SURVIVAL IN RPGS: HUNGER, AMMO, SLEEP AND PORN WITHDRAWAL.

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Nightowl
Remember when I actually used to make games? Me neither.
1577
So RMN, after I've played Fallout: New Vegas for a while, what's your opinion on survival elements in RPGs? Y'know, like having to eat, sleep and watch porn in order to prevent insanity.
I'm planning to add some sort of hunger/thirst system to my game, and I'm wondering if RMN playerbase would tolerate having to stop, eat and rest ingame instead of just straightforward JRPG gameplay consisting of just moving from place to another.
Not only food would fend off hunger, but it would also restore MP (You can't eat a huge gourmet dinner during battle, though. The enemies are not going to sit and wait until you have finished your lunch.)

So, what's your opinion on this?
I liked it in Minecraft. But not in New Vegas. I don't know why, it really depends on the game though. I did like that in Fallout food did relatively little for health, you needed to rest or use a stimpack or something. Because food doesn't really heal people, does it?
Caz
LET'SBIAN DO THIS.
6813
As I was playing through Fallout, I found the food/water system to be just clunky and irritating. There was no real benefit to doing it other than.. y'know, not dying. While that's nice and fitting in the post-war setting, it was just far too easy to get water and way, WAY too easy to get rid of radiation poisoning afterwards.

In Skyrim, they chose to make food curative instead. This was great, other than the fact that I'm an idiot who never carries potions. Therefore, I'd tell the dragon to stop shooting fireballs at me for just a moment so I could down 28 potatoes, 3 cheese wheels and a couple bottles of wine for good measure before I jumped to my feet to fight him again.

I dislike systems that punish you for not eating, and much prefer ones that reward you for doing it instead. Like, it's okay not to eat and nothing bad will happen if your characters go without food, but they'd be much better and get huge buffs if they ate. For example if they ate a protein dish, perhaps they'd have a huge boost to strength for an in-game day and wouldn't be able to eat again until tomorrow. For stuff like this, I recommend you take a look at Haven & Hearth or Salem. They had a system that slowly starved you unless you ate (it was outrageously difficult to find a stable supply of food) and you could only eat so much. Your stats would very slowly improve depending on what you ate too.

If you're trying to go for something more realistic (which you probably are if you intend to include such a degree of survival), take a look at The Sims games. Those are a game in themselves just taking care of people's needs. To add an RPG onto the top of that may become slightly more cumbersome to the player. Think about what's fun to play, and what's not just a chore to do (see my complaints over Fallout). Remember this is a game, and should ultimately provide either fun or some kind of experience that can be enjoyed overall.
Nightowl
Remember when I actually used to make games? Me neither.
1577
Recovering from a gunshot wound by eating a salisbury steak doesn't really make sense to me, unless it's a burrito injected with medical stuff that heals you.

But okay, I suppose I'll add food and keep them as some sort of stat-boosting items.
Caz
LET'SBIAN DO THIS.
6813
Yes, I loved rubbing cheese on my burn wounds after every fight with a dragon. It's magical cheese, after all!

This is just my two cents though. Some people might enjoy unrealistic elements of gameplay and overlook them for the sake of it all tying together better. Like maybe someone dislikes the idea of magic in their game, and so refuses to have "potions" as such.. but they'd much rather have some nice noodles to heal their character!
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15150
Caz
If you're trying to go for something more realistic (which you probably are if you intend to include such a degree of survival), take a look at The Sims games. Those are a game in themselves just taking care of people's needs. To add an RPG onto the top of that may become slightly more cumbersome to the player. Think about what's fun to play, and what's not just a chore to do (see my complaints over Fallout). Remember this is a game, and should ultimately provide either fun or some kind of experience that can be enjoyed overall.

The Sims 3 is basically an RPG. It has races, classes, special abilities, ancient tombs to explore, fight clubs, buffs/debuffs, XP, perks to purchase, bases to build, etc. I'm not even kidding, you can play ETERNAL ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE or INDIANA JONES or GHOSTBUSTERS (with the right expansion packs, natch).

TS3 handles food/pissing/drinking in a fairly simple way: almost any meal will fully restore, or almost fully restore, your Hunger meter. If it's just a slice of toast with jam, that's it -- your Hunger is restored. If it's something properly cooked, and even moreso if it was made with good ingredients (that you can grow yourself and become better at growing), you'll get a long-lasting mood buff. Even then there's some flexibility; a frat boy making some macaroni and cheese is going to be +5 mood, while a professional chef's key lime pie might be +35. If the Hunger meter gets really low, you'll start getting debuffs negatively affecting your mood and causing your Sim to seek out food autonomously.

