scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/3mvp8n.md

[BST] How can you best abuse the food, rest, and status effect systems if you were a real life gamer?

• Author: u/None *

• URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3mvp8n/bst_how_can_you_best_abuse_the_food_rest_and/

• Score: 3

• Created: 2015-09-29T20:45:58

Post:

Like in my previous thread I am exploring game concepts and how they can be abused. Partly for curiosity, partly because I may write a rational The Gamer story in the future. Keep in mind you can only abuse this particular system. There will be more threads in the future on other systems. So without further ado here are the rules.

• You can see and monitor your health and stamina through bars, if your HP drops to zero you die, if your stamina drops to zero you cannot move or think.

• If you are cut or shot, etc you will get a wound on your body and lose HP. These wounds can cause status effects like bleeding which can be fixed by applying a bandage or will instantly be fixed upon healing the damage taken in HP.

• Any bonuses or deficiencies will show up as status effects. If you are bleeding that is a status effect, same with being drunk, or well rested and they have an effect on your overall health and stamina points.

• Physical or Mental exercise use stamina. The harder the exercise you do the more stamina is used. Mental exercise uses much less stamina overall than physical, though it can still drain you especially if you don't rest or eat.

• Hard physical or mental work, or taking HP damage will over time increase your HP or stamina respectively. This has diminishing returns and though you will never be even close to invincible you can eventually have superhuman levels of endurance. (Keep in mind that this will not effect things like strength, agility, etc. that is a whole other can of worms)

• Food, medicine, rest, and sleep restore your HP and SP. Higher quality food restores more points and medicine in general restores the most. Earthy foods like meat restore more HP and little or no SP while "relaxing" comfort foods like cake or cookies restore mostly SP and little or no HP. Resting and relaxing will restore your stamina quickly, even if you exercised a whole day resting for 10 or 15 minutes will fully restore your stamina. Your HP will regenerate over time also, though at a much slower rate.

• Sleep will restore your HP & SP fully and get rid of all but the most debilitating and chronic negative status effects. You must sleep for at least 6 hours for it to count and 8 or more hours will make you well rested, increasing your HP and SP by 10% for 24 hours.

• Wounds to vital areas will cause more HP damage than normal though most wounds can be fixed by restoring your HP for the amount of damage taken. Wounds like severed limbs, crushed eyes, or heart removal require high quality food, medicine or a full rest to heal. If you are fully decapitated you will instantly die.

• Diseases like colds can be healed easily by taking medicine and chronic problems like diabetes, cancer etc can be solved over time.

• You are much less likely to have any physical problems and though not immortal it is estimated that you can easily live several hundred years assuming your HP never drops to zero.

• Any severed limbs, organs, blood or anything else of your body will disappear if they are outside your body once you have healed. No infinite severed arms or organs!

• These effects will only work on you. Feeding someone food or similar actions will not heal anyone but yourself.

Comments:

u/Jiro_T [+6] (an hour later)

As nobody has mentioned the Randi prize yet, I'll do so.

There is also the fact that pretty much anything which will win the Randi prize will also revolutionize science if you let scientists study it. If you could heal all your wounds by resting, and the circumstances were not contrived to make it impossible to scientifically study, you'll have changed humanity's store of knowledge more than Einstein simply by showing up to the lab.

(If you do this I would recommend going public in such a way that your disappearance would look suspicious and/or piss off some important person. Otherwise you'd get kidnapped by the CIA or Mafia.)

u/ArgentStonecutter [+13] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (an hour later)

Great. Randi steals your power and now HE's immortal.

u/Superguy2876 [+3] (11 hours later)

What? Is this a reference to something?

u/ArgentStonecutter [+8] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (14 hours later)

Fanfic about the reason nobody ever wins the Randi prize is that Randi has the power to steal people's powers.

u/None [+1] (2 days later)

Link?

u/ArgentStonecutter [+3] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (2 days later)

https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3a2ooz/rt_the_randi_prize_short/

u/None [+3] (2 days later)

https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3a2ooz/rt_the_randi_prize_short/

u/None [+2] (19 hours later)

(If you do this I would recommend going public in such a way that your disappearance would look suspicious and/or piss off some important person. Otherwise you'd get kidnapped by the CIA or Mafia.)

This works when you know boring shit like corporate poisoning of water supplies or (relatively standard/minor) government malfeasance.

When the prize becomes so enticing you'll have a much harder time pulling this off. It becomes worth it to eat the bad PR.

Which is the problem with all these "I'll reveal that I turn our current scientific understanding on its head, to the point that our lives must be reshaped" plans.

u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+3] Roll the Dice on Fate (2 days later)

Find the food I can devour fastest for the highest possible hp/second restored possible. Same for sp.

