Hunting and Gathering in D20

[Psyckosama]

I'm trying to run a stone age themed game where keeping fed is an important challenge but trying to keep it from becoming overwhelmingly tedious.

Are there any games that would have rules for gathering, trapping, food prep, or how much meat you could get from an animal?

 

[Dross]

3.5 has foraging under survival: 1 day's food/water
Move at 1/2 speed for day
DC 10, & can provide for 1 extra person per every 2 above 10.
The DC should be modified based on external environs (harder in a desert than a forest).

a cooking skill (Profession in 3.5) may be required.

As for the amount of meat from an animal? haven't heard of one. could do a rough guesstimate:
Cow (large biped) = 20 people for 1 day and base other animals off that.

 

[jedavis]

Against The Shadow's first Midnight netbook covers these topics (hunting, gathering, fishing, and meat weight per critter), along with food spoilage and foodborne disease (Don't want to start a fire that might tell the orcs where you are? Mighty unfortunate...). I used them once, and my players had sufficiently more fun hunting and gathering than dungeon crawling that they decided to just sit around and fish instead, despite having (already) gathered plenty of food. It was all fun and games until half the party decided to go hunt bears, which the (first level) monk then charged. He was shortly eviscerated, prompting a retributive strike by the rest of the party which (barely... er, bearly?) put the bear down without any further PC deaths. Good times.

Against the Shadow - Downloads

 

[Thanael]

Have you tried Og! RPG?

 

[Mand]

A DM mentioned some buffalo roaming the plains that we were wandering through, so we went hunting. My Warlocked chased them down on horseback and shot one with Eldritch Blast. Our ranger got another two hits in and dropped it. They had stats, they were animals like any other, we fought one, killed it, and looted the meat.

We feasted on buffalo meat, and took some with us. And then later that night we were attacked by a pack of worgs, which we fought off some of and then abandoned the meat to in order to escape the rest. Oops.

 

[Raven Crowking]

You might want to try Lost Prehistorica or Frost and Fur, both of which might have useful information for your game.


RC

 

[Psyckosama]

Those three (Og, Prehistroica, and First and Fur) don't have much of anything on the subject. I checked.

Against the Shadow on the other hand is very useful, but the meat amount for each animal was fixed and I'm hunting Dinosaurs, not deer

Any one have any other ideas?

 

[jedavis]

I'd probably ditch their weight table... there's no good way to generalize from it (creatures of the same size category often have drastically different values, creatures of roughly the same weight (bison and brown bear, for example) have pretty seriously different values, etc). Maybe use it as a guideline by CR - a CR X critter should yield roughly Y pounds of 'treasure' meat.

 

[Psyckosama]

Here's the weight table I used... I'm using Vitality, for the record, so here's what I came up with. Not perfect... but it does a job.

Size			Meals Per Wound
Tiny			1d2-1
Small 			1d4
Medium			2d6
Large			4d8
Huge			8d10
Gargantuan		16d12
Colossal		32d20

Most tiny creatures will give you about a meal... maybe 2... 3 if you're real lucky... while a Colossal creature can feed a small village for almost a year!

 

[mwaite]

With this in mind, does anybody know of any rules regarding depletion of resources for an area?

My players wanted to start a community and support it with hunting and gathering until they got a more permanent system of agriculture and herding established. As the community grew larger, they increased the amount of time they spent getting food and water. After a while, I increased the difficulty of finding food and water because they had taxed the area too much.

The players though I was being hard on them because I didn't like the idea of them founding a village, but I just figured that resources are limited and they should eventually have a harder time finding what they needed. Unfortunately, I could find no rules to back me up and the players eventually got fed up and we abandoned the campaign.