Survival Mode: Awesomeness or Bookkeeping?

[Yora]

Managing the resources should be easy and painless.

But having to make decisions between packing extra stuff in case you might need it, or packing only the most necessary things to travel faster is a huge part of what makes wilderness campaigns and dungeon crawls in RPGs work. Or you have to decide what part of your cheap supplies you probably won't need and can leave behind to make room for more treasure to carry. And of course this includes heavy tools like crowbars, ropes, and digging tools. Bring them or not? Leave them behind or not?
These are decisions that will also affect which paths to take through a wilderness. Go over the mountains where you have to bring heavy clothing and fire wood, which might negate any time saved from not going around? Take a shortcut through the desert for which you have to carry more food and water? Are you willing to gamble on the wells all being accessible to you or do you bring extra water to make sure?
Hire helpers to carry all the stuff you'll need? Take pack animals along the journey, which you will have to leave outside when you go into dungeons?

There's a whole new (or rather old) game aspect there, which all depends on characters consuming supplies that slow down travel speed. Without it, wilderness campaigns don't work.

 

[CreamCloud0]

i don't think that tracking supplies and such is in and of itself 'awesome' but it can lend itself to certain styles of play that are interesting and fun to experience, just so long as thats what you actually want to be experiencing and you buy into the premise, unlike some players who go "sure i'd love to play a survival campaign" procedes to prepare and cast Goodberry, Leomunds Tiny Hut and Create Water every day.

 

[GMMichael]

. . . and many of them make it interesting. Generally speaking, I find that games that lean to hard into the minutiae of logging kit details to accomplish this somewhat annoying

That's the catch for me. Make it intetesting, not annoying. There are a lot of immersion points to be scored, but I don't want to spend my time toying with charts on my character sheet, or looking up rules.

 

[overgeeked]

In small doses, when well handled, it can be awesome. Like if this journey is particularly deadly and we need to reach some distant place in a short time, so leave unprepared and push the whole way, then absolutely wonderful stuff. If you need to constantly track every ration and every gallon of water constantly for no pressing reason...ugh. In settings where it's a baked in premise, like Dark Sun or other post-apocalypse settings, it's great.

 

[Gradine]

I said "bookkeeping" because that's really where I'm going to occupy for the vast majority of the time, but my real answer would honestly be "yes". I'm not going to find myself in the mood all that often, but I can totally see it being incredibly awesome on the off-chance I would be in the mood.

 

[kenada]

I voted for “Other” because it depends on the game and what it’s about. I wouldn’t expect it to matter in a game about heroic adventures, especially if they’re part of an adventure path or some similar curated approach to play. For a game about exploration, particularly if it involves going out into the wilderness to discover what’s out there? I’d expect it there.

I like to run an exploration-driven game, and that’s what my homebrew system is designed to support. I’ve tried to do it with usability in mind. Inventory is a grid, which is easy to manage. Food and water are measured in units. Camp is important. PCs can take activities to do things (forage, find water, spend XP on a skill, speciality, or proficiency, work on small-scale crafting, etc). Since a Mixed Success or Failure on a Skill Check results in consequences, stuff can happen during camp.

Spoiler: Consequence Example in Camp

Several sessions ago, Deirdre (the barbarian) and Dingo (the thief) went looking for a source of water. Deirdre got a Mixed Success, so they found the water, but there were also a couple raiders they’d antagonized back in town. The raiders were watering their horses. They probably could have taken them, but Deirdre and Dingo decided to mess with them instead. Deirdre approached the raiders to talk to them while Dingo snuck up to loot their horses’ packs.

Mechanically, what happened is Deirdre made a Skill Check to Help. The result gave Dingo a bonus on his roll to sneak up to the horses and go through the packs. I can’t remember Deirdre’s roll, but Dingo got a Mixed Success. The consequence was he couldn’t take everything without being caught. He’d have to choose something or deal with the fallout of taking everything.

After Dingo yoinked the raiders’ stuff he could, Deirdre ended the conversation with an offer for a contest to see who was stronger. This had been an issue back in town when they met last time. She told them to meet there in a couple of weeks, and they agreed. When Deirdre got back in town, she had her bard retainer announce the contest at a different time. She wanted to embarrass the raiders and boost her reputation at the same time!

Several sessions later, the raiders showed back up on another consequence — but indirectly. They’re now looking for the party. There’s a clock to track how close they are on the trail. It’s pretty low right now after the party took steps to hide their trail and camp to avoid discovery. I have a feeling the raiders are going to be a nuisance until the party goes and does something about them. (Whether they settle that with violence or by some other means? Who knows. That’s for us to play to find out.)

 

[GMMichael]

There's a whole range of what resource management-based 'survival' play might look like . . .

Managing the resources should be easy and painless. . .

i don't think that tracking supplies and such is in and of itself 'awesome' . . .

Hearing a common thought here. I might have unconsciously avoided mentioning "supplies" or "resources" in the OP because it's more or less a given that no one wants to count rations or gallons of water on top of hit points and, often, ammunition.

