felid vampires etc.); and 2.) all the non-satiation purposes of chunks (mutagenic, sublimation of blood, etc.) would be retained. But even if those weren't brought up in the other thread from which this one spun off, there is nothing in the OP's recommendation that would prevent all those other things from staying in. So it is just nitpicking and basing one's criticisms off the assumption that this change would be implemented in the most idiotic way possible. Any idea executed poorly is going to suck, nothing new there.
My points of criticism stem directly from the proposed "satiation on kill" mechanic, and how it would lead to uncomprehensible causation. Making weird diet races stay as they are would only make it even more jarring: A human only need to clobber a goblin to death to gain satiation, a felid has to actually eat said goblin. If the purpose of such a reform is streamlining the steps a player has to take to avoid starvation, players who choose to play weird diet races are still stuck with the same butchering hassle as always, thus giving them an unfair disadvantage and partially defeating the point of the reform (We'll streamline the corpse fooding minigame/hassle, but only for normal-diet races, which can now mystically gain satiation from the act of killing itself, everyone else still has to butcher and eat chunks the old-fashioned way)
I have stated before that I am NOT against butchering removal, I am against satiation on kill.
I am not assuming this change would be implemented in the most idiotic way possible, I'm working with what has been stated, and my pretty specific points of criticism can very well serve as a highlight for possible shortcomings of the proposed change, thus even allowing it to be improved upon.
As you can check for yourself, Hirsch I has much less against my criticism than you do, your approach here falls squarely into a case of being more papist than the Pope himself.
Oh I guess there are the claims about "opaque and spoilery," but that is simply a matter of how well any new system is explained; one might as well call the new training system erected after victory dancing was removed "opaque and spoilery." Frankly I think at present it is much worse in terms of spoilers, based on how often newer (and sometimes not-so-new) players overreact to hunger. The current system is in fact already opaque in terms of game play (what matters most), and much worse, it is opaque in a way that leads to bad and tedious play because people actually think they need to manage their food costs really really carefully. "Opacity" in and of itself isn't bad; Crawl chooses to be opaque sometimes precisely in order to discourage people from concerning themselves with things they shouldn't worry about. I think that rationale should be extended to chunks usage; if it *can* be automated without removing any interesting choices, it should be.
I don't even attempt to manage hunger costs really carefully, I just do whatever I feel like doing, and then bring myself back to satiated or engorged if possible. I hit starving quite frequently as a result of ability or spell costs (heroism and vampiric draining make me particularly prone to that)
It is a de facto "spoiler" at present that hunger almost never matters unless you are doing really weird things that you shouldn't be doing for a dozen other reasons that are more important than hunger. So let's remove that spoiler.
Weird things? Such as using god abilities liberally in order not to die?
Whew! Almost as long as a char dump!