Cook NPCs - Good or bad?

[Anonymous]

• Are the steps of hunting, skinning and cooking food items ultimately shallow and boring, and best to be replaced by an NPC with an unlimited stock, or would clans be better served by having to actually rely on hunters or buy food from Houses/Clans with hunters?
• Does the addition of cook NPCs in the game help keep PCs in organizations with a huge and efficient virtual workforce from starving when they wouldn't be, in reality, or would relying on hunters give meaning to actions beyond getting more sid?
• Does having organizations feed PC employees help keep the economy in swing by having as much of the PC-held obsidian going towards item purchases as possible, or would ceasing the unlimited food and water benefit from an organization help make the game more realistic and gritty?
• Should only certain clans have them, such as only middle and upper tier noble houses?

Overall, do you think Cook NPCs, who have an unlimited supply of food, add or detract from the game?

[Dakkon Black]

You know I think it would be kinda neat if your cook could run outta supplies.

Ask cook supplies

The fatass cook says "I've enough to make six more meals"

Give cook meat

ask cook supplies

The fatass cook says "I've enough to make eight more meals"

Even if he can make lots from just some meat, it would be sorta cool. Means that we'd actually have to hire some PC hunters and stuff, which is something that I think is lacking IC anyways.

[Tamarin]

I thought about this the other day, and I really think we should abolish cook pcs.  Or at the very last, -actually- have to provide them with meat.  As a lone hunter, I've become overburdened with so much food that I have to waste meat from my kills.  And I see meat and stuff lying around outside all the time.  This has to stop.  Get rid of the cooks.  It won't be that bad.  Food might actually become a commodity, as it should be.

[Gilvar]

You are not important in the scheme of things.
Life will go on without you, and most likely (except in rare cases here and there) will not be changed in a huge way because of you. You are not a unique or beautiful snowflake. You are a very small fish in a very big pond. Life of a large clan (houses, merchant houses, tribes) will probably never rely solely on its PCs. Repeated... life goes on without you.

Most houses that have cooks: Noble Houses and Merchant Houses, have a very active VNPC population, doing things that its pcs do, just in a larger way. Certain houses for example, just from their PCs can accrue a large enough surplus to feed all the players for years ICly. Trump this with the surplus of a much larger number of VNPCs doing the same exact thing and you get the huge virtual surplus that cooks represent.

It correlates to people in houses being provided for. As it should be. Its an incentive to join a house. Free food, free water, free place to rest. If free food suddenly becomes: Free, after you hunt it down and kill it... it looks bad. And there are houses that wouldn't hunt, but through their large budgets have food regularly delivered by slaves or servants. I.e. Borsail doesn't hunt, but being the biggest badest house in Allanak, its pretty much guaranteed they will have food on hand. It puts people in Houses up a notch, which is good. Life should be hard for the lone individual, struggling against the world, and it should be a step better for people in a group, tied to a large and established orginization.

I think this discussion doesn't really need to be hacked to death over the subsequent 5 or 6 pages of arguing that will happen. If you think a certain clan shouldn't have a cook you can mail that clan Imm and explain your case, if its logical you will probably get your way.

[sarahjc]

Maybe you should be able to give them food to cook.. But I don't think they shouldn't have any food available.

Only because what happens when in merchant clan there is in a lul and there aren't very many PC hunters to go out and get food. Do all the merchants and crafters of the house starve.. There are lots of Vnpc hunters bringing in food..

And as far is noble houses..  Well they have to have NPC cooks, or there is no way to eat as most noble houses don't allow the guards out the city.

It is also one of the perks of working for a great house. Meals, bed, free stables.

[SpyGuy]

Trying to respect Gilvar's wishes but I'd like to bring up a point,

Not having a NPC cook-o-matic doesn't mean no food.  Sergeants, quartermasters and aides can all go out and buy a house the supplies it needs from a grocery store.  Stimulate the economy people!  If a house hunts an obscene amount, good for them they have food.  Borsail is rich as hell, good for them they have food.  I've played in a very large clan but in a rather backwater area before.  We didn't have an NPC cook, just a couple of baskets of food for the garrison.  I happened to like this alot more than the NPC cooks actually.

