The Drunken Lizard Pub

How about both in one? Wink

When its done right? Why not. The more complex the better....(So lets see....page 465 in the manual: How to Order a PinaColada at the local pub)

There was a Neverwinter Nights persistant world that I played on for a while, it had hunting for food and refillable canteens and such. If you had food, water and a tent when you camped you healed more HP during rest. I really liked the system as I played a Ranger so it added something to a class that usually just fell through the cracks.

I think having the extra survivability stuff makes it more interesting. Remember the definition of role playing, since you are assuming a role. Surviving is part of that role.

Yes. Its all about how well this features are implemented into the gaming world. They must fit seamless into the game, so the player dont have the feeling
of beeing forced to do something he think is boring or total unnecessary.

Unfortunately, even people who uphold RPG "virtues" still balk at survival stuff. For a lot of RPG players, the RP part is expressed soley in conversations with NPCs, the rest of the time is just game mechanics to facilitate the move to the next dialogue point.

That´s because there are no "Typical RPG-Gamers". Its an old story in this genre....everybody has a version of his "Perfect RPG" in mind.
We RPG-Gamers are a special kind of gamers! Especially the older ones...

I think what scares people from survivor stuff is that you have no idea what you will actually need....I remember in realms of arkania and you never really knew what each peaice did. So, to combat that problem I would suggest decent descriptions of what each peice is for. And you know what? It doesn't even have to be all that complicated....like a tent gives you better chance of healing etc....something like that should not be daunting to anyone who enjoys rpg's...since its harder to actually select a weapon:)

I've just read the initial question, not the whole thread, but since it's a "poll" type question I'll respond anyway...

I do not want realism in my RPGs. Instead, I want good gameplay. If feeding and watering a character can be made fun in a gameplay sense, then fine; but just as a realism hoop to jump through, it's a downer.

I think eating can be real fun, until it's not soo realistic.
Some rogue-like games were mentioned below (IVAN and ADOM), there the system were quite realistic, you could buy tons of supply in your town before your journey, but half the way all of it were rotten, and you become sick and poisoned if you ate them. You always had to look for possible food sources, eatable corpses, and it was a real stress, because when you didn't find any you starved quickly.

I think in a pleasent food system you could find much more food in your enviroment than you need to, and you have to only buy some while you are doing 'the talking quests' in a city, but there's plenty of cheap taverns to supply you. Outside some food could be found on humanoid creatures (gnolls, trolls, ogres don't know what do you plan ) and some could be also acquired from plants.

I think making a complicated cooking system is rather a waste of development in a game like this, it could be done much more simplier way, for example: every ingredients can be good for eating, good for alchimistic reasons, or both. Imagine that water can be good to please your thirst, but it is also essential to most of the potions for an alchimist, the better alchemy skill you have the better you can recognise what is eatable among the strangest food sources, this doesn't actually mean handycap for a non-alchemist character, he could easily live from bread and water, or pork, that he know he can eat, but he rather not try Mossy Heket Tounges out

I can't really imagine a perfect way of hunting critters, so I'd rather leave it. (Imagine a sorceress hunting... Casting a meteor shower on a poor bunny ) Naturally you can't eat during combat, and foods can heal only a minimum amount of life, and there should be a limit how many can you eat in a row... (Many games made fun of overeating )
It is really annoying when your character is a baby, and it must be fed in every 2 hours, I think eating once or twice a day is far enough, and every food should be a fed value, but keep it a really simple way... I only don't want to see a character well fed after a stawberry and after a chunk of pork meat as well

I was playhing Blades of Exile, recently released for free (check it out), and they have a pretty good way of handling it. You eat food as time passes, but you normally have more than you need. However, if you are resting all the time or just wandering around, your food supply will go down and you will start taking damage, and eventually die. Food isn't a pain to keep, but it does keep you from constantly sleeping or walking for months without stopping (like you can do in the Baldur's Gate series).

Also, I might have mentioned this, but I liked that in ADOM what you ate affected your stats (eating spiders poisened you but also built your resistance to poison).

Hi,

in a German RPG trilogy from the 90s ( its called "Die Nordland Triologie" and based on the P&P system DSA ) there was quit a nice Food/Drink-System.
On your characters status-screen there are 2 bars one for hunger and one for thirst. So your character had food rations( I hope thats the right English word ) and a leather bag for the water.
There was no cooking system or other complex things. There were 2 ways to get food 1. from a store or tavern 2. from hunting. And there was also only 1 type of food.
Water was only found in wells ore automatically restored when you reached a city.

I think this system was quit nice because when you enter a dungeon or start a long journey you have to be prepared.
So when you're in a dungeon , your way out is blocked, you have to dig your way through and the dice rolls that you will need 24h to do this then you can only hope that you have got enough food and water.



This is my first post in this forum. I hope you can understand me since English is not my first language.

Welcome to the forum Keratardon.

I´ve played the Nordland-Triologie too. The food/water system was quite nice and i liked it very much. Adds some complexity.

Welcome Keratardon-

That food/drink system sounds very much like what we will be putting into Book II. The main idea though is that death is almost impossible from failure to eat or drink, but your character will suffer decreased performance when he/she is very hungry. Likewise, when eating well, your character will have an increase resistance to disease and improved healing time.

I vote for having both but maybe I was meaning just the need of food.

I love the way you guys thinks of implementing it dying of hunger nearly impossible but dying of a small goblin because weak from lack of food...

Also I go along the comment from quasimodo...

quasimodo wrote:If the source of the food and water is always the same and is easy to get then there is not really any point to it. If you occasionally need to go hunting in the wilds for some food and water, and the search involves some combat, bargaining, moral choices and maybe the chance to find some loot or gain experience then it could add a lot to the game.

So yes a good food/water system... to show them all it is quite possible...

Rezo

These days -- well, probably since the inception of the cRPG genre -- I've felt that games have simply had a different focus than what food and water might provide for a game, so they've usually ended up coming off as more annoying than anything else. The point of the game is to kill things in spectacular fashion, and both the level-up treadmill game play and whatever story the game has involves characters quickly outstripping whatever humble origins they might have had, so what's really the point of food or water? Healing? A reduction of inventory space?

In a game where, for most if not all of the game, you have to make tough choices about spending those few coppers you just stole on an extra torch so you can explore that dark cave or a few extra rations so that you can make it to the next village without crippling hunger pains, then food and drink could add some valid game play elements, as well as drawing players further into the setting. But if the acquisition of food is only relevant for the first 10 minutes of the game, then it'll quickly become tiresome for me.... unless perhaps I'm faced with a choice of hunting for food and not starving later on in the game, and seriously ticking off the guardians of the Forest of Unshed Blood. There's got to be a point to food and water in the game other than just eating and drinking, IMO. It's got to add to the game play, as opposed to being there for the sake of "realism".

So yeah... am in agreement with those that think it could add something to a game. Just because I haven't seen it yet doesn't mean that it can't be done, after all. I think it'd need a game with a far less "epic" scope to both its story and game play, as well as a more adventure-oriented game than certainly the current crop of cRPGs (ie action RPGs) offer, but I think it could be done, too.