Dessert Nomad
Adventurer
In another thread, someone mentioned the idea of a monster destroying the PC's supply wagon during a desert trek, and pointed out that being trapped in the desert with no food or water was a really scary situation. I've also heard people talk about being stranded on partially wrecked ship with no water. But while such a disaster would be devastating for real people, a typical adventuring party is only going to be mildly inconvenienced, not in danger of death. All you need is a single character with a single level of cleric or druid to cast Create Water and you can have 10 gallons of water per day using just a first level spell slot (more using a higher level slot or more castings). A druid or ranger can cast Goodberry to provide food each day, or the party can carry along corpses and use ritually cast purify food and drink from the cleric to get rid of any rotting, without even dealing with survival skills. So a thing that's supposed to be a life and death situation that forces 'now we have to find the destination or die' downgrades to 'now we have to prepare two spells and use 1 or 2 slots a day to deal with the problem' when actually put to adventurers. The only way to really make players worry about thirst is to either contrive a party with no cleric/druid casters or disable some normal first level spells (anti-magic, 'the gods won't grant that spell'), which aren't really satisfying - I can't really think of a good way to make this one work that doesn't involve arbitrarily turning off basic abilities.
What are some other situations people have run into that should be scary but can actually be readily dealt with by PCs? And are there any non-cheesy ways to make the situation actually seem 'real-world' dangerous instead of mildly inconvenient?
What are some other situations people have run into that should be scary but can actually be readily dealt with by PCs? And are there any non-cheesy ways to make the situation actually seem 'real-world' dangerous instead of mildly inconvenient?