I think VNPC cooks should be much rarer, especially when it seems like there are alot of PC cooks with nothing to do but cook their wares and try to sell them off.  A pantry system of sorts would likely work the best, with whoever would be put in charge assigned to go buy X sacks of flour, X tubers, etc.

That clans X, Y and Z have unlimited amount of steaks, etc. that would total to hundreds of 'sid if you tried to buy them individually seems unrealistic to me.  And as for VNPC hunters, most clans that seem to have hunters would likely also have stacks of VNPC guards, aides, family members, etc. that require just as much feeding whereas the PC hunters that gather so much food arent using any of it because they "ask cook mekillot steak".

All that being said I think some clans should have NPC cooks.  Templars, the Byn (just because its part of their appeal, come on, the stew!), and maybe nobles in noble compounds.  The Nobles guards though should have to scrape a little bit, their quartermaster or sergeant or whoever should have access to a little extra petty cash to go buy the needed supplies for the garrison.

In an ideal world this would also create a higher turnover in grocery shops, which seem to have 5 of everything that no one ever buys.

Just my take on it.

[Tamarin]

Gilvar, why not have vnpc cooks feeding the vnpc population, and have PC cooks and hunters feeding the PC population?

[Rindan]

Gilvar, why not have vnpc cooks feeding the vnpc population, and have PC cooks and hunters feeding the PC population?

Because if the PC cook decides to stop logging on suddenly the richest noble or merchant house in town can't feed its members, when in truth it can.

I like the idea of interaction and I like the idea of struggling to food and water.  However, large clans are not the place for this.  Large clans don't struggle for food and water unless something very bad is happening.  How would you justify House Borsail suddenly not being able to feed its members because a few key players decide to stop logging on?

I love the idea of a PC economy and a struggle for survival.  In order to have this though you need to bring things down a notch to where this sort of stuff would happen.  A mercenary guild of a dozen people might very well promise members free food, and they might very well struggle to provide it.  If you want this type of interaction, then you need look at the world of Zalanthas on a different scale.  So long as massive merchant and noble houses are the PC clans, this sort of interaction is going to be religated to the independents.

[Gilvar]

I tried to explain that with my point on the obvious surplus PC hunters make. Some clans have over 100 food items surplused. With maybe 5 active hunters. If 5 can surplus 100, then a virtual group of 20 could theoreticaly store 4 times that... and say give it to a cook... to prepare for people.

[Tamarin]

Ahhh ok I see what you're saying.  There has to be a way tho, so that so much food doesn't go tossed aside in the desert, though I suppose that's not the issue of this thread.

[Gilvar]

One idea might make food decompose. So people can't stockpile food. Giving it more value since you either go hunt your food the day your going to eat it, take the time to salt it, or buy it from someone. (Excluding clans with cooks).

Would make salt more popular too.

[creeper386]

I've been in a merchant house in an area that relied on PCs to buy food and water. Lets just say, even though the merchant house should be well off and have food for it's employees ... I had to supply myself and a few others with food. It's bad enough when you start missing hard earned pay or can't get anything accomplished because the people in charge aren't around, but it sucks when you start to STARVE to death because of it. If everyone clan was made this way, there'd be no reason to be in a clan, because you'd be just as better off as any loner most of the time. I don't know where you guys are playing but any clan I've been in rarely has a consistant enough of a PC playerbase to be able to keep themselves fed. Heck, I know for awhile in Tor most people that went out on patrols or various missions had no skill in skinning, and even if we had a person with them, we wouldn't bring back meat. They were training missions or acctaully paid missions, they weren't hunting expeditions.

Something like this might be suitable for small clans, in most cases this is already the case, but for merchant houses, and noble houses ... I'd say if the few that don't have cooks haven't been given one, they add them in.


Creeper

[SpyGuy]

One idea might make food decompose. So people can't stockpile food. Giving it more value since you either go hunt your food the day your going to eat it, take the time to salt it, or buy it from someone. (Excluding clans with cooks).

Would make salt more popular too.

Though I like this idea it'd also make the life of the independent much harder whereas the life of the noble guard would be just as easy, except of course that never used pantry of raw meat wouldnt be quite as filled up.

