Let's get rid of hunger

[Derakon]

Originally Posted by Sky

As a bith option, yes, buth otherwise no. And no removing torch/lantern fuel either.

I don't think I've seen anyone argue that all light sources should be permanent. The light clock does introduce some interesting choices in the early game, and the consequences of running out of light aren't necessarily game-ending, they just make things a lot harder.

...hm, what if we still had a food clock, but you couldn't starve? Just make Weak apply some substantial debuffs (a flat -5 to all stats, maybe), but ditch the HP damage and periodic paralysis. It'd still be something you'd always want to avoid if at all possible, but running out wouldn't be an immediate death sentence. That would also open up space to play with how common food is, or how quickly the food clock runs down.

I do agree that having monsters that drain your food level is also worth exploring. Green Glutton Ghosts at minimum, Vampires too (gotta replenish that lost blood!), but possibly any monster/effect that drains XP could also make you hungrier.

[Moving Pictures]

Speaking as a guy who had at least one Ironman character die from hunger and another that came within a whisker of doing so ....

... please do not remove the hunger mechanic.

speaking as the recently-addicted rookie, let me try to explain.

It's taken me a bit to grasp that a major part of Angband is inventory choices. Do I keep dagger (a) or rapier (b)? Do I take the dwarven mail or stick with my elven armor? Oh, crap, I can't ditch that leather cap for the helm of telepathy because the cap is the only source of rPois... etc, etc.

Early game management requires juggling food, until scrolls come along. The bigger critters eat more food. (Kobolds eat little, i gather). Ironman troll? Better pack about 15 rations... it's part of the give-and-take.

In fact, I've already voiced my disappointment at the fact feature/class rangers get satisfy as the first castable spell. For me, this ruined one of the milestones of the game. (Along with when CLW becomes of little use; when CSW becomes of little use; when healing becomes the go-to potion, because CCW is now just a way of curing confusion or blindness; oh, a *rod* of TO, etc.)


I will not soon forget an early half-troll experiment (ironman) where I started chugging CLW just to stay alive, and mission objective shifted to finding food/scroll of satisfy/slime mold/slime mold juice.

Originally Posted by Sphara

Angband doesn't need a big overhaul like DCSS would, if food would be removed. Just removal of slow digestion and satisfy hunger scrolls and spell. Would probably keep mushrooms and e)at command still though.

Not so. Also remember that "slow digestion" is a magical item attribute. With the aforementioned seemingly ever-hungry trolls, an item with SDig is a key early-to-midgame find.

In fact, i'd like to see "satisfy hunger" as an item attribute.

[Derakon]

Originally Posted by Moving Pictures

Early game management requires juggling food, until scrolls come along. The bigger critters eat more food. (Kobolds eat little, i gather). Ironman troll? Better pack about 15 rations... it's part of the give-and-take.

Not to discount your very valid opinion, but just to clarify on game mechanics: everyone eats the same amount, but regeneration makes you get hungry faster. So half-trolls will need more food than other races, up until those other races find sources of regeneration themselves.

[EpicMan]

What if you did not regenerate at all while hungry? Then food is a clock on your current run, unless/until you have so many Cure X wounds potions you can ditch it altogether. This could potentially break ironman, unless you made food more plentiful.

But simply removing hunger would be less of a gameplay change than making it meaningful. Yes, it frees a pack slot, but less slots than no-selling did.

And while it technically is making the game easier, it is not going to be a significant difference in ~99% of games (excluding ironman, though apparently not a huge difference there). Plus, the new classes sound like they have been limited, which will more than make up for it.

I would guess making this an option (and default to it) would find it more popular than no-selling. But if you make it an option and it proves to be too unpopular, it's easy to switch back.

[wobbly]

You could make it an adjustable number, hunger-rate, with 0 as off. Then people who want a tougher food clock for ironman can go the other direction.

[bio_hazard]

Hobbits should be always hungry. Semi-serious suggestion.

And sort of along the lines of Derakon's suggestion, hunger could be distracting, e.g. increase spell fail rate, to hit, and stealth.

[Carnivean]

Part of the problem with proposals like this is that they entirely discount the beginner player. They don't know what is good and what isn't and having to buy food rations before descending into the dungeon is a decent part of the immersion. Removing a "boring" mechanic discounts this immersion, which leads to my next point.

