Let's get rid of hunger

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Originally Posted by Raerick

I would like to add that hunger probably shouldn't be a death sentence as it currently is. Hunger should be a factor in how healthy and energetic the character is on their long trek through Angband to slay Morgoth. Not everyday a banquet or the threat of starvation outweighing the threat of the enemies at hand. Right now hunger is effectively binary. You are either fainting or not. There is fundamentally no difference between FULL and HUNGRY or any of the the turn increments between full and fainting. If you weren't guaranteed death if you couldn't find food for too long, but merely had the risk of dying during an encounter increase due to being weakened, then you could avoid saving up food or scumming for it. It would become a calculated risk whether you kept your character well fed or not. All that would be left after that would be adjusting the availability of food to make that risk meaningfully weigh on the player. The current binary system makes food being plenteous necessary.

This is perhaps the most cogent discussion of the current food mechanic and suggestion for improvement that I have seen. Well said!

[Netbrian]

Originally Posted by Derakon

What do you want food to mean? How do you want it to be meaningful?

Broadly speaking, I'd like to remove it entirely. We need to keep in mind that if we want to add "meaningful hunger", it should enhance the game more than removing hunger and adding some other game mechanic instead. I'm skeptical of putting lots of effort into hunger to justify its existence.

That said, here's an idea I had in broad strokes --

1. No starvation/hunger penalties.
2. Instead, food gives you certain bonuses that eventually expire. "Bilbo's Delight" might let you see invisible at close range.
3. The bonuses expire immediately if you use an upstairs, or recall to town. The clock counts down the longer you stay on a level. The clock is reset when you go down a level.
4. Bonuses from more powerful meals are discouraged at shallower depths. It might be a soft mechanic (the clock runs out faster the shallower you are) or a hard one ("Gandalf's Gelatin" ceases to work at dlevels above 50.)
5. My preference is for bonuses that wouldn't be cumulative with good equipment. For instance, one food source might give you better rolls against paralysis. Once you have Free Action, you'd be encouraged to find a better food supply that gives you something relevant again.
6. A few ideas where you'd find food. I'm not sure you should be able to carry it with you. If you can, you don't want it to stack --
   1. A restaurant in the town (different recipes are either found as treasure or unlocked based on dlevel.)
   2. Found in the dungeon (orcish kitchen or something)
   3. Prepared by ranger/druid skills.

Edit -- I'd also have food speed up HP/SP regeneration too. Not enough to make a ton of difference in battles, but enough to reduce resting between battles.

[kandrc]

Any argument that claims that hunger adds something to the game, or that hunger should be modified to make it more realistic should be extended to include thirst, urination, and deification. Arguably thirst is far more important than hunger. A healthy person can survive literally weeks without food, but only a few days without water. And access to clean water is a far more important public health issue than access to food.

A character should require 8 pounds of water per day. Double that if the character is burdened, since they're sweating. Maybe double it for every turn that they are engaged in melee or magic as well.

And if you care so much about the realism and "flavor" that come from a hunger mechanic, then we definitely need food spoilage, unclean water, boiling and cooking, diarrhea and dysentery, etc.

Perhaps diarrhea penalizes a character with -6 to stealth and dysentery aggravates and gives an additional per-turn HP drain until the player receives antibiotics or magical healing and a shower.

I hope that this doesn't come across as too crass or too judgmental, but I honestly believe that these kinds of ridiculous mechanics are logical steps to follow from the pro-hunger arguments above.

There are reasons that novels and movies don't include narratives about characters' personal waste (except on the rare occasion where it drives the plot). It's not that it's uninteresting (even if it is). It's not that nobody cares (even if they don't). It's that it doesn't add anything to the story. Just like hunger in Angband. Increasing its tedium doesn't change that.

Get rid of hunger. Make it a birth option if people insist, but if you're going to do that, add a dysentery birth option for them, too.

