Smoke can be reduced by using dry firewood, avoiding green wood, and allowing airflow. If magic is available, you might use some low-level wind manipulation to keep the smoke under control.

One trick I've been wanting to do for a while is using alchemy or magic to change the fire's color to a deep red or violet. Red light has a higher wavelength, so it's less visible from longer distances.

Quote from: Mishihari on July 11, 2021, 01:06:16 PM
I went with a very simple reason for my game.  In order to recover health from a rest you need adequate food, water, heat, protection from the elements, and so on.  If you need heat or you need to cook your food, you need a fire.

Sure. In D&Dish games though, PCs will usually have magical healing. So they're happy to live a rather shitty lifestyle otherwise. Which is kind of counterintuitive, since instant availability of water, food, heat or cooling and entertainment hasn't made modern Westerner exactly stoically spartan, has it?

I'm toying with the idea of a more realistic-themed D&D. In this you'd max out at 3 hit dice of hit points, higher levels would allow you to reroll with the extra dice (eg 4th level fighter rolls 4d10 and keeps 3 highest, 8th level rolls 8d10 and keeps 3 highest, etc). Magic would be slower, for example Cure Light Wounds means poultices and things, and you get the HP back overnight rather than instantly.

In this kind of world, having a campfire or not would be a serious choice. If you're a typical 5th level D&D party, not so much, usually.

It's a given that it doesn't make sense to try to have meaningful mechanics about campfires in a game world if low-level wizards can just create extraplanar spaces to camp in.

In my D&D-like system, I've set it up so that magic doesn't recover nearly so well without the food and shelter.  It's not slots or mana points but you can think of it in those terms for comparison to D&D.  Moreover, the magic is geared to normally take about a week to fully recover.  So what you get overnight is not dependable and not full.  Having good food and shelter improves your chances.

I did this specifically to counteract the tendency of magic to not make food and rest matter so much at higher levels. 

Campfires are the default, as you note.  If it bothers you, assume that incredibly spiteful wizards with long memories reach high levels and then go back over their old haunts to every place where they had their rest ruined by nighttime ambushes, and set up long-lived night-time traps with Continual Flame tailored to mimic a campfire, persistent illusions of sleeping adventurers, and Explosive Runes everywhere, and that the random encounter roll isn't for whether the orc patrol can see the campfire from miles away or not, but if they think it's worth the risk to approach.

The other big reason for having a campfire is one I'm not sure how to make important in an RPG - just being able to see after sundown.  Light is handwaved in most RPGs in actual play and sometimes in the rules as well.    If you can't see it's hard to do maintenance and you're at a big disadvantage in a night time attack where your enemies can see well in the dark.  Without a light you're pretty much done for the day when the sun goes down.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron on July 11, 2021, 05:43:57 AM
If you want to give them a negative for having a campfire etc, you need to give them a positive to explain why anyone would do it.

So you can have things like a comfortable night's sleep gives you a +1 to Constitution to the next day, and hot food +1 to Strength, a scop/bard's song gives +1 to Wisdom, that sort of thing.

Certainly if there are hirelings and men-at-arms, the conditions ought to affect their morale and loyalty. It's not just gold, after all, what will people use gold for? Making life comfortable.

Most people don't realise just how much you need to carry if you're carrying everything you need, and how long it takes to set up camp etc. This video goes into the gear carried.

  I guess most people dont go do hike in camping with their kids.  Having done it, you really understand that any adventurer who can afford it is going to have pack animals or porters, or both. 

Quote from: oggsmash on July 12, 2021, 04:16:27 PM
  I guess most people dont go do hike in camping with their kids.  Having done it, you really understand that any adventurer who can afford it is going to have pack animals or porters, or both. 

Definitely.  I've done hiking/camping with my son for scouts, and even with modern lightweight tents, bags, stoves, etc, it gets pretty freakin' heavy after a few miles.  Especially up steep hills and over sand.

Quote from: Mishihari on July 12, 2021, 05:00:29 PM

Quote from: oggsmash on July 12, 2021, 04:16:27 PM
  I guess most people dont go do hike in camping with their kids.  Having done it, you really understand that any adventurer who can afford it is going to have pack animals or porters, or both. 

Definitely.  I've done hiking/camping with my son for scouts, and even with modern lightweight tents, bags, stoves, etc, it gets pretty freakin' heavy after a few miles.  Especially up steep hills and over sand.

A lot of that weight is conveniences and comforts for modern standards, rather than necessities. The same goes for campfires. People can live for quite a while on preserved foods like pemmican, and especially if there is moonlight, eyesight is good enough for practical purposes.

If the characters are trying to sneak behind enemy lines or similar, then I think not lighting campfires would be reasonable and practical. On the other hand, normal travel shouldn't be that dangerous. I try not to punish players for behaving in normal ways to keep their lives comfortable.

Quote from: jhkim on July 12, 2021, 05:34:32 PM
A lot of that weight is conveniences and comforts for modern standards, rather than necessities.

Well, the way I see it, most medieval villagers never went more than twenty miles from their home village - a day's walk, doss down in the next village's inn or someone's kitchen in front of their fire, walk home the next day. Going further than that would mean some long-term discomfort and hardship. If there were better convenience and comforts available, then more of them would have gone further from home!

The closest we have in our modern world to adventurers is the army. And even those guys are pretty well-supplied. Still I think I can say that adventuring really would be a miserable business, most of the time.

So if you did take some of those conveniences and comforts, the morale of your hirelings and men-at-arms would be a lot higher.

It's possible to know a lot about medieval life and also NOT know a lot.

