Who needs automatic eating?

[kinvoya]

I think that if our chars were require to eat a minimum variety of three different food groups in order to stay fully healthy it would really boost the Cantr economy because chars would have a reason to export and sell different kinds of food and other chars would have a real need for them.

Food groups:

Meat
Fruits
Vegetables
(Grains as a possible fourth group)

For optimum health a char would eat from each group each day. The actual amounts eaten would not have to be equal from each food group.

Any of these which are now healing foods could remain as healing foods.

If a char is missing a food from one of the groups then he/she would accumulate a slight amount of damage which would require a healing food heal.

Specialty foods like pizza or sushi could, perhaps, span two or more food groups and be especially nourishing, i.e. you wouldn't have to eat as much of them.

This would make cooperation and trade flourish and the quest for food would take on more of the imperative it has in rl.

It mights even make restaurants have a purpose.

This is just a rough idea but I'm sure others could polish it up.

[Nick]

If a char is missing a food from one of the groups then he/she would accumulate a slight amount of damage which would require a healing food heal.

I liked all you posted but this...
I'd rather diet choices affect HEALTH issues that can later be programmed into the game.
That would be a little unrealistic, gaining damage...

[kinvoya]

I thought the damage would be appropriate since the chars are essentially becoming malnourished but if it can be expressed in a better way, fine. As long as it creates a genuine need for chars to trade for a variety of food.

Maybe, if there were four groups then a person would only need three of the four to have a nutritionally sound diet. Then specialty foods could be prepared with three of the four ingredients. And people who ran restaurants could sell the specialty foods one meal at a time. And there could be take out stands for stocking up for trips.

[Lumin]

I'm all for a well-balanced diet, but I think I'd prefer if a character was somehow rewarded for eating a wide variety of foods, rather than being punished for not doing it.

The ideas I've seen so far would be great for rich chars or ones in large cities with established trade routes, but would pretty much screw over newspawns and small villages.

Either way, if diets were ever taken into account in the game, it would probably be best to make the results of them show up over the long term and be a bit more subtle than simply taking damage. It shouldn't be something that can kill you in a few weeks (if at all), and I don't think there should be any drastic effects just because you change your diet for a couple of days. (Heck, I don't get the correct servings of all four food groups in every day, but it would take repeated offenses over a long period of time for me to actually get sick.)

Micromanaging shouldn't be the answer; your character's overall lifestyle should be what's taken into account, not whether you did good yesterday but screwed up this morning.

And for what it's worth, let's not forget that in real life there've been times when entire cultures have primarily subsisted on one food item, like rice or potatoes or even meat. Actually, I think it might be interesting if over time Cantrian cultures evolved with slightly different physical traits based on their diet...but of course that's not going to happen anytime soon, if ever, and it would be complex enough that I don't even want to think about it this late at night.