NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GnomeWorks" data-source="post: 6040422" data-attributes="member: 162">The level of grittiness in the game matters. If you're much higher than 5th or so in d20, the daily issue of eating and drinking stops being a concern. I've got characters in my current game that don't care about breathing, much less food or drink.I think part of the issue here is that the penalties for not eating or drinking, and the benefits for doing so, are so miniscule that they're irrelevant. If it's made a bigger part of the game, it becomes more important.For instance, in the system I'm working on, different foods have different effects (within reason). For instance, apples might give you a boost to skill X, while bananas give you a boost to skill Y. Likewise, eating the same food all the time might diminish its effectiveness, and not getting a "balanced diet" might lead to penalties.Provide more options, make it interesting, and suddenly players will care. The difficulty lies in making sure those extra options don't weigh down the game with something that should be handled with at most a minute - you don't want to spend half an hour discussing lunch.This is an easy fix.Get rid of measurements.Talking about pounds and half-pounds and all that other nonsense is a massive pain in the rear, as has been noted. It doesn't help that the numbers are also rather large - when your carrying capacity is 400 lbs., you can carry a lot of stuff, and tallying all of it can be annoying unless you're using a spreadsheet.Translating weights and carrying capacity into smaller numbers, and always rounding to the nearest half, makes this way easier. I initially started this idea by converting all weights into stones, then rounding to the nearest half. The unit is irrelevant, so long as everything in the system agrees on the system of measurement being used. So instead of a sword weighing 4 lbs., we just say it weighs 1. End of story.Carrying capacity is then a function of Strength and Constitution scores.For carrying things, containers like bags and chests and such have a number of slots that each are 1 unit. So a bag with Size 8 can carry up to 8 units worth of stuff, regardless of what it is.Nope.You want to play a clumsy dwarf paladin with a big mouth, you're not going to be able to sneak past encounters. Sorry, not going to happen - that's not the character you built.By all means, go ahead and try. But just like no one should be able to contribute to a fight like a fighter, no one should be able to do exploration stuff like an explorer. Participate, yes, but not outshine, and sometimes be a hindrance.</blockquote>

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