so a goodberry provides enough nourishment for one day, does that include watering needs? maybe?
although purify food and drink purifies everything in a 5-foot radius sphere, which is big enough to purify a looooot of food and water
Yeah, bean-counting supplies isn't a particularly effective way to pressure players/limit rests.
A day of food and water (pound of wood+gallon of water) weighs about 9 pounds - so even the 8 STR wizard can lug around almost 2 weeks of provisions without pushing his carry capacity, and players can find supplementary supplies with Survival checks, and there are scads of class/background features that expressly let you forage/scavenge/hunt for an indefinite supply of food+water for 6-8 people with no check unless the DM decides there's none to be had, and then there are low-level food- and water-conjuring spells like goodberry and create water.
Plus the actual rules for starvation/dehydration (which will absolutely come up if you start handing out starvation penalties by fiat) let even the flimsiest character go without food for 4 days without penalty (longer if your CON is high), and explicitly resets the counter every time they eat - which means that in an actual survival scenario where you're just trying to eat enough to not starve, you only need 1/4 pound of food per day to avoid penalties. (Still need that 8 pounds of water per day, but with a good CON you can get away with half that - DC 15 con save lets you duck the dehydration penalty if you drink only half the required amount of water)
A party that knows their DM is going to track supplies is easily capable of carrying literally months of rations at all times with little to no resource investment.
The problem with traps is that players have practically infinite hp out of combat.
Only if they aren't operating under any sort of time constraint. Even if it's a first-level, leisurely "let's explore this creepy abandoned tower" type deal, they still have to worry about provisions and a proper place to sleep and such.
Sure, but even then the players can just shrug and go home if they take enough HP damage. They're not going to say "hey, we're all at four health with no food or spells left, guess we'll just keep going and hope for the best!". They're going to be goddamned cowards.
I guess the answer to making traps meaningful is to use them in combat, where action economy and the threat of attack keeps them on their toes.
The problem with traps is that players have practically infinite hp out of combat.
Only if they aren't operating under any sort of time constraint. Even if it's a first-level, leisurely "let's explore this creepy abandoned tower" type deal, they still have to worry about provisions and a proper place to sleep and such.
Sure, but even then the players can just shrug and go home if they take enough HP damage. They're not going to say "hey, we're all at four health with no food or spells left, guess we'll just keep going and hope for the best!". They're going to be goddamned cowards.
I guess the answer to making traps meaningful is to use them in combat, where action economy and the threat of attack keeps them on their toes.
This is assuming that they can take the extra time to go somewhere safe to rest and then rest, and then go back. If they're trying to get somewhere on a time limit, like before the wizard fully unlocks the artifact's secret power, they maybe don't have time. If they're just exploring a castle to defeat the ghostly king atop it so he stops terrorizing the village, then maybe they've got time.
In general I think having a clock in the background is good adventure design though. It doesn't necessarily have to be a total failure clock, though it could be, but something as simple as "if you take too long out there, the big bad will sacrifice the hostages on the altar, and you won't be able to save them" can work well. As long as it's a failure of one kind or another, or it's on a track toward failure, and it's mission related, I think it's good.
Also, just so we're all on the same page, I hate traps as well. I think they're only good when used extremely sparingly, mostly as a way to add ambience to a dungeon, like to give it that Indiana Jones flavor.
I guess the best solution is to have some sort of time constraint.
Are they trying to stop the bad guy at the end of the dungeon? Well that bad guy is putting plans in motion and won't wait forever. Hunting a dangerous beast? Maybe it gets stronger the longer it chills out in its lair, or is resting and vulnerable but will eventually leave. Are they just treasure hunting? Maybe there is a competing adventuring group heading through a different path they have to race with.
Personally if I use traps I tend to stay away from the basics and use them as large challenges in of themselves. A trap room or big trap encounter, like the classic hallway of swinging blades for example.
so a goodberry provides enough nourishment for one day, does that include watering needs? maybe?
although purify food and drink purifies everything in a 5-foot radius sphere, which is big enough to purify a looooot of food and water
Yeah, bean-counting supplies isn't a particularly effective way to pressure players/limit rests.
A day of food and water (pound of wood+gallon of water) weighs about 9 pounds - so even the 8 STR wizard can lug around almost 2 weeks of provisions without pushing his carry capacity, and players can find supplementary supplies with Survival checks, and there are scads of class/background features that expressly let you forage/scavenge/hunt for an indefinite supply of food+water for 6-8 people with no check unless the DM decides there's none to be had, and then there are low-level food- and water-conjuring spells like goodberry and create water.
Plus the actual rules for starvation/dehydration (which will absolutely come up if you start handing out starvation penalties by fiat) let even the flimsiest character go without food for 4 days without penalty (longer if your CON is high), and explicitly resets the counter every time they eat - which means that in an actual survival scenario where you're just trying to eat enough to not starve, you only need 1/4 pound of food per day to avoid penalties. (Still need that 8 pounds of water per day, but with a good CON you can get away with half that - DC 15 con save lets you duck the dehydration penalty if you drink only half the required amount of water)
A party that knows their DM is going to track supplies is easily capable of carrying literally months of rations at all times with little to no resource investment.
So I'm actually planning a game where we do track resources a bit. Mainly because the party will need to cross an incredibly inhospitable desert. The thing is... they get to decide on their rations at the beginning of the journey. When they are a month into the journey and there are no places to forage for food, or to buy new supplies, and they have needed to rest for more days than expected (because they keep running into horrible, inedible, monsters and needing to take long rests)... Things will get interesting.
Hydration is really the bigger part. In hot weather the water requirement doubles. For a month long trek through the desert a party of 6 requires 360 gallons (3002.4 pounds) of water... that kinda requires a pack animal... Which increases the amount of water necessary to get the party across the desert. If you'd like to just regularly blow a 3rd level slot (create food and water) every day to make that not a problem... I'm totally okay with that, but hopefully the guy making all the water doesn't die.
Remember 2 days without the right amount of water results in 3 levels of exhaustion, 3 days results in 5, 4 days without the proper amount of water means you're dead, and given how exhaustion works 3 days effectively kills you unless someone comes to your rescue.
so a goodberry provides enough nourishment for one day, does that include watering needs? maybe?
although purify food and drink purifies everything in a 5-foot radius sphere, which is big enough to purify a looooot of food and water
Yeah, bean-counting supplies isn't a particularly effective way to pressure players/limit rests.
A day of food and water (pound of wood+gallon of water) weighs about 9 pounds - so even the 8 STR wizard can lug around almost 2 weeks of provisions without pushing his carry capacity, and players can find supplementary supplies with Survival checks, and there are scads of class/background features that expressly let you forage/scavenge/hunt for an indefinite supply of food+water for 6-8 people with no check unless the DM decides there's none to be had, and then there are low-level food- and water-conjuring spells like goodberry and create water.
Plus the actual rules for starvation/dehydration (which will absolutely come up if you start handing out starvation penalties by fiat) let even the flimsiest character go without food for 4 days without penalty (longer if your CON is high), and explicitly resets the counter every time they eat - which means that in an actual survival scenario where you're just trying to eat enough to not starve, you only need 1/4 pound of food per day to avoid penalties. (Still need that 8 pounds of water per day, but with a good CON you can get away with half that - DC 15 con save lets you duck the dehydration penalty if you drink only half the required amount of water)
A party that knows their DM is going to track supplies is easily capable of carrying literally months of rations at all times with little to no resource investment.
So I'm actually planning a game where we do track resources a bit. Mainly because the party will need to cross an incredibly inhospitable desert. The thing is... they get to decide on their rations at the beginning of the journey. When they are a month into the journey and there are no places to forage for food, or to buy new supplies, and they have needed to rest for more days than expected (because they keep running into horrible, inedible, monsters and needing to take long rests)... Things will get interesting.
Hydration is really the bigger part. In hot weather the water requirement doubles. For a month long trek through the desert a party of 6 requires 360 gallons (3002.4 pounds) of water... that kinda requires a pack animal... Which increases the amount of water necessary to get the party across the desert. If you'd like to just regularly blow a 3rd level slot (create food and water) every day to make that not a problem... I'm totally okay with that, but hopefully the guy making all the water doesn't die.
Remember 2 days without the right amount of water results in 3 levels of exhaustion, 3 days results in 5, 4 days without the proper amount of water means you're dead, and given how exhaustion works 3 days effectively kills you unless someone comes to your rescue.
