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.