Pissing and hygiene are simpler: if they're low, you get a debuff saying "hi please find a toilet" and your Sim gets a debuff due to being uncomfortable. There are no positive moods related to urination, although high hygiene will cause you to feel "squeaky clean," and brushing your teeth provides a long-lasting +5 mood boost. Sims with low hygiene will negatively affect the mood of nearby Sims as well as themselves, and social interaction will suffer.

Thirst isn't a need in TS3, but you can drink alcohol at various bars and different effects. Woohoo on the Beach will make romantic interactions more successful for a while, while a Big Mistake will temporarily seize control of your Sim and make them do things they normally wouldn't. (Heh.)

EDIT: Energy is the biggest influence on mood, and can only be reliably restored by sleeping. Not sleeping will plummet your Sim's mood, and they'll refuse to do absolutely anything productive or reasonable. :END EDIT

A Sim's mood affects everything that they try to do -- Sims in a bad mood wouldn't be able to learn new skills as quickly, or interact with people successfully, or properly craft a perfect wine.

Going to repeat this again:

Caz
Think about what's fun to play, and what's not just a chore to do (see my complaints over Fallout). Remember this is a game, and should ultimately provide either fun or some kind of experience that can be enjoyed overall.
Nightowl
Remember when I actually used to make games? Me neither.
1577
author=Caz
Like maybe someone dislikes the idea of magic in their game, and so refuses to have "potions" as such.. but they'd much rather have some nice noodles to heal their character!

That's why we have medkits that somehow disappear and restore your health when you touch them.
author=Nightowl
Recovering from a gunshot wound by eating a salisbury steak doesn't really make sense to me, unless it's a burrito injected with medical stuff that heals you.

author=Nightowl
burrito injected with medical stuff

You have to do this now.

Also, I enjoyed how the original dark cloud played on thirst. Your thirst bar would go down whilst you were in a dungeon, drinking water would refill it and when it emptied you would start losing health. Along with the dehydration debuff (not sure if this was only in DC2 (they removed thirst) or an enemy only debuff) that meant you could not eat until you drank some water. Eating healed you in that game though :/

Edit: In line with many of the other opinions, try also adding a buff or something when thirst is over x%, could be interesting.
In principle I kinda like systems like this in game. But more often than not it's an annoying hassle. Either it is like in New Vegas where it doesn't affect the game in much of a meaningful way (chew on some plants every now and then when the hunger meter goes up. Also I don't know how you say food didn't heal in New Vegas, I used food items almost exclusively for healing) or it basically kills you and is the focus of the game.

However, as I said, in principle I really like the idea of stocking up on supplies in order to make it in the world. Making the world even more dangerous (remove random encounters, throw in starvation instead!). Maybe it could be a more numerical thing where you basically have to buy supplies to travel. So that when traveling between areas you basically can't do it until you've stocked up properly. (having to make supply stops along the way and planning routes and whatnot) Though that is a completely different game.
slash
APATHY IS FOR COWARDS
4158
If you design your game around a system like hunger/thirst you can create an exciting experience - but tacking it at the end makes it feel like more of a hassle or chore instead of a mechanic that adds to the experience.

If your game is about survival, hunger/thirst adds a ton to the experience. Say you're on a desert island and you have no equipment, no survival skills, no idea where to start looking, and you see a slowly ticking hunger/thirst meter. You're going to panic a little - which is the entire point. Later on when you're King of the Jungle eating roast boar legs and loaded with a campsite, weapons and food, you can look back at that health meter and laugh, because you conquered the jungle. Bam, the game has successfully given you a sincere feeling of accomplishment. Minecraft pulled this off well enough, and I'm pretty sure the new Don't Starve game is based around this idea.

In fact, one of my best MC experiences was using a world-seed that dropped you on an island in the middle of the ocean on a small island with only a tree and a few bushes and no animals/mobs. It was a blast to desperately work the land to grow food before I starved and eventually I made an enormous garden and finally set off for mainland :)

But just imagine tacking on those same meters on another game, say Skyrim. Let's say you had to eat food and drink water to stay alive. Skyrim isn't really about survival, it's about becoming a hero. You can get well-equipped pretty quickly in Skyrim, food is just lying around waiting to be stolen or looted and water is plentiful enough with all the rivers. After that initial period of being underfed, you'd have to deal with food/water for the rest of the game, during dungeon crawls and fights, and it would feel irritating, rather than fun or important. Once it's no longer a challenge, a system feels like a chore. If you heavily redesigned Skyrim, you could make hunger/thirst fun, but it would change the core of the game from "Becoming a Hero" to "Surviving in the World".