Through trial and error find out what distances of fall damage I can survive. I'm sure there are tactical uses for that.

If combat is likely, and let's be honest combat is always likely as a Gamer, then armour the areas of my body that are most vulnerable. For example decapitation is a big problem, so a gorget and helmet would be a good combo.

Find out my base hp regen/sec rate. Wear armbands with inward facing spikes/razors/whatever so that I am always taking damage and thus increasing my total hp. On a related note, always be wearing weighted clothing. If my stamina is a single stat that increases total full body stamina regardless of which limb has done the work, then awesome. Continue until the size of the weights makes it impractical.

Finally, be careful writing a Gamer story. Many writers make the mistake of saying to themselves 'what do I do now' to which to answer in Gamer fics is often 'write about numbers going up'. This tends to make for some really mediocre fics, as the numbers going up can easily be completely divorced from any actual plot points or interesting situations. Design your system such that when you get around to asking what the most sensible thing for your character to do is, the answer is not 'grind for 3 years then beat everyone without breaking a sweat'.

u/None [+3] (3 days later)

I agree with your assessment on gamer stories ( I like your fic btw). I would massively nerf the gamer powers down to a less OP level.

Inventory system would just detail what you are holding on your person and in your bags with no pocket dimension. Only medicine or magic heals your HP and cut off limbs need to be reattached or regrown with high level magic, a much slower HP regeneration rate too and you can't spam medicine.

You can only observe things you already know about an object (or at high levels things you know in your unconscious). This makes it more of an organizational and learning tool and not some crazy thing that will show you all possible information.

I'd change experience and statistics so that he could become superhuman but never just a walking god, there would be heavy diminishing returns, just like in real life.

As for the skill system (the most powerful in my opinion) I'd change it so he can simply learn things (much) faster and he doesn't necessarily get bonuses from skill level, instead skill level is simply an abstraction of how skilled he actually is. No skill books but he can glean much more information from books than others can and can possibly recreate lost techniques. Also he can learn things while bypassing some of the requirements, he can't learn everything and if he learns certain things they will limit his growth in other areas, but by learning multiple magic disciplines + melee combat he can become quite powerful.

All of this would be in it's own world where every magician has their own power, most are minor some are major. Every magician can possibly learn all the different disciplines of magic (think old school disciplines like divination, enchanting, alteration, warding etc) but their power might pull them in a certain way.

For instance one of the most powerful people is a guy (who I refer to in my head as shield guy) who is exceptionally good at shields. His power grants him the ability to make shields perfectly efficient and cost as little mana as possible, but it limits him to shields entirely, any other magic will not work. He works as a mercenary and is next to invincible, he's even survived a targeted atomic bomb (just barely).

I really like the world I've come up with but I'm already writing another story and this one may or may not happen. But I've tried to make it as balanced as possible, the MC has to actually go through and learn all the magic disciplines and use them together to beat powerful foes. He's more of a generalist mage, kind of like a super zorian if you've ever read mother of learning.

All of this I would mention by saying that powers tend to run down family lines or come from a persons personality. The MC is the type that likes the most hardcore games, hence why his power is like this. A person can awaken their power (and latent magicial ability) by going through a very traumatic experience or by chance, though trauma certainly doesn't make everyone a mage. If a person has too strong of an innate power they will overflow with mana and burn to death (or explode). A normal The Gamer power would cause my MC to explode, leading to a pretty poopy story.

u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+2] Roll the Dice on Fate (3 days later)

You've clearly put a lot of thought into this. I like how the diminishing returns allow you to do the training montage thing at the start where it's still interesting, while still keeping progress associated with risk or at least hunting down masters to learn from in the medium and long term. Too many Gamer fics divorce growth from real risk, and suffer because of it. In a word, they stagnate.

Really, the whole genre would have been better off if it had never included ID create. Which isn't to say that such a power can't be used well, (The Games We Play being an example) it's just that's it's rather easy to... not use it well.

Anyway, I'll be interested to see what wonders your mind brings forth if you find the time, seeing as you've clearly gone hard on the worldbuilding.

u/None [+1] (3 days later)

Yea ID create is so broken. I don't like the idea of getting something from nothing, there always has to be some cost to magic. If you have ID create whats the point of even going out in the real world, you can get all your training without disturbing anyone or ruffling any feathers. With ID create your back in the proverbial basement.

Thanks for the encouragement!

u/nicholaslaux [+2] (55 minutes later)

First step: Perform initial testing on every consumable available at my local grocery store, keeping a list of all items that have duplicate effects (specifically, keeping track of the most powerful per-use items for each stat, as well as being on the lookout for anything that increases any stats permanently, which I would quickly fully drain the supplies of).