Sure, but again, Create Water is a level 1 spell that conjures 10 gallons of water - enough for a full party for a full day even in hot weather - and it's available to every cleric or druid. Likewise, Goodberry fulfills all the food and water needs for an entire party for 2 days per casting, and it's available to every druid or ranger. Create Food and Water is like the least efficient provision-related spell, although it does add Paladins to the list of classes that can obviate the need for supplies.
Like, practically speaking the resource management part of that adventure is likely to boil down to "We have a ranger so we have a supply of goodberries (and also can't get lost and can move overland faster through difficult terrain, so we can cut down on trip time), and we'll bring like...60 gallons of water and 10 pounds of food or whatever so we have a week or so of supplies just in case something happens to the ranger." and that'll be the end of it unless you go out of your way to try and kill the ranger in particular and do it in the middle of trip when they might not have the supplies to either finish the journey or turn around.
If a DM really wants a resource-tracking mechanic that they can use as a time limit to stop the party from taking rests, I'd recommend making it something other than food - do something like a crystal chronicles-style miasma: "You take (cumulative penalty) for every hour that you're in the poisonous air of this shitty place, but hey! here's a special magic torch that lasts for 24 hours and purifies the air within 60 feet of it so humans can survive here. You have ten torches. I suggest being back within 10 days."
A single first level casting of create water (wich is cleric/ druid only) doesn't cover desert travel for 6 party members, only 5. So you'd either need to burn a second first level slot, or one second level slot (instead of healing spirit on the druid? fuckin yes please) to cover everyone for water every day.
I'm fine with the druid operating 2 spell levels down every day to keep everyone hydrated, 3 spells if they are going to goodberry for food every day as well.
That's like an encounter burned off the druid's resources every day, and again the party better protect the shit out of that druid because if they die the party no matter what dies.
I'm confident that missing a level 1 spell slot or two is not going to substantially effect the combat performance of a druid with access to third-level spells.
And either way, the point is that tracking food and water isn't making players manage those resources in a way that is compelling, it's just siphoning a couple minor spell slots every couple of days.
Even the risk of having the druid die isn't really significant unless, again, you're going out of your way to gun for him - how many adventures do you really have that include a straight-out character death halfway through? especially of a durable spellcaster class with access to healing spells (not to mention the absolutely enormous EHP boost that is Wild Shape)?
The campaign I'm currently playing in is sort of Fallout-esque, where large swathes of the overworld is essentially radioactive. "Radiation" damage applies to your max HP and requires special measures to remove. You better believe we don't dilly-dally in areas where that's a threat.
Also when we run into monsters that deal that kind of damage, we tend to go overboard on burning high level spell slots to make sure those things die quickly. The dragon that spewed radiation as a breath weapon was especially terrifying.
I'm confident that missing a level 1 spell slot or two is not going to substantially effect the combat performance of a druid with access to third-level spells.
And either way, the point is that tracking food and water isn't making players manage those resources in a way that is compelling, it's just siphoning a couple minor spell slots every couple of days.
Even the risk of having the druid die isn't really significant unless, again, you're going out of your way to gun for him - how many adventures do you really have that include a straight-out character death halfway through? especially of a durable spellcaster class with access to healing spells (not to mention the absolutely enormous EHP boost that is Wild Shape)?
Not that hard, I literally have to pull punches not to do it regularly (I'll rarely have enemies target downed party members unless they are zombie like hit em till they are gone types). However actually getting the kill isn't important, threatening it changes party behavior.
As well those 3 spells are basically your full load of first level spells. Yeah eventually that's not much of a bother, but like outside the first ten levels... it shouldn't be a problem they really care about anymore. I'm not saying it's gunna be a compelling issue at every level band, but there's about 7 levels there at the beginning of the leveling course where this type of resource tracking is able to be an actual challenge. It is burning money, and making plans for your journey, or burning daily spells for the entire journey so you don't have to plan (given you have folks willing and able to always spend their spells on feeding and watering the party).
Hell we haven't even gotten into interrupting their rest cycles to force exhaustion levels, and limit spell refreshes ahead of the not eating or drinking correctly because the druids not been able to refresh those three spell slots.
Also yes I'm regularly targeting the druid... because druids are crazy strong, and do a bunch of super obvious magic that does super crazy shit that makes them prime targets for anyone with an int score of 9 or higher. Oh yeah that guy that wiggled his fingers and made a bunch of lightening appear and then turned into a bear, I'm gunna feel bad for having the enemies focusing that guy down. Like that isn't some easily recognizable terrifying shit. If your characters walk into a room and an enemy summons a bunch of other enemies to help them and then turns into a harder to defeat enemy, the party is going to focus that thing immediately. Enemies do that very same thing. Druids are terrifying at a basic level, enemies focus them as a matter of trying not to die. It isn't out of the way to gun for the druid... it's out of the way not to once they reveal their capabilities to the enemy.
This all again tied to there being a druid in the party to begin with. Without a druid or ranger/cleric combination we are back to needing to track resources. And the first level slot out of the ranger is a big ask becasue that's where s bulk of their damage comes from (hunters mark).
Leaving the resources entirely un tracked in the scenario, and just assuming they are always covered, means those spells never get spent on that utility and get spent in combat instead. Without the tracking of resources you don't need to good berry or create water. You can use those spells for light heals, moderately damaging spells or a number of other things. Like yeah the spells remove the necessity of the fiddly book keeping, but they don't remove the resource tracking, the resource tracking is the reason you use those spells to circumvent the challenge. Which again is exactly what the druid/ranger is supposed to do for the party (make overland travel easier).
There's a lot to unpack there, but just as topline
1)we're not talking about 3 spell slots per day, we're talking about 2 at most and probably less than that (even with 6 people in the party AND hot weather doubling their water consumption AND ruling that goodberry doesn't provide water AND actually having everyone in the party eat every day when they only actually NEED to eat every 4 days, you need 1.2 Create Waters and .6 Goodberries per day to feed+water the party, and both spells provide resources that are fungible across at least one additional day so you can take advantage of the fractional outputs.) Two level 1 spell slots simply do not have a significant impact on a caster's performance past about level 3 and those spell slots will frequently go unused anyway.
2)Sure, target the druid. You're not burning down a wildshape druid, though, because when he turned into that bear he got 34 extra hp, and if pressed into shifting out he can just healing spirit himself. You're not going to kill him without a prodigious amount of effort from an unusually dangerous encounter, and by focusing on him in wildshape what you're mostly going to do is waste 34 points of monster damage on what is effectively a damage shield that does not impact 'real' party HP. There are relatively few reasonable scenarios where the druid is the first party member to drop and even fewer in which he is the first party member to die outright. "Threatening" to kill the druid is unlikely to change party behavior because it's not a credible threat - a scenario in which the party is in danger of starving because the druid died in the wilderness is very likely also a scenario in which most of the party is already dead, too.
3)Sure, you can limit their ability to refresh spells if you want. But my point was that tracking food/water is not an effective way to limit party rests, and if your plan is to limit rests directly in order to make the food tracking matter, then you're doing more to support my point than undermine it.
4)Sure, these spells don't apply as solutions if you have no divine casters in your party. But any divine caster - druids, clerics, rangers, paladins - can provide supplies for the party in this way, and if you've got 6 party members it's relatively unlikely that you've also got no divine casters.
Like, you can make this work if you really want to, and if you want to track that stuff just for its own sake, or just for 'inhospitable desert' ambience, go for it. But DnD isn't designed for supply tracking to matter, it explicitly includes a bunch of easy workarounds for providing food/water to the party because most players don't enjoy beancounting that stuff, and for almost any goal (and especially if your goal is to limit rests) there are better, more effective ways to go about it.
D&D5 just isn't a game where tracking rations is going to be effective as a player deterrent, because it won't be effective unless the players specifically buy into "we want these resources to be scarce" and build accordingly.
You could feasibly "patch out" spells that create food and water if you wanted that sort of thing, but like fundamentally D&D characters aren't supposed to get hungry or thirsty in aggregate. And unfortunately, if you're trying to use rations as a method by which to stop players from trying to imbalance the resource scenario, they're not very likely to respect scarcity when you add food and water as a resource.
so a goodberry provides enough nourishment for one day, does that include watering needs? maybe?
although purify food and drink purifies everything in a 5-foot radius sphere, which is big enough to purify a looooot of food and water
Yeah, bean-counting supplies isn't a particularly effective way to pressure players/limit rests.
