Food, drink, energy, exp, morale, and TIME

Have a new general feature to suggest, or think one should be tweaked? Share your ideas here.
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Nappist
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Joined: Tue Dec 14, 2021 11:45 am

Food, drink, energy, exp, morale, and TIME

Post by Nappist »

Here's why you should remove the energy bar system:
1. It's annoying
2. I don't like it.
Okay, but seriously, it comes down to what you're trying to do to these systems and which behaviors you're trying to encourage or discourage along with a certain amount of simulationism to draw players into the headspace of their characters.

In survival games in particular the emphasis on several resources to manage while struggling as the landscape tries to murder you helps draw the player into tense desperation as they work constantly against an uphill battle.
The endless struggle for survival becomes tedious when you have to constantly cram food down your mouth or go out into the wilds unless food and drink were made very scarce - which would in turn make it painfully difficult for a player to go through a newbie area or just storytell, because then you would have to balance travel and gathering against folks sitting down and casually RPing for four hours.
Energy is explicitly the barrier and solution to this issue, as it adds a clear survival mechanic while also being a relatively safe buffer that does no drain down when performing safer tasks.

This is a MUD, an RPG, and with a certain amount of storytelling leveraged together, so the circumstances seem a little different.
In terms of pacing it seems like what is going for is a certain amount of realism behaviors - e.g., your character should stay clean, eat, drink, and so on - coupled with the pacing of you go out and grind then come back and sit around a campfire or inn to have conversation.
EXP bucket covers this, energy bar covers this as well. In particular, the energy bar coupled with regulated traffic (main roads, inns), is clearly supposed to create short breathers where people come together and chat and network a little even if they are not sitting down for long sessions.

Which mean there's a lot of overlap in what these systems do in gameflow:
Energy bar: Combat balance mechanic, resource management, time sink for advancement.
EXP bucket: Time sink for advancement.
Food/Drink: Money sink, resource management, encourages trading with players
Time delay: Combat balance mechanic, gives mobs time to react you, fundamentally broken, time sink for advancement
Morale: Does everything the previous items do, except for giving mobs time to react you

There's a couple problems here.
The energy bar is interconnected to so many systems that it requires constant maintenance and balance to stay functional, increasing future and current workloads.
The EXP bucket and an energy bar do precisely the same things. The only difference is that the exp bucket has a lower maintenance requirement while also being extended to compensate for the length of scenes and being more flexible. If you make the energy bar too large, it will no longer serve it's purpose - whereas the opposite is by and large true of the bucket. Similarly, the energy bucket is a lot more forceful (for better or for worse).
They also drag out content by slowing players down.
And most importantly they're PUNISHMENT mechanics, which is mechanics that feel like players are being slapped on the wrist or chained down by. Regardless of their effectiveness, it's added pressure on players and their tracking for both.

I posit that just replacing all of it with the morale system, balancing the game around always having positive morale (10 or something) and having players default to zero.
While, mechanically, it should have roughly the same effects in long and short term gameflow, the presentation and how players view it is key as instead of 'you get worse if you do this' is 'you can only get STRONGER if you do this'. It's roughly the same thing way back when some MMORPGs realized that they had degraded exp after a certain amount of playing: They simply reversed it, saying that the 'degraded' exp was the new normal and that you instead got a daily boost (thus, day-lies).

Similarly, morale is a simpler system to keep track of as a resource, and it's relatively easy to understand. There's also a certain amount of flexibility in special rooms that help boost morale, sitting around, swapping stories and drinking fine liquor before foraying out into battle again. And as a storyteller, even if some people 'exploit' the system to just afk or idle in these rooms, I certainly appreciate the very concept that folks have arrived just to listen to me blather ;)

Food and drink? Perhaps it's limited in how much you can consume - perhaps you have to sit down to eat, have utensils for certain fine dishes, and they boost your morale substantially. Doing things can slowly drain your morale, just like it does an energy bar. Sit in a room doing nothing but manufacturing tiny statues all day? Morale goes down. That's not good for your mental health!

