Wilderness Survival

[Yora]

I am about to run a Pathfinder campaign where most of the world is uninhabited wilderness and the PCs come from the small local barbarian clans.
Usually I don't really worry with tracking rations and the weather, but I think in this case it might actually add quite a lot to the game.

It's not nearly as harsh a world as Dark Sun where just being out in the open is dangerous, but I am really quite clueless how to add this aspect to game without it simply ending up as a few effortless Survival checks every day. Traveling in winter is the only thing that seems reasonably difficult and dangerous to me, but is there anything I should be doing when it's simply a three day hike through the forest?

I think I identified the following main aspects:
- Water
- Food
- Getting sick from weather and toxic environments
- Fighting in forests and on mountains
- Getting lost

I think using the hexmap system from Ultimate Campaign might be a good idea. That way you have an easy reference what the current environment is like and you can also track where the PCs end up if they are getting lost.

[Chronos]

Sandstorm has some specific rules for dealing with environments that are inhospitably hot, and Frostburn likewise for environments that are inhospitably cold. I think Stormwrack might have rules for extreme weather, but I'm not sure about that.

[Splendor]

1) Finding food for yourself is DC 10 (+2 for each additional person) but you move at 1/2 speed (3 day trip, turns into 6 day)
2) Avoid natural hazards is DC 15
3) Making Camp is DC 10 (+2 for each additional person) DU 124 p119
--If failed you don't heal normal and spellcasters might not regain spells.
--If made by 10 you only use 1/2 water/food/firewood
4) Trailblazing allows you to lower terrain penalty. (CAdv p103)

[Yora]

I've been looking over the rules for Thirst and Starvation and for Survival in the PRD again, and think about using these mechanics:

When moving only at half speed during 8 hours of overland movement, characters can forage food using the Survival Skill. On a successful check, the character finds food worth 1 ration. For every +2 points by which the check exceeds the DC, he gets another ration worth of food.
On a successful check, the character also finds a source of drinkable water and can refil as many containers as he likes.

{table=head]Terrain|Survival DC
Desert | 20
Forest | 10
Hills | 12
Marsh | 12
Mountains | 15
Plains | 12
Winter | +5[/table]

Rations weighs 1 lb. each, a full water skin 4 lb. Each will last a character for 1 day. In hot weather, characters require twice the amount of water.

I think it's a start but still not terribly exciting. A 3rd level character with decent wisdom can easily have a +8 bonus to Survival checks, making travel through anything but deserts pretty much without any risk.
But maybe it shouldn't be a problem in normal conditions anyway. If the characters escape into the wilderness from prison half starved, hunting for food might actually become a lot tougher and dire.

[Palanan]

I'm pretty sure none of the designers at WotC have ever actually spent a day foraging for food in the wilderness.

I have, and it's not always easy. In my experience, it's not just a question of walking slowly and looking for yummy things, as if you were hunting morels or something. What's far more important is knowing where and when to look.

This is essentially what a lot of wild animals do when they're foraging. Birds and primates especially will know their local patch of woods intimately, both in time and in area, and they'll rely on particular foods--fruits, berries, mushrooms, etc.--as individual trees or specific sites become productive through the course of the year.

For hungry PCs, just off the cuff, I would think that bringing Knowledge (Nature) into the mix might touch on the need to know when and where to look, and what precisely to look for. Also keep in mind that if there's a lovely patch of lowbush blueberries in the forest, it's not going to wait undisturbed for the PCs to wander by. There's a lot of competition for food out there. I just went looking for sassafras berries a couple days ago, and after checking my two best spots I have a grand total of two (2) berries. Birds.

As for other hazards and natural encounters on the forest trail--for low-level characters, a fierce hornet's nest could be an issue, especially if it's in a tree right by the narrowest section of a deep gorge the characters need to cross. And rattlesnakes like to sun themselves on the tops of temptingly climbable cliffs....

[Yora]

I think side tracks to find food are intended to be included in the halved overland movement speed. In an 8 hour day of travel, you will only cover half as much distance to your destination, because you're not taking the fastes route.

I've been starting to think about catching diseases. In the standard rules, there only seems to be nonlethal damage acompanied by the fatigued condition to represent starvation, dehydration, hypothermia, and heatstroke. But I think traveling outdoors in bad weather would also probably have some chance of catching all kinds of diseases. However, a bad cold might not really warrant a special character condition.

[Palanan]

Well, my underlying point was that if you don't know the area, you can literally spend all day trying to find something to eat. Whether you want to incorporate that degree of realism is certainly up to you.

[Spuddles]

If it's late summer, I honestly wouldn't worry about survival checks beyond what's in the books.

Most encounters in D&D are edible, anyway. The hazards Palanan lists sound like the results of a successful survival check to me.

Snares, pitfalls, and deadfalls can be used to forage while you're sleeping, too.

You may want to put a limit on how much forageable food there is an area. 10 people walking from A to B will have difficulty finding enough small game and berries to feed all of them.

On your overland maps, you could put patchy distributions of rations/day, such that the straightest routes won't have enough food for everyone. Then the party will have to consider navigating by which routes have food.

