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Xuc Xac
2018-04-21, 06:26 PM
I'm just curious. How carefully do you keep track of food supplies in your games when characters travel outside of civilization?

Do you just ignore it and assume your characters have enough supplies or can forage/hunt/live off the land while traveling through wilderness?

Do you track it in an abstract way ("Ok. The trip to the wizard's tower takes three days so check off three days' worth of rations. The tower looms before you..."

Do you keep track of exact supplies and consider how they're going to be prepared? "The donkey is loaded with 10 pounds of smoked bacon, 20 pounds of hard tack, 20 cakes of pemmican, 2 sacks of flour, a sack of salt..."

Honest Tiefling
2018-04-21, 06:37 PM
If the party can reasonably feed itself, then I don't count it. In town, they need accommodations to sleep/bathe/scheme, so I just assume that the cost of that also covers food. In the wilderness, as long as someone in the party has a decent enough ability to forage/hunt in the area given the season, I still don't count it.

When the party starts to travel during winter, onto a mountain or into a desert is when I force them to start taking note of their supplies. If I do it all the time people get bored of all of the note-tracking from my own personal experience, but they do often act like a herd of cats. I also feel that forcing them to confront their dwindling supplies makes hostile areas both less attractive to travel in and highlights the difficulty of getting food and water in those circumstances.

Kelb_Panthera
2018-04-21, 07:58 PM
I generally pick up an item that says, "you don't have to worry about that anymore," fairly early in a character's career; everlasting rations, myrlind's spoon, etc. Current character has a "traveler's cloak" from Magic of Faerun which covers food, water, and shelter for my character until and unless it's taken from me.

Until I acquire such an item, of course I track how many trail rations I have when traveling in the wilderness. The survival element is just one of the elements of low-level play in my preferred system.

Keltest
2018-04-21, 09:09 PM
I also take the Tiefling approach. I assume the characters are capable of planning ahead for a reasonable amount of time and making sure they have sufficient supplies for whatever journey theyre making. I only start bringing it up under exceptional circumstances, where they've done something like lost all their gear or gotten lost in a desert.

BWR
2018-04-22, 07:28 AM
If food supplies are limited, then we keep track of them. If not, then no. I have played in games at low level where finding food was of paramount importance at times or even a constant worry, and I've played games where it isn't an issue. The exact detail of what sort of food people have is a detail we leave to the individual - if they want to keep meticulous track of type and amount, fine. If not, we just say 'X days worth of food' or 'you are getting tired of the same old hardtack day after day' or something of the sort.

jojo
2018-04-22, 07:40 AM
How/when I track resource consumption like food and water depends a lot on what edition is being used.

In 5E, as a DM, I have everyone write down their consumable items and I check them off as they're used to keep things honest.
When/if the players need to find food I usually handle it with a Survival check. DC starts at 11 and goes up by +1 for each character/creature that people are trying to feed through foraging or hunting. For every day spent hunting/foraging in the same 10 mile hex I add +1 to the base DC (so DC 12 for you on day 2 and DC 17 for your 5 friends.)
Right now I'm running ToA, food and water matters. In fact the party just lost pretty much all of their resources a good 120 miles south of the nearest outpost (that they are aware of) including their canoes. So they're going to be hurting, which is part of what the table has enjoyed about ToA so far.

In older editions I usually just do the thing with the notecard. If someone has the hunting/fishing proficiencies I usually just let them feed everyone on a success. If no one has it there's usually a roll-under d100 check with an arbitrary number for success based on the general landscape around them. I usually let the party dictate how long they want to spend hunting in such cases and the longer they devote to it the more likely they are to be successful.

Anonymouswizard
2018-04-22, 10:25 AM
It depends.

I run a lot of urban adventures, so there I assume lifestyle covers food.

In the game I'm starting on Friday characters move about a lot more, and distances between locations ate measured in days of travel instead of miles. An uneventful day's travel takes one unit of rations per person, an eventful day's travel takes two units of rations. 'Standard rations' last for one week, cost a few coppers per day, and cause grumbling if not supplemented. 'Good rations' also last for one week, and cost a few silver, but are significantly nicer. 'Iron rations' last for three weeks, aren't particularly nice, and cost a handful of silver per unit. Elven rations are rare and you're unlikely to see them, but never go off.

A successful hunting roll generates 1d6 standard rations, as does a foraging roll. Surviving by hunting and foraging is possible, but not a sure thing.

Pex
2018-04-22, 12:12 PM
For a one time adventure where it's part of the whole point of scarcity due to the adventure arc plot, it's fine and fun for that adventure arc and we stocked up on supplies specifically for the adventure. As a matter of course for the whole campaign it becomes an annoying bookkeeping happenstance for the sake of bookkeeping that adds nothing to the game. Even if the DM starts off the campaign of having us track it, eventually even he stops making comment on it and it's dropped. It's enough to say while in town we replenish provisions and leave it at that. Every character I make starts off with 7 days rations for realism. In all my years of gaming since 1988, I've had to change that 7 to a 6 twice. I did not have to make the 6 a 5.

Mike_G
2018-04-22, 12:48 PM
We usually don't bother, but I did play in one campaign where survival was a big part of it. We got shipwrecked and lost most of our gear, and scrounging became a big part of the game. We had to devote some time each day to hunting or fishing and gathering, and if we failed to find enough food, we lost temporary points in Strength, Con and so on.

It was fun once. But I wouldn't want to play bookkeeping every session.

JoeJ
2018-04-22, 01:51 PM
We usually don't bother, but I did play in one campaign where survival was a big part of it. We got shipwrecked and lost most of our gear, and scrounging became a big part of the game. We had to devote some time each day to hunting or fishing and gathering, and if we failed to find enough food, we lost temporary points in Strength, Con and so on.

It was fun once. But I wouldn't want to play bookkeeping every session.

Why is tracking food considered "bookkeeping" and unfun, but tracking damage, conditions, spell slots, fatigue, etc. are not? Especially given that the latter usually have to updated far more frequently.

Chad Hooper
2018-04-22, 03:02 PM
Due to the environs the PCs have been in and their combined skills (AD&D2 e, two or three characters have Herbalism NWP, Ranger has his Hunting and other abilities/knowledges, and the whole group is capable of Fishing) it hasn't been an issue in my campaign thus far.

They are likely to move into the unfamiliar terrain of the Underdark very soon now. Foraging will then be difficult to impossible until they've gained more familiarity with the environment, so ration tracking will be a driving issue. Once some time has passed and it no longer provides a new novel facet to the RP experience I'll probably go back to largely ignoring ration consumption until (approx.) the final third of the campaign module. Then it may become important again, as will other consumables.

Pex
2018-04-22, 03:21 PM
Why is tracking food considered "bookkeeping" and unfun, but tracking damage, conditions, spell slots, fatigue, etc. are not? Especially given that the latter usually have to updated far more frequently.

You answered your own question. That's the game being played.

Deophaun
2018-04-22, 03:21 PM
Why is tracking food considered "bookkeeping" and unfun, but tracking damage, conditions, spell slots, fatigue, etc. are not? Especially given that the latter usually have to updated far more frequently.
Generally because hunger is trivially overcome and only has one of two outcomes: you've eaten and you're fine, or you haven't and you're not. Note that I said generally. If you're playing some kind of survival RPG where hunger is a constant enemy, then tracking food would be fun (is there a tabletop version of Don't Starve?). Similarly, if you remove the binary outcome by having specific foods or categories of food with their own niches, tracking ingredients becomes meaningful.

But when it's just handled by something like a DC 10 Survival check or a cantrip, it's often just an annoyance.

Mike_G
2018-04-22, 03:27 PM
Why is tracking food considered "bookkeeping" and unfun, but tracking damage, conditions, spell slots, fatigue, etc. are not? Especially given that the latter usually have to updated far more frequently.

The same reason there are lots of war movies that focus on the infantry, and none about supply troops.

JNAProductions
2018-04-22, 04:03 PM
Also, a lot of people don't like excessive bookkeeping in their combat too.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-04-22, 04:10 PM
Also, a lot of people don't like excessive bookkeeping in their combat too.

Amen. Count me as one who prefers the action to keep moving--I'm especially displeased by bunches of stacking modifiers. A logistics-heavy game (tracking weight, individual items, individual item storage locations, spoilage of rations, hit locations, exact wound modifiers, etc) would bore me heavily.

Anonymouswizard
2018-04-22, 04:36 PM
Also, a lot of people don't like excessive bookkeeping in their combat too.

Notably I played through an entire game where I was the only one to track ammunition. I think I ended up getting separate sheets for each firearm, and was going to track loaded clips and loose bullets but the GM never specified how many clips the party had for our collection of weapons.

On the other hand, I hate the movement tracking many groups do. I honestly don't like tactical movement beyond 'where am I roughly', I feel it gets in the way of doing cool thingsTM.

SirBellias
2018-04-22, 04:51 PM
I have my players keep track of rations until the characters are rich enough that the cost of them is insignificant. As this only really happens for a few moments, as they often blow all their money on something shiny (or important), they often have to figure something out to keep from starving.

JoeJ
2018-04-22, 08:06 PM
You answered your own question. That's the game being played.

The game being played is whatever the group agrees to play. In this case, the adventure for you seems to start at the dungeon entrance, glossing over questions of how the party got there.


Generally because hunger is trivially overcome and only has one of two outcomes: you've eaten and you're fine, or you haven't and you're not. Note that I said generally. If you're playing some kind of survival RPG where hunger is a constant enemy, then tracking food would be fun (is there a tabletop version of Don't Starve?). Similarly, if you remove the binary outcome by having specific foods or categories of food with their own niches, tracking ingredients becomes meaningful.

But when it's just handled by something like a DC 10 Survival check or a cantrip, it's often just an annoyance.

Now this makes a bit of sense, but I'm thinking that it really comes down to an expectation that if supplies aren't tracked they'll default in favor of the players. That is, if you don't track supplies you'll never run out. Under the opposite assumption, that you by default don't have enough and will suffer a level of exhaustion every day or so, I think you'd find tracking supplies wouldn't feel like such a burden.

FreddyNoNose
2018-04-22, 08:27 PM
I'm just curious. How carefully do you keep track of food supplies in your games when characters travel outside of civilization?

Do you just ignore it and assume your characters have enough supplies or can forage/hunt/live off the land while traveling through wilderness?

Do you track it in an abstract way ("Ok. The trip to the wizard's tower takes three days so check off three days' worth of rations. The tower looms before you..."

Do you keep track of exact supplies and consider how they're going to be prepared? "The donkey is loaded with 10 pounds of smoked bacon, 20 pounds of hard tack, 20 cakes of pemmican, 2 sacks of flour, a sack of salt..."

I use encumbrance and require everything to be accounted for including food, arrows and material components.

Keltest
2018-04-22, 08:28 PM
The game being played is whatever the group agrees to play. In this case, the adventure for you seems to start at the dungeon entrance, glossing over questions of how the party got there.

If I wanted to experience the joys of a three day hike through the woods, I would go outside. I don't need to roleplay that, I can go actually do that fairly easily. Even people who don't live on the edge of a forest can reasonably plan to go camping or whatever on fairly short notice.

Finding a dungeon full of skeletons and demons to swordfight, or a book that teaches you how to create fire from sulfur and bat poop is rather more difficult to do in real life.

Honest Tiefling
2018-04-22, 08:32 PM
The game being played is whatever the group agrees to play. In this case, the adventure for you seems to start at the dungeon entrance, glossing over questions of how the party got there.

Just because you don't track every little detail doesn't make you a rollplayer. Tracking supplies can also really bog down games of higher level/higher fantasy because when you are smiting demons left and right you probably don't want to track if you have enough meat for the day or if you found suitably soft leaves. For me, it gets in the way of PC/PC and PC/NPC interaction if the situation isn't dire, so I handwave it to get to the parts I'm here for.


Now this makes a bit of sense, but I'm thinking that it really comes down to an expectation that if supplies aren't tracked they'll default in favor of the players. That is, if you don't track supplies you'll never run out. Under the opposite assumption, that you by default don't have enough and will suffer a level of exhaustion every day or so, I think you'd find tracking supplies wouldn't feel like such a burden.

Punishing people for not playing the game as you wish isn't going to work on most people. If a system only has punishment, it might not have widespread appeal. There is no success, only status quo.

JoeJ
2018-04-22, 08:37 PM
If I wanted to experience the joys of a three day hike through the woods, I would go outside. I don't need to roleplay that, I can go actually do that fairly easily. Even people who don't live on the edge of a forest can reasonably plan to go camping or whatever on fairly short notice.

Finding a dungeon full of skeletons and demons to swordfight, or a book that teaches you how to create fire from sulfur and bat poop is rather more difficult to do in real life.

So basically you don't want anything that happens on the way to the dungeon to affect what happens inside? Nothing happens that might affect party resources? (This is a question not a criticism. Different people find different games fun, and that's as it should be.)


Punishing people for not playing the game as you wish isn't going to work on most people. If a system only has punishment, it might not have widespread appeal. There is no success, only status quo.

