Comfort in RPG's part 1

I want more games to add mechanics that deal with characters comfort. Things like food, bedding, hygiene, etc. In so many games characters function identically when eating hardtack and sleeping In a dungeon as they do sleeping in warm beds and eating lavish meals; even while the game provides detailed prices for different inns and meals. In real life I can distinctly remember days when working on an empty stomach or bad nights sleep made every task seem a degree of magnitude harder. Likewise I can remember bad days turned good by a nice meal or a hot shower. Furthermore, the comfort of characters is often brought up in the fiction that inspires many RPGs. Scenes of feasts, descriptions of homes and bedrooms and monologues emphasizing characters tiredness, hunger or thirst are littered throughout the literature that makes up appendix N and beyond. It's no accident either, comfort and the lack thereof are experiences everyone shares and understands viscerally. Therefore they're a helpful way to quickly get an audience to empathize with a character or grasp the stakes of a situation.

Making comfort matter mechanically instantly involves players with their characters further. When the hunger and fatigue your character feels is codified in rules it feels more real than if it's only described, and the when the characters hunger feels real so to does the character as a whole. In addition, these mechanics can add incentive for PC's to make interesting choices. They might spend their money on somewhere nice to sleep, take up cooking as a skill or saddle up to a patron for the warm meals and beds they provide. The increased focus on these more mundane aspects of life in the setting make it feel more real, tangible and interesting. It creates a reason to care about the foods you can eat and places you can stay. Making the comfort of characters into a mechanical reality introduces new, intriguing questions to a game and grants the players a greater feeling of verisimilitude toward the world and their characters.

My next post on this subject will be about actually implementing these sorts of rules into a game, and I'll include a couple hacks introducing this to games I enjoy.