Cantr Leisure & Luxury: Snack bar + COMBAT

[Cogliostro]

It is a simple wooden item. Functions as a thing that allows characters to eat at will, and not to push off starvation farther off into the future but for pleasure purposes. Consumes only a very small amount of the chosen food item per use.

How it could work: After being built, the SnackBar is empty. You need to "seed" it with a food. Raw foods like potatos or carrots are excluded (can't be used). Useable types of food include high end cooked stuff (icecream, cakes, fancy dishes etc.), apothecary potions and liquers. To seed the Snackbar you need quite a big amount of the food in question Let's say for example it requires a minimum of 1000g of wine to seed. You cannot partially seed it with 23g of Wine if that's all you have. You need the full amount to make the SnackBar functional.

Once it's functional, it becomes a machine - Snackbar [Wine], that anyone in the same room can use. When used, the Snackbar generates an event announcing "You see Gladis Bottleface drink some wine." or "You see John eat a taco.", in the case of apothecary mixtures it can get chemical: "You see John take a blue bubbling medicine." Depending on the specific medicine, it might be "bubbling", "foaming", "frothing", "flurescent" etc. A lot of the fun involved (for players) in this Snackbar might end up being connected to collecting unique food types and discovering all the different possible messages you can get when imbibing them this way, weaving this new detail into their usual roleplay. Using the Snackbar has no gameplay effect otherwise, for example the wine will not heal you as it would have if consumed from your inventory.

If you want to put something different into your already-seeded Snackbar, you have to deconstruct it (losing the current foodcontents). Eventually the food inside is used up, but very slowly, only a few grams per use.

There are some other minor details that come to mind, which should be talked over if it's a good idea, like what about machine-gunning it and hitting the bar hundreds of times in a row. That probably shouldn't be possible, so maybe it can be a use-once-per-Cantr-hour kind of item (doesn't generate new messages or reduce the foodcontents in the Snackbar if you click it again before the time is up). And, should it reduce hunger a little bit or just ignore that completely? I am in favour of "ignore that completely".

[Doug R.]

I'm sorry if I missed it, but what would the point of this be?

[Cogliostro]

The point of this suggestion will be explained in full in my upcoming whitepaper: "The Pleasurable and Tasteful Utilization of Advanced Foodstuffs, Brews, Drafts, Pharmaceuticals in Multiplayer Virtual Worlds".

The reason we flesh-and-blood people Love Food is not that it helps prevent starvation. I would like to give Cantrians a starter incentive, however small, to also Love Food "aesthetically" instead of treating it in a purely utilitarian manner.

[Dudel]

Cantr is its mechanics. Adding something like this would be ignored by most, if not all, players. There are already tons of "RP only" items which are never/rarely made as it is. Adding to this with something that consumes something characters need is a waste when it gives nothing in turn by a gimmick.

Or the short is "This idea is nothing more than a wasteful gimmick."

[Tincho]

I like the idea that my characters can eat when they aren't hungry or when they aren't injured. But I don't like this new object.

[Doug R.]

I like the idea that my characters can eat when they aren't hungry or when they aren't injured. But I don't like this new object.

Pretty much the same here.

[Cogliostro]

The idea of attaching it to an object (Snackbar) is pretty hacky, agreed.

So if everyone's in favour, would it be possible to implement "arbitrary-amount eating and drinking", which would work in addition to the auto-eating, not instead.

So that if you have 100g of wine, you can click the eat button for it in the inventory. Then the following happens:

If you are hurt, then you see the current screen for using wine as a healfood. The one where it tells you how many grams you need to get back to 100% health etc.

If you're at 100%, then instead of the current red error ("Can't eat..."), you see a new eating screen. It'd be a simple one where you're selecting how many grams to imbibe.

The game then compares the amount you entered to the normal daily amount of that item (what you'd eat with auto-eating). If your entered amount exceeds it, everyone in the location sees:

"You see John Doe gorging himself on wine like a pig."

If however it was only a little amount you selected -

"You see John Doe sip some wine."

Altogether, it's a way to use food on purpose, and not for hunger purposes or healing, but for pleasure and to generate this message, seen by people around.

[GPark]

I don't know enough about coding to say whether this would be difficult to implement or not, but whatever the effort involved it just doesn't seem worth it. I can't really see any of my characters using this feature and I wouldn't gain anything from it as a player either.

[Cogliostro]

Being a self-congratulating utilitarian hack, what you fail to understand GPark is that the human being is a lot like a peacock. We derive a very real pleasure from useless displays of affluence and wealth. And that is only one reason why being able to eat showy food in a showy manner would improve the game experience...

[Piscator]

I do see the need for consuming food at will for roleplaying purposes, but again, I don't think that this option should be anchored to a certain item. I agree with Tincho there.

We do have a eat button already, all we have to do is change how it works. Allow eating regular food anytime and healing food even though you're not injured, perhaps create a simple "you see xy eat zw" message (more detailed descriptions can be left to rp) and add a limit of how much you can eat in a day (to avoid sabotage by eating 120kg of carrots in a minute) and we have a system the works without fancy gimmicks.

[SekoETC]

(Replies split into stomach capacity.)