How do you make food MATTER in an RPG? I don't think I've

IIRC in most editions of D&D, you have to eat a pound of food a day or suffer penalties. That's usually not a problem, as food can be obtained easily.

In campaign settings like Dark Sun or the old Fantasy Flight one Midnight, where food is treated as a currency and thus literally treasured, it becomes much more important to keep track of.

>>53565909
If you want to go all the way then make it so not eating certain foods can make you sick over time. Not enough Vitamin C, Vitamin A, fiber, carbohydrates, etc can lead to bad health.

>>53565909
Keep track of rations and apply penalties for starvation
Eating rotting or poorly handled food carries a penalty
Food is expensive enough / PC's are poor enough that a substantial chunk of PC wealth go's to paying for food
High quality food comes with mechanical benefits

>>53565909

Very simple: you don't recover HP from time rested that doesn't include eating food.

A short rest requires drinking water to recover your stamina, which makes tracking water important.

Resting for the evening requires food and water. You can go without food for a night or two, but the longer you do the more its going to hurt you since you are not recovering from shit.

In this system, water will obviously run out faster than food, but that's realistic. It means that replenishing water whenever possible becomes important, which lets you do stuff like dirty water that might not be safe to drink actually mattering, or cursed pools or whatever.

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>>53565909
So in a recent campaign I had a player with a herbalist character.
I came up with a bunch of different herbs and their uses. I gave each a habitat (marsh, alpine, deciduous forest etc) and a specific recipe to make them useful. Something really detailed like needing to soak the root in salt water for a week or smoking the leaves in a chimney or brewing it and sweetening with honey.
This really got the player involved. It wasn't just a passive 'roll a check, make a potion' thing - they had to consider the kinds of plants that grew in their environment and whether they had the correct tools to prepare the herbs. And of course, the payoff was good. The potions created were genuinely useful despite being labour-intensive to make.

Food is harder though. It's a challenge to provide that payoff.
Perhaps consider giving some foods buffs of some kind to the character. They could alleviate exhaustion or give a bonus to awareness. Maybe give the characters a reroll (fate point/inspiration point, whatever) if they take the time to work out an actual meal and not just 'iron rations x1'.

>>53565909

Making it matter isn't enough. You need to make it fun.

Something can matter while being an utterly shitty mechanic everyone will hate and most people will ignore. If you want it to actually add to the experience of the game, focus on the benefits fine food might provide, rather than leveraging penalties and forcing annoying bookkeeping.

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>>53566669
Another thing I've done is to create a proper fatigue system to complement overworld exploration.
Each fatigue point a character gains gives you a -5% penalty to all rolls. If you get more than about half a dozen fatigue points, you die.
You gain a fatigue point from 8 hours of travel on foot. Illness and injury give you a number of fatigue points each morning for a certain amount of time. Dehydration, starvation and sleep deprivation give you an increasing number of fatigue points each day for as long as you're suffering from them.
You lose a fatigue point by resting for 8 hours.

I mention this system mainly because it's a simple, tangible currency you can use to keep the players thinking about certain things. If you're ill, maybe it's not a good idea to travel etc.
You can incentivise food within this framework. Maybe proper, specified food makes you lose an extra fatigue point. Now when you're trekking through the icy wilderness with a broken leg, a hot meal suddenly seems rather appealing.

>>53565909
Only bring it up when you can make it dramatic and interesting.

The party crosses a great desert to the lost, sunken library. Challenge them to find water and run them past a few encounters they might use to get what they need.

-A desert caravan passes. Will the party attack, trade..? Or take a mission from the head caravaneer?

-The party see an oasis just when they feel they're about to fail. Will they escape the illusory charms of the shaytan djinni trying to steal their bodies?

-The strange free people of the dunes attempt to capture you for your blood. They turn out to be vampires that hunt the party if they (wisely) travel during the cooler, clear nights. Will the party prevail? If not - will they escape?

I guess what I'm saying is that you make food/water important by not making them the enemy themselves, but putting them at the center between the party and other foes. Use them to create conflict. If the party ignores it and slogs on, smack them with debuffs. Let them try to work around it with their prep, warn them in advance.

If you make the encounters above random and warn them, you've set up food/water to be interesting but also dynamic.

>>53569679
I guess on top of that, show hunger and thirst as issues that the NPCs deal with. This makes it more real to the players if not more important.

I'd say reserve it to harsh environments too because it will strike the players as more believable.

>>53566704
I guess bottom line is this.

Will throwing hunger/thirst into the mix make this game more fun?

If no, don't do it.

If yes, how? Do you use it as a hook only where it's thematically aporopriate for a party who enjoys a more narrative game?

Do you have them track it for a group that enjoys a more simulationist sort of hex crawl, letting the numbers and rules create their own drama?

I dunno, that's your group. Don't do it if it won't make fun though.

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Honestly, the most the player's have ever cared about food was when I made it real fucking hard to get.

They were basically in a lost in space situation, nearly a million LY away from anything human or indeed civilisation in general, with a slow model of hyperdrive. They had plenty of nuclear fuel, and they could use that energy to refine ammunition, recycle air, or whatever, they just didn't have any sources of food onboard. They had a few weeks worth (A lot for many settings!) But they were a century away from the nearest human outpost by hyperdrive (A journey which probably WOULD require refuelling the ship to do), and they had to scavenge for resources.

They stopped off at a destroyed human vessel repeating a warning about biohazards because deadly spacevirus or not, it would definitely have human rations on board. That got them another month. They even found the source of the infection (A shittier, much less adaptable The Thing), and decided that contagious or not, they couldn't overlook the possibility that it might be necessary to cook and eat it down the line, since it was about a month worth of meat.

They found a primitive (WWI-tier) civilisation and traded with their government for food. Naturally, this got them the entire hold packed with food, but one of the prices they paid was to transport a good number of their people off world as a survival of the species strategy. Which then meant they had more people eating their food.

They then made it clear that if any of their passengers fucked up they would be the next meal. Because that's what their adventure had made it clear was important.

They later experienced true terror upon discovering a race of energy beings that they couldn't eat.

They even came up with a complex flowchart to morally justify when and why it was okay to eat sapient aliens they encountered.

>>53565909
What kind of setting are we discussing here?

>>53569928
Man, I'd really want to see that flowchart.

>>53566704
>>53569859
These sum it up pretty well. Think of the feeding mechanics in VTM. Thats essentially what you need to make eating fun. It fuels your powers, it can be really horrific or pleasurable, it is oddly sexual. You have to do something really fun with eating.

>>53566886
>ginger apple cider
Can confirm, that shit's amazing.

>>53569928
see >>53570068
Please post the flowchart. I really want to see this, and I really I like your players.

>>53565909
I sort of tackled this alongside my attempt to turn the d&d 3e alchemy skill into spellcasting for muggles. Food and drink heal a bit and give small bonuses depending on what it is. The better it is prepared, the better the bonuses. Inspired by Fallout New Vegas.

>>53565909
Play FFd6. Food is an important buff for the party.