So, I've been thinking about the systems that have largely gone by the wayside with modern fantasy games where day-to-day necessities (food, water) are either absent completely or are just a box to tick off. Sure, some people still track this stuff, and maybe track torches/lanterns & oil and whatnot. And pretty much once you buy your starting gear, that's basically it. Now there have been some attempts to add elements such as Standard of Living, to track consumption of resources when outside the dungeon, though I feel that this basically means the characters are otherwise shiftless louts who have no job. The old Secondary Skills system sort of compensated for this, though it didn't really give any means for non-discretionary spending (like how much you earned from such endeavors and how much you owed for living). There was no source of actual income outside of dungeon adventuring (and yes, these games weren't built on non-adventuring aspects, though they could be added).

Rules wise, there isn't much difference between Standard Rations and Iron Rations (or Trail Rations). Extended periods of eating the latter doesn't really impact the character at all. No chance of scurvy or dysentery (no Oregon Trail pop up to tell you how you croaked). Hell, nothing to show absolute discontent with eating hardtack, preserved meat and dried vegetables endlessly. While I am not proposing (necessarily) something that either rewards or penalizes characters for eating food that tastes yummy or like a dead skunk's arse, depending upon the type, there should be SOMETHING.

The same goes with standard gear. How long is that shield you brought with you as a starting character gonna last? At some point, the boss is gonna get dented beyond repair or the leather bindings are gonna give out. That trusty Arming Sword is gonna get dull or notched or simply break. Mail is gonna have links pop or rust. Brigandine or Lamellar is gonna de-laminate and will need to be fixed. Cuir Bouli leather armor is gonna get holes in it that you can't simply sew up. Your clothes, Aketon or even Gambeson, are gonna rot or simply fall apart. Your boots are gonna have a hole in them. Etc.

Of course, physical exertion is going to require you up your calories. The standard amount of food your average clerk in a Keep needs to stay healthy is gonna be WAY different than what your average Man-at-Arms would need while adventuring. Presumably Iron Rations are gonna be a more calorically dense foodstuff, something like the real world's pemmican or Tolkien's Lembas and Miruvor of the Elves (and analogues carried by the Dúnedain). However, other than Lembas, you're gonna get REAL SICK, REAL QUICK, of meals with nothing but pemmican, hard bread, pickled foods (sauerkraut, etc), hard cheese and water. 

And, of course, all this crap players are hauling around requires encumbrance. A smart adventurer (even at first level) should get either a Mule, Pony or Donkey and hire a few Porters (if for nothing else than hauling the crap you find in the dungeon OUT).

There has got to be a better way to skin a cat.

Greetings!

Insightful thread!

I agree. In my own Thandor world, I generally apply a Disadvantage for all Player Characters dealing with Social Checks, and Resist Disease Checks, after 1D6+2 weeks of living and traveling, surviving on a constant diet of trail rations, hard bread, moldy cheese, and such like. That gives a three week minimum, and an 8-week maximum effect range. Eating and living just on trail rations and such has a huge impact on you--and that impact grows in scale the longer you must endure it.

In a similar manner, I apply Disadvantage on Morale Checks and various performance-related activities whenever the characters have been operating with worn clothing, gear, armour, and weapons. Constantly having to adjust weak straps, readjust buckles, constantly cleaning and seeking to repair gear that is weakened, worn, and damaged--it holds up under stress and action also progressively worse as time goes on. Dealing with all of that places a mental, physical, and emotional tax on Player Characters. Every day, they need to do *more* just to function at a minimum level.

That all makes replacing damaged gear and even worn, stressed clothing--and repairing or replacing entirely various items of armour and weapons a fairly regular necessity.

If my Players try and slide on this, the penalties, frustration, and inconveniences grow and increase over time. Hence, most of them, are pretty good about maintaining their gear, clothing, armour and weapons on a regular basis. They already know to expect added and additional expenses. Adventuring puts *even more* stress on their gear. Traveling, climbing, digging, fighting Orcs and Trolls. Being drenched in rain and fog, and scorched by the blasting rays of the sun.

They always have plenty of business to attend to whenever they go to a village or town, especially.

I also lament how much of the details and hardship of traveling and surviving out in the wilderness is mostly *handwaviumed* aside in modern gaming.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

I agree these elements could use more focus. It's hard balance to strike with keeping it playable. A lot of stuff like lifestyle costs and weight-based encumbrance were practically difficult to enforce at the table beyond bare-minimum common sense, so it often ended up being a de facto honor system. That made it hard to retain these issues as conscious factors to influence decisions during play. So there's some streamlining I do, but I try to maintain the basic representation of the problem to make it easier for me to actually enforce from the GM side of the screen. Here is what I do, YMMV.

