How to add a foraging mechanic?

[SangoProduction]

As a DM, the best way to let the party alchemist / herbalist accomplish foraging is probably like the daily survival checks to hunt for food.
Or, by presenting special plants that a trained herbalist would notice along their path. Something that acknowledges the player's choice, without overwhelming the rest of the game with a relatively minor thing.

So that's fairly simple and elegant when running a game.

However. How would one implement an actual system for herbalism?

My first thought was to go towards something like Spheres of Power.... because... The fact that my mind goes to that should be obvious. Something like having Herb talents, which have different effects based on (preparation) type used. Sort of like the Nature sphere's (theoretically) highly flexible individual talents whose flexibility is expanded by unlocking the packages.

And that definitely would be a great way to implement using herbalism. To make use of herbs... that you have talents for. So maybe they should just be actual items.
But that's not really much in the way of implementing the gathering of it in a way that doesn't detract from the rest of the game.

And I'm actually kind of having a hard time of it. I rather enjoy going into an MMO and just zoning out, collecting materials, but I just can't really come up with a good translation of that as a gameplay mechanic.

Of course... outside of the highly genericized "spend 15 or 30 minutes collecting materials" line that the other crafting spheres have. Which, honestly, is probably just fine, and fairly representative. But I wondered if there were any other ideas people could contribute?

[AnimeTheCat]

Something that I regularly do is think about the ecology of the dungeons/cities/places that the party will go and identify 20-30 different plants that the group could use for a multitude of different things, each with different effects that can be actualized in a real way. Another thing I do is include some mundane trainers that let you learn new ways to use the plants.

For example, a dungeon that my party was recently in had two very widespread and available plant called Thriving Heartsroot. The Party's Herbalist already knew they could use the tuber of the plant to squeeze liquid out and make a tonic that heals 1d4 hp upon consumption, but due to the nature of the concoction your body can only metabolize one tonic in a 24 hour period. They also had uses for the leaves and stalks, but for this example I'll just focus on the tuber. Later, they found another herbalist in a town and they were able to learn how to distill the concoction which used up more resources, but concentrated the tonic. Depending on their check, they could heal 1d4, 2d4, 3d4, 4d5, etc. The DC to make the basic tonic was 10, for every 5 more they could concentrate the tonic (DC 15=2d4, 20=3d4, etc). Same group later found a book that had secrets of how to achieve the same results of concentrating by using other methods, such as pulverizing to get a higher yield or low-heat, long term concentration, which dropped thosed DCs to an additional 1d4 per 3 DC. Another adventure brought them to another town where they were able to learn how to turn the concoction in to a spray that could be used to AOE heal. Another was how to create a volatile concoction and use the mixture as an explosive (same damage as the healing done, the reaction caused solids to form, the more concentrated the original solution the more "shrapnel" formed before sudden and explosive expansion).

all of the methodologies worked with all sorts of different plants and each plant had 2-4 parts that could be used for different things. All of the abilities were available to anyone with Herbalism (was actually 2 players) of a certain number of ranks to understand. I didn't require them to use Feats or trade class features out for them (I regularly hand out bonus feats as rewards from particular individuals or trainers in addition to monetary rewards, so this wasn't herbalism specific).

As far as official material, I know of nothing other than the Alchemist class from Pathfinder.

[liquidformat]

So a while back there was a thread looking at ways to make the Bear Warrior (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?613865-Bear-Warrior-(3-5)) and one of the more flavorful and interesting ideas was adding bear spells based on gathering honey. Here are the honey gathering mechanics that might be a decent baseline for doing herbalism resource gathering:
Honey Hunter(Ex): A bear warrior can gather sacrificial honey by making a Survival check and foraging for an hour in an appropriate area. The amount of honey gathered is worth [2 + class level] gp per point their Survival check exceeds 10 (i.e. a 10th-level bear warrior gathers sacrificial honey four times faster than a first-level bear warrior with the same Survival skill). For a first-level bear warrior (ECL 8, Survival +15) the expected result is about 45 gp, enough for 90 gp worth of ‘scrolls’--three firsts and a cantrip. For a tenth-level bear warrior (ECL 17, Survival +25), it is about 300 gp, enough for 600 gp of scrolls--enough for three firsts, a second, and a third.

A bear warrior can forage in a given area only once a day (an area is as a square mile, so he can walk over to a new area and forage more, if terrain permits). He can also simply buy or steal honey and sacrifice that. Bear spirits like honey, and aren’t particular on how it was procured.

Possession of up to ten hours' worth of gathered honey (but not honey the bear warrior didn't personally gather) does not violate his Vow of Poverty, but he can't do anything with it except sacrifice it to the bear spirits.