Also salt should be fairly cheap and should make said meat permanent, mainly because its unfair to those who already have a rough life in the wilds if an even further wedge is driven between them and the guy that got hired in a noble house.

At the risk of derailment I'd like to say its pathetically easy to get hired into a clan with an Npc cook and never have to worry about food or water.  Sometimes it actually seems like you need to willingly say "I'll be an independent regardless of any IC justification (an easier life) to the contrary because 10 people would like to hire me (I think we have a few threads ont his already though).  I think the clans shouldnt have to worry about such, I think the clan leaders should just have to have more thought on the subject then "Just ask the cook" like having to buy supplies/cooked products from a shop.

[LoD]

NPC (and I guess VNPC, though I don't know why anyone would care) cooks are both a completely IC entity as well as a playability issue.  You just can't have PC's responsible for distribution of the entire organization's materials.  It would depend too much upon playing times and availability.

Likewise, I don't see anything wrong with the NPC cooks being able to dole out whatever amount of food required because of the immense NPC and VNPC actions of the Noble or Merchant House bringing that food into the organization.

Now, there are two solutions I would add to maybe make this a little bit more worthwhile:

1) Have your cooks only able to provide 5 'basic' food types, and try to provide a way in which other options will appear if certain food is in a food or smoke rack.

2) Have some sort of system for placing the food into IC objects that imply the food will be used from them, and replace that with the junk function.  Maybe the object clears its inventory every nood and evening with an emote about 'cooks coming by and grabbing some smoked meat and other foods' from the object.

That way you aren't wasting these huge food supplies, but you aren't taking away a valuable and needed part of the game for playability.

-LoD

[jhunter]

I think the reason the pantry stuff doesn't get used up is because people are playing a bit unrealistically.

Here is why, if your pc knows how to prepare food a bit and there are other alternates for things to eat right at hand...are they always only going to eat what's on the menu?

Or they might just dig some of that stuff out of the pantry and whip something up?

I think people need to start treating food more like real people do...some things people like and some things people don't. Alot of people, will get tired of eating the same things day in and day out  and take a little extra effort to make something different now and then.

As it stands now alot of people just go to the automated food dispenser and get something to fill their bellies as if their pc doesn't ever care what they eat.
This is just how I see it.

[sarahjc]

I've been in a merchant house in an area that relied on PCs to buy food and water. Lets just say, even though the merchant house should be well off and have food for it's employees ... I had to supply myself and a few others with food. It's bad enough when you start missing hard earned pay or can't get anything accomplished because the people in charge aren't around, but it sucks when you start to STARVE to death because of it.

I too can testify to that. I've been in a similar clan that didn't supply food, or did so on a very limited basis and it sucked. Nothing like having your belly rumble, then look in the tun and .. oh.. no food.  Then wait hold on, I can't go out and hunt alone because the rules say I can't and I've already wasted most of my money buying food and water last week.  

Think: Hrm.. Why did I join this clan?

It sucked...

[Bestatte]

I like mek steaks. I'll admit it, I'm a food twink. Why, some of the uninformed might ask? Because it is one of the most filling food objects in the game that I've experienced (so far). I don't need to do this:

get root bag
get root bag
get tuber bag
get tuber bag
get meat bag
get meat bag

eat root
eat root
eat root
eat tuber
eat tuber
eat tuber
eat tuber
eat meat
eat meat

Just to get full.

One piece of mek steak, in 4 bites, will cover ALL THAT. I twink eat to avoid twinky spam. Go figure.

[Tamarin]

I definitely like the food rotting idea.  It'd be cool to log on and find my 60 travel cakes reduced to a smaller number...good for new space in the pack too.  Not to mention cleaning up the desert.

[Tamarin]

Oh that reminds me...now we could have food that becomes poison when you ingest it...so a cooked steak may appear to be bad, and that should reflect in the description as a bad steak would be fairly obvious, I think.

[Trenidor]

I didn't take the time to read much of this post, I found too many faults in the discussion and decided to point a few things out. Sorry, I'm too lazy to find the actual quotes, but here goes; I notify you when it's quoted somewhere so you guys can clam your quote if you like.


