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Thread: "Iron Rations"
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2018-04-23, 03:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
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2018-04-23, 03:32 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
In most games, I stop bothering about rations very quickly after the game starts, both as a DM and as a player unless enforced. If the characters start at level 1 or whatever, then yes, there's some consideration about rations and foraging and having someone who can roll Survival or equivalents well enough for us not to starve to death. Otherwise, it's either a non-issue where party funds won't even lose 1/1000th after buying rations for a year, or there's enough magic to ignore the issue (Everlasting Rations flavored with Prestidigitation, anyone?).
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2018-04-23, 03:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
I use differently colored plastic beads to count rations. Everytime characters eat, players hand me some of the beads, and every time they stock up rations, I hand some beads to them.
I use a similar method to track hit points. When a character is wounded, I give red beads to a player, and as the character heals, they hand beads back to me.
The point of the bead counting in both cases is the same: available resources define possible move space. If you're wounded, you can't jump through a window or survive inclement weather; if you're short on rations, you can't take a detour through the forest or camp ten days in the middle of nowhere.
People here who say "player characters are seasoned adventures so they can be assumed..." deserve a whop on the head. Calculating supplies per day is easy on the level of "I literally teach third graders to do this in real life". Because of this, it makes a good category flr gameable decisions. Basically any player can make informed decisions on the level of "well if we go that route we only need supplies for N days, but in case something comes up we should double that" etc..
At the same time, it's easy to get across stakes of failure, and easy for in-game events to demonstrate whether a plan is good or bad. With just a short initial period of learning via trial and error, players can learn how to make decisions like seasoned adventurers, giving them the satisfaction of improving in the game. That all goes away if you just assume the characters do this with no input from the players.
Keeping track of supplies in favor of making assumptions also allows for roleplaying bad decision making in a defined way, if gambling and playing to lose are not foreign concepts to you."It's the fate of all things under the sky,
to grow old and wither and die."
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2018-04-23, 05:21 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
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2018-04-23, 05:46 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
In real life it's very important to keep track of your food rations. When I go shopping I generally buy for the next week. For 3rd graders to learn this is wonderful. However, I'm playing a game. Minutiae of that detail isn't a necessary thing. Adhering to realism can only go so far before it interferes with the fun of playing.
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2018-04-23, 05:53 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
Bag of what?
Sounds like magic. Burn the witch!
In all seriousness, buying a bag of holding or magic item that generates food/ammunition/spell components/spare limbs is a decent sign that the group isn't interested in tracking it. Of course, some settings don't have such items
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2018-04-23, 06:10 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
Suppose that, halfway through the desert of really long, hot days, a sandstorm blows through that disorients the party and they're now -lost- in the desert of really long, hot days. Suddenly, how much food they actually brought matters quite a lot. They very much -can- get part way through the journey and discover they didn't bring enough if circumstances change. In a high magic world, the number of circumstance changers rises pretty sharply compared to more low-magic settings.
Either you're pupuing an idea that you have a particular distaste for, which is a perfectly valid position but not a universal one, or an idea you're having trouble wrapping your head around. Which is it?I am not seaweed. That's a B.
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2018-04-23, 06:19 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
Counting beads is not that far, especially not when it is tied to interesting events within the game. And things which would be disastrous in real life, such as rations running out on a week-long hike, can be exciting challenges in a game.
Saying that such minutiae "isn't necessary" is missing the point. Neither is tracking injury necessary. But when tracked to appropriate level of detail, it expands the space of gameable decisions. Knowing whether or not you can jump out of the second-story window and run away creates tension and defines available strategies when you're dueling in the top floor of a tavern; just as well does whether or not your stack of rations will last long enough to go around an enemy encampment. In both cases, assuming competence removes player agency. In both cases, not assuming anything creates a chance for the player to fail, but it also creates chance for the player to succeed on their own skill and feel the satisfaction of having made the correct choice."It's the fate of all things under the sky,
to grow old and wither and die."
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2018-04-23, 06:36 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
It depends entirely on the game. If you're playing Torchbearer then there are very explicit rules for how much space rations take, how much they cost, how quickly you go through them, and what happens when you run out. It's fun because the game is specifically designed around it.
In other sorts of games it doesn't matter at all.
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2018-04-23, 07:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
I generally assume the group can (and does) buy, forage or hunt food for the next 3 days, unless they are in a region where obtaining food is particularly difficult, like a desert, abandoned city, sewer maze, etc.
I don't even bother to keep track of ordinary ammo, for the most part.Homebrew Stuff:- Lemmy's Custom Weapon Generation System! - (D&D 3.X and PF)
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2018-04-23, 08:04 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
How much minutia you keep track of is very dependent on the style of game you're playing. A hexcrawl is very focused on wilderness survival, so wilderness survival elements will be important. A game focused around political intrigue, on the other hand? Not so much.
