D&D 5E Proposed House Rules for Supplies

[ezo]

Thank you for your detailed response!

I get the desire to make exploration and survival aspects of D&D more appealing and engaging. If WotC put as much into the exploration and social pillars of the game as they do combat, things would look very different. Whether or not a player prefers that, of course, is speculative.

So, in an attempt to be more helpful ( ) I have some questions and comments:

1. What size area is required to search for supplies? (1 "hex", 1 mile?)
2. How many supplies are gathered on a successful check? (1 unit? more?)
3. Once a check is made, can further checks be done? How many supplies can an area produce?
4. You mention meager supplies in the revision, but no mention of what they are?
5. You have several terms: meager, standard, special, exceptional, which could become a bit confusing.

I'm certain some, if not all, of these would be addressed in a final version.

 

[James Gasik]

Thank you for your detailed response!

I get the desire to make exploration and survival aspects of D&D more appealing and engaging. If WotC put as much into the exploration and social pillars of the game as they do combat, things would look very different. Whether or not a player prefers that, of course, is speculative.

So, in an attempt to be more helpful ( ) I have some questions and comments:

1. What size area is required to search for supplies? (1 "hex", 1 mile?)
2. How many supplies are gathered on a successful check? (1 unit? more?)
3. Once a check is made, can further checks be done? How many supplies can an area produce?
4. You mention meager supplies in the revision, but no mention of what they are?
5. You have several terms: meager, standard, special, exceptional, which could become a bit confusing.

I'm certain some, if not all, of these would be addressed in a final version.

1.- for now, 3 mile hexes.
2. 1 unit unless you have a special trait that modifies this amount.
3. each check takes 1 hour. The DC increases by 1 each hour.
4. oops, artifact from the first version of the rules. Ignore please!
5. Possibly, yes, I simply wanted the option for people to acquire better supplies, and leave myself wiggle room for the occasional unique benefit.

Something very important that no one noticed (and I just realized), what happens if you run out of Supplies?

Running Out Of Supplies-

In the course of events, characters may find themselves with no Supplies. If this occurs, they cannot take Rests. Characters cannot regain healing surges or recover from Exhaustion, and each day spent without a Long Rest gives them another level of Exhaustion.

Penalties

In addition, going days without consuming any Supplies begins to erode character's ability to function in other ways. Each day, the party is subject to a Strife level.

Strife level 1: Ammunition and reserves of spell components begin to run dry. The first day this occurs imposes a -1 penalty on weapon and spell attack rolls.

Strife level 2: characters suffer Disadvantage when attempting to use weapons with the Ammunition property (replacing the -1 penalty), and attempts to cast spells with a non-costly Material component have a 1 in 4 chance of failure.

Strife level 3: weapons with the Ammunition property cannot be used at all, and attempts to cast spells with a non-costly Material component have a 50% failure chance.

Strife level 4: attacks with melee weapons are made with disadvantage (replacing the -1 penalty) and spells with non-costly Material components cannot be cast at all.


Recovering from Strife

A Short Rest recovers one level of Strife. A Long Rest recovers up to 2 levels of Strife.

EDIT: updated rules have been added to post #18: https://www.enworld.org/threads/proposed-house-rules-for-supplies.702787/post-9274139

 

[ezo]

1.- for now, 3 mile hexes.

Hmm... ok. Depending on how you are measuring your 3-mile hex (long or short diagonal), the area would range from 6 to 8 sq. miles. For most people, simply walking a mile takes 20 minutes, under good conditions. In a wilderness, it can easily be twice that. So, "searching" a 3-mile hex to look for food/water would likely take longer than a hour. Just walking an "optimal" path under good conditions to cover a 3-mile hex would likely take 2 hours or a bit more.

Of course, the DC could be raised for different terrain types, or you could grant advantage/disadvantage as you noted.

2. 1 unit unless you have a special trait that modifies this amount.

I figured, but didn't see it specified anywhere.

3. each check takes 1 hour. The DC increases by 1 each hour.

Right, that much is clear, but does the DC increase on a success or failure or both? When does it stop? How many supplies can a single hex produce?

4. oops, artifact from the first version of the rules. Ignore please!

Gotcha.

5. Possibly, yes, I simply wanted the option for people to acquire better supplies, and leave myself wiggle room for the occasional unique benefit.

No problem. With meager out of the way, 3 is more manageable IMO and clearer.

 

[James Gasik]

Hmm... ok. Depending on how you are measuring your 3-mile hex (long or short diagonal), the area would range from 6 to 8 sq. miles. For most people, simply walking a mile takes 20 minutes, under good conditions. In a wilderness, it can easily be twice that. So, "searching" a 3-mile hex to look for food/water would likely take longer than a hour. Just walking an "optimal" path under good conditions to cover a 3-mile hex would likely take 2 hours or a bit more.