A day of food and water (pound of wood+gallon of water) weighs about 9 pounds - so even the 8 STR wizard can lug around almost 2 weeks of provisions without pushing his carry capacity, and players can find supplementary supplies with Survival checks, and there are scads of class/background features that expressly let you forage/scavenge/hunt for an indefinite supply of food+water for 6-8 people with no check unless the DM decides there's none to be had, and then there are low-level food- and water-conjuring spells like goodberry and create water.
Plus the actual rules for starvation/dehydration (which will absolutely come up if you start handing out starvation penalties by fiat) let even the flimsiest character go without food for 4 days without penalty (longer if your CON is high), and explicitly resets the counter every time they eat - which means that in an actual survival scenario where you're just trying to eat enough to not starve, you only need 1/4 pound of food per day to avoid penalties. (Still need that 8 pounds of water per day, but with a good CON you can get away with half that - DC 15 con save lets you duck the dehydration penalty if you drink only half the required amount of water)
A party that knows their DM is going to track supplies is easily capable of carrying literally months of rations at all times with little to no resource investment.
So I'm actually planning a game where we do track resources a bit. Mainly because the party will need to cross an incredibly inhospitable desert. The thing is... they get to decide on their rations at the beginning of the journey. When they are a month into the journey and there are no places to forage for food, or to buy new supplies, and they have needed to rest for more days than expected (because they keep running into horrible, inedible, monsters and needing to take long rests)... Things will get interesting.
Hydration is really the bigger part. In hot weather the water requirement doubles. For a month long trek through the desert a party of 6 requires 360 gallons (3002.4 pounds) of water... that kinda requires a pack animal... Which increases the amount of water necessary to get the party across the desert. If you'd like to just regularly blow a 3rd level slot (create food and water) every day to make that not a problem... I'm totally okay with that, but hopefully the guy making all the water doesn't die.
Remember 2 days without the right amount of water results in 3 levels of exhaustion, 3 days results in 5, 4 days without the proper amount of water means you're dead, and given how exhaustion works 3 days effectively kills you unless someone comes to your rescue.
I mean, unless you intend to also restrict the Wizard/Cleric spell lists and ban Rangers and Druids, these are challenges for extremely low level parties and not much else. And if the party is able to pick/decide on rations at the beginning of the journey, why *wouldn't* they pick multiple pack animals. On top of which, what's interesting about a slow trek through an inhospitable dessert? I just don't think it's that D&D's treking system leads to interesting/fun choices to make, so I'm actually asking for how/why I'm wrong here. Exhaustion is a fine mechanic to engage, I guess, but realistically, what's stopping the players from just taking a few days to recover at some point? For example, just in the wizard spell list:
Tenser's Floating Disk - level 1 spell that can hold 500lbs, floats along with you, basically can't be lost. It's a ritual, so it doesn't cost spell slots to cast this, it can be cast by anyone with access to spell casting via a scroll, and it would be super annoying to track because it lasts an hour and takes 10 minutes to cast. So unless you hand wave it, it's ~22 rituals per day to keep track of.
Rope Trick - starting at level 3, a wizard basically allows any party to take a short rest literally anywhere, for the cost of 1 spell slot, at any time.
Tiny Hut - starting at level 5, free long rests anywhere you want, in a dry and comfortable space, as a ritual. So legit, what's stopping a party from just casting this 3 times to spend a day recuperating nice and easily under normal (instead of dry/arid/inhospitable) conditions? This clears exhaustion levels whenever the party wants, and essentially only allows 3 failure points.
For my travel scenes, I hacked together a kinda-sorta mechanical system based on travel speeds and such based on picking a travel speed, wilderness encounters, and "enemy preparedness". When the party decides to go somewhere, I figure out how long they'll have to spend in transit, and how dangerous it might be. Then, the party can alter it as follows:
Fast Travel Speed:
-1 day in transit, party arrives with exhaustion, and enemies are *less* prepared for them.
Standard Travel Speed:
Days in transit as quoted, enemies prepare as normal, roll on wilderness chart, with a bias towards negative stuff. Some are simple delays, some are loss of gear, but I don't really bother with combats here unless something thematically makes sense.
Slow Travel Speed:
+1 day in transit, party arrives well rested, roll on wilderness chart, with a bias towards positive stuff. Enemies are ready, prepared, and expecting the party.
That's the basic skeleton, and then we discuss options, how bad the charts may or may not be based on where they're going, and then we roll, resolve, and move onto the more exciting bits. The key is to either really sell how important it is that the party arrives on time (ritual completion!), how dangerous the terrain might be, and if the party goes slow, to really sell how well prepared the enemies are.
Diagnosed with AML on 6/1/12. Read about it: www.effleukemia.com
For 6 people its 12 gallons of water or con saves vs exhaustion for 2 people. So two slots every other day, minimum 1 slot a day Good berry would have to be every day as they go bad after 24 hours (and are specifically meant to only work as food, as clarified by Jeremy Crawford, the DM ruling would be to have it also cover water). So minimum 2 slots a day, 3 every other day, and hopefully we didn't need a drop of that water for anything else. Look at all this resource management.
Your entire argument hinges on there always being either druid or a ranger/cleric combo in every party (druid or ranger for good berry, cleric or druid for create/destroy water) or else it's a 9th level paladin with create food and water. Any party not containing those things can easily be manipulated by resource shortages
For 6 people its 12 gallons of water or con saves vs exhaustion for 2 people. So two slots every other day, minimum 1 slot a day Good berry would have to be every day as they go bad after 24 hours (and are specifically meant to only work as food, as clarified by Jeremy Crawford, the DM ruling would be to have it also cover water). So minimum 2 slots a day, 3 every other day, and hopefully we didn't need a drop of that water for anything else. Look at all this resource management.
Your entire argument hinges on there always being either druid or a ranger/cleric combo in every party (druid or ranger for good berry, cleric or druid for create/destroy water) or else it's a 9th level paladin with create food and water. Any party not containing those things can easily be manipulated by resource shortages
No.
The water from Create Water doesn't go away. You need 1 Create Water per day, plus a second one once every 5 days.
Likewise, the Goodberries last for 24 hours, which means you can cast it, eat one, and then eat a second one 23 1/2 hours later for two days of food. You get 10 berries per casting, and so you'll need one casting per day, except that every third day you won't need to cast it because you'll have 8 left over from yesterday's casting to eat.
It'll consume an average of 1.8 spell slots per day; IE, two most days but occasionally only 1.
And again, that's assuming you eat every day just for fun and verisimilitude: The starvation rules make clear that there is no penalty whatsoever for only eating once every 4 days. If you do that, you just need to cast a goodberry every fourth day and so drop to less than 1.5 spell slots per day, so that on a majority of days you'll need only 1 slot.
And in all cases you can do your food-related casting at the end of the day, so that any extra unused spell slots can be spent on additional Create Water castings and banked for the future, so that after a while you'll really only be worried about the goodberry slot - which, again, can be something you only cast every fourth day if you want.
Of course, all the math gets a lot easier if you have a more average-sized party of 5 members, in which case you simply need 1 Create Water per day and 1 Goodberry every two days (or every 5 if you're just trying to avoid penalties).
Your entire argument hinges on there always being either druid or a ranger/cleric combo in every party
No, the entire argument is that there are a multitude of options both mundane and magical to get mundane resources like food and water, and that for that reason and also several others, shorting those resources is not a very good way to deter the party from taking long rests all the time, especially in the presence of other options like plot-based time consideration.
Your entire argument hinges on there always being either druid or a ranger/cleric combo in every party
No, the entire argument is that there are a multitude of options both mundane and magical to get mundane resources like food and water, and that for that reason and also several others, shorting those resources is not a very good way to deter the party from taking long rests all the time, especially in the presence of other options like plot-based time consideration.
And that since the magical options rely on spell slots which are recharged by rests, attempting to limit rests by shorting those resource will encourage them to rest more since they can get more spell slots that way to make up for the ones they're losing to supply management.
To discourage rests, you need the players to be managing a 'resource' that is not fungible with resources that are regained by resting.
Your entire argument hinges on there always being either druid or a ranger/cleric combo in every party
No, the entire argument is that there are a multitude of options both mundane and magical to get mundane resources like food and water, and that for that reason and also several others, shorting those resources is not a very good way to deter the party from taking long rests all the time, especially in the presence of other options like plot-based time consideration.
