At present, hunger is really quite complicated. It does its damage in weird scaling ticks that vary in rate from race to race. Eating different items of food provides an assortment of unreliable and difficult to track buffs (that may be abused horribly). Eating habits will affect your character’s weight - with most players trending toward skin and bones as a result. Gurgling stomachs can interrupt spellcasting, and sufficient hunger results in a penalty to strength, constitution, and dexterity.
Not only is this too complex and involved, it’s too harsh and arbitrary. Yes, player characters should need to eat (it’s part of the mudlib’s original vision). No, they shouldn’t die because they idled out. Yes, wolves should eat deer. No, peasants shouldn’t starve to death because their employer’s player went on vacation for a week.
What we need is a simpler system that motivates people to eat - requires them to eat if they want to play the game at all, but does not penalize them for periods of inactivity and does not require the balancing of quite so many variables.
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allaryin idea buff, crafting, hunger, stats
(This is a repost of some of my old notes on the move to using ‘recipes’ for the crafting system. It was originally imported into my personal blog in Dec of ‘06. I’ve not edited this from its original state, so odds are medium-high that these scribblings are entirely obsolete.)
Four categories of recipe difficulty: novice, apprentice, journeyman,
master. Each category corresponds to an equal 25% of the skill level range.
There should also be rare/unique type recipes that are only available to
high masters (like 90% or 95% skill). These recipes won’t be published in
the list here, but will wait for game implementation and will probably be
designed largely by the players.
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allaryin repost crafting, plans
(Wow. Of all of the old reposted posts… this is the only one to actually contain a disclaimer that it was already obsolete at the time it was originally posted. There are still a few shreds of ideas that I’d like to extract from here, but the whole notion that players would have to use “cook” and “chop” type verbs to prepare potions one step at a time has been completely replaced by the longstanding recipe system.)
Note: This document is old. The ideas herein have not yet been updated to bring them in sync with current plans for the game world.
The SIMud alchemy system will hopefully wind up being very interesting. It should allow players to experiment with a tremendous number of different ingredients and methods of preparing and combining the ingredients. There should probably be multiple combinations that result in similar potions.
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allaryin repost alchemy, crafting, magic, obsolete