Of course, the DC could be raised for different terrain types, or you could grant advantage/disadvantage as you noted.


I figured, but didn't see it specified anywhere.


Right, that much is clear, but does the DC increase on a success or failure or both? When does it stop? How many supplies can a single hex produce?


Gotcha.


No problem. With meager out of the way, 3 is more manageable IMO and clearer.

Oops, I really thought I specified the roll grants 1 Supply. Doh. Whether or not you can completely search a 3-mile hex (I'm only using 3-mile hexes right now because that's what's on the map upthread) in an hour is something I'm willing to handwave.

The DC is time based, so here's an example:

Bob, Jodie, Ryan, and Keith decide to take an hour to forage for Supplies. The first hour is DC 10. If they find nothing, the DC raising means they are less likely to find anything in the future, but the possibility that they missed something still exists. If they all find something, the DC raising reflects the increasing scarcity.

Eventually the DC rises to the point that it's unlikely to find anything (ie, we can assume the area is "played out"). There is no maximum, but what I think I'll do is, if they return to that hex during the same adventure, they'll have disadvantage to try and forage there, since it was established that it's scarce on resources.

This, by the way, is only for "generic" hexes. If I know ahead of time that a hex is rich or poor in resources, or has something interesting to find, I'll have the details ready to go. But if they wander into random hex C23, then we can find out together what's there to work with.

Should there be a maximum amount of Supplies? Probably, but I think it would take awhile to strip a 3 mile zone completely bare, and any number I decide upon would be entirely arbitrary, so I couldn't say just what a good value would be.

 

[Shardstone]

This is only tangential to the thread but is influenced by, of all things, going to massage therapy recently.

A lot of people talk about how its "gamey" to only allow X amount of short rests per long rest, but in real life, resting in short increments does have diminishing returns. You can't just massage someone for an hour in between really hard work outs (or, god forbid, combats) and expect each massage to get them back to full HP. Likewise, if you work out three times a day, each rest isn't bringing you back to full HP; you're still dealing with micro-tears and other bulking "injuries" with each work out (which is why working out like doing weights 3x a day is usually no bueno).

So the idea that you should be able to unlimited short rest each day really doesn't work for me IMO. Even for mental stuff. If I'm studying all day, each rest needs to be longer and longer after a certain point, and you def burn out eventually.

All that to say, I think in the future designs I make, short rests will always be limited to long rests, because sometimes you need a long rest IRL to actually get the benefits of a short rest IRL.

 

[James Gasik]

This is only tangential to the thread but is influenced by, of all things, going to massage therapy recently.

A lot of people talk about how its "gamey" to only allow X amount of short rests per long rest, but in real life, resting in short increments does have diminishing returns. You can't just massage someone for an hour in between really hard work outs (or, god forbid, combats) and expect each massage to get them back to full HP. Likewise, if you work out three times a day, each rest isn't bringing you back to full HP; you're still dealing with micro-tears and other bulking "injuries" with each work out (which is why working out like doing weights 3x a day is usually no bueno).

So the idea that you should be able to unlimited short rest each day really doesn't work for me IMO. Even for mental stuff. If I'm studying all day, each rest needs to be longer and longer after a certain point, and you def burn out eventually.

All that to say, I think in the future designs I make, short rests will always be limited to long rests, because sometimes you need a long rest IRL to actually get the benefits of a short rest IRL.

I have a weird sleeping schedule, where most days, I only sleep a few hours at a time, wake up for a few hours, then go back to bed. Some days I get more sleep than others. While doctors say we should all get 6-8 hours of uninterrupted sleep, it's not always possible.

Adventurers are effectively like soldiers in a combat zone- you should get whatever sleep you can, when you can, because you might be woken up very suddenly, or be unable to sleep for 30 hours a time. Needing X amount of uninterrupted time to remain functional is a purely gamist construct, because delving into dungeons slaying monsters isn't really a 9-5, 40-hour week job where you can have a set sleeping schedule.

But with WotC deciding that Short Rests are part of the game's balance, and limiting them by requiring a specific chunk of time that can easily interfere in most adventures, these gamist elements intrude much more heinously on the narrative of play.

In 4e, short rests took 5 minutes, and the game was balanced around you resting after every encounter. Now, apparently, they want players to take no more than 2 short rests inside of 6-8 encounters*, but rather than come out and say that, they give us these unwieldly not-so-short-rests to work with.

