Them Bones of Adventure - XVII: Outdoorsmanship (Hunger, Hunting & Foraging)

Continuing my exposition on table procedures for common exploration feats & rules, which began here with part one.

Introduction

By now I’ve laid many a foundation as regards prosaic survival while in the great outdoors – rigours of weather, food depletion, exhaustion, encumbrance. There are a few stones still left unturned, so today I’m going to approach the angle of depletion and also active replenishment of resources. Food resources, specifically.

The Hunger Game (guest-starring Thirst)

Most hexcrawl material I’ve seen makes a point of keeping things very simple on this front. I don’t wish to wade too deep into the mire with it, either, as I’m simply after task-identity.

While I've wanted to avoid trackers, I’m conceding that the rulebooks, with all their talk of half-rations and days gone by without eating effectively imply that players must be jotting down notes somewhere already. It might prove profitable, when running a more survival-driven game, to just formalize this in a nonintrusive, out-of-the-way part of the sheet.

As it comes to foraging, I looked at distilling unified mechanics onto a fold of distinct elements, in effect splitting foraging’s hairs into separate tresses, wherever I felt that this would potentially aid immersion and thus add interest.

Consumption, the Conspicuous Way

I had already half-committed to give this topic a second pass, so here it is.

Reading what I wrote a few months back, I am now of the mind that, in order to be able to credibly demand double ration intake on physically stressful days, it is necessary that they be groupable 3 to an inventory slot. As I equate a slot to roughly 5 pounds, this shifts the food accounting to the forgiving side of the spectrum, for once.

Working with the above alteration, this frees up my hand to be more demanding in select circumstances. With water consumption keeping on being a full slot to the day, 2.2 daily liters being about right for a physically active person to consume, with some abstraction to account for usage in cooking and whatnot.

The Crunchy Bits

Food and Drink Consumption

A character’s minimum daily food and water intake is represented as one unit of each type of ration per day. Circumstances of strenuous effort leading to checks to avoid Exhaustion (even it the test is passed) will mean a necessity for supplementary consumption of food rations during that day. Cold temperatures will require double the normal daily food intake, and exposure to extreme heat will likewise increase the daily water intake to two rations.

Failure to consume the prescribed amounts of either type of ration will mean a mark on the respective Hunger or Thirst tracker on the charsheet; filling a tracker will mean daily Constitution checks from Hunger and/or Thirst from that point on, with failures mounting on the Exhaustion main tracker.

Hunger and Thirst tracker marks can be rolled back and erased by eating and drinking over the daily required amount, so as to recover from deprivation. Overindulging on food with a day’s hearty meal above the bare minimum needed to subsist also improves the potential for Hp recovery when camped for a long rest.

Inventorywise, food rations can be grouped three to a slot, a ration of water takes up a full slot.

Food Gathering – Ground Rules:

- Though the plethora of circumstances confound strict mechanic categorization, the rolls normally called for will involve the Wisdom and Intelligence attributes in tandem with the Nature or Survival skills. Also, when coming to a DC, I find that the unbounded natural expanses dictate that it will fluctuate wildly by dint of accounting for varying terrain and geography, weather, season, type of prey, abundance in the region, etc. I don’t have this logically formalized but in a pinch a DC of “10 + roll of minimum yield die” can serve as a rule of thumb.

- The dice for yield size may vary for each type of foraging, starting at the minimum and going up in size for every 2 numbers the rolled total exceeds the DC by.

- A failure can mean inability to find quarry, an appropriate location or any of a number of adverse circumstances. The time is wasted, with little or nothing to show for it.

- Depending on the methods and type of gathering attempted, success on the foraging check yields a die’s worth of rations. If several characters wish to contribute to something such as hunting or foraging, this will imply a group roll with corresponding additional yield rolls per each character involved, or separate individual rolls if they go search for quarry in separate directions (or distinct group rolls, if split into two or more groups). As separate rolls are engaged in, the parties or individuals will necessarily count as being entirely apart for all intents and purposes, so should anything untoward happen, each group will be on its own.

