Wizard Needs Food Badly - Television Tropes & Idioms

First off, the Avatar is a junkie. He's addicted to two main substances, 'Food' and potions. Food is probably the most dangerous, since the Avatar is totally unable to kick the habit and withdrawal will kill him. Worse yet, the other party members will ... also become Food users simply by virtue of being in close proximity to the Avatar.

— IT-HE Software, Ultima V - Lazarus page

This is the practice of using a food resource as a time limit. It is sometimes implemented as a hard time limit, in which case death, and other times it simply conveys various disadvantages, such as weakening stats, increased chance of death. If you're lucky, actual consumption of food will be abstracted away. At other times, you'll need to explicitly eat the food. Being able to die from overeating isn't unheard of.

Depending on who you ask (and on how the game uses it), this is either an enjoyable source of tension, a gentle prompt to keep a player moving through the game or a form of Fake Difficulty.

Trope named after the way the game Gauntlet tells the player that he's about to starve to death if he's playing a wizard (or elf, or valkyrie, or warrior).

Probably related to Timed Mission but takes place over an entire game. Sometimes paired with a Hyperactive Metabolism. The inversion of Easy Logistics. Sometimes used in Roguelikes to prevent grinding by making you keep going forward.

Examples:

Anime

In every Digimon anime series, if the mons were too hungry, they couldn't Digivolve, and thus couldn't fight. Much time was devoted to finding food.

Live Action TV

Kids Game Show Knightmare had a life force clock which gradually counted down to nothing, and could be refilled by picking up food and putting it into a knapsack.
- Particularly notable for the Nightmare Fuel quality of said life clock (basically, a face which falls apart) and the fact that it seemed to need refuelling every ten minutes.

Music

Nerdcore rapper MC Frontalot features the backing vocals "Frontalot Needs Food Badly" at one point in the starving-artist-themed Charity Case.
Ska band Five Iron Frenzy made a song of this, including the voice from Gauntlet saying "Wizard needs food, badly" at the start, and "Wizard is about to die" at the end.
The Aquabats also referenced this in their largely-instrumental song Ska Boss; at the end, after what is presumably a fight with the band, the Ska Boss announces that he "needs food badly", and that "Ska Boss is about to die".

Tabletop Games

Rarely a problem in Dungeons And Dragons. Even if you aren't in a friendly town, you probably have a spellcaster who can create food or someone who can hunt or recognise edible plants. If that fails, there are also magic items or even class abilities which either create food or mean you don't have to eat (or drink, or sometimes even sleep or breathe). If you somehow don't have any of those things, starvation (in 3.5 at least) only causes nonlethal damage anyway.
- 4th edition has an item anyone with 4 levels, 840 gold, and the Ritual Caster feat can create, producing enough food for five people every day.
  - All of this assumes, however, that your DM is the type who keeps track of this sort of thing.
  - Hey, Bards can create not just food but a portable hotel and for free!
The GURPS Create Food spell would allow the caster to convert any non-metallic matter into edible food. Discussions and speculations that continue to this day point out that any character with access to this spell would be able to eat their way out of any dungeon that wasn't built completely of metal or otherwise given specific protection from this spell.
- 4th Edition dropped the "non-metallic" rule. Which makes Food College Mages into nearly unstoppable tunneling machines.
White Wolf's Ars Magica game system fairly subverts the above: Rather than being able to eat anything—this game's variand on the Create Food spell did exactly that—but it had a duration of sunset/sunrise (whichever came first), and any food created by the spell would simply vanish from your system at that time, leaving the person hungry again.
- It was also notable that consistently eating food in this manner would not only kill you by starvation (because when it vanished, it took its nourishment with it) but could cause a magus to start accumulating Twilight.