Having the tactically meaningful choices begin when you leave town rather than at the dungeon entrance is not a punishment; it's just a different kind of challenge.

JNAProductions
2018-04-22, 08:41 PM
So basically you don't want anything that happens on the way to the dungeon to affect what happens inside? Nothing happens that might affect party resources? (This is a question not a criticism. Different people find different games fun, and that's as it should be.)

Having the tactically meaningful choices begin when you leave town rather than at the dungeon entrance is not a punishment; it's just a different kind of challenge.

No, but there's a difference between "How do you travel to the dungeon? Slowly and carefully, ensuring you can avoid the evil viziers patrols, but giving him time to prepare; or fast and hard, almost certainly catching into some patrols, but giving him less time to enact his dastardly plans; or something else?" and "Check off three days of rations that weigh half a pound each-if you forgot to buy rations, you take three levels of exhaustion."

Honest Tiefling
2018-04-22, 08:42 PM
So basically you don't want anything that happens on the way to the dungeon to affect what happens inside? Nothing happens that might affect party resources? (This is a question not a criticism. Different people find different games fun, and that's as it should be.)

I'm a little confused on how you got to point B from A. Just because food isn't tracked in certain areas doesn't mean there aren't other resources to steal, ruin, or expend. Even NPCs can be a resource, as you often need someone to dupe to go in front of you to set off traps. Time is also the greatest resource and it is very fun to tick off the days while the PCs attempt to explore...

Keltest
2018-04-22, 08:47 PM
So basically you don't want anything that happens on the way to the dungeon to affect what happens inside? Nothing happens that might affect party resources? (This is a question not a criticism. Different people find different games fun, and that's as it should be.)

No, I don't want to roleplay completely mundane concerns that any person capable enough to go adventuring would be able to handle on their own with minimal difficulty. I shouldn't need to take the time to announce that my character remembers to buy rations any more than I announce that they use the bathroom.

Assuming a finite amount of free time, I would much rather roleplay interesting things, or barring that, actually go camping so I can at least get the fun parts along with the tedious logistics.

Kelb_Panthera
2018-04-22, 08:51 PM
Why is tracking food considered "bookkeeping" and unfun, but tracking damage, conditions, spell slots, fatigue, etc. are not? Especially given that the latter usually have to updated far more frequently.

You're asking for a rational justification for a subjective taste thing.

Ultimately -all- of a P&P game is bookkeeping. The questions are "how much are you willing to deal with" and "what do we need/ what can we cut to stay/ get under that line."

The former is certainly subjective. I like playing an artificer in 3.5 so the answer for me is "quite a lot more than most would be willing to deal with."

The answer to the latter is also subjective but perhaps less so. The things that are more tedious, by virtue of being unrelated to the primary feature of the game, or don't add to the game something that interests the players get the axe first. For D&D 3.5 carry capacity and hunger/thirst mechanics tend to be at the top of that list. They're not related to combat (largely considered the major feature if the system) and they don't really put any tension into things unless the GM goes out of his way to make them matter at the levels where they can't just be permanently bought off. While I have an appreciation for them from a simulationist streak in my mind, I can see why they're quick to get the axe.

I hope that answers your question. :smallbiggrin:

JoeJ
2018-04-22, 10:05 PM
No, I don't want to roleplay completely mundane concerns that any person capable enough to go adventuring would be able to handle on their own with minimal difficulty. I shouldn't need to take the time to announce that my character remembers to buy rations any more than I announce that they use the bathroom.

Assuming a finite amount of free time, I would much rather roleplay interesting things, or barring that, actually go camping so I can at least get the fun parts along with the tedious logistics.

Interesting. So it sounds like the adventure, to you, is basically the dungeon, not the entire trip there and back. See, I actually prefer to have a dungeon stuck in the middle of a hexcrawl. So you're not hiking to the necromancer's tower just outside of town, you're tracking the goblin war band that attacked a village and took a bunch of prisoners, and that now is two days ahead of you and moving fast. And when you finally catch up to them in their lair, and rescue the prisoners, you still have to escort a band of frightened commoners safely back to civilization.

Pex
2018-04-22, 11:44 PM
The game being played is whatever the group agrees to play. In this case, the adventure for you seems to start at the dungeon entrance, glossing over questions of how the party got there.



Uncalled for hostility.

Minutiae detail is not necessarily important. We don't track when our characters go to the bathroom, bathe, or sneeze either, unless an appropriate joke presents itself or for flavor text. As you say, the game being played is whatever the group agrees to play, and the group can agree that keeping track of rations isn't an important thing to worry about beyond saying the party replenishes supplies while in town.

Kane0
2018-04-23, 12:12 AM
I only bring them up when it's interesting to do so. If the party could easily prepare ahead of time or find more in the field then there is no real source of drama or conflict and it just becomes busywork and bookkeeping.

Eg I assume rations are accounted for when the PCs are planning a trip across the desert. I don't bring attention to them until they are spoiled, stolen or abandoned or if the party winds up in the middle of the desert unintentionally, like a botched teleport.

Xuc Xac
2018-04-23, 12:54 AM
I only bring them up when it's interesting to do so. If the party could easily prepare ahead of time or find more in the field then there is no real source of drama or conflict and it just becomes busywork and bookkeeping.

Eg I assume rations are accounted for when the PCs are planning a trip across the desert. I don't bring attention to them until they are spoiled, stolen or abandoned or if the party winds up in the middle of the desert unintentionally, like a botched teleport.

A trip across the desert is exactly the kind of thing that I think should draw attention to their supplies. Water is really heavy, you'll need more than usual while in the desert, and you have to bring enough for the whole trip. If you're traveling more than a couple days, it's not as simple as "we hop on our horses and ride". You'll need an extra pack animal just to carry water. That animal will need its own water and food, which is more stuff to carry. A long trip across the desert is like sending a rocket to space : adding fuel adds more weight so you need more fuel which adds more weight so you need more fuel...

JoeJ
2018-04-23, 01:45 AM
Uncalled for hostility.

My apologies. I was not trying to be hostile.


Minutiae detail is not necessarily important. We don't track when our characters go to the bathroom, bathe, or sneeze either, unless an appropriate joke presents itself or for flavor text. As you say, the game being played is whatever the group agrees to play, and the group can agree that keeping track of rations isn't an important thing to worry about beyond saying the party replenishes supplies while in town.

I still find it interesting that many people here think of supplies as minutia rather than as part of the strategic or tactical decision process. Contrast that with the loss of a few hit points in an easy battle, which could arguably be an equivalent drain on party resources to the food and water consumed each day.

Knaight
2018-04-23, 02:14 AM
I still find it interesting that many people here think of supplies as minutia rather than as part of the strategic or tactical decision process. Contrast that with the loss of a few hit points in an easy battle, which could arguably be an equivalent drain on party resources to the food and water consumed each day.

Mild resource drain in negligible fights can also easily be part of the minutia and not the interesting part of the game. Speaking personally, I generally don't play RPGs for resource management, and tend to find games about resource management tedious and dull. "You get through the guards" in a game about wuxia heroes or others far beyond the guards is exactly the same sort of abstraction as "You manage to feed yourselves" in a game about wilderness travelers with years of experience. I find both helpful.

On the other hand, if you're all playing starving street urchins then neither of those abstractions are likely to be appropriate.

Cespenar
2018-04-23, 03:08 AM
In a fitting campaign, logistics could easily be made just as important as the oh-so-holy combat itself. For example, when we were playing Out of the Abyss, a 5e underdark campaign, then it became important what you do when you run out of rations while being chased by a drow slave-driver party. Do you starve and push forward in a fast pace? Do you try to forage and risk slowing down? Do you take a detour towards one of the few settlements to buy some food there? Or do you have some tricks up your sleeve, like Goodberry or something?

In a situation like this, having thought to pack some additional food in the last settlement could be the definition between life and death.

Though of course, these all depend on the agreed-upon priorities of the game.

Pelle
2018-04-23, 04:22 AM
If food has easy access, it is pointless to track it. If it has not, then it can be fun to track it. Rations is basically a time counter. "You have supplies with you for 30 days on your journey into the unkown wilderness searching for the MacGuffin"

This style of game should be agreed upon by the players though, and if someone plays a ranger that can scavenge food without slowing down, then the adventure is basically nullified.

Keltest
2018-04-23, 06:09 AM
Interesting. So it sounds like the adventure, to you, is basically the dungeon, not the entire trip there and back. See, I actually prefer to have a dungeon stuck in the middle of a hexcrawl. So you're not hiking to the necromancer's tower just outside of town, you're tracking the goblin war band that attacked a village and took a bunch of prisoners, and that now is two days ahead of you and moving fast. And when you finally catch up to them in their lair, and rescue the prisoners, you still have to escort a band of frightened commoners safely back to civilization.

There can be interesting things that happen on the trip to the dungeon. Breakfast is not one of those things.

Pelle
2018-04-23, 06:26 AM
There can be interesting things that happen on the trip to the dungeon. Breakfast is not one of those things.

That's intentionally missing his point. It's not eating the rations that can be interesting, it's the risk of running out of rations that can be interesting, and the decisions you have to make to overcome that.

bc56
2018-04-23, 06:34 AM
I have my players buy food before travelling, then expend it in transit. I mark all the travel times on my maps for easy reference.

Keltest
2018-04-23, 06:36 AM
That's intentionally missing his point. It's not eating the rations that can be interesting, it's the risk of running out of rations that can be interesting, and the decisions you have to make to overcome that.

No, he's missing our point. In most circumstances, rations are unlikely to run out. Your characters are reasonably experienced adventurers who would have a firm understanding of how much they need to prepare for a given trip to make sure they have enough rations to last them the trip, the return journey, and a little extra just in case. And that's not even taking into consideration the numerous ways adventurers have of magically creating food without spending any resources at all.

If you want to create tension and urgency, there are far better ways of doing it than "a wolf ate your rations overnight, youre going to start starving tomorrow unless you find some food and water. This now supersedes your dungeon quest."

Deophaun
2018-04-23, 06:50 AM
There can be interesting things that happen on the trip to the dungeon. Breakfast is not one of those things.
Depends on who's eating and who's being eaten.

Pelle
2018-04-23, 06:59 AM
No, he's missing our point. In most circumstances, rations are unlikely to run out. Your characters are reasonably experienced adventurers who would have a firm understanding of how much they need to prepare for a given trip to make sure they have enough rations to last them the trip, the return journey, and a little extra just in case. And that's not even taking into consideration the numerous ways adventurers have of magically creating food without spending any resources at all.

If you want to create tension and urgency, there are far better ways of doing it than "a wolf ate your rations overnight, youre going to start starving tomorrow unless you find some food and water. This now supersedes your dungeon quest."

Of course if you can magically create food, or if you know how many days you will travel and can carry enough to make breakfast every day, then of course you don't bother tracking rations!

But all of that doesn't negate that you can run games where you risk running out of food. In long journeys of unknown length, the number of rations you carry serve as time pressure. It informs you on what to prioritize in the game; following your main goal, spending time to hunt for food, going on side quests or not, etc, allowing for plenty of interesting decisions. You may not enjoy making such strategic decisions and don't want to play that game ever, but not acknowledging it and equating it to bathroom breaks is just dishonest.

I mean, you might not even have a dungeon quest waiting at the end of the journey, the journey itself can be the adventure.

Keltest
2018-04-23, 07:28 AM
Of course if you can magically create food, or if you know how many days you will travel and can carry enough to make breakfast every day, then of course you don't bother tracking rations!

But all of that doesn't negate that you can run games where you risk running out of food. In long journeys of unknown length, the number of rations you carry serve as time pressure. It informs you on what to prioritize in the game; following your main goal, spending time to hunt for food, going on side quests or not, etc, allowing for plenty of interesting decisions. You may not enjoy making such strategic decisions and don't want to play that game ever, but not acknowledging it and equating it to bathroom breaks is just dishonest.

I mean, you might not even have a dungeon quest waiting at the end of the journey, the journey itself can be the adventure.

But it doesn't inform any of that. At best, it can inform you of options. "The Shrine of Maximum Loot is in the middle of the Desert of Really Long Hot Days, and nobody can carry enough water for that. We need to either teleport, find a magical source of water or pick a different adventure." They aren't going to get halfway through the Desert of Really Long Hot Days to discover that they didn't bring enough water, they would either account for that in the planning stage or not go at all, because seasoned adventurers do not forget that they need to eat sometimes, even if the players have no idea what goes into finding desert rations.

Pex
2018-04-23, 08:10 AM
My apologies. I was not trying to be hostile.

ok


I still find it interesting that many people here think of supplies as minutia rather than as part of the strategic or tactical decision process. Contrast that with the loss of a few hit points in an easy battle, which could arguably be an equivalent drain on party resources to the food and water consumed each day.

For that one particular adventure that can be fun. For an entire campaign to worry about starvation, if that's the campaign premise go for it - apocalypse, Dark Sun, zombiegeddon. I don't play those types of games. I play typical high fantasy D&D/Pathfinder where we deal with other problems that are more interesting to us, of which worrying about food will be fun for that one particular adventure arc it's part of the point.