I allow players to sink their money into a pool representing their standard of living. When you hit different thresholds, you advance to the next standard of living (using the level progression chart numbers). Standard of living affects a character's healing rate (I strictly limit healing magic), and it also represents the quality of their shelter (including in the field), their warmth and security, their food, and their clothes for the purpose of RP. You don't pay for these things out of pocket anymore on a recurring basis, but you can pay extra to temporarily raise your living standard (the expenditure is then lost). You can get the money back, but at a really lousy exchange rate and you have to at least liquidate all of your belongings down to the last level's starting point. If you stay a pauper, you probably won't live long because that deep wound never heals quite right.

I use a form of slot encumbrance. A set of rations takes up a slot and lasts 1d6 days for a single character (they can be rationed in a pinch to roll twice and take the higher result for duration). Rations are a little more expensive as a result. I don't track the distinction between iron rations and standard rations. You can burn a ration to light a torch or lantern, and that fuel lasts for 1d6 hours.

I have a simple durability system for equipment. Save-or-destroy on most items if they're put under strain, but armor, weapons, shields get 3 strikes before they're broken under strain. Failures on a relevant check ticks a strike on the associated gear (I have players roll to defend, not just static defense). Salvaged gear has 1d3-1 ticks remaining (might be broken when the players pick it up). Players can roll craft to fix/repair damage with the right tools. In most cases we assume damage is stuff like glinting on a sword or a slight bend in a shield that can be fixed with portable tools. Once something's broken, no fixing it until back in town and rolls with the item have penalties. If it loses ticks after it's broken, it's utterly destroyed and unsalvageable.

For water, I just track access to water. After 1d6 days without access to water, your waterskin and other reserves run dry. After 1d6 more days (minimum 3 normally), you are dead. Roll again and take the lower if exerting yourself and/or in hot environs.

Quote from: Insane Nerd Ramblings on February 28, 2024, 11:45:29 PM
There has got to be a better way to skin a cat.

It's a pain to track every little common consumable, and after a few sessions, it falls into the mode of it being assumed that everyone has their supplies and uses them so they can get on with the Adventuring part of the adventure. I generally don't have a problem with that. It's almost in the realm of tracking which character has taken a shit lately. It's something that can impact an adventure (going into the woods to poop puts a character in a vulnerable situation) but is the juice worth the squeeze?

The prominent exception, of course, is when supplies and encumbrance become an issue because of circumstance and/or environment. Players gonna be much more interested in encumbrance and hydration and how much water weighs when their characters are lost in the desert...

Slot-based encumbrance goes a long way to making daily provisions easily tracked. My group uses such a system, where 1 day's worth of food is one "slot". They love tracking it, and take staying fed very seriously.

I use a reward system for daily upkeep: a character that got enough food, water, and sleep gets some extra HP for the next day. (I only get into punitive measures if the lack continues for multiple days.)

For general gear I'm toying with implementation of a system where "critical" rolls of the dice result in gear damage: to the attacker's gear in the case of critical failure, and to the defender's gear in the case of critical success. Then gear would have a "quality" rating that affects its efficacy and eventually destroys it. But this of course adds a whole new dimension of fiddly to gear tracking -- now everything has a weight and a condition to keep up with.

Like the other replies, the first thing is to recognize that you can't make this stuff meaningful in a vacuum.  There has to be other changes to the system so that having/not having the stuff is a decision with real consequences.

I went rather extreme with it for my system, and I'm still pulling back slightly ever rules revision to try to hit that balance of getting most of the good effects with minimal handling time.  Right now I have the following factors:

- Magic is relatively weak, especially in healing. It can't do much in the way of food, except enhance foraging skills. The power to use it recovers slowly (think weeks, not days to go from "out" to "full"). It's mainly used for spot healing or saving someone that can't be saved any other way. Natural healing is relatively generous (though since I have the "health points" broken up into two tracks, the "life" track is more hard to recover).  Characters with plenty of food, shelter, rest, etc. and a few levels under their belt can heal a lot of damage naturally. When those factors are lacking, it slows to a trickle, and can eventually shut off entirely when the situation is really awful. Eating extra food can provide a little boost to the natural healing during the day.