Video Games

Master Higgins from the Adventure Island games (well, most of them) had a time limit to get to the end of the stage that could (and most of the time had to be) extended by grabbing the numerous fruits that hung in the air. Milk was a full restore.
- This was also used in its spiritual predecessor, the first Wonder Boy game.
- The necessity to eat every five seconds or else die is fondly dubbed Master Higgins Syndrome(MHS).
The NES game Chubby Cherub. The only objective in the game is to eat everything in sight. And yes, eating keeps the cherub alive.
Achaea forces the player to keep an eye on his food and sleep status. If he forgets to eat or sleep for too long, he'll start randomly passing out (and in the case of food, eventually starve to death). This limit is lifted when the character reaches level 80, as they are considered to have transcended mortal needs. Fortunately, sleep is possible anywhere (although time-consuming, and leaving the character open to attack) and food can be kept for at least a Real Life day before it disappears. Mounts and some pets also starve, unless magically enhanced (read: paid for).
The Black Cauldron, an early Sierra graphic adventure based on the Disney movie based on the Lloyd Alexander fantasy novel series, was infamous for this. Your character had to eat regularly to avoid dying, which was bad enough since you were always fighting the clock. What made matters worse was that there was a limited total amount of food in the game, so you effectively had a hard time limit to finish in. Add to this the standard Sierra sadism and the result was almost unplayable. There's a good reason they never used that game mechanic again.
- There was a "food wallet" under a bridge that had unlimited uses, and your water jug can be refilled indefinitely at any stream.
- The mechanic was used again, both in the Quest For Glory series, and in Kings Quest 5. Also, the Black Cauldron's limits are generous, and the game overall is pretty easy.
- Actually, the mechanic appears in Kings Quest 3, too. Manannan, to whom you are enslaved, periodically demands food. If you don't feed him within 3 game-minutes, you are killed. There are only four things in the game you can feed to him; if you feed him the fourth without special preparation, the game becomes Unwinnable By Design as you will be killed the next time he demands food. Manannan is, of course, a wizard, and since you can disobey him in other ways without being killed, he must need food badly.
Even older is Epyx's Crush, Crumble, and Chomp!, a turn-based strategy game that has the player play a Kaiju out to destroy a city. The player must regularly eat ~~food~~ people to sustain his monstrous self. Failure to do so would result in the monster going mad with hunger; this was simulated by having the game enter random commands, which tended to leave the player vulnerable to the humans' counterattacks.
Food availability limits city growth in Civilization. The AI will often pillage your farms, trying to cause depopulation and civil unrest through starvation. In earlier games, lack of food could even result in military units spontaneously disbanding (now they are supplied entirely with money).
Infinity mode in Dead Rising. It's necessary in that game because Infinity Mode is timed with an online leaderboard. Without a timer, there would still be fools with their X Boxes humming away and Frank West just sitting on an awning that the Zombies can't reach.
In Dwarf Fortress, making sure that your dwarves keep well fed is vital to keeping them alive. Making sure that they have sufficient alcohol is vital to keeping them productive and non-homicidal. Yup, a dwarf forced to drink water will work more and more slowly and his happiness will decrease, making him more likely to snap and start murdering his neighbors or commit suicide. The later versions have made it harder to starve during your first winter, but it's still something that must be planned against.
- Sometimes more insidious, all of the dwarves have food preferences and keep track of what they've eaten lately, and get unhappier if served the same food constantly.
Spiderweb Software's Exile went like this: Start game, create characters, enter world, completely ignore the first NPC (who would've said where to get free food), wander around town, find directions to next town, head out the gate, walk fifteen steps, keel over. Reload game and repeat. A lot.
Eye of the Beholder series of RPG games had this issue. Luckily, being a Dungeons and Dragons game, it also gives you a handy solution in the form of "Create Food and Water" spell if you have a cleric in your party.
The aforementioned Gauntlet abstracts its food away into a clock that gradually counts down. Said food counter doubled as a health meter, meaning it doubled as a Hyperactive Metabolism.
- The blue sorceress still needs clothes badly though.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas tied CJ's life meter to his hunger. If you go without eating for a long time, CJ's fat and muscle stats begin to deplete, and his life meter eventually starts draining. Luckily, you'd have to go a very long time without food before the game starts to remind you that you need to eat and you'd practically have to be starving CJ on purpose if he were to die from hunger.. Since food is the only way to recover energy while not on a mission, eating too much (except salads) would make CJ gain weight.
- Eating too much in one sitting results in his meal coming back to haunt him.