Pelle
2018-04-23, 09:04 AM
But it doesn't inform any of that. At best, it can inform you of options. "The Shrine of Maximum Loot is in the middle of the Desert of Really Long Hot Days, and nobody can carry enough water for that. We need to either teleport, find a magical source of water or pick a different adventure." They aren't going to get halfway through the Desert of Really Long Hot Days to discover that they didn't bring enough water, they would either account for that in the planning stage or not go at all, because seasoned adventurers do not forget that they need to eat sometimes, even if the players have no idea what goes into finding desert rations.

Ok, so it is the assumptions that is the problem here.

If running a game where tracking the rations should be worthwhile, the premise of the game when pitched is that you are taking a big risk when going on that journey. It is assumed that you are competent and carrying as much as you can, and hope that that will be enough if you are lucky or skilled. If you bring a teleporting wizard to that game, you have failed to make a character suited for the premise of the game. And if you bring a character who refuse to try to go on the journey then, well, you don't like the premise in the first place.

Having some time pressure absolutely facilitates interesting decisions. Should you avoid dangerous areas and spend more time? Should you take risks looking for water? Should you spend time searching ruins in hope of finding potentially useful items? The game is not about seasoned adventurers being incompetent, it is about competent adventurers taking and managing risk.

Knaight
2018-04-23, 09:10 AM
But it doesn't inform any of that. At best, it can inform you of options. "The Shrine of Maximum Loot is in the middle of the Desert of Really Long Hot Days, and nobody can carry enough water for that. We need to either teleport, find a magical source of water or pick a different adventure." They aren't going to get halfway through the Desert of Really Long Hot Days to discover that they didn't bring enough water, they would either account for that in the planning stage or not go at all, because seasoned adventurers do not forget that they need to eat sometimes, even if the players have no idea what goes into finding desert rations.

There's room for adventure here. They brought enough water for the DoRHLHD, but then a giant desert eagle made away with one of their pack camels and now there's a water shortage - what do they do? They're making a sea voyage, there's some variability in travel time depending on wind - just how safe do they play this, in terms of bringing rations instead of cargo? The caravan has more than enough supplies to make it over the pass, until a freak blizzard drops six feet of snow on the ground and they're suddenly stranded - how do they try and escape this predicament?

denthor
2018-04-23, 09:11 AM
Sadly my party only keeps track of important things


They bought a bag of holding to keep track of....


The beer

Anonymouswizard
2018-04-23, 10:33 AM
Sadly my party only keeps track of important things


They bought a bag of holding to keep track of....


The beer

I once had a GM ban alcohol.

It was a M&M game. First he banned any character concept related to alcohol.

Then he banned starting in a brewery.

Then he banned knowing how to brew beer.

Then he literally retconned alcohol from the world. It was weird.

Corneel
2018-04-23, 10:51 AM
I once had aGM ban alcohol.

It was a M&M game that would have essentially been Scion. First he banned us being the children of any gods to do work alcohol.

Then he banned starting in a brewery.

Then he banned knowing how to brew beer.

Then he literally retconned alcohol from the world. It was weird. Gods of war, murder, and even sexual violence were okay as parents, but beer was banned.
Risking a warning for discussing real world religion here, but as a Unreconstructed Belgian I'm obliged to consider that Heresy, Blasphemy and Sacrilege all rolled in one.

Deophaun
2018-04-23, 10:55 AM
Then he literally retconned alcohol from the world. It was weird. Gods of war, murder, and even sexual violence were okay as parents, but beer was banned.
A world where beer has been erased from history? That's a campaign hook, not a ban.

Anonymouswizard
2018-04-23, 11:34 AM
A world where beer has been erased from history? That's a campaign hook, not a ban.

He banned both searching for beer and investigate his absence.

Game never happened because he went off to university in the town we play in.

8BitNinja
2018-04-23, 11:37 AM
For me it depends on the nature of the campaign. Is the campaign involving weeks or months at a time being outside of civilization? If so, food is important and I keep track of it. Is wilderness just something between point a and point b? If so, then food can most likely even be ignored entirely

Deophaun
2018-04-23, 11:39 AM
He banned both searching for beer and investigate his absence.
Well, now we need to investigate the absence of investigations into beer. This is a full blown crisis!

LibraryOgre
2018-04-23, 11:41 AM
Trail rations are foods that do not require additional preparation. They are expensive and relatively light. Subsisting on them for too long may result in malnutrition, but that's relatively easy to avoid in a small group setting.

Standard rations are goods that store and travel well, but require additional preparation... meaning someone in your party needs to have the Cooking skill to make decent food.

Unless you're a great hunter or have a lot of time to be a mediocre hunter, rations are part and parcel of making your way through the game. While, at higher levels, you can sometimes avoid them (magic items, retinue sufficient to make each meal less of an issue), at lower levels, you're looking at needing to track them, IMC.

Pex
2018-04-23, 12:32 PM
Even if wanting to be concerned about it how it's resolved can vary. In some cases it's enough for a character to say "I hunt for food". Some DMs may require a Survival roll. Depending on the game system having enough character resource spending in Survival is enough so a roll isn't necessary. Other DMs want to play out the hunting encounter, but that I surmise only happens once or twice before everyone gets annoyed with it for wasting playtime instead of dealing with the adventure and it's not done anymore.

JoeJ
2018-04-23, 12:57 PM
But it doesn't inform any of that. At best, it can inform you of options. "The Shrine of Maximum Loot is in the middle of the Desert of Really Long Hot Days, and nobody can carry enough water for that. We need to either teleport, find a magical source of water or pick a different adventure." They aren't going to get halfway through the Desert of Really Long Hot Days to discover that they didn't bring enough water, they would either account for that in the planning stage or not go at all, because seasoned adventurers do not forget that they need to eat sometimes, even if the players have no idea what goes into finding desert rations.


Knowing that you need to eat is not the same as keeping track of how much food you have left. The middle of the DoRLHD is a big place. How long does the party expect they'll have to search to find the shrine? In my previous example, how far will they have to pursue the goblins, and how many survivors will they need to escort back to safety? When the group is hired to map the Isle of Dread, how long will that take? What is the weather going to be while they're out there? Experienced adventurers don't necessarily know how long they'll be in the wilderness, just as they don't necessarily know which spells they'll need, or how many healing potions they should try to get.

Again, you seem to be assuming that the group is not going to play out the hexcrawl portion of the adventure, just the dungeon.

Deophaun
2018-04-23, 01:45 PM
Knowing that you need to eat is not the same as keeping track of how much food you have left.
I want to rephrase this a bit:

Keeping track of how much food you have left is not the same as knowing how you will eat.

For many games, low levels concern themselves with the former question: we have this many rations we can afford/carry, we have our water skins, and no one put ranks in Survival so our ability to forage is going to be hit and miss. We can feed ourselves for X days with no problem, past that we're at the mercy of the dice/GM. And this is fine for the early levels, where every tenth of pound and every gold piece matters and overland travel is a thing with which you need to contend. Sure, some people just throw that all on a mule, but there are advantages in taking only what you can carry and mules aren't the best at climbing cliffs. This makes these choices meaningful and this is where people can call me crazy but I'll say I do enjoy the logistical planning in the low levels.

As you get higher up, that is likely going to fall away and the game's focus should move on to the later question. "How are you going to feed all the people you rescued?" is a great problem, but solving it with math isn't the most fun route. You can say that you brought a food train along, but that would necessarily slow you down and mean that in the end you rescued fewer people. Or you spent gold on a wand with enough castings of create food and water, which was an expensive proposition. Or you cheaped out and just said people can live for three weeks without food, create water and purify food and drink on what they scavenge will do fine for keeping them alive, and now you have to deal with unrest through the march back. Or you know that it is rather marshy and people have seen hydras in the area. They can eat all the hydra heads they want if you can capture one and bring it back with you.

This is now interesting; there are advantages and disadvantages to every option. But it's all high-level planning. At no point do you have to mark down how many bags of rice you consumed or charges you spent, because that doesn't really add anything.

Mike_G
2018-04-23, 01:48 PM
Knowing that you need to eat is not the same as keeping track of how much food you have left. The middle of the DoRLHD is a big place. How long does the party expect they'll have to search to find the shrine? In my previous example, how far will they have to pursue the goblins, and how many survivors will they need to escort back to safety? When the group is hired to map the Isle of Dread, how long will that take? What is the weather going to be while they're out there? Experienced adventurers don't necessarily know how long they'll be in the wilderness, just as they don't necessarily know which spells they'll need, or how many healing potions they should try to get.

Again, you seem to be assuming that the group is not going to play out the hexcrawl portion of the adventure, just the dungeon.

I think you're getting a little judgy about this whole thing.

Lots of people find mundane resource management boring. If you honestly think that counting pounds of beef jerky is as exciting as allocating spell slots, we're just going to have to disagree.

Yes, you can make supplies an important part of the campaign. I described a game I played years ago that did just that, and it was fine for a one off. I would not be up for that in every game. If the DM says the journey will take a week, the party should be assumed to bring a week's rations. If they decide to screw around for a month in the wilderness, a gentle reminded "Hey, guys. This was supposed to be a week. You're going to run out of supplies soon. So, do you push on or start picking berries or what?"

I would not play a game where I had to list types of food and how I carried them and how I kept the bugs out of the flour and roll for the butter going rancid.

That's like a worse version of Oregon Trail. I just want to shank me some orcs and rescue some princesses.

There are plenty of way to play the journey, plenty of side quests and distractions and social encounters that don't need me to count biscuits. Stop telling me that means that I want the game to start "at the door of the dungeon."

JoeJ
2018-04-23, 02:34 PM
I think you're getting a little judgy about this whole thing.

Am I?


If you honestly think that counting pounds of beef jerky is as exciting as allocating spell slots, we're just going to have to disagree.


I would not play a game where I had to list types of food and how I carried them and how I kept the bugs out of the flour and roll for the butter going rancid.

That's like a worse version of Oregon Trail.


plenty of side quests and distractions and social encounters that don't need me to count biscuits

???



If the DM says the journey will take a week, the party should be assumed to bring a week's rations.

And if the DM says there will be X number of battles, the party should be assumed to bring enough healing potions/scrolls/wands/whatever to restore everybody to full X number of times, plus a bit of reserve in case of unexpected troubles. There's therefore no need to bog down play with bookkeeping details like how many magic bandages that wand has remaining.

In all the examples I gave, however, the PC's don't know how long the journey will take. The players look at maps and listen to traveler's tales, legends, and rumors, and watch the weather to help decide whether to spend a day foraging in the woods before heading off across the plains, or if it's worthwhile to follow a path that isn't going quite the direction they want but might lead to a village where they can resupply. Survival proficiency can help the party with relevant information, but it can't make the decisions for them.

And it's not just outdoors that supply can be a problem. Mega-dungeons with hundreds of rooms are a thing too, as are long treks through the Underdark.

Mike_G
2018-04-23, 02:51 PM
Am I?


Yes.








???



!!!



And if the DM says there will be X number of battles, the party should be assumed to bring enough healing potions/scrolls/wands/whatever to restore everybody to full X number of times, plus a bit of reserve in case of unexpected troubles. There's therefore no need to bog down play with bookkeeping details like how many magic bandages that wand has remaining.



Strawman.

There's a difference between "It takes three days travel to reach the Black Tower" and "Expect four ambushes plus a boss fight."

Sure, there is an element of uncertainty, but if you decide to go hiking up a mountain, you should try to figure how long it's gonna take and plan accordingly.

If stuff comes up once in a while, that's great, it adds flavor. Like the time we got shipwrecked and lost all our gear. But I liked it as a change of pace. I would not be interested in playing Bad Vacation as a rule.

You put the amount of detail into a campaign that you want. Some of us have three hours every other week to see friends, run a con at the tavern, get in a bar fight, leave town in a hurry, explore some ancient ruins and stab some dragons. I want to make memories of derring -do and stories of heroic escapes and rescues. Not advanced meal prep.

None of this even remotely means I don't want to play the journey to the dungeon, so stop saying it.

Anonymouswizard
2018-04-23, 03:23 PM
Well, now we need to investigate the absence of investigations into beer. This is a full blown crisis!

Not according to the GM. Probably something about him not being 18 when he suggested the game to us, the spoilsport.

LibraryOgre
2018-04-23, 03:24 PM
The Mod Wonder: Might everyone consider taking a step back for a moment? I'll go look to see if anyone's been flaming, but, really, calm down.

Ignimortis
2018-04-23, 03:32 PM
In most games, I stop bothering about rations very quickly after the game starts, both as a DM and as a player unless enforced. If the characters start at level 1 or whatever, then yes, there's some consideration about rations and foraging and having someone who can roll Survival or equivalents well enough for us not to starve to death. Otherwise, it's either a non-issue where party funds won't even lose 1/1000th after buying rations for a year, or there's enough magic to ignore the issue (Everlasting Rations flavored with Prestidigitation, anyone?).