1.[NOTICE: this is sorta quoted somewhere way back and I don't remember by whom]
In introduction, I'd like to say that we play PCs because they are the most noticable, uncommon, characteristic, different, etc. (The list goes on and on.) people in the game. No one wants to play a game if they can't be a 'hero' so to speak. I'm positive that there isn't a sole alive that's playing a true commoner. (the ones with a crappy life, less than 100 sid a year etc.) We like to play the people that you are likely to hear about if you were reading history.

That said, we must be important to houses, or we wouldn't be hired over all those VNPCs, and promoted over them as well.  So we -are- more than just small fish in a big pond. We're more like Moby Dick under the sea. :wink:

2. Ever wonder why there's so many stories about lack of supplies in the (an) army? (olden and stuff the past few wars)

It's cuz there's a lack of transportation, communication, and development. If I was a Kuraci in Red storm, I'd be pretty angry when supplies dwindled low and would then send a few messengers to the head kurac office for them to ship new supplies down. [This not only would supply great RP experiences, but would even out the playing fields for houses that hate other houses; all one would have to do is boycotte a supply train (arm desperatly needs to stress on IMHO, the importance of supply trains, be it just a man with a loaded up kank traveling to the city with the supplies, whatever, it should still be there.) and the opposing house would be in trouble when their campsite doesn't have food for the soldiers.

3. PC Cooks in arm don't do much. They can't sell their things because the NPC cooks underbid them at a low cost of $0. The only people they end up selling to are the people that don't belong in a house.

4. Food can only be stored for a fixed amount of time, with zalanthas being a desert climate, there must be a lot of germs and other things which would cause meat to not stay good for that long.

Now, my thoughts on this:

I think that cooks that have unlimited inventory should be banned for everyone but the nobles and under special conditions.[/i]

[Angela Christine]

Meat left in the desert is appalling.  It gives the impression that the hunters are just out there to twink out fighting and/or skinning.

ICly food, any kind of food, is in high demand.  Unfortunately the code does not support this, and in the end it is the code that most influences behavior.  Hunters aren't going to carry around bags full of meat that they can't sell because the local shops already have 5 hunks of scrab meat, and it certainly isn't (or shouldn't be) worthwhile to ride to Tuluk to sell another 5-10 hunks of meat.  So food is left as garbage.


1. One way to increase the real demand for food would be to remove NPC cooks except from the noble and merchant house mansions (and the Byn, because byn stew is legendary).  A noble or merchant house would have exactly one NPC cook, and that cook would be inside the mansion, all the other compounds and barracks owned by the House would have a food area, but not a cook-o-matic.  That would create _real_ work for the PC hunters, servants, cooks, aides, etc.  Independant hunters and rangers could sell food to actual PCs for a change.  Run low on food and there are no clan hunters or leaders around?  The clan imm can briefly animate an NPC, give the PC 300 sid and tell them to go buy supplies to replenish the larder.  Now you've got food and the exciting roleplay of a shopping trip.  


2. A similar option would to reprogram cook-o-matics.  They can always produce, oh, say travel cakes.  If they have meat (any kind of meat) they can produce mek steaks and erdlu drumsticks.  If they have fruit and meat (any kind) then they can produce stuffed belshun fruit.  Roots and meat, and then they can produce soup.  Give 'em flour and they can produce bread and cake.  But this whole idea sounds like a lot of work for some poor overworked coder.


3. Change the way grocers buy food, or create a new grocer that does things differently.  There should be an UNLIMITED market for raw meat, fruit, roots, nuts, and other unprocessed food.  Sure, the market for ginka pie is limited, and only so many people want a roasted scrab head, but the market for raw ingredients is limitless.


Angela Christine

[Tamarin]

2. A similar option would to reprogram cook-o-matics.  They can always produce, oh, say travel cakes.  If they have meat (any kind of meat) they can produce mek steaks and erdlu drumsticks.  If they have fruit and meat (any kind) then they can produce stuffed belshun fruit.  Roots and meat, and then they can produce soup.  Give 'em flour and they can produce bread and cake.  But this whole idea sounds like a lot of work for some poor overworked coder.

That is possibly one of the greatest ideas I've ever heard of in this game.  If the NPC cooks have maxxed cook skill, then all players have to do is hand them an uncooked piece of food, wait a short delay, and then get the prepared food back.  Instant use for hunters, beyond just gathering shells and skins and hides and whatnot.  Nicely done.

