"There are no rations," Kyliss shot back. "Daldreth was carrying all our food." She cast a deadly glare at the cleric, who was dusting himself off in the corner.
"Hey, if you guys hadn't taken your sweet time getting me out of that gelatinous cube, maybe we'd still have some rations left!" he shot back defensively. "Or if you guys carried some of the food, for a change..."
"We had a week's worth of rations. Your saying all of it's gone? What are we going to eat?"
Kyliss thought for a moment. "Well, we killed all those dire rats a few rooms back."
Daldreth pulled a face, but Folg lit up. "Now you're talking," the dwarf said. "Fresh meat! Daldreth, go get some of those R.O.U.S.es! I'll break some of this furniture up and get a fire going; this is a vaulted ceiling, there should be enough space for the smoke to go without smothering us all."
Kyliss rubbed her hands together decisively. "Right, I'll attach a rope to this bucket and draw some water from the well."
Daldreth turned. "A dungeon well? Do you want throat-leeches? Because that's how you get throat-leeches! No, I'll just cast create water."
"Into what? That gross-ass old barrel? It smells like someone stored jellied fish in it."
Kyliss sighed, walked over to the barrel, and cast prestidigitation. With a flick of her hand, a cloud of dust and unidentifiable ancient muck shot up out of it and splattered against the wall. "We're good."
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Food and drink should be important considerations for any adventuring party, because you need that stuff to live. But, like weight and encumbrance rules, such things are often neglected in favour of gameplay expediency. A lot of gaming groups feel that keeping track of rations is too 'simulationist' and slows things down or distracts from the fun. Well I'm here to champion the right of every PC to eat a square meal a day, and not just for the sake of realism.
Roleplaying
Making sure players keep track of food and drink encourages roleplaying. It gets players to think about their characters as real beings with actual needs, just like they have. It can even lead to exchanges like the story at the head of this column, which - while it involves no combat or traps or puzzles - is undoubtedly a roleplaying opportunity, which is by definition a part of gameplay in a roleplaying game.
From there, it can lead to further introspection about one's character. What kind of rations does your character bring with him? What is your character's favourite food? What flavours does your character relish in at the tavern after two weeks straight in the wilderness and inside dungeons? When pressed, what foods would your character be willing to eat?
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| via Medieval Manuscripts Blog |
Of course, roleplaying is helped along by a heightened sense of...
Immersion
Foraging for food in a dungeon, hunting in the wilderness, and buying a hearty meal at an inn all help to immerse players in the game-world. It also means the environment has consequences; adventuring in the desert doesn't just mean a change of scenery, it means scrambling to find enough water to survive, searching for oases, stocking up on water at the caravanserai, stripping the waterskins off the corpses of your enemies... in other words, immersion and roleplaying.
It also ties into dungeon design. If your players need to get food and water in the dungeon, it will prompt you to think about how they will do so when you are designing it. That, in turn, leads you to think more about the dungeon ecology: where and how do the dungeon denizens get their food and water? If the dungeon is an ancient dwarven keep, which room was the kitchen? If the dungeon is an abandoned tomb-complex tuned into a brigands' lair, where do they cook their meals and store their foodstuffs?
Then, of course, there is the food itself. When the PCs are at an inn, describe the smell of the stew or the roast boar. When the PCs attend a harvest festival, describe all the delicious foods laid out for the banquet: roast pheasants, stuffed squashes, apple pasties, pine nut meal, honeyed oat cakes...
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| source: wikipedia |
Magic
There are loads of spells and magic items that completely lose their value if you don't have rations in your game. Purify food and drink and create water hardly matter at all if you don't keep track of that kind of stuff. Higher level spells like create food and water negate the need for carrying rations as long as you can spare a 3rd level cleric spell slot every day; it's a strategic decision, as choosing spells is intended to be.
Several magic items mitigate the need for carrying rations, but always at a cost. The ring of sustenance gives you all the nutrition you need, but it takes up one of your two ring slots. The cauldron of plenty feeds 36 people, but that's more of a magic item to keep in your feast hall; hauling a 25 lb. iron cauldron around in a dungeon isn't fun. And the sustaining spoon can keep you alive on gruel, so long as you are okay with eating nothing but wet cardboard every day.
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| "One more hit from the magic spoon, sir?" source |
The point is, these spells and magic items are designed to complement - not supplant - the food and drink needs of adventuring characters.
So how do you incorporate food and drink into your game?
First of all, I know I'm really pulling for keeping track of rations in game, but if you try it out and you or your players really hate it, don't do it. Above all, keep the game fun. But a lot of people find it fun to do this kind of thing - just look at the popularity of Minecraft and other survival/crafting games where finding food is a priority.
There's no reason to over-complicate things, either. We don't need rules that rank various foods by nutritional value and demand adventurers seek out all their necessary servings of fruits and vegetables or face certain scurvy.
Just determine if the adventurers have eaten or drank enough for the day at the time they go to sleep, for simplicity's sake. No need to make sure everyone eats breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or stays properly hydrated throughout the battle - you can just lump all the meals and drinks into one. If they've found a cool stream an partaken of it that day, they're good on water. If they've killed a delicious monster like a dire boar and said that they would eat its dire bacon, they don't need to dig into their rations for the day.
Here's the table I've created for keeping track of rations in the new character sheet I'm working on:
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| (c) d20 Despot |
The solution I settled on is to let people list what foods they have and have a separate place for how many lbs. of food total they have. The food itself and the amount of it consumed per day are abstracted from each other, meaning you have to keep track of your food per day, but you don't have to break out a spread sheet and calculate out a bunch of crap. It even has a little reminder about how much food and water should be consumed per day, so you don't have to look it up.
I separated the drink section into several different rows just to help people keep track of all the different alcoholic beverages they are no doubt bringing along into the dungeon. Well, if your players are anything like mine.
And of course, what would a rule be without consequences for breaking it? I've included spaces to keep track of the damage a character has taken from starvation and dehydration, in case it comes to that. The rules-as-written for hunger and thirst are pretty good as far as I'm concerned. This is the sort of thing that might come into play if your characters are traversing a desert or shipwrecked on a desert island.
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Well, I've written a lot more than I though I could on this subject. Thanks for bearing with me. As a reward, here's a picture of monkeys getting drunk.
-your ventripotent d20 despot
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