And that since the magical options rely on spell slots which are recharged by rests, attempting to limit rests by shorting those resource will encourage them to rest more since they can get more spell slots that way to make up for the ones they're losing to supply management.
To discourage rests, you need the players to be managing a 'resource' that is not fungible with resources that are regained by resting.
And while entirely logical, such bean counting is decidedly in-fun.
Running low on food and water could be an extremely interesting issue to deal with in a hostile environment for a session or two. A foe that can't be beaten with a sword, as it were. But every day, all day? That's no fun.
Yeah. To be clear, mathberry is just the part of the argument that says "a party with a druid or ranger is literally incapable of going hungry," but if the party ventures forth from a town for any amount of time less than three months they'll be easily able to carry enough supplies to get them where they need to go.
If a person eats 2 pounds of food per day (from srd) and can go down to 25% rations when you're at 20% or less supply, you consume a little less than 10 pounds of food per week. (4 pounds for 4 days and then 1 more pound for four more days, so we'll go with 10 pounds per 7 days)
10(pounds) * 4(weeks per month) * 6(months) = 240 pounds for half a year
240(pounds per person) * 4(people) = 960 pounds for half a year for four people (assuming you bring mostly non perishables like hardtack and cured meats and the like)
A mule carries 420 pounds and costs a whopping 8 gold pieces, so even one mule, fully loaded with food, is enough for about 2.5 months of travel. The rations themselves would be 105gp per mule-load.
Even a totally nonmagical party can, for about 112 gold pieces, feed themselves for 75 days. Not counting water, but do we really need more math? Point is, supplies are easy, and they're easy for a reason: because D&D doesn't particularly like dealing with them. And while you can run a game where they are scarce, it specifically requires player buy in.
In fact, I find the fun in resource scarcity is how the party triumphs over it relatively easily.
The locals tell stories about how notoriously lethal this desert this. Caravans travel months out of their way to circumvent it. "Entering the desert" is a regional idiom for death, for it is so surely a death sentence to stride forth into it.
Or so everyone thought until your party casually strolled up and knocked on the Sand Gate, the massive doors creaking open for the first time in centuries, the guards gaping at the sun tanned but otherwise hale adventurers waiting impatiently.
In fact, I find the fun in resource scarcity is how the party triumphs over it relatively easily.
The locals tell stories about how notoriously lethal this desert this. Caravans travel months out of their way to circumvent it. "Entering the desert" is a regional idiom for death, for it is so surely a death sentence to stride forth into it.
Or so everyone thought until your party casually strolled up and knocked on the Sand Gate, the massive doors creaking open for the first time in centuries, the guards gaping at the sun tanned but otherwise hale adventurers waiting impatiently.
"...Someone going to get the door, or do we need to take another long rest out here?"
so a goodberry provides enough nourishment for one day, does that include watering needs? maybe?
although purify food and drink purifies everything in a 5-foot radius sphere, which is big enough to purify a looooot of food and water
Yeah, bean-counting supplies isn't a particularly effective way to pressure players/limit rests.
A day of food and water (pound of wood+gallon of water) weighs about 9 pounds - so even the 8 STR wizard can lug around almost 2 weeks of provisions without pushing his carry capacity, and players can find supplementary supplies with Survival checks, and there are scads of class/background features that expressly let you forage/scavenge/hunt for an indefinite supply of food+water for 6-8 people with no check unless the DM decides there's none to be had, and then there are low-level food- and water-conjuring spells like goodberry and create water.
Plus the actual rules for starvation/dehydration (which will absolutely come up if you start handing out starvation penalties by fiat) let even the flimsiest character go without food for 4 days without penalty (longer if your CON is high), and explicitly resets the counter every time they eat - which means that in an actual survival scenario where you're just trying to eat enough to not starve, you only need 1/4 pound of food per day to avoid penalties. (Still need that 8 pounds of water per day, but with a good CON you can get away with half that - DC 15 con save lets you duck the dehydration penalty if you drink only half the required amount of water)
A party that knows their DM is going to track supplies is easily capable of carrying literally months of rations at all times with little to no resource investment.
I'd add that even if you try and spring a food-limited situation on your players as a surprise (which is a dick move but whatevs) that the various starter-packages of supplies that every character gets by default in the players handbook have a fair amount of food in them. 5-10 days usually. There are a couple odd exceptions but if players pool their supplies they probably already have at least 5 days worth per character even if they don't know it.
Provision tracking is hardly the only way to emphasis time to players.
Honestly, if they are insisting on taking a long rest after every fight, it's on the DM to start having consequences occurring for them dragging their feet.
Re: spells that create supplies for five people, in parties of six characters:
Just carry some amount of actual supplies, and use that to supplement the spells. Carrying "one person's" supply of food/water, divided among six people, is pretty easy.
If you have a day when you literally need all of your spell slots for combat and exploration, you can dip more heavily into the supplies, and on the many, many days when you don't need literally every spell slot, you don't have to use any supplies at all.
Provision tracking is hardly the only way to emphasis time to players.
Honestly, if they are insisting on taking a long rest after every fight, it's on the DM to start having consequences occurring for them dragging their feet.
Indeed. Though one of the many things that 5e shits all over DMs is that it gets difficult to keep coming up with such reasons without it starting to seem really artificial and tacked on. I kind of like the old school approach of just bringing back wandering monsters based on die rolls. It's silly but not any moreso than other options. And at least then the players know up front what the risk is of a 10 minute workday and can choose whether or not to roll the dice.
If you're tracking somebody and decide to take a break from tracking them, whoops, they got away.
You're trying to stop a group of bandits from raiding caravans? Whoops, they killed another caravan full of people.
How many times do you think you can take a nap in the lich's sanctum without him sending his minions after you?
I'm not saying that long rests are something that should only occur at the end of an adventure, but if there is never any consequence for a party taking them constantly, then the design conceit of only having access to a limited amount of [class gimmick] between multiple encounters is moot.
Provision tracking is hardly the only way to emphasis time to players.
Honestly, if they are insisting on taking a long rest after every fight, it's on the DM to start having consequences occurring for them dragging their feet.
It's a shame there isn't a game out there that just attached game consequences to resting to refresh your abilities before accomplishing some significant task. Then you could just let players make interesting choices about if they really want to rest or not with clear consequences to the decision.
Who took them away? And who says you need to roll on a random table for a wandering monster? You, as DM, control the world. If you say there's a wandering monster, the gods dang it, there's a wandering monster!
Sleep in the middle of an un-cleared dungeon? Danger all around? BAM! Midnight Ooze attack. That's what you get, careless adventurer! That's what you get.
Wandering through the haunted forest, wasted most of your spells before 11am against the ghouls and decide to call it day before lunch? Even though your safe destination is only another 5 hours away? Well, fuck you, big shot hero. Here's a random horde of zombies to interrupt your rest.
Have I mentioned before that I absolutely hate the 10 minute workday? I'm pretty sure I have.
Again, though: Random encounters cost HP and spell slots.
HP and spell slots are restored by resting.
Putting more pressure on resources that are restored by resting creates more incentive to rest.
If you start springing midnight monster attacks on players when they rest, they will decide to rest when they still have enough spell slots left to deal with a midnight monster attack, or they will dedicate spell slots to resting safely (and rest more often to account for the spell slot loss).
If you want to create meaningful pressure for players to not rest, you need to be pressuring resources that are not restored by resting.
For me, and tangentially to the discussion, I favor strongly discouraging inappropriate resting. I do it with warnings both IC and OOC, appeals to the narrative, and If it comes to it denying a rest with something interrupting it.
I do it not to cost resources. I do it to preserve the narrative. And to give a consequence to players who metagame and think it's ok to blow all of their resources and try to rest anywhere they please because why not?
That said, I very much do provide the occasional safe resting spot if the players would even give half a mind to preserving said narrative.
For example: in the Undermountain game here there was a point where the party could have rested in a kitchen storage room with fresh water & supplies. All they needed to do was make sure the slaves who ran the kitchen were onside and wpuld cover for the party.
Another time when low on resources, I walled them into a certain set of rooms that, once cleared, provided a peefectly safe place to rest.