Frozen_Feet
2018-04-23, 03:34 PM
I use differently colored plastic beads to count rations. Everytime characters eat, players hand me some of the beads, and every time they stock up rations, I hand some beads to them.

I use a similar method to track hit points. When a character is wounded, I give red beads to a player, and as the character heals, they hand beads back to me.

The point of the bead counting in both cases is the same: available resources define possible move space. If you're wounded, you can't jump through a window or survive inclement weather; if you're short on rations, you can't take a detour through the forest or camp ten days in the middle of nowhere.

People here who say "player characters are seasoned adventures so they can be assumed..." deserve a whop on the head. Calculating supplies per day is easy on the level of "I literally teach third graders to do this in real life". Because of this, it makes a good category flr gameable decisions. Basically any player can make informed decisions on the level of "well if we go that route we only need supplies for N days, but in case something comes up we should double that" etc..

At the same time, it's easy to get across stakes of failure, and easy for in-game events to demonstrate whether a plan is good or bad. With just a short initial period of learning via trial and error, players can learn how to make decisions like seasoned adventurers, giving them the satisfaction of improving in the game. That all goes away if you just assume the characters do this with no input from the players.

Keeping track of supplies in favor of making assumptions also allows for roleplaying bad decision making in a defined way, if gambling and playing to lose are not foreign concepts to you.

Kane0
2018-04-23, 05:21 PM
A trip across the desert is exactly the kind of thing that I think should draw attention to their supplies. Water is really heavy, you'll need more than usual while in the desert, and you have to bring enough for the whole trip. If you're traveling more than a couple days, it's not as simple as "we hop on our horses and ride". You'll need an extra pack animal just to carry water. That animal will need its own water and food, which is more stuff to carry. A long trip across the desert is like sending a rocket to space : adding fuel adds more weight so you need more fuel which adds more weight so you need more fuel...

Most definitely, if you don’t have a bag if holding or similar.
My parties usually do, so it becomes a nonissue unless something *ahem* happens to said bag of supplies.

Pex
2018-04-23, 05:46 PM
I use differently colored plastic beads to count rations. Everytime characters eat, players hand me some of the beads, and every time they stock up rations, I hand some beads to them.

I use a similar method to track hit points. When a character is wounded, I give red beads to a player, and as the character heals, they hand beads back to me.

The point of the bead counting in both cases is the same: available resources define possible move space. If you're wounded, you can't jump through a window or survive inclement weather; if you're short on rations, you can't take a detour through the forest or camp ten days in the middle of nowhere.

People here who say "player characters are seasoned adventures so they can be assumed..." deserve a whop on the head. Calculating supplies per day is easy on the level of "I literally teach third graders to do this in real life". Because of this, it makes a good category flr gameable decisions. Basically any player can make informed decisions on the level of "well if we go that route we only need supplies for N days, but in case something comes up we should double that" etc..

At the same time, it's easy to get across stakes of failure, and easy for in-game events to demonstrate whether a plan is good or bad. With just a short initial period of learning via trial and error, players can learn how to make decisions like seasoned adventurers, giving them the satisfaction of improving in the game. That all goes away if you just assume the characters do this with no input from the players.

Keeping track of supplies in favor of making assumptions also allows for roleplaying bad decision making in a defined way, if gambling and playing to lose are not foreign concepts to you.

In real life it's very important to keep track of your food rations. When I go shopping I generally buy for the next week. For 3rd graders to learn this is wonderful. However, I'm playing a game. Minutiae of that detail isn't a necessary thing. Adhering to realism can only go so far before it interferes with the fun of playing.

Anonymouswizard
2018-04-23, 05:53 PM
Most definitely, if you don’t have a bag if holding or similar.
My parties usually do, so it becomes a nonissue unless something *ahem* happens to said bag of supplies.

Bag of what?

Sounds like magic. Burn the witch!

In all seriousness, buying a bag of holding or magic item that generates food/ammunition/spell components/spare limbs is a decent sign that the group isn't interested in tracking it. Of course, some settings don't have such items :smallamused:

Kelb_Panthera
2018-04-23, 06:10 PM
But it doesn't inform any of that. At best, it can inform you of options. "The Shrine of Maximum Loot is in the middle of the Desert of Really Long Hot Days, and nobody can carry enough water for that. We need to either teleport, find a magical source of water or pick a different adventure." They aren't going to get halfway through the Desert of Really Long Hot Days to discover that they didn't bring enough water, they would either account for that in the planning stage or not go at all, because seasoned adventurers do not forget that they need to eat sometimes, even if the players have no idea what goes into finding desert rations.

Suppose that, halfway through the desert of really long, hot days, a sandstorm blows through that disorients the party and they're now -lost- in the desert of really long, hot days. Suddenly, how much food they actually brought matters quite a lot. They very much -can- get part way through the journey and discover they didn't bring enough if circumstances change. In a high magic world, the number of circumstance changers rises pretty sharply compared to more low-magic settings.

Either you're pupuing an idea that you have a particular distaste for, which is a perfectly valid position but not a universal one, or an idea you're having trouble wrapping your head around. Which is it?

Frozen_Feet
2018-04-23, 06:19 PM
In real life it's very important to keep track of your food rations. When I go shopping I generally buy for the next week. For 3rd graders to learn this is wonderful. However, I'm playing a game. Minutiae of that detail isn't a necessary thing. Adhering to realism can only go so far before it interferes with the fun of playing.
Counting beads is not that far, especially not when it is tied to interesting events within the game. And things which would be disastrous in real life, such as rations running out on a week-long hike, can be exciting challenges in a game.

Saying that such minutiae "isn't necessary" is missing the point. Neither is tracking injury necessary. But when tracked to appropriate level of detail, it expands the space of gameable decisions. Knowing whether or not you can jump out of the second-story window and run away creates tension and defines available strategies when you're dueling in the top floor of a tavern; just as well does whether or not your stack of rations will last long enough to go around an enemy encampment. In both cases, assuming competence removes player agency. In both cases, not assuming anything creates a chance for the player to fail, but it also creates chance for the player to succeed on their own skill and feel the satisfaction of having made the correct choice.

Koo Rehtorb
2018-04-23, 06:36 PM
It depends entirely on the game. If you're playing Torchbearer then there are very explicit rules for how much space rations take, how much they cost, how quickly you go through them, and what happens when you run out. It's fun because the game is specifically designed around it.

In other sorts of games it doesn't matter at all.

Lemmy
2018-04-23, 07:24 PM
I generally assume the group can (and does) buy, forage or hunt food for the next 3 days, unless they are in a region where obtaining food is particularly difficult, like a desert, abandoned city, sewer maze, etc.

I don't even bother to keep track of ordinary ammo, for the most part.

Grod_The_Giant
2018-04-23, 08:04 PM
Again, you seem to be assuming that the group is not going to play out the hexcrawl portion of the adventure, just the dungeon.
How much minutia you keep track of is very dependent on the style of game you're playing. A hexcrawl is very focused on wilderness survival, so wilderness survival elements will be important. A game focused around political intrigue, on the other hand? Not so much.

Also, though, I think there's an important distinction between "survival elements" and "tracking rations." As you've said, the point of the exercise isn't bookkeeping for the sake of bookkeeping, but to add an element of tension. To create situations where the unexpected happens and suddenly starvation becomes a concern. And keeping track of individual supplies is certainly one way to do that... but there are plenty of others, at varying levels of abstraction, and which level you prefer to use will vary from group to group and system to system.

Tipsy_Pooka
2018-04-23, 08:13 PM
After reading this thread, I realize that I'm in the minority when it comes to this topic. Myself, going all the way back to BECMI, I always enjoyed the minutiae of tracking every single solitary cn of weight. Ammo, food, water, individual articles of clothing, spell components... whatever. I figure I must have been a logistician in a past life. I also never picked on anyone else, as a DM or a player, for NOT being that way.

One of the reasons that TTRPGs will always be so near and dear to my heart is that there is something in it for everyone.

Keltest
2018-04-23, 09:37 PM
Suppose that, halfway through the desert of really long, hot days, a sandstorm blows through that disorients the party and they're now -lost- in the desert of really long, hot days. Suddenly, how much food they actually brought matters quite a lot. They very much -can- get part way through the journey and discover they didn't bring enough if circumstances change. In a high magic world, the number of circumstance changers rises pretty sharply compared to more low-magic settings.

Either you're pupuing an idea that you have a particular distaste for, which is a perfectly valid position but not a universal one, or an idea you're having trouble wrapping your head around. Which is it?

If my DM advertised the game as a dungeon crawl and it turned into a survival game, I probably wouldn't come back next session. I showed up because I wanted to play one of the people ransacking the dungeon for loot, not some fool lost in the desert.

Youre correct, circumstances can change. But when the DM says "a giant roc came out of nowhere and ate your water-carrying mount. You have three days of water left. What do you do?" then that's just contriving a problem for the sake of making us do more work that we aren't interested in. Managing resources like food should be done before the expedition sets out, if its necessary to handle it all. The only time it should have to actually come up after leaving town is if the players knowingly and deliberately set out with fewer resources than would take them to their destination and decide to just play it by ear.

Pex
2018-04-23, 10:30 PM
Counting beads is not that far, especially not when it is tied to interesting events within the game. And things which would be disastrous in real life, such as rations running out on a week-long hike, can be exciting challenges in a game.

Saying that such minutiae "isn't necessary" is missing the point. Neither is tracking injury necessary. But when tracked to appropriate level of detail, it expands the space of gameable decisions. Knowing whether or not you can jump out of the second-story window and run away creates tension and defines available strategies when you're dueling in the top floor of a tavern; just as well does whether or not your stack of rations will last long enough to go around an enemy encampment. In both cases, assuming competence removes player agency. In both cases, not assuming anything creates a chance for the player to fail, but it also creates chance for the player to succeed on their own skill and feel the satisfaction of having made the correct choice.

The so called tension of keeping track of food rations is not a universal fun thing to do. It's flavor text background. Its importance is dependent on the campaign and the players' desire to bother with it, including the DM.

Deophaun
2018-04-23, 10:40 PM
They very much -can- get part way through the journey and discover they didn't bring enough if circumstances change. In a high magic world, the number of circumstance changers rises pretty sharply compared to more low-magic settings.
While high magic may have more "circumstance changers," it's low-magic settings where those circumstances will matter more.

In high magic settings you can be taken from your comfortable village and the attendant support network and suddenly find yourself upon a sea of lava on the elemental plane of fire. No amount of rigorous bookkeeping of supplies is going to help you in that situation because your supplies are all gone. You better be able to function without your train precisely because circumstances can change so drastically, and high-magic settings provide you the tools to do that for precisely that reason.

Low-magic, well, go on a hike out in the true wilderness where you are days away from another soul and out of communication and, while you aren't as liable to find yourself in an environment actively hostile to all earthly life (if you're in Yellowstone when it goes, that's another matter), a little thing like an unexpected hole in the ground can make a nature retreat into a full-blown survival situation.

The whole point of having magic in the first place is to solve mundane problems, so it makes sense that the more magic there is, the easier it is to overcome or ignore those problems.

Kane0
2018-04-23, 11:00 PM
After reading this thread, I realize that I'm in the minority when it comes to this topic. Myself, going all the way back to BECMI, I always enjoyed the minutiae of tracking every single solitary cn of weight. Ammo, food, water, individual articles of clothing, spell components... whatever. I figure I must have been a logistician in a past life. I also never picked on anyone else, as a DM or a player, for NOT being that way.

One of the reasons that TTRPGs will always be so near and dear to my heart is that there is something in it for everyone.

Maybe because the name of the game was how much loot you could carry home rather than how much XP you could get or how many times you can save the world. With that sort of focus every ounce you carry into the dungeon impacts how much you carry out.

Kelb_Panthera
2018-04-23, 11:11 PM
If my DM advertised the game as a dungeon crawl and it turned into a survival game, I probably wouldn't come back next session. I showed up because I wanted to play one of the people ransacking the dungeon for loot, not some fool lost in the desert.

See there you go with presuppositions again. Who said it was advertised as a dungeon crawl and not just general adventuring? Sometimes dungeons open into the underdark too, btw. If all you want out of the game is old-school dungeon-crawling, that's fine. That's not the whole of the available game with any number of systems and you may have to compromise unless you have an established group that also wants to stick to dungeon crawling.


Youre correct, circumstances can change. But when the DM says "a giant roc came out of nowhere and ate your water-carrying mount. You have three days of water left. What do you do?" then that's just contriving a problem for the sake of making us do more work that we aren't interested in. Managing resources like food should be done before the expedition sets out, if its necessary to handle it all. The only time it should have to actually come up after leaving town is if the players knowingly and deliberately set out with fewer resources than would take them to their destination and decide to just play it by ear.

The GM's entire job is to contrive scenarios for the PCs to play through. Some of us like to be surprised sometimes. "The unexpected happens, what do you do about it?" is one of the oldest story-telling and gaming tropes there is. Sometimes "the unexpected" is something that extends your travel time by an unknown length. You don't like it? Cool, do you. It'd bother me if everything always went according to plan, though.

