by Sam Witt
May 9, 2001

There are a lot of things that go into maintaining the human body - air, water, decent food, and rest are all crucial to the survival of the bipedal animal. Lack any of those elements for long enough, and you'll keel over in your tracks. But first, you'll go through some fairly agonizing stages of walking death. And that, my friends, is where the gaming goodness comes in.

My goal, you see, is to implement all manner of things that will make Horizon Station characters suffer in new and inventive ways. Don't eat, and starvation will start eating away at your abilities. Ignore the warning signs and continue exerting yourself too long, and you might just find yourself collapsing in a deserted corridor. Breathe dirty air long enough, and you'll not only start getting stupid, but you'll probably even start hallucinating. Ah, the possibilities are endless.

But it's not all about making things hard for players, all of these things (and more) are needed to give players more options. Trust me, and read on as I discuss reasons for making characters tired.

Fatigue and Rest

If you don't make characters rest, players will keep their avatars out in the field forever. They won't return to civilization until they absolutely have to, and when they do return, it'll just be to grab the supplies they need and dump their cash in the bank.

On the other hand, players hate downtime, it drives them nuts when they have to take time out from the activities they enjoy to do nothing. The key then, is to give the players options so that they feel more in control of their characters' destinies. Here's my take on it:

Every profitable action that a character performs must have an energy cost that is deducted from that character's stamina. Where possible, more profitable activities should have higher energy costs, but this isn't really necessary. The key here is that when characters do something that will potentially net them cash or skill advancement, they will get tired. Once their Stamina is fully depleted, they're so tired that they must rest and are no longer able to take part in profitable activities. In our model, it should take roughly an hour to deplete a character's stamina, more or less completely.

But characters have a choice about how to rectify this situation. First, they can just sit down where they are and rest. It should take about a half hour to fully regain a character's stamina if they're just flopping down wherever.

Second, characters can head to an area specifically designed for rest and recreation - bars, restaurants, or other in-game rooms. In these areas, it takes about fifteen minutes to fully restore a character's stamina, and only ten minutes if they're actively participating in conversation with other characters.

This relatively simple mechanic resolves two crucial issues. To start with, it limits the rate of character advancement in a very logical way. Doing things makes your character tired, when you're tired you have to rest. With a more-or-less hard limit on the number of activities that a character can perform in a given unit of time, designers are able to model the growth of their game with a greater degree of precision. This is important, because it will allow designers to better plan the growth of their game within reasonable deadlines based on character growth.

The other thing that it does is promote socialization in a very direct fashion. Characters are encouraged to not only congregate in specific areas, but also to spend time talking to one another in those specific areas. A mechanical incentive for at least some roleplay is certain to get the attention of even the most jaded powergamer. Not everyone will socialize and talk to one another, but there's definitely a reason to do so now.

Players will still complain about the downtime, but by giving them a choice you can drastically reduce the amount of griping that takes place. Make the areas for resting interesting enough (and with everyone congregating there, it'll be plenty interesting) and you might be able to eliminate the vast majority of complaining. Such are the tricks of a devious designer. Those of us who are particularly vile might even consider putting in only the first option, and then adding the 'reduction areas' in the answer to player complaints. Of course, I would never stoop to such a thing. No, really.

Next week I'll talk about how cool food is, and of course how wonderful starvation can be from a game design perspective. See that button down there? You know what to do.