He actually requires his PCs to eat food rations and sleep

Could actually be fun, if you're hunting for exotic meats.
Could be really bothersome when you fail some mundane rolls and end up hungry and hunted.

That's why you confirm botches the same as crits

You think you're funny, but this is how WoW rpers often play. Their characters are ubercool warriors never seen outside of taverns, drinking, bragging, brooding or ERPing

Sounds pretty fun for everyone to essentially be Kvothe just telling each other about awesome stories

>character is a woodsy barbarian
>many ranks in survival
>keep hoping we get some campfire downtime so I can RP hunting for game and preparing a meal for the lads
>"Your characters hungry? Okay, the DMPC teleports in and casts a Heroes' Feast, you can continue adventuring!"

that usually comes from
>GM refuses to award xp for anything other than combat and couple linear "hard-scripted" quests

1/400 isn't actually much better.

It gets old real fast, trust me.

This is the sort of shit you directly talk with your referee out of game about.

>one player counts his arrow supply of his own volition

"Explain why you didn't inform me my character was hungry first, DM. There is no reason he wouldn't have felt mild hunger and mild weakness before he felt major starvation and extreme weakness. Well? Are you going to explain?"

Just stop everything and stick to this point and the beta will likely never bring it up again. Most DM's are cowardly garbage who just like being little tyrants anyway.

>DM insists that everytime you go to take a piss your pc does as well

Jesus christ please don't post additional b8 in a b8 thread.

I like doing this, though.

> roll survival to find deer, rabbit, etc. based on how well you roll
> have a table for how many days of food each provides (per person)
> stealth check to sneak up
> ranged attack to hit
> if you hit, it dies, if you miss it runs away

Simple as fuck, and it gives the ranger an actual spotlight beyond being a subpar martial.

There's the old saying that slaves would be tyrants should they get the chance. Becoming DM is such a chance.

I had this talk.

>Hey, DM, my character is somewhat focused on Survival, so could I have a chance for a few relevant rolls? We're in the wilderness anyway, it could be fun
>......Ok, the orcs you're looking after left some tracks! Roll survival to see where they lead!
>Never ever comes up again

SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT

I FUCKING HATE THIS SHIT

> traveling with all-caster party
> get to camp
> decide to roleplay my ranger
> start looking for stream to catch fish
> "lol user we have create water"
> wtf
> "well i'm finding tasty spring water and possibly mountain trout for us to eat"
> "we have rations"

Well there goes my fucking entire character. I don't mind being shit in combat, but when I don't get at least 5 minutes to enjoy RPing an outdoorsman when one player gets an ENTIRE session to himself going back and soloing a merchant who sold us out to bandits, it's time to stop playing D&D.

They don't even mark off their fucking rations. They have 3 days of rations each, and these rations have lasted them for AT LEAST 3 weeks of travel.

really the massive gold piece imbalance in D&D and lack of tracking weight (so you can't just carry 900 days of rations in your ass) is the biggest thing nerfing rangers anyway.

At least I can stealth. Although the one time I did go hunting the fucking sorcerer decided to follow me, we ran into a dire boar. I was 6th level at this point so a dire boar would be a tough fight alone. I hid in a tree with a 32 hide check, the sorcerer climbed a tree, then decided to start casting magic missile. Boar knocks down the tree after a couple rounds and starts attacking the sorcerer. I ended up at 1 hp (and about to die next round) saving this fucker, who proceeded to run away as I was saving him.

I hate spellcasters so fucking much.

> Campaign is about killing gods
> Be cleric with religion skill.
> It never comes up.

I'm still puzzled how did that even happen.

You gotta take initiative with this shit

> well I'm a ranger so i might know this
> well I'm a ranger so i am using survival to do this

It helps, trust me. DM has a lot to keep track of, out of game talks often get forgotten. Now if he starts cock blocking you to suck caster cock, it's time to get pissed.