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AegisFear My DanceOvershot Toronto, Landed in OttawaRegistered Userregular
Time elapsing and the consequences that arise because of that always seemed the simplest and most obvious way to combat excessive resting. You have to be willing as a DM to modify your set pieces, though, to reflect that, though fungible set pieces always seem prudent anyway.
Also remember that gold is pretty useless so buying 300 rations and a swimming pool of water carted by donkeys really doesn't set the party back in any meaningful way.
Get a bag of holding and you can skip the donkeys.
Did some more brainstorming today for my setting, particularly asking myself where all the races came from:
The Janni, Predecessors of Humankind and Elvenkind: The original genie race that came into existence alongside the Primordials in the Elemental Chaos was the Janni, who call themselves "The First People". The Primordial now known as the Prime Architect transformed some of the janni into the dao, marid, efreeti and djinni so that they could govern the Elemental Planes he planned to create. The genies in turn created the genasi with their enhanced power so that the newly-formed servitor race could fulfill the genies' duty to the Prime Architect. The genies later took their genasi servants with them to the world, but during the Dawn War most of those genasi were transformed into the first humans by the gods even as their genie masters were bound within arcane vessels. Another group of janni migrated to the newly formed Feywild and claimed it as their home, becoming one with the plane's magic to reincarnate as the first Archfey. The Archfey Oberon allied himself with the Elder Spirit called Tree Father, who gave Oberon the seeds for the Feywild's first trees. Thanks to Oberon's influence these trees produced the hamadryads, the predecessors of both true dryads and all elvenkind.
My thought process was that the genies look humanoid but are older than the mortal races, so why not have them as the first beings making mortals in their image? I also wanted to explain where the Archfey originated and tie them to the similarly nature-related Elder Spirits. At least one 4E source presented the idea that many of the primal spirits were elementals who had become attached to the world they had been used to create, so I thought a similar origin for the Archfey would work.
I've also decided that all reptilian creatures were descended from the scattered fragments of the serpent-related primordial Byrakus, including dragons (this was inspired by the fact that, in real-world mythology, monstrous serpents predated the creatures we think of today as dragons).
Hey everyone! I have selected what I'm going to run for my siblings (this), and I'm pretty happy with it. I have never DM'd before, and the way this is all put together should make it easy (and I'm skipping the "everyone meets each other" bit via "there is a big tournament/festival in town, but there have been attacks in the wild, so you all ended up in the same caravan to get here and are bffs. Now hug."). With that all said, I'm pretty nervous. Other than avoiding railroading, are there things I should keep in mind? Tips that people wished they'd heard before they DM'd the first time?
Fun coincidence, I was going to run the same over the Holidays. I look forward to sharing notes after!
Yeah. To be clear, mathberry is just the part of the argument that says "a party with a druid or ranger is literally incapable of going hungry," but if the party ventures forth from a town for any amount of time less than three months they'll be easily able to carry enough supplies to get them where they need to go.
If a person eats 2 pounds of food per day (from srd) and can go down to 25% rations when you're at 20% or less supply, you consume a little less than 10 pounds of food per week. (4 pounds for 4 days and then 1 more pound for four more days, so we'll go with 10 pounds per 7 days)
10(pounds) * 4(weeks per month) * 6(months) = 240 pounds for half a year
240(pounds per person) * 4(people) = 960 pounds for half a year for four people (assuming you bring mostly non perishables like hardtack and cured meats and the like)
A mule carries 420 pounds and costs a whopping 8 gold pieces, so even one mule, fully loaded with food, is enough for about 2.5 months of travel. The rations themselves would be 105gp per mule-load.
Even a totally nonmagical party can, for about 112 gold pieces, feed themselves for 75 days. Not counting water, but do we really need more math? Point is, supplies are easy, and they're easy for a reason: because D&D doesn't particularly like dealing with them. And while you can run a game where they are scarce, it specifically requires player buy in.
This doesn't even account for the mule itself, which has got to be at least another couple weeks of food when slaughtered.
You guys gotta start thinking like a real survivor. Dilute your urine into your water supply to make it last longer. Cannibalize the half-orc with the promise to save a finger for a resurrection ritual.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
Dark Sun in 4e did a decent job in 4e. You had "rations" one of which kept you going for a day. Adventuring away from a town or oasis was dangerous because there was no foraging, magic was practically nonexistent and the desert itself was pretty much a continuous hostile encounter. If your traveling between safe areas you better keep a good pace.
It really required a DM to know the distances and terrain types of wherever the party was and where they were going. To hamdwave overland travel was to get rid of about half of dark suns hook.
Astilathor, Goddess of Trade, Treasure and Wealth.
- Neutral.
- Worshiped most often by humans, dwarves, halflings and tieflings. Most are fortune seekers who increase their wealth through banking, trade or scouring ruins for lost treasures. Some sects tolerate thievery, believing that wealth only truly belongs to those who can protect it.
- Astilathor is most often depicted as a dragon made of gemstones sleeping on a bed of gold or as a plump, smiling dwarf woman wearing outrageously ostentatious jewelry and clothing.
- She has an uneasy alliance with Sagawehn, goddess of law and civilization, who sees wealth as a simple resource and decries its use to attain social status. Wealth is necessary to build civilizations, but it can also be a destabilizing force. Professional adventurers who revere Astilathor sometimes mockingly describe their profession as their goddess's way of foreclosing on Sagawehn's failed ventures. Sagawehn's followers reply that Astilathor herself is often to blame for the fall of civilizations, sometimes going so far as to claim that her trade partners include the Archdevil Mammon or the Demon Lord Oublivae. In recent centuries the animosity between Sagawehn and Astilathor's followers in various sects has intensified, with both sides hoping their goddess usurps the domains of the other.
- In truth, the exaltation of wealth in Astilathor's philosophy has likely encouraged the sin of envy within mortals, some of whom may have sold their souls to Mammon for riches. Whether this is part of some nefarious conspiracy on her part to collude with Mammon is unknown, but the majority of Astilathor's faithful agree that anyone who leaves a negotiation with their soul promised to a devil is a poor negotiator indeed.
- Astilathor and Sagawehn, despite being on such bad terms, share the same Astral Dominion. The Peaks of Plenty, Astilathor's realm, appears as a mountain range blanketed by trees with golden leaves and fruit. Within and beneath the mountains are a winding series of caverns and vaults filled with a hoard of riches and treasures. Still further below are inexhaustible mines where Sagawehn's immortal servitor race, the formians, toil to obtain the resources necessary to construct their endlessly expanding city. It is speculated that Sagawehn provided for the formians herself before Astilathor used her divine influence on the plane to usurp control of all resources in it.
- Though it is certain that Astilathor is a younger deity than Sagawehn her origins remain unclear. Most often she is said to be a former mortal, usually a dwarf or halfling, who amassed stupendous wealth in some way and used it such that it helped the first major civilization to develop. As a reward she was taken on as an exarch of Sagawehn before eventually becoming a goddess in her own right.
I had started out with Sagawehn, a dead 4E goddess of insects who wanted to destroy free will. Then I combined two Forgotten Realms wealth deities to make Astilathor.
Without even meaning to I essentially ended up with two major deities of my setting being warring embodiments of communism and capitalism.
Hexmage-PA on
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
Oh my character is so hosed
Out of the Abyss spoilers...
So I'm playing a Minotaur barbarian that if he gets the kill that ends the combat he will eat a bit of whatever he kills before coming out of his rage. He is normally a vegatarian and is disgusted by this, but you know, rage, and its provided some funny and gross moments.
We've just escorted the little mushroom man back to the other mushroom people, and were going after the "bride". Anyways we ended up fighting this mutated fungus person covered in pustules along with a couple other mutated folks that we had first met back in the first couple sessions, when they were way less deformed. I got the killing blow and the combat ended and I told the DM that I lick my weapon clean. He was all "are you sure?" as we knew that this stuff really fucks people up but my character has been doing this since the beginning of the adventure so I go ahead and lick that blade clean before snapping out of his rage. Two failed con saves later there is something certainly wrong with me, and the DM is delighted to explore this new opportunity.
I'm very excited to see where this goes. And terrified. My DM is too creative for his own good sometimes.
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Yeah, bean-counting supplies isn't a particularly effective way to pressure players/limit rests.
