Candy and the like

[EkarusRyndren]

So being an adult I can make the horrible decision to eat nothing but candy for a day. Which brings me to this, I’m sure we’ve all had a game or two where we’ve been forced to eat nothing but junk-food for a day (possibly longer)

I would like to suggest an invisible usage monitor on anything labeled “Junk Food” and give a nausea condition after “ODing” on it. Possibly lead to vomiting as well in later stages. Plus it’d go well with the pepto… Obviously you’d know when you’re starting to ‘get sick’ from it, (EG “You’re starting to feel queasy from all the candy, this might have been a bad idea…” “You vomit, maybe eating all that candy was a bad idea” etc)

Another thing that might add another scale of difficulty to the game is a separate usage monitor, I personally love pizza, but after three days of nothing but pizza I’m gonna be bloody sick of it, rather want something else to eat, not the “side effects” Personally, late game for me usually involves eating from a small mountain of Mannwurst endlessly, same thing, every day, followed up with some water. In a nutshell what I’m suggesting here is a “Tired of eating the same old food” and “Tired of the same old booze drink” morale condition that progressively gets worse as you eat and drink the same crap every day. Ideally it’d work like the rest of the other morale conditions so you couldn’t just sneak in a unit of candy and get back to your mannwurst, water, and vitamins diet.

Thoughts?

[Luissen]

while adding to difficulty, it makes sense, and its reasonable. I wouldn’t want to become unable to cook as a result, but I’d say a capped and growing penalty would be interesting

[kevin.granade]

I’ve been planning on doing the, “eating/using/reading the same thing over and over again makes you sick of it” thing for a while now, just a matter of getting around to it, or maybe someone else will step in.

Basically the system would be like this, we’d maintain a list of all items that have a morale modifier and their effective modifier. Each time you use one, it has a chance of ticking the morale modifier down, and periodically we go over the whole list and tick it back up again. It should be fairly easy to rotate just a little bit to keep the morale penalties from decaying too much, but if you literally only have one or two things to eat it’ll be a problem.

Along with this, we could have a randomly-generated set of likes and dislikes for various items that adjust how much a particular character likes a particular thing, and might also influence the chance for you getting sick of it, so maybe you reallly like beef jerkey, so you don’t get tired of it unless it’s literally all you eat. Traits could also play into this, like gourmand and (new) picky eater.

I’ve wanted to do this since whalesdev days, but haven’t gotten around to it ;_;

The junk food thing might be reasonable, currently the only impact for eating just junkfood is invisible (low health stat -> get sick a lot), a more visible indication might be a good ide. Warning though, booze is also junk food, so this would likely have even higher impact than you think it would…

[Mrnocamera]

But… But that means I can’t just eat whole pizza’s and wash them down with vodka…

NOOOOOOOOOOO!

[GlyphGryph]

Disapprove. Candy is the food of kings for calorie starved survivors! The weird health hit is already bad enough. (I could see more nutritional food giving a health BENEFIT, but a health penalty for sugar is weird)

[i2amroy]

Along with this, we could have a randomly-generated set of likes and dislikes for various items that adjust how much a particular character likes a particular thing, and might also influence the chance for you getting sick of it, so maybe you reallly like beef jerkey, so you don’t get tired of it unless it’s literally all you eat. Traits could also play into this, like gourmand and (new) picky eater.

It would be nice to tie this into some sort of system that would allow players to choose what they like/dislike. Maybe give each player X amount of “like” points, completely separate from other point systems, that could be spent or gained to alter your likes/dislikes. There could also then be a “random” option that would just randomly place these points into different categories. This would also serve to give the player feedback on their actual likes and dislikes without forcing them into experimentation, and would allow for an easy base to create changing preferences over time.

Disapprove. Candy is the food of kings for calorie starved survivors! The weird health hit is already bad enough. (I could see more nutritional food giving a health BENEFIT, but a health penalty for sugar is weird)

I do agree that the health system could probably use a bit of a rework to something slightly more sensible and wide reaching (it already has some other effects then just getting sick in the experimental, notably infection recovery chance and fungal infection resistance).

[Hyena_Grin]

It’s worth noting that food doesn’t have to make you happy to be beneficial.

See: protein drinks.

I really like the idea of continuously eating the same things lowering the morale boost you get from them. This seems particularly needed for the renewable foods like meat chunks. It’s pretty easy to surround your house with spike pits and then collect the meat every morning. Just live off nothing but cooked meat. And the morale bonus you get from it is pretty huge. I think I’d get sick of nothing but meat after not terribly long. Mind you; it’d still fill you up. It just might not give you the morale boost it used to. It may even get so bad that you eventually start to resent your meaty diet. I think that’s a good thing because it gives you an excuse to keep foraging and exploring.

I’d also like to throw it out there that your hunger level should impact the morale bonus of food. If you are starving, a steak is going to do more for your mood than if you’re just a little hungry. Obviously this means that you could just wait until you’re starving to get the most out of your food, but since high levels of hunger and thirst have negative impacts on your character I think it’d balance out.

[GlyphGryph]

It would be nice to tie this into some sort of system that would allow players to choose what they like/dislike.