>Jesus christ please don't post additional b8 in a b8 thread.
Not him but how is that bait? Just use a better system? The thread of critical failure is neat but in some circumstances it's a little odd.

>using 3+ consecutive rolls for a simple between-scenes action

Just how much do you hate your players?

>Playing 3.0 a few weeks after it came out
>Roll up a party with some friends
>We have, IIRC, (but it's been a long time) a fighter, a monk, a bard, a cleric, and a wizard
>Level 1
>We're in this city
>Get hired to take care of a problem in this village, a bit of a distance away
>We have 3 weeks worth of rations
>The long but easier route would have been to follow a river as it meanders.
>We, however, decide to cut straight across a loop through a forest, which would shave a day or two off of our journey
>Nobody has wilderness lore or survival
>We get lost
>Supplement our food once or twice from killing wilderness things like a bear at one point, but we're losing it faster than we replenish
>Fail every. Single. Roll. to become un-lost in the woods.
>Starve to death.

Next game, I made sure to play a ranger.

You're either baiting by pretending crit fails are a thing outside of really shitty houserules, or you're baiting because you're baiting by pretending you know what you're talking about when you obviously don't.

>"we have rations"
>"mmm, yes, salted meat you can't eat without soaking it first and old cheese you have to break with a hammer are much better than fresh game"
I mean ok, if you're just playing murderhoboes extraordinarie and the horrendous dungeon of murder you can just handwave and let your characters subsist off infinite rations, but if your campaign is RP-heavy that's just stupid

>go hunting
>instead of staying safely with your salted meat
it's like you've never been camping before

It's definitively a by-the-system/group situation.
Personally I like tracking gear and supplies and jury rigging solutions to hazards, and doing first-aid and rationing out food and shit like that. It makes adventuring feel like the undertaking it should be.
If you let your PCs travel by-foot an indefinite distance at impossible speeds just to skip around between plot-points you're being just as unreasonable, only in a different fashion.

That's just funny.

This is a good house rule.

> Part travels through the woods.
> The ranger Vasily, the only male party member, decides to show before the girls.
> Goes hunting for food.
> Rolls poorly, looses an hour. Rerolls.
> Vasily gets a string of incredibly bad luck and never rolls higher than six. Level 1, so not much for bonuses.
> He gets lost deep in the woods for an entire day.
> Even meets a wolf whom he instinctively shoots.
> Wolf gets an arrow piercing in his ear, looks pissed and hungry.
> Vasily realizes he's alone, tries animal handling.
> DM just gives him that look.
> He runs.
> Another string of incredibly bad rolls.
> Eventually he finds the party. Another two days later.
> The party is pissed and hungry, because we waited for him on the same spot the entire time.
> The next night, while we are sleeping, we are attacked by a pack of wolves.
> The alpha has an arrow in his ear.

I used to work assembly line. I can go longer without pissing than average citizen can without eating.

fucking kek

It's bait because it's not actually a 5% chance. Critical hits/fumbles have to be confirmed, altering the actual probability by a factor I can't be arsed to calculate because I am shit at math.

>Critical hits/fumbles have to be confirmed
[citation needed]
That's not in the book that's second most common houserule regarding nat1/nat20.

He replies: " When you didn't consume a single ration in three weeks."

Fumbles do nothing except for missing automatically in 3.5 and 5.

>another PC says hes going to pick up an arrow that missed him
>DM replies that it doesn't matter

super kek

"I can't decide when your character feels hunger. That's just roleplay on your part which you failed to act on. I CAN tell you when the physical effects of malnurishment kick in though. So there you go."

If the player still complains, I privately uninvite him from the table after the session.

Botches aren't a thing for a reason.