A day of food and water (pound of wood+gallon of water) weighs about 9 pounds - so even the 8 STR wizard can lug around almost 2 weeks of provisions without pushing his carry capacity, and players can find supplementary supplies with Survival checks, and there are scads of class/background features that expressly let you forage/scavenge/hunt for an indefinite supply of food+water for 6-8 people with no check unless the DM decides there's none to be had, and then there are low-level food- and water-conjuring spells like goodberry and create water.
Plus the actual rules for starvation/dehydration (which will absolutely come up if you start handing out starvation penalties by fiat) let even the flimsiest character go without food for 4 days without penalty (longer if your CON is high), and explicitly resets the counter every time they eat - which means that in an actual survival scenario where you're just trying to eat enough to not starve, you only need 1/4 pound of food per day to avoid penalties. (Still need that 8 pounds of water per day, but with a good CON you can get away with half that - DC 15 con save lets you duck the dehydration penalty if you drink only half the required amount of water)
A party that knows their DM is going to track supplies is easily capable of carrying literally months of rations at all times with little to no resource investment.
Sure, but even then the players can just shrug and go home if they take enough HP damage. They're not going to say "hey, we're all at four health with no food or spells left, guess we'll just keep going and hope for the best!". They're going to be goddamned cowards.
I guess the answer to making traps meaningful is to use them in combat, where action economy and the threat of attack keeps them on their toes.
This is assuming that they can take the extra time to go somewhere safe to rest and then rest, and then go back. If they're trying to get somewhere on a time limit, like before the wizard fully unlocks the artifact's secret power, they maybe don't have time. If they're just exploring a castle to defeat the ghostly king atop it so he stops terrorizing the village, then maybe they've got time.
In general I think having a clock in the background is good adventure design though. It doesn't necessarily have to be a total failure clock, though it could be, but something as simple as "if you take too long out there, the big bad will sacrifice the hostages on the altar, and you won't be able to save them" can work well. As long as it's a failure of one kind or another, or it's on a track toward failure, and it's mission related, I think it's good.
Also, just so we're all on the same page, I hate traps as well. I think they're only good when used extremely sparingly, mostly as a way to add ambience to a dungeon, like to give it that Indiana Jones flavor.
Are they trying to stop the bad guy at the end of the dungeon? Well that bad guy is putting plans in motion and won't wait forever. Hunting a dangerous beast? Maybe it gets stronger the longer it chills out in its lair, or is resting and vulnerable but will eventually leave. Are they just treasure hunting? Maybe there is a competing adventuring group heading through a different path they have to race with.
Personally if I use traps I tend to stay away from the basics and use them as large challenges in of themselves. A trap room or big trap encounter, like the classic hallway of swinging blades for example.
My Let's Play Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC2go70QLfwGq-hW4nvUqmog
So I'm actually planning a game where we do track resources a bit. Mainly because the party will need to cross an incredibly inhospitable desert. The thing is... they get to decide on their rations at the beginning of the journey. When they are a month into the journey and there are no places to forage for food, or to buy new supplies, and they have needed to rest for more days than expected (because they keep running into horrible, inedible, monsters and needing to take long rests)... Things will get interesting.
Hydration is really the bigger part. In hot weather the water requirement doubles. For a month long trek through the desert a party of 6 requires 360 gallons (3002.4 pounds) of water... that kinda requires a pack animal... Which increases the amount of water necessary to get the party across the desert. If you'd like to just regularly blow a 3rd level slot (create food and water) every day to make that not a problem... I'm totally okay with that, but hopefully the guy making all the water doesn't die.
Remember 2 days without the right amount of water results in 3 levels of exhaustion, 3 days results in 5, 4 days without the proper amount of water means you're dead, and given how exhaustion works 3 days effectively kills you unless someone comes to your rescue.
Sure, but again, Create Water is a level 1 spell that conjures 10 gallons of water - enough for a full party for a full day even in hot weather - and it's available to every cleric or druid. Likewise, Goodberry fulfills all the food and water needs for an entire party for 2 days per casting, and it's available to every druid or ranger. Create Food and Water is like the least efficient provision-related spell, although it does add Paladins to the list of classes that can obviate the need for supplies.
Like, practically speaking the resource management part of that adventure is likely to boil down to "We have a ranger so we have a supply of goodberries (and also can't get lost and can move overland faster through difficult terrain, so we can cut down on trip time), and we'll bring like...60 gallons of water and 10 pounds of food or whatever so we have a week or so of supplies just in case something happens to the ranger." and that'll be the end of it unless you go out of your way to try and kill the ranger in particular and do it in the middle of trip when they might not have the supplies to either finish the journey or turn around.
If a DM really wants a resource-tracking mechanic that they can use as a time limit to stop the party from taking rests, I'd recommend making it something other than food - do something like a crystal chronicles-style miasma: "You take (cumulative penalty) for every hour that you're in the poisonous air of this shitty place, but hey! here's a special magic torch that lasts for 24 hours and purifies the air within 60 feet of it so humans can survive here. You have ten torches. I suggest being back within 10 days."
I'm fine with the druid operating 2 spell levels down every day to keep everyone hydrated, 3 spells if they are going to goodberry for food every day as well.
That's like an encounter burned off the druid's resources every day, and again the party better protect the shit out of that druid because if they die the party no matter what dies.
And either way, the point is that tracking food and water isn't making players manage those resources in a way that is compelling, it's just siphoning a couple minor spell slots every couple of days.
Even the risk of having the druid die isn't really significant unless, again, you're going out of your way to gun for him - how many adventures do you really have that include a straight-out character death halfway through? especially of a durable spellcaster class with access to healing spells (not to mention the absolutely enormous EHP boost that is Wild Shape)?
Also when we run into monsters that deal that kind of damage, we tend to go overboard on burning high level spell slots to make sure those things die quickly. The dragon that spewed radiation as a breath weapon was especially terrifying.
Not that hard, I literally have to pull punches not to do it regularly (I'll rarely have enemies target downed party members unless they are zombie like hit em till they are gone types). However actually getting the kill isn't important, threatening it changes party behavior.
As well those 3 spells are basically your full load of first level spells. Yeah eventually that's not much of a bother, but like outside the first ten levels... it shouldn't be a problem they really care about anymore. I'm not saying it's gunna be a compelling issue at every level band, but there's about 7 levels there at the beginning of the leveling course where this type of resource tracking is able to be an actual challenge. It is burning money, and making plans for your journey, or burning daily spells for the entire journey so you don't have to plan (given you have folks willing and able to always spend their spells on feeding and watering the party).
Hell we haven't even gotten into interrupting their rest cycles to force exhaustion levels, and limit spell refreshes ahead of the not eating or drinking correctly because the druids not been able to refresh those three spell slots.
Also yes I'm regularly targeting the druid... because druids are crazy strong, and do a bunch of super obvious magic that does super crazy shit that makes them prime targets for anyone with an int score of 9 or higher. Oh yeah that guy that wiggled his fingers and made a bunch of lightening appear and then turned into a bear, I'm gunna feel bad for having the enemies focusing that guy down. Like that isn't some easily recognizable terrifying shit. If your characters walk into a room and an enemy summons a bunch of other enemies to help them and then turns into a harder to defeat enemy, the party is going to focus that thing immediately. Enemies do that very same thing. Druids are terrifying at a basic level, enemies focus them as a matter of trying not to die. It isn't out of the way to gun for the druid... it's out of the way not to once they reveal their capabilities to the enemy.
This all again tied to there being a druid in the party to begin with. Without a druid or ranger/cleric combination we are back to needing to track resources. And the first level slot out of the ranger is a big ask becasue that's where s bulk of their damage comes from (hunters mark).
Leaving the resources entirely un tracked in the scenario, and just assuming they are always covered, means those spells never get spent on that utility and get spent in combat instead. Without the tracking of resources you don't need to good berry or create water. You can use those spells for light heals, moderately damaging spells or a number of other things. Like yeah the spells remove the necessity of the fiddly book keeping, but they don't remove the resource tracking, the resource tracking is the reason you use those spells to circumvent the challenge. Which again is exactly what the druid/ranger is supposed to do for the party (make overland travel easier).
1)we're not talking about 3 spell slots per day, we're talking about 2 at most and probably less than that (even with 6 people in the party AND hot weather doubling their water consumption AND ruling that goodberry doesn't provide water AND actually having everyone in the party eat every day when they only actually NEED to eat every 4 days, you need 1.2 Create Waters and .6 Goodberries per day to feed+water the party, and both spells provide resources that are fungible across at least one additional day so you can take advantage of the fractional outputs.) Two level 1 spell slots simply do not have a significant impact on a caster's performance past about level 3 and those spell slots will frequently go unused anyway.