Knaight
2018-04-24, 01:20 AM
If my DM advertised the game as a dungeon crawl and it turned into a survival game, I probably wouldn't come back next session. I showed up because I wanted to play one of the people ransacking the dungeon for loot, not some fool lost in the desert.

Which is fair - on the other hand, if the game turned into a dungeon crawl when that wasn't explicitly the structure I'd be similarly likely to bail. Different games interest different people, and both of these are in the category of resource management which is emphatically not what I play RPGs for (outside of very occasionally going way against type0.

Cespenar
2018-04-24, 02:34 AM
He banned both searching for beer and investigate his absence.

Game never happened because he went off to university in the town we play in.

There's a joke waiting between those two lines, but, meh.

JoeJ
2018-04-24, 03:30 AM
There's a difference between "It takes three days travel to reach the Black Tower" and "Expect four ambushes plus a boss fight."

No, they're pretty much equivalent. In both cases you're telling the players what to prepare for. Giving out that information ahead of time is reasonable in some circumstances, but not in others.



Sure, there is an element of uncertainty, but if you decide to go hiking up a mountain, you should try to figure how long it's gonna take and plan accordingly.

And if you decide to storm the BBEG's lair you should try to figure how many enemies you'll fight and plan accordingly. But then do you play out the events or simply assume that everything goes according to plan?



You put the amount of detail into a campaign that you want. Some of us have three hours every other week to see friends, run a con at the tavern, get in a bar fight, leave town in a hurry, explore some ancient ruins and stab some dragons. I want to make memories of derring -do and stories of heroic escapes and rescues. Not advanced meal prep.

And some of enjoy the hex crawls that you keep disparaging. Can't you simply say that the logistics part of the game isn't what you enjoy without the negative characterizations?



None of this even remotely means I don't want to play the journey to the dungeon, so stop saying it.

What do you consider playing out the journey to entail?

Mike_G
2018-04-24, 04:35 AM
No, they're pretty much equivalent. In both cases you're telling the players what to prepare for. Giving out that information ahead of time is reasonable in some circumstances, but not in others.


They aren't.

Look, Napoleon knew how far it was to Moscow. He had a good idea of the time it would take to get there under normal circumstances. He did not know, nor could he know, where and when and how often the Russians would fight him.

It would be insane for the DM to say "Expect to fight 30 orcs, two trolls, some Kobolds who will just trap everything and snipe at you, and the cleric of Nerul with his minions." That's waaaaay more information than "The mountain is three days travel from the city."








What do you consider playing out the journey to entail?

Random encounters, social encounters, side quests, non combat challenges like crossing rivers or whatever.

There are plenty of things to meet on the way to the dark Tower than do not involve me knowing how many pounds of salt pork we're carrying.

Pelle
2018-04-24, 04:49 AM
Minutiae of that detail isn't a necessary thing. Adhering to realism can only go so far before it interferes with the fun of playing.

It doesn't have to be "minutiae", and it isn't about adhering to realism. It is about adding time pressure and another failure state. Do you also have problems with adventures where you are on a time limit? "You have 30 days until the BBEG finish hos ritual", is tracking days in this scenario also minutiae?

"You have 30 days of rations, find the MacGuffin before you run out" is the same setup, and that's a situation when it's a point to track rations. If you are of no risk running out of food, you don't track rations, the same way you don't track days if time doesn't matter.


Have you played the semi-cooperative (traitor) board game Battlestar Galactica? There you have to try escape from some robots with your spaceship, and if you run out of either Fuel, Food, Morale or Population, you lose. Balancing the different resources, avoiding multiple failure states is fun! I can imagine for example a hypothetical Mad Max rpg, where running out of either HP, Water or Petrol makes you lose. Tracking those resources doesn't have to be unfun minutiae.

Pelle
2018-04-24, 05:47 AM
They aren't.

Look, Napoleon knew how far it was to Moscow. He had a good idea of the time it would take to get there under normal circumstances. He did not know, nor could he know, where and when and how often the Russians would fight him.


That's just one scenario, one where you wouldn't necessarily bother to track rations. So what? That doesn't preclude other scenarios. Look, when Stanley went searching for Dr. Livingstone, he had a good idea of how many Doctors he was looking for. He did not know his exact location and exactly how many days he would need.



It would be insane for the DM to say "Expect to fight 30 orcs, two trolls, some Kobolds who will just trap everything and snipe at you, and the cleric of Nerul with his minions." That's waaaaay more information than "The mountain is three days travel from the city."


Why would that be insane in all circumstances? You don't have scouting, intelligence, scrying, rumours etc in your games? Do you always have to walk blindly into combat situations (expecting encounters to be level appropriate)?

JoeJ
2018-04-24, 05:57 AM
They aren't.

They are.


Look, Napoleon knew how far it was to Moscow. He had a good idea of the time it would take to get there under normal circumstances. He did not know, nor could he know, where and when and how often the Russians would fight him.

They're equivalent. That doesn't mean that knowing one tells you the other. Spies, informants, tracking, prisoner interrogations, and divination are all tools that PCs can use. If you investigate thoroughly you should be able to get a good estimate of the opposition you'll face, some of the time. Just as you should also be able to predict how long the adventure will last, some of the time.


It would be insane for the DM to say "Expect to fight 30 orcs, two trolls, some Kobolds who will just trap everything and snipe at you, and the cleric of Nerul with his minions." That's waaaaay more information than "The mountain is three days travel from the city."

It would also be insane for the DM to say, "the goblins you've been tracking are going to travel north for six days across the moors to the Brown Hills, then turn northeast for two days to the edge of the forest, where their home base is located, but you'll catch them about half a day before they get there." That's a lot more information than, "there are fifteen sets of goblin footprints."


Random encounters, social encounters, side quests, non combat challenges like crossing rivers or whatever.

There are plenty of things to meet on the way to the dark Tower than do not involve me knowing how many pounds of salt pork we're carrying.

There are also plenty of things to meet that don't involve knowing how many potion of healing you're carrying. Do you not track any consumables at all, or is it only food that bothers you?

Pex
2018-04-24, 07:32 AM
It doesn't have to be "minutiae", and it isn't about adhering to realism. It is about adding time pressure and another failure state. Do you also have problems with adventures where you are on a time limit? "You have 30 days until the BBEG finish hos ritual", is tracking days in this scenario also minutiae?

"You have 30 days of rations, find the MacGuffin before you run out" is the same setup, and that's a situation when it's a point to track rations. If you are of no risk running out of food, you don't track rations, the same way you don't track days if time doesn't matter.


Have you played the semi-cooperative (traitor) board game Battlestar Galactica? There you have to try escape from some robots with your spaceship, and if you run out of either Fuel, Food, Morale or Population, you lose. Balancing the different resources, avoiding multiple failure states is fun! I can imagine for example a hypothetical Mad Max rpg, where running out of either HP, Water or Petrol makes you lose. Tracking those resources doesn't have to be unfun minutiae.

For that one particular adventure arc that's fun. As a universal every adventure every game it's not.

I see your Battlestar Galactica and raise you The Walking Dead. There is a story where keeping track of food is very important, an absolute necessity for survival. Indeed, an episode or two will happen where getting food and supplies is the whole or part of the episode plot. There will be a scene of people worrying. Key words though: an episode or two. It is not every episode. In the comics, it's not every issue. It's acknowledged, it's done, then they move on to other interesting things and don't talk about food rations running out at all. It was potent for that one scene to see the young girl eat a turtle to "Just Survive Somehow". It was not necessary to see her hunt for some animal every day.

Pelle
2018-04-24, 07:48 AM
For that one particular adventure arc that's fun. As a universal every adventure every game it's not.

I see your Battlestar Galactica and raise you The Walking Dead. There is a story where keeping track of food is very important, an absolute necessity for survival. Indeed, an episode or two will happen where getting food and supplies is the whole or part of the episode plot. There will be a scene of people worrying. Key words though: an episode or two. It is not every episode. In the comics, it's not every issue. It's acknowledged, it's done, then they move on to other interesting things and don't talk about food rations running out at all. It was potent for that one scene to see the young girl eat a turtle to "Just Survive Somehow". It was not necessary to see her hunt for some animal every day.

No disagreement here either. I'm just reacting to the seemingly dogmatic claims people make asserting that tracking rations can never be fun and comparing it to other inconsequential stuff. Sometimes it can be important, but quite often not. In fact, I usually never track rations myself, due to the type of games I normally play. But I have no problem imagining games where it would be fun, particulary survival expeditions into unknown territories.

On the topic of The Walking Dead, I also have the board game Dead of Winter, where you run a colony of survivors after a zombie apocalypse, trying to survive through winter scavenging for enough fuel, food and medicine (with a potential traitor in the group). Come to think of it, I also prefer Agricola to Caverna, because I like the extra stress and tension you have to feed your family every harvest. Some players hate it, though.

Frozen_Feet
2018-04-24, 08:16 AM
The so called tension of keeping track of food rations is not a universal fun thing to do. It's flavor text background. Its importance is dependent on the campaign and the players' desire to bother with it, including the DM.

So? You're still missing the point. No mechanic I know of has been proven to be "universally fun thing", nor is "fun" the sole justification for a game design element. (Losing is rarely fun, but risk of genuine loss often makes victory sweeter.) What you say here could as well apply to any mechanized game element.

GungHo
2018-04-24, 10:30 AM
I don't really understand what's being argued here.

Anonymouswizard
2018-04-24, 11:44 AM
I don't really understand what's being argued here.

As far as I can tell, whether or not bookkeeping is wrongbadfun.

LibraryOgre
2018-04-24, 11:52 AM
Anyone remember the old Knights of the Dinner Table where BA gets the DM's Companion he wrote for his TRS-64 (no, not TRS-80... an older model), and is able to start keeping track of things like "You are not eating enough calories, and so your character begins to suffer malnutrition"?

Honest Tiefling
2018-04-24, 11:52 AM
As far as I can tell, whether or not bookkeeping is wrongbadfun.

And whether or not it changes the tone of the campaign and the risk/reward paradigm.

Pex
2018-04-24, 12:14 PM
I don't really understand what's being argued here.

Some people are bothered other people don't enjoy tracking food rations the party eats as much as they do.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-04-24, 12:19 PM
Some people are bothered other people don't enjoy tracking food rations the party eats as much as they do.

After all, there's only one right way to play, and that's my way.

On topic, it strongly depends on the starting premises and system. Systems that have logistic concerns baked into the core of the system and don't give many ways of avoiding the issue do logistics as a constant concern well. Systems that don't have those properties don't. It's not all or nothing, but certainly a system like 5e D&D is not designed around food tracking being a major concern. Even without magic, things like the high default carrying capacity make it real easy to carry enough food and water for quite a while (and unless you're going into the wastelands foraging is easy and relatively quick). Torchbearer does more of it.

So play what does what you want. Except at the extremes, there are no bad systems. There are only systems unfit for a particular purpose.

JoeJ
2018-04-24, 04:42 PM
Some people are bothered other people don't enjoy tracking food rations the party eats as much as they do.

It looks more to me like some people are bothered that others do want to track logistics.

Nightcanon
2018-04-24, 06:09 PM
My apologies. I was not trying to be hostile.



I still find it interesting that many people here think of supplies as minutia rather than as part of the strategic or tactical decision process. Contrast that with the loss of a few hit points in an easy battle, which could arguably be an equivalent drain on party resources to the food and water consumed each day.

As most people have said (including Pex in his original post), they have made nods to tracking rations with starting characters, in low-level gritty realism games, or when doing specific scenarios such as being lost in the wilderness. Most fantasy RPGs tend towards the PCs eventually becoming powerful figures in their world. Most of the population might struggle to feed themselves, but not the guys with the big swords and spells and items and sacks of coins that make feeding oneself in the wild or in the city a trivial matter. Spending time checking off a few silvers' worth of rations when you are worth thousands of gp is pretty pointless, as is role-playing hunting rabbits if you have access to magic either to catch prey or summon food directly.

Kelb_Panthera
2018-04-24, 06:26 PM
Some people are bothered other people don't enjoy tracking food rations the party eats as much as they do.


It looks more to me like some people are bothered that others do want to track logistics.


Both of these things are true.

GungHo
2018-04-26, 10:09 AM
Anyone remember the old Knights of the Dinner Table where BA gets the DM's Companion he wrote for his TRS-64 (no, not TRS-80... an older model), and is able to start keeping track of things like "You are not eating enough calories, and so your character begins to suffer malnutrition"?

Yes. While KotD is largely embellishment and exaggeration, the skeletons of the stories are quite relate-able.

martixy
2018-04-28, 09:16 AM
I track their ability to acquire food, not the food itself.

JellyPooga
2018-04-28, 03:57 PM
I think it might be interesting, over the course of a long campaign, to track specific foodstuffs. After all, if you've been surviving for weeks or months on hard rations, then vitamin or other deficiencies could become a problem. An encounter that goes along the lines of "you appear to have contracted scurvy; find a source of vit-C or suffer (a penalty)", could make for a change of pace to the usual "fight, fight, talk, fight, get lost, fight more" paradigm of your typical game.