Honestly I always kinda figured that was at least partialy becasue it's a pain to actualy RP durring missions in MMO's, either becasue stopping to type out emotes durring battles is suicide, or becasue "ah ha, another vile cultist slain, only 12 more to go!" would probaly get old even faster than the tavern stuff

>party ticks off rations per the day
>GM checks on occasion
>no-one falls over of starvation

My players actually do this on their own, but they like realism, so I guess it's fine. I'm usually okay with it if someone gives me a list of stuff they purchase for their travels (and the guy who makes these lists works them out really nicely, so I throw him a bone here and there for extra good RP) and then be done with it. If I feel like being a dick, well, they have x days of food but due to unforseen circumstances the journey is x+7 days.

Feeling hunger IS a physical effect though, whether I would choost to act on the physical sensation or decide to "tough it out" is where the roleplaying would come in.

It's also dependant on the person when and how they feel it. Plus, they should know on their own when i asl for a con saving throw at then end of the day for not eating or drinking that shit is getting counted

Do you tell the players what time it is?
I just auto-deduct rations when the players are traveling and tell them what time they're getting up at, when it's noon and when it's six when they're not traveling.
You gotta keep players on track as to how much in game time has passed if you're playing with rations or enforcing penalties for not sleeping.

botches exist in a lot of systems.

Those systems are not shitty house rules.

Ergo.... eat a dick.

If we're playing a story game, then I tend to focus purely on the story.

If we're playing D&D? You're damn right you have to eat food rations and sleep. If you go too long without, you're going to start taking penalties. You may even starve. You had better have lots of torches, too, and I'm going to be rolling for random encounters. If a hireling rolls really badly on morale, I'll roll to see if they start panicking in a way that draws wandering monsters.

Hell, if you go traipsing through the sewers or get stabbed with a rusty knife, you might slowly succumb to a disease, and I'll roll the save in secret behind the DM screen, or maybe even have a sheet with 100 d20 rolls I did before he session, so you don't even know I did anything. Then suddenly you start blowing chunks or the wound on your leg appears infected.

In my next campaign, I'm going to have troglodytes (who are immune to disease in my setting) who keep their stone spears tip-first in a barrel full of the festering blood and organs they don't like from the animals they eat, specifically to inflict diseases on those they wound and decrease the likelihood of an enemy they've beaten into retreating, ever returning.

I also keep track of arrows and bolts, and I make wizards tell me what spells they've prepared each day.

I also make female characters count their menstrual cycle.

It's realistic.

It's not fun, though, because there's nothing players can do to mitigate it. Everything I listed, the players can do something about.

>bring extra rations, hire someone who knows how to hunt if none of the PCs do
>consider carefully whether going into the sewers is worth it
>wear armor, don't fight unless you absolutely have to
>if you have any cuts, clean them as best as you can as soon as the fight is over
>treat hirelings well and have a high charisma character who can attempt to calm them down if they freak out

Note that none of mine have the solution of "don't adventure." The only solutions for female characters having their menstrual cycle is "don't adventure on those days," and that's a boring as fuck solution that removes the players from the adventure rather than immersing themselves in it.

The pill doesn't exist in your setting? Or any kind of contraceptive magic?

The pill doesn't. Magic to deal with it does. I suppose I could have female characters have to have magic used. However, some women have much lighter cycles than others, so players could just say "it sucks, but isn't severe enough to affect me mechanically" unless they actually want it to for whatever reason.

i want to do this, try to get a party cursed to never poop again to finish their quest before they die from getting filled up with poop.

So at this point it becomes Tag, Not-It-Forever for That GM and That Player.

It doesn't matter until it does. Beware of GMs that like to throw in twists like that and just track arrows for confirmations sake.

If you are using best edition, fumbles are an optional rule that requires a confirming roll.

I'm trying to do a campaign where the PCs escort a caravan across the desert (it's been delayed a couple weeks, but I have 4 players on board). They have to manage food and water and stuff for themselves, ~50 NPCs, plus animals.

This thread has me worried now. Any advice on how to make sure it's not un-fun?