2)Sure, target the druid. You're not burning down a wildshape druid, though, because when he turned into that bear he got 34 extra hp, and if pressed into shifting out he can just healing spirit himself. You're not going to kill him without a prodigious amount of effort from an unusually dangerous encounter, and by focusing on him in wildshape what you're mostly going to do is waste 34 points of monster damage on what is effectively a damage shield that does not impact 'real' party HP. There are relatively few reasonable scenarios where the druid is the first party member to drop and even fewer in which he is the first party member to die outright. "Threatening" to kill the druid is unlikely to change party behavior because it's not a credible threat - a scenario in which the party is in danger of starving because the druid died in the wilderness is very likely also a scenario in which most of the party is already dead, too.
3)Sure, you can limit their ability to refresh spells if you want. But my point was that tracking food/water is not an effective way to limit party rests, and if your plan is to limit rests directly in order to make the food tracking matter, then you're doing more to support my point than undermine it.
4)Sure, these spells don't apply as solutions if you have no divine casters in your party. But any divine caster - druids, clerics, rangers, paladins - can provide supplies for the party in this way, and if you've got 6 party members it's relatively unlikely that you've also got no divine casters.
Like, you can make this work if you really want to, and if you want to track that stuff just for its own sake, or just for 'inhospitable desert' ambience, go for it. But DnD isn't designed for supply tracking to matter, it explicitly includes a bunch of easy workarounds for providing food/water to the party because most players don't enjoy beancounting that stuff, and for almost any goal (and especially if your goal is to limit rests) there are better, more effective ways to go about it.
You could feasibly "patch out" spells that create food and water if you wanted that sort of thing, but like fundamentally D&D characters aren't supposed to get hungry or thirsty in aggregate. And unfortunately, if you're trying to use rations as a method by which to stop players from trying to imbalance the resource scenario, they're not very likely to respect scarcity when you add food and water as a resource.
I mean, unless you intend to also restrict the Wizard/Cleric spell lists and ban Rangers and Druids, these are challenges for extremely low level parties and not much else. And if the party is able to pick/decide on rations at the beginning of the journey, why *wouldn't* they pick multiple pack animals. On top of which, what's interesting about a slow trek through an inhospitable dessert? I just don't think it's that D&D's treking system leads to interesting/fun choices to make, so I'm actually asking for how/why I'm wrong here. Exhaustion is a fine mechanic to engage, I guess, but realistically, what's stopping the players from just taking a few days to recover at some point? For example, just in the wizard spell list:
Tenser's Floating Disk - level 1 spell that can hold 500lbs, floats along with you, basically can't be lost. It's a ritual, so it doesn't cost spell slots to cast this, it can be cast by anyone with access to spell casting via a scroll, and it would be super annoying to track because it lasts an hour and takes 10 minutes to cast. So unless you hand wave it, it's ~22 rituals per day to keep track of.
Rope Trick - starting at level 3, a wizard basically allows any party to take a short rest literally anywhere, for the cost of 1 spell slot, at any time.
Tiny Hut - starting at level 5, free long rests anywhere you want, in a dry and comfortable space, as a ritual. So legit, what's stopping a party from just casting this 3 times to spend a day recuperating nice and easily under normal (instead of dry/arid/inhospitable) conditions? This clears exhaustion levels whenever the party wants, and essentially only allows 3 failure points.
For my travel scenes, I hacked together a kinda-sorta mechanical system based on travel speeds and such based on picking a travel speed, wilderness encounters, and "enemy preparedness". When the party decides to go somewhere, I figure out how long they'll have to spend in transit, and how dangerous it might be. Then, the party can alter it as follows:
Fast Travel Speed:
-1 day in transit, party arrives with exhaustion, and enemies are *less* prepared for them.
Standard Travel Speed:
Days in transit as quoted, enemies prepare as normal, roll on wilderness chart, with a bias towards negative stuff. Some are simple delays, some are loss of gear, but I don't really bother with combats here unless something thematically makes sense.
Slow Travel Speed:
+1 day in transit, party arrives well rested, roll on wilderness chart, with a bias towards positive stuff. Enemies are ready, prepared, and expecting the party.
That's the basic skeleton, and then we discuss options, how bad the charts may or may not be based on where they're going, and then we roll, resolve, and move onto the more exciting bits. The key is to either really sell how important it is that the party arrives on time (ritual completion!), how dangerous the terrain might be, and if the party goes slow, to really sell how well prepared the enemies are.
Your entire argument hinges on there always being either druid or a ranger/cleric combo in every party (druid or ranger for good berry, cleric or druid for create/destroy water) or else it's a 9th level paladin with create food and water. Any party not containing those things can easily be manipulated by resource shortages
No.
The water from Create Water doesn't go away. You need 1 Create Water per day, plus a second one once every 5 days.
Likewise, the Goodberries last for 24 hours, which means you can cast it, eat one, and then eat a second one 23 1/2 hours later for two days of food. You get 10 berries per casting, and so you'll need one casting per day, except that every third day you won't need to cast it because you'll have 8 left over from yesterday's casting to eat.
It'll consume an average of 1.8 spell slots per day; IE, two most days but occasionally only 1.
And again, that's assuming you eat every day just for fun and verisimilitude: The starvation rules make clear that there is no penalty whatsoever for only eating once every 4 days. If you do that, you just need to cast a goodberry every fourth day and so drop to less than 1.5 spell slots per day, so that on a majority of days you'll need only 1 slot.
And in all cases you can do your food-related casting at the end of the day, so that any extra unused spell slots can be spent on additional Create Water castings and banked for the future, so that after a while you'll really only be worried about the goodberry slot - which, again, can be something you only cast every fourth day if you want.
Of course, all the math gets a lot easier if you have a more average-sized party of 5 members, in which case you simply need 1 Create Water per day and 1 Goodberry every two days (or every 5 if you're just trying to avoid penalties).
No, the entire argument is that there are a multitude of options both mundane and magical to get mundane resources like food and water, and that for that reason and also several others, shorting those resources is not a very good way to deter the party from taking long rests all the time, especially in the presence of other options like plot-based time consideration.
And that since the magical options rely on spell slots which are recharged by rests, attempting to limit rests by shorting those resource will encourage them to rest more since they can get more spell slots that way to make up for the ones they're losing to supply management.
To discourage rests, you need the players to be managing a 'resource' that is not fungible with resources that are regained by resting.
And while entirely logical, such bean counting is decidedly in-fun.
Running low on food and water could be an extremely interesting issue to deal with in a hostile environment for a session or two. A foe that can't be beaten with a sword, as it were. But every day, all day? That's no fun.
If a person eats 2 pounds of food per day (from srd) and can go down to 25% rations when you're at 20% or less supply, you consume a little less than 10 pounds of food per week. (4 pounds for 4 days and then 1 more pound for four more days, so we'll go with 10 pounds per 7 days)
10(pounds) * 4(weeks per month) * 6(months) = 240 pounds for half a year
240(pounds per person) * 4(people) = 960 pounds for half a year for four people (assuming you bring mostly non perishables like hardtack and cured meats and the like)
A mule carries 420 pounds and costs a whopping 8 gold pieces, so even one mule, fully loaded with food, is enough for about 2.5 months of travel. The rations themselves would be 105gp per mule-load.
Even a totally nonmagical party can, for about 112 gold pieces, feed themselves for 75 days. Not counting water, but do we really need more math? Point is, supplies are easy, and they're easy for a reason: because D&D doesn't particularly like dealing with them. And while you can run a game where they are scarce, it specifically requires player buy in.
The locals tell stories about how notoriously lethal this desert this. Caravans travel months out of their way to circumvent it. "Entering the desert" is a regional idiom for death, for it is so surely a death sentence to stride forth into it.
Or so everyone thought until your party casually strolled up and knocked on the Sand Gate, the massive doors creaking open for the first time in centuries, the guards gaping at the sun tanned but otherwise hale adventurers waiting impatiently.
"...Someone going to get the door, or do we need to take another long rest out here?"
I'd add that even if you try and spring a food-limited situation on your players as a surprise (which is a dick move but whatevs) that the various starter-packages of supplies that every character gets by default in the players handbook have a fair amount of food in them. 5-10 days usually. There are a couple odd exceptions but if players pool their supplies they probably already have at least 5 days worth per character even if they don't know it.