- Food and water are appropriately heavy compared to a lot of other gear.  I've got a 3-tiered encumbrance system where some things always count (armor, most weapons, food, water, etc.), others only count when stacked (torches, knives, etc.), and many things aren't tracked at all, but baked into the assumptions of the system (empty sacks, spare change, vials, etc.)  The net effect is that stuff in the first category adds up fast, since it's encumbrance is a little inflated to account for all the stuff that isn't being counted.  Until someone gets into the last "heavy" category of encumbrance, the effects are mainly on distance travel, not tactical. 

- While some food is cheap and plentiful, "trail rations" are much more expensive. Since money is scarce through the first third of the character levels, it's not something to spend on lightly. Standard rations are great for short jaunts, but they spoil.  If you got into a dungeon or swamp or fall into water or any other such environmental factors, they spoil by the time you get back to town.  There's no putting a ration on your sheet and forgetting about it for months.  (The players are very careful to use standard rations first.)

- To keep the food and water accounting from getting too onerous, it's done on a "party" level, not individual characters.  For a typical party, one heavy ration feeds the entire party for a day. Someone gets to mark it off and not carry it anymore.  If the party has a lot of hirelings or other help, they need their own rations.  I keep this deliberately loose, not caring whether the party has 5 PCs or 10 PCs.  The in-game assumption is that everyone carrying some food is eating a little of what they carry, so that if the party gets separated, it's assumed to be proportional. We just don't track it that way, since most of the time it doesn't matter who is carrying the remaining food. 

- I have slightly generous but grounded travel rules, abstracted for ease of use but with effects that come out somewhat in the vicinity of reality. Encumbrance penalties act just like terrain.  So hauling a medium load over the plains is like hauling a light load through the woods.  And if for some reason you want to haul a heavy load out of a thick swamp, you pace slows to a crawl. Which wouldn't matter much at all, except ...

- I use wandering monsters, and they rarely provide any experience. I have a system in place for getting lost, with some teeth to it.

- As for equipment wear, that I keep more general. Shields can block some critical hit damage, at the chance of breaking.  Other than that, I go by assumption that anyone with the weapon repair kit is using it to keep their gear in good condition. There are a few exceptions, some more obvious than others.  Magic and falls can break things. Using something in a non-standard way can break it. Many characters need to use silvered or bronze weapons at times, and of course those can be temporarily put out of commission. Barring things like that, it's situational.  If you have to flee your camp into the wilderness and leave your pack behind, then you don't have your repair kit anymore. At that point, I start adjudicating for rust and other issues. I don't so much want to track tick boxes every day for this aspect as to have a basis for the rulings should the players find themselves in a situation where they can't do the routine maintenance.

All I really want is that for the players to care about this stuff enough to include it in their plans. It's the combination of all these things that makes that happen, not simply dumping some esoteric rules on the tracking itself.

The devil is in the details. Getting too much into the details can get to the point to where it feels more like resource management.

That can get boring as a player.

It's finding the balance is the tough part.

For me, I'm at the point in my DMing to where I keep it pretty loose and will only play up the resources (food and water primarily) for dramatic effect in the game.

I'm done with dealing with the actual count of your food, water, and torches.

But if you can do that without bogging down the flow of the game, more power to you.

For encumbrance, I only track treasure. A PC can carry a "reasonable" amount of gear plus 1200 coins +/- depending on strength. Borrowed from this guy:

https://smolderingwizard.wordpress.com/2019/01/17/simplified-encumbrance-for-odd-and-clones/

Unreasonable amount of gear reduces your 1200 coin capacity by steps of 300. 1-6 torches is reasonable, more reduces your coin capacity. 1-2 weapons plus a dagger/knife is reasonable. I let fighters carry 3 weapons without penalty.

Special treasure (goblets, plates, etc.). Are discounted 50-99% compared to coins because some of the value is in the artistry.

As that blog says, players track treasure very closely, so this system tricks them into tracking encumbrance at the same time. The only wishy-wishy bit is what counts as "reasonable," but that's easy to rule. It's common sense adventuring gear.

So far, this is the best system I've found for my table. It's simple enough and it works when it matters.

