I'm doing a campaign where the players have to travel a lot and one of the challenges is making sure they have enough water.
I've come up withe the following:
Each Medium character needs 2 liters of water a day for drinking in temperate climate
Additionally, the whole party needs an additional 1 gallon of water per day to prepare their rations (desalting pork, boiling food, making soup, etc...). An Iron pot can hold 1 Gallon of water and cooking with an iron pot will feed up to 5 medium humanoids.
This is assuming they don't spend the time to hunt and forage.
The amount of water the players will need is X+2N+H8 per day.
X = Number of Pots of water being boiled N = Number of Medium humanoids in the party H = Number of horses
So a party of 5 medium sized characters will need 18 liters of water a day, or 2.5 gallons.
5 Medium characters, plus a horse need 5.5 gallons of water
A Barrel holds 40 Gallons of water. according to the D&D 5e Players handbook (Weighing 320 lbs, 390 including the barrel)
Yes, but you shouldn't rely solely on water if it's too heavy to carry. I'd reccomend havig the food contain moisture (a sandwich could have 1/4 liter water equivalency, for example) to reduce the penalty of having no water as well.
Noah Morris
You have good taste in MREs, OP.
James Torres
I'm not sure how serious you are, but this is D&D fantasy. Rations consist of hard tack, salted pork and dry food stuffs like nuts so they don't spoil.
The party also plans packing a couple amphoras of wine they were given as gifts.
Bentley Moore
My question is can the party afford to lose weight that could be used to carry loot and important items for water? And how long is an average trek for them? Can they restock along the way or can they only do it in certain cities?
Easton Reyes
Part of the challenge if for them to figure that stuff for themselves.
I did the math and a Horse and Cart with a Draft Horse can pull a maximum load of 2500 lbs. A Wagon with two Draft Horses 5000 lbs.
A Chest can contain up to 15,000 coins for the normal chest in the PHB. A Full chest of coins weights 325 lbs.
Food is simply 2lbs per ration and players need 1 ration of day, or half a ration a day on meager rations.
Horses need 10 lbs of feed a day, 1 bushel of feed is roughly 30 lbs or 3 daily rations. 1 barrel holds roughly 3 bushels or 9 days rations of feed.
Players have the option of slowing their travel to make option of foraging and surviving off the land, or moving faster by just eating rations. Not everywhere they can easily find or hunt. Even rangers.
Dominic Bell
Sorry, but had to second this. The only one I'd put on par for taste is what the JSDF uses, and even then it's not as well rounded.
Bentley King
I'd look to the Romans, OP. Each soldier carried their own water-skin, but they also scouted out camp locations ahead of time based on where water was available. It's entirely reasonable to make the group chose their route based on their water needs. In fact, look at the oldest cultures and you'll see that towns, villages, and cities are all based by reliable sources of fresh water.
In other words, carrying large amounts is and should be impractical. It's more important for the group to be smart in how they go about getting from a to b. Luckily most roads logically follow water sources eventually, but going off trail or into dangerous environments turns this into a concern.
to avoid beeing >that dm and wasting everyones time with the not so thrilling prospect of digging in mid looking for water, check out torchbearer and its light system, and basically rip that thing wholesale for water.
basically what it does is it gives you a fixed amount of rounds of exploration in a dungeon depending on how much light resources you have. do the same for water but for traveling. Or simplify it and tell them they need to accumulate X-amount of water for Y-amount of distance.
or just play torchbearer if you want gritty grimdark survival instead.
Juan Anderson
5e, not as useful
Brandon Taylor
5e's version makes five times as much water, how is it "not as useful"?
Jose Lopez
Well, five times at level 1. Still, thats double the the amount OP has calculated.
Parker Allen
Are you sure that your players asked for a multiplayer Oregon's Trail rather than just timeskipping over?
Bentley Moore
Limited spells at low level. It's a waste of a spell slot until higher levels when a level 1 or 2 slot is something you can afford to use. Even still, you have to have vessels large enough to hold the amount of water anyway. Sure you can fill a wine skin every day, but that's a wine skin. You need a larger container, a barrel.
Now, you do solve the problem of actually getting a hold of water with Create Water if your supplies are running low. However easier to just buy and ration out water at low levels for a few coins (you're not doing much else with money in this edition) than use a spell slot that could better serve as a healing spell or something else.
Eventually supplies will be a trivialty to them and the wilderness survival and supply-train aspect of this campaign is going away once they get their teleportation spells and an airship later on when the campaign switches over to another published adventure.
My system works out pretty simple actually.
It just requires the PCs to tick off boxes per ration used and they can plan ahead based off of amount of time to travel, time spent at place and time spent traveling home. They can travel slower or adventure less to hunt and forage as well, if the areas has stuff for them to do so.
Plus planning ahead on how they intend to store treasure and secure it.
Luke Adams
This is how D&D was played back in the day you know?
Anthony Mitchell
Is that ration pack nothing but sweets and snacks? What kind of shitty army is that stupid?
>French combat ration Well that explains that.
Benjamin Phillips
Can you not read? The big tin is peas with veggies, there is a package of dehydrated beef bouillon, and the smaller tin is probably tinned meat of some kind.
Cameron Price
Whats wrong with book keeping? Just because you think you don't like it doen't mean it can't be fun.
It's an open world campaign in a largely empty frontier with random encounters and plenty of dungeons, mines, ancient keeps and other things to exploreIf it becomes too much of a hassle I'll trivialize it.
Nathan Bennett
>th-there's like two other things in the box of snacks!
Oh no, looks like I was wrong to say "nothing but" about the big box of snacks stupidly passed off as military rations. Looks like there's a tiny bit of "actual" food among the sweets as well.
Still looks like something I'd expect the murricans to pack.
Adrian Gutierrez
I can't read that moon language.
Matthew Wood
I mean, it's not like you're expected to eat this every day for long periods of time, and if you want a lot of calories while saving space I'd say that snacks are the way to do it.
Christopher Stewart
This isn't actually a proper ration. It's a morale booster.
Their post will actually have proper food stuffs. If they were marching across europe, they'd have more meat and bread. The sweeties are to keep them somewhat happy because they're eating mostly tack, tined meat and packaged pasta at camp.