Damn right. Why just kill stuff when you can explore the more comfy side of adventuring

Just break their expendables down into days, rather than individual rations or units of water.

And actually, unless the caravan is ransacked or they're separated from it, they shouldn't have to worry about supplies--that's the quartermaster's job, not the job of some hired guards.

Have the players agreed to these things? If so, they'll likely enjoy it. It really depends on the players, and communication is ALWAYS key. What system?

>there's no doujin about an alpha bitch who controls her flock of players and protects them from the affection of other women by forcing any female characters to make menstrual cycle checks, and deal with it in-game
>this mostly works and keeps women out, but eventually one shows up with a period-sex fetish
>this doesn't exist

why live

Yeah they're all excited for it. It's 5e.
The campaign is meant to be sort of Oregon Trail like, so hardships are a must. If things start turning too catastrophic, I'm planning on just DMing them out of it instead of rolling dice and telling them they all die of thirst.
One idea that I had was that gradually more and more dopplegangers insert themselves into the group, and at some point the food starts noticeably not going as far, and then they notice that they've got half a dozen or more people than there are listed on the expedition manifest...

How frequent should I make encounters? And what kinds of encounters work well when the players have so many NPCs in tow?

Honestly? I would ignore anything Veeky Forums says. Most people here have never actually played a game, and most of them have a huge sense of entitlement where if you don't explicitly ask the player involved for their direct permission to harm their special snowflake character that they put all that "time" and "energy" into, you're a that guy for triggering them.

Honestly, that adventure sounds like fun and I would certainly play it.

Honestly talk to your players, and see if they would enjoy it, remember it is a cooperative game, so I would lean against adding a bunch of tedious book keeping aka managing food and water, especially if it is a caravan there should be an npc that has that job explicitly unless one of the pcs want it, he can just gives them a budget and an amount of time supplies would last.

...

It shouldn't be much of a problem, make gaining food and water a big part of the game, keep a handy calculation ready to keep track of your total storage. (-55 rations per day -20 feed per day. Current storage: 795/320) etc.

Make at least some of the NPCs useful or interesting.

Most games have the PCs rolling in so much cash they could be a world superpower. Handwaving the pocket change of feeding yourself is not a big deal.

There's no reason to bog down a game that isn't survival oriented with minor details.

Newsflash: some people like that kind of stuff.

So piss off with your One True Way faggotry.

Sit down, Mr. Koebel.

>he doesn't require his players to calculate weight of equipment in grams
>he doesn't require his players to calculate dimensions of equipment down to one hundredth of a millimeter
>he doesn't have nutrition tables for 1000 of the most common foods readily available
>he doesn't require his players to calculate their exact daily intake of calories, fibers, minerals, water (in milliliters) and vitamins
>he doesn't require his players to calculate exactly how much energy they spend each day and force them to adapt their diet accordingly

casual as fuck

>So piss off with your One True Way faggotry.
>he says dismissing the "don't sweat the small stuff" method in favor of his own One True Way.

It's only bad when OTHER people do it!

>How frequent should I make encounters? And what kinds of encounters work well when the players have so many NPCs in tow?
How dangerous is this area supposed to be? How dangerous is the wilderness in general in your games? As to what the encounters should be, I'd recommend you take a moment and think about what sorts of things would actually think it's a good idea to attack a group of 50+ (presumably armed) humans (or elves, dwarves or whatever).

Having said that, I usually like to toss in some random encounters here and there that are not combat related. The PCs may hear something rustling in the bushes, but it's just a deer and nothing more, no tricks. I find this makes it easier for them not to metagame when it really is a monster, since they genuinely believe that it could be a monster, or it could be nothing.

Did I dismiss the permissive method? No, I didn't. I dismissed the opinion that the simulationist method had no appeal at all.

>I didn't d-dismiss it!
>I j-just threw a bitchfit becasue someone else had the audacity to like something I don't!

Other way around. I had the temerity to argue against someone dismissing something they didn't like.

