Level Up (A5E) Need Help Understanding Extended Journies

[Faolyn]

Personally, @Stalker0, I have a hard time seeing how Busk is a traveling activity in the first place, since to me busking is standing in one place playing music or something similar. I see it as more of a downtime activity. Maybe it has a different meaning than I'm used to.

(I also have a hard time believing that Hunting and Gathering only nets 1 Supply on a normal success. You bring down a deer but only get one day's meal for one person out of it? I looked it up: you can get about 60 pounds worth of meat off of a deer! I might accept 1 Supply per member of the party though.)

But anyway. As @Stone Dog said, each party member is supposed to do their own thing. So the entire party shouldn't be busking unless everyone in it is or aspires to be an entertainer. Anyway. The rules also say you decide how many days you're going to be doing a thing, and you roll just once, no matter how many days it is. So, like, the ranger says she's going to spend three days hunting. You roll once. On a success, she gets 3 Supply (it's one Supply per day spent) or if you're me, Supply equal to 3 x the number of party members*. You can say that she bagged one deer and got a ton of meat from it, and on the other days, she just gathered some berries and bagged a squirrel.

Also, I would assume you're spending a work-day (8 hours) doing this thing, not 16 hours. Walk 8 hours, then stop, set up camp, do your journey activities. If your party is so hard-up that they genuinely will spend 16 hours doing one activity, take them out of journey time and into adventure time, and roleplay hunting down and killing the deer. The journey activities are supposed to be abstract, after all.

*If there's an entourage of hirelings and hangers-on, they don't count towards determining how much Supply you get, but you still have to feed them).

 

[Stone Dog]

Hunting for one supply is probably just a rabbit and/or some edible roots.

 

[Stalker0]

Wait, are you having the whole party do ONE thing every journey day, not each person doing their own activity?

No it was just for the example.

 

[Faolyn]

Hunting for one supply is probably just a rabbit and/or some edible roots.

See, this I don't quite accept because if there are any party members with these sort of survival skills--which can include Rangers, someone with the Outlander background or the Wildling culture, etc.--than for some reason they'd be doing a poor job hunting and gathering. We would have to take them out of journey mode and into actual gameplay for them to get decent-sized prey animal. Which is fine, since journey is abstract, but that might be too abstract.

 

[Stone Dog]

I don't think it is too abstract, I just think that they aren't setting the expectations as clearly as they should have in the text. The goal of a journey activity seems to be merely the things you do in the free spaces of that day of dedicated travel. Not eight hours of travel, eight hours of activity, and eight hours of sleep any more than one of us will regularly do eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep, and eight hours of productive errands. The characters need to have breaks in there, chat for a while, spend time setting and breaking camp and everything else they do.

In my view, you take the Hunt and Gather activity for Supply of Opportunity and mostly that character will get a net zero, no Supply gain, no Supply loss, but still a full day worth of travel along with everybody else. The hunter is just keeping a dedicated eye out for a pheasant to pop out of the long grass or a rabbit to scamper by or "hey, look, wild fruit that probably won't kill us." The critical failure would be that the hunter was wrong about the fruit or something similar.

If for some reason the party needs to replenish enough Supply for all characters for the rest of the journey, then yes, I'd absolutely stop the journey system, lose a day of travel, and pick it back up as a fresh journey the next day or however long it takes to get the supplies back up. I've seen fully prepared and skilled game hunters go out for days and come back with nothing, promising one Supply per successful day of travel feels kind and generous to me. Even when they did come back with a deer or a boar there was a dedicated day of breaking the beast down to turn it into functional blocks of food.

The place in a journey for a deer to pop up and say "hello friend, how are youUURGHK" and give everybody a bunch of Supply would be in the Boons and Discoveries, not the Hunting and Gathering journey activity.

 

[RuinousPowers]

I don't think you could hunt things like deer while on the move. Dontyou need to skin it, separate the meat, and preserve it somehow? You aren't just throwing the carcass into a fridge. I'd think that kind of hunting would be a full day activity without travel.

 

[Stone Dog]

I'd say so. Find, track, kill, skin, butcher, and prepare at least. You can't just kill a deer and have a bunch of Supply fall out of it. A smaller animal you can probably do all of that on the move, but that big of an animal takes some dedicated time to transform into food.