[Raerick]

Originally Posted by kandrc

Any argument that claims that hunger adds something to the game, or that hunger should be modified to make it more realistic should be extended to include thirst, urination, and deification. Arguably thirst is far more important than hunger. A healthy person can survive literally weeks without food, but only a few days without water. And access to clean water is a far more important public health issue than access to food.

A character should require 8 pounds of water per day. Double that if the character is burdened, since they're sweating. Maybe double it for every turn that they are engaged in melee or magic as well.

And if you care so much about the realism and "flavor" that come from a hunger mechanic, then we definitely need food spoilage, unclean water, boiling and cooking, diarrhea and dysentery, etc.

Perhaps diarrhea penalizes a character with -6 to stealth and dysentery aggravates and gives an additional per-turn HP drain until the player receives antibiotics or magical healing and a shower.

I hope that this doesn't come across as too crass or too judgmental, but I honestly believe that these kinds of ridiculous mechanics are logical steps to follow from the pro-hunger arguments above.

There are reasons that novels and movies don't include narratives about characters' personal waste (except on the rare occasion where it drives the plot). It's not that it's uninteresting (even if it is). It's not that nobody cares (even if they don't). It's that it doesn't add anything to the story. Just like hunger in Angband. Increasing its tedium doesn't change that.

Get rid of hunger. Make it a birth option if people insist, but if you're going to do that, add a dysentery birth option for them, too.

By this logic I guess we should make wounds require extensive medical treatments if magical options aren't available or remove wounds entirely. Got to remove HP as well, can't have that acid breath being abstracted to point damage when we need to have actual acidic damage to layers of skin represented.

The argument that hunger either needs to be completely realistic without any abstraction or completely removed does not work. It is a cheap argument blind to its own hypocrisy. Whether thirst should be added or not or what thirst could add to the game is an entirely different argument to be had. I personally wouldn't be opposed to hunger and thirst being handled by a generalized meal system as long as there was some value to it.

[tangar]

Another 0.02$

It's quite easy to prevent scumming low lvls for food in option 'to remove food from town' (so player has to search for it in the dungeon); idea:
make loot drop from monsters only at appropriate lvls which are equal to player lvl, eg
- lvl 1 player could get loot anywhere
- lvl 10 player won't be able to find food at < -450 ft dungeons
- lvl 20 has to go deeper than -950 ft to get loot (aka food)

So simply speaking - make low lvls 'stale' for loot (& exp?) if you are overgrown them in lvls

This implemented in certain way in TomeNET IDDC when you reenter old lvl after relogin (I tell this to point out that it's not too hard to implement from coding point of view)

[Nick]

Originally Posted by Raerick

I would like to add that hunger probably shouldn't be a death sentence as it currently is. Hunger should be a factor in how healthy and energetic the character is on their long trek through Angband to slay Morgoth. Not everyday a banquet or the threat of starvation outweighing the threat of the enemies at hand. Right now hunger is effectively binary. You are either fainting or not. There is fundamentally no difference betweeen FULL and HUNGRY or any of the the turn increments between full and fainting. If you weren't guaranteed death if you couldn't find food for too long, but merely had the risk of dying during an encounter increase due to being weakened, then you could avoid saving up food or scumming for it. It would become a calculated risk whether you kept your character well fed or not. All that would be left after that would be adjusting the availability of food to make that risk meaningfully weigh on the player. The current binary system makes food being plenteous necessary.

I agree with Ingwe - this is seriously worth thinking about.

[Hounded]

Long-time lurker so forgive any presumption. I think my most memorable death was a Half-Troll Warrior who died of hunger because he couldn't get out of a corridor full of white lice (though that may have been back in Moria to be honest).

Personally I appreciate the dimension that hunger adds without consuming the whole mechanic. Yes it's a pain to worry about a commodity but who doesn't carry around a pile of {insert your preferred bulk consumable here} because it's what you've decided is a must-have. Food just happens to be less glamourous than Cure Potions.