Nethack has you collecting food and possibly starving to death, requires you to explicitly eat food, allows you to die from overeating, has some corpses which give food poisoning, has food that rots away, and has a weight restriction for an inventory which can only carry fifty-two items total. Surprisingly, it's rare for a non-new player to die from starvation, as the game difficulty is high enough that most characters for new players will die quite quickly from something else.
- Nethack has an explicit Shout Out; a character playing a wizard (or elf or valkyrie) receives the Gauntlet message when in need of food.
- Food is a similar resource in Alpha Man, though it's a little more simplified.
- This is a key part of most roguelikes. If it isn't food, then it's water, or even something more exotic like fuel.
Oregon Trail uses the abstracted away sort, and allows you to restock food either by trading for it from others or via a hunting minigame.
- A friend of mine worked at MECC (the company that released Oregon Trail) and all of the programmers wanted the food supply to increase slightly if the wagon train had reached the starvation stage and a settler died. Management vetoed this No Party Like A Donner Party reference.
The Harvest Moon games—the Gamecube version, and probably the others as well—required that you eat or else your character will stop moving at regular intervals to pant and recover. This is extremely troublesome to newbies starting out, for whom it's not clear where to get food from easily.
- Luckily, any Harvest Moon game is full of lots of tasty free herbs growing in the forest behind your farm, and they all respawn daily or every other day (and can be kept in your 'fridge, or even your rucksack, for fifty years without spoiling). The other versions (besides the Wonderful Life version mentioned above) only have you eating food to refill your stamina meter, which is depleted by using tools (so that a day of just running around talking to people won't leave you hungry, but a day of mining will).
- In Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness, the fatigue bar has been replaced with a "fullness" bar that depletes with time, and seems to do so faster during particularly hot or rainy days. You will HAVE to eat (or use the kappa earrings) to keep it filled; if the hunger bar goes to zero, you WILL pass out even though you may have full stamina. Even if you don't let it run down, when the fullness bar starts slipping below half, you'll start waking up later and later in the morning, until about 20%, when you wake up at noon! Also, the "freshness" meter on food and flower items makes sure you can't keep them forever (unless you have a gold/mythic fridge); spoiling food fills you up less.
Lost In Blue is a game about being stranded on a desert island. Unsurprisingly, food is spare. More annoyingly, the food meter drains ridiculously swift and fills ridiculously slowly—a massive plate of fish and potatoes will give you maybe 10% fullness—unless you cook or taw them together into a clever recipe, which takes some out-game learning to grasp. Oh, and if your stomach is bare you can't rest. If you thirst meter is bare you can't eat. If your fatigue meter is bare you walk at a crawl. If they're all bare you start to die.
You would die of starvation in the Quest for Glory series if you went too long without eating anything. (There was also death by dehydration in the second game since the setting was in a desert.)
- In the first game, you can't starve to death (although you still get the warnings that your character needs to eat) due to a programming oversight. In the third game, if you're wandering in the overworld and starving, a giant waffle will follow you until you eat it.
Parodied by Kingdom Of Loathing with "the wettest water you've ever encountered" which makes you "Ultrahydrated" to adventure in The Arid, Extra-Dry Desert.
- Also averted therein with a general consumable system which doesn't penalize the player for long periods without food or booze; in fact, the game rather generously rewards Self Imposed Challenges of the sort.
- Also also, a Shout Out to the trope title occurs when braving the Gauntlet Gauntlet.
A variation appears in Fallout. While the remaining time limit is a water supply, and passing 150 days (or 250 days if you buy water for them) gives you a game over, it is for the player's home, rather than the player himself.
- As well, the player character will randomly take (minor) damage from thirst if he doesn't have a decent outdoorsmanship skill. This can be avoided by the too-obvious solution of carrying a canteen. (Fallout 2 even gives you one to start, but under a different pretext...)
Dark Cloud does this as well, with the player having a thirst meter in the form of water drops near your health gauge. As you wander dungeons, the drops will slowly vanish, and should it reach nouht, your health will start to drop, and your stats will all decrease. You can rehydrate your characters by finding small springs in the dungeons or by drinking bottled water from your inventory.
- In the sequel, Dark Chronicle, "Thirst" is simply a status effect that prevents the player from eating (presumably from dry-mouth) until a bottle of water is consumed.
Several Infocom text adventures (notably Enchanter and Planetfall) require you to eat regularly, or else die of starvation.
- Players found this so annoying, that very early in the sequel to Enchanter you obtain a magical potion that enables you to go without food and water indefinitely.
- This was especially annoying in Planetfall, which had both a "you need to eat" timer, and a "you need to sleep" timer. And part of the plot involved a disease with the symptoms being increased need for food and sleep, making the timers run even swifter.