Similarly, it might also be interesting to explore the possibilities of toxic food that has been foraged; just because it can sustain you, doesn't mean prolonged consumption is necessarily good for you. Eating the wrong parts of animals can cause long-term problems just as much as eating the wrong berries or 'shrooms.

Maybe such things are only a Cure Disease/Poison away from full health, but the possibility of including such concerns is certainly an option. With the right group, of course.

Tanarii
2018-04-29, 11:51 AM
While I'm generally a fan of tracking logistics* opening up further decision points and potentially enhancing tactical playing, I feel like Koo Rehtorb nailed it best.


It depends entirely on the game. If you're playing Torchbearer then there are very explicit rules for how much space rations take, how much they cost, how quickly you go through them, and what happens when you run out. It's fun because the game is specifically designed around it.

In other sorts of games it doesn't matter at all.
And for some games systems where it can either matter or not matter, it can depend on things like the specific campaign goals/flavor/feeling being aimed for, or specific adventures/scenarios, or even specific one-time challenges/encounters/scenes.

-----------

*in old-school D&D-like dungeon/wilderness exploration games in particular, the encumbrance that logistical considerations take up is critical for tactical decision making. That's space you need to haul back phat loots!

Honest Tiefling
2018-04-29, 11:54 AM
I track their ability to acquire food, not the food itself.

I feel like this approach makes rangers and other nature hunting types a bit more useful. I would worry that if the system to track rations is too harsh, no one will want to go out of the city so these characters will never get that chance to shine.

John Campbell
2018-04-29, 12:32 PM
I basically never keep track (or, as a GM, enforce keeping track) of rations. For starters, of all the different game systems I regularly play, D&D and its derivatives are the only one that doesn't abstract food, water, shelter, etc. concerns into a generic upkeep cost, so unless it's specifically a survival game where survival needs aren't easy to come by and the challenge of the game is finding a way to meet those needs, it's assumed that you're buying food when you need to, paying your rent and water/electric/internet bills when you need to, putting fuel in your car when you need to, paying for your ale and wenches when you need to, and so on (depending on the specific genre of the game), and the details are abstracted away.

And even in D&D, once you get past the first few levels, the challenge of feeding yourself simply stops being any sort of challenge. Once you're past starting money, the cost of rations to feed yourself is a negligible expense compared to the kind of cash adventurers rake in, and on top of that many characters - I don't remember the last party I played with that didn't have at least one - gain abilities that make even survival-challenge situations simply not a challenge. In some cases by being able to literally create food and water out of thin air. The levels of Survival skill many PCs achieve are very nearly as magical.

And the difference between eating lunch and fighting the monsters is that fighting the monsters is generally a challenge, and eating lunch generally isn't - and that challenge is what makes the difference between a fun game and boring bookkeeping. In situations where the challenges are reversed - where being able to eat lunch becomes a challenge, and any monsters you run into are effectively helpless in the face of your amazing prowess - abstracting away the fighting and focusing on the food is something you can and should do. But most of the time that's not the case.

Though 3/4ths of the PCs in the Pathfinder party I'm currently running for will attempt to eat pretty much anything organic (despite my not actually enforcing food tracking on them, because the lizardman ranger's Survival is such that he can trivially feed the entire party), so "fighting the monsters" and "eating lunch" are quite often one and the same. We had an amusing episode recently with the ogre wizard tripping balls because he thought it was a good plan to make mushroom stew out of the fungus-monsters they'd just fought.

Xuc Xac
2018-04-29, 03:31 PM
I feel like this approach makes rangers and other nature hunting types a bit more useful. I would worry that if the system to track rations is too harsh, no one will want to go out of the city so these characters will never get that chance to shine.

I think tracking the food makes ranger types shine more. If you just say, "You don't have to think about food when the ranger is with you", then the players won't think about food. They also won't think about the ranger's contribution.

If you say "OK, so you make camp and everybody uses up one trail ration or takes hunger penalties" and the ranger player gets to make a hunting/foraging check to find 1d6 free rations, the ranger gets to feel actively useful and the other players all notice that usefulness.

It's a difference between contributing behind the scenes or contributing in the spotlight.

Deophaun
2018-04-29, 04:33 PM
If you say "OK, so you make camp and everybody uses up one trail ration or takes hunger penalties" and the ranger player gets to make a hunting/foraging check to find 1d6 free rations, the ranger gets to feel actively useful and the other players all notice that usefulness.
In this particular example, you're negating the ranger, not making him useful. When it comes to survival, reliability is key. Why would anyone rely on chance for survival when there is a dependable alternative available? A hunter/gatherer that can consistently feed the party is an asset. One that cannot is unnecessary.

Honest Tiefling
2018-04-29, 06:19 PM
I think tracking the food makes ranger types shine more. If you just say, "You don't have to think about food when the ranger is with you", then the players won't think about food. They also won't think about the ranger's contribution.

This is a danger of this approach, yes. I would probably stress that the ranger is why they don't need food, and encourage the ranger to come up with ideas of how they might forage.

However, while you have a good point, I still think that if rations are too cumbersome or survival is too rough, the party will avoid any survival situation so the ranger won't be doing much of anything in that scenario.


In this particular example, you're negating the ranger, not making him useful. When it comes to survival, reliability is key. Why would anyone rely on chance for survival when there is a dependable alternative available? A hunter/gatherer that can consistently feed the party is an asset. One that cannot is unnecessary.

Many players in my groups have had HILARIOUSLY bad luck when it comes to dice rolls. Having the ranger have a very good chance of screwing up what is usually a secondary skill is not going to make the ranger feel useful. Which is why I specified very harsh survival rules.

Xuc Xac
2018-04-29, 06:19 PM
In this particular example, you're negating the ranger, not making him useful. When it comes to survival, reliability is key. Why would anyone rely on chance for survival when there is a dependable alternative available? A hunter/gatherer that can consistently feed the party is an asset. One that cannot is unnecessary.

Why would anyone use a sword that has to roll to hit and might miss when they can just use spells like magic missile that always hits? Because the "less reliable" sword can be used without cost and the spells are limited in number.

You can buy a full load of food to last the whole expedition, but that costs money. Even if you are rich enough that you don't care about the money, you still have to carry everything. Even if you have a bag of holding or portable hole or something, you're sacrificing storage space that could be better used for other things. There are opportunity costs even if the monetary cost is negligible.

Also, it doesn't have to be one or the other. I would bring some rations to eat on days that the ranger can't find enough fresh food for everyone, but fresher is better. Think about it from the characters' perspective.

Sir Roderick Lanternjaw the paladin: "We only need to bring one sack of trail rations with us because Talthorn the ranger knows how to harvest the bounty of the wild."
Pestis the Nimble: "Oh really? So what will we eat?"
Talthorn: "It will depend on the weather, season, and place. Considering the route we're planning to take... We'll probably have a lot of rabbit and carrot soup to soften our hardtack into dumplings for a few weeks until we reach the great river. Then it will be fried fish or turtle soup with greens as we go down river for a fortnight. When we reach the sea and strike west along the Oaken Coast, we'll have clams, crabs, and nuts that we can supplement with our dried food. Maybe some nice mushrooms if we get there during truffle season. For the last week as we cross the Rocky Barrens to the wizard's tower, we'll have a lot of snail soup. It's bland, but it goes well with the salted pork we'll carry and we can bring flavorful herbs from the river to make it more lively."
Pestis the Picky: "Nah. I'll just bring a donkey loaded with dry biscuits and beef jerky to eat every day. You guys can get by with your small packs and random crap, but I need consistency."

Pex
2018-04-29, 06:35 PM
In this particular example, you're negating the ranger, not making him useful. When it comes to survival, reliability is key. Why would anyone rely on chance for survival when there is a dependable alternative available? A hunter/gatherer that can consistently feed the party is an asset. One that cannot is unnecessary.

The ranger is not the only one who could do this. At least since 3E anyone can make a Survival roll and Take 10 is permitted. In 5E whether a roll is needed or not and if needed what the DC is depends on who is DM that day, but I bias digress. It is enough for some people to say Survival is used the first game session, ignore it because it's always presumed, mention in flavor text from time to time, and then pay special attention to it for the particular adventure arc where it part of the point of it. My pet peeve on this is not the glossing over the gathering of rations but the insistence that only the character with the highest Survival gets credit for doing it or made to do it. However, that's a different topic about skill play use in general.

Other game systems may handle this differently, and the continuous on purpose bookkeeping of rations may be integral to the game itself.

Deophaun
2018-04-29, 06:56 PM
Why would anyone use a sword that has to roll to hit and might miss when they can just use spells like magic missile that always hits? Because the "less reliable" sword can be used without cost and the spells are limited in number.
This is a terrible argument.

You can buy a full load of food to last the whole expedition, but that costs money. Even if you are rich enough that you don't care about the money, you still have to carry everything. Even if you have a bag of holding or portable hole or something, you're sacrificing storage space that could be better used for other things. There are opportunity costs even if the monetary cost is negligible.
Yes, and I have to now pay those opportunity costs even if I have a ranger, because the ranger may screw up and now we're starving. So the ranger gets me nothing. It's not "The ranger's so good we can rely on him" but rather "We're so screwed we need to rely on the ranger." A tool that works half the time still needs another tool to pick up the slack, in which case you might as well just get a tool that works all the time instead.

Also, it doesn't have to be one or the other. I would bring some rations to eat on days that the ranger can't find enough fresh food for everyone, but fresher is better. Think about it from the characters' perspective.
If we're doing it for the fluff then we don't need the mechanics.

Honest Tiefling
2018-04-29, 07:12 PM
If we're doing it for the fluff then we don't need the mechanics.

In my experience, newer roleplayers might have an issue with this, and the mechanics can prompt some roleplaying. However most of my players are of the variety who will gladly tell you such details without the mechanics, so I never had a problem with this.

Deophaun
2018-04-29, 07:45 PM
In my experience, newer roleplayers might have an issue with this, and the mechanics can prompt some roleplaying.
All it takes is for the GM to say "and how/what are you eating," and now you've got your prompt. I know in 3.5 the rules for starvation are laughable. You can eat once every three days and be fine, likely more. I don't think anyone actually plays by those rules.

Oh, and it got worse in 4e. 3 weeks. Eat once every three weeks and you're good. Because "staying alive for three weeks without food" is the same as being perfectly physically capable for three weeks without food.

John Campbell
2018-04-29, 08:10 PM
You know, there are actual rules for using Survival to hunt and forage. At least in D&D 3+, which seems to be the perspective most everyone here is approaching the subject from. In Pathfinder, it's DC 10, +2 for each additional person you're trying to feed, and it's an untrained skill that you can Take 10 on, so anyone without a Wisdom penalty can reliably feed themselves, and basically any Survival-oriented character (and IME Rangers usually keep it maxed, for tracking purposes if nothing else) can reliably feed their entire party.

Tanarii
2018-04-29, 08:27 PM
5e is a little different. Mainly because if you aren't a ranger and you forage, you can't use passive perception. So you will be automatically surprised in an ambush situation. Same with Navigating, Mapping or Tracking. So there's incentive to either have a Ranger along, or pack your bags and carry waterskins.

Of course, with the default encumberance rule packing your bags isn't that big a deal. Even after you find phat lootz to haul away, at least before high levels. Like many things in 5e, it's pretty easy to hand-wave logistics away if you want to. And if you don't, they have a variant encumberance rule that effectively cuts encumberance limits by 1/3. And suddenly how much food and especially water you plan to take with is more relevant.

Or you can just spend spell slots, if you've got the right casters in the party. But that's a resource, just a different kind.

Xuc Xac
2018-04-29, 09:16 PM
This is a terrible argument.

Yes, and I have to now pay those opportunity costs even if I have a ranger, because the ranger may screw up and now we're starving. So the ranger gets me nothing.

You don't see any difference between "carry 10 pounds of supplies to make up for unproductive foraging days" and "carry hundreds of pounds of supplies to make up for not foraging at all"?

Deophaun
2018-04-29, 10:10 PM
You don't see any difference between "carry 10 pounds of supplies to make up for unproductive foraging days" and "carry hundreds of pounds of supplies to make up for not foraging at all"?
Not really.

Using your 1d6, the ranger will average 3.5 rations a day, which is almost enough to feed a standard party of 4, requiring them to carry an additional half pound of food each day if they don't have a firm grasp of probability, but we'll start with that. Alternatively, they can carry 4 lbs and not rely on the ranger.

So, your "10 pounds of supplies" equates to 20 days, or 80 pounds of food without a ranger, or 20 pounds per person. That sounds like a lot, but if we're venturing out on a twenty day journey away from civilization at low levels (assuming 3.5-like for baseline), we have pack animals. Not only can they carry that easily, one of the nice things about pack animals is that in an emergency they are also rations.

