Survival

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

In a game I was in today, we did something silly. It went back to last session, and indeed, character generation.

We are a 9th-level Eberron party. No one in the party has any ranks in Survival. My character is from the Talenta plains, and another PC is a goblin - both of us should have had ranks in Survival, but didn't. I'm the wizard, and don't have teleport in my spellbook (this is by choice - I just don't like the spell). We had to go into a desert to retrieve two items, and the trip would take three days by horse. Since we had a cleric, water was not a problem.

We didn't have enough food with us. So we used our paladin's mount, a deinonychus, to hunt for us. It had a ridiculously high Survival check, so it kept us all well fed. Let's ignore how the raptor did that, okay? The DM was a bit annoyed by this, pointing out that it couldn't find food for the horses, so they starved. We ended up eating them.

We made it to the appointed site, nearly got slaughtered by the opposition, and made it out safely. Now we had to walk all the way back out, six days or so, and we had no horses. Worse, the guy playing the paladin was away, so we couldn't use his character or mount. The DM forgot to slow down our speed because of the hunting...

Due to sheer luck, we made ridiculously high untrained Survival checks, averaging (literally) quadruple our needs per day. I know I wasn't cheating! The DM pointed out that there was no food in the desert, but fortunately I have a bit of strictly book knowledge survival skills, so I was able to convince him that we could eat cacti. He pointed out we didn't know which ones were poisonous, and the other players argued that was part of making a Survival check.

In any event, IMO it's silly that you could feed yourself in a desert by making a Survival check of DC 10! Any group of three or four people would have no trouble surviving in a desert, then, since enough group members could just make high enough Survival checks and keep everyone fed and watered.

You could say the same thing about survival in any part of the world. Does anyone have a set of house rules they used based on terrain, and perhaps such things as "poisonous plants being common"?

 

[Turhan]

Deserts vary in their hostility. Was it like the huge Gobi desert with neverending wind and a trackless waste where even the locals fear to go? Was it like eastern Oregon (USA) where rabbits, snakes and lizards abound. Water can be found in many deserts - Far below the Sahara is one of the largest fresh water aquifers on the planet (I've heard, but don't recall where).

If any plant will grow, there will be water courses and dry stream beds which can be deeply dug into and water will be found.

A three day trip you said. And you ate your horses?? Why not go hungry a couple days? Water is the real problem in the desert.And one horse is a lot of meat, which you could hang to dry or smoke and dry and even eat raw. Horses won't starve in three or 6 days-- or were you out longer?-- but they will get weak and grouchy. Sounds to me like The DM just over-reacted a tiny bit.

House Rules? Well, my players overkill on food, water, ale, supplies and such. But Then all of them have real world experience with traveling in the rough, survival skills, hunting and hunger. So I don't have a house rule.

If I made one up however, for your situation I would have just said you all were foolish and would take a cumulative -1 on every dice roll per day in the desert. I might have made a bad luck call and rolled a d100 too, and anything less than 10% meant a horse died- but that would depend on your water rations and whether you had grain for the beasts.

For a general rule, I'd say, one day without food or water in the desert would be a -1 on all rolls. Accumulate that for 5 days. After five days: a daily Fort save of 20 +2 per day versus death, until everyone died.

As for the Survival skill: let's look at a normal life. Most everyone has heard that if you don't know about poisonous plants, you can smear some of the juice of one on your wrist and wait a day to see if you break out or get a skin burn of some sort. Then you can taste it and see if you can stomach the flavor. Not a big deal and not high tech. Almost any animal can provide muscle-meat with complete safety. To be safe, never eat the organs. I'm not familair with Eberron but if there are some animals that are toxic to eat, common knowledge probably abounds and local rumor can fill you in on what they are. So if you are in a new land, just talk to the locals. You can even hire a guide your first time out.

For my own campaign, I don't sweat it too much and seldom make the gang roll for anything except a special hunting excursion.

Good gaming,

 

[MachinaDeus]

If your Cleric was also level 9, you should have had ample access to Create Food and Water, a level 3 cleric spell.

 

[Nyeshet]

They have rules for adjusted Survival DCs in the various environment suppliments (Sandstorm, etc). Also, note that the DC 10 Survival check presumes a forest or at least a lightly wooded field. Personally, I would work it something like this (for forests):

DC 10 (summer), +2 per additional person
DC 12 (spring / autumn), +3 per additional person
DC 15 (winter), +4 per additional person

Deserts would ignore the seasons, instead being a flat DC 20, +5 per additional person. If it were a mild desert (more of an arid grassland) I would consider DC 15, +4 per person.

I am also curious about why the horses died. They should have lasted the entire three days with ease so long as enough water was present. I can see them dying on the way back (perhaps halfway back to civilization), but the meat you would have gotten from them at that point would have been overwhelmingly sufficient for making it back to settled lands - easily enough for a week or so.

As for the dinosaur finding food, note that you were only three days into the desert. Unless the settled lands were very small (a town around an oasis) it is likely that you were near a biome border (between desert and savanna, for instance), in which case there were likely several animals about in the desert - if you knew where to look. Antelope, lions hunting those antelope, wild camels wandering about, snakes, vultures, hares, falcons, etc. And that is not even taking into account some of the monsters that may have been present. And as you already pointed out, I have not even started on the (sparse) plantlife present: cacti, timblebushes (sp?), and possibly more, dependent on the type of desert.

It all depends upon the severity of the desert and your location along (or in) its borders.