The classic Atari ST, Amiga (and now Windows) game Dungeon Master had both food and water meters for each party member. Fortunately there are plentiful fountains and food can be restocked by killing certain respawning monsters.
Appears on most MUDs, and can be particularly annoying. If you're hungry/thirsty, you'll start taking damage and get an annoying little reminder everytime you do. On more fantasy-based muds there's usually a plethora of ways of dealing with this thankfully. On the SWR codebase (a SMAUG derivative devoted almost entirely to Star Wars), consider yourself lucky if the mud in question has any option other than dragging around a mountain of food.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater was the only game in the series that had the consumption of food as a major gameplay factor. If the player did not eat, his stamina meter would slowly deplete which would cause all sorts of negative effects such as reduced health regeneration.
- Four introduced the Psyche meter, which performed largely the same function, albeit by much more arbitrary parameters. Eating food did recover it, among other options.
Magician, an NES game by Eurocom(Taxan), integrated both hunger and thirst into protagonist Paul's status; keeping both up was necessary in order to recharge Hit Points and Mana, and the game only contained two sources of free (safe) limitless water; all food had to be found or purchased.
- Not only that, but if your food and water percentage drops to nouht you begin losing health. A Game FA Qs writer notes that it takes 4 minutes, 15 seconds to go from a full stomach to dying of starvation.
Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Hearts is practically based around this. It was only released in Japan, but there is a good fan translation going around, somewhere. Every step you take in the games overworld consumes some food, you start to lose precious Hit Points if you run out of food, and the first major "quest" you embark on even involves feeding a ghost-woman-thing some of the food ingredients you find. It's actually easier to just drag your caravan/camp, walk a few steps, and starve to death, and drag your base camp again though, since if you die they anfill your food. Oh, and the manier people and monsters you have with you, the more food you consume. This becomes a tedious process. Fake Difficulty much?
Food is an important factor in The Magic Candle. Each party member consumes one "unit" of food per day from his inventory (characters have separate inventories in this game). A character whose supply drops below 5 is "hungry" and must be told to eat, or else he can't sleep. A character with no food at all is "starving" and incapable of taking any action until he eats. (It's safe to keep starving indefinitely, though—you can't die outside of combat.) You can anfill food by buying it or hunting for it, but it's easy to forget.
Parodied in Space Quest with the can of Dehydrated Water. "Just add air!" It had the two-fold use of allowing you to survive the desert heat, and later on doubled as an alternate way to get rid of a hungry monster by tossing the can in his mouth, resulting in a cartoonish death by overdrinking.
(In?)directly referenced in Army Of Darkness / Xena Warrior Princess crossover "What, again?" by Ash with "Warrior needs food badly"
In the Lone Wolf series, every so often you'll be prompted to "eat a meal or lose 3 ENDURANCE points"—which can't be healed until after you've eaten. You can avoid this by having the Hunting skill of your tier.
In Mount And Blade, no food = periodic morale penalty = troops desertion. Having a variety of food, on the other hand, gives a morale bonus.
NeverwinterNights 2: Mask of the Betrayer has an interesting take on this: it's not food you need to eat, but souls.
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. Especially annoying in dungeons that you're not allowed to bring outside items into, as you're essentially at the mercy of the random item appearances.
Used in Rune Scape in the Kharidian Desert. Traveling on foot requires you to carry a (filled) waterskin and occasionally top it off with water from cacti. Running out of water causes you to start dying of thirst.
- Similarly done in the Mort Myre swamp area, though not as severely: If you don't have the proper protection from the swamp's decaying effect, you'll occasionally lose a handful of Hitpoints. The ghastly denizens of the swamp will also swipe at you and try to steal more Hitpoints out of you, unless you have another protective item, or food. If you have the latter, it protects you because the creatures somehow attack your food instead of you. Thankfully, the damage done by these is a good deal less than that of dying of thirst in the desert, so you can ignore it if you're not staying in the area long.
Sheep In Space requires you to graze periodically in order to avoid starving to death. You can die from overeating, and grazing is the only way to recover shields. Land on anything other than grass, however, and it's instant death. Makes for a surprisingly interesting resource management puzzle for a Shmup.
The Sims, although in 2 at least they will make themselves food if you have a fridge and their hunger is yellow, rather than starving because you won't tell them to make lunch.
In Space 1889 your characters had to eat every day. The days passed ridiculously quickly.
In Spore's Creature and Tribal stages, at least, your creature can starve to death relatively easily if you don't remember to get it some food. Can cause some unfortunate snags in making friends if you're playing a carnivore creature.