Honestly, if they are insisting on taking a long rest after every fight, it's on the DM to start having consequences occurring for them dragging their feet.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Just carry some amount of actual supplies, and use that to supplement the spells. Carrying "one person's" supply of food/water, divided among six people, is pretty easy.
If you have a day when you literally need all of your spell slots for combat and exploration, you can dip more heavily into the supplies, and on the many, many days when you don't need literally every spell slot, you don't have to use any supplies at all.
Indeed. Though one of the many things that 5e shits all over DMs is that it gets difficult to keep coming up with such reasons without it starting to seem really artificial and tacked on. I kind of like the old school approach of just bringing back wandering monsters based on die rolls. It's silly but not any moreso than other options. And at least then the players know up front what the risk is of a 10 minute workday and can choose whether or not to roll the dice.
You're trying to stop a group of bandits from raiding caravans? Whoops, they killed another caravan full of people.
How many times do you think you can take a nap in the lich's sanctum without him sending his minions after you?
I'm not saying that long rests are something that should only occur at the end of an adventure, but if there is never any consequence for a party taking them constantly, then the design conceit of only having access to a limited amount of [class gimmick] between multiple encounters is moot.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
It's a shame there isn't a game out there that just attached game consequences to resting to refresh your abilities before accomplishing some significant task. Then you could just let players make interesting choices about if they really want to rest or not with clear consequences to the decision.
Sleep in the middle of an un-cleared dungeon? Danger all around? BAM! Midnight Ooze attack. That's what you get, careless adventurer! That's what you get.
Wandering through the haunted forest, wasted most of your spells before 11am against the ghouls and decide to call it day before lunch? Even though your safe destination is only another 5 hours away? Well, fuck you, big shot hero. Here's a random horde of zombies to interrupt your rest.
Have I mentioned before that I absolutely hate the 10 minute workday? I'm pretty sure I have.
HP and spell slots are restored by resting.
Putting more pressure on resources that are restored by resting creates more incentive to rest.
If you start springing midnight monster attacks on players when they rest, they will decide to rest when they still have enough spell slots left to deal with a midnight monster attack, or they will dedicate spell slots to resting safely (and rest more often to account for the spell slot loss).
If you want to create meaningful pressure for players to not rest, you need to be pressuring resources that are not restored by resting.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I do it not to cost resources. I do it to preserve the narrative. And to give a consequence to players who metagame and think it's ok to blow all of their resources and try to rest anywhere they please because why not?
That said, I very much do provide the occasional safe resting spot if the players would even give half a mind to preserving said narrative.
For example: in the Undermountain game here there was a point where the party could have rested in a kitchen storage room with fresh water & supplies. All they needed to do was make sure the slaves who ran the kitchen were onside and wpuld cover for the party.
Another time when low on resources, I walled them into a certain set of rooms that, once cleared, provided a peefectly safe place to rest.
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
Get a bag of holding and you can skip the donkeys.
The Janni, Predecessors of Humankind and Elvenkind: The original genie race that came into existence alongside the Primordials in the Elemental Chaos was the Janni, who call themselves "The First People". The Primordial now known as the Prime Architect transformed some of the janni into the dao, marid, efreeti and djinni so that they could govern the Elemental Planes he planned to create. The genies in turn created the genasi with their enhanced power so that the newly-formed servitor race could fulfill the genies' duty to the Prime Architect. The genies later took their genasi servants with them to the world, but during the Dawn War most of those genasi were transformed into the first humans by the gods even as their genie masters were bound within arcane vessels. Another group of janni migrated to the newly formed Feywild and claimed it as their home, becoming one with the plane's magic to reincarnate as the first Archfey. The Archfey Oberon allied himself with the Elder Spirit called Tree Father, who gave Oberon the seeds for the Feywild's first trees. Thanks to Oberon's influence these trees produced the hamadryads, the predecessors of both true dryads and all elvenkind.
My thought process was that the genies look humanoid but are older than the mortal races, so why not have them as the first beings making mortals in their image? I also wanted to explain where the Archfey originated and tie them to the similarly nature-related Elder Spirits. At least one 4E source presented the idea that many of the primal spirits were elementals who had become attached to the world they had been used to create, so I thought a similar origin for the Archfey would work.
I've also decided that all reptilian creatures were descended from the scattered fragments of the serpent-related primordial Byrakus, including dragons (this was inspired by the fact that, in real-world mythology, monstrous serpents predated the creatures we think of today as dragons).
Fun coincidence, I was going to run the same over the Holidays. I look forward to sharing notes after!
This doesn't even account for the mule itself, which has got to be at least another couple weeks of food when slaughtered.
You guys gotta start thinking like a real survivor. Dilute your urine into your water supply to make it last longer. Cannibalize the half-orc with the promise to save a finger for a resurrection ritual.
It really required a DM to know the distances and terrain types of wherever the party was and where they were going. To hamdwave overland travel was to get rid of about half of dark suns hook.
Damn i want to play darksun again.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
- Neutral.
- Worshiped most often by humans, dwarves, halflings and tieflings. Most are fortune seekers who increase their wealth through banking, trade or scouring ruins for lost treasures. Some sects tolerate thievery, believing that wealth only truly belongs to those who can protect it.
- Astilathor is most often depicted as a dragon made of gemstones sleeping on a bed of gold or as a plump, smiling dwarf woman wearing outrageously ostentatious jewelry and clothing.
- She has an uneasy alliance with Sagawehn, goddess of law and civilization, who sees wealth as a simple resource and decries its use to attain social status. Wealth is necessary to build civilizations, but it can also be a destabilizing force. Professional adventurers who revere Astilathor sometimes mockingly describe their profession as their goddess's way of foreclosing on Sagawehn's failed ventures. Sagawehn's followers reply that Astilathor herself is often to blame for the fall of civilizations, sometimes going so far as to claim that her trade partners include the Archdevil Mammon or the Demon Lord Oublivae. In recent centuries the animosity between Sagawehn and Astilathor's followers in various sects has intensified, with both sides hoping their goddess usurps the domains of the other.
- In truth, the exaltation of wealth in Astilathor's philosophy has likely encouraged the sin of envy within mortals, some of whom may have sold their souls to Mammon for riches. Whether this is part of some nefarious conspiracy on her part to collude with Mammon is unknown, but the majority of Astilathor's faithful agree that anyone who leaves a negotiation with their soul promised to a devil is a poor negotiator indeed.
- Astilathor and Sagawehn, despite being on such bad terms, share the same Astral Dominion. The Peaks of Plenty, Astilathor's realm, appears as a mountain range blanketed by trees with golden leaves and fruit. Within and beneath the mountains are a winding series of caverns and vaults filled with a hoard of riches and treasures. Still further below are inexhaustible mines where Sagawehn's immortal servitor race, the formians, toil to obtain the resources necessary to construct their endlessly expanding city. It is speculated that Sagawehn provided for the formians herself before Astilathor used her divine influence on the plane to usurp control of all resources in it.
- Though it is certain that Astilathor is a younger deity than Sagawehn her origins remain unclear. Most often she is said to be a former mortal, usually a dwarf or halfling, who amassed stupendous wealth in some way and used it such that it helped the first major civilization to develop. As a reward she was taken on as an exarch of Sagawehn before eventually becoming a goddess in her own right.
I had started out with Sagawehn, a dead 4E goddess of insects who wanted to destroy free will. Then I combined two Forgotten Realms wealth deities to make Astilathor.
Without even meaning to I essentially ended up with two major deities of my setting being warring embodiments of communism and capitalism.
Out of the Abyss spoilers...
We've just escorted the little mushroom man back to the other mushroom people, and were going after the "bride". Anyways we ended up fighting this mutated fungus person covered in pustules along with a couple other mutated folks that we had first met back in the first couple sessions, when they were way less deformed. I got the killing blow and the combat ended and I told the DM that I lick my weapon clean. He was all "are you sure?" as we knew that this stuff really fucks people up but my character has been doing this since the beginning of the adventure so I go ahead and lick that blade clean before snapping out of his rage. Two failed con saves later there is something certainly wrong with me, and the DM is delighted to explore this new opportunity.
I'm very excited to see where this goes. And terrified. My DM is too creative for his own good sometimes.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981