CLOK BBS

Hi everyone! You might not know me, and I probably don't know you. But that's ok I guess.

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.

Seems people complain a lot about getting hungry way too fast. I think it needs to be lessened, but we'd have to compensate in other areas.

-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.

I took the time to read over all of this and while I understand your personal gripes with the system and how it's inconsistent, I need to throw in the addition of one of your own admissions. It is a game. Does it really need to be so consistent, or overly realistic? There's a hundred variables to your argument that changes each and every of your points.

-The amount of time it takes for your to starve is more than fair. 12 hours in a game is perhaps overly generous, as this isn't real life.
-The cold damage you take really does not make any sense to be lesser simply because you're bundled up. It massively prolongs the time it takes for you to freeze and just because you're all wrapped up should not mean the cold has a lesser effect.
-The game does not expect you to be naked. Ever. If you choose to be, that's your own volition but also your own consequence.
-There are methods in the game that not only massively cut your nutrition usage, but makes it a very manageable experience.
-Food is plentiful and cheap, nor does it weigh much. While your argument is one of realism, it is still a game and someone on foot traveling from one span of the map on foot to the other will only use up perhaps 5 rations, or 25 riln, which can be earned in a matter of six seconds.

Moving on to your suggestions, I can respect your own desires, but...

-Nobody wants to spend up to 30 minutes traveling from one section of the map to the other. It's not a very realistic expectation in the game when you consider that could be up to an hour where somebody has to wait, dead, before they can be revived. An hour of their time taken away while they can do quite literally nothing.
-Once more, I don't think anybody cares to be stopping to rest after moving five rooms and then spending a five minute timer waiting for their energy to return. That doesn't make for good gameplay.
-While I can understand the desire for something like heatstroke to exist in the game, there's already more than enough for you to be concerned with. Parts of the map vary dramatically in temperature and nobody wants to carry around two sets of clothing just because they crossed a border and went from freezing to death to burning to death.

While you spent all of this time on the subject, I can't help but feel that you're nitpicking for problems. The travel system is one that is quite effective at what it represents and a character with any amount of experience knows what they need before setting out into the wilderness. There's days where I personally head out with perhaps a single food item, or none whatsoever simply because of my formerly mentioned ability to cut down on food usage. I'm sorry that the system isn't up to your standards, but admittedly.. I'm sort of glad that they aren't, since what you suggest to 'improve it' not only transforms it from something that works to something that very few people would enjoy.

If we were to increase the time spent traveling in the wilderness, and/or the stamina costs for traveling room by room you then need to consider that they are not only going to be in a frozen climate for potentially up to 10 minutes, extending to thirty or even fourty minutes depending on where they travel. All this time, they are going to be assaulted by the cold and would be forced to, multiple times, stop and try and find some means to warm up. It doesn't sound like a very enjoyable experience all around. Sorry, that's just my opinion.

I've not seen anybody else complain or even consider the topic, so I'm not sure where you get the impression this is something people would want. How could anybody say no? I'm going to say a big time no. The idea that somebody could be left out of the game for up to or over an hour just doesn't meld with me.

However, I am not a GM. It's not my decision. But I am a mentor, so I would like to believe that I have some idea of what people's interests are and how to keep the players pleased. If it's decided that this is how they want things to be, so be it, but my take on it is that it won't be a healthy one.

Thank you for your opinion on the matter, so here is mine.

So, I've dealt with extreme temperatures both seeing it as a nurse and from personal trips camping and fishing, and CLOK does have it fairly accurate to a degree.

In the cold (and the weather doesn't have to be 0 degrees for this), hypothermia can set in fast. 25 times faster if you are not well dressed for the cold, and/or wet. Once you have hypothermia (started by frostbite that can take approximately 5 minutes to hit your fingers, toes, face and eyes when wind chill comes to play), it can take roughly 1 - 2 hours to die. Once your body reaches a certain temperature (34 degrees C) it steadily speeds up to the point of death.

Anyway, rambling, but point is, cold is dangerous. It is also fast. CLOK never expects you to play naked and has a mixture of clothing textures to help you keep warm as well as some abilities that increase that protection. Once the cold starts to hit, it warns you with a few small hits before really smacking you, pretty much like hypothermia does (if you are dressed for the weather, that is).

Regarding traveling, I won't voice my opinion much because it pretty much echoes Lucius, but I will say that I play this game primerily to RP with people. It's an RP-E MUD, after all. Some of our players can only log in for an hour or two at a time due to work, school, family or other RL commitments. I don't think it's fair to expect those players to spend potentially 30 minutes to an hour traveling to complete one task or to join with friends RPing. Even with me currently having most of my days free, I don't want to log into a character and spend an hour traversing from Shadgard to Nelra for my task, half an hour back to Haiban to turn it in for a few guild points. It would also further increase the lack of people going out to rescue others and with the new death system starting to roll out and becoming more unforgiving, it's just not feasable.

Sometimes, in a game, there is a thing as too much realism.

another completely legitimate thing you have to take into account when talking about things like this is tasks run and processing requirements for calculations. While admittedly it isn't an extreme amount for this particular thing. It would add up quick with each thing being done for each person on top of all the other tasks run and calculations performed.I do believe Jirato did say something about a heat system being implemented in the not so distant future, FYI.

