Mines Malingerer
Posts: 47
Joined: Tuesday, 3rd December 2013, 19:12
Re: But seriously, remove hunger
Hunger is almost never meaningful given reasonable play. The issue is that hunger remains a counter against extreme dawdling (beyond the level of poor play, it's still hard to starve while actually trying to advance) as well as the use of high-level spellcasting and evokables and a few other things like berserk, and spriggans.
It's pointless to remove hunger without another mechanic to counter these. If you want to make it less of a pain, just have chunks be automatically harvested and eaten with aut use and no inventory interaction - and raise the current "satiated" hunger level higher to account for not being able to hold chunks in reserve. This eliminates turn loss, hitting c, hitting e or auto-eating on o/5, and stuff like having to clear space in inventory when you're full for chunks. At that point players are not having to take extra actions, they are only dealing with the hunger mechanic when it becomes meaningful because they are trying to do things like cast 7th level spells or berserk every fight.
This is the next step in food revision and would open the way to other changes. You can revise permafood to require less management as well if you want. As you find various ways to replace hunger mechanics you can simplify and eventually remove permafood and then the chunk-eating mechanic altogether. Although you may find once you eliminate the pain-in-the-ass parts of hunger that the flavor, atmosphere and familiarity it provides - as well as the differentiation, however slight, for races like Troll or places like The Crypt - is worth it. Or you can get rid of it. Either way, on the way to being able to do that you've eliminated much of what is boring and painful about hunger.