I would lean towards-
* De-Buff Slow Digestion. It shouldn't permanently solve hunger.
* Reduce availability of Satisfy Hunger
* When HP are below maximum (ie. when healing) then increase the speed of the hunger clock.

I like the possibility of having degrees between Full & "About to Die" with some sort of actual impact on @'s performance but again, not sure it's really worth the effort. Hunger adds atmosphere but it's not critical.

[Carnivean]

A couple of years ago there was a poster that was introducing their son, age approximately 7, to Angband. Because the son was a new player to the game they had to stop and think about everything as it arose. Literally everything was new and wondrous to this child. Every thing you take away from the start of the game, every rite of passage that veteran players had and won't be there any more is something that future versions of this child won't be able to enjoy.

I look back at dying to an eye, literally starving to death, helpless from paralysation with some nostalgia. I want future players to be able to fail so poorly, though hopefully only once or twice. It's part of how we learn that the game is dangerous and complex.

Making starvation optional for seasoned players, or making it trivial to ignore from a game play perspective is good. Removing this experience is, in my opinion, a bad thing.

Originally Posted by kandrc

deification

Deification is already the point of the game! Defeat Morgoth, become a god.

[tangar]

1) it would be fun to have a new curse, which would increase hunger (opposite to slow digestion)
2) add trap of hunger, which would infuse you with such curse for certain amount of turns

Also if there is planned option to turn off hunger (already @ trac), maybe bring back gorged state? Lets it would give less mali, like -3 to speed (or progressive: from -1 to -10) and wouldn't be permanent: so it would stay gorged like 10 turns idle, then your character PUKE and become hungry It would solve problem with the need to 'R' for hunger to be able to drink pots at high lvls.

[Grotug]

I don't want to see hunger become a thing you constantly have to hunt for. I think it's fine as is as far as its availability, but what I would like is for the binariness of it to be removed. That is, when you become weak you should start to be affected by it (you regenerate slower) and when you become faint, instead of immediately entering periodic paralysis mode, you start to drain stats (STR and CON, with CON getting hit harder than STR (for every 3 loss to CON you lose 1 STR). After your STR drops to 3, then periodic paralysis sets in (same as it behaves now). This sort of stat drain should probably trump sustains, just as Time attacks do.

Some elements in a game don't have to be super interesting or super meaningful or super important, for their existence to be justified. I do not think hunger needs to be one or the other: a super-interesting/frequent problem or removed entirely. Hunger has a place in the game's flavor; in its history, but doesn't need to be a major character in the game (and for me it presents a meaningful drawback to playing half-troll warrior since I don't like scumming and so I find myself fainting fairly often!).

That said I'm open to the idea of having food and its purpose in the game be more interesting (Bilbo's Delight as a given example), but I don't want to see the possibility of starving completely removed!

I don't understand the desire to debuff slow digestion. You have to sacrifice something in order to gain slow digestion unless it happens to be on a great piece of kit. But no one is wearing rings of slow digestion over other rings; so why the need to debuff it? It's still a low priority piece of kit even when it almost completely stops the hunger clock. And I have no problem with hunger ceasing to be a concern in the late game due to having slow digestion. Again, I'm not of the belief that the challenge hunger presents in the game needs to be dramatically increased so that slow digestion is a more meaningful concern to the player. Not every aspect of the game needs to be a top concern/challenge. Just as not every resistance in the game needs to be top priority to have. Some things in the game are more important than others. rBase is more important than rPois which is more important than rLite; FrAct is more important than pConf which is more important than slow digestion.

Basically, hunger isn't a super interesting aspect to the game, but that doesn't mean it needs to be removed. I think Carnivean's point is a significant part of my argument.

For people against hunger for the bother of it, what about having the game automatically eat or read scrolls for @ periodically from @'s inventory? Or automatically satiate from food/scrolls on the ground when walked over? Could be added as a togglable game preference.