[Bestatte]

AC (or someone anyway) mentioned that idea in a previous thread. I love the idea too!

But, have the cook carry at least one staple item all the time, location-specific. If they're in the north, they could carry tandu or duskhorn steak (not both), in the south, a mek steak or roast scrab.

That way if a clan just plain doesn't have a chance to get out, and doesn't run into a hunter selling food, they will still have -something- available. If they want choices for their meals, they have to acquire the ingredients somehow.

[John]

AC (or someone anyway) mentioned that idea in a previous thread. I love the idea too!

She did. It was in response to the issue of cooks not being open 9/11.

I've been in a merchant house in an area that relied on PCs to buy food and water. Lets just say, even though the merchant house should be well off and have food for it's employees ... I had to supply myself and a few others with food. It's bad enough when you start missing hard earned pay or can't get anything accomplished because the people in charge aren't around, but it sucks when you start to STARVE to death because of it.

I too can testify to that. I've been in a similar clan that didn't supply food, or did so on a very limited basis and it sucked.

And I've been in a clan (recently) where the PC hunters provided food for the PC hunters (as well as supplies for others) and the other people in the clan got to go to the NPC cook. I liked this set up because the House consistantly had enough hunters to feed the hunters. I'm sure that in some clans it is a problem, in my recent experience in one particular clan it hasn't been a problem for that clan. Where it can work, I think it's good to implement it.

I think people need to start treating food more like real people do...some things people like and some things people don't. Alot of people, will get tired of eating the same things day in and day out  and take a little extra effort to make something different now and then.

As it stands now alot of people just go to the automated food dispenser and get something to fill their bellies as if their pc doesn't ever care what they eat.

I see this as a real problem across the entire PC population. Not just with clannies. I know quite a lot of people who (from what I saw) ate nothing but travel cakes. Because everyone did it, I'm now on a crusade to never eat the darn things

Although lately I have been seeing a few PCs mixing it up which is great to see I can't say I've seen many travel cake eaters, but then again I don't watch people when they eat So maybe this is a problem that is no longer around, but a while back it was definitely prevalent.

You know I think it would be kinda neat if your cook could run outta supplies.

Ask cook supplies

The fatass cook says "I've enough to make six more meals"

Give cook meat

ask cook supplies

The fatass cook says "I've enough to make eight more meals"

Add some default foods (see ACs idea) and I would love to see this happen

[flurry]

Chiming in a little late...

Some of the suggestions for modifying NPC cooks seem pretty cool.  I dislike the idea of removing them though, in general.

I had a previous PC who was in a clan in which only a very few had access to the NPC cook, and the rest depended on other people (either hunters or the people who had access to the cook) to fill up the general food supply.    I didn't think it enhanced conflict in any realistic way.   (This particular situation was maybe worse because there were very few active PCs)  It seemed more similar to the type of conflict (if that's the right word for it) that arrises from not being able to find the person who does hiring for a clan, or not being able to find the person who pays you, etc.

[Trenidor]

after going on a short vacation, I've come of with a good idea for this:

Make the PC recruits make the meals. In the army, this is popular, even famous for the fact that New Recruits are put on Cooking Duty to peal potatos all day long...

You could mix it up a little, since recruits aren't always online to make a steady schedule, and assign them to prepair food and get out of practice.

Another thing I'd have to add would be change the cooks into inventorists. Let me explain: Follow AC's #2 plan in that anyone can drop off the meat and other raw materials off to the NPC. Only instead of prepairing the food, they put it in storage and keep track of the items. After X amount of days, the food goes rotten. These raw materials could be accessed by the house servant, the cheif, and whoever is assigned on cooking duty (give them a key to the locked storage room with the NPC in it) This way, those Byn Mercinaries will really become mercinaries when they can cook, clean, and beat someone's ass. The Inventoriest will only take raw materials, cuz cooked ones are harder to store.

It'd solve a few problems.