Due to the existence of different qualities of honey (standard honey, queen’s nectar, emperor’s jelly) the mass of the ‘honey’ can vary widely. Standard honey is 1 gp/oz, queen’s nectar is 25 gp/oz, and emperor’s jelly is 100gp/oz and the bear warrior can choose which kind of honey he hunts for. Due to the relative rarity of the different qualities of honey it takes no longer to forage for 100gp of standard honey compared to 100gp of emperor’s jelly. IE a bear warrior who forages for 300gp of honey is free to choose what type and therefore the total mass he has procured in that time frame.

[Glimbur]

I started work on a base class which was herb themed. It is more warlock though, was supposed to be a full class worth of abilities. Never finished it but feel free to mine it for ideas.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/18sP__loEiwhkGlWmj6kJvtoocZ7B5FkJIOZRmO31KgE/edit?usp=drivesdk

[Psyren]

Ehhh... Zoning out and picking herbs works as a mechanic in an MMO because those have plenty of solo aesthetics of play (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uepAJ-rqJKA) - Abnegation from completing a routine and low-pressure task, Sense-Pleasure from enjoying the graphics and listening to the music (or your favorite podcast) while you move from node to node, and even Discovery from finding new optimal clusters and farming spots for that herb you were short on. You can even squeeze some Challenge or Competition out of the activity by optimizing your route to avoid (or confront) enemy monsters and players in the world, or beating the auction house prices with your time invested.

Tabletop (or at least, D&D) doesn't do any of that. Sure it might be appealing to zone out at the table and roll a bunch of d20s by yourself in the corner followed by telling the GM how much elfroot and guano you found, but either nobody else is going to be paying attention to you while you do it anyway, or they will probably be bored to tears. And even if they are doing something else, you zoning out just means you're not being social with them anymore, detracting from their experience if they wanted to do a group activity like a RP scene or combat.

My best suggestion is to fold your reagent foraging into some kind of larger Downtime or Day Job system so that at least the GM knows what everyone else is doing while you're off scraping spiderwebs into a jar - but doing so would probably necessitate abstracting it to such a degree that picking flowers, baking bread, entertaining on the street corner and picking pockets in the crowd all have similar resolution mechanics.

[ShurikVch]

Masters of the Wild, actually, has foraging mechanics: you go at half-speed, and collect plants by Survival (Wilderness Lore back then) check = 10 + (infused spell's level)x2
Optional table 3-4 listed examples of required plants by level and magic school (like Oregano for 0th-level Conjuration, and Madweed for 9th-level Illusion)

[Morty_Jhones]

I have always run Herbalisam as a part time job skill.

for every day they spend in a nateral envoroment they can gather herbs for ether sale or use, DC 15 and for every 5 they pass by they gather 1d3 herb bundels, which they can use to ether refill a Medical kit or sell for 5 gp, (the Value of a single use of the Medical kit).

if they whant somthing special they they can only look for that. DC 20 for 1 only.

this allows charicter to use the wild but still keep doing other things without draging to much away from the game, espeshaly since I often use a hoiuse rule for med kits that turn them into skill based healing items to keep the heal skill usfulle.

[daremetoidareyo]

https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?500214-Survival-Skill-Survival-Guide&p=21901674

Also this


Herbalism
Shining South p.40: Locating a particular herb is not as simple as strolling into the woods and plucking flowers. Searching for herbs requires a successful Wilderness Lore or Knowledge (herbalism) check, depending on how common the herb is in the immediate vicinity.

Common DC 10
Uncommon DC 20
Rare DC 30
Not present Impossible

Any character may attempt to locate herbs with a Search check, but only if the DC for the particular herb is 10 or lower. Each attempt requires 10 minutes and covers the ground in an area roughly 100 feet square. A character with the nature sense ability (a druid, for example) only requires 1 minute per attempt.

[Fouredged Sword]

I would make profession herbalist a skill, and gathering reagents a use of the profession skill to make money. That money is in the form of herbs and reagents that can be used in craft alchemy. This should produce somewhere around 10-40 gold a week in alchemy reagents that the player can convert into alchemical items. Just handwave and say the player is doing this in their off time and or along the way.

[zlefin]

I'd consider having herbs be one use items that can boost spells of a particular type in various ways. Then the forage rolls would factor in the terrain, your skill, as well as whether you're looking for particular herbs or types of herbs. Then you get a selection of herbs based on some appropriate random rolls. Herbs have some sort of duration/freshness limit so you can't just stack them forever in downtime.

That sounds like it would make a reasonable boost of the sort.