Adventuring days are not all the same, and if they were, it would be very obvious that you're playing a game. The narrative could make you fight one bandit encounter during three week's of travel, or a dozen skirmishes while in lands infested with monsters- there is no one size fits all.

So you either set a gamist limit on how many rests you can have per diem and don't sweat the time required, or structure all of your adventuring days according to a schedule (including doom clocks) so that no one ever ends up with too many or too few resources- my verisimilitude goes out the window either way, lol.

 

[Shardstone]

I have a weird sleeping schedule, where most days, I only sleep a few hours at a time, wake up for a few hours, then go back to bed. Some days I get more sleep than others. While doctors say we should all get 6-8 hours of uninterrupted sleep, it's not always possible.

Adventurers are effectively like soldiers in a combat zone- you should get whatever sleep you can, when you can, because you might be woken up very suddenly, or be unable to sleep for 30 hours a time. Needing X amount of uninterrupted time to remain functional is a purely gamist construct, because delving into dungeons slaying monsters isn't really a 9-5, 40-hour week job where you can have a set sleeping schedule.

But with WotC deciding that Short Rests are part of the game's balance, and limiting them by requiring a specific chunk of time that can easily interfere in most adventures, these gamist elements intrude much more heinously on the narrative of play.

In 4e, short rests took 5 minutes, and the game was balanced around you resting after every encounter. Now, apparently, they want players to take no more than 2 short rests inside of 6-8 encounters*, but rather than come out and say that, they give us these unwieldly not-so-short-rests to work with.

Adventuring days are not all the same, and if they were, it would be very obvious that you're playing a game. The narrative could make you fight one bandit encounter during three week's of travel, or a dozen skirmishes while in lands infested with monsters- there is no one size fits all.

So you either set a gamist limit on how many rests you can have per diem and don't sweat the time required, or structure all of your adventuring days according to a schedule (including doom clocks) so that no one ever ends up with too many or too few resources- my verisimilitude goes out the window either way, lol.

It has to be mentioned that soldiers in that state suffer a lot of consequences and used to rely on drugs to stay active, and now its a mixture of training, food, but also just accepting that you take essentially IRL mental damage from being in high-stress, low-sleep situations consecutively. Its more accurate to say that soldiers in your description or effective even when debuffed by terrible schedules then it is to say that this is a natural state the human body can remain in indefinitely. Not to mention that, again, combat deaths aren't usually about skill IRL in these situations but more about surprise and the state of the troops themselves. When you're worn down from marching 10 days with bad sleep and stressed all the time, mistakes become more common and your failing body makes it easier for you to take damage. You basically stop regaining hit points and more or less use the small bits of rest to prevent yourself from losing hit points at a faster passive rate.

 

[bloodtide]

So, I need to call into question your "meager" supplies. You make them the lesser/least type. They Should Not Be. Human beings have been living off the land for 10,000 years just fine. Like a lot of us country folk, nearly all common folk of a typical D&D game world have to know how to live off the land. After all, your choice is find your own "supplies" or die.

So...having your natural supplies be "meager" really does not fit. The idea that only "stuff from a city" is a Standard Supply is not really fitting.

And "meager supplies" don't last long? Well....true enough as the whole idea of living off the land is you live of the land your currently on and don't really carry much with you. But I would also note that not all natural supplies "don't last long". Some of them do quite well...like plants and plant products. Tree bark is a great example.

 

[Shardstone]

The only thing I don't like about your new system @James Gasik is the Strife system, and that's because the exact penalties feel a little too divorced from the fiction to me.

 

[ezo]

So, I need to call into question your "meager" supplies. You make them the lesser/least type. They Should Not Be. Human beings have been living off the land for 10,000 years just fine. Like a lot of us country folk, nearly all common folk of a typical D&D game world have to know how to live off the land. After all, your choice is find your own "supplies" or die.

So...having your natural supplies be "meager" really does not fit. The idea that only "stuff from a city" is a Standard Supply is not really fitting.

And "meager supplies" don't last long? Well....true enough as the whole idea of living off the land is you live of the land your currently on and don't really carry much with you. But I would also note that not all natural supplies "don't last long". Some of them do quite well...like plants and plant products. Tree bark is a great example.

While a valid point, living in such a way for years also led to issues like vitamin deficiencies, diseases, etc. that resulted in shortened lifespans or even deaths. So, to quote Crocodile Dundee, "Yeah, you can live off of it... but it tastes like sh!t."

I'm guessing the "stuff from a city" is really stuff brought in from farms and such with better cultivated, and perhaps with more variety, foodstuffs.

At any rate, the "meager" category has been removed in the updated version.