Thirst

[Hoodwink]

The last time I ever played a character who received the message 'You are thirsty' even once was a desert roaming character.  Aside from that I've had 'Rinthers and nobles, dwarves, and elves, all of whom never required to drink even once.  While I understand that some foods provide moisture, I don't think any food provides enough to prevent dehydration.  Even if I lived off fruit my whole life, aside from the complications a limited diet such as this would create, I would still need to drink additional liquid -- especially in a desert realm.

It is possible the code is set this way as a means of sarificing realism for playability -- a philosophy I whole heartedly agree with, when the situation calls for it.  But as it is, despite what the help file on Vivadu Elementalists states, water is not a precious resource, nobody cares about it and nobody needs it.  In some respect, I could see Vivaduans being the highest ranking karma guild, not one of the lowest, for no other reason than their sheer worth as an individual.  I know, that is a ludicrous suggestion, and I don't mean to imply this should be the case, I'm merely stressing the value water ought to have that it currently does not.

Unfortunately, when you do get thirsty, if you and/or your mount are fatigued and you have no water while out in the desert, there's a very good chance you're not going to make it.  The times you do get thirsty, and later dehydrate, it's all one big downward spiral from there.  My proposal is for characters to actually get thirsty more frequently (perhaps even more frequently than one hungers), however with less initial side effects.  Meaning, while I may thirst quite often (or at all, considering the way the current code is), I don't approach dehydration quite so fast.  I think in the oppressive heat of Zalanthas, beggars and nobles alike would carry a small water pouch dangling from their neck, in case they're a long hike from the nearest well.  As it is right now, I have no idea where the nearest water source is from my character, nor am I at all worried about ever needing it in the first place.

Will somebody please make me thirsty!  

[JollyGreenGiant]

I actually like the code the way it is.  Consider this:  when you get thirsty, you are technically already dehydrated.  Depending on the rapidity of your water loss, you may already be seriously dehydrated.  I got severly dehydrated a couple of years back during an illness, and even in the early onset, it is extremely debilitating.  When you're thirsty, it's essentially your body saying, "Ok, I need water now."

In other words, the code is working pretty much the way it should.  I wouldn't want to get thirsty all the time, and when I have a character get thirsty, I'd expect that to be a red flag that that character needed water.

[Hoodwink]

I wouldn't want to get thirsty all the time

Neither would I.  I want a character who gets thirsty once in a while, as opposed to never.

[Angela Christine]

I agree.  While I wouldn't want to see the hunger rate increased, I'd like to get thirsty faster.  When I first started playing I took the docs to heart and sometimes my desert wandering characters would carry TWO waterskins.  Now I sometimes set out without even one, if I happen to have some fruit on me.  Water is heavy and I hardly ever seem to need it on the road as long as I drink heartily while visiting towns.  

Just recently I had a chracter who was comletely full when she left Allanak, she couldn't drink another drop if she had wanted to.  She had recently lost her kank and was trying to raise money for a new one so she walked from Allanak to Luir's outpost by way of the Salt Flats and the Red Desert.  Not an elf, just some average person walking through one of the hottest and dryest stretches of the known world.  Since she wasn't an elf she had to take a few rest stops along the way, so she was out under the sun for a good long time.  She finally got to Luir's, and naturally one of the first things she did was buy a beverage, but even after hours of moderate exertion she was only able to "drink" once before she became full again.  I was surprised.

City characters can almost ignore hydration altogether.  The occasional ale in the tavern, bought because if one has the money one ought to buy something while sitting in the tavern, will likely be enough to keep you from ever getting thirsty.  If you live in a place where beverages are more expensive like Red Storm or the 'Rinth, and for some reason you can't leave that zone, then there may be a minor challenge to raising enough money to keep yourself in water, but it is still just a minor challenge.

I think water requirements are one of the areas where Armageddon should be harsh.  Everyone should be carrying a little water, or at least those with a reasonable expectation of needing to leave the city on short notice should be carrying water.  As it is, as long as they fill up on water before they leave, most characters will be able to spend days in the desert without needing another drink.  I'm surprised we don't all have camal humps on our backs.  

