remember how realistic the Ultima games for PC and NES were because you actually had to buy food to keep your characters from going hungry (upon which their hitpoints began depleting automatically over time).

with all the water exploration some of these new RPGS have in them, i think they need to make it so that if the characters in your party dont change their socks after wading thru a pond or river, then they become susceptible to blisters or a nasty foot fungus and have to go into town to buy some tinactin or something. it would be similar to having to go into town to visit the church to get a curse removed, not just something that you can just stay at an inn and it goes away... i mean seriously,, you cannot spend several hours in the water and just expect to walk around the rest of the day like nothing happened.

I think they have spells that make you immune to fungus or wet socks (not sure adventurers wear socks, to be honest). However, I've never heard of spells against sea lice...

We need more characters that need to go the bathroom, too.  If a battle takes too long, you start losing hit points due to bladder discomfort.

No, no. I think many characters would go to the bathroom immediately, especially when facing a very difficult enemy. However, if you survive, afterwards you need to have your armor cleaned.

Remember the medical system in MGS3?  Midway through the game I realized that you could simply ignore it and heal yourself by laying prone for awhile.  The game punishes you for this by making you wear your wounds for the entire rest of the game, including in the cinema scenes.  My Snake spent the rest of the game as a living pin cushion since he had so many arrows stuck through him from the fight with The Fear.

there's always forests on the overworld...