Also, though, I think there's an important distinction between "survival elements" and "tracking rations." As you've said, the point of the exercise isn't bookkeeping for the sake of bookkeeping, but to add an element of tension. To create situations where the unexpected happens and suddenly starvation becomes a concern. And keeping track of individual supplies is certainly one way to do that... but there are plenty of others, at varying levels of abstraction, and which level you prefer to use will vary from group to group and system to system.Last edited by Grod_The_Giant; 2018-04-23 at 08:04 PM.
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2018-04-23, 08:13 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
After reading this thread, I realize that I'm in the minority when it comes to this topic. Myself, going all the way back to BECMI, I always enjoyed the minutiae of tracking every single solitary cn of weight. Ammo, food, water, individual articles of clothing, spell components... whatever. I figure I must have been a logistician in a past life. I also never picked on anyone else, as a DM or a player, for NOT being that way.
One of the reasons that TTRPGs will always be so near and dear to my heart is that there is something in it for everyone.
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2018-04-23, 09:37 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
If my DM advertised the game as a dungeon crawl and it turned into a survival game, I probably wouldn't come back next session. I showed up because I wanted to play one of the people ransacking the dungeon for loot, not some fool lost in the desert.
Youre correct, circumstances can change. But when the DM says "a giant roc came out of nowhere and ate your water-carrying mount. You have three days of water left. What do you do?" then that's just contriving a problem for the sake of making us do more work that we aren't interested in. Managing resources like food should be done before the expedition sets out, if its necessary to handle it all. The only time it should have to actually come up after leaving town is if the players knowingly and deliberately set out with fewer resources than would take them to their destination and decide to just play it by ear.“Evil is evil. Lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I'm not a pious hermit, I haven't done only good in my life. But if I'm to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.”
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2018-04-23, 10:30 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
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2018-04-23, 10:40 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
While high magic may have more "circumstance changers," it's low-magic settings where those circumstances will matter more.
In high magic settings you can be taken from your comfortable village and the attendant support network and suddenly find yourself upon a sea of lava on the elemental plane of fire. No amount of rigorous bookkeeping of supplies is going to help you in that situation because your supplies are all gone. You better be able to function without your train precisely because circumstances can change so drastically, and high-magic settings provide you the tools to do that for precisely that reason.
Low-magic, well, go on a hike out in the true wilderness where you are days away from another soul and out of communication and, while you aren't as liable to find yourself in an environment actively hostile to all earthly life (if you're in Yellowstone when it goes, that's another matter), a little thing like an unexpected hole in the ground can make a nature retreat into a full-blown survival situation.
The whole point of having magic in the first place is to solve mundane problems, so it makes sense that the more magic there is, the easier it is to overcome or ignore those problems.
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2018-04-23, 11:00 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
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2018-04-23, 11:11 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
See there you go with presuppositions again. Who said it was advertised as a dungeon crawl and not just general adventuring? Sometimes dungeons open into the underdark too, btw. If all you want out of the game is old-school dungeon-crawling, that's fine. That's not the whole of the available game with any number of systems and you may have to compromise unless you have an established group that also wants to stick to dungeon crawling.
Youre correct, circumstances can change. But when the DM says "a giant roc came out of nowhere and ate your water-carrying mount. You have three days of water left. What do you do?" then that's just contriving a problem for the sake of making us do more work that we aren't interested in. Managing resources like food should be done before the expedition sets out, if its necessary to handle it all. The only time it should have to actually come up after leaving town is if the players knowingly and deliberately set out with fewer resources than would take them to their destination and decide to just play it by ear.I am not seaweed. That's a B.
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2018-04-24, 01:20 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
Which is fair - on the other hand, if the game turned into a dungeon crawl when that wasn't explicitly the structure I'd be similarly likely to bail. Different games interest different people, and both of these are in the category of resource management which is emphatically not what I play RPGs for (outside of very occasionally going way against type0.
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2018-04-24, 02:34 AM (ISO 8601)
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2018-04-24, 03:30 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
No, they're pretty much equivalent. In both cases you're telling the players what to prepare for. Giving out that information ahead of time is reasonable in some circumstances, but not in others.
And if you decide to storm the BBEG's lair you should try to figure how many enemies you'll fight and plan accordingly. But then do you play out the events or simply assume that everything goes according to plan?
And some of enjoy the hex crawls that you keep disparaging. Can't you simply say that the logistics part of the game isn't what you enjoy without the negative characterizations?
What do you consider playing out the journey to entail?
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2018-04-24, 04:35 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
They aren't.
Look, Napoleon knew how far it was to Moscow. He had a good idea of the time it would take to get there under normal circumstances. He did not know, nor could he know, where and when and how often the Russians would fight him.
It would be insane for the DM to say "Expect to fight 30 orcs, two trolls, some Kobolds who will just trap everything and snipe at you, and the cleric of Nerul with his minions." That's waaaaay more information than "The mountain is three days travel from the city."
Random encounters, social encounters, side quests, non combat challenges like crossing rivers or whatever.