The survival mode I'm thinking of is about choices. Rest or charge? Eat or starve? Bring everything or move quickly?

I have to ask because a lot of games eschew such petty details as sleep, nutrition, and encumbrance. And exposure. And storage capacity. And and and...

 

[Fenris-77]

Hearing a common thought here. I might have unconsciously avoided mentioning "supplies" or "resources" in the OP because it's more or less a given that no one wants to count rations or gallons of water on top of hit points and, often, ammunition.

The survival mode I'm thinking of is about choices. Rest or charge? Eat or starve? Bring everything or move quickly?

I have to ask because a lot of games eschew such petty details as sleep, nutrition, and encumbrance. And exposure. And storage capacity. And and and...

This is more about playloops and game design than it is about the basic idea, IMO. So in my OSR games, which are mostly Black Hack based, I have added in exhaustion as a mechanic that feeds back into the sleep and rest cycles, as well as food and water. I designed the playloop specifically to add decision points like the ones you list. Players need to manage their exhaustion levels (hit 6 and you die) and that means they also need to be careful about food and water, as well as decisions about whether to push on or not. I had the idea of The Grind from Torchbearer in back of my mind while I was putting the system together, but it's not quite that punishing.

I like Black Hack for this because of the usage die and equipment space based on slots rather than weight keep the book keeping to a minimum but without sacrificing the importance of decision points. If anyone is curious, I used a lot of ideas, as well as setting details, from Into the Wyrd and Wild for this.

 

[Willie the Duck]

It's getting late. We just got our new quest, and it seems that the bandits we're supposed to intimidate (kill) won't be in their hideout for long. But we're hungry, getting tired, and once the sun goes down, it gets pretty dang cold around here! Do we wait until after breakfast, make concessions (have a snack, take a nap, wear warmer clothes), or ask the GM to quit using these annoying survival rules?

I've only had to suffer through Skyrim's survival rules (they're actually awesome), but it's fun to ask yourself some of these questions: should I go on the quest now and hope my enemies are sleeping or groggy when I get there? Should I rest up and eat so I'm at full throttle when I go (like my opponents might be)? Should I dress for the cold and have a top speed of 2 mph if I get jumped?

That's the catch for me. Make it intetesting, not annoying.

Fundamentally GMMichael has my answer -- survival is interesting when the game makes it interesting. And interesting means interesting decisions (both before the gameplay loop and during), as well as interesting consequences. I think a lot of people have been burned by games where the important decisions are mostly "before the journey, did you 1) pack one weeks of rations; 2) two weeks and will move slower; or 3) two weeks but drop from plate- to chain- mail so you can still move quickly?," little to no decisions during the survival gameplay loop*, and the consequences mostly being 1) you arrive at the dungeon (the place with actually interesting decisions and gameplay loops) with depleted HP or spells memorized, or 2) the entire party starves to death/dies of exposure*. Also games where the deciding to be serious about survival is a build tax** and everyone allots 20% of their encumbrance to supplies but nothing else changes.
*excepting maybe a complete uninformed "you got lost, which direction do you guess is towards getting back on track?" non-choice.
**something so anticlimactic and campaign-disruptive that in general it doesn't then make people 'learn from their mistakes' and pack more provisions next time, and instead just means that everyone (GM included) vote to not do survival rules next time.
***someone takes a level of ranger or druid or someone maxes out 1-3 survival-type skills or the like

Myself and a guy I swap GMing-duties with for one of my groups are working on a homebrew TTRPG with travel/survival being important. It is challenging and as far as we can tell needs to be an integral part of the game (and thus have player buy-in). We include a success roll
(dice pool game, so there is #-of-successes) along with daily events (based on difficulty of terrain) and PCs can expend successes, or else potentially lose fatigue (a hp-like pool, which slowly degrades combat readiness) food (effectively an ablative fatigue pool that uses encumbrance), candles&shovels (abstract pool of 'other survival supplies,' without which you cannot recover fatigue at a rest point), or potentially suffer a mishap (possibly making a save-like check to avoid). The whole thing is engaging, involves decisions both at trip start and during play, and makes it feel like you're not just doing an elaborate check to see how depleted you are when you get to the real interesting point... and is at least as complex (and time-consuming) as combat or other action-oriented encounters like dungeon-exploration.

 

[GMMichael]

I like Black Hack for this because of the usage die and equipment space based on slots rather than weight keep the book keeping to a minimum but without sacrificing the importance of decision points. If anyone is curious, I used a lot of ideas, as well as setting details, from Into the Wyrd and Wild for this.

How do your players react to the exhaustion rules? I'm going to try equipment slots too. Mostly because I'm too lazy to write each gear's weight down

The whole thing is engaging, involves decisions both at trip start and during play, and makes it feel like you're not just doing an elaborate check to see how depleted you are when you get to the real interesting point... and is at least as complex (and time-consuming) as combat or other action-oriented encounters like dungeon-exploration.

This please. Let me role-play my way through surviving on the journey - not just make a roll and take a penalty the next day.