I haver personally heard this topic discussed before and can say that while I do like a touch of realism to my games, I would not like things like this beging implemented, except maybe to delete cold, hunger, heatstroke, and damage. LOL JK

I seem to have a different take than some of the others reading. Maeriwyn has written a lengthy and thoughtful post with observations, and I will add in a much less aggressive or whiny tone than many of the complaint posts I've seen. The post is a critique, not even a complaint, so hold off on those torches and pitch forks.

That being said, I can agree with the odd scale within the game. Blacksmithing and carpentry take a crazy small amount of time compared to what they really take, and even more so with farming. Farming takes DAYS to go from planting to harvesting (which when I was doing it felt like forever) but also it's much faster than real life which takes weeks or months. So, if there was going to be a fix to address this, I think it would make much more sense to just accelerate game time. However, as pointed out, the heart and soul of CLOK is RP; altering the time scale of Arad to allow game mechanics to more accurately mirror reality would break the time scale of in-character interactions. Similarly changing the round time for travel or time-intensive activities could really break the fun factor of the game. So, what do we do? We shrug it off and say, yeah, it's definitely a game that needs to work like a game and not a life simulator.

As an irrelevant side note, most of the 'realism' rules in D&D never get used - heck most groups I've heard from ignore the rules for encumbrance. If people want realism they play GURPS instead.

Hey everyone, thanks for the feedback!

I honestly had forgotten about death and people sometimes having to travel a huge distance to get to bodies and bring them back. At the same time, when I was throwing out numbers, I wasn't taking horses into account either. I think we could take a lengthy travel time on foot and reduce it drastically with a beast of burden, as would be intended. We'd see a huge difference between traveling via mount or by foot.

Food has never really been an issue for me either. I'm not complaining that food consumption is too hard or tedious, but saying it's unrealistic. Very much so out of scale with everything else. Recall, completely starving to death within the span of a minute (and traveling like 50 miles too). I could swear I've seen topics before on the matter... And I know a topic about cold was just closed.

Also, while I thought a mere 5 minutes to die while naked was harsh, I was mainly making a comparison. Never was I suggesting that gameplay be catered to running around without clothes. The most important thing to take away from my arguments on hypothermia was that in the end stages when you are freezing and bundled up, if you then took your clothes off, at that point it wouldn't make a difference in the game. And please don't say something about paradoxical undressing haha. The clothing you are wearing should always help mitigate the death from hypothermia.

Perhaps it's just the numbers I find wrong though. After all, while warm clothes certainly do extend your lifespan out in cold weather, it's really weird seeing 50-100 cold damage after a while, which is the exact amount of cold damage you also receive with no clothes. The main point is that everyone would agree that a naked person dies the fastest out in the cold. And the cold damage represents that, their loss of body heat. The timer that counts down until onset of hypothermia is perfectly fine. It's the numbers of the cold damage afterward that makes no sense.

While I agree that once hypothermia onsets, you don't have much longer to live, I still think the clothes should reduce the amount of cold damage taken. Insulation is insulation. In the end, such a tweak would change survival time of maybe about 25 minutes out in the wilderness to maybe 30 minutes... But that would still be something!

This post isn't meant to argue one way or another, but to just explain a little what the mindset was behind these mechanics when they were created.

When I designed these systems, the thing at the fore of my mind was "would I want to play this game?" I always strove for a balance between realism (which I enjoy) and game-type fun, but it was my own preferred balance, of course. A hard rule of game development is that you're not going to please everyone, so my first priority was always to produce a game that I myself would enjoy playing, and then build from there.

I never found myself overly committed to real-life-simulation consistency. It was more about "will this thing be interesting and have an appreciable impact, while not feeling detrimental to the fun factor?" I like survival-type stuff. I put in the cold effects, and the cold can set in pretty quick, true. This was so that it couldn't be something that was largely ignored by players. Cold taking a long time to set in won't be felt in a game where travel times are extremely fast compared to real-world travel. It was either make the cold set in quicker, or make travel slower - I opted for the former, as the latter would have turned the game into one that I, myself, would not want to play - and then why would I want to continue working on such a game? Food was always meant to be mainly a travel-related thing: You travel far, you bring food with you, or learn how to forage/hunt/fish/etc. So I made wilderness map movement reduce nutrition at a high rate to facilitate that.

I certainly think there's a place for a game with mechanics where travel takes a significantly long time, and other mechanics are designed to take more realistic (or consistently-multiplied) amounts of time. I wouldn't play it, but I know there are plenty of people who would, and would enjoy that sense of realism in those aspects of the game. It just wasn't something I wanted in my own game. I opted for inconsistent time tables when compared to real life in favor of my own fun factor.

I'm excited to see what kinds of tweaks are made as feedback continues to roll in.

I agree! Don't want to make the game something too tedious that no one wants to play.

And I suppose if the majority of people think things are fine and they are having fun... Well, there will be no need to change anything.

I will say, straight out, that if traveling takes 30 or even 20 seconds per room consistently, I probably will not play. I enjoy rp. I enjoy the flow of moving from place to place, and being as clok is a very movement heavy game, that extra time in which I literally can't do anything but that would be too short for me to do anything irl, would add up quickly.