Any way to make survival important but not tedious?

[Pinkie Pyro]

Personally, I've always liked the little things in a role play like "making sure you have food" or "No you can't carry the entire dragon's corpse with your 5 str wizard" but these things tend to get very tedious very quickly, and are often ignored in my groups, does anyone have a solution/thoughts?

[awa]

ive had this problem as well the only time i had even remote successes is when it was a short term thing like part of one session so the party did not have time to get annoyed at it. They basically made survival checks to get through a blizzard faster and thus suffered less damge with a hypothetical threat of being lost. times ive tried to do more were either render pointless by high skill ranks or player boredom

[Psyren]

It depends a lot on the kind of campaign. If food is scarce and needs to be foraged then I would expect Survival to be necessary and for at least one player in the party to be good at hunting, at least until we got to the levels where conjured food was an option. But in most campaigns you can simply by "rations" (in fact, your class' starting kit comes with some) and you can just ensure the players buy enough to tide them over for however long they will be gone from town.

If this is the kind of thing you want to start tracking, just make that clear to everyone up front and suggest that at least one person might want to be the forager.

As for survival to find your way, you can handwave this if someone has a compass or the Know Direction orison, or you can have them navigate by celestial bodies with a successful check.

[jaydubs]

I don't actually know how well this would work in 3.x. It's just an observation from other systems.

Games like Rogue Trader and Stars Without Numbers make navigation more exciting by incorporating extremely dangerous hazards for parties that don't have characters skilled in those areas. In theory, one could apply the same principle to 3.x to make survival more interesting.

Essentially, advertise at the beginning that there are extremely dangerous hazards in the wilderness. And survival checks are necessary to properly avoid those hazards. On poor survival checks, the DM rolls on a table. And the party might end up losing several days of travel. Fighting an over-CR encounter. Wandering into the lost valley of rust monsters. Falling into the Underdark. Getting cursed by walking into an ancient burial ground. Or any number of other, horrible things.

[Pinkie Pyro]

I don't actually know how well this would work in 3.x. It's just an observation from other systems.

Games like Rogue Trader and Stars Without Numbers make navigation more exciting by incorporating extremely dangerous hazards for parties that don't have characters skilled in those areas. In theory, one could apply the same principle to 3.x to make survival more interesting.

Essentially, advertise at the beginning that there are extremely dangerous hazards in the wilderness. And survival checks are necessary to properly avoid those hazards. On poor survival checks, the DM rolls on a table. And the party might end up losing several days of travel. Fighting an over-CR encounter. Wandering into the lost valley of rust monsters. Falling into the Underdark. Getting cursed by walking into an ancient burial ground. Or any number of other, horrible things.

This is brilliant, thank you.

[jedipotter]

Games like Rogue Trader and Stars Without Numbers make navigation more exciting by incorporating extremely dangerous hazards for parties that don't have characters skilled in those areas. In theory, one could apply the same principle to 3.x to make survival more interesting.


This works very well in D&D. I use it all the time.

Default D&D has the world ''just like Earth'', so walking in the wilderness is boring. Sure you can make a pointless survival check of fight a randomly encountered monster, but nothing big.

But adding in strange, mysterious and extremely hazardous effects work great. So the ''Cursed Lands of Arba-Zan'' have an actual Curse on them....and travel to the land and you will be cursed too. The Dark Forest is full of hungry shadows. The Goldwood forest is full of random animating trees that attack all non elves. The Fire River looks normal enough, but if you touch it you get burned.


Living spells work great as hazards too. As do most plant monsters. Just flip through the books...

[Nibbens]

There's always the "You fail at staying on the path - the entire party falls into [insert poisonous plant here]. Make a fort save of suffer 1d[number] [ability type] damage for 1d[number] days." I find this particularly effective - quick as it doesn't derail the adventure, and substantial as it forces ability score damage onto players as they're going to a dungeon and may encounter enemies with these lowered scores.