- A ‘1’ on a forage check means a random encounter, not necessarily hostile as the reaction may dictate, but one that will be played to the hilt, so character beware: if the player can’t bluff wandering brigands about a reason for being alone in the wild, things will take a very finger-bone snappy turn, very fast. And no, the ‘character’ and ‘player’ terms were not  switched inadvertently.

A note on resources and preparation: other than the first two options, the remainder will require some sort of equipment in preparation for the attempt as well as cooking afterward in order to reap the full benefits, with this being subsumed in the process of striking camp. Should the characters somehow find themselves prevented from preparing their food, halve the effective amount of rations gathered.

Foraging

The harvesting of bird nests, mushrooms, fruit, berries, honey, edible plants, seeds and roots, small reptiles, insects, molluscs.

Time required: Two watches

Equipment required: none

Bounty: d4 rations

Special: Bountiful territory may turn the task into a guaranteed success, also allowing for Foraging to be done on the move if the party is moving slowly (half-speed or less) for a maximum party yield of a single d4 per day, as the party picks food along their path, but without straying. 

Locating Water

The process of finding a freshwater source, be it a creek, lakelet or a spring or even certain species of water-retentive plant life.

Time required: One watch

Equipment required: none

DC: Varies by terrain type, at a baseline of 12.

Bounty: Success means finding a source of fresh water, which in all but exceptional cases should be enough to sate the thirst of a whole party plus the filling of any containers.

Special: If near to an already known water source, such as a river, this type of foraging can be done in a matter of minutes, barely slowing down the party beyond the need to detour to the water source and get their fill as the characters make overland progress.

Fishing

Food gathering by resorting to patient subterfuge for small catches, from pond fishing to line fishing.

Time required: Two watches

Equipment required: a thrown piercing weapon or a net for pond fishing, a fishing rod (hook, sinker, line and bait) for line fishing.

Bounty: d4 rations for pond fishing, d4 to d8 for line fishing.

Trapping

Another form of passive food gathering over a large time frame, resorting to craftiness and inventiveness, ranging from bird-trapping to noose setting and large pit construction.

Time required: Two watches for bird-catching, one watch for laying nooses, up to days for pit-trap digging.

Equipment required: Nets or wooden cages for bird-trapping, lengths of string for noose laying, shovels for pit digging.

Bounty: d4 rations for bird-catching, d4 to d6 for noose-trapping, for pit trapping, a different baseline of ration is yielded, amounting to a roll of the HD of whichever animal ends up trapped in the pit.

Special: While the more active methods require full engagement from the character, the laying of passive traps can be used to gather food without requiring constant oversight, these yelding something on a 1 in 12, tested up to once every day, per trap, rolled as the trapper goes to check on it. 

Additional days of wait decrease the die size, to a minimum of d4. A maximum roll on the die means the trap has either caught something but it escaped, the trap has succumbed to the elements or it was effective but the quarry has already decomposed or else been eaten by something else.

An additional adequate trap placement spot is found for every 2 points rolled in excess of the DC.

Game Hunting

Active food gathering by engaging in the tracking and hunting down of small and medium game. Mammals (fox, deer, beaver, badger, rabbit, gopher, etc), or large birds (wildfowl, pheasant, partridge, wood grouse, turkey, duck, etc).

Time required: One day

Equipment required: Missile weaponry, with (d12 minus Dex Mod) pieces of ammunition expended per hunter on any hunt attempt. If thrown weaponry is used instead,  it is recoverable but the forage roll is made at Disadvantage.

Bounty: d8 to d12, depending on the catch.

Special: As this method is not tied to geographical immobility, the party can make overland progress – the equivalent of one watch at a slow speed – while in the process of hunting.

Big Game Hunting

This entry serves just for completist purposes. By electing to hunt large prey running the gamut from portly herbivore herds (boar, mountain goat, elk, reindeer, mustang, aurochs, bison, mammoth), to apex and near-apex predators (wolf, bear, mountain lion), the players are entering formal Encounter territory, as I’m not confortable reducing into abstraction hunts with dangerous animals, even non-carnivorous ones. If the prey can strike back and Hp be shed, it can’t be abstracted down into a linear single-roll endeavour.