I'm not sure how feasible it is to speed up dehydration, code-wise.  It might be easier to make stomachs smaller.  If I'm figuring the conversions right, it seems like most characters can drink several gallons of water at a single sitting when they are thirsty.  That would be hard to do, not impossible, but hard.  If your body could hold no more than one gallon of water at a time, then people would be reminded to drink more often and it would be worthwhile and necessary to carry water on journeys.  You wouldn't actually need to drink any more than you do now, you would just have to drink smaller ammounts more often.

I'd also like to see a warning that you are starting to get thirsty a little earlier.  If you are far from water on a hot day the time between when you get your first echos about being thirsty and when you are in danger of passing out from dehydration can be surprisingly short.  Not necessarily even an echo, but changing "not thirsty" to "you could drink" in the score would be helpful.  Or having a catagory of fullness beyond not thirsty, so that when you are so full you can't drink any more you would see something in the score like "You are not hungry and you slosh when you walk."  Some indication of the range between completely full and dangerously thirsty.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: The most dangerous thing in the desert should be the desert itself.  That is why I like the changes to the Tablelands, even though they have seriously inconvinenced a couple of my characters.  Being told that the terrain is dangerous isn't as good as having the terrain jump up and bite you in the ass.  

Angela Christine

[Dan]

I think its enough that once you get thirsty you have a very short time to go before you die.

My current character gets thirsty/hungry often enough. Or mayby your character isn't regularly active outside? Hunting and such, doing things that would get you thirsty faster? All I know is that if you start getting thirsty, you have very little time to get something to drink before it progresses into dehydration and death.

[Dracul]

I've never been thirsty before. although what Im am playing is a city character whos 3 days old now, he doesn't eat very well, often dipping into starving, so I dont think hes eating so much that theres enough moisture. not once has he been thirsty

[creeper386]

Hmm... Most any food fills up your thirst in Armageddon. So even if you don't eat much and stay inside or shadowy places you'll be alright.

But I don't really see the problem with not getting thirsty enough. All my city characters who make trips out into the sands, ussually get thirsty on that trip. Although they don't always NEED need the water untill they get back, they'd certainly need to drink.

The only thing I might want to see changed. Is that the echoes happen soon when getting thirst. So the length it takes to get thirsty is the same, but how it is now, if you get thirsty when your outside, it can be less then a day untill you die. And, the body can ussually last a few days. People that live in deserts I don't think drink alot of water either. And if water was really precious... I probably wouldn't spend alot of it by drinking it pure either. Making it into other drinks that spreads out the use is alot better. Or using it in food. Anyway to make it go further. The human body really doesn't need that much water... People now of days are just really spoiled.


Creeper

[Forest Junkie]

I feel that due to the lack of "danger" of becoming dehydrated, Vivaduans are not as highly revered as they should be. This to me is a problem...

I also find it strange that I get hungry more often than I do thirsty, and I play pc's that usually live in the wilds.

Maybe it's just me.

[gfair]

I agree with AC on this one - when I first read about Arm, and water, and worms, and spice, several unoriginal thoughts came to mind:

"The worms.  Spice.  Is there a relation?"
"The second moon."
"My name is a killing word."
"Spice."
(And then that cheesy, but oh-so-sweet 80's rock played when Muad'dib gets up on the giant worm and Stilgar gets up and joins him.  Vangelis RULES)

And I figured that water would be as rare as it is in Dune, and a heck of a lot rarer than it is in Arm.  I actually fully expected Arm to be a Dune/Arakis Mud, and in many ways it is, but in many ways it isn't.

But let's assume that water is as rare as it is in Dune - there would be specific, genetic adaptations on the part of the creatures in the game to use less of it.  Even in our world we see this - for example, some spores are so hardy that they can survive for years without water, and suddenly come to life again.