Did I ever share with you the proposal I had for this system? I thought it was pretty good. If someone goes to implement this, I would like to dig it up first and run it by them.

Basically, though, you had a pile of default preferences you could use, and they could be set to “Loves/Likes/Neutral/Dislikes/Abhors”, and each would have a default value. Every move towards “Loves” would cost a point, and every two moves towards “Abhors” (across all stats) would grant a point. Some things may have a max they can go in one direction or the other, if it’s easy to avoid or find and balance requires a cap.

It would still require diminishing returns for repetition in order to avoid extreme minmaxing, but it could easily cover things like rain and cannablism.

Music: Loves -> Likes (.5 points gained, reduces morale benefit of music)
Reading: Likes -> Abhors (1.5 points gained, severe morale penalty from reading books, esp. skillbooks)
Candy: Likes -> Dislikes (severe morale penalty for eating, 1 point gained)
Porn: Likes -> Neutral (.5 points gained, maximum drop since it’s trivial to avoid)
Rain: Dislikes -> Abhors (.5 points)
Cannibalism: Abhors -> Loves (costs 4 points, with the points gained from changing the above values, big morale boost from cannablism)

[EkarusRyndren]

[quote=“i2amroy, post:6, topic:3610”]It would be nice to tie this into some sort of system that would allow players to choose what they like/dislike.

Did I ever share with you the proposal I had for this system? I thought it was pretty good. If someone goes to implement this, I would like to dig it up first and run it by them.

Basically, though, you had a pile of default preferences you could use, and they could be set to “Loves/Likes/Neutral/Dislikes/Abhors”, and each would have a default value. Every move towards “Loves” would cost a point, and every two moves towards “Abhors” (across all stats) would grant a point. Some things may have a max they can go in one direction or the other, if it’s easy to avoid or find and balance requires a cap.

It would still require diminishing returns for repetition in order to avoid extreme minmaxing, but it could easily cover things like rain and cannablism.

Music: Loves -> Likes (.5 points gained, reduces morale benefit of music)
Reading: Likes -> Abhors (1.5 points gained, severe morale penalty from reading books, esp. skillbooks)
Candy: Likes -> Dislikes (severe morale penalty for eating, 1 point gained)
Porn: Likes -> Neutral (.5 points gained, maximum drop since it’s trivial to avoid)
Rain: Dislikes -> Abhors (.5 points)
Cannibalism: Abhors -> Loves (costs 4 points, with the points gained from changing the above values, big morale boost from cannablism)[/quote]

Oh good, now I can specify Tequila instead of beer with this system… I like the sound of this. Though the Cannibalism foods have a handful of sub-foods (Mannwurst, Jerk Jerky, etc) Not to mention there should be a few that are automatic “Abhors” (Bleach, Ammonia, etc)

Wonder if we can get an “Allergic” tag…

[AseaHeru]

So, could this result in things like “A. hates spam. Hates it. After a month of eating everything else BUT spam A. tries it and fall in love with it.”?

[EkarusRyndren]

So, could this result in things like “A. hates spam. Hates it. After a month of eating everything else BUT spam A. tries it and fall in love with it.”?

It’s not what I’d intended, more along the lines of Eating Mannwurst for a month leading to no morale boost, possibly a morale loss until you eat something different for awhile. Ideally you wouldn’t be sick of more than, maybe four? Types of food and drink at the same time. That said a few things should probably be exempt form “Tired of eating” Specifically Water and chems, that said I’d love a separate system for chems. (Because pills don’t taste the greatest.)

[AseaHeru]

Well, I understand that but you also have things that are acquired tastes. I just think it would be cool if you cook things that you hate and love the result, or grow to love things.

[GlyphGryph]

What I’d basically like to see is, combined with the system I proposed, a temporary value of “current taste” -> It naturally moves towards whatever value was selected, but each “indulgence” moves it a bit towards neutral.

This means that not only will you get tired of things you like, but you’ll eventually become accustomed to things you hate and they won’t bother you so much (if you encounter them regularly enough).

Things that are neutral, like water, simply stay that way.

[EkarusRyndren]

Well, I understand that but you also have things that are acquired tastes. I just think it would be cool if you cook things that you hate and love the result, or grow to love things.

Also a fair point, used to hate sausage myself, now I’m fairly certain I’ll be dead before 30. XDD

[kevin.granade]

My only problem with picking likes/dislikes (not necessarally a fatal one) is that it does indeed lead to min/maxing, what’s keeping the player from bumping up likes of all the most common foods, and hating obscure food they’re never going to eat anyway?

For GlyphGryph’s proposal in particular, it seems like it requires a hell of a lot of annotation of every item in the game to make it work, and I’m skeptical that we could make it work even then due to the general issue of dumping on rare items and liking common ones.

For the specific use case of “I only eat n things”, it’s basically impossible to make the system remotely balanced, because we have hundreds of foods with wildly varying availability, so there’s an overwhelming variety of things you can set to “hate” in exchange for “loving” the few things you will actually eat.

The only thing I can come up with to make it balanced at all is to make the payoff for disliking things be absurdly small, on the order of a few points total for hating everything.

[GlyphGryph]

I rewrote out the full proposal in it’s own thread.

Commentary appreciated. http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=3841.0