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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Emberashh" data-source="post: 9076677" data-attributes="member: 7040941">No, but you're already off the rails if you're assuming thats what Im suggesting.If we step into Video game land, the MMORPG Runescape actually serves as a big inspiration for my thoughts on how to approach it. In RS, food is what restores your health. There are no health potions or resting.And aside from obvious MMO scaling, thats about as deep as Food goes in RS. Game design wise, it provides a pretty big justification for the simultaneous existence of Fishing and Cooking as skills, and together through how Jagex designs questing, each skill is worthwhile to train up. (If you can deal with the soul crushing grind of MMO gameplay anyway, I should know, it took me 20 years to Max my account in that game)But that said, Food doesn't have to be that shallow. Food can be elaborated on to provide a great deal of passive and active benefits, and how food is made and consumed can in turn provide a lot of meaningful decision points.Sitting down to eat a high level soup for instance could take time, and in turn provide boosts, resistances, and even perhaps special one-off abilities they retain as long as they don't go hungry (!!!). The skys the limit.But say the party doesn't have that time? Scarfing down a fairy muffin might provide a lesser benefit as a trade off for only taking a moment to consume. (But would upkeep your, lets call it, Food Baby)But you can even go the other way. Sitting for a super high level 7 course meal would take even more time, but come with an even greater benefit.And with that, now you've got knobs and levers to dink with, and all the while, we're no longer sitting and dreading the horrid spectre of "tracking rations", because we're already engaging with the thing that resolves that issue, because said thing is an indepth system that provides tangible gameplay benefits and meaningful choices to make.And thats before we consider quality of life for the player. The benefits of food, for instance, might be designed in such a way that tracking their diminishing benefits is dead-easy, with their final elimination being made the mechanical point at which the characters "hungry". And then, you start tracking hunger levels, which in turn can also be made easy by not slaving ourselves to a whole separate chart to memorize. In my system, I have 4 Energy pools already ready to go, simply drain one or more of them at a fixed rate until you eat.Meanwhile, with a universal signal thats being run always to begin with (ie, a tension pool automatically tracking time), you no longer have a cognitive load. When the signal comes, you simply remove a mark, a die, whatever it is, and you're done.And that is assuming we just automatically say whenever time advances, your needs go down...they don't have to, not everytime. Thats the value of breaking down time into separate time scales, with the bulk of the game taking place in lower scales.Having to update your Needs would come relatively speaking infrequently in actual gameplay, and as alluded to, you'd ultimately have to be in some real deep doo doo to not be keeping up with it automatically, or you'd have to be ignoring entire reams of content, at which point I can't help you because you're not really playing the game.</blockquote>

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