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

[Matt Chatterley]

On Mon, 30 Jun 1997 clawrenc at cup.hp.com wrote:

> >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.
> 
> For this area I fall into the grunt player camp.  I expect my
> cahracter, outside of unsusual circumsatances (forced march across a
> desert etc), to take care of his own nutrition without requiring my
> attention or direct involvement as player.  Possibly this is because I
> try and handle feeding my own body in much the same manner -- utterly
> ignorable automaticities.  Eating is a bother and an unfortunately
> necessary waste of time.  (Conveniently ignoring my own gourmand
> tendencies which I see as entirely seperate -- eating for pleasure as
> vs nutrition which I can't see translating into a text MUD well at
> all)

Hmm, I can see where you're coming from - but I stand by the view that
adding hunger (and the necessity for feeding), and thus the necessity to
find means to satiate that hunger is a good thing (at least for the
environment I'm trying to build). Plus it sounds neat, and I like to try
things out on people to see what they do. ;)
 
> >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). 
> 
> That "chance of being ill" piece is interesting.  Why should a
> character get ill from eating a freshly killed carcass?  Parasites? 
> There are amazingly few that can survive a human digestional system
> long enough to be real bother.

Perhaps I wasn't very clear (at all) - I mean more from the point of view
of eating something extremely distateful to your race.. hmm, I can't
really think of a good example right at this moment. Perhaps an extreme
one would be trying to eat the carcass of a recently-un-un-killed zombie.
 
> >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.
> 
> There is considerable evidence (I find supportable) that Homo Sapiens
> is by nature a cursorial hunter.  What is a cursorial hunter I hear
> you cry in bewilderment?  Very simple:  A cursorial hunter is a hunter
> which hunts its prey by running (jogging actually) it into the ground. 
 
Heh. Well, completely possible to simulate, and it actually makes more
sense than throwing or shooting weapons at things that probably aren't
going to die easily, or quickly, from it. Awful lotta meat and bone to get
through to hit anything vital.
 
>   eg  Bubba hunter sees an antelope.  Bubba starts jogging toward the
> antelope.  He approaches the antelope.  The antelope startles, jumps,
> and runs away like the clappers.  Bubba keeps trotting after the
> antelope.  He approaches the antelope.  The beast startles, jumps, and
> runs away like the clappers.  Bubba continues jogging after it.  It
> doesn't take all that long at all before you have one compleatly
> winded antelope (if not actually dead from strain -- it happens not
> infrequently) that Bubba can just walk on up to and hit over the head
> with a nearby rock while it struggles to breathe.
> 
> Several "primitive" tribes continue to hunt this way to this day.  

A quite conceivable approach - I just want to avoid "Ooh, theres an
antelope.."

> kill antelope
You whack the antelope with your staff.
Antelope missed you.
etc..
You killed antelope.
> eat corpse
Yum.

<g>

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)