Time required: Variable, possibly requiring an adequate result on the encounter table of either the creature type or its spoor.

Equipment required: It’s a full-fledged encounter, possibly resulting in combat.

DC: Read as CR.

Bounty: Each creature will yield rations in accordance with its HD, doubling for each size above medium.

Special: As this method is not tied to geographical immobility, the party can make overland progress – the equivalent of one watch at a slow speed – while in the process of hunting.

Closing Thoughts – The Naturalistic/Mythic Divide

I purpusely include only natural fauna here, even if nothing prevents extending such a definition to impressive prehistoric beasts such as mammoths, short-snouted bears and sabertooth tigers or even saurids if one wants to get campy.

But then comes the questioning inherent to the choice: what is, after all, a natural creature? Wholly shedding inappropriately scientific thought as it has little place here, it can be argued that it is that whose presence is a given and whose nature is known or at least knowable and yes, surely, a fantasy world, starting with the playable races, stretches and twists this categorization into all sorts of weird places, but it begs considering that many a creature on this earth was once considered mythical, before becoming a known quantity and then finally hunted down in systematic fashion towards extinction.

To my mind, the hunting of mythical creatures shouldn’t really be thrust into question, as the matter of their essence, far from being a point of contention, is as follows: for the realms of man, I take the natural world as foundational and relegate the mythical beast as something close to a status of rarity that would easily allow ingress into an endangered species list, ranging from the low hundreds to the singular individual. For the untamed wilderness outside the ken of men, anything can happen, always keeping in mind that familiarity breeds contempt.

Them Bones of Adventure - XVI: Ambushes and Occluded Rolls

Continuing my exposition on table procedures for common exploration feats & rules, which began here with part one.

Introduction

This time it’s about cornercase addendas, meaning to belabour topics approached in the Stealth and the Rolling Differently entries, supplementing them.

Turns out I couldn’t quite think of everything when laying down the rule apparatus for Stealth, which was concerned mostly with character movement while sneaking about. Here’s the gist of what I’ll try when dealing with static stealthers waiting to ambush a third party. The rest is a refinement to collective and hidden rolls and me ranting about screens.

Far From Sight, Close To Mind

I’ve always been against the institution of the DM screen. The first – and, arguably, the only – necessary reason to put the argument to rest being that it constitutes a barrier to effective communication (if doing things right, body language counts), which, if I may kindly draw notice, is what an RPG is essentially all about, meaning screens are a singularly anti-RPG implement, a profound way of crossbowing oneself in the foot.

They’re also an elitist symbol of unearned status and an invitation to caving in to roll fudging. Even if a referee plays it straight all the way through, statistical unlikelyhoods are sure to crop up and set about the seedings of doubt, depending on how well the players know and trust their referee.

Occluded Rolls

The above statements read that this kind of roll is best avoided whenever possible, the optimum policy being for the mechanics to call for rolls only when a character is already comitted to a course of action. As well, on the chapter of relevance, if a party is making good progress along gentle terrain and provisions are plentiful, there is quite no need to hide the Weather roll from the players, as it will promptly be subsumed into the rolling narrative of the journey anyway and nothing of importance is hinging upon it. If, on the other hand, the party is pressed by time and the gleam of cruel axe heads from an orcish warband looming close by, it will be crucial for the party to know if their tracks in the snow will be suppressed by an incoming storm and an ambush might be feasible… or not.

There will be occasions where knowledge of rolls will warp the running’s immersion and influence decisions that clearly should be made with the players unburdened by external factors. For these occasions I reserve the occluded roll.

When I say occluded, I mean that the roll is indeed made in secret by the referee with the purpose of driving tension and not allowing the players (and hence the characters) information they would not have, but with the particularity that the die roll, having been made in some reserved space, is then not removed or interfered with in any way, that it may be publicly revealed once the situation that precipitated the roll is resolved.

Off the top of my head, this can apply to Random Encounter Checks, Encounter Distance for enemies out of sight, Weather Rolls, Stealth attempts by enemies against the party, Sensorial Perception Range of foes a player character is sneaking upon… or ambushing.

