Have you tried Shadowdark?
P.S. I think it's a masterpiece, BTW.
I have, it's great - my table of players/DMs does like the slightly chunkier character builds of 5e though. I think the ideal would be something in between 5e and AD&D, but nobody afaict has made this yet! But I haven't looked at Level Up/A5e.
I don’t think it fair to criticize the design for something it doesn’t do anymore which is survival sim. D&D is heroic fantasy now. Staving of hunger or avoiding dysentery from bad water isn’t that exciting for hero stories.
One area I would criticize is the lack of moudularity that was discussed during Next which would suit this desire. Though 5E proved too popular on its own to need exploring it. Leaving torch maintenance and food foraging to OSR games.
I definitely think darkness as a threat is a big part of heroic fantasy (if I understand the category). Consider the Hobbit:
When Bilbo opened his eyes, he wondered if he had; for it was just as dark as with them shut. No one was anywhere near him. Just imagine his fright! He could hear nothing, see nothing, and he could feel nothing except the stone of the floor.
Imagine if Bilbo had darkvision or the light cantrip! (I know 5e Halflings don't have darkvision, but I guess my point is there is little chance of your average PC finding themselves in this interesting situation). Darkness is scary in Lord of the Rings, Conan, GRR Martin's works, various myth...I also think by its nature D&D tends to be at least partly tragicomedy along with the heroism, even these days. "It's pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." If your PC is in that situation, well it's probably at least a little funny.
Getting all the way to death by starvation or dying of thirst is admittedly not as common in fantasy literature, but survival challenges do come up, and I think the object of the a food system is to put logistical pressure on plans where appropriate, rather than to be a ubiquitous consideration: you are crossing this desert or this mountain range, how will you survive the journey? What happens if you get lost or your food gets soaked in dragon bile? How deep will you delve into this dungeon before you must turn back? What do you do when Gollum throws all your lembas bread off the cliff and blames it on your halfling? Dungeon Meshi spends a lot of time on the eating part, but underlying this is the fact they are constantly thinking about the logistics of dungeon delving, and how much deeper to go. The threat of running out of food/water is a tool in the toolbox for creating challenge and drama.
And he's more antiheroic, but I seem to remember Vance's Cugel the Clever getting pretty desperate for food between villages...
Darkness in PF2 has a similar role as a long path filled with rough shrubbery and weeds. It's a challenge where some builds and ancestry can decrease or bypass but it's not like it's a big deal of a challenge either way.
Does a game of OSR consider the mental health of the player character or their nutritional intake? In the latter case as long as it's just 'food' they'll be fine and dandy no?
I recall PF2e being even more permissive with light: Darkvision has no distance limit, works on magical darkness, and has no dim light radius, it's just all bright.
In OSR games, and in my ideal version of 5e, you aren't constantly thinking about food, but it does have the ability to determine logistical range in a dungeon/wilderness (how deep can we go before turning back), and there are situations where something goes wrong and all of a sudden it really matters (you just used all your rations to distract a monster from eating you, but you are days from the surface, what do you do?).
I don't mind at all that the game includes rules for aspects of D&D that might get ignored by 90% of the playerbase but be vitally useful for 10% (percentages are made up and merely for explanation). All rules have their fans, so why get rid of them? Especially considering that when some rules don't get ported over to the next iteration or edition the complaints about that are always there (see Warlord, Psion, Half-Elf etc.)
And let's be honest here... even if WotC was to remove these "vestigial" rules from the game because the majority of players do not use them... they will only get replaced by new rules that ALSO won't get used by large amounts of the playerbase. I mean WotC added Bastions into the game rules in the new DMG, but how many people actually use them?
But in terms of specifics... in this case regarding Darkvision... if (general) you want darkness to matter as a ruleset in your campaign, then it's up to you to tell your players that you aren't allowing them to select species that have Darkvision. You're the DM... select the aspects of the game you wish to use and toss out the others for that specific campaign. When I ran Curse of Strahd that is exactly what I did-- all PCs had to be human. And in fact, in order to make getting hurt more important I also removed all Healing spells from the game as well, only allowing for potions, hit dice expenditure, and the Healer feat to let PCs heal when not taking rests. I wanted CoS to run a certain way, and as the DM I adjusted rules myself to get things the way I wanted. I did not sit on my hands waiting for WotC to do it for me. Because that is just a waste of time and I'd never actually get the game I wanted if I did.
Yes, I definitely don't want these aspects to be gotten rid of, these "vestigal" parts of the game are great when taken seriously imo even if most don't use them, but I do want them to be functional systems, as in capable of challenging the party without extraordinary contrivance.
And I generally agree that there isn't much point in waiting for WotC to change things here, and I do house rule things quite a bit, though there are social and logistical advantages to not having to make and whip out my pages of unskillfully designed house rules. Light Cantrip becomes a first level spell, Goodberry has no nutritional value, etc. Yes, I could play a different game, but I do like many aspects of 5e and it makes getting buy in a little easier. And related modern games like Pathfinder have similar issues. So, I feel compelled to critique the design philosophy! And, discuss why I think these things are useful even in heroic fantasy.
