[Basic] Disadvantage of the Week: Restricted Diet and Slow Eater

[johndallman]

Restricted Diet [-10 to -40] is a mundane physical disadvantage. You need some unusual form of nutrition or fuel, which is harder to acquire than food for humans. This disadvantage appeared at GURPS 4e, as a generalisation of the 3e disadvantage Delicate Metabolism, from Compendium I.

Slow Eater [-10] is likewise a mundane physical disadvantage, which is normally a racial disadvantage. You use a lot of your time eating, about two hours per meal, as opposed to the half-hour which suffices for humans. It dates from Compendium I.

The price of Restricted Diet depends on the availability of your required diet. Examples for the present day include batteries, fresh blood, or fresh meat at [-10], human flesh or gasoline at [-20], babies or radioactive materials at [-30] and highly enriched uranium at [-40]. Unlike Dependency, you don’t take immediate damage if you can’t get the right food, you “merely” starve. Normal humans can take this disadvantage if they have serious digestive problems. There’s a -50% special limitation, “Substitution.” This lets you use similar food, but you need to make a HT roll after each meal to avoid an adverse reaction: failure reduces your HT by 1 until you get appropriate mechanical or medical care; critical failure incapacitates you until you get such attention. If you don’t have this limitation, trying substitution is a bad idea: you don’t gain any nourishment, and need to roll vs HT as above, treating success as failure, and failure as critical failure.

Slow Eater is appropriate for herbivores that need to spend a lot of time eating, and covers creatures that need to chew their cud, or have other digestive processes that prevent them being active for significant parts of the day.

Restricted Diet is standard for ghouls, robots and vampires, and shows up on templates for the extremely elderly, Bio-Tech creations that didn’t come out quite right, or that are wildly different from conventional biology. The Fascinating Parachronic Disasters table can give you this disadvantage, as can Martial Arts lasting injuries. Power-Ups 6 has quirk-level versions, and Psi-Tech psiborgs can’t eat normal food. Space has guidance on applying both of these disadvantages to aliens and Template Toolkit 2: Races has more on Restricted Diets. Slow Eater shows up on Bio-Tech uplifted elephants and bio-blimps, Horror things that eat people to assume their forms, and undead that ned to dissect out specific organs.

I’ve never seen these traits used on a PC, except for AIs and robots. They seem to be mostly used as template elements, rather than individual disadvantages. As you recover from an un-restricted Christmas diet, have these disadvantages been significant in your games?

[whswhs]

I've done a lot of thinking about Restricted Diet. The baseline seems to be human omnivory. So how do you represent either obligate herbivory or obligate carnivory? Fresh meat is the first level of Restricted Diet. It's a little odd to put plant matter at that same level, but there isn't any lesser level, and at least if you live in a human society, being a strict vegan does impose inconveniences.

As for carrion eaters, if what they have is "can eat meat even after it's rotted," that seems like the first level of RD plus a level or two of Reduced Consumption with Cast Iron Stomach. That makes being a carrion eater slightly cheaper than being able to eat only fresh meat. (In the other direction, C.J. Cherryh's kif need really fresh meat, as in live animals that they kill by eating them. I think that could be RD (Common). So would "can only eat rotted meat.")

[Flyndaran]

In the wild, obligate herbivores still eat animals occasionally. It's not inherently toxic the way Restricted Diet of any level would make it.
Same for hyper-carnivores like cats and vegetation.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

In the wild, obligate herbivores still eat animals occasionally. It's not inherently toxic the way Restricted Diet of any level would make it.
Same for hyper-carnivores like cats and vegetation.

Hmmm. Some point to that. So how would you represent carnivory or herbivory, then?

[WingedKagouti]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Same for hyper-carnivores like cats and vegetation.

From everything I've read on felines and their dietary needs & restrictions, they can't derive much sustenance from the (safe) plants they do eat and grasses are mostly used to help clean their stomach and intestines. I'm not an expert on the subject, but I did spend some time reading up on the subject when I got my current cat.