Carrying food for a 3 day journey is no big deal, so if no food is found, who cares.

[Yora]

Also, the time it takes for the starvation rules to kill you are actually quite realistic. People who don't perform much activities often last up to two months without food, even if they were not particularly fit and healthy before. By the rules, you get permanently fatigued after a few days, but that does not cause a penalty to the Survival checks to find more food.
Unless it's very special circumstances and the characters are lost in a desert, starvation will almost certainly not be the thing that eventually kills them. Much more likely it would be thirst, heat, cold, accidents, or predators long before dying from starvation becomes a real threat.

But I think the possibility of being permanently affected by fatigue after having lost all supplies to raiders or a dragon with only finding food as the only chance of relief still can make for very interesting situations in the game. Which make it worth keeping track of food supplies. Even if the players only keep checking their supplies every time they set out on a trip and they never actually happen to run out at any moment.
The fear of a danger is much more exciting than the danger itself. :smallbiggrin:

[Spuddles]

With the proper tools, it can be very, very easy to get food, especially in summer months.

A fishing & trapping kit for small mammals will yield a few pounds of animal protein a day. This requires time to set and check, but given that you cannot travel for more than 8 hours a day in D&D, that leaves 16 hours for hunting, fishing, and trapping.

Also, since survival checks while traveling halve your speed, it can be assumed you're going out of your way to find food, such as walking along an overgrown stream to spear a fish, meandering through a meadow looking for tubers, or traversing a hillside in search of berry patches.

Of course, the first dire bear that the party kills will yield between 1/3 and 1/2 live weight in meat, so that's 2,667 lbs to 4,000 lbs. You could probably get another half ton in organs. Collecting blood, boiling bones, skull, and smashing things open for marrow could get you another 500 lbs or so of fat/gelatin. So you're looking at upwards of 5,500 lbs of food from a big dire animal. Dry weight is about 1/3 wet weight, so that's 1,833 trail rations.

With an iron cauldron, they can extract a ton of delicious, fatty calories that may otherwise be difficult for a primitive neolithic tribe to acquire. Iron tools will also make getting at marrow and the brain much, much easier. The best parts of an animal for a hunter-gatherer society, and most societies that have food insecurity, are the fatty parts. Skulls are full of fat and grease. One way to get at it is to wrap the skull in leaves and bury it in an underground fire for a day. Pull it out, put it in a vessel and unwrap it. A bunch of soupy broth is in there (yum!), and the rest of the animal should scrape right off the bone, like the soft palette and tongue.

If you're not forcing the party to keep track of these sorts of things, then they're probably not going to bother turning everything they kill into food and usable tools.

[Splendor]

"A creature can move at half speed during overland travel, hunting and foraging, providing food and water for itself by succeeding on a DC 10 Survival check. This DC increases by 5 for inhospitable lands, such as a desert, and by 10 for barren lands, including the open ocean for nonaquatic creatures." - Rules compendium page 99.

This allows you to increase the DC by 5 for areas that are hunted out (this is why there are nomadic tribes, they follow the game). This means if he has a +8 he could take 10 and find food/water for 2 people. But if he wanted to find for 3 (DC 19) he'd have to roll and risk failure.

In addition keep track of water, according to the D&D rules (dmg 304) you need 1 gallon of water per day if active (which hiking through the woods is). A water skin only hold 1/2 gallon. Did everyone bring two waterskins to hold water. What if he fails the check the 2nd day? Sure a druid or cleric just casts create water, but you'd still need food.

Note: The druid answer to this is the good berry spell. Which makes at least 3 meals and as many as 8, with 5 being the average. So the druid can feed themselves for 1 day and someone else for 2/3 of a day before needing to make survival checks.

[Yora]

@Spuddles: That's awesome, I hadn't thought about eating your slain foes. :smallbiggrin:
I think that should add a really nice touch.

In the game that I am running, none of the food and water providing spells exist and also none of the magic items. It's going to be more 2nd Edition Dark Sun with a less brutal environment.

I would tend to say that the risk of having to make a save against nonlethal damage constitutes some form of immediate danger, which makes you unable to take 10. But if you still have supplies for another day, failure would not include any immediate consequences, so taking 10 should be permitted.
I think that may actually not be such a bad way to handle it. As long as the characters still have enough supplies for the day, they can take 10 and in most situations will only have to chose if they want to resupply during this day or move at their full overland speed.
Only when something special happens that makes them lose their supplies or they have to cross terrain where there is few food and water will they have to make the rolls.

Also, in a group with a human barbarian and a gnome, with everyone only carrying a light load, could the barbarian search for food and move at only half speed, while the gnome still moves at full speed? That way, the group wouldn't even be slowed down.
But that would mean the barbarian separating from the party at several times of the day. Should that be possible or would it be too difficult to find the rest of the group, even assuming they agree in advance where they are heading to?

[Splendor]

The barbarian should be able to range a little distance from the party and still know basically how to find them so long as someone else in the party has survival. If not, I could see him trekking off for 30 minutes and the party suddenly going the completely wrong way and him having to track them down (I hope he has track).

Plus the party could leave him signs to show where they went. To make discreet trail signs is covered in races of the wild p147.