Now, if we're playing it safe and covering ourselves for a run of bad luck, we'll carry enough food to handle a -3σ case (basically we're assuming we don't roll a 1 on a d100). SD for 20d6 is somewhere around 7.5 (I'm eyeballing this, someone much, much better at math will correct me), so for -3σ we're going to carry an additional 22.5 pounds of food.

That's 32.5 pounds versus 80. It's definitely better, but you're bringing pack animals regardless here. The ranger doesn't save you much in terms of convenience this way. OOC, you actually have to do some non-basic math, which is decidedly inconvenient.

Now, compare this with a level 1 ranger in 3.5 using standard Survival rules. With a 10 in Wis and four ranks in Survival, he can take 10 and provide enough food and water to consistently feed 3 people. We just need food for one more. That's 20 pounds for 20 days. The math is easy, and we save even more weight. To improve on this we don't need handy haversacks or everlasting rations or rings of sustenance. The ranger (or whoever) simply needs to get an additional +2 modifier to his survival check, which can be accomplished through leveling, possibly mundane gear, or a cheaper-than-dirt magic item.

Knaight
2018-04-29, 10:21 PM
That's 32.5 pounds versus 80. It's definitely better, but you're bringing pack animals regardless here. The ranger doesn't save you much in terms of convenience this way. OOC, you actually have to do some non-basic math, which is decidedly inconvenient.

Pack animals have very limited ability to traverse terrain - most of them can't climb well, more than a few can't swim well, just about all of them eat boat space like nothing else (though if you're traveling primarily by boat an extra 47.5 pounds of food is practically negligible), and if speed and stealth matter they're downright liabilities. The assumption that they'll be there is questionable.

Deophaun
2018-04-29, 10:39 PM
Pack animals have very limited ability to traverse terrain - most of them can't climb well, more than a few can't swim well, just about all of them eat boat space like nothing else (though if you're traveling primarily by boat an extra 47.5 pounds of food is practically negligible), and if speed and stealth matter they're downright liabilities. The assumption that they'll be there is questionable.
Then your reliance on a ranger is forcing you to carry 32.5 pounds of food up a sheer cliff (which is still 12.5 lbs more than would be otherwise at level 1 in 3.5).

I fail to see how this counters my point that the ranger under this system is a defective tool to be replaced.

Keltest
2018-04-29, 11:02 PM
Pack animals have very limited ability to traverse terrain - most of them can't climb well, more than a few can't swim well, just about all of them eat boat space like nothing else (though if you're traveling primarily by boat an extra 47.5 pounds of food is practically negligible), and if speed and stealth matter they're downright liabilities. The assumption that they'll be there is questionable.

If youre planning on a ~20 day journey, then chances are you are traveling by pre-planned routes through known terrain. Nobody goes trecking off in random unexplored wilderness for half a month.

Xuc Xac
2018-04-29, 11:19 PM
Pack animals have very limited ability to traverse terrain - most of them can't climb well, more than a few can't swim well, just about all of them eat boat space like nothing else (though if you're traveling primarily by boat an extra 47.5 pounds of food is practically negligible), and if speed and stealth matter they're downright liabilities. The assumption that they'll be there is questionable.

If you use pack animals to carry your food, you also need to bring a lot of food for the pack animals too. They can graze in grassy areas, but that only gives them enough energy to stand around grazing all day. Marching with a heavy load burns a lot more calories.

Tanarii
2018-04-29, 11:32 PM
If youre planning on a ~20 day journey, then chances are you are traveling by pre-planned routes through known terrain. Nobody goes trecking off in random unexplored wilderness for half a month.
Except, y'know, D&D adventurers ...

TheStranger
2018-04-29, 11:36 PM
If youre planning on a ~20 day journey, then chances are you are traveling by pre-planned routes through known terrain. Nobody goes trecking off in random unexplored wilderness for half a month.

That seems like the kind of thing that could happen all the time in at least some campaigns. The ruins of Castle MacGuffin are high in the mountains. We don't know exactly where. Gear up and start looking.

Not unheard of in real life, either - see Lewis & Clark (and many lesser-known explorations).

Anyway, I go on long treks in real life for fun. In games, I usually don't track rations because that's not fun. I also try to keep my backpacking experience safely stowed and avoid going off on tangents about the overland travel rules.

Tanarii
2018-04-30, 12:01 AM
In games, I usually don't track rations because that's not fun.
This kind of statement really needs a clear IMO in front of it. I mean, I know it's underlying most posts in the forums. (As such, the rest of my post is IMO.) Tracking rations is a LOT of fun for many people, including myself and all my players, so long as it adds interesting tactical decisions to the game. And since roleplaying is making decisions for your character in the fantasy environment ...

I mean, it's no fun even for me if you've got carrying capacity to spare, plenty of money to buy rations, plenty of opportunity to get spare water, and no chance to lose or run out of any supplies. Or foraging has no consequences or chance of failure. There are no decisions to be made, no roleplaying.

Especially that first one. But if I've got a choice of hauling the golden idol and rich tapestries back to civilization successfully and risking cutting my supplies below the minimum required ... decision time. Now we've got roleplaying! Fun is enhanced!

TheStranger
2018-04-30, 12:26 AM
This kind of statement really needs a clear IMO in front of it. I mean, I know it's underlying most posts in the forums. (As such, the rest of my post is IMO.) Tracking rations is a LOT of fun for many people, including myself and all my players, so long as it adds interesting tactical decisions to the game. And since roleplaying is making decisions for your character in the fantasy environment ...

I mean, it's no fun even for me if you've got carrying capacity to spare, plenty of money to buy rations, plenty of opportunity to get spare water, and no chance to lose or run out of any supplies. Or foraging has no consequences or chance of failure. There are no decisions to be made, no roleplaying.

Especially that first one. But if I've got a choice of hauling the golden idol and rich tapestries back to civilization successfully and risking cutting my supplies below the minimum required ... decision time. Now we've got roleplaying! Fun is enhanced!

Sorry, the IMO was implied. If you enjoy it, more power to you (until we end up at the same table). The logistics of wilderness travel and survival is one of those things that I'm happy to handwave in large part because I've spent enough months playing that game IRL. If I start thinking about it too much, I mostly just get annoyed at the level of abstraction in the rules.

OTOH, I can't recall ever being in a game that actually had meaningful decisions to be made about food, water, carrying capacity, etc. I think every time it's threatened to come up, we were either close enough to town that it didn't matter, the Ranger had an automatic success in Survival, or the half-orc had the carrying capacity of a medium-sized horse.

Xuc Xac
2018-04-30, 01:41 AM
That seems like the kind of thing that could happen all the time in at least some campaigns. The ruins of Castle MacGuffin are high in the mountains. We don't know exactly where. Gear up and start looking.

Sometimes it's not a matter of looking for something. It's just a question of reaching it. Christopher Columbus miscalculated the size of the earth. Everyone else "knew" that you could reach India from Europe by sailing west, but it's a really long trip and you can't carry enough supplies for a trip that long with the ships they had. Columbus was an idiot who thought the world was a lot smaller, but he got lucky and hit land just before running out of supplies.

Also, everyone who ever tried to reach the north or south pole knew exactly where their destination was. The problem wasn't finding it. The problem was getting to it. You can melt snow for water, but you need fire and food and the nearest food or fuel is a long way from the poles. You have to carry everything with you. It took a lot of planning and several partial trips to go one time. You have to carry as many supplies as you can, travel partway, drop off all the stuff you don't need for the trip back, then go back for another load. Each supply depot gives you a little oasis that allows you to go a little further the next time. But as you extend your chain of depots, you have to keep resupplying the earlier ones. You can't make the final push until each depot has enough stuff to use them twice: there and back again. This logistical skill is what made Roy Chapman Andrews famous. He was the real life Indiana Jones who set up supply depots across outer Mongolia and the Gobi desert so he could explore (he was the first to bring back dinosaur eggs among other discoveries). He didn't have to worry about random encounters with dragons but he did get into gunfights with Mongolian bandits, who were probably friendlier than the polar bears that arctic polar expeditions had to avoid.

Keltest
2018-04-30, 09:52 AM
That seems like the kind of thing that could happen all the time in at least some campaigns. The ruins of Castle MacGuffin are high in the mountains. We don't know exactly where. Gear up and start looking.

Not unheard of in real life, either - see Lewis & Clark (and many lesser-known explorations).

Anyway, I go on long treks in real life for fun. In games, I usually don't track rations because that's not fun. I also try to keep my backpacking experience safely stowed and avoid going off on tangents about the overland travel rules.

The whole point of the Lewis and Clark expedition was to establish these defined routes west. I guarantee you they weren't just hiking in the woods in a westerly direction until they ran low on food. Creating supply depots, bases and otherwise establishing routes and paths was a significant time sink, and a major goal of their mission. There was nothing random about what they did.

John Campbell
2018-04-30, 10:32 AM
5e is a little different. Mainly because if you aren't a ranger and you forage, you can't use passive perception. So you will be automatically surprised in an ambush situation. Same with Navigating, Mapping or Tracking. So there's incentive to either have a Ranger along, or pack your bags and carry waterskins.
Yeah, the one time I've played 5E, I was a Druid with the Outlander background, and I could trivially feed the entire party, and live in raw wilderness more comfortably than the rest of the party could in the inn, with the features that gave me.


Or you can just spend spell slots, if you've got the right casters in the party. But that's a resource, just a different kind.
And also I had goodberry, which I cast every morning, kept for healing during the day (primarily to get the cleric back on his feet if he went down), and the next morning fed the party with any from the day before that I hadn't used, just before their duration expired. If I didn't have any left, I had foraging. We didn't bother getting even token rations.

Tanarii
2018-04-30, 12:32 PM
Yeah, the one time I've played 5E, I was a Druid with the Outlander background, and I could trivially feed the entire party, and live in raw wilderness more comfortably than the rest of the party could in the inn, with the features that gave me.outlander background does not change that you're automatically surprised if you are ambushed while foraging. I agree it trivializes any non-hard terrain if you take that risk. But thats a decision the player has to make.


And also I had goodberry, which I cast every morning, kept for healing during the day (primarily to get the cleric back on his feet if he went down), and the next morning fed the party with any from the day before that I hadn't used, just before their duration expired. If I didn't have any left, I had foraging. We didn't bother getting even token rations.Yup. Goodberry is another way to trivialize rations, at the cost of a diffrent kind of resource. Personally my experience is that players would rather take rations with on the way and save their slot for encounters, but are willing to risk their slot in order to dump weight on the way back. Its a decision point.

(Note: you can't forage after you discover you dont have slots at the end of the day. You have to start foraging at the beginning of a days travel.)

John Campbell
2018-04-30, 03:29 PM
outlander background does not change that you're automatically surprised if you are ambushed while foraging. I agree it trivializes any non-hard terrain if you take that risk. But thats a decision the player has to make.
I wasn't the only one in the party with Perception, and I could make it unnecessary for anyone else to forage. And I rarely actually had to forage, anyway, because on the occasions that I actually used up all my goodberries, I usually just cast it again. Having them on hand was too useful, and it was one of the very short list of useful things I could do with my 1st-level spell slots.


Yup. Goodberry is another way to trivialize rations, at the cost of a diffrent kind of resource. Personally my experience is that players would rather take rations with on the way and save their slot for encounters, but are willing to risk their slot in order to dump weight on the way back. Its a decision point.
The thing is, I wasn't using goodberry to trivialize rations. I was using goodberry because it was out-of-combat/emergency healing that I could give to others to use, or use on people myself without un-wildshaping, and as a side effect it trivialized rations. If the goodberries didn't have the nourishing effect, I still would have been casting it any day that combat seemed like a possibility (which is pretty much every day when you're an adventurer). A single 1st-level spell slot for 10 1-hp heals that anyone can use any time in the next 24 hours is too useful, especially with the 5E system where you only need a single hp of healing to take a character from down and dying to up and fully functional.


(Note: you can't forage after you discover you dont have slots at the end of the day. You have to start foraging at the beginning of a days travel.)
The decision whether or not to forage wasn't based on whether I had slots at the end of the day. It was based on whether, in the morning, I had goodberries left over from the previous day.

Tanarii
2018-04-30, 08:08 PM
I wasn't the only one in the party with Perception, and I could make it unnecessary for anyone else to forage.Other PCs being able to use their perception has no impact on your PC surprised. All that matters is your Pc's passive perception. If you cannot use it (like while foraging) your PC will be surprised, barring a special feature or magic item.

These are some commonly overlooked (or ignored) rules, and they have a a fairly huge impact on foraging, navigating, and tracking. That's the main reason I'm going on about it. It's seems it is rarely used correctly.

Otoh ...

And I rarely actually had to forage, anyway, because on the occasions that I actually used up all my goodberries, I usually just cast it again. Having them on hand was too useful, and it was one of the very short list of useful things I could do with my 1st-level spell slots.Sounds like you mostly made the decision to spend a resource instead of buy rations. But the relevant point here seems to be you consider that a relatively unimportant decision. Given you were already using it anyway, I'm inclined to agree. :smallwink:

In fact, I do consider Goodberry to be one of several spells that rather too easily removes logistical considerations in 5e. It's great if you don't want them. It kinda sucks if you do.


