PCs without food

[SnowleopardVK]

I'm not even sure if there are specific rules for food or not, but I'll ask anyways. Are there penalties for PCs not eating, and if so what are they and how long would a PC have to go without eating to get penalized?

In this situation the PCs ate at dinnertime one night and then stored away the rest of their food. The next day they spent the whole day working and at dinner they found that their stored food was gone. So they've now spent a whole day doing heavy labour and will have to go without food. The day after that they'll have to go out and look for more food, but even then it's not guaranteed that they'll find any since there's no nearby civilization, no clerics to make food, and only one of them has even a single rank in survival which is negatively impacted by her low wisdom and amounts to a +0 bonus on survival checks anyways.

My assumption is that there might not be a penalty after just a single day without food, but if they can't manage to get anything by the second they're going to start having problems.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

Environment :: d20srd.org

EDIT: Forgot this was Pathfinder, not sure if the rules changed at all.

 

[SnowleopardVK]

Ah excellent, thank you.

Looks like they'll likely be fine then. Even though their stored water is gone they have a river nearby, and they'll have two full days to look for food. With four PCs searching they're likely to find something.

 

[IronWolf]

From the PFSRD:

Environmental Rules - Pathfinder_OGC

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

I'm also pretty sure you can take 10 on Survival checks to find food anyway, and give someone a +2 aid another to boot. The game actually makes the wilderness thing pretty not scary, apparently.

 

[Volaran]

The way I usually rule it when doing survival checks to 'get along in the wild', you can take 10 on your own check or to aid another, but we generally assume that it takes up enough time during the day that you couldn't effectively do both.

That said, since you can only move half-speed while hunting and foraging in this manner, it isn't as if multiple people using survival are going to slow down the party further.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

The reason for aiding is to make up for the DC increase for finding food for multiple people anyway, so that's not much of an issue.

"Get along in the wild. Move up to half your overland speed while hunting and foraging (no food or water supplies needed). You can provide food and water for one other person for every 2 points by which your check result exceeds 10."

Conveniently, the DC increase for an extra mouth to feed is identical to the bonus of aid another. The more I think about it though, it probably shouldn't be that hard to survive in the wild. Humans managed to long ago, no reason D&D adventurers couldn't.

 

[SnowleopardVK]

The reason for aiding is to make up for the DC increase for finding food for multiple people anyway, so that's not much of an issue.

"Get along in the wild. Move up to half your overland speed while hunting and foraging (no food or water supplies needed). You can provide food and water for one other person for every 2 points by which your check result exceeds 10."

Conveniently, the DC increase for an extra mouth to feed is identical to the bonus of aid another. The more I think about it though, it probably shouldn't be that hard to survive in the wild. Humans managed to long ago, no reason D&D adventurers couldn't.

Essentially two party members take 10 and the other two each aid one and that's food for a party of four people. Then again they could just all take 10 I suppose unless one of them was negatively impacted in survival or something like that.

 

[TarionzCousin]

Are the players enjoying this aspect of the game? Ask them.

I know that I wouldn't. I don't want to keep track of how much my character eats, when he goes to the bathroom, if he's wearing enough sunblock, etc.

I played in a game once where the DM kept track of food--of course it was scarce and we had to spend most of our time fishing or hunting. Everybody quit after the third session because the DM insisted that we keep doing it.

It simply isn't my idea of fun.

 

[SnowleopardVK]

Are the players enjoying this aspect of the game? Ask them.

I know that I wouldn't. I don't want to keep track of how much my character eats, when he goes to the bathroom, if he's wearing enough sunblock, etc.

I played in a game once where the DM kept track of food--of course it was scarce and we had to spend most of our time fishing or hunting. Everybody quit after the third session because the DM insisted that we keep doing it.

It simply isn't my idea of fun.

I am one of the players actually, not the GM, and so far the game's been really fun. Also food's not scarce around the party's camp, and there's a river right beside us so water is pretty much never unavailable. Normally eating is just something that gets mentioned at the end of each in-game "day" that we occasionally use as an excuse to do a little player-to-player roleplay. The GM isn't oppressive with it or anything.

Also; it was all of us collectively that came up with the idea for this game, so I suppose it literally is our idea of fun.