The key difference is broad application and that you are not *unable* to do things at low morale; it would be possible to simply make it cost-inefficient to do so, and balance the game around having high morale.

EXP buckets may be kept due to simply wanting to have a longer-tempo resource drain for long scenes, but it would necessitate that buckets be both larger and drain more slowly.

And as for the argument of wanting to create a survival scene, that would only be possible in a zone far away from a town, and it's just as easy to fill it with hostile mobs that grind down your gear and try to kill you while being substantially less effort.

How broken roundtime is will be covered somewhere else

tl;dr
Rip out most of the mechanics and use the morale system instead to decrease staff overhead and as a reward mechanic instead of a punishment mechanic to decrease player stress.
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Marcuson
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Re: Food, drink, energy, exp, morale, and TIME

Post by Marcuson »

When I am a new guest in someone's home, and I decide that I don't like their decor, I don't tell them that they should rip it all out and replace it. That would be enormously rude and callously self-absorbed of me. Instead, I just don't go back over to their home.

They have a right to decorate their home as they please, and I have a right not to be there.
Ephemeralis
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Re: Food, drink, energy, exp, morale, and TIME

Post by Ephemeralis »

This is probably going to come across as snarky but please take my word that I mean it in the most inoffensive way possible: I think you might be looking for a different type of MUD.

Between this and your other thread, I get the strong impression that you're after something less mechanically-oriented and more story focused, which would probably be something like a MUSH. Mudstats has the most complete listing of MUD/MOO/MUSH there is and is definitely worth looking over if you're after somewhere new to play, though this isn't to say that you couldn't have fun with COGG here either!

Your post is difficult to respond to since the general idea of "replace everything with morale" is difficult to really imagine working given how exhaustively energy is used in most activities in the game. There's evidently a great deal of game design placed on the consumption of energy as a general resource for action (things like certain weapon types/classes taking more to use, scaling costs in mining, etc) and even a big portion of the game's primary currency sink (food) is centred around it as well.
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Lexx416
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Re: Food, drink, energy, exp, morale, and TIME

Post by Lexx416 »

The morale system doesn't actually stop you from doing anything. Instead, it penalizes you for going too low, and then otherwise rewards you when maintaining a positive morale with a chance at an extra reroll for most tasks that have a skill roll associated with it. The sanity system, by comparison, is much more punitive in that it does stop certain activities when you've hit a certain low threshold.

Energy is also attached to the nutrition system - you regenerate energy FROM nutrition. You have abilities that further interact with Energy (and nutrition). I can respect that you may not enjoy the resource management attached to COGG, and that's fair. But I don't really think that necessitates chopping a bunch of systems out, to replace them with a singular resource.

As much as I enjoy narrative driven games, there's something very satsifying to learning how to manage the different resources in COGG, which I think would ultimately be lost in this suggestion, and would result in this being a fundamentally very different game, with much less mechanical depth.
"You hear the Woses, the Wild Men of the Woods... Remnants of an older time they be, living few and secretly, wild and wary as beasts."
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Rias
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Re: Food, drink, energy, exp, morale, and TIME

Post by Rias »

These are some interesting points and neat ideas that would be cool to see implemented as part of a new game. For COGG specifically, I'm generally happy with how these things are implemented with the pacing mechanics and the various resources that need to be managed. It was designed that way deliberately from the start, and I've enjoyed playing my characters with different ones worrying more or less about different resources based on their guild, class, and what they do with their time. I realize it's not going to be great for everyone, but I feel these core mechanics of COGG are in a decent place for how I've intended the game to be, and I enjoy utilizing these mechanics when I implement various abilities, activities, and so on.

I feel like if I enjoy playing it as the designer, and the majority of players are enjoying it (or at least not complaining about it), I'd rather not rip out several large chunks of the foundation of the game's code and mechanics and then have to spend a major amount of time and effort rebuilding said foundation and all the things that were built upon the removed pieces.
<Rias> PUT ON PANTS
<Fellborn> NO
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