---

Anyway to sum it up, if your game is about struggle and survival, a hunger/thirst meter can add a lot to the experience. Otherwise you gotta take a careful look because tacking it on carelessly would be a huge mistake.
River City Ransom ftw

Egg Roll of +6 Stamina & +1 Def
I've hated almost every kind of hunger system in every game I've seen it in. I'd say I hate them all but I can't remember every one, so it's possible one of them was ok.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Just don't do it like Nethack. I hated that. The only way to find food in Nethack was to explore new areas (which tended to not have food), or kill things and eat their corpses (which tended to poison you). So depending on how fast and skilled (and lucky) you were, there was just a hard line between "food is a non-issue" and "you starved to death and could not have possibly avoided it" with nothing in-between.

I generally feel like resources that cause you to no longer be able to fight (or even to instantly die) when you run out of are kinda dumb, unless you can instantly teleport back to town/base and restore (and maybe have other methods of restoring). The goal is to limit (or soft-limit) the amount of time you can spend in a dungeon before you have to leave, but no one wants to get a game over because they timed their departure wrong. That sucks. Let the player leave after they run out of MP or ammo or food, don't make them guess the number of random battles they'll get into on the way back out of the dungeon.

If you do it right, you can create a pretty enjoyable system (for certain kinds of players, anyway) where the player feels like increasing their Max MP is actually a seriously useful upgrade because it lets them dive deeper into the dungeon. Etrian Odyssey games do this really well - the resouces you have to manage in Etrian Odyssey are MP, healing items, and stamina to gather resources from mining/woodcutting/herbpicking points in the dungeon. Unfortunately, if you do it wrong, you create a really unforgiving system that kills the player for poor planning he did hours earlier when he had no way to predict what he would need, and doesn't really add any fun to the game because the only way to make sure you beat the system is to go back to town and restock after every single battle, which is boring and lame.
Nightowl
Remember when I actually used to make games? Me neither.
1577
I suppose I'll add a different hunger system, where you don't have to eat but get significant boosts if you do. There will be a need to sleep, however, and if the entire party passes out, they will end up either in a random place or jail, depending on the place.
Food also restores MP (or stamina, as it's called in the game) and it's fairly cheap compared to potions that instantly restore stamina (although less effective)

As for explaining why the characters don't necessarily have to go find some proper food, well, I guess I'll have some obligatory interrupting NPC give the main character a machine that dispenses edible white shit that keeps them alive.

I think I'm going to scrap the need to carry ammunition. I suppose having to reload them and fix them is enough already?
(The weapons don't instantly break randomly, they just degrade slowly every time you use them. They don't also suddenly disappear from your inventory if you forget to repair them, so there won't be that "FFFUUUCK, I FORGOT TO REPAIR MY ONE-OF-A-KIND SWORD, SO IT BROKE AND DISAPPEARED PERMANENTLY" moment)
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
I love the idea of staying awake too long, passing out, and waking up in a turkish bordello or a cage fight or something
author=Nightowl
"FFFUUUCK, I FORGOT TO REPAIR MY ONE-OF-A-KIND SWORD, SO IT BROKE AND DISAPPEARED PERMANENTLY" moment)


The other problem with Dark Cloud xD

author=LockeZ
I love the idea of staying awake too long, passing out, and waking up in a turkish bordello or a cage fight or something


I want to see this done in a game, somewhere, sometime
Nightowl
Remember when I actually used to make games? Me neither.
1577
You could find yourself in Dolan the Archaic Robe Duck's house after passing out.

(ps copyright'd idea no steal kthxbai)


That idea is now mine, also I think the parrot might have killed people, look at his eyes.

You could totally have it instead of a game over screen, you just end up locked in dolan's house until you quit the game, with a forced save overwrite as you teleport in.
Caz
LET'SBIAN DO THIS.
6813
author=LockeZ
I love the idea of staying awake too long, passing out, and waking up in a turkish bordello or a cage fight or something


And he's not talking about video games!
Ideally, things should be implemented in a way that makes sense to the character in the world, and not just the player at the controller. Panic-strafing around a group of enemies while munching on every item of food in your inventory doesn't make a lot of sense. "I just got shot. Potato and Onion, GO!" Unless of course they were to wedge the potato into the gunshot wound... and make a poultice with the onion?
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