[MUD-Dev] Eating and sleeping (was: A flamewar startingpoint.)

[Derrick Jones]

Just thought I would change the subject line here, as none of the original
material is still present or referenced.--gunther

On Wed, 12 Nov 1997, Brandon J. Rickman wrote:

> On Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 12:27:46 Derrick Jones
> <gunther at online1.magnus1.com> wrote:
> >I've always thought is was odd that characters never had to sleep on any
> >of the muds I've played.  I can't imagine making it playable (1/3 of the
> >time you'd be sitting there watching the insides of your eyelids). I guess
> >its just an area where realism/playability clash.
> 
> Most of these things are present in a lot of muds I've seen, perhaps you
> don't consider "sitting in a room waiting to heal" sleeping, but there are
> certainly muds with more explicit "sleep" (usu. with sit/stand/lie)
> commands.  Yes, you are stuck watching the insides of your eyelids.  Is
> is playable?  If having to sleep is built into the game, where you get
> tired from walking around or fighting, and being asleep leaves your 
> character vulnerable to attack, then finding a safe place to sleep
> becomes part of the game.  This is both playable and realistic.

Actually, I meant a system where you sleep for 6-9 hours every night.
I know that most muds have a 'sleep' command, but that usually is a trade
off between protection and healing rates, and very few players really
concider this to be sleeping.  Many muds even let you carry on
conversations while asleep, and allow you to wake up at will.  Of course I
can't imagine having to switch to another screen for 15 minutes every hour
because my character is unconscious and therefore completely out of my
control (thus my playability problem).

> I would say the biggest problem caused by eating/sleeping activities
> is due to accelerated time used in most game worlds.  When one real
> hour is one mud day your character has to eat too damn often.  If a
> game made me perform my daily routines once an hour (shower, dress,
> feed cats, eat lunch, eat dinner, brush teeth, sleep) I wouldn't play.

This problem would actually get _worse_ as mud-time approached RL-time.
Imagine having to wait 8 hours before the game recognizes any of your
commands because you happened to log on while your character was asleep.

> And there would actually be little immediate consequence if I didn't
> do those things once a week or so.  The consequences appear when I
> am somehow prevented from those activities for a sustained amount of
> time.
I'm sure your cat would remind you if you forgot to feed it. And there 
would be _immediate_ consequences, usually the staining of your pillows or
some irreverent claw-marks on your ankles the next morning.

> If a character spends seven game days wandering around the desert
> he should certainly get hungry.  With money, getting food in a city 
> is a trivial exercise and probably doesn't need to be in the game.
> I guess I'm saying that these things should be context sensitive.

Yes.  Sensitive as pre-set by the player.  If the character is in a
situation where there is food readily availible, then the character would
stock up until the character reaches some pre-set amount of store.

> On Wed, 12 Nov 1997 12:30:37, s001gmu at nova.wright.edu (Greg) wrote:
> >hmm... I wonder how feasable it would be to have eating be a semi-automated
> >process?  Kind of like breathing.  You can take control, but most of the
> >time it's automated.  When you get hungry, assuming you are not too busy
> >doing something else (like fighting for your life, or casting a spell), the
> >game has the character pull out a loaf of bread or whatever, and eat it.
> >You do sacrifice a bit of realism, in that they might be running for their
> >lives from that nasty dragon whose layer they just raided, but it takes care
> >of a tedious detail, while still keeping some flavour.
> 
> In a context sensitive environment, a dangerous situation (being
> hounded by a dragon) should deactivate any automatic functions.
> There could of course be different "danger" thresholds for different
> functions:
> 
> - If in an unsettled area that has few edibile resources, and less than
> three days of travel rations -> Stop automated eating.
> - If swimming -> Stop taking naps.
> - If air is poisonous -> Stop breathing. 

Again, allow players to reset their players reactions, but assign a
common-sense default selection.  Some player may actually want to stop and
eat whilst being chased by a dragon.  Perhaps there could be three levels
of reactions: automatically eat, automatically not eat, prompt player
(with something like You feel a grumbling in your empty stomach(s).).

> While I would avoid killing characters because they refused to breathe I
> would certainly penalize them for other actions.

Well, the character would eventually lose consciousness, in which point
the default would be: automatically breathe regardless

> And I would make characters have to eat an amount of food proportional
> to their physical strength and size.  You wanna play a big brawny
> barbarian you'll spend most of your time eating.

Actually, the big barbarian would be able to eat one massive meal a day,
and be able to spend more time hungry before it affected him.  The total
food consumption would be greater, but the time spent eating would
probably decrease.  This would parallel to the real-world where those
100-lb women spend 3 hours to finish the same meal a 250 lb linebacker
would finish in 5 minutes.  I'd have to question the cause and effect here
though.
There would be many character-dependent things with food.  Such as
different races would find different foods edible, individual food
alergies, maybe even simulate hyper-activity by changing a characters
stats after too much sugar...

> [I don't actually have any cats.]
lucky thing.  Especially if you don't plan on feeding them (cackle)