While food and drink items can be used to restore some health in STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, there is a hunger indicator that serves no apparent purpose other than to pop up after some time and force you to consume food or else you health will suddenly start to decline.
In a brief part of Star Fox Adventures, you have to steer a Snowhorn through an area beset by a blizzard. While you're in that area with him, he has a bar gauge which empties steadily over time. To refill the gauge, you have to guide him over alpine roots. If the gauge empties, you'll probably have to start the section over, considering that Fox cannot go through by himself.
- And your sidekick Tricky has a meter for using his special abilities, such as digging and breathing fire, that's refilled by feeding him mushrooms.
Superfrog had to keep drinking bottles of his power source Lucozade to keep him from turning back into an ordinary frog.
The Yoshis in Super Mario Sunshine had to eat fruit regularly or else they would vanish into the air.
Time Stalkers gave the player a stomach gauge that slowly drained while in dungeons; when it was empty, the player's HP would drain instead. Nearly all the recovery items were "fruits" of some kind, so it was relatively easy to keep it above zero (and there were some dedicated food items that filled the stomach a lot), but in the longer dungeons it was rather easy for it to reach zero. Still, it was one of the more minor threats, all things considered, and running out of HP just kicked you back into the overworld anyway.
Ultima I-VI used the abstracted away variety, with a unit of food being consumed every several steps, by increasing orders of magnitude depending on the size of your party. Ultima VII did away with the point system in favor of discrete units of food that had to be explicitly eaten, and also made it impossible to starve to death. (Hungry characters got gradually increasing stat penalties instead.)
- The worst part of the Ultima VII food system wasn't the stat penalties; it was that your companions would constantly complain about how they "could use a little food."
- Likewise Ultima Underworld utilized a discrete food system. Fortunately there was usually plenty around that was edible and this editor never had any real difficulties, rarely going past 'peckish'.
  - In addition Ultima Underworld (and the later main series games, IIRC) had a create food spell that you got fairly early.
  - Ultima V had a create food spell that a wizard who turned himself into a rat would tell you. The reagents cost more than just buying food.
The Hunter class in World Of Warcraft is often pestered with this problem. Hunters have to make sure they are carrying enough food to keep their pets properly fed in order to keep them happy. If not fed, the pet begins to lose loyalty to whose master and suffers severe damage penalties.
- In theory, this would seem to be a harsh penalty, but in practice really becomes something more like Fake Difficulty, since by the time you hit level 20 or so, your pet loves you so much that every piece of food you give whom seems to last for a relative eternity, effectively reducing the number of times you have to feed whom per session to almost, but not quite, none.
  - Blizzard seems to agree, as the loyalty part is being removed entirely in Wrath of the Lich King, which also introduces some other ways to keep the pet happy.
  - The bigger annoyance factor came from the fact that different kinds of pets eat different kinds of food, and while meat, fish, and bread are usually pretty easy to come by, keeping your pet happy could be quite irritating if who preferred cheese, fungus, or fruit.
- While not required, most classes will regularly eat nor drink as a cheap and relatively swift method of recovering health and mana between battles. In a total 180 of Wizard Needs Food Badly, the mage class can actually conjure up food and water that can be shared with party members.
The browser-based game Improbable Island encourages you to eat by giving you Stamina rewards for meals and a great Stamina penalty if you allow yourself to starve. Starvation can't kill you, though, and the penalty for being too fat seems to outweigh the penalty for being underfed.
Yoshi's Story could suffer from this. All of the non-boss levels, the point is to consume enough fruit. Then the level suddenly ends and you get to advance.
Two instances in Breath Of Fire 3. In the faerie village Side Quest, you have to keep the food supply up (by assigning the "hunter" job to faeries) or no new faeries would be born and those you had could die of starvation. The second instance is in the Desert of Death, where you have to drink when prompted to avoid getting a penalty to you max HP.
While Giants Citizen Kabuto didn't use food as a time limit is a resource for your builders and they will refuse to use work without being fed.
Averted by 8-bit adventure game The Hobbit; Elrond gives lunch to you (Bilbo), but you don't need to eat it (or anything else). You can choose to do so, in which case Elrond will in time give you another. Eat too many of them, however, and you get the message "Your foul gluttony has killed you"—Game Over.
In the Cossacks series, units drain food at a steady rate and if you run out, they die of starvation.
While food was not strictly necessary in Realmz, having “Iron Rations” in any party member's inventory gave a bonus to health regained while resting, consuming them in the process.