The decision whether or not to forage wasn't based on whether I had slots at the end of the day. It was based on whether, in the morning, I had goodberries left over from the previous day.Gotcha. That makes sense.

TheStranger
2018-04-30, 09:38 PM
The whole point of the Lewis and Clark expedition was to establish these defined routes west. I guarantee you they weren't just hiking in the woods in a westerly direction until they ran low on food. Creating supply depots, bases and otherwise establishing routes and paths was a significant time sink, and a major goal of their mission. There was nothing random about what they did.

I never said it was random, just that they weren't following an established route*. They set out knowing only generally where they were going and how long it would take to get there. I don't know what part of my post implied that they were just wandering aimlessly, though.

*Actually, the routes they followed were probably fairly well-established among the people who lived in the area at the time. But they weren't known to Lewis and Clark when they set out, so they had to plan accordingly.

Keltest
2018-04-30, 10:11 PM
I never said it was random, just that they weren't following an established route*. They set out knowing only generally where they were going and how long it would take to get there. I don't know what part of my post implied that they were just wandering aimlessly, though.

*Actually, the routes they followed were probably fairly well-established among the people who lived in the area at the time. But they weren't known to Lewis and Clark when they set out, so they had to plan accordingly.

I assumed it, since it was a response to my "wander in the woods for half a month with no idea where theyre going" remark. Yeah, I'm sure they had shorter scouting trips and expeditions where they searched for paths and got the lay of the land, but they definitely didn't just pack as much supplies onto their pack animals and just wander in a generally westerly direction until they ran out of food.

John Campbell
2018-04-30, 10:54 PM
Sounds like you mostly made the decision to spend a resource instead of buy rations. But the relevant point here seems to be you consider that a relatively unimportant decision. Given you were already using it anyway, I'm inclined to agree. :smallwink:
No, I made the decision to spend a resource in order to have on hand emergency healing that I could use to get the cleric's healing back in action without un-wildshaping, or that the party's non-healers could use to get the cleric and/or me back up if we were both down. The making-rations-irrelevant bit was an incidental side effect. We made use of it, but it wasn't a factor in my decision-making process.

When goodberry was originally introduced, the nourishment effect was the primary effect, and the healing was an incidental and unreliable side effect. By 5E, the healing is the primary effect, and the nourishment is a pleasant side effect.

And, come to think of it, the only times I ever actually had to forage in that campaign, it was because we'd been taken prisoner by vastly overwhelming force and all my goodberries had been used in the fight, or confiscated along with our other stuff, and I'd used all my spell slots attempting to avoid being captured and had been prevented from resting to refresh spells, so I couldn't make more, and had to do some foraging to fill the gap until I got my spellcasting back online. And we never got our stuff back, so buying rations wouldn't have helped anyway. They would've just been lost along with all our other gear.

(This kind of thing happened way too often in that campaign. The DM at least couldn't just arbitrarily take away my foraging ability.)

Socratov
2018-05-02, 02:02 PM
As Tanarii says, it's all about it having consequences. I can remember playing agame where we were in the vicinity of water and food the whole time. Also reasonably close to a base of sorts. It was fun and I didn't miss the rations keeping for a bit.

however, when the DM threw us into a desert campaign with some good and some bad oases, then the rations minigame can be fun. Emphasis on can. Actually very little people like to do bookkeeping. If they did they'd make sure they would have gotten paid for it. I found I had a lot more fun planning it out then actually counting the rations. And Tanarii is 100% right since this tactical decision changes the whole game and it becomes a meaningful choice with actual consequences.

You know, I's pull the scope wider a bit and challenge you to, while preparing, decide wether what you present the party with is a meaningful choice, i.e. ticks of all of these boxes:


The situation creates a choice
The situation has (irreversible) consequences
The situation can be 'solved' in multiple ways to a satisfactory ending


Now some notes as to why these aspects are som important:
(1)If it is not a choice, it's merely a speed-bump. Something to entertain you with on the way. A formality if you will. And formalities rarely are meaningful.
(2)Consequences are what power choices and create story and these consequences should matter: Like how in the MCU the Guardians of the Galaxy are bold and mighty heroes: they meet their challenges head on, While Cap and Black Widow are much more stealthy and will be seen as tactful, having finesse and restraint. This should impact the party's renown and future missions. If you need an infiltration mission you don't hire the Hulk and if you need something smashed Black Widow should be the last person to call (unless it's for asking mr. Banner's number).
(3)-this is important: if there is only 1 way for the party to 'win' that is not fun: it's a false choice. A formality. And fortunately players can help you with this one. While playing. destroying your precious time spent planning by circumventing it. But this, too, creates great roleplaying moments. Also, don't adjust the reward for overcoming (or surpassing) the problem, play it straight, you might include a bonus for gimping oneself beforehand, but never penalise player ingenuity. This will reinforce player creativity and make for a more meaningful game and meaningful choices. Also, play with reputation aspects and #2 to make your game feel real. It will be worth the effort.

JAL_1138
2018-05-02, 02:25 PM
Based on both recent discoveries in Antarctica and on personal experiences, I have concluded that "iron rations" are just another term for "fruitcake."

PhoenixPhyre
2018-05-02, 02:51 PM
As Tanarii says, it's all about it having consequences. I can remember playing agame where we were in the vicinity of water and food the whole time. Also reasonably close to a base of sorts. It was fun and I didn't miss the rations keeping for a bit.

however, when the DM threw us into a desert campaign with some good and some bad oases, then the rations minigame can be fun. Emphasis on can. Actually very little people like to do bookkeeping. If they did they'd make sure they would have gotten paid for it. I found I had a lot more fun planning it out then actually counting the rations. And Tanarii is 100% right since this tactical decision changes the whole game and it becomes a meaningful choice with actual consequences.

You know, I's pull the scope wider a bit and challenge you to, while preparing, decide wether what you present the party with is a meaningful choice, i.e. ticks of all of these boxes:


The situation creates a choice
The situation has (irreversible) consequences
The situation can be 'solved' in multiple ways to a satisfactory ending


Now some notes as to why these aspects are som important:
(1)If it is not a choice, it's merely a speed-bump. Something to entertain you with on the way. A formality if you will. And formalities rarely are meaningful.
(2)Consequences are what power choices and create story and these consequences should matter: Like how in the MCU the Guardians of the Galaxy are bold and mighty heroes: they meet their challenges head on, While Cap and Black Widow are much more stealthy and will be seen as tactful, having finesse and restraint. This should impact the party's renown and future missions. If you need an infiltration mission you don't hire the Hulk and if you need something smashed Black Widow should be the last person to call (unless it's for asking mr. Banner's number).
(3)-this is important: if there is only 1 way for the party to 'win' that is not fun: it's a false choice. A formality. And fortunately players can help you with this one. While playing. destroying your precious time spent planning by circumventing it. But this, too, creates great roleplaying moments. Also, don't adjust the reward for overcoming (or surpassing) the problem, play it straight, you might include a bonus for gimping oneself beforehand, but never penalise player ingenuity. This will reinforce player creativity and make for a more meaningful game and meaningful choices. Also, play with reputation aspects and #2 to make your game feel real. It will be worth the effort.

I agree, but can I add one criteria?

The players must have enough knowledge (or be able to acquire said knowledge) to meaningfully choose between the consequences. If they have no way of knowing how long the trip will be (not even roughly), penalizing them for not planning well enough is just sadism.

Those things, together, are the requirements for agency in general. You have to have meaningful choice(your #1 & 3), consequences (#2), and knowledge (my addition).

FreddyNoNose
2018-05-02, 07:31 PM
This kind of statement really needs a clear IMO in front of it. I mean, I know it's underlying most posts in the forums. (As such, the rest of my post is IMO.) Tracking rations is a LOT of fun for many people, including myself and all my players, so long as it adds interesting tactical decisions to the game. And since roleplaying is making decisions for your character in the fantasy environment ...

I mean, it's no fun even for me if you've got carrying capacity to spare, plenty of money to buy rations, plenty of opportunity to get spare water, and no chance to lose or run out of any supplies. Or foraging has no consequences or chance of failure. There are no decisions to be made, no roleplaying.

Especially that first one. But if I've got a choice of hauling the golden idol and rich tapestries back to civilization successfully and risking cutting my supplies below the minimum required ... decision time. Now we've got roleplaying! Fun is enhanced!

I agree with you on this. Part of the fun is the challenge of what if. Too many people get ez-mode games. Oh, the ranger can quickly forage and feed everyone! Arrows are another thing that matter.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-05-02, 07:32 PM
I agree with you on this. Part of the fun is the challenge of what if. Too many people get ez-mode games. Oh, the ranger can quickly forage and feed everyone! Arrows are another thing that matter.

Ironic that this post would be quoting one that starts "This kind of statement really needs a clear IMO in front of it."

Part of the fun for you is...

John Campbell
2018-05-02, 09:15 PM
I agree with you on this. Part of the fun is the challenge of what if. Too many people get ez-mode games. Oh, the ranger can quickly forage and feed everyone! Arrows are another thing that matter.

The last archer I played, I had a decent Craft (bowyer) skill, talked the DM into letting me use broken arrows as the 1/3-cost materials for crafting new ones, and spent my watches repairing arrows. I tracked arrows that had been unrecoverably lost (like I shot it into the ocean, or just didn't have time to go back for it), and expensive special arrows, but regular arrows I stopped even checking to see if they were intact. I just assumed they all broke and needed to be repaired, because I could trivially do that in time that I'd otherwise just be sitting around waiting for the casters to wake up.

That character was also +23 on Survival at the time that campaign broke up, so, yes, I could quickly forage and feed everyone. And even moving at half-speed to forage, I still moved faster than the rest of the party.

Pex
2018-05-02, 09:47 PM
I agree with you on this. Part of the fun is the challenge of what if. Too many people get ez-mode games. Oh, the ranger can quickly forage and feed everyone! Arrows are another thing that matter.


Ironic that this post would be quoting one that starts "This kind of statement really needs a clear IMO in front of it."

Part of the fun for you is...

Yep. The fun for me is the gaining of levels and spending character build resource options into eventually becoming that good such that what used to be a challenge no longer is. Having finally achieved the autosuccess I get to enjoy the fruits of that labor. Case in point in 5E my paladin has +10 Constitution saves. I enjoy the satisfaction of knowing I can never fail a Concentration check when I get hit for 23 or less damage. I don't cast many spells, but when I do I want to keep the buff spell going. Having become a Sorcadin with Absorb Elements, the need to make a check because I could technically fail it is virtually nil.

FreddyNoNose
2018-05-02, 10:30 PM
Ironic that this post would be quoting one that starts "This kind of statement really needs a clear IMO in front of it."

Part of the fun for you is...

I was speaking for you!

Socratov
2018-05-04, 12:29 PM
I agree, but can I add one criteria?

The players must have enough knowledge (or be able to acquire said knowledge) to meaningfully choose between the consequences. If they have no way of knowing how long the trip will be (not even roughly), penalizing them for not planning well enough is just sadism.

Those things, together, are the requirements for agency in general. You have to have meaningful choice(your #1 & 3), consequences (#2), and knowledge (my addition).

Fair enough, I'd lump it in with the choice (my #1), but I can see the need for making it into it's own category.

Even if I'd like to make a note here: the knowledge is something that can be earned, while the choice aspects are more like the foundations fo agency, while knowledge can be witheld for a good reason. When the plot is rife with intrigue, knowledge on the inner workings and machinations of the city is a boon: it allows you to quickly assess the right ways to go about. Gathering said knowledge should be the party's priority #1. Having said that: the knowledge should be accessible to the party.

in short: yes such knowledge should exist, however, that makes it a privilege, not a right.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-05-04, 01:29 PM
Even if I'd like to make a note here: the knowledge is something that can be earned, while the choice aspects are more like the foundations fo agency, while knowledge can be witheld for a good reason. When the plot is rife with intrigue, knowledge on the inner workings and machinations of the city is a boon: it allows you to quickly assess the right ways to go about. Gathering said knowledge should be the party's priority #1. Having said that: the knowledge should be accessible to the party.

in short: yes such knowledge should exist, however, that makes it a privilege, not a right.

I completely agree. The knowledge doesn't have to be given, just available if they look with reasonable effort. Now if it's publicly posted, downstairs under a leak, in a locked file cabinet with "beware of leopard" on it...

JAL_1138
2018-05-04, 05:39 PM
I completely agree. The knowledge doesn't have to be given, just available if they look with reasonable effort. Now if it's publicly posted, downstairs under a leak, in a locked file cabinet with "beware of leopard" on it...

Well if that's where it's posted, just wait till Thursday and it'll turn into a sci-fi campaign.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-05-04, 06:03 PM
Well if that's where it's posted, just wait till Thursday and it'll turn into a sci-fi campaign.

Glad to see someone got the reference :smallsmile:

John Campbell
2018-05-04, 07:36 PM
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.