Under Siege Update- How much does a commoner eat per day?

[Aesmael]

Gate could let some refugees escape to a peaceful Outer Plane. Unfortunately each casting only opens the gateway for a short time, and you may annoy the current residents of the destination plane.

You might be surprised how many people can travel through a gate or other limited-duration portal. Since everyone involved is not an 'enemy', they can move freely through each other's space (and people can be packed more tightly when not in combat). The only real limiting factor is how many people you can fit in a 1080 foot radius. Maybe more if you let them run. Remember, everyone gets to act during a turn and only those further away than they can move in one round will take any longer than that to pass through it.

 

[AuraSeer]

Aesmael, that's technically true in game terms, but the standard rules aren't designed for dealing with huge crowds.

Think about trying to leave a sports stadium after a game. There may be only a couple hundred people in your section, but there's still a huge bottleneck where they need to cram into a single hallway. Imagine how much worse it would be if you had thousands of people moving through that space, and all of them were in fear for their lives. That is not a pretty picture.

The point of a gate would be to help the refugees escape, not to have them trample each other to death in a mad dash for safety.

 

[Xath]

The DM sometimes allows new magical items, but only if they've been created and judged on the House Rules forum. I'll try my hand at a few and post them there.

 

[kigmatzomat]

There are a couple of historical points I think people miss. Actual sieges rarely resulted in an "absolute" cordon. In most cases, small groups of stealthy individuals could pass back and forth. There's nothing new about rogues.

And fortresses generally stockpiled 1-2 years worth of supplies based on siege population. Some held out for three or four times that long. They had either massive cisterns, pipes accessing rivers, or springs to supply water. The fortress, like the rest of the military, was the justification for heavy taxation. An under-supplied fortress could easily result in riots more fatal to the ruler than the attacker.

 

[Xath]

Well, the problem with the siege is that it's a bunch of creatures with massive SR and energy resistances versus a city of mages. So the battle has come to somewhat of a stalemate. I tried to make a magic item to help out on the house rules board (http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?p=1980189#post1980189) but I'm also looking for pre-existing examples that others have used. There's no such thing as too many ideas.

 

[Xath]

As an alternative, we're trying to figure out how much food 200000 people would eat in a day under poor circumstances. How much mundane food would we have to buy every day?

Can someone survive on the equivalent of half a loaf of bread and 2 turnips a day?

 

[painandgreed]

As an alternative, we're trying to figure out how much food 200000 people would eat in a day under poor circumstances. How much mundane food would we have to buy every day?

Can someone survive on the equivalent of half a loaf of bread and 2 turnips a day?

After some quick web-fu, the average diet for a concentration camp prisoner was 1,300 calories for light work and 1,700 calories for heavy work. this was sufficient to keep them alive for three months before starvation set in. The above was roughly 2/3 pound of bread and a liter of turnip sop a day (probably light work figure). Ifnot working, they could probably last longer.

The suggested amount of calories for a man is 2000-2500 per day and 1,300-1,800 per day. that's probalby for no to light work.

Bread is roughly 1000 calories per pound. Beef or pig is abo 1000 calories per 1/3 pound (varies greatly due to fat content). Poultry and game animals are about half of what beef is.

For a low intake figureing a half male/half female poulation, that's 330 million calories per day to keep everybody healthy. That's 165 tons of bread a day which would be about one large merchant ship full or 83 wagon loads. At 1 CP per pound of wheat as the main component of bread and all the work is free, that's 3300 GP per day. Meat would take less weight but cost much more.

 

[AuraSeer]

IIRC from a news story about tsunami relief, the modern standard for "temporary maintenance" is 1800 calories per day.

Half a loaf of Wonder Bread contains about 1000 calories. The turnips will provide another couple hundred. So, that amount of food could probably keep people alive for a good long while, though they'll be bored of it very quickly.

Incidentally the turnips are a very good choice; they provide vitamin C, which prevents scurvy. If you supplied bread alone, symptoms of that disease would begin showing up in as little as six weeks. (Of course, here I'm assuming that biology and nutrition work the same in the gameworld as in real life...)

 

[Aesmael]

Auraseer, you are quite right to point that out. Nevertheless, I will continue to feel an unjustified sense of pride at my first pointing out of an abusable rules-thingy.

But to try and actually help Xath, what do you mean by 'city of mages'? How many and how powerful? What kind of schooling/disposition/philosophy (if any) does this city have overall?

As a blanket statement, perhaps it is possible to harvest food from remote regions, or farm from a distance. Maybe teleport out to a field, work it for the day and bring the workers back. Or there might be enough of them to blanket the city (or its borders) with advantageous spells?

 

[taliesin15]

First off: 200K?! That's a really large city, an exceptionally large one I think for most AD&D style milieus, like there'd only be a few of that size or larger, typically

Jürgen Hubert said
Make some Soylent Green.
___________

Now, see this is along the lines of what I'm about to suggest, vis a vis Purify Food And Water. There are numerous instances where people besieged had to consider Second Harvest options (I think there's something in the Old Testament to that effect where the attacking army said come on out now or you'll have to consume your own urine/excrement)--but seriously, though, if clerics have the power to Purify food matter, why wouldn't Second Harvest options be on the table at least for consideration? It seems like the spell could just hasten the process of putting fertilizer into the soil, composting it, nourishing the plants, eaten by the animals, and back into human consumption--seems like something a Druid would especially highly recommend as really its only a part of the Natural Cycle, simply magically or divinely accelerated.