First, Welcome, mate. I saw you registered for a couple of days but since this is your first post, welcome <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wave.gif" alt="" />
I like the idea of having to eat and rest for multiple reasons. However after I've read the entire thread I started to think that cRPG's like DD are supposed to be a heroic saga and the ideas here are close to making it something more like Sims, which most people probably wouldn't be happy about.
Sims is not only eating and I don't mind micromenage my character. If you played games like Quest for Glory or Arx Fatalis, you would see how eating is implimented. In the latter, you even have to cook the food and you can make bread out of water, flour and bake it on fire!
So my idea is - implementing food/starvation factor but making eating automatic. I've seen it once and it worked perfectly fine - the player brought rations and once in a few hours their number decreased until there were none in the inventory. Thanks to that you felt that there is a food/starvation factor in the game, but you weren't forced to drag and drop the food into your character's mouth three times a day.
I don't really like that idea. What if I want to starve my character? Better if the character himself says he's hungry (like in Arx Fatalis).
Also different sorts of rations could be available - basic rations would only keep you up and running while luxury food (for example different sorts of fruit) would be more stuffing or would temporarily increase a certain attribute, etc.
It's interesting how in most games food rises stats. You don't become a superhero by eating meat or something. What if you eat a special diet (let's say you eat two oranges, one apple and two pieces of meat) you get addition to your stats after a week? Like +1 constitution or something? Eat healthy :0).
Now I'm going to be a bit <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/offtopic.gif" alt="" /> here, but I haven't found any thread about that and it has something to do with food (frankly, not much). In almost all cRPG games I am sooner or later irritated by the amount of money my "yet no so powerful" character carries in the inventory. Right now in DD I'm still no big hero and I have about 40 000 pieces of gold on me. Putting aside the fact that carrying that amount of gold should make one's back ache, it is kind of funny. Money was usually made of material that had some value (now we have money made of paper but that is a different story) and wasn't as easily obtainable as sand whilst whenever I think of the amount of money I'm carrying I start to ask myself whether rivers of gold flow through Rivelion. I understand that the value of money in the game is based on food (one piece of food costs one coin) so my proposal is - making rations come in packs of for instance fifteen. That could make the prices of all items decrease a bit: basic food for five days = one coin, good knife = five coins, and so on.
Money isn't exactly based on food. Money adds to the fun. The more money you have, the greater the hero is. For example I had about... 400 000 when I played.
Maybe <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/riftrunner.gif" alt="" /> could have some kind of a bank or maybe a special purse which contains all the money instead of scattering it arround?
PS. I apologize for all the spelling mistakes that I've made (there are probably at least a few of them).
Didn't find them yet ;0).