The old early 80s TSR character sheets (we always used either the 'Goldenrod' ones or the 'Permanent Character Record' sheets that came with a pad of blue general use character sheets) always had a section for condition of weapon and armor on them and I took that to mean it was a quasi rule that armor would deteriorate - In the early 1980s I never played the 20 = double damage house rule (still don't), but I did house rule that a 20 rolled by a monster against the player cause the armor to degrade by 1 point of AC. It was never popular with players, so I stopped using it 

A lot of people for forget that AD&D has an upkeep rule that scales with character level that represents an adventurer's cost of living. 100gp per level per month. This assumes covering basic food & lodging when not adventuring, equipment maintenance, and resupply of ordinary consumables such as oil, torches, rope, spikes, etc. The only times I bother carefully tracking such resources is when the characters are stuck in a place where resupply is difficult or impossible. Long wilderness treks without a trading post anywhere means that the party has to rely on what they brought with them or can gather from nature. In a lot of circumstances when adventuring near villages or towns, I just make sure the cash is deducted every month and that the party has adequate supplies.

A few random thoughts:

- Tried hiking with 20 lbs for an hour and it was harder than I though
- Carrying a number of sword-sized items equal to STR has worked very well in my games.
- I use 100 coins = 1 item, but IMMV.

I've spent much time thinking and reading upon these issues - Food/Water/Gear/Enc - over the many years and here's what I have learned.

1) Players don't like to concern themselves with these issues. As a GM, you're lucky if they count arrows or bullets. No player ever said "I really enjoy how our GM keeps track of how deteriorated our gear has gotten!"

2) There's no GREAT system for tabletop gaming to accurately track all these various things. Either the systems are highly abstract or full of minutiae or inaccurate to what makes sense in the real world. If we start talking about the few "good systems" for resource management, the convo will collapse quickly into just personal preferences.

3) Nobody is excited about resource management as a campaign focus, not even the GM. While it could be the focus of a single adventure (hey guys, we're in a desert and we only have 3 days of water!), unless those are life & death resources, players want the GM to handwave those issues to get to the exciting part of the story. 

4) These issues rarely are notable after 3rd level. Higher level PCs have enough cash to toss around buying all new magical gear as an afterthought. Overland travel is often with caravans of NPCs who handle all the non-exciting parts.

My only suggestion to GMs is use resource management for drama when it makes sense. AKA, we've been shipwrecked on a cold and arid island! How do we survive?

Players don't like character death, but removing the possibility makes for a worse game. Tracking anything at all may not be exiting or enjoyable, but doing so does lead to engaging decisions and additional challenges to overcome.

Quote from: Wisithir on March 02, 2024, 11:33:55 PM
Players don't like character death, but removing the possibility makes for a worse game. Tracking anything at all may not be exiting or enjoyable, but doing so does lead to engaging decisions and additional challenges to overcome.

Moreover, players care about meaningful choices.  If you make them track every arrow and it never matters because they can always restock well before running out, and the encumbrance system is so loose that archers can carry 3 quivers without trouble, and then their friends can carry a few spares just in case--then they'll hate it, because it is pointless.  OTOH, if their is some minimal system in place for arrows running out (whether simple tracking or more abstract) and encumbrance limits bite, then they'll still gripe a bit about it, but at the same time they'll make comments such as, "Like how tactical this is?" or even "Like that I had to decide which was more important, more arrows or more food."  (Actual comments I have had in the last couple of months by experienced players new to my game.)  All it takes is a couple of players to get what you are saying, and the rest will go with it. 

It's difficult to get that if ammo is all that is tracked, too, because then there isn't any real reason why allies can't carry extra arrows.  Likewise on levels and money.  The game has to make equipment somewhat harder to get, and not evaporate all the issues with magic and a flood of gold by level 2. 

I've found the Forbidden Lands system of tracking consumables like ammunition and ammunition to be a good mix of having to record it but also being meaningful in game.  I don't see why someone wouldn't be able to transfer it to a d20 style system instead of the d6 dice pool it originated with (other than the very different encumbrance rules between the systems).   I plan on using a variation of it with my own WIP ruleset.  Basically, you have step dice worth of the resources and rolling low drops your supply down to the next lowest die until you run out.  You can of course hunt/forage instead of using your resources but that takes up another resource (time) and comes with a risk both of failure and danger in the wilderness potentially.

One a "acktually" note about the scurvy mentioned in the original post, as long as you're supplementing your diet with fresh raw organ meat (assumedly from hunting) or dried fruit in the rations then it shouldn't be an issue.  It's why people living in arctic conditions aren't all suffering from it despite a lack of fresh fruits and vegetables most of the year.  Alot of animals other than humans make their own vitamin C in their livers so as long as we in turn eat them fresh (uncooked) then we're fine.