[G4e] Meals: Survival Vs. Foraging Rules

[Stripe]

I'm posting this question from work without my books, so I might get the specifics wrong, but the Survival skill seems to indicate to me that only one roll is needed per day to, well, survive. However, the foraging rules seem to indicate to me that one survival roll equals one meal (there are more specifics for hunting, fishing, etc., but it's moot to my question).

The only other way I think I could interpret the rules for the daily Survival skill rolls are that they don't provide meals, only safety.

Remember I don't have my books, I'm just wondering if you have to roll Survival once per day for all meals, or once per day for safety and then also at least three times per day for meals.

Thanks! :)

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Stripe

Remember I don't have my books, I'm just wondering if you have to roll Survival once per day for all meals, or once per day for safety and then also at least three times per day for meals.

I'd personally say "Once per day for safety only, no food. Further rolls to forrage for food." You don't necessarily have to roll three times a day for food, but obviously if you only roll once, you're likely to only find one meal, and only if you get successful.

Most people who try for wilderness survival do their best to bring food with them, but food doesn't save you from stepping in a snake hole and breaking your ankle, having deadwood fall on you, slipping on a rock, stepping in poison ivy, etc etc.

[Stripe]

Originally Posted by Bruno

I'd personally say "Once per day for safety only, no food. Further rolls to forrage for food." You don't necessarily have to roll three times a day for food, but obviously if you only roll once, you're likely to only find one meal, and only if you get successful.

Yeah, that's how I'm reading them too.

Thanks to all who replied. Some good ideas in here! :)

[Kyle Aaron]

Regarding Survival skill and what the damage of a failed roll means, there was a thread on that a while back.

[Not another shrubbery]

The Foraging rules (B427) are mainly concerned with supplementing your rations while traveling or making a temporary camp. My recommendation is to treat them as optional, using them only when you wish to include more detail in long overland trips by the party. A single Survival roll is sufficient in actual survival situations, though you could use the foraging rules in those cases too, if you were so inclined.

[Captain Joy]

Originally Posted by Stripe

I'm just wondering if you have to roll Survival once per day for all meals, or once per day for safety and then also at least three times per day for meals.

My Star Fleet officers just spent a few hellish weeks on a miserable jungle planet. I thought long and hard about just this application of Survival skill. This is what I came up with. Every day they would make a Survival roll, if they were successful, then they managed to forage one meal's worth of food while they hiked. Since they needed at least three meals a day to avoid fatigue loss problems, they would generally also stop hiking specifically to forage for additional meals. To that end, one hour and a successful Survival roll would result in one meal.

[Kyle Aaron]

As GM, I have handled it like this.

You know how with the rapid fire rules, you look at the margin of success of a dice roll, and compare it to the recoil number to figure out how many rounds hit? So for example your skill is 15, you roll 8, so your margin of success is 7. If the recoil number was 1, you hit 8 times - once for the 0, and once for each 1 of success. If the recoil number is 2, you hit 4 times - once for the 0, and once for each 2 of success. And so on.

Well, I do the same thing for Survival skill and foraging, except that instead of "hits" there are "meals and water" and instead of "recoil" there is "harshness of terrain." So for example a forest in a temperate region on virgin land never before visited by humans has a "harshness" of 0. But a sandy desert has a "harshness" of 10.

The time taken is two hours. This can be a two hour block, or it can simply be two hours taken out of eight as the PC hikes along, and they lose 25% of their speed as they do so; they lose just as many FP as if they were hiking the whole time, since being constantly alert for things is tiring. So the player gets to decide how to weigh things up, which is more important, to find food and water or to get moving across terrain. If they decide it's more important to find sustenance, then they stay in one place and do 4x 2hr searches. If they think it's more important to get moving (perhaps out of that Harshness 10 terrain), then they go at 3/4 pace and forage as they go.

If you don't want to make those calculations, then you can just look at their margin of success of skill, one roll per day. Just succeeding lets them have one of,

• Shelter
• Water
• Food
• A comfortable walk across the terrain (remember that's a function of Survival skill, too - not walking into huge thistle bushes, etc

You would then rate the terrain as easy, difficult, or dreadful. Easy means each 1 margin of success gives them an extra one of those four; difficult means each 2 does so; and dreadful means each 4.

The more dice rolls they have to make, the slower the game session and the more likely they are to have some crippling failure. If you really want them to fail, don't let them have high skill levels and then make them roll a zillion times, just make them have lower skill levels, give them less XP, and roll once.

[Philomath]

Now that's elegant. Consider it stolen :)

[Kitty_Of_Doom]

Definately worth as a houserule!

[Ogbendog]

dumb question, so if they fail the non-food survival roll, what happens to them? Broken ankle, fatigue from lack of sleep or shelter, ?