Playing "Adventurers" As Actual Adventurers

[The Firebird]

I think you would have to have an idea in real life what each would be and then try to abstract it to a game rule.

For water.
You need around 1 gallon of water per day per person for temperate temps and a moderate level of work.
If it's hot, then you would need more water (2-3 gallons per day per person or more) and perhaps additional salt.
If it's really cold (low humidity levels), then you would need more water (2-3 gallons per day per person or more).
Water weighs around 8 lbs per gallon, so you need anywhere from 8-24 lbs of water per person per day.
For food.
You need around 3,200 calories per day per person for temperate temps and a moderate level of work.
If you are doing very strenuous work or it's very cold, then the calories may be as high as 6,400 per day or more.
If you are doing very little work, then the calories may be as low as 2,000 per day.
A pound of grain has around 1,600 calories, so you are looking at anywhere from 1.25-4 lbs of food per person per day.
Other foods usually have less calories per pound than grain unless they are high in fat, but then spoilage may be an issue.

So, for an expedition of a party of 6 adventurers for a weeks travel across an arctic desert with no known water/food sources, you would need to have around 1,008 lbs of water and 168 lbs of food. You would need some way to cook the food and boil the water, so you would need to carry some fuel source (you might be able to carry just fuel if there is snow/ice and melt it at each stop). The fuel source would need to be something that wouldn't have issues igniting at low temps.

If you have pack animals to carry the above water/food (not to mention other items like camping equipment, cooking equipment, etc), then you have to factor in additional water/food for them which may require additional pack animals to carry that water/food.

Also this was my source for water. It says 2 - 12 L, which works out to 4.4 - 26.4 lb. This was mine for food, which gives about 60-80 lb per month per individual for the Roman army. It is nice to see the numbers you came to worked out to be rather similar.

 

[LordBP]

I agree that is the starting point. My question is--how do we do that mechanically? Are the players tracking lbs of food/water, and food/water quality, and activity level, and weather effects? The Wilderness Survival Guide tried to do some of this and ended up being too complex for most players.

If you abstract, what do you abstract and how? Source of the Nile has you track rations with the rule '1 person eats 1 ration per turn'. It doesn't track water; it just says you can't stay in a hex without water. (At least when I played. I understand there may be more complex rules in the full game?)

For my system, I said each unit eats 1 unit of food weekly and 1/2 a unit of water daily, with the water subject to multipliers by DM fiat. For me, '1 unit' corresponding to ~10 lb. That is pretty generous with the food but I liked the ease of calculation. Then I use a gear slot system (like Shadowdark), with every expedition member carrying 10 units.

I think the DM will need to determine the rate of consumption due to conditions and notify the players.

If I was going to try to abstract it, I would probably combine food and water for one day into a ration unit that would weigh 15 lbs (extra weight is for the containers).

So, a week's worth of rations would be around 105 lbs (about the limit of being able to carry it yourself).

I'm not a big fan of gear slots, but I also haven't seen how Shadowdark does it, so I might change my mind.

 

[LordBP]

Also this was my source for water. It says 2 - 12 L, which works out to 4.4 - 26.4 lb. This was mine for food, which gives about 60-80 lb per month per individual for the Roman army. It is nice to see the numbers you came to worked out to be rather similar.

Yeah, reading military manuals on how much food/water is required by soldiers is always good if you want it to be close to real life.

Water has always been the biggest issue with armies throughout history.

 

[Reynard]

I think attempting to hew too close to realism is going to be counterproductive to achieve the goal of finding ways to make hardship on expedition dramatic and fun gameplay.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think attempting to hew too close to realism is going to be counterproductive to achieve the goal of finding ways to make hardship on expedition dramatic and fun gameplay.

How close is too close though? Everyone has their own line, and the only ones that should matter to you in your own game (which is what we're talking about) IMO is yours and your players.

 

[Celebrim]

I think attempting to hew too close to realism is going to be counterproductive to achieve the goal of finding ways to make hardship on expedition dramatic and fun gameplay.

It very much depends on how the participants define fun.

A player with primary (or sole) aesthetics of Fantasy is fulfilled by lots of moments focused on their imaged self-representative triumphing in style and often by the meta of their fellows showing emotional fulfillment with their triumph - "You rock!". And well, yes, that player isn't going to enjoy spending a lot of time book-keeping and imagining their character overcoming and enduring mundane struggles like getting food and water off of a camel. To that person we are just getting in the way of the good stuff and harming their fun.

But a player with the primary (or sole) aesthetic of Discovery is fulfilled by lots of moments where they experience the gritty reality of what it might actually be like to be in an expedition travelling across the desert, and dealing with the imagined heat and sweat and parched mouth and overcoming and enduring the mundane struggles of getting food and water off a camel, and in a sense figuring out if they are the sort of person who might successfully plan an expedition across a desert (even if perhaps they don't have in reality the physical capacity to live out that adventure). To them, all that bookkeeping and concretely imagined problems is the fun, whereas imagining their fantasy character leaping thirty feet in the air and cleaving off the head of a giant with a two-handed sword is at best uninteresting and at worst a bit jejune and trite because there is nothing interesting to be learned from an encounter with a giant if you can just do that. (To the extent that they think superpowers are interesting at all, they are interested in the burden that comes with that power and responsibility.)

I think it's a massive mistake to assume that your entire audience only sees the fun in Fantasy and not in Discovery or that there is only one sort of Narrative that is satisfying as if all interesting stories featured protagonists that were always aura farming all the time with no real threat to their person like the Isekai protagonist that is just over-leveled beyond any real threat and every seen is them just showing off to the poor schleps how cool they actually are.

