Forgotten Kingdoms Forums

I think it's safe to say everyone has experienced this... you're having a serious IC discussion, and suddenly, you start losing health. Or drooling. Or hallucinating. Why? Well - you wouldn't want to interrupt the RP with a roast pig or three! Conversations often take several days in game-time (though it wouldn't be realistic for that to be the case), and for the most part that can be ignored, but the hunger problem is pretty apparent.

I don't know if this would be worth the effort - people tend to go with it and gloss over the casual munchies - but if it wouldn't be a huge chore to somehow change hunger from time-based to activity-based, it would be really cool not to have discussions interrupted.

Is this requirement to eat and drink actually achieving anything anymore? I wonder if it wouldn't be best to remove it entirely... I recall some previous discussion about doing this.

It was discussed here before: viewtopic.php?f=77&t=15991&p=103150&hil ... er#p103150

I would love to have the code taken out, and not have to rely on it. It doesn't really add anything to any RP to have stop, and shove your face full of food. Food could then be used as a prop to enhance RPs.

Granted it is annoying, if you removed the hunger/thirst code, it would cause a handful of prayers to become useless - create water, create food, heroes feast, sustain... There might be others, but those are all I can think of at the moment.

About the only way I could see to make it realistic is if the game mirrored realtime. Which would be awesome in my opinion, but that's just me.

EDIT: On second thought... maybe you could tie it into stamina/constitution so that you have to eat whenever you have reached a certain percentage of stamina, if you don't, your stamina will not regenerate and will begin to decrease after a certain level of hunger or thirst. The thirstier and hungrier you are, the quicker your stamina drains. Since constitution is already tied to stamina, PCs with high constitution would naturally be able to survive longer without food or water.

I'd rather see it mechanically altered, as well as having to sleep. I think each of these should be spread out, at least once every four hours or more. There are already penalties for a decreased mental state, but what about the reverse? Lots of games have a bonus for being well rested. If you use a room flagged for inns, ie somewhere you are supposed to rest, and are sitting or sleeping there for at least ten minutes every x amount of hours, maybe you get a +1 bonus to all saves for an hour or two. You should have to eat and drink far less often, however the detriment should be ramped up. Have starvation start acting like the drunk code, random actions or garbling your speech, traded off with only having to worry about it once every RL six hours.

I don't think they would become entirely useless (except perhaps sustain) - they would still have RP uses.

Casamir wrote:I'd rather see it mechanically altered, as well as having to sleep. I think each of these should be spread out, at least once every four hours or more. There are already penalties for a decreased mental state, but what about the reverse? Lots of games have a bonus for being well rested. If you use a room flagged for inns, ie somewhere you are supposed to rest, and are sitting or sleeping there for at least ten minutes every x amount of hours, maybe you get a +1 bonus to all saves for an hour or two. You should have to eat and drink far less often, however the detriment should be ramped up. Have starvation start acting like the drunk code, random actions or garbling your speech, traded off with only having to worry about it once every RL six hours.

There is 'well rested' code in-game, but I think only some inns are coded to work with it. With the new inn code in Batterhill, the need for sleep would actually be feasible, since sleeping in an inn now replenishes prayers, stamina, and spells... but you'd have to overhaul all the inns in the game to get any real benefit from doing all that extra coding.

Is this more than just the rooms being coded with the inn flag and increasing the rate at which you regain spells, stamina, etc? I was talking about adding to this, gaining a buff for sleeping and eating. If we did make hunger optional, I could see altering it from punitive to incentive based. You dont have to eat or drink, you can ignore the code, however you could regain hp, stamina, and spells faster with a full belly, giving you reasons to bother.

Casamir wrote:Is this more than just the rooms being coded with the inn flag and increasing the rate at which you regain spells, stamina, etc?

Yep, from what I can gather the new quest/inn code in Batterhill functions much like the old Forgotten Realms PC games from Black Isle, minus the alignment based speech options.

Once you rent a room, everything is replenished as if you spent the night there and I think you do get a well rested bonus afterwards.

EDIT: My bad, there are also alignment based options you can take within the town for both speech and actions.

