Help!!!!! Might contain spoliers!!!!!

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I ran out of food right after the peace conference went wrong in Tarna; now the village won't let me in, and Tarna is not accessible. Am I dead meat?

EDITED: forget it. I've actually managed to finish the game... lol!

Thanks!!! After my post I found out about the waffle as well.... was half hoping to encounter it (and half worrying that I'll be dead)... but the game finished much faster than I've expected! lol

There's free food available in every single game in the series except 4.

QFG1 - fruit from Erana's Peace
QFG2 - free meals at the inn
QFG3 - waffle walker
QFG5 - free meals at the inn

While food technically costs money in QFG4, the price is so nominal that it's never an issue. So really, I wouldn't call out QFG3; the entire series does it.

#2 and #3 are the only ones that lock you out of the inns/merchants though (at least, the only ones that do so with enough in-game time remaining that starvation is a reasonable possibility).

Fair enough, but at least you have to act in order to reach Erana's Peace or get to the Inn(s) before getting locked out/it closes for the night. The Waffle Walker is spawned in whenever the game detects the player starving, basically handing food to them (provided that they are not in the jungle, but if that bug were fixed, then this wouldn't be the case).

I believe in #2 that Shema packs you a few extra meals, which happens to be the exact number you'll need for the rest of the game.

Yes, #3 is the only game that locks you out of town, although the game ends around 36 hours later so a single ration should take you to the end... enter the Waffle Walker. In the case of QFG1 the valley was very small and going from one place to another took negligible time. In the case of the inns, you just need to wait around for 6 hours or so for them to reopen, so unless you really do leave it to the last moment to address your starvation it's a non-issue.

QFG3 is unique in that it closes the door to the towns for its end-game and has a sprawling overworld map so reaching a specific "safe point" can take quite a long time. Having the emergency food source be mobile makes sense.

Food is so cheap, widely available, and easy to carry in the QFG series that people understandably just forget about it. There's a reason most RPG's handwave it entirely.

Food is very cheap in QFG3. You can talk the dog meat seller down to selling his wares for a copper a piece. You can stock up very easily.

This is exactly the problem; in other games, if the player makes a stupid mistake, like, say, wandering around without any food in case they needed to set up kip away from an inn, the game makes things inconvenient for them. Granted, the inconvenience might be viewed as negligible compared to the myriad of ways other Sierra games loved to screw over the player, but they could be annoying.

In Spielburg, you had to plan your movements with some degree of caution in order to ensure that you didn't have to wander from one end of the valley to the other to find Erana's Peace after dark; if you didn't, the game proceeded to ram a broomstick up the PC's bum and break the handle off by letting the gates of hell itself open and unleashing the most difficult monsters in the game to tear the hapless adventurer to pieces. Even after the player had gained enough experience for Cheetaurs and Mantrays to start attacking whenever possible, the Trolls only came out at night, and they were not to be screwed around with, as they were hard to hit and had more hit points than James Bond has had vodka martinis. Even if you were relying on Erana's Peace as a source for food and shelter, you were still well advised to carry rations for those times when you had to pick between sleeping in the stables and living and trying to travel through the forest on your last legs.

In Shapier and Mordaavia, the inn closed late at night, meaning that unless you were able to pick the lock (iirc), you were forced to wait around the square or grind one of your stats, alternatively trying to rest every now and then. Even once you got into the later that morning, you were still out for a meal that night, meaning that if you hadn't bought rations on the off chance that you got a little careless in allocating your time during the day, you would suffer (more so in Mordavia because the meals provided by the inn were available in the evening only, meaning that you had to buy your own breakfast). Same thing generally went for Silmaria, except for the part where the hero's metabolim seemed to have slowed down dramatically, resulting in him seemingly needing to eat once a day on average.

In Tarna, the player is never once intentionally punished for their lack of survival instinct when it came to the decision as to whether or not they should keep their larder well stocked in case of being suddenly required to make a trek to hell and back, let alone having to flee a region that, from the start, looks like it might turn into an active war zone if the king starts feeling insecure about the size of his manhood. Was it unfair that the game automatically shut you out of the city the moment you had managed to negotiate for a conference instead of after you walked into the Council chambers when you were good and ready? Oh hell yes, but no more so than sending the player into a part of the game where they were unable to buy food, like say, Raseir, without any real indication that this was the case; except in QFG 2, the game had mercy on you and gave you a supply of rations just in case you had been running on fumes, thereby preventing the game from becoming unwinnable without reducing the effects of wandering into the desert without food for the rest of the game by having a sentient Saurus burger appear every time you were hungry.

I fail to see how the humorous solution that the waffle-walker presents to this situation is somehow a problem. Inn is open 24/7 in Shapeir, and Erana's Staff is a safe place to sleep in Mordavia. Untrue; the inn served two meals a day. Not that the general store rations were anywhere near expensive. Spielburg valley is so pock-marked with "safe zones" that monsters cannot enter that you can easily book it from one to the next without ever having to fight anything. The most dangerous locale to get stuck in at night is Erasmus' home, which requires you to travel through all of four screens to reach safety.

Man, I really need to replay these games at some point. However, while my memory seems to have failed me on some of the details, I still maintain that there was at least some inconvenience to the player, be it sleeping without the benefit of a free meal or being forced to sleep elsewhere; the penalty was more pronounced (for me, at least) in QFG1. I had forgotten about all the other places I could sleep for one very good reason: I never used them unless I could absolutely avoid it. Sleeping with Harry actively gave you a poor night's sleep (which you had to pay for, no less), and sleeping anywhere other than Erana's Peace or the stables resulted in me receiving no benefit (free food or free morning cash).

My point is that there were consequences for failing to keep a good stock of food; not always rash consequences, but consequences. The Waffle Walker (in addition to not being funny) removes all consequences from the decision to not carry food, meaning that the game no longer punishes carelessness, resulting in the player having no incentive to play smart (at least in this regard).

If I might draw upon something you mentioned earlier, let us imagine that someone is running an RPG in which the players are required to carry food; if the game ran on QFG3 logic, the players would never carry food, knowing that the DM would always shower food on them in order to keep them alive. If the DM wants to house rule food out of the equation, that's one thing, but having a requirement in place and then disregarding it sends the message that that particular action does not have consequences, thus cheapening the experience. One of the fundamental premises of gaming is that if the player fails to satisfy certain conditions (i.e. not getting hit too often, making sure they are able to feed themselves), then they risk suffering and failure; the Waffle represents a school of thought that certain conditions are there to present optional challenges, in this case, that the player has to carry food to not die... or at least they can pretend that that's the case, because if they actually fail to do so, they don't die.

One thing of note in Spielburg. They don't start sending the hardest enemies until you level up a certain bit, and/or get certain objectives out of the way (doing certain actions, and collecting certain points, maybe fighting certain enemies a certain amount of times). I can't remember the exact stat details. But its usually by the 3rd or 4th night, IIRC.

It is possible to get the stats up in the first night, and that can be a problem, or at least make things more difficult.

I seem to remember that the tough monsters came out at night regardless?

Initially, you get tougher monsters at night, but not the most dangerous ones.

After reaching 1000 'experience' (which comes from skillups, puzzle points, and such), you get some of the tougher monsters during the day and the most dangerous ones at night.

And you could also evade the monsters and run away from them, it doesn't always work but with good clicking and save/load you can move around even at night, especially when you know the place and what to look out for (eg. big dark splashes on the ground = Mantrays = are to be avoided).