Today I want to talk about our traveling system, and also topics so closely interconnected: the hunger and cold mechanics. First of all I realize CLOK is a game, and so it's always going to be in a delicate balance between realism and expediency/fun. I notice that the time of day seems to flow exactly as it does in real life. Even the weather from various regions is taken from some unknown real-life locations and changes in real time... but everything else, not so much.
Let's take hunger for example. If your character is completely full and you just have them sit around in one spot all day doing nothing else, it'll take about... oh, I'm not sure exactly... ten, maybe twelve hours to completely starve and die from hunger. That's a sharp contrast from the typical three weeks it takes a person to die from starvation in real life. Then again, we aren't dealing with atrophy, malnutrition, and all the other nasty complications that can come from prolonged starvation, and it's a game, so ten hours of pretty much not having to worry about such a trivial issue in game is fair enough.
But then we throw traveling into the mix. Move about twenty spaces without eating anything, and you are on death's doorstep! This is total starvation in the matter of about a minute. "But you are traveling leagues when you do so!" you might say. So my question is, why are we traveling miles in the span of a few seconds? And why is my stamina consumption negligible compared to this endeavor?
I haven't even begun making some kind of coherent argument here, because first I'd want to now examine the cold/warmth system. A naked character going out into the cold probably has about a five minute lifespan. Again, not very realistic. Although oddly enough, I did some math.. comparing it to the rate of starvation...
As an aside: 12 hours of game-time starvation vs 21 days of RL-time starvation. It's a ratio of 42 to 1. If we take 5 minutes and multiply it by 42, that's 3.5 hours. That comes out as a "realistic" time, but again, probably inappropriate for gameplay.
Now, if we take a nice bundled up newbie who is "well-fortified" against the cold and let them sit outside, it takes a good 15 minutes before they even start feeling cold. But... things start deteriorating rather fast after that. While I was initially quite satisfied and thought, "Huh, I guess warm clothes actually work. What is everyone complaining about?" I soon realized that the cold damage was ramping up way too fast. After about five minutes of taking relatively low cold damage occasionally, it soon increased to levels I have seen on a naked character. So much so, that my negligent OOC behavior testing these mechanics lead to the unintentional death of this poor guinea pig character. Despite all the warm clothes they were wearing, the cold damage was becoming so severe that there was literally no difference between being bundled up or stark naked at that point. This makes no sense.
Circling back to the topic of traveling, we will also notice that moving in the wilderness system does not cause any cold damage at all. You would think that after traveling miles on foot in the cold, one would not only be exhausted, but also cold (and yes, probably hungry too). While the wilderness system "works" and has worked for years, it really seems like there's a disconnect not only from reality but with consistency. It's consistency that you really need in order to have a believable, enjoyable game.
Take Dungeons and Dragons for instance. By definition it's a fantasy game about heroes that can do amazing feats and take incredible amounts of damage. There are fantasy creatures in these settings, and there is magic. None of these things have anything to do with reality, but that's basically the premise. They aren't supposed to, and it should already be implicitly agreed in advance that no one is going to call these things out for being unrealistic. Despite these magical fantasy elements, however, you will still find a bunch of complicated rules in the game. Most end up making the mundane elements of the game emulate real life, and others are there as guidelines to make everything else run more consistently; more smoothly. For example, even though there is magic in the game, it is only used in specific ways: typically as a "standard action". And you only get one standard action per round, except in very extraordinary circumstances.
If we look at these various mechanics in CLOK, I think we'll find that maybe the reason players always wind up griping about these features is not that they are unrealistic, and not even just because they might be inconvenient. It's because they are inconsistent with other aspects of the game.
Traveling in the wilderness system:
- Implies a large distance traveled.
- Consumes a lot of hunger.
- Barely consumes any stamina.
- Has no effect on your body temperature.
- Miles are crossed in a matter of seconds.
-What I would first suggest is drastically increasing the round time of traveling in the wilderness. Maybe up to 20 or 30 seconds. Something that seems a lot more noticeable and impactful than it is now, but not completely obnoxious. I think a tradeoff in the name of realism would make people appreciate the distances between locations more.
-Then what should happen is traveling takes a massive hit to your stamina. I can't say for sure what the exact number should be. Maybe 15-20% of your energy, such that you can move about 5-6 times before becoming exhausted. When you don't have enough stamina to go to another location, you get a message saying you're too exhausted. We don't want people traveling to a location in the wilderness, only to pass out and get their head bashed in by some hostile creature.
-Finally, depending on how you are dressed, you could take further cold damage (or heat damage if ever implemented). For instance if you're completely bundled up and hike several miles in the middle of summer, you should likely be on the verge of heat stroke. Dressed similarly in winter, your exertion, factoring in cold weather and insulation probably balance out. But if you're naked, even if you are using up a lot of energy to travel, you're still going to lose more heat than you make.
That's my suggestion for travel and hunger, but I don't know what people will make of it. I guess most people are fine with how things are now, loading up on travel rations and hoards of other food they may have, and so even though the hunger is completely unrealistic, they don't mind and just eat a bunch of food as they go. It could be that such a change, if anything close ever happens, would garner more ire from the playerbase, seeing as traveling would see a drastic slowdown due to stamina loss.
As for dealing with the cold, I really think that while warm clothes do a good job at first, they should never, ever become meaningless as exposure to the elements is prolonged. A person who is "well-fortified" to the cold should be seeing about a 66% reduction to the cold damage they receive, even with prolonged exposure. In the end, I don't see why the cold damage numbers have to be so high anyway. Once a character is in the Freezing status, they will not be able to recover their stamina at all. So even if cold damage was reduced drastically (as it should be for warmly-dressed characters), they'd still eventually succumb to the cold.
And I think that's just what players want. A little more time to have some fun and ironically more realism too. If making a change to the game would not only make it more fun, but more realistic, how could anyone say no to it?
If you managed to read all of this without falling asleep, congratulations! And thanks for reading.
