It has been said that you do not need to drink or eat while in a tavern or inn for just the reasons you mentioned.
It has been said that you do not need to drink or eat while in a tavern or inn for just the reasons you mentioned.
If I'm remembering correctly, Star Wars Galaxies had the exact game mechanic you propose in your post and it was extremely successful in producing a social setting in cantinas (sci-fi taverns).
Players had the ability to follow a career in entertainment, as dancers or musicians. If other players "watched" or "listened" to the entertainment for a specific time period, they would gain a buff for a few hours and heal any wounds that they had accumulated.
Entertainers could buff players wherever they were by performing for them, but to heal certain types of wounds that all combatants would inevitably pick up, players had to enjoy the provided entertainment in cantinas or within temporary campsites placed in the wild by Rangers (another type of player profession).
This generated some important points that should be noted as they made the game so amazing to play:
Transferring this over to a CoE setting, there is no reason something like this couldn't be applied to bards and chefs in taverns (should they end up becoming playable professions), as well as medical professionals in clinics and hospitals.
I think taverns providing accelerated rest, health recovery, and possible stat benefits from food /drink found there would greatly enhance the socialization factor. With the recent direction of MMO's (pantheon in particular) towards forced grouping to nurture socialization, I think the OP is onto something great here.
Your food resources won't automatically fill up in town, it's just that you won't become incapacitated from not eating like you would in the wilds, but your hunger will still rise the longer you go without eating. At least, that's the last information that I heard on the subject. So, players will still have to go to places like taverns to get food and drink.
Hey folks,
Thanks for your questions regarding taverns. This is already a system we have planned and have talked about in IRC.
Survival has three vitality related metrics: vitality itself, Hunger, and Thirst.
When you're out in the wild your Vitality naturally decreases over time at a rate determined by your Stamina attribute as well as the activities you're performing.
Additionally, while you're out in the wild your Hunger and Thirst will increase. As it does, your vitality begins dropping faster. Eventually your Vitality will drop to 0 and you will pass out (incapacitated) from fatigue. Upon waking your Vitality will have risen a bit after getting some rest, but your Hunger and Thirst grow without bounds until eventually you will die (coup de graced) from Hunger or Thirst.
Now, when you're within the comfort of a Hamlet, Village, etc... there are modifiers on the rate of change for those three metrics.
In general, when in town your Vitality does not drop as long as there's a place to rest in the village. This could be your house, a room you rent, etc... However, while in town your Hunger and Thirst will continue to increase. It will not increase to the point of killing you, but it will increase to an absurdly high level.
When you walk into a tavern, even if you don't explicitly order any food, as long as the Tavern has supplies your Vitality will begin to increase from where it was, and your Hunger and Thirst stop increasing. This means that the best way to stay "neutral" and to get a slight reprieve is to visit a food/entertainment establishment.
If you purchase/eat explicitly, your Vitality increases at an accelerated rate and your Hunger and Thirst begin to drop.
Having bards in the tavern, playing card/dice games, etc.. all serve to increase the rate of Vitality recovery, and the quality of the food you consume will dramatically increase the rate of Hunger/Thirst recovery.
Vwalla! Enjoy your stay at the pub!
I will say that I am looking forward to running a Tavern in this game world, and with player contracts being a thing I'm thinking it could have a bulletin board for quests and wanted posters and what not... I'm picturing great things!
That's awesome. That means there is definitely a game-play reason for virtually everyone in town to want to passively hang out in the tavern and inadvertently will socialize.
Very cool solution mixing gamer reasons with in-game roleplay to facilitate socialization.
I for one hope that there will be an Elyrian "Eolian" (Kingkiller Chronicles) - basically musicians come to this tavern and play a fee to play their music, in hopes of getting sponsors/high ranking noble patrons that pay their fees (whether that's paying for their housing, schooling, food, and everything in between) in return for the musician's services (which I assume is playing at court or at their hosted events, etc).
This is great. Ever thought about adding social features while in taverns? Maybe when you enter a food/entertainment establishment additional options unlock.
Just had an image of troupes of travelling entertainers visiting taverns throughout the land...
The way SWG did this stuff was indeed great and I'm delighted to hear that CoE has a system which, while different, will still have the same sort of effect. Even when SWG was in its dying days, cantinas were still great places to be. That says a lot about the mechanic.
FWIW, I was KS Backer #21 and wanted nothing but the best for this game.
I'd seen Caspian's hints about tavern mechanics when I first hopped on the forums here which was what got me excited to run one (or you know, tons of them). Though I never got to play Star Wars Galaxies, their cantinas and a lot of the peripheral classes like doctors and bards seemed like a lot of fun. When I play things like D&D I love to play the quirky support roles more than I do pure combat so CoE's focus on that style of gameplay was the hook that reeled me in.
<3 Soulbound.
I can't wait. The mechanics involved an how they are intertwined should be awesome. Capturing a part of the world almost every game has failed to truly capture will be awesome and I am looking forward to knocking back some brews after a long day.