Collective Crimes (Incriminate No One)

As I was squinting at making something with ambush mechanics, feeling like there was a trunk standing in the way of my view of the treeline, I was struck by what follows for a unified method for doling out the modifier to group rolls, one that doesn’t kill the d20’s variance or excessively penalize the whole party by one black sheep not having the prescribed skill.

As I've gone back-and-forth on this, I've yet again chosen to alter the methodology to something more direct and less finicky on the number-crunch front. I've thus gone ahead and overhauled entry nr. IX of this series, rather than disperse my thoughts over several nooks like a squirrel harvesting for winter.

The Crunchy Bits

The Art Of Lying In Wait

- An ambushing side, appropriately ensconced and having previously declared stealth, will lie in wait until the quarry approaches.

- Once the ambushing group’s stealth is challenged by coming into sensorial range of the victims (occluded roll of encounter distance), roll [Wisdom (Stealth)], making it a group check if a whole party is ambushing vs. the targets’ Passive Perception. A successful roll will ensure the ambushers are not found until their quarry gets to half the sensorial distance, being called anew every time the would-be victims halve their distance again to the ambushers' position.

- If the party has had enough time to prepare the ambush and sort positionings, the roll can be made with [Intelligence (Stealth)] instead and, if a group, with the best proficiency modifier found in the party, as the time spent in preparation allows the expertise of the cutthroat party elements to guide the whole set up. Note that the roll is still only put to the test once challenged by circumstances.

- Once the ambushers decide to make their move, they make a group roll of [Dexterity (Stealth)] opposed by individual rolls of [Wisdom (Perception)] from the victims – note how asking here for individual rolls is justified as they equate to an individual benefit or detriment for each defending character, whereas asking the same of the attackers makes little sense.

- Defenders who beat the ambush roll will be included in the normal Initiative group roll as combat initiates, those who roll below the attackers’ surprise threshold are caught flat-footed for the round and lose their turn, on a botch a character loses two whole rounds in confused bewilderment; on a critical success, the character may immediately act.

Closing Thoughts – The Pay-off of Preparation & Collective Doubts

The possibility of engaging a different, more cerebral, character statistic for prepared ambushes was the last thing that I added to this entry and it has left me thinking. What else might be prepareable long-term to the point of it enabling (even demanding) a logical switching of statistics and how does that map to the use of the Intelligence stat, by itself the most immediate action-averse attribute on the sheet?

I’m also not happy with how I can’t really define how long is “long enough” in terms of timing for preparation of an ambush and how much benefit it should afford. I’m of the mind that Advantage is to be granted strictly for circumstantial benefits, but should “take 10” be a possibility? What about “take 20”? How well can something as fluid and wildly unpredictable as an ambush really be prepared? Grist for the mill...

Them Bones of Adventure - XV: Enduring the Seasons (Weather part II)

Continuing my exposition on table procedures for common exploration feats & rules, which began here with part one.

Introduction

The table from the previous post was intended to represent fairly stable weather and, in a pinch, it feels amply sufficient. Just adjudicate a reasonable baseline temperature and roll from there. But one can dig a little deeper even without much effort, it being perfectly possible to adjust all sorts of parameters until we end up with a vastly different weather experience, made to reflect different lands and bring their exoticity into contrast.

Like I said before, considering that one doesn’t roll for weather in a dungeon nor are its consequences usually felt while in town, the Wilderness becomes a lot more of a place once weather has to be contended with. But the ultimate question remains: can the players tell the difference at the table? Therein lies the only answer that matters to me.

Deep Goeth the Rabbit Hole – Ancillary Table for Climate Types, Seasons and Geography

The following table modifies - and significantly complicates - the proposal from last post. I don’t know that I’ll apply all of it, I’m just reaching about and exploring options for now, some of these being markedly more important than others. It’s broken down into the following elements:

Temperature Ranges and Weather Modifiers: A handful of broadly inclusive types of climate, each with a different temperature range, chance of rainfall and timings for checks of temperature/precipitation/wind direction and speed.

Elevation: Exposure to the elements by gain in altitude affects the Temperature Range and the Wind Speed.

