Temple Termagant
Posts: 11
Joined: Monday, 19th March 2012, 23:38
Food Reform
In two words, food is Not Fun.
You get no benefits from food other than that you may continue playing. It does not help your character in any way. The only thing that food actually DOES is let you continue what you were doing anyway. For example, not being hungry lets you berserk. It's not the food itself that lets you berserk, though. It's that your food state sometimes prevents it. Hunger interrupts map exploration. It interferes with combat. It messes with spellcasting. It causes frustration and drudgery. Food in Crawl is an entirely negative, or subtractive, experience.
Its purpose in the game is to prevent or limit fun. It's not an enemy to be outsmarted. You can't interact with food--there's no cooking. You can't be clever with food to allow things not normally done (except perhaps Fedhas skills). All it does--and I do mean ALL IT DOES--is get in your way.
Don't give me the line about how important food is to balance. Development focused entirely on notions of balance instead of notions of fun is how you end up doing pointless crap like removing Mountain Dwarves and pissing everybody off. They weren't hurting anything, for the Gods' sakes.
Instead, the focus should be on turning food into a positive mechanic. Finding ways to make it fun and improve the experience of the player. Balance is certainly important, but it's something you do AFTER you've made the game more interesting.
Here are some ideas, going from mild to major, to make food more fun. They're not really part of one big proposal; rather, they're a bunch of separate ideas that might work together:
-Eliminate nausea/sickness. This was a terrible idea to begin with. Its only purpose is to make food even more tedious. Oh, you need to eat two chunks? Well, you can't, because F you.
-Growing plants. Let the player cultivate a garden. Gardening is an active and optional interaction and it would make the game more interesting for the players who chose to do it. Players who hated carving chunks could just farm all their food somewhere. Since fruit is faster to eat anyway, this would be a strategic decision as well. Yes, they'd have to do it on a non-normal level because of the OOD monster anti-scum timer, but would it be so awful if players could establish a home base somewhere?
-Freeze the metabolism timer when hunger is at normal. The real scum timer isn't food, it's the OOD monster timer. Just let people play and explore without constantly being forced to play the carve 'minigame'. It's a game that sucks. If food absolutely can't be divorced from spellcasting or other concerns, fine. That's no reason to make everyone keep eating 2-3 times per level. Spellhunger, and hunger from other sources like Berserk, would remain. Hunger below normal would continue to decrease until starvation, and hunger above normal would degrade to normal, at the current rates. This would let people fight and explore and cast minor spells without food getting in the way.
-A gathering/survival skill that lets you make jerky and/or get more nutrition from regular food. Even if no other change was made, this would be a positive addition and add fun to the game. Before you say it would serve no purpose since there's lots of food, keep in mind that it would give players a greater sense of progress and control. It would be something they could track and improve that would make playing less tedious.
-Positive benefits from corpse eating. This is probably the most controversial thing I'll propose. Interesting or unique food should have some interesting or unique benefit. For example, eating fire drake should give fire resistance (and if not permanent, the duration should be really long). Resistances are all pretty obvious as far as ideas go, but I think the coolest thing to see would be special xp gains from named critters. For example, eating Sigmund might grant 1000 xp per chunk into the Fire Magic skill. (This would go well with a survival skill, giving you more chunks or something). Some monsters could also give increases to aptitudes for a period of time (or for a set number of levels). This idea would take a lot of work and balancing, since to actually be interesting the benefits would have to be non-trivial, but it'd be a huge step in the right direction.
-Just eliminate food altogether. Adjust spell costs by mana and remove the food requirements. Put a cooldown timer on Berserk and lengthen the penalty phase. No hunger, ever. It would be an improvement.