Any beneficial status effects, I'd keep stock on me, keeping a look out for anything not easily reproducible (such as invisibility, damage immunity, etc).

Regarding SP, I'm assuming this would have the largest impact on my life, so I would stock the smallest/cheapest/most easily acquired SP-restoring food/medicine, in order to more fully spam all of my new SP-using abilities. Ideally, I'll be able to get a free-conjuration ability, and use it to continually conjure SP/Stamina healing food/drugs, in order to train it up.

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Additional uses could be being used as a medical test dummy, by trying multiple forms of specific drugs in order to determine what potential effects/side effects they might have in normal people based on the numerical effect that it had on me (including hard relative efficacy of treatment).

For the most part, I feel it would be a relatively passive ability, allowing for greater risk-taking in your other activities, but on its own, by being limited purely to yourself, seems less likely to be massively munchkinable.

u/Bowbreaker [+2] Solitary Locust (9 hours later)

Physical or Mental exercise use stamina. The harder the exercise you do the more stamina is used. Mental exercise uses much less stamina overall than physical, though it can still drain you especially if you don't rest or eat.

Does that mean that from now on these two things completely share the same pool? What about work/exercise of only one body part? Could I now use my full theoretical stamina to put it all into biking or lifting weight, thus tiring much more slowly? Can I train my mental capacity through doing cardio? Sounds useful.

heart removal require high quality food

Wait, so I could remove my heart, get patched up and just live on with low HP and no other problems until I can get around to getting food/medication? How comes that doesn't deal max damage? Is this a thing from the manga this is based on?

u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (8 minutes later)

Radiation poisoning rules?

u/None [+1] (12 minutes later)

Low level radiation can probably be countered by HP regeneration, you can tank through it unless its at an insane level by eating. A radiation suit, HP regeneration and occasional eating could probably make you immune to its effects. Though longtime exposure could lead to status effects.

u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (46 minutes later)

Though longtime exposure could lead to status effects.

Green skin, bulging muscles, torn pants?

u/None [+2] (an hour later)

Sure the girls will be all over you. Wonder if being the hulk is counted as a debilitating status effect.

u/rhaps0dy4 [+1] (2 hours later)

even if you exercised a whole day resting for 10 or 15 minutes will fully restore your stamina

Do you need to eat to do this? If you don't, you're creating negentropy!

u/None [+1] (2 hours later)

Don't think so I'm basing this off of the rules in the gamer and my rules are even more strict than theirs. So negentropy all the way!

u/krakonfour [+1] (2 hours later)

You could empirically do away with most of medicine and biology by using one test dummy and standardized testing of everything you can imagine.

u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (14 hours later)

If your blood completely vanishes when you're healed I bet there are some laboratory processes where you need to generate a good vacuum where that would be useful.

u/Shadawn [+1] (a day later)

Well, apparently you don't need to eat. But it may be handy to keep some food pills to use against "bleeding" condition (as any HP heal clears them). Unless you need to fully heal the damage that caused wound to remove it.

Also, you can try to feed part of your liver to your enemy. When it disappears, it will destroy a lot of molecules inside his body, creating effect similar to radiation poisoning. Can be pretty lethal, I think.

Do you need to breath? If you don't, learn "not-breathing", may become handy sometimes down the line.

Do you continue to piss/poop? What if you don't eat? Can you be used to create enough water for a Moon pool (nobody needs to know how that water came into being)? Actually, do you get damaged by low pressure and/or high acceleration? In any case, you can be extremely valuable to space program.

What happens if you try to eat only half of the hamburger? Do you regain half of hp, how is it rounded? Can you eat hamburger in small pieces each regaining 1 hp?

What happens when you try to eat metallic object? Will you defecate it later, or will it be mysteriously converted into hp (or probably damage)? In latter case, you can try to destroy radioactive waste or other unwanted matter, but you probably won't be able to make significant impact this way.

If it turns out that consuming chemicals (including food) works for you exactly as for humans but with directly revealed consequences (hp, sp, status effects), you can make a bank (and probably help Humanity) by being test-subject for pharmaceutical research. Just eat their drugs and check your status, and let scientists optimize. Just get a lawyer before contracting anyone!

u/eaglejarl [+1] (3 days later)

There's a fanfic called "Harry Potter the Video Game: Exploited". The writing is mechanically bad (spelling, etc), but the story is fun and it comes up with a lot of good hacks.

One of them is this: stamina regenerates continuously, but only decreases when you actually exert your muscles. So, when you jump you recover a little bit of stamina while in mid-air; if your regen rate is fast enough, this will be enough to offset the cost of the jump. If so, traveling by bunny hopping is free, yet still counts as exercise so it still grinds strength and endurance.

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