How about something more along the lines of a realistic meal?
As I've taken to understanding the food system, food items are assigned a certain value of hunger they replenish. Certain foods then fill you up much faster, like the roast pig Amalia mentioned, or the steak from the School of Wonder.

Currently, we just echo "You eat xxxxx." and the item is gone. Why not make it more like the craft system used for fletching(&others)? You have say a bowl of stew, a roll, a tart, and a cup of ale. You type [eat] and whatever food and drink items that are in your inventory are consumed over time. You can still smote during fletching, I do it all the time, so this allows you to RP during meals and even RP the meal.
Then we also only need a handful of items, and can make it like a real meal, with the value of replenishment also denoting the time it takes to consume the item. So a roast pig would take a PC roughly and hour to finish eating vs. a bowl of hearty stew that would take 20 mins. It might take two bowls of stew to be full, but that is far better than (exag.) 20 of them.

That too. It would be nice if food prepared by a PC got different 'nutrition' levels depending on how well they can cook. So all these butcher shops would have a little extra usage for players who want to pursue talent in the culinary arts (a few players have done this in the past, but they were mostly bakers of pastries I think). You cannot just live off of cookies!

Rhangalas wrote:You cannot just live off of cookies!

You, Sir, are a liar and a fiend.

I very much like the idea of altering the mechanics of hunger/thirst/resting. Food and drink that provides minor bonuses and penalties for poor nutrition, starvation, or thirst would add a very interesting element, I think. Also, it would make the cook skill more than just a cosmetic ability.

Alitar wrote: You, Sir, are a liar and a fiend.

I resemble that comment.

For many rp/rpi, eating, drinking and sleeping are already coded in. I am in favor of this as I think there would be alot of temptation not to eat. After all, food can weigh alot and take up alot of space in a pack. Maybe re-working the time code? I think it's1 hr in game to 5 mins irl. Maybe extend this to something longer?

I like having to eat in-game. I think it is a friendly reminder of the reality that is attempted to be brought to the game, even if it is a fantasy setting. That being said, perhaps it needs to be just that - a reminder. It's safe to assume that your character stops for a meal now and then and it does not necessarily need to be RP'd every time. What if the code that echoed hunger simply occurred less? This would present the opportunity to indulge the RP when the echo comes up instead of it being a very common, frequent annoyance as it is currently with the rate that it occurs.

Part of the problem seems to be that you can easily go from "You feel a mite peckish" to "You are STARVING" within the course of a single RP. Which might be realistic in the sense of how often people eat IRL, but since in-game a single conversation/RP that takes 1 hour IRL can actually last 12 hours...

Tamryn wrote:Part of the problem seems to be that you can easily go from "You feel a mite peckish" to "You are STARVING" within the course of a single RP. Which might be realistic in the sense of how often people eat IRL, but since in-game a single conversation/RP that takes 1 hour IRL can actually last 12 hours...

Having the hunger code trigger less often might illuminate the trend of it just so happening to occur during RP. What if it triggered once ever other RL day? The rest of the time it's safely assumed (or even done if you choose to - I have characters with sustenance rings that still opt to eat from time to time) that you character has eaten in the interim.

I think a change to taverns would be nice. This change would make it so that simply being in a tavern refilled your hunger meter; it is assumed that at some point, role-played explicitly or otherwise, that your character ate. The amount of coin food should really cost is trivial to most adventurers, and this would not take coin; if you wanted fancy food for props, that can take coin.

This would:
Enforce eating, but remove echoes/spam.
Make taverns more popular, like the Dagger wants to be.
Allow unhindered roleplay that moves more fluidly.
Still make people buy food for when adventuring, out on the trail, grinding, etc.





Edited because my suggestion didn't make a whole ton of sense the first time.

Could make hunger less of a burden and less full of spam by making it only take 1-2 food items of any sort fill a character, 1 drink from a waterskin. Not 5-6 the plates of pork, or the 10-15 pieces of fruit or the 4-5 drinks from a waterskin etc. I'm not a dainty eater but thats well beyond any sort of realism.

This change could be done relatively easily requiring just a small change without even altering the food value of every food item but would have to be done in code to alter the value what fully fed is.