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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5068368" data-attributes="member: 4937">In my experience, if you are dependent entirely on spells for your food, water, shelter and healing, then you'd better be pretty high level.  So, I don't think it's rendered pointless at 5th level.  It's true however that at some level you run into that problem.At very high level, you get spells like 'Magnificent Mansion' that do everything at one shot, but that begins to move into the topic of high level spell use in D&D and how it can be balanced, not whether the environmental rules are sound since at high levels of spell use any environment is negotiable.The more likely problem you'll first run into when trying to run 'Man vs. Nature' is the fact that by mid-level, PC's are capable of carrying civilization with them in a portable hole or bag of holding.  It's less like backpacking and more like going camping in a motor home with the general store near at hand.  This ultimately returns us to the magic problem in D&D.In 1e AD&D spells were primarily balanced by how they effected combat.  Spells who had no utility in combat and which didn't profoundly effect the dungeon environment (like passwall or etherealness) were generally deemed to not be that powerful, regardless of how profound the effect of such a spell might be on a society that had access to it.  Items like the 'Bag of Holding' demonstrate the problem with that approach, in as much as no party would desire to be without 'Heward's Handy Haversack' and if you increased the price by a factor of 5 or 10, players would still eventually by one (or something comparable).  So, yes, even if you fixed the environmental hazard rules, you'd still have some problem with the effects of magic.  The trick is fixing this in such a way that a high level party can still go on a trek across the burning Elemental Plane of Fire or into the depths of the Abyss and have some hope of survival, while still maintaining some degree of threat from the hazards of the Sahara Desert or the Arctic to a party of slightly lower level.</blockquote>

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