Let's get rid of hunger

[Raerick]

I would like for hunger to mean more rather than ever be removed. Such as rations/satisfy hunger not being quite as filling as they are and impairing stats/slowing HP and SP regen when hungry. Satisfy hunger in particular is just too powerful whether in spell or scroll form. I think it should instead take you to a few hundred above hungry rather than completely filling you up and it shouldn't stack above that point.

Slow digestion should also be changed to simply slowing the rate of fullness depletion rather than being effectively never eat again, or slow digestion should be changed to magical satiation.

If hunger mattered more and rations/satisfy hunger were nerfed then the fullness gained by mushrooms could also be buffed a bit along with having some of the weaker mushrooms be more common (especially on cavern levels.)

[Derakon]

In order for hunger to be meaningful, it has to change player behavior in an interesting way. Just increasing the mechanical consequences isn't enough if the player just says "OK, now I have to recall to town more often to stock up on food". You want the player to be taking their food supply and hunger level into account at a deeper level.

I think that means that probably the General Store has to go in its entirety, or at least it can't sell food any more -- either way, it's weird to have the possibility of the player starving to death when the town exists. You also need to make sure that the player can't trivially scum level 1 for food, or else that becomes the new "go to the General Store to stock up on food", just more tedious. So maybe food only gets generated the first time you visit a dungeon depth? That's basically how Rogue worked, isn't it? Very gamey and non-simulationist but it'd probably work.

I guess you could also do things like, food cannot be carried, only eaten immediately on being touched, so that the player can't carry tens of thousands of turns' worth of food in their packs. But then you would also probably want to make it so the player isn't discouraged from walking on food tiles when they aren't hungry, so "food" then becomes a resource you automatically replenish by exploring the dungeon...it just ends up being very strange, very fast.

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

[HallucinationMushroom]

After you guys end hunger I hope you tackle world peace.

[Nick]

After you guys end hunger I hope you tackle world peace.

Well, you can win Sil as a pacifist...

[Adam]

In order for hunger to be meaningful, it has to change player behavior in an interesting way. Just increasing the mechanical consequences isn't enough if the player just says "OK, now I have to recall to town more often to stock up on food". You want the player to be taking their food supply and hunger level into account at a deeper level.

I think that means that probably the General Store has to go in its entirety, or at least it can't sell food any more -- either way, it's weird to have the possibility of the player starving to death when the town exists. You also need to make sure that the player can't trivially scum level 1 for food, or else that becomes the new "go to the General Store to stock up on food", just more tedious. So maybe food only gets generated the first time you visit a dungeon depth? That's basically how Rogue worked, isn't it? Very gamey and non-simulationist but it'd probably work.

I guess you could also do things like, food cannot be carried, only eaten immediately on being touched, so that the player can't carry tens of thousands of turns' worth of food in their packs. But then you would also probably want to make it so the player isn't discouraged from walking on food tiles when they aren't hungry, so "food" then becomes a resource you automatically replenish by exploring the dungeon...it just ends up being very strange, very fast.

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

Just ideas, i don't know how they fit into the game mechanics...
You can make food rot with time. Rotten food can't be eaten or has x% chance acting like salt water or other negative effects (- to hit/speed/etc for some time). Orcs/trolls don't care about food being rotten but can't eat elvish bread (or it acts the same as rotten food for humans). I know this brings the problem of auto-merging food when you step on it (but we have the same for torches). But at least you couldn't carry food forever.
In some games being full meant higher chance to hit as i remember (Ishar for example). That could also be added. As below said satisfy hunger should not make you full.

Currently food does not bring anything interesting to the game for me. I eat in the town, bring 2-3 food/scroll when going into the dungeon and when i need the inventory slot i eat again or drop them. I did not try the new classes though. The best way in my opinion is to add it as a birth option.

[wobbly]

Civil war + Famine + Corruption = 1000 Au tins of spaghetti from the BM.

More serious I don't think you're going to make food interesting without making it "the game" aka. Unreal World or gimmicky aka. Nethack.

I'd be more interested in a balance that accepts food is not a real concern with ?WOR & balance it around Ironman play. Balance it as a restriction on the rest command where you pretty much have ample time to rest but not to go overboard.

[tangar]

Roguelike gamedesign: food problem

Let's remember Frodo who went to Mordor from Lothlorien. He got limited supplies and he should be causious with them. It was fun

1) Food is a resource which slowly depleted (the same as light); it works differently in compare to other sources, like HP (which depleted very fast, but only during the battle).