 

[Reynard]

I think it's a massive mistake to assume that your entire audience only sees the fun in Fantasy and not in Discovery or that there is only one sort of Narrative that is satisfying as if all interesting stories featured protagonists that were always aura farming all the time with no real threat to their person like the Isekai protagonist that is just over-leveled beyond any real threat and every seen is them just showing off to the poor slops how cool they actually are.

This feels like a strange non sequitur.

 

[Celebrim]

This feels like a strange non sequitur.

I think it's a highly relevant response to the statement: "I think attempting to hew too close to realism is going to be counterproductive to achieve the goal of finding ways to make hardship on expedition dramatic and fun gameplay."

UPDATE: To see why, consider the history of RPGs. RPGs originally came out of wargaming. And wargaming has some degree of fantasy to it but it doesn't have an aesthetic solely dependent on fantasy. Yes, the question of "Could I do as well as Napoleon or Wellington or Rommel or Montgomery?" has a certain edge of fantasy to it, but to answer that question in a satisfying way to a wargamer typically involves as much as possibly making the scenario that they face equivalent to the scenario some great commander faced. "Could I manage the war in north Africa better?", or at least, "What would it be like to manage the war in North Africa?" are primarily questions of Discovery. And that's precisely why the early instincts of most RPG players and creators was to really dig deep into realism despite the fantasy settings, because the really interesting things weren't just, "Wouldn't it be cool to be Conan!" but also, "If I had the muscles, could I successfully be the sort of hero Conan was?" or "What would it be like to experience the sort of things Conan experienced."

So when you just like dismiss realism as counter-productive to fun gameplay, frankly I don't think you are looking at how different people approach what is "fun". Because isn't one single thing.

The player with the sole aesthetic of Fantasy looks at your desert expedition and says, "I conjure a giant sand worm and I ride on its back across the desert, traversing it in safety and ease." and that's his maximized fun and attempting to make him do Discovery is just never going to work because hardship isn't what is fun for him and isn't what makes for fun gameplay. Hardships are either stumbling blocks preventing fun, or else opportunities to triumph with surprising power over the seeming difficulty.

There is just no way to have a repetitive hardship loop however abstract be fun for that player. If you want to make an expedition fun for them, then you do it be breaking up the loop with moments to leap thirty feet into the air and cleave the head off the sand giant marauders.

 

[Reynard]

I think it's a highly relevant response to the statement: "I think attempting to hew too close to realism is going to be counterproductive to achieve the goal of finding ways to make hardship on expedition dramatic and fun gameplay."

UPDATE: To see why, consider the history of RPGs. RPGs originally came out of wargaming. And wargaming has some degree of fantasy to it but it doesn't have an aesthetic solely dependent on fantasy. Yes, the question of "Could I do as well as Napoleon or Wellington or Rommel or Montgomery?" has a certain edge of fantasy to it, but to answer that question in a satisfying way to a wargamer typically involves as much as possibly making the scenario that they face equivalent to the scenario some great commander faced. "Could I manage the war in north Africa better?", or at least, "What would it be like to manage the war in North Africa?" are primarily questions of Discovery. And that's precisely why the early instincts of most RPG players and creators was to really dig deep into realism despite the fantasy settings, because the really interesting things weren't just, "Wouldn't it be cool to be Conan!" but also, "If I had the muscles, could I successfully be the sort of hero Conan was?" or "Experience the sort of things Conan experienced."

So when you just like dismiss realism as counter-productive to fun gameplay, frankly I don't think you are looking at how different people approach what is "fun". Because isn't one single thing.

The player with the sole aesthetic of Fantasy looks at your desert expedition and says, "I conjure a giant sand worm and I ride on its back across the desert, traversing it in safety and ease." and that's his maximized fun and attempting to make him do Discovery is just never going to work because hardship isn't what is fun for him and isn't what makes for fun gameplay. Hardships are either stumbling blocks preventing fun, or else opportunities to triumph with surprising power over the seeming difficulty.

There is just now way to have a repetitive hardship loop however abstract be fun for that player. If you want to make an expedition fun for them, then you do it be breaking up the loop with moments to leap thirty feet into the air and cleave the head off the sand giant marauders.

You excluded a middle there about the size of the Amazon basin.

 

[Celebrim]

You excluded a middle there about the size of the Amazon basin.

I'm not denying the existence of players with complex aesthetics of play. In fact, the existence of complex aesthetics of play was and remains one of my biggest attacks on GNS theory with its assumption that only one aesthetic can be fulfilled and they are in mutual competition to each other. I'm merely providing simple examples and models for the purpose of establishing some basic facts with clarity.

My point is that if you have a player with high priority on both Fantasy and Discovery, it's not necessarily the case that you deal with that by compromising the two aesthetics. Not every two aesthetics can be easily fulfilled by going together was well as chocolate and peanut butter and making a blend of the two, nor is it necessarily the case that a compromise and going half-way actually makes that player the happiest. You can have chocolate fudge and roasted brussel sprouts on the same buffet, and the player is fulfilled by going and getting big helpings of each on separate trips. And the group itself can be thought of like that, with not everyone liking chocolate fudge and roasted brussel sprouts equally well, but they each might get something out of every course of the meal and each don't mind that not getting served their favorite right now because they know what they like is coming up soon.

In short, claiming that I'm excluding the middle, is not a defense of the statement "I think attempting to hew too close to realism is going to be counterproductive to achieve the goal of finding ways to make hardship on expedition dramatic and fun gameplay." nor does claiming that I'm excluding the middle really address the argument I'm making here. I have never asserted that the design must be either/or (an actual case of excluding the middle) anywhere. All I have said is that realism is not necessarily counterproductive to "the goal of finding ways to make hardship on expedition dramatic and fun gameplay" and given logical reasons why I think that is so.