>food rations
Rarely matters. Most adventurers are skilled in slaying demons and warrior generals and bodyguards and liches. The occasional deer is nothing, a typical PC could kill one blindfolded while wielding a bow with their feet.
System dependent, obviously this wouldn't fly in Torchbearer, but you don't complain that survival is hard in Torchbearer. But usually PCs rapidly raise to the level or above the level of normal ken, and hunting isn't that difficult (humanity survived on it for two hundred thousand years after all).

>sleep
Obviously matters. What is your character doing all night, and why the fuck would they not be sleeping? Almost every RPG I know has a rest system where sleeping replenishes resources at a necessary rate for basic functioning. In most games it would be a wonder why you would not want to sleep.

>What is your character doing all night, and why the fuck would they not be sleeping?
Don't you know? Rests are just something that happens to a person as they move down the corridor to the next combat. They don't take any time or anything that would get in the way of rolling more dice.

The post you replyed to started with "Most" thereby establishing the subject of the statment as his opinion of most games and not an objective statment right?

Further the end of it
>>"There's no reason to bog down a game that isn't survival oriented with minor details"
Any game that has the GM say "hey you're going have to actually track food and water" from the get go IS "survival oriented", so the only thing he's "dismissing" is GM's that spring that on the players out of nowhere for a cheap "gotcha!"

This guy gets it.

This doesn't even make sense. Who are you replying to?

Little Napoleon here proving my fucking point.

>If the player still complains, I privately uninvite him from the table after the session.

First of all, you never did this because to a man, DM's like you are cowardly trash. Your only method of dealing with confrontation is throwing a tantrum with quivering beneckbearded jowls. Screeching and table-flipping is more your speed, but this never happened.

Secondly, hunger is a physical sensation and if you're going to keep track of other nonessential systems you WILL keep track of them fairly.

Thirdly, if you're uninviting me from the table for this level of inanity, I'm uninviting you from this house, and any future sessions with the rest of the group in them.

Bye.

I have never had any GM ever treat rests so transiently, nor any player demand so. I've had precisely one campaign where the game equivalent minor-rest was accelerated so PCs only needed to stop and catch their breath in a safe zone for 5 minutes to be refreshed, but they still needed the major-rest for daily abilities.

I'm 99% sure you're actually trying to make fun of "old school" dungeon crawl gamers, aka "grognards," but as someone who plays mostly those kinds of games, you generally want to avoid combat, and you generally want to have someone keeping watch at all times. The need to sleep is yet another challenge, as well as an opportunity to roleplay (and in many cases those are one and the same).

Depends on the game, I'd say. If you're going for a game where survival is one of the primary aspects of the game, not requiring the players to eat food and sleep would be retarded. It would completely remove the point.

>he actually starts a thread with a single line of greentext and a reaction image

You need to calibrate your sarcasm detector.

I was making fun the murderhobo types who only see the game as rolling dice for combat, not grognards. Hell, grognards would be more of a stickler for keeping track of shit.

>sign on for a fun adventure in a fantasy setting
>get mundane camping simulation

>doesn't discuss anything
>doesn't communicate expectations
>gets what he doesn't want
It's your own fault.

>sign on for a game where we act like adventurers traveling through the wilderness for weeks, like in Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit
>it's always daytime and we don't have to eat, just like in Lord of the-- Wait.

>sign on for a high-magic game
>the GM/players/etc. will never stop complaining that casters are op

I love D&D

Go the fuck away, preteen.

It wasn't advertised as that let me tell you. And before I could voice my concerns the guy quit because of marital issues or some shit.

But still-- you can craft any kind of world and you decide to make a Tolkien clone setting and you make the adventure about traveling across boring landscape with barely anything interesting happening? What's with these people?

>What's with these people?
They're not inferior, like you are.

Not every game is D&D. Most aren't, in fact.

If all you're eating is rations, you'd be dead from constipation in three hours.