When there isn't any food in the Store Room (goes rotten or someone takes the last bit) the next person to enter the store house, or the person that takes the last piece of food, will recive a simple message like: "Go tell your searge we're all done outta food here in the storehouse." The recruit will contact the seargeant and tell him/her the bad news. The seargeant will go get into the secret stash of food buying supplies and get some money out to give the recruit to buy supplies. After that, more supplies will be orderd from some source (The next town over).

On Saturdays, since the system goes down and resets the shops and what not, this would work out perfect because the storehouse could be restocked from the only VNPC caravan shipment.

[Forest Junkie]

As a lone hunter, I've become overburdened with so much food that I have to waste meat from my kills.  And I see meat and stuff lying around outside all the time.  This has to stop.

There is a simple solution to your "problem": stop hunting when you have enough meat.

[Bestatte]

Forest Junkie has a very valid point.

What are the realistic explanations for why people hunt?

1) For food
2) For body parts to make crafted items or to sell
3) For self-defense if they are attacked by an aggro critter

If you already have food, cross off #1.
If you've got all that food, then chances are you probably also have a packful of skins, hides, shells, beaks, sinew, feathers, and whatever the fuck else. Cross off #2.
If you have all the food and skins and everything else you need, you should be heading back home (wherever home happens to be) or pitching tent to camp out for the night so you can prepare to head home in the morning. So, really, the only reason after you've exhausted #1 and #2 is to keep yourself alive on the way home.

Assuming you know how to use the FLEE command, know your way around wherever you're hunting, and know how to type RUN, you should be able to reduce the need to stay alive to a bare minimum.

Summary: Under extremely rare circumstances, there is no reason to hunt once you already have the things you went out to hunt for in the first place.

OOC reason to hunt: Practice to boost your skills if your clan doesn't have training, or if you are unclanned.

A very real need, and a very understandable need. But I would submit this: If you have all that food, and all those skins, it's time to go home. You've had enough practice for the RL day.

[Anonymous]

I just can't imagine a situation where anything but the foulest of food items were left behind.  This isn't the great American frontier where people had all the food they wanted, so they could just take the skins and not give a damn.

To me your average hunter wouldn't be willing to risk leaving behind 5-10 sids worth of meat that s/he knows there's a market for just on the off-chance they might be able to get another jozhal skin.

[Armaddict]

Someone said something about how salting and preserving food would keep it from spoilning, and otherwise, food would have a delay before it was useless, and it was responded that it would make life as a noble or merchant guard or whatever 'too much easier' than the independent hunter.

Anyone else think this is completely logical and makes perfect sense?

A noble guard -does- have benefits over an independent hunter, man!  Otherwise, people wouldn't sign their lives over to these people.

And it's late.  That's all I'm putting down right now.

[Angela Christine]

Would you even need salt to dry meat in most of the known world?  Salt is used to deal with moisture, because moisture encourages rotting, but the known world is extremely arid.  This isn't like salting fish on the sea shore, next to a gigantic sea full of water, with bouts of water falling from the sky.  Just leaving the meat on a rock or a spear in the sun for a few hours ought to dry it out quite nicely.  The inner layers of a large carcass might have time to rot since the outer layers would prevent the moisture from escaping too quickly, but unprotected hunks of meat should dry out quickly.  Unless you do something stupid like put a bunch of wet meat in a moisture-proof hide bag for a few days, then you're going to get some interesting rotting and a really special smell when you open the bag.  

I think the natural tendancy would be for most food to dry out, not rot.  If it did rot, they would probably eat it anyway, because that green fuzzy stuff is the closest some of them ever get to a vegetable.  

If you are going to stick a timer on raw meat, have it turn into "a small dried out hunk of meat" when the timer expires.  This could be a generic result for all/most meat, like the burned mass of meat, so that no one would have to write up a bunch of new objects.  Dried out meat would have a moisture content of zero, and would probably have the effect of making you a little more thirsty when you ate it, because your body would need to re-hydrate the meat to digest it.  It would also have limited craftability, compared to fresh meat, because you simply can't make a juicy steak from a hunk of dehydrated meat (you can add water and vegetables to make a nice stew, but not a steak).  It would be slightly less valuable than fresh meat, but not quite as worthless as burned meat.


Angela Christine

[EvilRoeSlade]

Angela Christine.  I applaud your ingenuity.