I'd still say that any feline should have at least the lowest level of Restricted Diet. Possibly with the Substitution Limitation, and I could certainly see some special breeds where the Substitution Limitation would be too lenient.

From experience with my mother's dogs, Restricted Diet would also be apropriate for various forms of food allergy.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Hmmm. Some point to that. So how would you represent carnivory or herbivory, then?

I think they're physical quirks, although a case could be made for features.

[khorboth]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I've done a lot of thinking about Restricted Diet. The baseline seems to be human omnivory.

I think that's true only insomuch as the default setting assumes human dominance. If humans are dominant, human food is dominant, therefore human dietary needs are commonly catered to (pun not intended, but embraced). In a setting like Titan AE where humans are refugees living on the fringes, perhaps humans have Restricted Diet. In Star Trek: TNG, I'd be loathe to give anybody more than a quirk for it due to the prevalence of replicators.

The real key, I think, is about access to the food. The examples relate to human diet and modern society because that's relateable. If the setting has wacky resources, then different things are advantageous.

[Bruno]

There's not a lot of herbivores that are as broad eaters as humans are, "minus the meat". Primates, rodents, and bears are the garbage cans of the the mammalian world, as a general rule, but there are still primates and rodents with very specialized diets, polar bears are carnivores, and, well, pandas (which have finally been confirmed by genetics and the fossil record to be a bear).

A herbivore that can eat everything except high-cellulose or high-silica foods and specific toxic plants (like humans) may not have more than a quirk. They can eat a little bit of unprocessed animal proteine, but they don't want flesh - they want bones. There's just not enough calcium in a lot of vegetation, particularly if the soil is poor in it. Herbivores can and will make up mineral deficiencies by eating dirt or clay, which works just as well as bones. Processing the animal flesh can make it edible, but I would say that's the same for any Restricted Diet: given TL 6+ technology, at least some inappropriate foods can be processed to be at least not-very-dangerous and provide some nutrition, even if it's not a complete diet on its own. This trades off the normal penalties of the disadvantage for having a very expensive and hard to get/transport/store diet.

Some foods can be processed even at low TLs (Nixtamalization of corn to improve its vitamin content, or crushing and soaking bitter cassava to remove the cyanide) but this explodes once we finally get our brains around chemistry and the basics of nutrition.

[LukeXanten]

Interesting discussions on the Restricted Diet stuff. It seems like one of those disadvantages where the point costs are more of a starting point, to be adjusted as needed for your specific settings, than a hard and fast rule.

Slow Eater brings up an issue I’ve always struggled with, in any game system, and as both a GM and a player: How do you make in-game time matter? I know there are the PC time-use sheets, but tracking down to even the hour seems like a horrendous amount of bookkeeping. How can I make disads like Slow Eater, and things like Requires Preparation or ritual magic stuff, meaningful without bogging down the whole game?

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I've done a lot of thinking about Restricted Diet. The baseline seems to be human omnivory. So how do you represent either obligate herbivory or obligate carnivory? Fresh meat is the first level of Restricted Diet. It's a little odd to put plant matter at that same level, but there isn't any lesser level, and at least if you live in a human society, being a strict vegan does impose inconveniences.

I'll do something that seems to be always met with controversy on this forum. I'll point out to the fact that a mere Vow of Vegetarianism (i.e. will not eat animals willingly but can do it if forced by circumstances with the usual penalties) is [-5], so outright inability to gain sustenance from animals seems like a worse Disadvantage than that, warranting the [-10] level.

I would also argue that a diet of meat is likely as tricky to provide as one of only vegetarian food, since growing meat essentially requires also growing plants/fungi as a prior trophic stage, or relies on chasing animals that run away, or other complications. Meat is also an infamously expensive and/or seasonal and/or regional source of nutrients for people. Due to all this I prefer to interpret 'fresh meat' as 'not rotten' rather than a barely-dead carcass.