2) With such long-term resources there should be rare occasions which brings 'crysis' to it. There are RNG events which could drain this resource at once: mobs EAT_FOOD, traps; and also draining it's more slowly - curses, wearing powerful items (magical rings in Nethack). The more different events like this - the better (I mean diversity). Some of them should be higly unpredicted.

Considering RNG - it would be great to add ego monsters, like it's implemented in TomeNET. Please Nick, check this out. And among such monster could be 'hungry' mobs. So occasionally even simple orc could EAT_FOOD from you.

3) Town is a place to restock food. Of course, making player to go there too often is bad; but please remember that recalling to the dungeon every now and then increasing risks (you could appear in the middle of 'bad lvl'). Anyway, player should be able to get certain amount of food in town to be able to solve RNG 'crysis' (the same way as we buy healing potions), but not have too much of it to become bored (that's why I recently made an experimental price x100 on satisfy hunger scrolls (for BM) and removed them from sale @ PWMA).

The question is: how to make player 'search' for food while in the dungeon. In IronMan mode it's quite clear, but in regular mode with unlimited WoR mechanics it could bring additional food 'grind' to the game. So if we would apply nethack approach and would make food to rot in time (in Angband it could be made like this: let's it just looses 'turns' in time) - player would have to return to dungeon more often.. It could be solved by making WoR scrolls more limited resource too.. But it would make players to have boring walk long way by stairs sometimes.. So it's quote complex issue.

Ok. Why not to remove food from town?! Logic: it's dire time, war with Morgoth is going on, 1kg of gold cost less than 1kg of wheat. So shortage is quite logical. It bring the game closer to 'ironman' experience, but as you still could recall back to town, it's not an ironman!..

I'll try to test it @ my PWMA server and would report there after a while Hunger is comming (tm)

[Sky]

I would genuinely stop playing if food was changed into forced descent.

[tangar]

Why to force? It could be just an option :P But it's pretty easy to customize it right now with great .txt configs (already did it for PWMA)

Also wanna add some more radical thingy: what about to give possibility to eat corpses? (it's a pity there is no CHA... eating corpse could be fun way to 'play' with it). Maybe eating corpses could give different effects? (from slow & confusion when eating foul trolls to speed&hallucinations bonus by eating magical mushrooms).

Also if you play 'fair' race/class (elfs, dwards, paladin, priest etc) - give more long-term debuffs.. (so hobbit who would eat corpses would become Gollum-like: stupid (-int, -wis), but dexterious)..

In PWMA there are already corpses implemented for Necromant class.. (but no eating yet lol). So it looks like at least as not impossilbe to implement

I understand that Angband probably should preserve traditional features and has it's own way, which I'm ignorant yet, as I'm new in this community.. But still wanna join brainstorm =)

[Raerick]

In order for hunger to be meaningful, it has to change player behavior in an interesting way. Just increasing the mechanical consequences isn't enough if the player just says "OK, now I have to recall to town more often to stock up on food". You want the player to be taking their food supply and hunger level into account at a deeper level.

I think that means that probably the General Store has to go in its entirety, or at least it can't sell food any more -- either way, it's weird to have the possibility of the player starving to death when the town exists. You also need to make sure that the player can't trivially scum level 1 for food, or else that becomes the new "go to the General Store to stock up on food", just more tedious. So maybe food only gets generated the first time you visit a dungeon depth? That's basically how Rogue worked, isn't it? Very gamey and non-simulationist but it'd probably work.

I guess you could also do things like, food cannot be carried, only eaten immediately on being touched, so that the player can't carry tens of thousands of turns' worth of food in their packs. But then you would also probably want to make it so the player isn't discouraged from walking on food tiles when they aren't hungry, so "food" then becomes a resource you automatically replenish by exploring the dungeon...it just ends up being very strange, very fast.

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

As for avoiding scumming for food that is never going to happen with anything that is useful to a player unless that player refuses to scum. You can't both make food meaningful without also raising the likeliness that a player will scum for it. Making something ubiquitous or meaningless to avoid scumming really isn't a good solution.

Removing the general store sounds like a terrible idea to me and in fact I think the stores need some work in general to make them more useful in the long run, but that is a different subject. If food was harder/impossible to get in town or the food in town was weaker, then having the adventurer parties encountered in the dungeon have a chance to drop food wouldn't be that hard of a change to make. Those are encountered at a reasonable rate without the need to scum levels.

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.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

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]

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]

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)