Another part of the problem is that you are reducing the Angband experience to which weapons do I use. Angband is a rich environment and that differentiates it from hack and slash games like Diablo. If you remove the complicating factors then you reduce the experience and you remove any differentiators between it and a more graphically rich experience.

Angband should not be for the speed runners alone.

[bunnies]

Ideas for modifying the negative effects of hunger are well and good, but I feel the key issue here is addressing the availability of food.

In Rogue, hunger was an interesting mechanic because food was scarce, and dying to hunger was a very real problem. I constantly had to make the decision whether to explore the rest of the level for food/loot or take the down staircase immediately.

Angband took the hunger mechanic, but greatly increased the availability of food turning it into an uninteresting and boring nuisance. For a non-ironman game, hunger doesn't translate well because of the presence of Recall scrolls. Regardless of whatever negative effects there may be, I can simply Recall back to town and remove hunger. For an ironman game, the drop rate of hunger removal items are so common that apparently you can just eat off the floor. Even then, in current stable version 5/6 classes have Satisfy Hunger in their spellbooks.

From the discussion in this thread, I believe I can say that most people agree that hunger adds flavour, but leads to very few meaningful decisions.

To "fix" it and turn it back into a meaningful mechanic, there are some steps that can be taken:

1. Limit the availability of hunger removal items. This might include food being an uncommon item in shops, and lowering drop rates in the dungeon
2. Modify the tempo of the hunger clock to make it interesting
3. Modify the negative effect of hunger

I believe the question then boils down to: is this the direction we want? Do we want to "fix" the mechanic, remove it entirely, or leave it alone in it's useless but admittedly flavourful state?

[Sphara]

Out of roguelikes I've played, NetHack and ADOM had more challenging food mechanic. Both games feature corpse-eating, negative/positive effects from eating, B/U/C status of food to name few. Food is also relatively more expensive in both games. In Brogue, which I haven't played a lot, food represents a bullt-in game timer. None of these features, except more expensive food, are realistically doable in Angband.

Food eating/nutrition lowering attacks for some monsters might be worth a shot if the community here wants to keep the nutrition timer around and wants it to have actual gameplay effect.

Satisfy Hunger scrolls come in big stacks for some reason and having it as an early spell for many classes doesn't help either. To top that, a ration costs 3gp which makes the hunger non-issue from turn 0 (if a player wants this).

Glutton ghost might be the only monster that can make a serious effect on a player if you have no way to detect it and you keep getting bad RNG out of its random movement.

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by Nick

It has always been a feature that the aim of Angband is to kill Morgoth, but that there's more than one way to do that. I want to be broadening the space of possible game trajectories, and I feel that removing mechanics like hunger is narrowing it.

To me Angband has two main places where player decisions are important.

The first is in tactical battles. Mostly in whether or not to engage and when to run away. But also in consumable use and deciding how to defeat specific monsters. To me this is actually the bread and butter of angband, and we should be very leery about removing things that reduce tactical complexity, and strongly consider adding things that improve it. Luckily there are tons of possibilities here. Food (and fuel) have no effect on tactical gameplay.

The second area is in inventory management. What to take with you when you descend into the dungeon and what to leave behind. This, obviously, gets much harder in ironman and IMO is the main difficulty spike (secondary difficulty is lack of access to town shops, third difficulty is forced descent which to me isn't really an increase in difficulty at all except in cases of Deep Descent scrolls). Food (and fuel) do affect the difficulty here by removing a slot, really only in ironman though. Even then, fuel only matters until you find a good artifact light, and food is irrelevant once you've ID'd !salt water. Personally I don't find dying by hunger or lack of light interesting in any game, since it just means you were very unlucky in drops, but I can see why some people might find it interesting.

My recommendation is to prune back things that don't have a strong impact on tactical gameplay. And if the goal is to improve the difficulty of inventory management, I think there are better ways to do that. For example, reducing artifact spawn rate would affect that a lot more than the one slot you devote to satisfy hunger scrolls.

However, I'll also note that pressuring inventory is directly opposed in a way to improving tactical options. A player who can carry tons of status effect wands has a lot more options on which battles to fight and how to engage than one that has to drop them because their inventory is full. Since I think that tactical gameplay is really the bread and butter of angband rather than the inventory management, I'd much rather see an increase in tactical breadth rather than tightening inventory controls.