I figure the water situation is directly attributable to the adaptations these creatures have made.  There may be substitutions where other types of molecules may substitute for the function of water.  Skin may be substantially thicker on Zalanthans to form a better water barrier.  We may be able to store water much more efficiently, extract far more from our intake of food, etc.  We also know nothing of Zalanthan humanoid anatomy or biochemistry, so there could be an explanation we know nothing of.

Also, water just makes so many things easy in Armageddon - soap, for example.  How do Zalanthans use soap that doesn't involve water?  How can stew exist without it?  How can we all live above ground without it?  Why hasn't the Grey Forest Halflings been decimated by other humanoids moving North?

Who knows - a bit more starvation would be nice, and I would like to see those Vivaduans walking around loaded with the finest fineries, and beautiful people scattering sid before their path in lieu of rose petals.  As for them being higher than karma 2, I don't think so.  The hierarchy exists due to the difficulty of playing the race/class of any specific Karma level.  With a Vivaduan in an even more water-starved world than this, it would be much too easy to have all doors opened to them, they would probably be regarded as religious figures of worship, almost.  "Take my children, give me their weight in water, please!" and that sort of thing.

[Lazloth]

Originally, I fell on the "playbility vs realism" side of this discussion, but AC's idea that MAX_THIRST be reduced to some point lower than MAX_HUNGER is a great suggestion!  
Two thumbs up and all of my worthless support.  

The ensuing issues of too many [inexpensive] sources of water, Viv's, et.al., carry a different sort of baggage I won't address here.

[X-D]

Oh, and add this to Gfair's post, during the processing of food into energy (IRL) one of the byproducts is H2O, humans here on earth get about I think 18% maybe less of our water this way, and I am not talking about the water in the food either, A totally -dry- food yields water in the metabolic process, this is how a desert rat survives so long on so little water, it has water saving kidneys and breathing and gets nearly 80% of it's water from -dry- foods.

through evolution on arm, there is no reason why these things cannot happen to all the animals and people there.

[Dracul]

Oh, and add this to Gfair's post, during the processing of food into energy (IRL) one of the byproducts is H2O, humans here on earth get about I think 18% maybe less of our water this way, and I am not talking about the water in the food either, A totally -dry- food yields water in the metabolic process, this is how a desert rat survives so long on so little water, it has water saving kidneys and breathing and gets nearly 80% of it's water from -dry- foods.

through evolution on arm, there is no reason why these things cannot happen to all the animals and people there.

cool

[Hoodwink]

Oh, and add this to Gfair's post, during the processing of food into energy (IRL) one of the byproducts is H2O, humans here on earth get about I think 18% maybe less of our water this way, and I am not talking about the water in the food either, A totally -dry- food yields water in the metabolic process, this is how a desert rat survives so long on so little water, it has water saving kidneys and breathing and gets nearly 80% of it's water from -dry- foods.

through evolution on arm, there is no reason why these things cannot happen to all the animals and people there.

I still don't think it's too much to ask for, nor stepping outside the bounds of reality, for a character to require ingesting water, even if only once in a great while, as opposed to never at all.  I'm sorry, I just don't think living off bread or something is really going to cut it, nor does it help reinforce the fact that water is allegedly a precious resource as mentioned on numerous occasions in documentation.  If we (human(oid)s, not desert rats or other fauna) can metabolize baked potatos into water all the time then there would never be an issue of thirst in the desert to begin with.  Water, not fruit, nor dry cereal and raisins, nor M&Ms, nor anything else, really ought to be essential (as opposed to simply not needing it what so ever, which is the case with my current character and many of my previous ones).

[Dazed and Confused]

Look there is not reason to make it EVEN harder to live the first few RL weeks before you get a job....

And perhaps you are overlooking the obvious...YOU DRINK...when not logged in?

Well, what -would- be nice, is if water from food was only absorbed after an hour or more game time, that way, you can still become thirsty after eating, and might need that drink for the "insta-quench"

[Dazed and Confused]

Is it considered too twinkish to emote buying a beer from the bartender and drinking it even though you never buy it?