Pilgrimages, and not just to the Holy Land were definitely a thing and not just for nobles.  If you have Platemail, you should probably have pilgrim travelers.  Canterbury Tales was 1392.  Santiago de Compestela became a pilgrimage site in the 800s.  If a sick grandma with boils on her bottom could make the trek, it wasn't as harsh as you might think.

Remember that History 'is written by the winners' and a lot of original scholarship was along the lines of 'things are pretty great now, even though we live in one-room row homes with no plumbing g or electricity.  I'm not saying that life was grand, but it wasn't perhaps as 'nasty, brutish, and shodt' as you've been led to believe.

Quote from: jhkim on July 12, 2021, 05:34:32 PM

Quote from: Mishihari on July 12, 2021, 05:00:29 PM

Quote from: oggsmash on July 12, 2021, 04:16:27 PM
  I guess most people dont go do hike in camping with their kids.  Having done it, you really understand that any adventurer who can afford it is going to have pack animals or porters, or both. 

Definitely.  I've done hiking/camping with my son for scouts, and even with modern lightweight tents, bags, stoves, etc, it gets pretty freakin' heavy after a few miles.  Especially up steep hills and over sand.

A lot of that weight is conveniences and comforts for modern standards, rather than necessities. The same goes for campfires. People can live for quite a while on preserved foods like pemmican, and especially if there is moonlight, eyesight is good enough for practical purposes.

If the characters are trying to sneak behind enemy lines or similar, then I think not lighting campfires would be reasonable and practical. On the other hand, normal travel shouldn't be that dangerous. I try not to punish players for behaving in normal ways to keep their lives comfortable.

Since I'm the one who packed and carried it, I can tell you that most of it I considered necessities.  Necessity is in the eye of the beholder though.  In warm weather you can certainly survive without a tent.  But being rained on some days, waking up wet from dew every day, and spending your morning all wet would be pretty awful.

And modern equipment is crazy better than back in the bad old days.  My hiking tent is 5 pounds.  If water is available I carry a 1 pound purifier rather than a gallon or so of actual water.

Quote from: deadDMwalking on July 12, 2021, 08:13:10 PM
It's possible to know a lot about medieval life and also NOT know a lot.

Pilgrimages, and not just to the Holy Land were definitely a thing and not just for nobles.  If you have Platemail, you should probably have pilgrim travelers.  Canterbury Tales was 1392.  Santiago de Compestela became a pilgrimage site in the 800s.  If a sick grandma with boils on her bottom could make the trek, it wasn't as harsh as you might think.

Remember that History 'is written by the winners' and a lot of original scholarship was along the lines of 'things are pretty great now, even though we live in one-room row homes with no plumbing g or electricity.  I'm not saying that life was grand, but it wasn't perhaps as 'nasty, brutish, and shodt' as you've been led to believe.

Greetings!

That's right, deadDMwalking. The pilgrimages--to many places throughout the land--often involved tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people, *every year*. There were entire industries and livelihoods established to specifically cater to the needs, desires, and expectations of hordes of traveling pilgrims. Taverns, roadside inns, relic merchants and peddlers of every kind of religious trinket, souvenir, and memorabilia. Ferries to cross rivers, watering stations, even smaller shrines and celebrated locations of "St. Hippo's Epic Journeys, who stayed here, and healed people here!" and the like. I certainly think that many of your more *isolated* rural folk may have lived very isolated lives, but there is significant evidence that a lot more people--ordinary people--not just nobles and rich merchants, engaged in considerably more travel than many people once believed.

I'm fond of "Nasty, Brutish, and Short!" though! Lots of wallowing in mud, sleeping with pigs and chickens, and dying young!

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: Kyle Aaron on July 12, 2021, 07:21:20 PM

Quote from: jhkim on July 12, 2021, 05:34:32 PM
A lot of that weight is conveniences and comforts for modern standards, rather than necessities.

Well, the way I see it, most medieval villagers never went more than twenty miles from their home village - a day's walk, doss down in the next village's inn or someone's kitchen in front of their fire, walk home the next day. Going further than that would mean some long-term discomfort and hardship. If there were better convenience and comforts available, then more of them would have gone further from home!

The closest we have in our modern world to adventurers is the army. And even those guys are pretty well-supplied. Still I think I can say that adventuring really would be a miserable business, most of the time.

So if you did take some of those conveniences and comforts, the morale of your hirelings and men-at-arms would be a lot higher.

I have a bunch of quibbles about this - but I agree with the core point that realistically, adventuring would be a miserable business. However, if the GM sets out to make adventuring miserable for the characters, that can detract rather than enhance the experience of the game.

I think the simplest route is just to skip all the details that make travel miserable. If I want to push more realism and have the PCs take wagon trains and caravans to supply long journeys, I try my best to make it fun for them rather than a constant drag of nitpicking them with details and vulnerabilities.

In practice, I've seen a lot of GMs push back if players try to have an expedition with lots of porters, pack animals, and other support characters for them -- because it comes across as unheroic and breaks assumptions.

Quote from: jhkim on July 12, 2021, 08:42:09 PMif the GM sets out to make adventuring miserable for the characters, that can detract rather than enhance the experience of the game.

It's just one of the things to consider when planning the expedition - and once it's done, generally it can be forgotten about at the game table.

QuoteIn practice, I've seen a lot of GMs push back if players try to have an expedition with lots of porters, pack animals, and other support characters for them -- because it comes across as unheroic and breaks assumptions.

Those GMs are dumb. We call it an adventuring campaign for a reason. There's a reason it's 30-300 bandits - someone's got to cook the gruel, after all.

Too many gamers have never read the AD&D1e Player's Handbook back section, from p.101 onwards. "THE ADVENTURE" first paragraph tells us to gather information and hire men-at-arms, get mounts and so on if we can.