There are plenty of things to meet on the way to the dark Tower than do not involve me knowing how many pounds of salt pork we're carrying.
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2018-04-24, 04:49 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
It doesn't have to be "minutiae", and it isn't about adhering to realism. It is about adding time pressure and another failure state. Do you also have problems with adventures where you are on a time limit? "You have 30 days until the BBEG finish hos ritual", is tracking days in this scenario also minutiae?
"You have 30 days of rations, find the MacGuffin before you run out" is the same setup, and that's a situation when it's a point to track rations. If you are of no risk running out of food, you don't track rations, the same way you don't track days if time doesn't matter.
Have you played the semi-cooperative (traitor) board game Battlestar Galactica? There you have to try escape from some robots with your spaceship, and if you run out of either Fuel, Food, Morale or Population, you lose. Balancing the different resources, avoiding multiple failure states is fun! I can imagine for example a hypothetical Mad Max rpg, where running out of either HP, Water or Petrol makes you lose. Tracking those resources doesn't have to be unfun minutiae.
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2018-04-24, 05:47 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
That's just one scenario, one where you wouldn't necessarily bother to track rations. So what? That doesn't preclude other scenarios. Look, when Stanley went searching for Dr. Livingstone, he had a good idea of how many Doctors he was looking for. He did not know his exact location and exactly how many days he would need.
It would be insane for the DM to say "Expect to fight 30 orcs, two trolls, some Kobolds who will just trap everything and snipe at you, and the cleric of Nerul with his minions." That's waaaaay more information than "The mountain is three days travel from the city."
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2018-04-24, 05:57 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
They are.
They're equivalent. That doesn't mean that knowing one tells you the other. Spies, informants, tracking, prisoner interrogations, and divination are all tools that PCs can use. If you investigate thoroughly you should be able to get a good estimate of the opposition you'll face, some of the time. Just as you should also be able to predict how long the adventure will last, some of the time.
It would also be insane for the DM to say, "the goblins you've been tracking are going to travel north for six days across the moors to the Brown Hills, then turn northeast for two days to the edge of the forest, where their home base is located, but you'll catch them about half a day before they get there." That's a lot more information than, "there are fifteen sets of goblin footprints."
There are also plenty of things to meet that don't involve knowing how many potion of healing you're carrying. Do you not track any consumables at all, or is it only food that bothers you?
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2018-04-24, 07:32 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
For that one particular adventure arc that's fun. As a universal every adventure every game it's not.
I see your Battlestar Galactica and raise you The Walking Dead. There is a story where keeping track of food is very important, an absolute necessity for survival. Indeed, an episode or two will happen where getting food and supplies is the whole or part of the episode plot. There will be a scene of people worrying. Key words though: an episode or two. It is not every episode. In the comics, it's not every issue. It's acknowledged, it's done, then they move on to other interesting things and don't talk about food rations running out at all. It was potent for that one scene to see the young girl eat a turtle to "Just Survive Somehow". It was not necessary to see her hunt for some animal every day.
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2018-04-24, 07:48 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
No disagreement here either. I'm just reacting to the seemingly dogmatic claims people make asserting that tracking rations can never be fun and comparing it to other inconsequential stuff. Sometimes it can be important, but quite often not. In fact, I usually never track rations myself, due to the type of games I normally play. But I have no problem imagining games where it would be fun, particulary survival expeditions into unknown territories.
On the topic of The Walking Dead, I also have the board game Dead of Winter, where you run a colony of survivors after a zombie apocalypse, trying to survive through winter scavenging for enough fuel, food and medicine (with a potential traitor in the group). Come to think of it, I also prefer Agricola to Caverna, because I like the extra stress and tension you have to feed your family every harvest. Some players hate it, though.
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2018-04-24, 08:16 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
So? You're still missing the point. No mechanic I know of has been proven to be "universally fun thing", nor is "fun" the sole justification for a game design element. (Losing is rarely fun, but risk of genuine loss often makes victory sweeter.) What you say here could as well apply to any mechanized game element.
"It's the fate of all things under the sky,
to grow old and wither and die."
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2018-04-24, 10:30 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
I don't really understand what's being argued here.
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2018-04-24, 11:44 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
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2018-04-24, 11:52 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: "Iron Rations"
Anyone remember the old Knights of the Dinner Table where BA gets the DM's Companion he wrote for his TRS-64 (no, not TRS-80... an older model), and is able to start keeping track of things like "You are not eating enough calories, and so your character begins to suffer malnutrition"?
The Cranky Gamer
*It isn't realism, it's verisimilitude; the appearance of truth within the framework of the game.
*Picard management tip: Debate honestly. The goal is to arrive at the truth, not at your preconception.
*Mutant Dawn for Savage Worlds!
*The One Deck Engine: Gaming on a budget
Written by Me on DriveThru RPG
There are almost 400,000 threads on this site. If you need me to address a thread as a moderator, include a link.