It would give people who are somewhat poor a sense of being in the bar doing something.

[Angela Christine]

Virtual beer is ok by me.  You don't have the coded penalty of losing 'sids or the coded benifit of hydration.  It equals out.  

If you've got the money it's probably better to buy the prop, even if you have to Sip it because you are too full to Drink it.  But if your character should have enough money to buy an ale then it's ok to just pretend.

The only time I'd think it was dubious is if your character is supposed to be flat broke and starving.  Going into the Trader's and pretending to be a glass of wine and some flame cheese while all you have to your name is a dark cloak and a tattered loincloth would be weird.

As long as the virtual things you are using are in-line with the role your character occupies it's all good.

AC

[creeper386]

I think the problem has nothing to do with code... But has to do with you people not thinking water is precious because codewise it's not needed. IRL I've gone long LONG periods of time without drinking acctually water. Some of the stuff may have been made with water, but not all of it.

And it's not like you need to take in mass amounts of liquids to survive... Let alone all of it be pure h2o.

I think, instead of making characters need more water to make water rare and precious... Water should be made rare. In the north... You can get gallons of water with the drop of a 'sid, in the south it's alittle expensiver but not by TOO much. Although it may be hard for any poor people to have water... And it'd be a ... Whats that word... SHRUG. Anyways, changing the code so you drink more isn't going to make water more valuable... It'd just going to make it so you drink more, and therefor more water is probably going to be about, and in the long run it's just going to make PCs more dependent on water and everyone running about with water... Don't think it well make it any more of a precious resource. Either deal with it in your RP... Or make water more expensive/harder to get.

Creeper

[gfair]

Drinking a beer to quench your thirst is actually a very bad idea, as is drinking any other alcoholic beverage.  Alcohol is a diuretic, which means that it causes you to lose more water than you take in.  This is the reason why over the course of a night with several beverages of that sort, you go to the washroom alot, and the next morning you wake up with a dry mouth.  So Alcohol is the worst means of quenching your thirst because, ultimately, it is very detrimental to your body's level of water.


But what I think we are underestimating here is the amount of water present in foods.  If foods start to show even minor dehydration, they very quickly wrinkle, shrink, harden, etc.  There is a lot of water in food.  There's a lot in Byn stew, in any type of fruit or tuber, even in meat and bread.  I have nothing against getting thirsty more often, that's fine, but the food of Arm does provide a ton of water.

Alcohol is a diuretic, which means that it causes you to lose more water than you take in... wake up with a dry mouth.

That's also the reason for hangovers, the membrane on the inside of your skull gets dehydrated and starts to like... shrink around your brain.

[X-D]

Hmmm, no, only one of the reasons, the largest reason for a hangover is the build up of a normal poison/waste in your body, lactic acid, this builds up because your liver and other parts are too busy trying to get rid of the other poison, alchahol to get rid of the lactic acid.

Something that can be offset a LOT by adding your B vits, specialy B-12.
One of the reasons so many people where I live drink beer with tomato juice, they do not know why but it cuts down on the hangover... :wink:

Sorry, just had to add that.

On thread topic, I think the thirst works fine as it is currently, city based chars have it pretty easy, that is true, but why not, one of the things that would get a city started on zalanthas is a ready supply of water...hhhmmm, what am I saying, thats the way it is here too.

But maybe try this sometime, try playing a non-desert elf char who never goes into a city and see how much you need to think about water.

[Yang]

Alcohol is a diuretic, which means that it causes you to lose more water than you take in. This is the reason why over the course of a night with several beverages of that sort, you go to the washroom alot, and the next morning you wake up with a dry mouth.

Most Zalanthan's don't urinate, so I suppose that theory is bunk.

[creeper386]

Theres also a problem... Beer may not be too good for hydration... But according to the echoes it works just fine. It certainly quenches thirst. It takes awhile codewise before you start dehydration... it's mostly just getting thirsty. :-p


Creeper