Shade and Night: Drops in temperature, including both the nightly drop and that experienced when out of direct exposure to light.

Seasons: Influencing Temperature Range, Turn of the Weather and Chance of Rainfall.

Climate Types & Other Effects

Click to enlarge

Fighting the Elements: Clothing and Shelter

Wanting to give some measure of accordance to clothing insolation without falling down a precipice of complexity, a table for clothing on Delta’s D&D Hotspot drew my eye and seemed in equal measures practical and robust enough that I coopted it with only minor tuning made to account for 5th.

Clothing versus Temperature Levels

Click to enlarge

Since I’m cribbing from Delta’s blog and he was thoughtful enough to include a Farenheit scale it’s no skin off my nose reproducing it here as well for the benefit of those concerned.

Clo, a human-biased metric, is here scaled from 0-4 to match the temperature, otherwise the weather’s considered to be either too hot or too cold. One degree of Clo is defined as providing warmth allowing for a human to be comfortable while idle, which means that physical activity should be taken into account.

Shelter is likewise graded as a Clo modifier, though one that can both provide warmth or protect from heat if dealing with a hot climate, with better and more complete shelter being accordingly more difficult to find, as stated earlier.

Implications of Weather

I’ve had it impressed upon me that travelling must have a price tag, waxing prose is both welcome and necessary but relying only upon narration to convey the weight of a journey is simply not enough, there has to be an equipment and Hp tax to be levied for things to gain in gameable substance. 

I also defend that if a party counts a Druid or Ranger amongst its number, they ought to see the weather roll and obtain some measure of foreshadowing of what's coming.

The Hot

If the temperature exceeds the clothing level a character is wearing, he’ll have to shed cloth on the pain of suffering an hourly d4 damage per difference in clothing level, with an additional d4 added to the roll for every passing hour. The die size can be aggravated if labouring under direct exposure to the sun or while wearing armour.

The Cold

If the temperature drops so as to demand a higher clothing level than what a character is wearing, he’ll have to acquire further layers or, again, suffer a mounting pool of d4 points of damage per level of difference. Dice size aggravated for the character being wet.

& the Extremes

Once all of an explorer’s Hp are depleted and the temperature (or other conditions) reach the point of unendurability, the exhaustion rolls come to the fore.

Wind and Water

Once rain or wind speed go past a certain degree, they too inflict Hp loss, generically dealt thusly: every time the condition metrics total up an integer equalling or rounding down to a die's worth, that die is inflicted in Hp loss every hour. For example: a Gale (level 4 of wind speed) along with light rainfall (Precipitation 3) would imply a rounded-down Hp erosion of d6 per hour.

Closing Thoughts – Unhinging the Weather Roll and Worldbuilding (or “Could Hel really freeze over?”)

I reread all the above and get this jolt on my spine: the weather, folks’ll say, as modelled on a 2d6 roll, is much too unstable and chaotic, with the only predictable result being how much of a completely unrealistic clusterfuck this will turn out to be.

I want to adjudicate what I can and dodge what I can't, but I’m left pondering that this same thought might serve as the butressing for the argument that we are to use a fictional world as the setting of our play. We’re not after modelling the world, after all, we’re after modelling A world. Does it feel disingenuous to make an appeal to the ignorance present in the unknowable? Well, here we are.

We can turn to the barrier of human knowledge to find our warm solace in its rainshadow, much like any charlatan from ages past: add a second moon to the firmament, say the world is hollow or flat-out-flat, I don’t care. And neither can classic meteorology from that point on. Unless anyone's versed in computer weather modelling and willing to put in the hours, everyone at the table will just have to accept the fact that winds, rain and temperature will display a far more erratic pattern than any amount of realism would condone.

By this point I’m ready to admit that it might be possible – interesting, even – to build a setting from inference of the front-loaded mechanic effects that rule a world’s meteorology. Kind of like setting funky parameters on a graphic renderer and iterating to see where it gets you.

After all, if it gets hotter as a mountain chain is climbed, colder when descending a fissure in the ground and the winds become wildly unpredictable at night, it can dawn on the players that, in known lands, knowable weather; for Terra Incognita, weather may well be playing free-for-all.