[MUD-Dev] Git out the boar spear, Martha!

[Matt Chatterley]

On Fri, 20 Jun 1997, Chris Gray wrote:

> This is completely off topic, but I can't resist sharing it with you.
> 
> The evening news tonight reports that we have a pair of wild boars in
> our river valley. That's a first for us. We have deer, coyotes and often
> a couple of spring moose that get lost, but these are a first. It seems
> that you are allowed to raise them on farms, and some got away.
> 
> I can see it now - some bozo gets trampled, wearing only his loincloth,
> armed with a wooden "spear", out to do it "like in the storybooks"!

Heh. Could only happen in America. ;)

I can actually turn this into something ontopic - it spawned an idea in my
twisted little mind.

The thread(s) upon hunger/food/nutrition a short while ago were very
popular and quite highly contested - I'd like to raise another issue of
that - the gathering of food, and specifically, implementation of some way
to hunt.

The obvious way to do it is either: (Lines with * are player input, ** are
mud output).

* hunt
** You hunt for some time, finally find a small boar, and kill it.

Then either give them a corpse, or simply stop them being hungry.

* kill boar
** [Normal combat stuff]
* get corpse ; eat corpse
** You eat the boar, yum!

And so forth.

I intend to allow the eating of corpses (of courpse, most players will
have to cut them up into suitable food pieces and/or cook them first..
only trolls and orcs will be able to chow down on a freshly dead body
with no chance of being ill). But this isn't any good to capture the
spirit of hunting, aka actually tracking down the beast, and killing it -
it's just eating what you kill normally, which may not even be 'game'.

How about having certain types of terrain where players can look for
animal tracks (if they're lucky enough to find some, they follow them for
a bit, and an animal they can hunt is generated), and then hunt any beast
they find. Hunting would involve following it until it stays still, and
then either being unbelievably quick to attack it by hand (aka superman),
or shooting it from afar with a spell or missile/thrown weapon.

What ideas do y'all have knocking around?

Regards,
	-Matt Chatterley
	http://user.itl.net/~neddy/index.html
"He can't stop us, we're on a mission from Glod!" - Soul Music (Pratchett)